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As someone that has read the books but not watched the show…
For books 7-9, I think of them as an epilogue trilogy. The time jump, the overall ending at the end of book 9, the state of the characters… Basically all of it fills the same purpose that a traditional epilogue fills. It just tells an entire story in the process of doing so and needs 1200-1500 pages.
After a certain point, scores are as much based on hype as quality.
That’s not even a malicious choice, either. Hype influences our experiences and perceptions of whatever is being hyped. It’s intuitively obvious that people will enjoy a good thing that they are hyped about more than a good thing that they are not hyped about. Hype is strongest just before release… which is exactly when reviewers play and assign a score to a game.
A sequel to a well received game is going to have more hype than the predecessor in most circumstances. Morrowind sold something like 5-10x the copies as Daggerfall and came about at a time when there was a lot of upheaval in the industry from a target-audience standpoint: a lot of potential Morrowind players (and reviewers) would have not played Daggerfall.
In essence, Oblivion was reviewed more positively because of the positive reception of Morrowind. The positive reception of Oblivion in turn boosted Skyrim.
This is not to say people would hate the games without the prior game before it or hype, just that there is a “hype boost” for games.
I doubt anyone will complain if Blizzard’s games are brought to other storefronts too.
I like Steam. Steam has the best features, best UI, good sales, and while they are not without faults (systems can stay unchanged for a long time!), they are run by a company that by and large respects its userbase.
I don’t mind if games are brought to Steam and any or all other storefronts. Put it on GOG, Windows Store, EGS, Itch.io, battlenet, Origin, Uplay… You name it, I approve of it going there also. If those other storefronts want me to use them, they need to provide a comparable or superior experience. GOG comes the closest, but its inability to get games in a timely or predictable manner, if at all, is too much of an obstacle for me.
Yes, it matters. If you’re picking 1 out of 10 each from 10 different sets, you get 100 combinations. This also limits the sample space to what is possible.
For simplicity’s sake so we can do math that we can intuitively figure out, look at it as picking one from binary choices, with three companions. So you have companions A, B, and C. With possible endings A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2.
If you pick 1 from A, 1 from B, and 1 from C you get 2*2*2 possible outcomes, or 8.
If you pick any 3 from the set of 6 (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2) you get 6!/(3!*3!) possible outcomes, or 20.
With the former, you always get one ending for each companion. Every companion has an option selected, and every companion does not have multiple endings selected. With the latter, you might get 1 from each companion. Or you might get A1, A2, and B1 — with no endings for companion C, and two endings for companion A.
How can ending A1 “A lived happily ever after” and ending A2 “A died midway through the player’s journey, never having found happiness” both happen? They cannot. We need to use a system that limits the sample space to exactly 1 per companion, even if that option itself might be “doesn’t show up in the end slides.”
Unless I’m getting the math wrong myself, for any “pick 1” combination set like this we’re dealing with just multiplying the combination sets together. Technically we’re multiplying by the factorial of the sample size, but 1!=1.
We’re not picking any 10 from within the subset of 100; you cannot pick both ending 1 and ending 4 from companion A and then no ending at all for companion C. I’m assuming each individual sub-ending is mutually exclusive with the rest of its sample space. That difference of assumptions is what led to your 1.7x1013 combinations.
I agree and I suspect companions are carrying a lot of the weight for this calculation.
Hypothetically, if there’s 10 companions with 10 individual endings each you’d get 100 endings right there. Add in 10 main endings and you get 1000, add in 4 major side quests and 4 variations each and you’re at 16,000 ending variations.
I feel the core genre identity of RPG is a known thing and not as uncertain as you paint it. There’s the iron-clad center-point with CRPGs and JRPGs. Then games that venture off from those identities into more action-y RPGs (a la The Witcher or Mass Effect). Or games that go more action-y but in a different way (Diablo-clones). There’s games expanding out from the JRPG core like tactical RPGs (though there’s an intersection with CRPGs somewhere there e.g. X-Com). And so on.
