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My first thought was genuinely "huh, wonder what water The White Dragon's talking about".
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Nov 4, 2017 09:13
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Regy Rusty posted:I'm disappointed that more thoughts have stopped appearing. I'm running a multi-million dollar corporation and pumping it into loot boxes and my dudes got nothing to say about it. I think a lot of the thoughts are tied to your leveling process within Box Quest. My favorite though is the one at like level 5 where you say "Wow, if I got to level 5 this fast I'll be at 100 in no time!"
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Nov 4, 2017 09:45
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exquisite tea posted:drat, I guess Hob must have completely tanked. Hob looked pretty cool and all but yeah no poo poo. If it wasn't for the Giant Bomb quick look I'd have had no idea it existed, and the main message of that was "maybe wait for them to fix it". I kind of wonder if a game of that type even can sell enough to sustain a mid tier developer at this point. Lizard Wizard posted:I've tried ESO a few times and it was kinda neat, but I always felt like I was building my character wrong. ESO is weird because unlike most casual MMOs it's very easy to build your character wrong. I forget how hard it is to respec, not that hard but not trivial, I think?
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Nov 4, 2017 12:56
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The Moon Monster posted:Hob looked pretty cool and all but yeah no poo poo. If it wasn't for the Giant Bomb quick look I'd have had no idea it existed, and the main message of that was "maybe wait for them to fix it". I kind of wonder if a game of that type even can sell enough to sustain a mid tier developer at this point. Video games aren't exactly a zero-sum industry but 2017 was such a strong year in particular that consumers didn't need to take chances on budget tier stuff they may or may not enjoy, and from the other end you have games-as-service demanding more and more time investment from players. Why risk wasting 20bux on something new when I could just put that into cosmetic items and emotes for a game I've already played for 500 hours. Kind of hard for a mid-tier studio to survive in this current environment unless they've got a hardcore fanbase or an especially provocative product.
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Nov 4, 2017 13:04
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Just do what Yoko Taro did, put a bunch of T&A in your game and hope Twitter finds out.
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Nov 4, 2017 13:06
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goferchan posted:I think a lot of the thoughts are tied to your leveling process within Box Quest. My favorite though is the one at like level 5 where you say "Wow, if I got to level 5 this fast I'll be at 100 in no time!" Yeah. Also new thoughts do start appearing about the other stuff there's just kind of a big gap before that starts happening.
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Nov 4, 2017 14:03
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The Moon Monster posted:
There’s a respec vendor. It’s really easy and pretty cheap to do. Unlike most RPGs for some reason, ESO figured out that playing around with different builds supported by build-defining gear is really fun while starting from scratch to grind out a new build sucks. So they let you do that.
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Nov 4, 2017 14:31
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Sakurazuka posted:Just do what Yoko Taro did, put a bunch of T&A in your game and hope Twitter finds out. Bayonetta was really too far ahead of its time.
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Nov 4, 2017 14:32
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I think it's quite plausible for a mid-tier studio to survive, they just have to actually accept that they're a mid-tier studio and make games that look and feel that. In Japan those kinds of companies and franchises exist, and are actually gaining a lot of ground in some cases, but in the west even a mid-tier company seems to have to chase the Mass Effects and Assassin's Creeds of the world.
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Nov 4, 2017 14:49
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I think the expectations are partly to blame. Indies are mortgaging their houses and kids' college funds to make games that look like a mid tier made them. Meanwhile mid tier devs will just get pointed to titles like Hellblade if their games don't have AAA art.
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Nov 4, 2017 14:57
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Raw sales are becoming more and more important as the games industry balloons again. I hope the bubble pops again soon because I'm really sick of "This publisher canned this entire studio because their last game only made 25 million dollars and they expected 30 million". If a second video games market crash is what it takes then so be it, because the current state of games making survivable money is only really viable for people making millions already
CJacobs fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Nov 4, 2017 |
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Nov 4, 2017 15:20
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CJacobs posted:Raw sales are becoming more and more important as the games industry balloons again. I hope the bubble pops again soon because I'm really sick of "This publisher canned this entire studio because their last game only made 25 million dollars and they expected 30 million". If a second video games market crash is what it takes then so be it, because the current state of games making survivable money is only really viable for people making millions already
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Nov 4, 2017 15:32
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Even so, we are pretty clearly reaching the tipping point of big name video games monetizing their own products with the whole Games As A Service TM stuff- they're not just doing it because they want more money. It also funds the game they're gonna make next year, and they're going to monetize that too if people keep buying it. It's a way for games companies to secure their future, and right now it's a viable strategy. But if that keeps ballooning, eventually it will reach the point where even that is not feasible for keeping your business running anymore.
