Jedi Survivor is a shockingly good game, so excited for a third one, but sad to hear that the director has left, but then again the rest of Respawn has seemed pretty consistently talented, but he left partly because he felt it was better working with a smaller team during early Respawn which could indicate Respawn is growing too big and bureaucratic like has happened to so many talented studios before it, but the wall running in Titanfall predated him … :S

Suda suggested that one reason is publishers and developers focusing too much on Metacritic scores, and deciding to play it safe and stick to what is conventionally known to ‘work’ instead of taking risks with new ideas.

I think most people are missing that they’re talking about them from a dev and publisher standpoint, not consumer / gamer.

And from that perspective it is problematic whenever things that are supposed to be used to assess something become targets to shoot for. Oscar bait, teachers teaching the test and not the subject, etc.

It’s also on EA Play / Gamepass Ultimate if you’re eyeing either of those or other stuff on them.

Yeah the writing in Starfield is pretty bad.

I think Skyrim’s was better because there was less central control. I know that stuff like the whole Werewolf quest was just made by a passionate designer and dev who made it after hours, but that during Starfield development a lot more got run up the chain and there was less individual freedom.

I suspect that stems from the massive procedural generativeness but am not sure.

Starfield’s biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda’s strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.

I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There’s waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there’s maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.

The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).

So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn’t their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don’t know if they’ll course correct.

Do be fair, I think that Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor are some of the best Star Wars games ever made, maybe a tier behind the icons like BF2, Kotor, and Tie Fighter, but not that far and in hindsight I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s up there with them.

Respawn are really great devs that know how to nail fluidly, difficulty, and just all the little details that make all their games a blast.

It’s quite frankly, rather hard for me to imagine a world where Xbox exits the living room with no replacement.

Literally zero competitive CoD players for instance, would ever think of streaming as a viable replacement, and Microsoft now owns CoD. Do you really think that they would just abandon the entire living room CoD base to Sony and be willing to give Sony a 30% cut of every game sale?

If Microsoft does abandon Xbox consoles, the smart way to do it would be to tailor Windows with an Xbox / Living Room interface. It’s what they’re doing for Steam Decks / competitors, and it would be a massive feature boost for them if they sold consoles that were just PCs and had your steam library and mods etc, and then it would let every PC maker (Asus, Lenovo, etc. etc.) become a console maker.

Yeah? So? Do your job and optimize it. If they can get BG3, Elden Ring, and Cyberpunk running on it then I’m sure you can get an action adventure Dune game running on it.

I don’t understand the hate for Series S, it’s an amazing console for the price, where a huge chunk of Xbox gamers are, and forcing devs to optimize their games for low end hardware ends up benefiting everyone.

So far it sounds like the only game that was actually a real issue optimizing for the S was BG3 and that’s because of its insanely high RAM usage between all the rippling choices that can have happened by Act 3. And the solution there was simply to implement a memory buffer that smoothed out RAM usage spikes and ended up benefiting every platform.

Too bad. Valve’s not exactly known for making good games anymore, just for printing with money Steam.

Because I’ve never once tried to argue that anyone should use it.

I honestly cannot fathom how gamers don’t see how much Valve has fleeced them. Like you said, it’s literally just 400 tech workers who would have had $150-200k salaries get to win the lottery and get $300k-500k salaries, at the expense of every single other gamer who just wanted to play a game at the end of their shift.

I’m honestly pretty pumped for Avowed for all these reasons, just swap Fallout for Skyrim… Being made by the New Vegas devs too.

Lmao, says the guy defending a multi billion dollar megacorp’s monopoly.

I prefer competition in all markets, if you prefer monopolies that take 18% more of every single sale, I have bad news for you about your level of grown up ness.

You shouldn’t.

Naive to think epic is offering a lower cut for altruistic reasons as opposed to it being the only method they could think of to try to convince devs to sell there.

This is literal the entire basis of our economy. A company being able to offer a service more efficiently charges less and gets more customers to come to them. It is the literal only mechanism in capitalist that keeps it running at all efficiently.