Sure, there will be games out there where people will ask “is this truly an RPG?” but that doesn’t mean the genre itself is fuzzy and poorly grasped, even if it will be difficult to come across a satisfying definition.
The name itself is vague and a poor guide… but that’s true across most gaming genres. People use “strategy” in shooters or RPGs or puzzle games, but we all know what a Real Time Strategy game is. Almost every game has “action” and a smaller but still nearly-every game has “adventure” to it, but action-adventure is another known quantity. I’m not sure there’s any genre that is perfectly encapsulated within the name given to it, or one where there are not people questioning games at the fringes of that genre.
I grabbed this in the recent Steam sale. I love it. The Diablo-esque atmosphere was something that I particularly enjoy. The trait system along with the memory+doubling flasks can be “abused” to create some satisfyingly powerful characters.
I put a good amount of time into it already. I think I’ll leave it back on my shelf until they have their 1.0 release, whenever that might be — end of the year?
Microsoft got Zenimax and was then rather excessive in how they handled it, and that is a large part of what prompted this degree of pushback by regulatory bodies.
If Xbox wants to leave the door open for future acquisitions they are very much aware they need to tread carefully moving forward.
This reads like a rather optimistic take to me.
What Microsoft learned here is that they can buy a publisher (Bethesda), make that publisher’s games exclusive, and still get the biggest gaming acquisition in history approved by regulators.
Microsoft will likely pause acquisitions for a bit, but everyone else that wants to get into/stay in gaming is going to look into them even more than before. I’d be surprised if Sony doesn’t end up buying someone decently large (but not as large as Activision: Sony cannot afford anything like that). Everyone seems to think Sony would go for Square Enix but I think they would make a different choice.
They have been picking their battles.
Breaking an existing company up into multiple smaller companies is an order of magnitude more difficult for a US regulator than stopping a company from buying another one. The FTC is running face first into a legal system that has methodically chipped away at anti trust law for generations. That’s the obstacle here, not picking the wrong battles.
Diablo is very different from Starcraft.
I think if people are just after a multiplayer-focused RTS that Blizzard is still capable of delivering a top quality experience.
Where I am skeptical is their ability to deliver a top quality single player campaign. SC2’s campaign had some of the worst gaming writing I have ever seen — and I’ve seen a lot of bad writing in games. The missions themselves felt over-designed / QA’d to the point of just being tutorials for individual units.
They can do the multiplayer, I’m confident they could pull that off. I also don’t have any interest in that. Can they make the single player experience fun? I’m skeptical, but would like to be proven wrong.
COD was the example you chose to highlight… It’s also pretty damn close to it, here.
Activision: basically a COD factory only. COD has its own mobile version.
Blizzard: Diablo, Overwatch, WoW. OW1+2 are on everything except mobile already. WoW doesn’t make sense to move beyond where it is. Diablo is on everything except Switch, and has its own mobile versions. Presumably the lack of a Switch release is a hardware issue, as D3 was on Switch.
King: mobile exclusively.
Other than COD on Switch, which again Kotick all but committed to, what new platforms can they bring their games to? I’m not seeing it.
Every single gaming IP Sony has purchased pales in comparison to the sheer financial juggernaut that is COD. Purchasing Activision is bigger than all of Microsoft’s other gaming purchases combined. There’s a good chance it’s bigger than all of the gaming purchases from Sony and Microsoft pre-Activision — combined.
As a gaming entity, Activision is in the same ballpark in size as Sony. Sony’s market cap last I checked was ~$120b, but they also have a consumer electronics division, music division, movie division, image sensors division, etc. Without an acquisition markup Activision might be worth ~$50b today or so, and Sony’s gaming-only value might be in the $60-80b range if I had to guess.
Activision-Blizzard has about 17,000 employees. Naughty Dog has 400.
Past acquisitions — by anyone — in the gaming market are completely and utterly incomparable to this acquisition.
Gamepass as it currently exists will be gone within a decade. This is the Netflix or Amazon model at play. Run service cheaply until it hits critical mass, then start ramping the price up to turn it profitable. You won’t be getting unlimited $70 games on launch for $15/month for forever.
