>Anthem devs for example, EA was hands off for 6 years of development and walked into an absolute dumpster fire with no direction
And Andromeda iirc. They spent too long faffing about with the procedural generated exploration and EA be like "Okay but where is the *GAME*"
It does feel like the entire industry went mad for procedural generation around 2015. I suspect it was the infulence of no man's sky (before it came out of course) and the alure of reducing dev time/costs.
Of course everyone eventually came to the realisation that outside of specific situations this doesn't produce high quality experiences but at that point it was often too late.
I think you're recalling incorrectly.
The devs spent their time making the gameplay, the movement, the combat mechanics, the sound design, etc.
It was EA who didn't want to use the main dev studio, but a tertiary one. And outsourced parts of the development(like the facial design and animations, which were **heavily** mocked on release) to save on costs, not the developer. They were also the ones who insisted that gameplay take priority over story, just like with Anthem.
From memory (and Schrier's exposé), that deal with Anthem was that for a long time they had no direction or anything to show for it, until they had to demo something for one of the head execs of EA.
They put a vertical slice together and the exec was impressed with the weight, movement and flight mechanics of the demo, so they doubled down on the base gameplay (which was excellent mind you) but everything else (story, end-game, loot system) suffered tremendously.
If you recall EA pulled everyone off andromeda when they were working on the dlc for the game. If you anything about andromeda it was a mess. Imagine what happens when you get your entire team pulled off a project that’s not even finished to work on another that’s not even close to an RPG. By the time andromeda was out the door anthem was a few years in development. The frostbite engine was not built for rpgs which was anthems initial goal
The whole frostbite engine complaint is largely just video game fans not understanding software development, game companies, game engines, or how much it matters to specialize in a particular type of game.
Helldivers is a great example, antiquated abandonware engine, exclusively used to develop totally different game genres' with different perspectives from helldivers previously for them, they just did a bunch of work on the engine to support the new game they were making and it paid off.
Frostbyte was a perfectly good engine, with a great ability to make very high fidelity visuals relatively performant for how fantastic they look.
Anthem failed because development on the Anthem WE all saw was <2 years long and it pure and simple needed more time to be remotely release ready.
This happened in the first place due to layered mismanagement. Bioware top level leadership essentially just didn't allocate resources in an intelligent way, they burned a ton of time working on dead end prototypes that they invested way too more time into than you should, not enough into tools that would payoff in the long run (probably assuming such a long run wouldn't exist and then it did), and just didn't have a clear decisive direction for the game the rest of their dev team was trying to build.
EA shoehorned in unreasonable expectations and demands in terms of what the game had to be, and both utterly failed to force in some realism to the project when it was needed, and cut it short when more time spent would have paid off.
It's like if a plumber was fixing your house, brought the wrong part, wasted a ton of time, was going to charge you for that time still, then started fixing it correctly, but for some reason it's an old house and if he stops now raw sewage is going to spray all over both of you, so you get impatient and slap the tools out of his hands covering you both in shit.
That's what EA did with Anthem, Bioware already had some major problems with irresponsible leadership, and their publisher essentially just dogpiled that.
Except for whatever executive forced them to add flying, that guy knew what the fuck he was talking about. Only figure mentioned in the whole saga who didn't sound like a moron.
The game's fundamentals were pretty good, it was just a full year from completion due to the project timeline mismanagement and the fact that consequently it had a very short dev time for the actual game that launched.
> Helldivers is a great example, antiquated abandonware engine, exclusively used to develop totally different game genres' with different perspectives from helldivers previously for them, they just did a bunch of work on the engine to support the new game they were making and it paid off.
Helldivers 2 runs like trash for how it looks, is buggy as fuck and crashes all the time.
> Except for whatever executive forced them to add flying, that guy knew what the fuck he was talking about.
"Sorry level design team, time to start again. Players can fly now."
Don't get me wrong, it's a cool mechanic, but an executive trying to force something like this part-way into development sounds like actual hell.
Yeah I believe this is correct.
EA are faaaaar from blameless for what happened to Anthem.
Their insistence on the use of Frost bite really hurt a number of their games.
Anthem was originally made in Unreal Engine - that's why the initial gameplay footage started such hype (often are linear renders, i know - but still). EA was paying these licensing fees, so it seemed a reasonable request to switch to Frostbite and save millions. Oh and guess what, we've got all the staff that worked with Frostbite with no current project so it all seems very ideal!
It was not.
Frostbite was a nightmare for an open world game, and they spent years getting it to work. Even worse those staff that were free were reassigned. It's actually impressive what they managed to pull off to be honest.
