Yes, but when's the last time you heard of firing execs as a coat cutting measure? How likely do you think it is that it's because it'll let them retain more devs versus because it's required to keep them afloat?
Cyberspark
joined 8 months ago
He must have said something right at some point, but it probably wasn't public or immediately parroted by his fan club
Maybe, but it's also something very few people were looking for. The advertising I saw was basically "the old braid looked worse than you remember". OK, but it didn't have enough replay-ability to warrant a second purchase, and that's not considering all the modern indie games it's competing with.
Then there's the $20 price point, which it hasn't quite earned. It's more expensive than the Beyond good and evil anniversary edition.
Here are some other games that are similarly priced: (steam below £16, ignoring sake price)
- Project Zomboid
- Phasmophobia
- Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
- Slay the Princess
- Fallout: New Vegas
- Noita ...
It is, but it's critical to causing the goal of SBMM being desirable on both ends
The key issue that's hard to address is making a hard fought loss feel more valuable than any other loss and not worse than any other fight.
Some games a hard fought fight can look like rushing to the point, getting a kill and a trade and then spectating either the rest of the match or the 20s respawn timer before making the 30s run back to the point, rinse and repeat. This might mean you're "playing" for less that you 10% of the time you actually spend in the match.
That's not what the paper says. This is specifically COD games that this was tested with
The loosening the skill matchmaking found players leaving from the bottom and continuing as new players found themselves at the bottom. Higher skilled players liked this as they got treated as having lower skill as lower skilled players left.
Tightening it found higher skill players leaving due to longer queue times and having less lower skill players to beat on in their matches. Lower skilled players had higher retention due to being more likely to be matched with their peers.
In other words high skill players enjoy stomping noobs more than fighting each other. Noobs don't like being stomped.
It's not entire untrue to say "everybody hated it", but it also misses the point.
Context: I'm a serial-dipper of PoE. The thing that puts me off the late-game/consistent game-loop of PoE is for sure the amount of management required between maps combined with the fact that none of the abilities feel as nice and impactful as those from the likes of D3 even. This means that running a map is walking and spamming 1-2 buttons and then when I get back spending 20x as long dealing with combing through the quantity of trash I picked up.
The spreadsheet and build/gear planning is something I typically enjoy, though with the scope of PoE I usually just follow guides. I've started to think that ARPGs just aren't for me recently, because few really seek to tackle the issue of scaling numbers and difficulty leaning towards a dead-or-not binary style of play. Dropping your entire health in less than a second because of some specific circumstances does not make for a compelling level of difficulty/challenge.
Todd has recently explicitly said he has no interest in remaking the games before fallout 3
Because everything made in the greyzone of "until the IP owner sends us a cease and desist" risks the console producer (sony/Microsoft/Nintendo etc) getting in trouble for allowing the content on their hardware.
For me the combat is flashy enough to feel cool, but far too fast and far too simple.
Though honestly what burned me was just how bad the starting characters feel (automatically moving backwards is really annoying when there's stage hazards to dodge) in combination with the slow gaining of new ones and exactly the same resource and upgrade systems as the other games.
Since the bot missed the core details:
- Soon, Xbox Game Pass for Console will be shuttered for new users only.
- Users currently on Xbox Game Pass for Console will be allowed to maintain their subscription, as well as day one games, and the hundreds of titles in the back catalogue.
- New users on Xbox Game Pass in the near future will be greeted by a new Xbox Game Pass "Standard." This is more like EA Access, which includes Xbox's back catalogue, and doesn't include day one games. This will be priced at $14.99 per month, and will also include Xbox Live Gold for multiplayer (now known as Game Pass Core, confusingly). It doesn't include Xbox Cloud gaming. Game Pass Standard is supposedly launching in September.
- From September 12, 2024, Microsoft will only allow users to stack Xbox Game Pass for Console users for up to 13 months, using pre-paid cards and the like, which will continue to function. If you have more than 13 months stacked already, you won't be impacted.
- Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will not be changed, but it will get a price increase. It will still include PC Game Pass, day one games, and hundreds of back catalogue titles, as well as cloud gaming. But, it is getting a price increase. The new price will be $19.99 per month.
- PC Game Pass is also getting a price increase, from $9.99 per month to $11.99.
- PC Game Pass will also continue to get day one games.
- Xbox Game Pass Core (Xbox Live Gold multiplayer) gets an annual price increase to $74.99 from $59.99, but it will remain $9.99 per month.
- The price increases are global. You can view the new prices for your region here.
- For users with recurring billing, the new prices will take effect on September 12, 2024, giving you time to cancel if you don't fancy it.
- UPDATE: Microsoft now has a support page up dedicated to these changes over here.
Yeah, that's not how game dev works.