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Gill doesn’t have to launch the game until September 15 to be eligible for the $250 million bonus at the center of the lawsuit.
Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier reported last year that, should Subnautica 2 meet the necessary revenue targets to trigger the bonus, a portion of it will be shared among some of Unknown Worlds’ staff.
I’m half-expecting the share given to employees to be a couple million tops and fans to turn on both sides, just to put the cherry on this crap sundae of a scandal.
If you pick it up, know that it has a huge modding scene that makes an already great game even better. I can recommend a few basic QoL mods if you want, though the 9.0 update is coming soon and will probably break most of them for a while.
Also, the base game has some arbitrary mechanics meant purely to punish the player so veterans can’t steamroll the NPC factions too quickly, at the expense of making the new player experience harder. There’s a list of these mechanics (and links to mods that reduce/remove them) here.
Admittedly I’m in the middle of a playthrough and currently deeply enamored with the game, but I’ve enjoyed Enshrouded much more than Valheim (which I also loved, to be clear). I’ll probably start noticing all the flaws I’ve been ignoring soon, but right now it feels like Valheim, but more. More recipes, more enemies, more options for farming and better animal tames, much better combat, a building system that doesn’t drive me crazy, and a hand-built world that is vastly superior to the samey procgen of Valheim.
The comparison to the Elder Scrolls is much less flattering, admittedly. It’s only in the world design and exploration that I’d put Enshrouded ahead, and even then I bet many players would be annoyed by just how much Enshrouded uses verticality in its map (which I love, but I’ll admit it makes overland travel a pain).
The entire world being one map so a hole in the internal walls of a dungeon could lead directly outside is a massive step up from Bethesda’s engine where dungeons are basically their own separate universe. I just completed the Blackmire tower the other day, a dungeon that had the branches of a giant tree punching through its sides and forcing you to take alternate routes. I fell all the way to ground level several times but still had a blast exploring the place.
I’m not super far in. I have three characters* that are all around the same point, at or just after the boss fight at the end of Pike’s Reach. It’s possible the rest of the game lacks the same polish the early areas have.
* One created when the game first entered Early Access, one for co-op, one newly created to see all they changed in the opening hours.
True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later admitted it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.
F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.
I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.
Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.
Nearly every title on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.
(And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)
I just wish they’d dedicate one or two of their major updates to integrating all the random features they added into a cohesive whole. Right now there are dozens of systems that are almost all pointless shallow grinds as well as completely isolated from every other system. It’d give the game some real depth if these mechanics interacted with each other in any way.
That, and fix their damn inventory system. It’s been a decade and multiple overhauls and basic crafting and inventory management is still unpleasant and tedious.
They kind of tried that, but unfortunately it wasn’t very good.
Right, but there’s a difference between automating a refund if they can detect the purchase happened in the last two weeks and has less than two hours of playtime, versus complex support problems being handled by an LLM that can be mislead or hallucinate.
I suppose it’s fine if it’s limited to giving advice on solving the problem and has to escalate to a human if any server side action is required, but it being tied to anti-cheat has me worried that’s not the case.
I know Valve wants to remain a small-ish company, but automating in-house support has literally never improved things for the customer. It’s even worse if it’s tied into their anti-cheat - a false positive can lock you and your entire family out of multiplayer, and good luck getting a human to overturn it after the former support staff is moved to other teams.
I’d say it’s weird they didn’t focus on using this to help fix their nearly nonexistent community moderation, but I’ve been told their hands-off approach is deliberate due to a libertarian bent among the higher ups.
How the hell would it have connected to MGS and not just Metal Gear? 🤨
The ending shows that the whole game exists to explain a “plot hole” that literally nobody cared about (how Big Boss survived his “death” in Metal Gear). The scrapped final mission, Mission 51, would have come before that and finished Eli’s plotline, setting him on the path to becoming Liquid Snake by the time of Metal Gear Solid.
And Ground Zeroes was always planned as a separate game to MGS5. They were supposed to release at the same time, but 5’s development got delayed.
I’m going off of what people said around the time of Kojima’s exit, which is that Konami were unhappy with how long V was taking and forced Kojima to release Ground Zeroes as a standalone. It seems I misinterpreted what that meant!