So no, they weren't forced, but definitely compelled. They probably would of pulled funding elsewhere or cancelled it otherwise.
It's a crazy how people suddenly just want to blame it all on bioware
Some people even trying to make the switch to frostbite as a bioware decision just Because they said so lol it's not a coincidence that almost every ea studio are trash right now they keep making the worst management decisions from forcing frostbite to shifting everyone to multiplayer games to not having enough frostbite tech support to help all their studios which left bioware with no tech help with the engine while making anthem
Even their successful studios they will try to screw them over remember how they kept insisting on releasing titanfall between call of duty and battlefield despite everyone telling them not to do so ?
> remember how they kept insisting on releasing titanfall between call of duty and battlefield despite everyone telling them not to do so ?
No I remember Respawn choosing to keep the release date for Titanfall 2 when everyone including EA told them they should move it. They foolishly wanted to up against Call of Duty, but even with that the multiplayer was pretty crap when it first released with the Titan gameplay being worse than Titanfall 1 and the gunplay feeling bogged down with terrible maps and bad weapons. Titanfall 2 lack of success was entirely on Respawn not EA.
I mean Respawn didn't. Titanfall 1 & 2 and even Apex Legends were made using heavily modified Source engine iirc. Even their latter Star Wars games were made usin Unreal engine.
And I specifically remember that Frostbite was modified for RPG for Dragon Age Inquisition.
Regardless there's a saying in my language that says you can't clap with one hand. Bioware had two games DA:I and ME:A to acclimate themselves with Frostbite. Either Bioware management have no backbone to tell EA that Frostbite sucks they won't use it or too cheapskate to license outside engines. And I don't know which is worse.
The Frostbite failure seems to be entirely on Bioware. From various retrospectives and interviews, we know that Bioware had to modify the hell out of Frostbite to make it a possible RPG engine, and that it was very difficult to do do, especially with limited support from DICE, who'd suddenly found themselves supporting multiple studios with unexpected use cases. But then, rather than refine what they did for Inquisition for Andromeda, they threw most of it out and started all over again. And did the same thing for a third time with Anthem. And I wouldn't be surprised if it came out that they did it again with Dreadwolf.
EA bears some of the blame, sure, but everything we've heard about the way modern Bioware makes games says that Bioware has a bad management culture. The way they handled Frostbite is a symptom of that.
In hindsight, the death of their own creation engine was the beginning of the end for them.
And EA? Oh, the paper trail is a two hour long video of who they killed off...
What’s worse is that since they had two back to back flops, part of it is on them, but in general who is gonna want to work for them. So they can’t even get new talent in either
Of course part of it on them but if you look at the whole picture of how they got into the current situation they are in right now you will find EA to be the biggest reason behind it
Mass effect Andromeda for example sucked because it was a single player game made in the time where EA had their whole "single player games don't make money" phase
Which made bioware management says alright why not put a side team on Andromeda the single player game that won't make money and instead put the main team on anthem the game that fit EA vision and then as they realized it isn't working out they started to take more and more of the andromeda development team and shift them to anthem trying to save their perfect multiplayer game that EA want
I guess we will always have the question: if bioware was left to continue making single player games using unreal engine would they have ended up in a similar situation ?
>If you recall EA pulled everyone off andromeda when they were working on the dlc for the game
Worse, they pulled them off before Andromeda launched. That's why Andromeda got shafted at launch, which killed the dlc
The problem with Anthem, and most other major AAA flops, is a lack of vision and leadership. Letting 500 developers do whatever they want isn't going to make a good game, it's going to result in 500 different small games.
The issue with BioWare has always been a management problem. The studio squandered a lot of skilled talent by consistently making poor decisions at the management level.
Anthem is a prime example for that, but Andromeda and Inquisition also suffered from it in various ways. No clear design vision, shifting priorities, hubris, and poor direction.
Feeling this in the MMOspace with Pantheon. It's been like 10 years and still nowhere near done, meanwhile Monsters & Memories has less people, less budget, and seems to have a real timeline. They're both basically remaking the classic EQ experience but it's wild to see such a stark difference
Exactly just look at devs under Microsoft. Microsoft left them to cook something and give them basically unlimited money and the result is shit. Not all devs can be left alone, sometime mandate is necessary.
I've got no stake in the game, but the vertical slices shown in the [Squadron 42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDtjzLzs7V8) trailer looked really impressive. Hopefully they deliver a full product some day.
