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Unlucky7 posted:Wasn’t eventual explanation about the Reapers was originally that they were originally supercomputers created to solve the problem of dark energy destroying the universe and the cycle they were in was their last chance? I always thought that was more keeping with the theme of Mass Effect instead of the whole synthetics vs organics thing they tried to push. The original pitch I recall was that the titular mass effect seemingly violated the second law of thermodynamics, and it was something no one had an explanation for in-universe. In reality, it was consistent with the second law: it simply increased entropy elsewhere, causing stars to age far more rapidly as their entropy increased to balance out the seeming decrease caused by the mass effect, which, if left unchecked, would lead to the heat death of the universe happening trillions of years earlier than it should. Under the assumption that the discovery of the mass effect was inevitable amongst intelligent species, the Reapers were created as a compromise: they'd allow civilizations to flourish and reach an apex along predictable lines (presumably so they don't gently caress around with primitive mass effect drives and cause even more rapid degradation) and then cull them to preserve each species as a "living," eternal memorial.
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Mar 8, 2019 16:37
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Hra Mormo posted:Yeah even in the bygone era of proper no-life MMOs, Phantasy Star Online is one of the more notorious ones for being morbidly grindy. Didn't it have some bizarre poo poo where your name determined the kind of item drop table you had?
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Mar 11, 2019 00:42
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drkeiscool posted:that seems like a dumb way to make a looter shooter Tech debt is real, strong, and not your friend if you're developing a game as massive as this. It's entirely possible that the actual code base used to calculate item drops was programmed by some guy who left for greener pastures, and the inner workings of it are simultaneously completely arcane to everyone except him and bound up inextricably with the rest of the game's architecture, such that trying to change it is like trying to pull a block from a Jenga tower.
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Mar 11, 2019 17:25
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Bofast posted:
I mentioned it upthread, but a fractured 6 year development means they almost assuredly have a mountain of tech debt hiding underneath everything. I'd be amazed if any of their current programmers had a full understanding of the scope of the functionality used to calculate things like level/ilvl scaling.
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Mar 12, 2019 15:52
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Skippy McPants posted:I dunno, Gearbox's last big release was Battleborn and that was honestly worse than Anthem. I'm genuinely serious when I say that, the first time I saw this image, I thought it was some kind of parody of overly busy games with too much visual/UI overload.
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Mar 13, 2019 05:39
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Kaysette posted:I remember being mad when Andromeda flopped bc I thought BioWare pulled all their talent from ME to make their new franchise amazing. Now I’m just confused and disappointed. Dragon Age 2 was the first real sign that something was amiss internally. You can probably blame that one on EA giving them a ridiculously short turnaround time, but other releases are a lot less explicable. I think they simultaneously expanded too rapidly and bled too much talent for a variety of reasons, and the result was these massive titles being developed by relatively new offices without the necessary veterans to guide them through production (combined with what was probably a ridiculously complex corporate structure).
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Mar 16, 2019 14:51
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Disargeria posted:Was everyone just blindly positive because the alternative was doom for the studio? Bingo. Six years worth of AAA development is a massive sunk cost, and your only hope after you realize it's a dud is to swing for the rafters and hope people try to catch it There's no way anyone in upper brass expects this thing to succeed; they just want it to eke out enough box sales to avoid going completely under.
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Mar 18, 2019 20:15
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exquisite tea posted:It’s hard to remember now but ME2 was a very cool game. ME2 is probably in my top 5 list. They nailed just about everything: characters, mission structure, gamefeel, story, etc. The only thing I remember disliking was the dumb resource scanning minigame, but everything else was golden. It helped that it was also the first game I ever played back in the day with good graphics that actually ran on my piece-of-poo poo PC. To this day, I'm still not sure how the hell they managed to optimize it so well.
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Apr 11, 2019 23:12
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I'm trying to think if this is genuinely the biggest high budget live service/MMO flop of all time. At this rate, I think even Tabula Rasa is gonna have outlived Anthem.
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May 3, 2019 00:08
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West007 posted:I don't think this game is worth investing in by EA/Bioware. Just cut your losses and abandon ship. They already are. You don't indefinitely delay your first significant content patch on a game that was already barely keeping its head above water unless your intent is to watch it drown. The game's too much of a fiasco on nearly every level to maintain its marketability, and you don't invest the kind of money and time Square-Enix or Digital Extremes gave their problem children unless you've got something big to lose.
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May 4, 2019 20:51
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The Lone Badger posted:Before killing it isn't the next step to go ftp to try and squeeze out a few more microtransactions? They can finish up whatever microtransaction models are in the pipeline and then staff it with a skeleton crew if they really want to. At this point, though, they're probably just counting themselves lucky they got the number of box sales they did and managed to recoup at least a portion of the costs.