The ultimate crime of MGSV is that they cut the ending mission that directly tied it to Metal Gear Solid. Without it the game’s more a prequel to Metal Gear than the Solid series.
That and cutting Ground Zeroes into its own game when it was originally supposed to be a chapter in V. It should have been retroactively included.
So the next day, I asked him, “So how is it?” He was shellshocked. “Snake died, man.” Excitement was gone. His day at school was ruined. I didn’t check in with him later, but presumably, a 7th grader couldn’t make heads or tails of the ending of that game, if he made it that far.
Sounds like you asked him right after he finished the Tanker chapter but before “Iroquois Pliskin” showed up on the Big Shell.
I didn’t play it myself until a few years later, and it was one of the most talked-about endings in all of video games, because it was so barely comprehensible, at best.
The ending was mangled due to 9/11 happening right before the game’s release and them rushing to recut and sanitize the finale, which had huge swaths of Manhattan being leveled by Metal Gear Arsenal ramming through it.
Presumably the original cut was more coherent, but I’m guessing nothing could have lessened the final mindfuck of “every leader of the Patriots has been dead for over a century”.
I’m more impressed by his ability to get players to like Raiden later on. He’s still a massive cringy dork in MGS4, but now he’s an edgy Gray Fox expy and that was apparently enough to change player’s minds about him. He’s gone from the most hated to one of the most popular characters in the entire series.
Kpjima later did something similar with Otacon using a completely different approach. Otacon was introduced as a coward and a naïve fool, and though he improved with every game, many players didn’t like him due to that poor first impression.
The prequels featured Otacon’s father, who all we knew about beforehand was that he committed suicide years before MGS1 because he found out Otacon was sleeping with his stepmother, and managed to make him a more hateable character than most of the actual villains. He has the exact same voice and appearance along with all the same personality flaws as his son, but those flaws were all turned up to eleven and he lacked any of Otacon’s virtues to counter them.
And his character spiraled downwards from there - it was basically Kojima rubbing into your face how much worse Otacon could have been and shining a spotlight on the importance of character development.
What I like about Enshrouded’s world is how every setpiece tells a story. Not just in the omnipresent side quests and lore notes, but in how every ruined house feels authentic. They’ll almost always have a kitchen, cellar, outhouse or latrine, bedrooms, etc, and many of them have tableaus suggesting what happened in their occupants’ final moments and/or what caused them to fall. It feels like a place people actually lived in.
They could try by being the only place to get Star Wars games or Marvel or any of the many, many other IPs Disney has accumulated over the years. It’s how they got Disney+ off the ground.
Like I said, others have tried this approach and failed, but Disney might actually have the critical mass to get people to use a client other than Steam. Or at least attempt to and make getting certain games a nightmare for a few years until they come crawling back, like EA/Ubisoft/Microsoft/all the others.
I don’t care about them buying Epic, the game developer. I do care about them buying Epic, the game store owner, and trying to do to game distribution what they helped do to streaming (fragment a unified and beloved system into a dozen enshittified walled gardens). Other megacorps have tried and failed, but Disney is greedy enough and owns enough popular IPs that they could do some serious damage to the entertainment ecosystem if they try to go exclusive.
The pattern from every previous Disney acquisition is the same. A minority stake, then deeper integration, then ownership. Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm all started as partnerships before Disney moved to close the deal entirely.
Epic looks like it is following the same path, and the only thing standing between Disney and a full acquisition is Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, who retains full voting control over the company and has given no public indication that he is ready to sell.
We’re stuck counting on Tim Sweeney’s ego to save the day. What strange times we live in.
Neither did many of the miners. There was pretty famously a near-universal shortage of GPUs for several years because crypto miners were buying so many cards - online, direct from the manufacturer, even big box stores; they drained them all. Most of those would be indistinguishable from a normal purchase (a lot of miners only bought one or two cards; there were just a lot of crypto bros looking to get rich).
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Those still doing 1080p/1440p gaming get the best of both worlds: high framerates with all the fancy graphics turned on, without needing to rely on frame gen or spend a thousand bucks on a graphics card.
IMO 4k isn’t enough of a qualitative leap to justify all the hacks needed to make it run acceptably on current hardware, let alone the sky-high VRAM costs for that resolution. I’d rather run a game in ultra quality at 1080p than medium quality in 4k.