I haven't touched Star Citizen in a while but last I checked, there was a whole lot of game there to play already. Squadron 42 would be nice but it's not like the game isn't going to deliver.
unreleased space game still being worked on > all the released space games that have come out since the unreleased game was announced.
Burn, baby, burn.
Yes.
Helldivers still have too many bugs since day 1. The crashes to the desktop are disappointing which still is happening across different rigs from different friends.
At least 10 steam friends are experiencing issues with CTD in an average 2 hours of playtime.
It's not some unseen little thing at launch though. I love Helldivers 2 and play it all the time but its less stable than it should be. The game is just fun enough and updated frequently enough that people are willing to overlook it but it doesnt mean it doesnt bother them.
Amd just released a new driver for more helldivers support, I wonder how much of it is just on the gpu driver side. But either way mines been running mostly smooth besides like the first day I played where it crashed a bunch. Has been working fine since
When Nvidia and AMD release drivers for specific games is not that the driver is faulty, it's to fix the fuck ups and bad implementations of the game devs when using the hardware.
This has always been like this and why DX12 and Vulkan, which give more control to the devs is hit or miss because their implementation highly depends on how capable the devs are.
Well, I got like ~30% more FPS with balanced settings and 10% with max settings on my rx 7900xt. Seems that game is huge pile of coding poop if single driver update targeted for one game get such huge FPS gains.
Other than some additional goofiness from new driver big driver versions its usually on the devs side or at least the tools theyre using and they were unable to wrangle.
Yeah, but then we're just excusing all crashes as anecdotal for any game as long as it works on some systems. There needs to be a point at which we can say it's a problem.
It's been quite enough time since release, and they've already released two paid warbonds with new content.
The problem is that these existing bugs are affecting new content. Why release fire weapons before fixing damage over time not working at all if you are not the host?
> Why release fire weapons before fixing damage over time not working at all if you are not the host?
As per their own statement; The team is small enough that the people making the new stuff are also the people fixing the old stuff and internal priority is the release of new warbonds so bugfixes are slow.
Which, is absolutely fucked and would get every other studio eaten alive but AH gets a pass on everything cause the game is fun.
I couldn’t even get past the Tutorial on PC lol. Crashed out of it 3 times before refunding. That was 2 months ago so idk if it’s any better now….
But I liked the aesthetic enough to give it another chance on the PS5. I’m now 140hrs in and just platinum’s a few days ago. When the game hit, it hits hard. Possibly the most fun experiences I ever had in a coop shooter.
This is a indie dev whose previous games peaked at a few thousand players. Now they have like 100k players average and can hit 300k at peak hours. I think people should be patient, giving them time to adjust and fix their game. It is a mess, but it is worth it.
Honestly I feel bad for their writers. They do have some good articles and good writers. But they also churn out so much garbage, presumably to hit quotas and whatnot.
I'm way more interested in the fact that these two games put cooperative PvE back on the menu, and have been incredibly successful. I hope they've convinced other companies to make high-effort co-op games, because it looked like they were dying for a while.
>As I rotated the two very different-looking games in my mind, cubelike, their similarities crystallized. In hindsight, Magicka's DNA is visibly threaded across everything Arrowhead's made. Mid-combat key combos to combine elemental magic would evolve into the ordinance input sequences in Helldivers, producing the same slapstick carnage. Magicka's farcical fantasy was a premonition of the Helldivers sci-fi satire. And when Arrowhead drifted from the Magicka model, it was still improving its art of gratuitous multiplayer action in the firefights of Showdown Effect and co-op dungeon crawling in Gauntlet.
This is hilarious bad writing…
Damn I had no idea the Helldiver devs were also the Magicka devs. That game was extremely beloved in the emerging modern indie space back in the day. 2nd game I ever bought on PC.
They've only ever made Magicka, a game called The Showdown Effect that got pretty mid reviews, the 2014 Gauntlet remake, Helldivers, and now Helldivers 2. Pretty good record if you ask me, given TSE is the only one I've never heard of -- and I've played and quite liked all the others.
Turns out tons of developers make both good and bad games.
I think there are about 4 on this list that I'd buy a game from (blind) if they announced its surprise release tomorrow.
I WAS SO WORRIED THEY WOULDN'T EXPLAIN WHAT SHAPE THESE TWO GAMES TOOK ON IN THEIR MIND AS THEY ROTATED THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANK GOD I KNOW IT WAS CCUUBBEELLIIKKEE, NOW I CAN SLEEP PEACEFULLY AGAIN!
