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Apparently EVERY AAA game must have THE BEST graphics and fidelity EVER. And because of that the prices have ballooned.
From the games directorhttps://twitter.com/GlenSchofield/status/1595513458618818560?t=ESdG7Nd_AHR5cbTLDOWt8A&s=19The animations will be tied to (presumably) new areas and enemies in the upcoming story dlc that will begin being worked on next year. IGN were somewhat misleading by making it sound like this was some exclusive thing cut from the final game. Nothing on the retail release has been cut from the game.
I would be completely fine getting an official System Shock 3 with Dark engine graphics.
foxAAA means produced and published by a large publisher. Graphics have nothing to do with it.
Regardless, I wouldn't trust the word of someone who worked on the game. Yes, many people in that position would be honest, but many people would not be. Maybe the animations, and/or other aspects of the DLC were cut from the original game when the games developers saw dollar signs, maybe (most probably) they weren't, but if they were then I doubt any spokesperson for the game would admit it.
The issue as I see it is IGN and VGC publications presented it as though somehow some new animations are the focal point of the DLC itself, and not the story additions and such. The additional death animations are but one part of the package, yet the headlines would leave you to conclude it's the primary selling point. It invites inflammatory discussion and gets people riled up (as evidenced by the very existence of this thread) over something extremely minor. Sometimes things aren't as fantastical or intricately elaborate as they appear. It seems pretty cut and dry. They're making additional story DLC next year, the gruesome death animations have received praise - so they're making more and throwing them in with the season pass. It's not that deep.
Thank you for blaming gamers, even if it was towards the end of your post. So many threads all over the gaming landscape are fixated entirely on blaming evil companies for being evil.
The problems in gaming aren't caused by "evil greedy gamedevs". So many people like to talk endlessly about how the evil game industry ruins everything and how the poor gamers are at the mercy of these evil mega-corporations.It's all bullshit.
I can already predict this game will be a massive financial success, despite the "aggressive evil monetisation", because gamers are largely stupid and only care about consuming product. Nobody cares if it's unethical, they will fork over money (usually while whining) because "this sucks", and yet will continue to actively support the practice.
We saw it with the Boycott Modern Warfare 2 thing, we saw it with the loot box scandals all through EA games over the last decade. We saw the complaints over CoD WW2 adding loot boxes - it was still one of the highest grossing games of that year. People were endlessly complaining that "the government isn't going to regulate loot boxes" without even contemplating the idea that if the practice was genuinely unpopular or unprofitable it would stop instantly.
People are constantly wondering why studios continue to pump out cookie-cutter garbage, and why they continue to do horrendous monetisation repeatedly. It's because it makes money. That's the only reason a company does anything. Call of Duty continues to get new releases every year because gamers continue to buy it. Meanwhile when companies try to sell something new or unique or interesting - Boomer shooters, RTS games, Prey and other immersive sims - they tend to do average but not great financially. At the same time the whole gaming community is complaining endlessly about boring, hand-holdey games filled with microtransactions, gambling mechanics, and half-assed DLC, we are continually pouring endless amounts of money into these games because we have no self-control and can't possibly stand to miss out on something.
I see the concern your raising - selling some animations as a DLC is a really dickish move - but calling out the company for doing it is a waste of everyone's time. Short of a well-organised boycott (and an ACTUAL boycott, not the typical gamer "boycott" where everyone buys the game anyway), it's a waste of time.
I have all but given up at this point. Modern games are a lost cause. Gaming is not going to recover until the people who play games realise that the consumer vote exists and take a positive stand to improve the quality of the industry. Government regulators are not going to do it and the industry itself is not going to do it, only the consumers can. They are the most powerful part of any industry, and they have willingly made themselves powerless by blaming their horrendous purchasing decisions on "evil companies for making bad products". Until gamers as a collective grow up, I'm going to stick to older games and games by smaller developers who care more about the quality of the product than money.Sorry if this came across as a rant or an attack. I am just so endlessly sick and frustrated with the horrible way the game industry works, the toxic and symbiotic relationship between gamedevs and consumers, and how immature and short-sighted most gamers are. The industry would be fixed overnight if we all came to this realisation and stopped supporting barebones experiences and exploitative business practices.I may delete this if it turns out to be too incendiary or offputting for this discussion. Don't get me wrong, what this company is doing is egregious - but they are doing it with the consent of the gaming public and will likely be rewarded for doing so by the very people who complained about it in the first place. I am very glad you mentioned that further down in your post, but the first and foremost message is "look how evil this company is being". I at least appreciate the effort.
These problems are caused deliberately by games companies, it is the gaming companies who decide to release games that haven't been properly debugged first, it is they who release games with 'less than honest' marketing and videos, they release games with that require ridiculous amounts of hard-drive space (this is especially bad with console games, as you're usually stuck with a much smaller hard drive), and so on. We paying customers have no say in any of that.
