I think it has to be insane levels of incompetence. They’re not patient enough to wait around for 3 years for Bluepoint to put out something that makes money, so they probably gave them some busy work, like support work for other studios, until they could go through the bureaucracy of closing the studio.

What happened is that pivoting from a bad idea like this takes a long time and a lot of money for a company this large, and they had no plan B, which is stupid, so they’d rather just reduce their operating expenses.

Word is this live service push was Jim Ryan’s initiative, and he left the company right before it all fell apart.

I think the reason Sekiro 1 happened was that they started making a Tenchu game and then changed their minds.

He’s only got vibes to go on in the EU, but the vibes were good from the people representing the movement there. There’s an NGO that already got the ball rolling in the US, and even though it’ll still be difficult, there may actually be legislation drafted in the US before the EU, which Ross finds hilarious. The UK’s initiative hasn’t been going well, but there’s one more long shot chance they have of some movement there.

I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don’t animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.

I want a modern Tenchu game too, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

It happens all the time, but you need startup capital. And a lot of what they did is remaking games (at high quality) that they don’t own the rights to.

What a needlessly stupid thing it was to put them on a live service project, and what a waste to close it down.

I’m reading between the lines a bit here, but back when I regularly attended PAX East, one of my favorite panels to attend was the video game data panel hosted by EEDAR (now a part of Circana). The games like NBA 2K, GTA, Call of Duty, or Assassin’s Creed that can regularly break $1B in revenue are the kinds of games that may sell to people like you or me on a gaming forum, but also that they can sell to the kind of person who only plays four or fewer games per year. Since then, I imagine live service games that keep you hooked on that one game in particular have only exacerbated that figure of four or fewer games per year. That’s a huge segment of the market. And I imagine that’s the customer that the market is losing on a Friday night to TikTok or OnlyFans.

There’s plenty of great new stuff too, often times even modern iterations of the retro stuff we loved, but it doesn’t get the same level of marketing, so it’s harder to find.

Dr. Mario 64 is my family’s most played N64 game by far. It didn’t hurt that it was a game that my dad actually found a taste for. One of the things that made it so easy for everyone to play is that you could adjust difficulty individually for everyone until it felt fair.

I doubt any of us were playing at the highest level of competitive play, but the reason garbage would be a factor for us is when you start taking risks to catch up to a player in the lead. Otherwise, I always appreciated that it was sort of a race to clear your own board. Garbage does slow people down, and not just in the animations but in how much time it takes to clear the garbage from what otherwise would have been an easy clear.

I said this before when you made your Puyo Puyo video, but if you’re left wanting by the state of the competitive puzzle gaming scene, even if you’ve never made a video game before, nothing could be a better target for a first project. The barrier to entry is just about zero these days. Take your pick of Godot, Game Maker, Unity, or Unreal, and iterate on one of these.

I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed.

I didn’t think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur’s Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.

Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they’re going to look outdated in 2030.

Yours is an aggressive timeline, but I think the market is naturally trending that way for a lot of reasons.

Optimizing for development time is a worthy pursuit as well.

They’re also not really comparable. Teams were so small and project timelines were so short that you often knew exactly what the end would look like. My favorite optimization story from 20+ years ago is that a dev (who went nameless, and so did the game, as the story was posted anonymously) made a habit of declaring a large empty variable at the beginning of a project, and that variable’s only job was to be deleted when they encroached on their memory budget so they knew when to stop.

The most anyone can do is make hay while the sun is shining and prepare for a rainy day, because it will rain. This is probably not the first or last bubble in your lifetime.

The further you get into CO:E33, the more it becomes about parries, and the less your actual RPG systems matter. And the story…I’m guessing you understood it just fine. It kind of discards a lot of its setup in the transition from act 2 to act 3, replacing the beginning of one story for the ending of a totally different one.

Yeah, it’s exactly where the genre started to lose me, haha.

I played Remake when it was included in PS+ back in ~2020, and I played the original right after (I was very confused by the ending sequence of Remake at the time). I have yet to play Rebirth, but I’ll get to it after a replay of Remake and before part 3 comes out.

I thought very little about the story differences between the two. The part that stood out to me was, politically, why people would support Shinra at all (a change in Remake), as you hear more from the average resident of Midgar. And I thought they gave you more time to get attached to all those doomed folks in your band of eco terrorists before they die.

I’m way into prog rock, so the soundtrack was just better for me in Remake. Maybe it’s not as good as the orchestral version of the original soundtrack, but that wasn’t in the original, so I only have the MIDI to compare it to. The main theme sounds fantastic, way better than the original actually, and you still get that Kansas-esque battle theme against the robot when you’re scaling the tower. Loved it. Going from either of those back to the original MIDI is cute, but it’s a downgrade.