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Nov 4, 2017 15:38
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mutata posted:I think the expectations are partly to blame. Indies are mortgaging their houses and kids' college funds to make games that look like a mid tier made them. Meanwhile mid tier devs will just get pointed to titles like Hellblade if their games don't have AAA art. Despite Hellblade being so-called "indie AAA" it still had a production budget of around $10 million from an established studio, which is just not going to be possible for a fledgling developer. Despite seeming counterintuitive, AAA publishers would prefer to keep production costs sky-high because it creates higher and higher barriers to entry for the competition. If you don't have a gifted art or animation team then your project is going to be relegated to pixel art garbage tier in the minds of a consumer.
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Nov 4, 2017 15:46
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exquisite tea posted:Despite Hellblade being so-called "indie AAA" it still had a production budget of around $10 million from an established studio, which is just not going to be possible for a fledgling developer. Despite seeming counterintuitive, AAA publishers would prefer to keep production costs sky-high because it creates higher and higher barriers to entry for the competition. If you don't have a gifted art or animation team then your project is going to be relegated to pixel art garbage tier in the minds of a consumer. Hellblade is interesting in that it's a 'AAA' indie that takes after the highly polished single-player games 8-10 hour that fell out of favor in the market. It's performing better than what Ninja Theory originally expected but it's still not at the breakeven point. Most indie titles would be lucky to have Hellblade's media coverage and sales. What if Hellblade wasn't a hit out of the gate and players waited for a price drop? Ninja Theory is unique in that they take up a lot of contract work to keep the lights on and work on their own projects in their spare time. I'm not sure how viable the model is for indie studios that are a couple of rent payments away from folding.
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Nov 4, 2017 15:51
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That's essentially my point. Here in the west at least we're far too willing to point at outliers and go "see? THEY did it" and hold that against every other title.
mutata fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Nov 5, 2017 |
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Nov 4, 2017 16:00
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Yeah. Like I said, I think vastly shrunk production costs in just about every arena would be better for everyone. Like Falcom released a game on PS3 in 2014 that looked like an early ps2 game: and their profits keep growing, both domestic and overseas, to the point that they're able to invest that money back into their products and release a ps4 game that looks like an early ps3 game!!  this is a company that's able to release large single-player experiences with DLC that's just costumes and make money doing it, and they release them year after year. Because they work within their means. admittedly falcom has more history and experience than a lot of random smaller developers, but they're still only a bit bigger than a larger indie and they aren't exactly making money hand over fist. i just cant see any midtier western dev releasing a game that looks even remotely like that first screenshot, even if it'd make much more sense for their budget. and I can't see a struggling AAA dev releasing a game that looks like that second screenshot, even if it'd make much more sense for their budget. I'm not sure if it's a case of the western games market being different than the Japanese one or the Western developers being different from the Japanese ones, or some combination of the two, but either way, it's a shame. i think the huge explosion of open-world is also a big culprit, since even in games of similar length, a linear game is much easier to work with than an open-world one. see also: dialogue choices
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Nov 4, 2017 16:01
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Sunning posted:Hellblade is interesting in that it's a 'AAA' indie that takes after the highly polished single-player games 8-10 hour that fell out of favor in the market. It's performing better than what Ninja Theory originally expected but it's still not at the breakeven point. Most indie titles would be lucky to have Hellblade's media coverage and sales. I think Ninja Theory did a good job looking at their limitations and creating a project that circumvented those limitations. They also knew how to market themselves by creating this "indie AAA" buzzword to describe B-tier studios that have effectively been around forever, but framed in a novel way. They took on the stereotypically gimmicky subject of mental illness in video games and used that narrative device to pursue a subject of interest that isn't normally shown in an empathetic light. They poured a ton of resources into the motion capture of Senua and provocative graphics/art to get people interested in the game from an aesthetic perspective. And of course it helps that Hellblade ended up being really good as an overall product. I don't know what's to be learned from Ninja Theory's success as they're just one datapoint, but I think at this moment in time if you're a mid-tier developer needing to strike out on your own, you really have to limit your scope and/or pursue novel topics in video games. Generic platformers and Zelda clones, engaging as though they might be, just aren't going to cut it.
