I predict an initial enthusiasm followed by a swift and unanimous “meh” when people realize how boring these will be.

Sounds like it’s a little more nuanced than I thought. In my play throughs it seemed like everyone was always ready to go!

Do you mean the being shot down part? Cause the devs have said in interviews that they purposely made the characters player-sexual.

I also would love to see this!

🫡

Thanks for writing all that! I’m interested as someone who isn’t asexual, so I find your perspective really interesting since it’s not something I can personally experience.

I haven’t played mass effect, but that write up mirrors how I’ve felt about a lot of games with tacked on romance. Also, as someone who does enjoy sex, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good sex scene in a game. Baldur’s Gate 3, for all the hype about the sex in it, was still pretty weak imo. You’re not missing much in other words!

I mentioned it in another comment on this thread about BG3, but it sounds like mass effect also went with the “player-sexual” approach, meaning every character is into you no matter who you are. I find that approach really off-putting personally. I would much rather have characters love or hate you based on the character you made. This means you could even try and get shot down, which would be a nice realistic image of dating where that is always very possible (even more bonus points if a game let you fuck up the relationship after it started).

I like how you emphasize the focus on a relationship in Haven. I think most romances in games are dating simulators, not relationship simulators, and I hadn’t been able to put that into words until you said all this.

I’m someone who has always preferred the stability and comfort of an established relationship over the high stakes feeling of dating, but that’s not true for everyone. Some people who only like the beginning, and once things settle they lose interest. I’ve been happily married for a long time, and I don’t miss dating at all. It seems like there need to be more relationship simulations so that people like you and I can enjoy romance in games more!

I agree with that, but negative reviews also affect the algorithm. If enough of those reviews drown out positive ones it will reduce the chance you see the game at all.

If you don’t mind sharing, what are the differences in how sex is portrayed in this game vs how you don’t like it?

I think it also makes them feel more shallow because the characters are all “player-sexual” to use an industry term. Basically every character is into you if you want them to be.

I’d love to see more games have characters with preset likes and dislikes and how you’ve built and played your character will determine who will be interested (and who will shoot you down!)

What does it have? Those are some pretty major features.

“Art is something that we think is a little outdated in the modern business landscape” - this guy probably.

I’m a millennial, how do I sign up for this too much disposable income thing?

I agree, and the performance thing was my suspicion as well. It just seems off to have a large scale siege game be so small.

To be honest 5v5 still seems kinda small on paper to me, but I haven’t played it.

The focus on player dropoff is always misleading. Free to play games always lose massive numbers of players within the first week generally. What matters is who’s left, and what the company’s operating budget is. 10k players or even less can be plenty for a small team for instance. With such small player team sizes in-game, that would also be more than enough for a populated feeling queue.

Welcome to the stock market: where the money’s made up and the rules don’t matter!

The team size is so baffling to me in this game, but I’ve been wondering after watching this if it’s actually a performance thing.

It sounds like the game is woefully poorly optimized, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it can’t handle a more fun number of players.

Do you like puzzle games? I played Blue Prince with my wife and that was pretty fun. She’s not much of a gamer, so I just drove and she took notes. We talked about decisions/speculated on puzzles together.

We got enough bad shit and greed in the world. I’ll celebrate good things when I see them.

“Being a healthy company means having healthy results.” But he adds that money won’t be the main motivating factor, and instead the focus is to “do a good job, have good products and good services, and then as a consequence and as a reward comes good money.” It’s a point that he thinks is obvious, “but many companies fall apart on that, putting the spreadsheets first.”

Such a refreshing take.

I thought the same thing. I would honestly argue that metroidvanias were open worlds before we had that term. There are some that are more linear than others, but many of them are very exploration heavy and don’t have a single order you must do things in.

I think it’s gotta be my phone, because other devices on my network don’t seem to have the same problems

Thanks for the recommendations!

Amazon are proving year after year that it takes more than money to make games.

Everyone’s talking about the mad cow part, but this is also a really excellent point:

“Some of these people trying to define the future of humanity, creativity, or whatever it is using AI, are not the most humane or creative people. So they’re sort of saying, ‘We’re better at being human than you are.’ It’s obviously not true.”

It’s not a personal attack

And I took that personally!

So let me get this straight… They’re still burning money on Concord through legal costs? Just walk away guys.

It’s hard to overstate how insanely fast these games get made. I have no doubt that the project managers have to cut any corner they can to meet the release schedule. Don’t take this as a defense of the result, but rather a criticism of the treadmill dev cycle for these games.

How much you wanna bet in around 6 months to a year there are headlines about them hiring loads of people to cleanup the mess.

I’m not average I’m sure, but I buy 0 games a year at full price 😅

Thank you!

Is this for the PC only version too? I can’t tell through all the marketing speak.

Different industry, but in my graphic design business I’ve had a couple small jobs fixing/finishing logos people tried to make with AI. Sounds like you’re getting a lot more, but I’ve been seeing this too.

Crashed like it was buggy? Never.

I played it a while after release though.

I’m apparently the only person who really enjoyed 3 all the way through.

Oh really? I haven’t heard of that before.

This seems like a fairly clever type of “strike” actually. Quotes cause it’s not really a strike, but it’s definitely strike-adjacent.

I love the data callout so much. I wish I remember the article I read this in, but there was a researcher who said we’re living in an age of data-driven stupidity and that’s stuck with me ever since.

It’s not that data is bad in all cases, but data aggregation is inherently reducing fidelity of detail in the process. When you’re approaching human-centric issues, such as making something fun and meaningful, data really can’t help you that much. You’ve boiled the messy human elements, the elements most crucial to a powerful result, out of the conversation.

I hope they release it for PC someday

That is a wild extrapolation from a sample of 615 people

I just came here to see if anyone could explain what a gaming SSD was lmao