There’s just so much insane bloat in the industry. It feels like every game made by a AAA studio has a hundreds of millions of dollar budget, and hundreds of people working on it. A lot of people are just completely unfazed by the novelty of high production value anymore. Not a majority, but the number of people checking of AAA seems to grow constantly a little bit over time.

There’s obviously an audience for these massively produced games, but I just don’t understand how every AAA game is expected to be successful like this.

Meanwhile digital publishing, with Steam Early Access being the default example, has lowered the bar to entry in the market to basically nothing. Indie and “AA” games are on the front page of the storefront next to multimillion dollar AAA games.

Sure the vast majority of Early Access games never get finished enough to grab attention, but given the sheer volume, even a tiny fraction of those games releasing and getting traction dilutes the hold of AAA games.

People spending time playing Zomboid or Kenshi aren’t spending that time playing AAA next big thing.

I’m not deluded enough to think anything like a majority of gamers are playing mostly indie games, but a noticeable enough amount might be to reduce the needed profit margin of a bloated production.

That’s how this goes every time a question like this is asked. I agree. There’s a lot of games I personally don’t enjoy at all, but I can understand the appeal to a certain audience.

It’s not out for Halo 2 yet, but the Halo CE Ruby Rebalance is very good. A lot of thoughtful changes, some obvious (new weapons and enemies) some more invisible (tweaks to weapon stats and enemy spawn logic). It is respectful and high quality enough to the original that if you’d never played CE or hadn’t played in a long time, it would be hard to tell what the mod content was.

Keep an eye out for the Ruby Rebalance mod for the MCC.

MCC are remasters not remakes. This entire discussion got beat to death when the Halo CE remake was announced. The remakes will be completely new games, not visual facelifts on existing ones.

Caesar 3 has different “levels” where you have different cities and have to meet different demands from Rome with them. If you play this game I highly, highly, highly recommend using the Augustus mod from the get-go to have modern quality of life features. Also look up some tutorial videos as there are some counter intuitive mechanics.

This is a standalone program.

Fortunately this person waited until it was playable to reveal it, so you can download it now before it gets zapped. Many projects show off footage early to build buzz and get killed before dropping a download.

I’ve been playing Dagger Directive, which isn’t an old game but you wouldn’t know that by looking at it. It’s an intentional throwback to the original Delta Force games. I bought it on some sort of early sale, but even full price it’s only $20.

If you like the original Delta Force or Ghost Recon games, this has a similar vibe with missions where you can select the time of day to start, and are then dropped in wide open maps. I’ve been having a lot of fun turning the HUD off and playing night missions. The game takes into account how night vision goggles interfere with looking down sights, which in turn makes things like IR lasers and dedicated night vision scopes useful. I’ve seen community complaints (some of them more recent than the newest AI update) that suppressors don’t do anything regarding enemy AI, but I’ve had a lot of success with them and think people might be having wrong expectations on how silent the guns are going to be and/or how oblivious enemies are going to be.

The weapon selection is fairly good and getting expanded with updates. The scope system gets some flack, but it is an intentional recreation of the Delta Force scope system.

For the most part I’m ambivalent about it, although now that red dots have been added to the equipment they use the same picture-in-picture window that magnified scopes do, which makes red dots actually kind of useless for close range fast paced fighting (which is the entire IRL point of them), and I’d actually recommend using no attachments or using an IR laser with night vision instead of using a red dot in the game.

The sound design sneaks up on you. Things will be quiet and boring one second, and then your audio is filled with terrifying cracks and whistles of gunfire as an enemy machinegun ambushes you the next.

Gameplaywise, Blacklist is okay. It does fall into the game design trap of allowing players to go through levels with variety of approaches, including guns blazing in many cases, and it often has scripted sequences and setpieces that are combat heavy which dilutes the intent of the original games.

Yes, the new voice and younger look for Sam is jarring and never stops being jarring.

It’s not a “Christian game”, its a game where the setting is a violent, fractured place and Christianity has a large in-universe footprint, influencing factions.

Iron Tower Studio games makes quite good RPGs.

How would you, in general terms, construct an arrangement between a publisher that is funding development, and a developer? How would the agreement hold a developer to certain standards without any kind of time or budget limitations?

I’m not trying to be cute. If a publishing company gives money to a developer who is a separate entity to make a game, they’ve got to have some kind of contract. If there is no timeline or total budget written into the initial contract, how could a publisher pull out of that agreement?

If the answer is going to be “publishers can just pull out when they feel like it” then that’s neither adhering to the “let devs develop ‘until it is done’.” philosophy that is the entire point of this hypothetical restructure, and it for practical terms it does impose a deadline based on the publisher’s patience, except now that deadline is not expressly clear and simply defined.

If publishers can’t simply pull out on a whim, then without some kind of limiting factor that denotes a failure to perform where by a specific time a publisher can point to that failure, it can’t really be functional contract. Saying “the game must have x, y, z features” but never putting a time or budget limit in place means the developers can never have failed at implementing the features because they just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

In a publisher fronting money to developer situation, without a fixed time limit (or money limit, which functionally translates to a time limit) is the publisher just infinitely on the hook to pay for dev time “until it’s done”?

Let’s look at the initial comment in the chain:

all game developers need to put their foot down and say “it’s ready when it’s ready.”

No marketing deadlines, no “crunch time,” make the game until the game is made

It isn’t saying publishers should be more flexible about deadline delays, it is saying there simply shouldn’t be deadlines at all.