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Nov 4, 2017 16:08
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An interesting part of Ninja Theory’s pitch was that they specifically said “we think this kind of thing is dying and we want to be a model for other developers”. A kind of soft Kickstarter approach where we were being asked to buy in to not only the game but the idea of the business model. I wonder how well that drove pre-orders.
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Nov 4, 2017 16:41
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So it's better that instead of dozens of people losing their jobs, thousands of people do?
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Nov 4, 2017 16:54
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doingitwrong posted:An interesting part of Ninja Theory’s pitch was that they specifically said “we think this kind of thing is dying and we want to be a model for other developers”. A kind of soft Kickstarter approach where we were being asked to buy in to not only the game but the idea of the business model. I wonder how well that drove pre-orders. NT's release and marketing strategy all went hand in hand with the type of narrative they wanted to tell. Hellblade is almost shocking in its simplicity. You pay $30 and play through the story, experiencing almost the exact same 6-8 hour sequence of events that everybody else sees. There are no branching paths and no dialogue choices. There is no HUD, no inventory, no skills and no items. There isn't even NG+ or chapter select, once you play the game once that's pretty much it. You simply couldn't release this type of project under a big publisher. Even assuming they approved of the subject matter, you'd probably have to incorporate some kind of hackeneyed skill tree where Senua unlocks Pyscho Slash at tier 3 or something like that. Preorder now for deluxe bonus outfits so that Senua can grieve through her psychotic breakdown in style. But on the other hand, I think that kind of approach must be liberating for a designer because you don't have to consider how all those external systems are going to connect back to your game. It reminded me the whole time of Shadow of the Colossus in its singular, almost fairytale like presentation. Hellblade released on August 8th and according to the PS store it was the top-selling digital download for that month. Last I checked it's up around ~200k total sales on Steam, but if I remember correctly it didn't debut with a ton of preorders already banked. Its length makes it easy to stream, which probably contributed to its popularity, and it hasn't had to go on sale yet. I imagine it'll probably get another spike when it makes a few year-end lists and award ceremonies.
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Nov 4, 2017 17:19
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My lukewarm take on the CoD lootboxes and stuff is mainly just to remember when the very first Medal of Honor came out on PS1 there were like...news reports and articles and stuff about making D-day into a video game and Dreamworks went out of their way to act respectful and get actual veterans on board with the game and stuff to mollify some of those complaints.
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Nov 4, 2017 17:31
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CJacobs posted:Raw sales are becoming more and more important as the games industry balloons again. I hope the bubble pops again soon because I'm really sick of "This publisher canned this entire studio because their last game only made 25 million dollars and they expected 30 million". If a second video games market crash is what it takes then so be it, because the current state of games making survivable money is only really viable for people making millions already People have been screaming 'second videogame market crash!!!' whenever publishers discover another dumb way of monetising stuff since I've been posting on this forum, it ain't gonna happen.
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Nov 4, 2017 17:58
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exquisite tea posted:NT's release and marketing strategy all went hand in hand with the type of narrative they wanted to tell. Hellblade is almost shocking in its simplicity. You pay $30 and play through the story, experiencing almost the exact same 6-8 hour sequence of events that everybody else sees. There are no branching paths and no dialogue choices. There is no HUD, no inventory, no skills and no items. There isn't even NG+ or chapter select, once you play the game once that's pretty much it. You simply couldn't release this type of project under a big publisher. This actually reminds me of like those LPs former Insomniac developers did and how they talked about how back in the day publishers would set actual potential playtime and feature quotas on games. A lot of stuff like new game plus features were simply born from "Okay we kinda have our vision laid out already but the publisher demands the playtime to be longer"
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Nov 4, 2017 17:59
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Sakurazuka posted:People have been screaming 'second videogame market crash!!!' whenever publishers discover another dumb way of monetising stuff since I've been posting on this forum, it ain't gonna happen. And it was a pretty different situation, console gaming being treated as a toy fad by companies that were overzealous in flooding the NA market, and even then only for a few years before Nintendo swept in. I think people just take "companies do bad, market dies" from that when it was neither as significant or comparable to today as they believe. Motto fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Nov 4, 2017 |
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Nov 4, 2017 18:33
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So Heat Signature does not live up to expectations. It's grindy and gets repetitive after just a few hours, and as a game that borrows so heavily from Hotline Miami you'd think they would learned not to put so much pointless downtime between the gameplay you actually came for.
