Amazon really is remarkably bad at releasing games

Ai first and already thinking about how they want to offer it to the military. Sounds like a real winner…

Is there any other game company that hates their fans as much as Nintendo?

It probably took some post processing if I had to guess.

Not that I care about cod particularly, but you’re not kidding. They’re yearly releases so that basically means you don’t get to play at all until the player base moves to the next one.

“People getting paid by AI say it’s great!”

Wow, shocker.

From what I’ve heard they’re having trouble convincing devs to join so I think you’re spot on. This is Spotify for games basically.

It’s called an add-on and it’s existed for decades.

The game has to have implemented it, just like all graphics settings.

I’ll throw in an artist perspective to back you up, cause I relate to what you’re saying in a big way, even if specifics are a little different.

I feel like big tech and business people are desperate right now to turn art into a science. To systematize art and creativity. They themselves don’t understand things outside of a data dashboard, and this weakness means they must find a way to make everything visible through that lens.

It won’t work, but the pursuit of it is still absolutely exhausting and soul crushing to witness and live through for me. It will also cause a ton of damage to people in the short term, and damage to organizations who embrace the bubble potentially for a long time.

All of the examples just feel like those weird touched up athletic photos where they just blow out the contrast to absolutely crunchy levels.

I don’t like that they used them in the first place, but I’m glad to see this move. They certainly have the money.

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.