Even if the above is wrong: a successful GP will fundamentally alter the way games are made. Content is aggressively and constantly tweaked or changed structurally in order to optimize profit. You know why search results on Google are garbage? Because people found a way to take advantage of that system to make the most money; doing so pushed out the good results. Same reason why all the biggest youtube channels have the content creator making a stupid face in the thumbnail with a clickbait title. Same reason why film has moved towards cinematic universes lately, or why so many IPs have moved towards the TV format (its for streaming).
Consumer oriented content changes when the revenue model changes. If GP is influential enough, games will change to optimize for whatever method makes the most money there — and that model will not be the one that exists currently. If Microsoft pays them by hours of playtime, games will become bloated with more and more empty content or arbitrary difficulty. If DLC continues to not be included, more and more core game content will shift towards DLC that becomes more expensive. Etc.
Cementing Gamepass is anything but a “tremendous” benefit for gamers.
They’re run more effectively than Microsoft has run their gaming division for the past ~15 years or so… Microsoft’s gaming leadership has seen one of the most valuable gaming IPs, Halo, flounder again and again and again. They closed all their game studios and spent a whole generation with minimal first party exclusives, they did I don’t know how much damage to Arkane with Redfall…
More generally, Microsoft’s approach to leading their game studios is to leave them to run the way the studio was ran pre-acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is not going to see major changes to the way they run if this deal does go through (pending CMA). Microsoft will Activision to be run the way it is now, and only intervene if profits dip too much (considering Halo, though, that might take quite the dip).
I don’t get the assumption that Activision is going to see some major cleanup from this. They won’t.
Kotick gets rewarded by the deal going through. Billions of dollars from the sale. Worst case for him after that is a few hundred million from a golden parachute if he’s fired. We have no real reason to think he will (or won’t, to be clear) be fired though, so there’s a very real chance this is full reward for him: giant piles of money and continues to get to run Activision-Blizzard, just with Microsoft bosses above him.
The deal going through isn’t something you want if you hate him.
A lot of people speculate that Microsoft would try to work around the UK’s CMA ruling against the merger by not publishing any Activision-Blizzard games in the UK.
To me that sounds like bullshit that wouldn’t fly, especially since MS has so many of their own offices in the UK and their own critical businesses that could be impacted too. But I’m not a lawyer so take my “that’s bullshit” with a heaping pile of salt. Although I haven’t seen any lawyers speculate the above either, so take that with a similar pile of salt too. But that’s the reasoning behind the statements to that effect.
The article mentions that most publishers will license it for 6-12 months, but it’s going to vary. Basically keeping Denuvo in use indefinitely costs more money than only using it for a short time.
From a business perspective I think it makes sense to license it for that first 6-12 month period. As a consumer too I wouldn’t mind that: let them protect the initial sales period and then remove the DRM for long-term use. Early adopters will get the shitty version of the game… but that’s already true in so many other ways.
Huin said publishers license Denuvo technology “for a certain amount of time, [maybe] six months or a year,” mainly to protect that initial sales period. After that, many publishers decline to renew that lease and instead release an updated version of the game that is not protected by Denuvo.
What grinds my gears with all the people (whether Denuvo officials or elsewhere) that claim that it has no effect on performance: they only focus on average FPS. Never a consideration for FPS lows or FPS time spent on frames that took more than N milliseconds. Definitely not any look at loading times.
I’m willing to believe a good implementation of Denuvo has a negligible impact on average FPS. I think every time I saw anyone test loading times though, it had a clear and consistent negative impact. I’ve never seen anyone check FPS lows (or similar) but with the way Denuvo works I expect it’s similar.
Performance is more than average framerate and they hide behind a veil of pretending that it is the totality of all performance metrics.
And here I thought he had finally disappeared from gaming.
