Thanks. It would be really interesting to know what’s going on behind the scenes. My understanding is that once a live service game makes it to the big leagues, like D2, resources aren’t a problem if they get reinvested into development. For example, Genshin gets an annual budget of around $200m (basically one AAA a year), and pushes updates on a 6 week cycle. These big income earning projects all ought to be capable of doing crazy stuff that other studios can’t match.

What sometimes happens is that the company milks the game to fund other stuff, so not enough is reinvested (like FFXIV). But it’s so strange to see it happening to Bungie, because the whole point of the Sony acquisition was to have a healthy ongoing live service game.

Thanks. That sounds remarkably like the same slump FFXIV is currently in, actually. You’d think professional writers would be able to see this problem coming a long way away, and find a way to pivot smoothly to the next storyline. Especially with so much $$ at stake in a live service game.

Out of the loop. Why is Destiny 2 sinking? Didn’t the game use to print money? Did the money not get reinvested back into the live service (like how FFXIV funds get vacuumed away to prop up the rest of Square Enix), or did Bungie make some bad artistic choices, or what?

It’s wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.

At this point, Western gaming companies’ monetization schemes are becoming worse than gacha, so you may as well go play Genshin Impact ;-)

Half of this article’s word count seems to be the writer snarking about how he doesn’t care about these games and doesn’t know much about them. I guess it’s good to show contempt for your audience…

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

I find Pathfinder 2e (and D&D 3e before it) way clunkier. Maintaining a level-appropriate power level requires stacking buffs like the Overlord meme, and if you decline to do so, you’re just crippling your character. It’s bad enough that auto-buffing mods are considered mandatory for the Pathfinder CRPGs.

Lots of RPGs allow rest cheesing. Even if you don’t let players rest in random locations like BG3 does, the players can always hoof it back to town to rest. Attempts to prevent this kind of cheesing often end up feeling unduly punishing and un-fun. It’s not a tabletop vs computer issue.

DOS2 fights felt much more like a slog than BG3. Especially in higher difficulties, every battlefield ended up a nightmarish soup of elemental surfaces, which got old after awhile. I also found whittling down enemy toughness bars un-fun.

Personally, I liked both the BG3 and DOS1 systems better than DOS2.

I want to like Palworld, but I don’t know if I can support running existing Pokemon through a fusor and passing them off as ‘new’ IP

Imagine being morally outraged on behalf of a multibillion dollar corporate behemoth.

The bloodiness of the battles of the American Civil War is often remarked upon, including by contemporary commentators. So it’s nice that they emphasized that in the game.

The layoffs and budget cuts are symptoms, not cause. They’ve been terribly mismanaged for years – on the studio side, not EA – pissing away resources doing essentially nothing.

• Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, still the single best computer gaming representation of an epic D&D campaign, edging out even Baldur’s Gate 1-3 in my opinion.

• Ultima 7: an RPG built around the goal of immersing the player completely into the game world, eschewing any straightforward gameplay loops. If only the Ultima series had continued going strong, like the Elder Scrolls, rather than fizzling out with 8 and 9…

It’s amazing that CT never spawned an ongoing franchise. Aside from the controversial CC, there have been no other followups or even remakes, only a remaster. It’s like the platonic ideal of a JRPG, sitting alone and unsullied in the timestream.

Does it still present the classic UO experience where as soon as you walk five steps into the wilderness, PKs descend on you, kill you in a few hits, and take all your stuff?

I would add that the Titanfall 2 campaign was more “surprisingly good”, with a lot of potential for improvement. IMO, it didn’t reach the level where you were sucked into the setting and wanted to know what happened next to the characters, like say Mass Effect 1. It could have gotten there, if the writing had been stronger, but it didn’t. So I too don’t think it’s EA’s fault.

With better world-building for the game setting, and more effort at writing memorable human characters, this could have been a major IP franchise. Pity.

The greatest willpower challenge in the universe is not savescumming X-COM after a bad mission.

In some ways, the modern iteration of X-COM feels even more punishing than the OG X-com UFO Defence game. Because of the RPG elements, losing a built-up soldier is painful, and can be hard to recover from.

“God of War” and “The Last of Us” are both incredible titles. They consist of simple words, immediately signal what the game is about, and have a poetic ring to them.

EA said in March that BioWare’s Mass Effect team had been drafted in to assist with Dragon Age: Dreadwolf development, while a small group led by Mike Gamble continued pre-production work on the next entry in the sci-fi series.

Isn’t this what happened during the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem too? Jason Shreier’s post mortem of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is going to be awfully familiar reading…

I liked the first game more. The introduction of armour bars in DOS2 made each fight a huge slog; I understand the intention of promoting strategic thinking, but it just felt un-fun to me. Also, I liked the light hearted nature of DOS1’s story more.

A chat and gaming company is more powerful than Microsoft and Apple? Gotta get a grip…

Yeah, that attitude can sometimes work, and sometimes it leads to disaster. Famously, the original devs for FFXIV were proudly ignorant of other games in the MMORPG genre, and went off in their own direction. The resulting fiasco nearly killed off Square Enix until YoshiP, who had played Ultima Online, WoW, and other western MMORPGs, came in and whipped things into shape.