The story changes are because this isn’t a straight upgrade meant to replace the old game. This is a game whose story is about the reverence for the original game. Or at least, that’s what it sets up in Part 1, and I can’t speak to Part 2. As for wasting your time, yeah, it does that. I had a great time skipping the side missions in Remake, and from what I heard of Rebirth, that’s probably what I’ll do again, since that content is pretty phoned in. The original game’s version of wasting your time is a random battle encounter rate that’s set too high, plus the macguffin hunt right before the end of the game.

The AI bubble isn’t immune to basic realities of economics. Eventually the bubble pops, and prices come back down; they can’t keep getting investment for demand that doesn’t exist. Analysts think that will be as long as two years, so take good care of your stuff for at least that long. And as a silver lining for replacing anything that does break, there ought to be more refurb or used parts available in the near term, since Microsoft made a bunch of people upgrade their perfectly usable machines due to Windows 11 and TPM 2.0 requirements.

That is surprising. Don’t expect this game to run well on Switch 1, lol.

Yeah, can’t argue with that. But I wouldn’t really mind which direction the solution came from.

At the same time though, I wish we could retain old versions, like how Ultra Street Fighter IV did. I know doing so is harder, but you can lose a thing you enjoy to a new version of the game that you don’t. I didn’t like Strive season 2, but fortunately, I liked every other season. I feel like Strive is in a really good place right now, and I’m nervous about this 2.0 update they’re talking about. If it’s a major update to the software and not the gameplay, then hell yeah, I’m on board, but I’m nervous that it could be another season 2.

That’s why SF6 has freak fights, MK has challenge towers and king of the hill, DBFZ has weird random modes on rotation, etc.

Even that is tricky though, because now you have to program the computer player to take bait. A computer Guile that can tell when you’re blocking and when you’re not could be just about unbeatable, and a human player can’t tell that, so they have to guess. In any case, I think the genre’s single player modes are lacking because we’ve only been taking them seriously for about 15 years. NetherRealm does what they do well, but they could still stand to do a better job of diagetically teaching you through the story mode like you’re saying. SF6 has its RPG mode, which I think is a better idea on paper than it is in how they executed it. RGG is talking a big game about the single player offering in the new Virtua Fighter, and I believe they’ll probably do a great job at it, because if you fork the code for Yakuza, you’re most of the way to a single player Virtua Fighter already; just make the plot something like Blood Sport.

You phrased it as “the newer generation of AI”, so it was unclear what you meant, but it seemingly referred to the AI we hear about all too often these days in the news. I do think there’s more room to get closer to approximating a human opponent in fighting games, and I know how I’d attempt to tackle it at a high level, but it must be harder than I think it is, or it would have been done by now; one potential pitfall would be having to update it every time you put out a balance patch, because that would affect how the computer player would have to behave.

Every era of video games was affected by its business model. Games used to be far more obtuse to sell guides and hint hotlines, and they used to be hard to the point that they were less fun so that it took longer to finish them. In the early 2000s, when the industry was largely between alternate revenue streams, you tended to get a lot of padding so that they could put a larger number of levels as a bullet point on the back of the box, so the first few levels would be great, but somewhere in the middle, they’d be pretty phoned in.

Yeah, it’s an article that makes you think it cites its sources and did its homework, but it doesn’t even examine why SF2’s success is so high, like that arcade revenue in the 90s is basically a cheat code compared to selling copies of console games, or that SF2 had a number of versions across that entire decade that all factor into that several billion dollars it earned. What the article refers to as “the dark ages” is actually a different era than what most would assign to the moniker to, misnomer though it might be. And it also states things as facts that aren’t; not just your Guilty Gear example but that somehow SF6 is the most homogenized SF game somehow. This feels like the author is just salty that they don’t care for the last few years’ offerings personally.

Guilty Gear is now a multi-million seller when every previous game didn’t even crack a tenth of that. Yes, what they did to Guilty Gear demonstrably worked. Tekken and Dragon Ball FighterZ are both huge. If I were a betting man, I’d say Marvel Tokon will do about as well as any of the other most successful fighting games out there.

I don’t want to be mean, but your best summary didn’t capture the counter system or the multi tiered stages. DOA rules as a fighting game.

I just played Escape from Ever After. Every bit as good and polished as the old Paper Mario games. $25. They cost $50-$65 back then.

I have, and the last Mortal Kombat that had a problem with infinite combos was 15 years ago. There’s also a structure to MK combos that reduces your need to memorize anything.

That’s neither here nor there, and it’s not much of a problem in the genre either.

It’s got to serve both masters. It should be fun when you don’t know what you’re doing, that person should always lose to someone who does know what they’re doing, and becoming the person who knows what they’re doing should be fun, too. When you don’t know what you’re doing in DOA, you’re still kicking people off rooftops and down the steps of the Great Wall of China.

It was a Sony show. They barely mentioned PC. There’s no listing for Volume 2 on the eShop, and to set your expectations accordingly, I would only expect this game to run on the Switch 2, not the Switch 1.

Not impossible but a colossal pain in the ass such that no one ever thought they’d dip into their pocketbook to fund the work.

It’s a handful of podcasts, and spoilers abound during GOTY in December.