Let’s be realistic: this is another scam by him. Everyone likes to brush it off as him as dreaming bigger than he can pull off and getting caught up in his own hype or whatever. But no, after you do it enough times in a row for enough decades without deviation, it’s hard to deny what it is.
Especially after his most recent game of Godus and all the bullshit from that.
This dude doesn’t deserve the coverage this article gave him, and the only discussion worth having is to warn people off of his lies.
Maybe unpopular opinion… Should Halo invert its focus? Currently it’s multiplayer first, singeplayer second. If the multiplayer modes cannot maintain a playerbase then its not going to be a main driver of success. The battle royale and hero shooter crazes haven’t left much room for the Halo multiplayer format to succeed these days: most of the potential players are focusing on something else.
I think if they could deliver kickass campaigns consistently that they could keep Halo as a successful franchise. If they keep chasing multiplayer it’ll fade into obscurity soon enough.
In theory any country that Microsoft and/or Activision do business in could make a point to approve or disapprove the acquisition.
The repercussions of that are going to depend on the enforcement mechanism, but in practice I’d expect in most cases it’d work out to being barred from doing business there either de jure or de facto (fined to the point of making it pointless). Large countries will have enough power that major corporations would be obligated to accept a negative decision. Medium countries could possibly leverage a negative decision into a desirable concession. Small countries have no leverage and will be aware of that.
Larian says the main issue is with the split-screen/local co-op mode and the XSS.
That suggests to me that this is a RAM issue. CPU power between XSX and XSS is nearly but not exactly identical. GPU power is separated by a big gap but that’s more or less worked around by changing the resolution. That leaves RAM as the differentiating factor. Xbox, like most consoles, has a unified memory system with a single pool of RAM for both CPU and GPU uses.
I think that the problem here is that split-screen co-op is forcing more of the RAM requirements to the CPU than is typical for a current gen console game. The XSX, having a larger pool of RAM, can handle this fine. The XSS cannot. For PC they just don’t have to guarantee that all these scenarios work with acceptable performance on any specific configuration — if split-screen co-cop plays like shit on a min-spec PC, well, too bad. For consoles that won’t fly.
There’s no real magic solution to this. They could spend a lot of time trying to optimize their code and assets to minimize the memory footprint, but that’s not certain to be enough and would be a lot of work with little benefit in other markets. They could axe the feature for Xbox, but I don’t know how well that’d go over with players.
I have some bigger games I intend to get later, but I bought Halls of Torment early. It’s a “[X] Survivors” game like Vampire Survivors, with a heavy Diablo theme/atmosphere to it. It has some fun little changes on the genre and I’m having fun with it. Always funny how these $3-$5 games can be so entertaining.
I play the remastered over this winter, first time playing D2 nearly 20 years… Maybe it’s the nostalgia speaking, but I found, even today, it’s exceptionally strong in the atmosphere department.
The lore was more threadbare than I remembered, and stamina is an annoying mechanic, but neither of those are all that large of a penalty. The atmosphere carries the story, and stamina basically ceases to matter after act 1 or 2.
I’d definitely echo your sentiment and say it’s still fun.
You’d be surprised at how long development cycles are for hardware. PS5 development would have started shortly after the PS4 shipped. You’ll see similar for other hardware. In all likelihood PS6 development has been going on for about two years.
For components like CPUs and GPUs, or popular consumer electronics like phones, multiple generations of hardware will be under development simultaneously in order to permit desired release cadences.
Not a final decision. SCOTUS (via Kagan) refused to overturn a stay on a decision while legal proceedings continue. Basically just an order to keep things as-is until the case finishes working its way through the courts.
Which as I understand it is generally how things work: if there’s no clear likely winner, go with the interim situation that most easily can be rectified if it is later ruled to have been wrong. In this case, if the ruling goes against Apple than they can be ordered to give money to Epic and other app-owners based on the revenue brought in from them to Apple during the appropriate period. The opposite case would require more complex estimates (how much revenue was shifted away from Apple incorrectly, in the case where Apple wins) and further it’d result in unnecessary consumer friction: users would go from A to B then back to A again.