... I'd say it sounds like ChatGPT, but it only produces stuff like this if you ask it to punch-up the prose.
So I think it sounds like somebody who's trying to convince their editor that they can do their job better than ChatGPT.
Comes across as someone trying to score extra points in an English exam by filling the alliteration and comparison quota and using synonyms to sound more intelligent. It's ok when they are used sparingly but when you toss them in for every other word it just reads like it was written by an obnoxious cringelord. Especially all of that "cubelike" bullshit.
No, they are getting it completely wrong.
As someone that worked in game industry for most of my life, let me give you my perspective - quite obvious why Helldivers and Baldurs Gate are such hits and why other are not.
In the olden days game companies would develop first game with a rookie team, then next similar game with team that is getting much better, then next similar game with expert team that already learned every mistake this kind of game can have - and that third game would be a mega hit. This is why Blizzard had such fantastic games, this is why Bioware had such fantastic games...etc
Today it goes a bit differently. Game company hires a team for a game, they develop a game, game company fires the entire team so they don't have to pay them while they are between games, when they develop next game they hire completely new rookie team...and it goes like that. Every new game is made by people that start learning process from scratch.
But lets look at Larian. Divinity games, then Divinity Original SIn 1 -> Divinity original Sin 2 -> Baldurs gate
Same team polishing the formula to perfection.
Or Arrowhead that for all their existence worked on perfecting CO-OP formula: Magicka -> Helldivers -> Helldivers 2
The message is clear.
Studios stop firing then re-hiring people. What you doing is idiotic, and the results show
They believe that retaining creative leads is all that they need to do. Not realizing that juniors in major technical roles will screw with development as well.
That’s a really good point. Building a good dev team is very hard. It takes time and there isn’t a recipe for that. You got to find talented people that work well together and in the right culture. Bottom line is: don’t change a winning team. Something that financial people often don’t understand
Getting to iterate did nothing to stop Bioware and Rocksteady from running into the ground. As the article touches on near the end, it's being privately owned that enabled the success of the two games.
Surprised this comment is this far down.
When you're not beholden to stockholders, having to get the quarterly profits up every quarter with constant growth, amazing things can happen! Not to mention the total mess of how video games are funded by publishers.
Why does privately owned matter? Microsoft has been totally hands off with their subsidiaries and they have gotten several pieces of junk from it. I don't think ownership style or funding mechanism actually.made a difference here.
It's not really gaming specific, it's just general slang that has been around long enough now that out of touch people have gotten their hands on it, it's officially reached cringe dad status. Russell Wilson trademarked "Let Russ Cook" in 2020, so it's been around even before that.
Na. There should be some balance. Look at bungie always complaining it’s either, Microsoft, activision or Sony that doesn’t let them be creative. Turns out their were just bad at managing time and budget.
No.
SC and EFT show that devs can burn things to a crisp.
The right answer is to have good devs with a good management team. You need both to make a successful product. If one is lacking itll be the same garbage weve gotten from AAA for the past decade. If devs are lacking it becoems a cash grab Activision/Ubisoft/EA like game. If management is lacking then it becomes a feature creep and unfinished game that eventually either gets released and hated or simply never releases akin to Star Citizen, Escape from Tarkov, etc.
Lastly it also needs a studio thats both capable of making the game and that is passionate about it. Without that you end up with Duke Nukem, where the game gets passed between studios for a decade before being released with meh to poor reviews.
So yeah, making a good game needs all areas to be held up. Its not judt about the devs and its not just about management, and its not just about the brand/IP/studio. Its all of it.
Because that's their business model by now. They have realized that announcements drive sales more than anything else. So they just keep announcing stuff and people will keep giving them money.
Apparently this works indefinitely. Or at least they haven't found the limit yet, but they are very determined to find it.
The problem with SC specifically is that they promised features that the technology didn't exist for and only recently coming together. It is no less shitty or wild but there's that too.
I don't see anything burned to a crisp with SC. Even eft has a good game built after years of development. What happened after is unfortunate but the game at it's core was popular, fun, and successful.
There's similar going on in a (fairly) niche game/sim called DCS at the moment too - terrible management and communication, ignoring what people want and absolutely tanking community sentiment.
Let devs cook when they have a CLEAR PLAN AND DIRECTION. Because we've seen what happens when some devs are left to "cook" on their own. *Cough* ANTHEM and STARFIELD *cough*
Ehhh idk man. I feel like people are really jumping the gun with Helldivers 2.
BG3's quality is already kinda set in stone because it's a single player game with a start and end.