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Nov 4, 2017 18:36
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At least if the video game market crashes everyone will finally finish their backlogs
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Nov 4, 2017 18:38
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also there's a disappointing trend among indie game developers (and also Bethesda Fallout games lol) of trying to paper over your inability to design a satisfying and engaging real-time combat system by giving you a pause button to do sicknasty time stop stuff with the thing is it doesn't actually make things any better by itself, it just turns uninteresting, difficult encounters into uninteresting, easy encounters
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Nov 4, 2017 18:40
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:So Heat Signature does not live up to expectations. It's grindy and gets repetitive after just a few hours, and as a game that borrows so heavily from Hotline Miami you'd think they would learned not to put so much pointless downtime between the gameplay you actually came for. What? Near the end of the game I was doing Mistake missions in 90 seconds and the time between missions was like 20 seconds at most
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Nov 4, 2017 18:41
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:also there's a disappointing trend among indie game developers (and also Bethesda Fallout games lol) of trying to paper over your inability to design a satisfying and engaging real-time combat system by giving you a pause button to do sicknasty time stop stuff with Have you just been doing Easy to Medium missions?
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Nov 4, 2017 18:43
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:What? Near the end of the game I was doing Mistake missions in 90 seconds and the time between missions was like 20 seconds at most if you screw up a mission in Heat Signature you're knocked unconscious, a soldier maybe comes along and picks you up, you get thrown out an airlock, you have to play the incredibly obnoxious "match the speed of a moving object with newtonian physics" minigame, and then you get to retry (with all kills you've made still in effect which makes sense narratively but kinda feels like a freebie) if you screw up in Hotline Miami you die and restart in, like, a couple frames of animation
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Nov 4, 2017 18:43
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I think you’re stuck on comparing everything about it to Hotline Miami.
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Nov 4, 2017 18:45
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I didn't find pod maneuvering that annoying. And having a fail-state possibility there gives a weight to the permadeath, like it only happened a couple of times over my whole campaign but the times I messed up significantly enough to die there had weightJay Rust posted:I think you’re stuck on comparing everything about it to Hotline Miami. Game's skill floor is too low, probably
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Nov 4, 2017 18:46
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Jay Rust posted:Have you just been doing Easy to Medium missions? i got up to the point where i was doing mostly hard missions and waiting for the randomly-stocked stores to give me weapons to handle armored or shielded targets, which is about where i had the epiphany that i didn't actually like the gameplay enough to wait for it to finally hand me the tools i needed to progress
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Nov 4, 2017 18:46
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In most galaxies you only need to liberate, like, a half dozen stations to get access to armored/shielded countermeasures, or to have the tools to avoid them entirely
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Nov 4, 2017 18:48
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Jay Rust posted:I think you’re stuck on comparing everything about it to Hotline Miami. it's superficially structured like an open world game but as far as i can tell the open world stuff doesn't actually do anything besides gate your unlocks, which in turn makes me wonder why it isn't just structured as a series of missions, which invites comparison to a game that did series of missions where you have to rapidly prioritize violence towards enemies who outnumber you much, much better i could compare it to Streets of Rogue instead, which is what it reminds me of more than anything else, but nobody comes out of that comparison looking good
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Nov 4, 2017 18:49
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You don’t need armour-piercing swords or shield-disabling guns to get through tough missions. There are teleports, stealth fields, speed-boosters, energy shields, keycard cloners, countless tools to avoid guards completely if you use them right.
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Nov 4, 2017 18:50
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Yeah if you are playing the game like it's another game and not the game it actually is I can see why you would hate it
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Nov 4, 2017 18:52
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:Yeah if you are playing the game like it's another game and not the game it actually is I can see why you would hate it I hate it 'cause it's bad, Mr. Foxtrot.
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Nov 4, 2017 18:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I hate it 'cause it's bad, Mr. Foxtrot. actually, it's good
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Nov 4, 2017 18:55
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