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May 5, 2019 00:29
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It's fair to say that FFXIV was the do-or-die release for SE, because a numbered Final Fantasy flopping as badly as 1.0 did when they were in the financial straits they were in would've probably shuttered the company. If it means your company doesn't collapse, you're willing to pull out all the stops. Anthem is a brand new IP for a parent company that's already making billions a year off of multiple other franchises; it's not worth the Herculean level of effort it would take to rescue it.hobbesmaster posted:Actually pretty much no assets are reused. Hell there’s probably more polygons in a FFXIV original flower pot than in an ARR full party. There was a heavy amount of asset reuse between 1.0 and 2.0. Hell, 2.0 took it a step further by ripping assets directly from other FF titles because of how ridiculously pressed for time they were.
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May 5, 2019 00:33
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ketchup vs catsup posted:Something I haven’t seen mentioned in all these ‘could EA tell BW to pull a realm reborn on anthem’ posts is that ff14 was a subscription based mmo - rebuilding it had the potential to bring in tons of recurring revenue - that potential doesn’t exist with anthem, and I’m guessing that was a huge motivation for SE - they’d built 1.0 at huge cost and seen very little return for it. ARR was entirely about salvaging the Final Fantasy brand over profit. If you look at the numbers SE releases during their conference calls, FFXIV, even at a point where it's at its most profitable, is bringing in pocket change compared to all of SE's mobile MTX gacha titles. Legal gambling - especially virtual, easy-to-access gambling - will always bring in far more money over subscription services until they're outlawed. The honest truth is that building a subscription MMO in the first place was an outdated concept at the time, which was completely in theme with FFXIV 1.0's initial design of "FFXI with the cracks painted over." The fact that it exists at all today is a consequence of the brand's importance to SE's survival as a major company. If it had been some new IP, they likely would've let it quietly drift into obscurity and refocused all of their internal resources to making whatever a singleplayer FFXIV would've looked like a real banger, which is exactly what Bioware is doing: they know this thing's a turd, and the only recourse they have now is to desperately try and funnel everything they've got into making DA4 a success or they're probably doomed.
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May 6, 2019 15:44
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ashpanash posted:Anti-consensus theory that I think may have merit: Frostbyte's poo poo, sure, but that's no excuse for the result. New Vegas was developed on an equally headache-inducing engine in the span of 18 months. The blame falls entirely on the total incompetence of management in guiding the project and the ethically reprehensible environment of peer pressure and economic fear that was built up in the labourers to compensate for it. Zedsdeadbaby posted:speaking of valve, people like to mention fallout 76 or anthem as the biggest flop in recent memory, so it stands as a testament to the utter failure of artifact that people have literally forgotten about it. it was so dull, trite, and mundane that it simply vanished off the radar. you couldn't even make memes out of the trainwreck. that's worse than anthem imo. Artifact's design is almost supernaturally bad, like demons in a hellforge somewhere were contracted to design the least appealing game possible. There's really no other way to explain releasing a loving virtual CCG with some of the most horseshit microtransactions possible in 2018 and expecting it to be anything other than a dismal waste of time for everyone involved. Vermain fucked around with this message at 18:18 on May 11, 2019 |
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May 11, 2019 18:14
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ashpanash posted:To be clear, I'm not trying to white-knight Any game, on any engine, developed over the course of six years in an environment where management can barely decide on a course for the game, long periods of productivity-destroying crunch are normalized, and workers are replaced left and right month after month when the stress finally skewers their soul, is going to be a nearly incomprehensible mess of tech debt. Well-written code and comprehensive systems documentation is the realm of stable development teams. The more stressed you are, the less effort you're going to put into writing good, sensible code with sufficient explanation of it; the more frequently your team gets torn apart by stress casualties, the less you're going to spend your already limited willpower onboarding new people on proper standards and already-developed systems. The result is what they're almost assuredly dealing with now: a spiraling mess of methods and systems that interlink and barely manage to work (because that was the point of the crunch at the end), but which are woven together in such a slapdash way that trying to change even a single portion of the code is like trying to disassemble a Jenga tower with your teeth.
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May 11, 2019 22:24
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here, I'm just trying to understand why it takes them days to weeks to fix petty things and every time they do fix something, it breaks three other things.
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Hra Mormo posted:They start from scratch again and this time they can't figure out how to make the camera 3rd person, so it's in 1st instead. Also there's a killfeed. It's first person but they have the player model and hitbox projected in front of the viewport, causing camera angles that would make Legacy of Kain: Defiance blush.
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May 14, 2019 15:20
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Thumbtacks posted:You can buy CD keys for $20, it’s worth at least that probably You can buy a pretty good meal for $20 and you will get vastly more ephemeral pleasure from it. Treat yourself right.
