I’ve got it too. Really enjoying it, although I find because it’s still unfinished, by the time I get to a town with a population of around 400-500 people it starts to get a bit boring as there isn’t really anything else to do. It’s visually quite stunning though and love just walking around checking everything out.
There are some really cool aspects of it like your villagers are your militia, so when you need to call them up to fight, they literally stop whatever job they are doing and run home to collect their weapons. Then when they die in battle you are losing an important person in the town, so unlike games like total war, you do your best to ensure you have minimal casualties.
The trade part of it kind of makes things too easy though, you can essentially just import/buy everything you need, so there isn’t much motivation to develop certain industries yourself or expand into other regions to exploit resources.
I think the foundations are there for a really good game, just hope it doesn’t take him another 7 years to get there. I guess with all the money he’s made so far, he’ll hopefully be able to hire a bigger team to help, I guess that’s why he did the early release to raise funds.
Yeah Risk of Rain 2 rules. First thing I tried on my steam deck when I got it. Perfect for it.
Was waiting for the 1.0 release of V Rising this week, and to kill time I started a game that was kind of similar, but fully expected to just drop it when the time came.
Unfortunately that game is Diablo 4 and it’s got it’s hooks into me, I won’t be able to just drop it and move on. I probably won’t be doing much endgame stuff but the main story has cool cutscenes and I’m content working through that.
It’s quite addictive too, easily found myself spending a whole day on it without realising, especially with the longer days here now.
It’s probably good for playing for a month or so for now and then when they do update the game you already have it at the reduced price. Apparently there is a shitload to still add.
I kinda thought the first round of lay-offs might have been understandable. They’ve acquired Activision and it seemed like there wasn’t much redundancy after they bought Bethesda.
But just shutting down whole studios, multiple at a time, including Arkane Austin and Tango. Crikey!
Acquire smaller studios and take the IP. Skim any talent you might want and jettison the rest to reduce liability. Reduce competition, protect market share, deny IP & talent to other big developers/publishers.
Google has been doing it to applications/companies for decades.
In terms of platform holders they’re a pretty distant 4th to Steam, Playstation and Nintendo, I believe.
And what IP have they acquired? I don’t reckon it’s much in the way of technical IP thats useful in game development without the manpower behind it.
It’s creative IP - the titles, COD, Doom, Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Warcraft, Candy Crush, Minecraft. Problem is they have to take that IP and turn it into new game sales. I haven’t seen them even announce something that’s really even somewhat interesting based on this acquired IP and they’ve had Bethesda for 3 years…
In fairness, Bethesda does have a fair bit in production at the moment. Skyrim VI is set to be released soon enough, as is Dishonoured 3 and Doom Year Zero. Once Skyrim is done, they’ve said they’ll start working on Fallout 5 which already has some sort of concept in place, plus they’re working on a bunch of remasters and, less exciting, an Indiana Jones games. Bethesda also has the myriad of Starfield updates plus the Starfield DLC that’s upcoming.
In terms of the Activision portion, they definitely need to up their games. COD is essentially tanking and there’s a whole load of new competition that’s coming out including games like Grey Zone. I’d say that this is easily the weaker portion of the acquisition.
Nothing announced. Arkane Lyon is working on Blade. They just closed Arkane Austin.
Nothing announced. Rumoured to be a cancelled project.
It seems so strange to buy all this stuff and then not really leverage it. I’d love to see them spread the IP around and let different studios do different takes on some beloved franchises. But I suspect the problem is that the majority of the market are fully entrenched in a single, usually free to play, game. Fortnight, League, Minecraft, Rocket League, Roblox, GTA V.
These kind of games that are free and or came out years ago. Stacks of people just play those games and they don’t need to upgrade their console and they don’t need to buy a new game.
But then Xbox haven’t really put out a hugely compelling game in the last… Decade? So is it lack of demand or lack of supply?
Fair call on the above, Dishonered was mentioned in court cases as being in production and Skyrim is meant to be out 2026, in theory.
The demand is there. Free games like Call of Duty, Fortnight and co are generally dropping in popularity. The market is 100% there, but I would say that the market is also becoming more and more picky. You also have the same issue that’s been plaguing video game producers for decades, in that they’re releasing games WAY too early with significant bugs. Some of them are able to save it, like the Fallout games by just generally being endearing, others like Cyberpunk manage to redeem themselves after a huge amount of effort that shouldn’t have been needed in the first place. Games like Assassins Creed Unity could have had a huge following if only they’d been done properly in the first place.
Companies have been taking gamers for granted for such a long time with loot boxes, play to win skins or just exorbitant costs, that they’re slowly starting to push back. All you need to see is how the release of Manor Lords has been dealt with. The producer has treated gamers with respect, he’s open and upfront about what’s ready and what’s not and he’s even having discussions with gamers about what’s working and what’s not. More importantly he’s being really open about it so anyone can see the process.
What a game like Manor Lords shows, is that the market is 100% there. People will pay for games and they’re happy to do so, but they want to pay for a finished product and they want to pay for quality.
Given the main game still costs over $100, they are taking the piss if they are expecting people to pay $30+ for it. No doubt they will, though. People really need to stop ponying up money for this kind of nonsense.
All of the stuff you mentioned sounds good, but the game is still $60 at full price for Early Access. Is there enough content to justify paying that much at this stage? I last took that kind of gamble with SimRail. While it is still fairly good and over time I will put in enough hours to justify it, it is not common for me to spend that much money on a game anymore, and I certainly won’t be buying their overpriced DLC.
Depends on the scope of this one. If they make it bigger than the Cyberpunk DLC or at least the same size, then you could maybe stomach it. I’m assuming they’ll drop the price once the DLC comes out.
But you can’t just look at those stats without looking at the bigger picture. Helldivers took a massive drop based on the fact that people rebelled after the forced players to sign into a third part app. Apart from Helldivers, there hasn’t been a massive non-FTP release for a fairly decently long time. The paid games aren’t generally known for replayability and I’d be surprised if CD Project Red or Blizzard are turning around and complaining that no one is playing their games any more, years after they’ve been released.
If you look back through the charts at release dates weeks or months after a new big title has been released, that would show the corrected metrics, that or just basic revenue from each game. The fact that Call of Duty is even in the top 10 is a massive misnomer as they’re taking metrics from both Warzone and the current title, which inflates it significantly, especially as they’re essentially stand-alone titles.
In short, with no major releases in the past few months, you’re seeing exactly what you would expect to see, the main games with large multiplayer followings are doing well, which generally happens to be the FTP ones.