Shoveling infinite money at a developer who tells you it will be ready when it’s ready is the Chris Roberts model of game development. While it certainly produces interesting results, it is unrealistic and undesirable to expect it as the standard.

Games that are developing well but need a little more time to fix issues should be given flexibility by publishers, but at the end of the day there are stretch ideas and content that has to be cut. Doing that cutting and keeping the project focused is what a lead on the dev team should be doing throughout the entire development. If a game has a realistic deadline given the expected scope and the dev team comes back and says they actually need another year of production, then it is worth looking into if that extra time is going to make the game a year’s worth of investment better or not.

Publishers are considering return on investment. In a model where they are providing the game budget to the studio, every delay means more money out of their pocket. Case by case it might be worth it, but just allowing developers to infinitely say it’s “almost ready, just one more delay” isn’t reasonable.

I know from the hard core gamer audience that discusses this stuff online there is often this vibe that nothing should be cut from games. People look at various interesting cut content and lament it for not getting enough time, but there is always going to be cut content.

If there isn’t a lead on the development team putting their foot down to control the scope and focus the team, and a similar push for focus by a publisher you get a meandering unfocused project that goes over budget.

In the solo/small amateur team dev, self-publishing model that ROI pressure isn’t coming externally from a separate publisher. It is means solo devs are making their first games usually on a budget of nothing, as a side project to their day jobs. In some cases like with Concerned Ape it turns out great. In many cases development comes out tediously slowly, like with Death Trash. In innumerable cases the games just die.

In cases like Wasteland 2 it was a full professional team working full time using crowdfunding. An alternate model, but still limited by budget pressure. There was no publisher to pay back, but when the crowd funding money was gone, it was gone. That game did come out and it was enjoyable, but clearly it wasn’t “done when it’s done” levels of polish by the team since they used the profits from the game to release a “Director’s Cut” which was a whole polishing pass on the game they simply couldn’t afford the first time.

The above comments were talking about how this policy should apply to every game development project. Which is a nice thought, but not realistic for every situation.

That’s more or less how I feel about the first game. I really liked the setting and characters, but found the gameplay underwhelming. Combat was especially boring, which made me go towards stealth or dialog resolutions just to skip it, except the game had a long chunk where fighting the local wildlife was the only option.

I don’t think anyone should preorder. It’s a predatory way to suck a full price of the game or even higher than normal price out of customers by using often laughably cheap benefits to drum up FOMO.

For me personally, I rarely have interest in brand new AAA games, which are the most guilty of pre-order sales tactics, so the problem more or less solves itself.

Early Access games can be a different story. I’m more willing to throw money at a small studio or solo project that appears to have some passion behind it. Even so I only spend with the mindset that whatever state the game is in might be all I ever get, so match the price to that expectation. I recently played through Deathtrash. It’s unfinished and is historically slow to get updates, however for the $11 I got it for on sale, it had a lot of content and I felt happy with what I got.

Project Zomboid is another example of a “permanently Early Access” game. It might never get out of Early Access but it has so much content now that $20 is a perfectly acceptable price. The history of devs supporting it and the community around it means support for it is unlikely to simply disappear.

I don’t feel bad about playing retro games because it’s not like Nintendo gets a cut on N64 games on ebay or that I got from people I know. The N64 is the newest Nintendo system I have any interest in, so I dodge all the issues of supporting the company.

That’s all of them.

Perfect. I don’t notice any lag.

FWIW, I don’t like the sequel games nearly as much so maybe the development overall of the first game was better.

I’m not a hardcore collector. Most of these were kept by me or scavenged from people I know who were clearing old stuff out.

If I ever sit down and get through all the games to the point I’m bored of them, I might try and find a reasonably priced copy of Majora’s Mask though.

It’s a great game, it feels right on the N64. The PC version to me just feels off.

It’s got great missions, and I really like the variety of fighters. It even has the Naboo fighter as a secret, which blew my mind to see before the movie was actually out.

Honestly I never really liked it single player. The Star Wars podracer game keeps me way more engaged. The customization really helps.

‘Architectcracy.’ Which is more or less, “rule by architects.”

I’m playing Caesar 3. I’m absolutely terrible at it because planning out the city is about following the esoteric rules of the game rather than logically laying the city out.

I mostly made models and textures, I was never a one-person team. I made assets for a number of students in game dev programming and I worked on some gamejams. Quite a few games, but nothing beyond the scope of a limited project. Currently I just don’t have the time in between other things to go back to making assets.

This was built inside of Unity.

My Steam recents:

Everything that’s got a finishable campaign here I’ve completed, with the exception of MCC where I only played Halo CE and ODST to completion.

To put the headline in perspective:

Despite all the numbers being down, Black Ops 7 was still the best-selling game in terms of units and revenue in Europe for the week ending November 16 (its launch week). Battlefield 6, it’s main competition right now, came in fourth in both units sold and overall revenue.

Even with huge drop, COD is still raking in cash. While I personally think the current direction of COD is terrible, these sales numbers are unlikely to be some kind of fundamental course correction wakeup call to the publishers.

I’ll never get past the Dangerous Hunts games since some management somewhere at Cabela’s had to approve a hunting game with deep lore about a literal shapeshifting demon and chimpanzee supersoldiers.

In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.

And then it goes into a sewer.

I blame the Tylenol.

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

I am now.