No I think it just proves this is a shit product

Good! Elden Ring felt too large at times, especially some DLC areas. Where I had the most fun was contained dungeons and castles. I think that’s really where their level design shines best.

That’s why I’m really glad to see Hooded Horse and Greg Styczeń have this mindset, and that they’re actually speaking out against the GaaS mentality. They’re going back to the unspoken contract and saying the current status quo is stupid.

The headline is poorly chosen. They aren’t saying that studios should be earning endless money without work. They’re saying the GaaS model to try and earn endless money is putting devs on a treadmill, and that this shouldn’t be the case.

I hope to see more like this going forward. I don’t think gamers nor developers are a fan of GaaS trying to stay constantly relevant.

Indeed! You can choose to co-op with friends, but it isn’t necessary at all. It’s a really nice model for RPGs.

Legitimately one of my favorite games. Incredible story, characters, and side quests. It’s also the only time I’ve actually felt like I was in a city when playing a game, they absolutely nail the environment and setting. It feels like a true city, not a video game city.

GAMERS

Yeah, I could never in good conscience recommend the first Attack on Titan game they made as an actual game. But if you’re a fan? It’s a fucking blast and I loved it. There’s not as high of a bar to clear. Same with Dragonball Xenoverse. It’s fun, but not incredibly good.

I usually think of scope creep as adding more and more work items, like this: you’re building a bridge between two buildings. During design, you find out one of the buildings has terrible foundations that should really just be replaced. Scope creep would be deciding to replace the building foundations as part of the bridge project.

It’s possible I’m not using the term correctly either though. Maybe what I’ve described instead is design creep, or something.

Same actually. Sometimes the game runs into too much to load and will just freeze and crash. I crashed twice near launch and I’ve had a ton more now.

It’s a healthy dynamic which could be better, but it being healthy for everyone is what keeps it afloat

It’s a really fascinating market dynamic. Steam is good to consumers, generally speaking, and offers features to that end. Family sharing is the wildest thing imaginable, since it’s formally letting customers share one purchase instead of each making one for two purchases. Their refund policy too is really, really nice.

Valve has effectively chosen to be more enticing to the end user than to the seller. They’ve gathered up so many buyers that it’s foolish for sellers to not set up a shop there. A 30% cut of revenue is hefty, but like you said, that sets up a dynamic where both want the game to succeed. I suspect paying a monthly fee to remain listed on steam would end up worse for everyone.

Gaben is one hell of a mastermind.

Yeah that’s fair. It’s you can nearly cordon off the engine and then upgrade it to keep the same functionality it could work well. I guess it really depends on estimated hours to figure out if it would be more economic to make a new game or new engine.

It’s certainly a very large financial undertaking to change the engine like that, and at that point they’re honestly better off just making a new game entirely.

I love your idea for the wilderness, safe PvP for factions would’ve been a lot of fun.

Ahhhh I totally see what you mean. Yeah the whole thing with SoF going away for TH was disgusting. I don’t even consider it a change really, it’s pretty much the same thing. It still doesn’t sit right with me that they had an option to kill Yelps in a quest as effectively a scapegoat while they changed nothing.

Completely agree that MTX is out of control and badly designed. I understand why they need it, but they’re going about it the completely wrong way and monetizing the wrong things. It should only ever provide cosmetics. And Jagex is absolutely trying to get more money out of us in return for providing less.

EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep. They should’ve left items and armors and stats the same, and only changed how you dealt damage. Maybe introduce only a couple of abilities to augment combat instead of outright replace it, like bleeds, stuns, freedoms, etc. Plus, OSRS clearly shows that the old combat system could still do interesting and challenging encounters. And yeah PvP on RS3 is laughable and a lost cause, at least as far as the wilderness goes. The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.

I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.

Which feature are you thinking of?

And the only reason they’re decent about mistakes is because of the plethora they’ve accumulated. By no means does that mean they get to it quickly nor fix it adequately all the time. But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best. It says more about everyone else than it does Jagex. Still, I appreciate they can flat out say they fucked up.

RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with “we messed up”. Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild

What really bugs me is that it’s not even infinite growth they’re after. What they want is as high growth as possible as soon as possible. Planning a sustainable long term profit business would mean great employee benefits to attract and keep the best, a ton of funding for new product development, and building things slightly more expensive so that they last longer.

There is no financial analysis that would say cutting safety measures is a net positive to your money in the long run. The bill will come due and you’ll lose an extraordinary amount of money when things blow up or derail. If I make a change that raises my risk to 1% over a year to have a safety incident which would cost me 5 billion, I’d have to save more than 50 million each year with that decision for it to make me more money. Plus it would take 100 years for the realized savings to cancel out the event. If it happened before 100 years, I’m at a net negative.

All of that is to say that the stakeholders aren’t just greedy bastards, they’re also dumb as fuck. But that’s not surprising – the type of person with that much money didn’t get it from consistently working over time. They think playing fast and loose will work in their favor always.

There’s no way this is legal unless it’s already in a contract – and even then, it might still be illegal. The notion of charging people more money because you’ve raised your prices after they’ve already bought something just breaks economics completely. You’d be able to sell a bunch of a product for cheap, and then later say sike and charge everyone a lot more.

I’m sure companies would love to do that, but no company exists in isolation. Every single company is buying something from another company to sell their product. If they could do this to their buyers, then their suppliers could do it to them. It would probably end up cancelling any gains you’d get.

I’m guessing this was a move their executives made without any consultation with legal, because it’s the kind of idiotic move only they could think of.

I mean you’d think so, but look at how often companies get into lawsuits for clearly illegal shit. Plenty of places will still try to enforce arbitration/NDA clauses that have no actual legal basis or consequence.

It blows my mind how critical everyone was of Cyberpunk, despite it running fairly well on PC especially a few weeks after release, and how much of a pass everyone gives Starfield.

It’s disappointing that AAA studios don’t recognize this. I don’t want a bloated game that takes 300 hours to experience most of it. I don’t want a giant map. I want a good game. I want a small map filled with life, not a large one with soulless procedurally generated dungeons.

There was plenty of distaste for Elden Ring when it came out – devs at Ubisoft I believe ridiculed how the UI wasn’t informative and such.

I think AAA studios are terrified because they’re seeing just how much consumers value quality over quantity and MTX bullshit. Games that should be in self contained bubbles are now hitting mainstream and becoming absurdly popular.

That and their response to “Free HK” really pissed me off.

There’s plenty of others. GoG and Humble come to mind as the major alternatives.

I’m ambivalent on console exclusives for this reason. It certainly drives sales for a console, but it’s so anti consumer

Same. Hell the exact numbers it has for drop rates has spoiled me even comparing to the RS3 wiki.

The RuneScape wikis did this several years ago, might even be a decade at this point. The actual developer studio, Jagex, helps pay to keep them online and independent because of how damn good they are and how useful it is for everyone, including developers, to reference.

Microsoft (or Mojang? I don’t know anymore) would be well served to do the same here honestly.