And that they wouldn’t jack up the rate once they corned the market given how their how strategy has been more reminiscent of Walmart approach of pricing lowering to gain market share. Biggest sign is that the store isn’t even profitable much like how lot of services these days aren’t profitable and burn money then jack up prices and offer less once they corner the market. Hell even Microsoft Store has offered low rates of 12% because few want to use it. Going to argue Microsoft is nice too now? Not falling for it Tim.

How would they corner the market? Steam still exists. As you pointed out, the Microsoft store still exists. If they ever jack up their prices devs can go elsewhere.

No one is accusing Epic or Microsoft of altruism, they offer 12% because that’s closer to what it actually costs them to run the store. Steam charges 30% because gamers refuse to buy games from anywhere else so they can just tack on an extra 18% more money that they’ll take.

How fucking naive are you? There’s no difference between the two because the later turns into the former every time. You’re just defending your favored party using shit tactics, which is why you can’t defend the opposite.

Lol no. It’s called competition. It’s the literal entire basis of how our economic system is supposed to work and remain balanced, and having two competitors inherently creates more competition than just one where their inherently is no competition.

If you have to use violence constantly to survive and thrive, violence is your only tool. Once the bully is defeated, the victim will begin bullying, continuing the cycle of violence. This is no different.

Now who’s naiive, you really think that every time someone has stood up for themselves that they’ve gone on to become a bully?

The store taking a smaller cut of the pie either means that developers get more money to spend on the game or consumers spend less for games. Full stop.

Publishers have revenue sharing percentages with the developers, if a game sells more and makes more money per sale the developer gets more money.

There is no way that Valve is the good guy or even neutral for taking more of the pie then they need to.

Steam doesn’t have monopoly on anything, they just have superior service that people prefer

Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

A creative work which you made yourself, which you can sell wherever you want.

Should you sell it everywhere so as many people can play it as possible? Sure. Do you have to? No.

We’re not talking about what you currently have to do, we’re talking about anti- competitive behaviour and what you should do.

If you set up your own shop to avoid paying a middle man for something you can do yourself fine. If you set up your own shop and then use your exclusive games to grow your shop into something bigger, then that’s anti-competitive tying. Your shop is not competing on its merits as a shop.

Let’s reverse the roles for a second: EGS is the big player and Steam is just getting started. EGS suddenly starts paying all publishers to only publish on their platform. Does that sound like competition to you? You don’t break a monopoly by using tools used by monopolies.

There is a fundamental difference between using anti-competitive behaviour to break a monopoly, and using it to entrench a monopoly. That’s like arguing that a bully using violence and someone standing up to a bully using violence is the same thing.

They don’t even need 21 years of infrastructure for most of these, they just need to fund development of it. Which they seem to be unwilling to do so.

Where do you think the funding for Valve’s system came from? 21 years of taking 30% of virtually every single PC game sale.

Valve pay their employees what they’re worth and share their success with them rather than devaluing them and extracting value from them. That’s pretty good going. And given how much they do with so few, it says a lot about their culture and ethic.

Gabe Newell is a literal billionaire. Valve executive are not taking a hit to pay them fairly, Steam just prints so much money that they can pay them more than they have to. Rather than lowering prices for the rest of consumers they decided to pay their staff exorbitant salaries in addition to themselves. It’s better than just paying themselves, but it’s not noble or good on a broad scale, it’s them taking more societal resources than they need to provide a service.

I don’t know about other gamers but I dislike EGS because it’s simply an inferior product and I vote with my wallet. If they offer me more value than a competitor, I’ll gladly use them. I use GOG, itch.io, and Xbox GamePass so it’s not like I’m averse to other platforms. I just don’t see why, if a game is on EGS and Steam (and not on GamePass), what value is there to me as a consumer with going with EGS?

Again, not saying anyone should prefer EGS, but this thread started off because someone said Epic was a bad publisher, which is just based of their hate for EGS, not based on anything to do with their merits as a publishing partner.