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May 24, 2019 04:13
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sunaurus posted:BioWare should really learn from Square Enix. I mentioned it a while back, but the only reason SE sunk as much money and time as they did into ARR was because the only alternative was to abandon the game and catastrophically damage the one brand that had kept them afloat through years of dire financial uncertainty. It's fair to say that FFXIV failing to recover likely would've shuttered the studio, or at least forced another desperate merger. Anthem, by comparison, is a brand new IP that no one cares about, from a studio that's merely a part of a vastly larger corporate structure that could eat the entire loss of Anthem's development costs and barely notice. The far more likely scenario is that Bioware once again forces a skeleton crew of employees into crunch to push through whatever content's already in the pipeline while everyone else is shifted over to DA4, and they try to squeeze as much blood from the Anthem stone with what they've got before setting it into maintenance mode and unceremoniously abandoning it. Even if they did pour an ungodly amount of money back into the game and gave it a complete ARR overhaul, there's no guarantee they'd ever see a dime of their second investment back. You might get people to go and give a Final Fantasy game another try, but Anthem?
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May 28, 2019 03:43
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:Honestly is anyone even really that desperate for Baldur’s Gate 3? Between Pillars of Eternity and Divinity it’s not like the die hard isometric rpg fans haven’t had fantastic options in the last few years That's almost assuredly why WotC is pushing for it now. D:OS2 made a lot of loving money for its budget if its sales are anything to go by. If you want to have another swing at a profitable WRPG based off an older franchise, now is probably the best time you're gonna get.
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May 31, 2019 05:12
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geonetix posted:Just to help me understand, why would you do keto? I’m just doing the “not enough calories” thing but have a decent balance in carbs/protein/fat, and I’m not dissatisfied. I think it's mainly the speed and simplicity that attracts people. I lost weight the old fashioned way via calorie restriction, and, even when calculating out everything I ate and following recommended daily calorie guides, I still plateaued fairly early on and took forever to get past it.
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Sep 18, 2019 16:15
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Pour the oil directly into your mouth after the pasta is finished to avoid living a coward's life.
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Sep 23, 2019 13:25
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Disargeria posted:The higher ups are disconnected, there's no vision, everyone's been working hard but progress isn't actually being made. Ultimately, this is why any reboot attempt will flop. ARR's success was in no small part due to it being headed by Yoshida, who had a clear, unambiguous vision for a redone FFXIV and enough game dev and managerial experience to know how to effectively get the project out the door within the severe time constraints they were under. Anthem is a plane without a pilot, and Bioware's higher-ups are expecting the flight attendants to land it.
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Nov 15, 2019 21:28
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drkeiscool posted:Man, why did BioWare use a "piles of sand" development structure? I don't like sand. It's all coarse, and rough, and irritating. And it gets everywhere. Because the "pile of poo poo" development structure would've been too on the nose.
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Nov 17, 2019 07:29
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There's people who are playing the loving Archeage relaunch. There'd absolutely be a base of people who would play a relaunched Anthem, but I cannot imagine it being a profitable enough base to recoup the losses of redeveloping the game's systems from the ground floor up.
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Nov 18, 2019 20:59
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Chomp8645 posted:What's the like, really abridged plot of Andromeda? I ain't never gonna play that poo poo at this point anyway. Basically: an evil bad guy named the Archon - the leader of the kett, a strogg-like race that "exalts" other races into new kett - is running around digging through the ruins of the Remnant - a bunch of precursor aliens/robots (?) - to try and find the secret of how to operate Meridian, a big, dumb, Remnant Macguffin that would allow him to control all of the terraforming machines on the various planets and thus control the whole sector. You engage in a bog standard Bioware hunt for the location of - and the means to control - Meridian, meet the Archon there, and defeat him. That's it.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:32
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Eastbound Spider posted:how long are the servers gonna stay up? end of 2022? Depends on how much it costs to run. They'll probably keep it up for a year for the optics, but I can't see it lasting much past that.
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Feb 24, 2021 20:27
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The REAL Goobusters posted:The fact that Dragon Age Inquisition was a success seems more and more like a miracle every day DA:I should have been a wake-up call for the company, but its success tricked them into thinking that their internal organizational strategy worked, or was at least tenable. The result has been two massive flops and an increasingly skeptical consumer base. I don't think they have a future if they don't massively knock it out of the park with DA4, and the fact that they're seemingly putting all hands on deck for it means they know it, too.
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Feb 24, 2021 21:10
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Olympic Mathlete posted:Lot of people mentioning Anthem in the same sentence as Redfall because that has turned out to be a massive disappointment. I will say though, at least Anthem had a cool way of getting around the world and AI that seemed to work. also, critically, anthem actually sold astoundingly well, whereas redfall will probably haunt arkane austin's finances until the studio eventually shutters
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May 19, 2023 19:05
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