On a tangent, one of my personal gripes about the gaming industry, and I know a probably small but hardcore group of gamers would agree with me here, is the gaming industries reluctance to bring older games to virtual reality. There are countless old but great gamesthat would be wonderful in VR, such as the two System Shocks, the Doom games, the Quake games, the Unreal Tournament games, old console games such as Perfect Dark, Goldeneye, the Timesplitters games (especially the last two), and many more, yet the industry seems to ignore this idea, and instead write new, and so often *massively* inferior new games instead for VR.
Just wanted to speak on this particular bit of your post, and note that my response is in a general sense of the games industry as a whole, and not for the specific game central to the earlier discussion.Fully debugged/bug tested games is pretty much like finding a unicorn. Impossible on PC. Consoles sure, PC no. You firstly have the technical side of every person having different hardware combinations, which can be very difficult to test for. Consoles on the other hand don't suffer from this, since all have the same parts.
Now game wise, testing for every possible thing a user could do should be done yes, though at the same time there is going to be some user interactions / combinations of user interactions that often a developer just never thinks of. And stuff like that has gone on since pretty much day 1 of the games industry. Or when it evolved past super simple Pong clones at the very least. At the very least though sure, there should be proper QA testing. Especially nowadays with such gargantuan games being made, with dev teams in the hundreds and sometimes thousands.
Buggy games though, if it's on a Cyberpunk 2077 level or Fallout New Vegas (how it was on launch) then sure that's bad, and yes games shouldn't be released like that for sure.As for "less than honest marketing and videos" I would not say that every company does that. Some yes (eg Cyberpunk 2077, No Man's Sky, Aliens Colonial Marines spring to mind immediately), but definitely not all of them. Some of that is due to higher ups at companies, and other times it's due to the lead game designers (eg Fable with Peter Molyneux and No Man's Sky with Sean Murry).
Large hard drive space is just a sign of the times, as models and textures in the resolutions that they are in require FAR more space, than say a game out of the 90s or early 00's. If you even compare a simple 2D sprite, that would likely take a few kilobytes, but then go up to a 3D model and that's going to be far larger. You can see this across games per decade, even if you only stick to console gaming. Compare very early Atari 2600 games and those take up literally a few bytes. Jump to the Super Nintendo and now the games were a few megabytes due to higher graphics and sound, and just goes up from there. Go another 10-20 years from now (if we've not all blown ourselves to smithereens by then) and likely you'll have 1 Terabyte games as the norm.
The Doom games have VR support. I played Doom 1 in VR and Mechwarrior 2, at a computer swapmeet back in the 90s. It was interesting, but not the way I'd want to play them. As for the rest of the games you mention, be interesting.
Problem with VR as that besides Halflife: Alyx, there isn't any killer apps for it. Those games that have everyone saying "You have to play -insert game name here- in VR". And it (VR) is still very niche.
But consumers did ask for all those things, even if indirectly.Buggy games? People keep demanding that the games launch as soon as possible, they are not willing to wait. Look at the huge uproar if a highly-anticipated game is delayed. People are less upset if a game releases on-time with bugs than if it is delayed to fix those bugs.
(Let alone what Icemann said, and that as games get increasingly complex it becomes increasingly difficult to find all the bugs during testing.)Bots in multiplayer games? Most people didn't use them. Again, should the company take time and resources away from other parts of the game to add a feature most people don't care about?
Cheats? Again, I'd imagine most developers don't bother to include them because they'd take development time to implement properly, and could lead to more bugs (need a UI for them, have to deal with how they interact with achievements, etc.). Since few enough players use them, they aren't considered important.
Huge games? People want higher fidelity, they want high-res textures that look great up-close in 4K. Those take up a huge amount of space. Most of the space in games these days in textures.
Even the habit of splitting things off into extra DLC and special editions on launch is a result of us wanting games prices to stay the same, while the cost of development (and everything else) has gone up dramatically. Game prices haven't increased in line with inflation.
Though, yeah, pretty sure no one asked for unskippable cutscenes, except maybe the legal department who want to force you to read the legal blurb or epilepsy warning every time the game starts.
Back in the 8 bit computer days, bug-testing, was mostly done by the single programmer who was writing the game. Thinking about it, it's perhaps surprising how few 8 bit computer games had serious bugs. On the other hand, when the only person testing the game was the bloke who was writing it, then you occasionally ended up with a game that the programmer could complete blindfolded, since the game's logic and timing was burnt into the programmer's mind, but new players found the game too hard to play.Yep, it isn't a common problem. But it does occur and doesn't seem to overly effect the guilty company's future fortunes when it is pointed out.And regarding No Man's Sky, from what I've heard, they really worked hard to repair the bad publicity and bad feeling of the release, from what I've read. I've never played the game, but apparently the company had continued to release free patches to really improve the game leaps and bounds, long after most companies would have said "We won't see any new profits from this game, so let's stop working on it now, and start creating a new game".
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