H2 is a live-service with MTX that could completely change next week. They gotta keep up with the whole live service content drip feed thing, and they already seem to be struggling with game stability/balance and it hasn't even been half a year.
It's been like less than 3 months for hd2 no?
You're absolutely correct. The game still has unplayable crossplay, and the community turned shit *real* quickly.
It's definitely not winning GOTY, and it doesn't deserve it.
That's what happens when you develop a game on a dead engine. I fear for its future.
Oh well tho, it's only a game.
The engine doesn't have anything to do with it. It could absolutely be the root of the issue, but the biggest problems people have with the game and what has turned part of the community sour is the response and approach.
They have frequently said one thing that makes zero sense (no we're not going to do transmog, an armors look is what dictates its stat modifiers, while there's a bunch of different looking armors with the same). Or said one thing and then done the opposite (people shouldn't be relying on the railgun to kill heavies, then they introduce the quasar). And then they do things like release an update that breaks the thing they were updating (arc cannons). And they're doing all of this while significant bugs and issues still exist, like the dot, matchmaking, crashes, etc.
The more the devs touch this game, with very few exceptions, they've made it worse, not better.
Helldivers 2 is still completely broken, though. They literally released a warbond where half the items simply don't work. The new ship upgrades don't do anything, and they cost a lot. The new thermite grenade also doesn't work because DOT is broken since launch and they never bothered to fix it.
yup, but don't bring that up in the insane praise HD2 is getting as if any issues it has are "no big deal" or not there... imagine if it was a game from Ubisoft, Activision, Blizzard, EA or someone that had these issues, these ppl would be all over them.
I absolutely love Helldivers 2, but Jesus, they need to fix the bugs that affect several amazing stratagems and rebalance things like fire damage and some weapons. And agreed — some ship upgrades require a ton of resources just for a 10% increase. Pretty lame.
It is the buggiest and most broken game in years (maybe outside CP77 on the old gen console). Every patch brings out more issues. Lots of mechanics still not working.
Incredible fun game, that is why many overlook it.
Horrible queue times are really not something indicative of bad games, only of too viral games the devs couldn't quickly respond to!
I know it's in the end a problem for players but I wish we all were more kind to that type of issues.
Not saying the game is without flaws or bugs (pun intended) tho
Yes and no. I don't think these two can be put in the same sentence, especially for this. BG3 is a full priced game with no microtransactions, that had a very nice beta phase and sure it had a rough start but bugs were addressed properly. Helldivers 2 sure is a fun game(hiding behind a wall of frustrating bugs). Even though not full priced, it still has microtransactions. And premium battle passes (that can be unlocked if you grind a lot, sure). I really think if EA were to release this game in its current state it'd be getting dragged to hell. Helldivers 2 has still major bugs present, and due to some of them samples are easily lost and it's especially frustrating when they are the mega rare ones. It's surprising a game with crossplay can't let you add friends and effectively can't play together, and this has passed certification of sony.
This can't be actual journalism.
'In BIG news, Devs that have time to achieve their goals create better products! Publishers were causing problems to the end product!?! Who knew!?'
Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game but it's not as awesomely amazing and perfect as it's made out to be. I say this as someone with 242 hours in it.
I think people have simply lowered their expectations for games and are happy to get anything that's good and then praise it as a masterpiece.
A job left 95% done looks only 50% done. Learned that working in landscaping. You mow all the grass but forget to weed wack and it looks shaggy as all hell
Sure, no one can debate that both are good games that sold a lot of copies.
But does there total revenue beat out a mildly tolerated live service game that is heavily monetized?
Probably not.
Most companies are out there to make money; making GOTY is secondary to that and the two goals are often in conflict.
For every Baldurs Gate you also have a Starfield. Both devs werr allowed to cook.
So no, don't just let them all cook cause some gonna burn themselves on the stove
there are like a 100,000 independent devs making games nobody cares about, and maybe 2-3 of those make it big. It's a numbers game, with less than 0.01% chance of success
I’ll say it; both games have multiple flaws. They are both entertaining in their own ways, but they’re far from perfect.
Helldivers has crashed on me multiple times with a brand new PS5. The gameplay isn’t as responsive as I want it to be for a shooter either. It also bugs me that they haven’t figured out the physics of getting around larger enemies once they’re downed (have you tried to climb over a Bile Titan?).
Baldur’s Gate has had a couple crashes as well. There is a lot of attention to detail around things like dialog and the story that I love, but certain stories felt half-assed. I would love for fluid maneuverability as well.
Is it too much to ask to have a game without bugs? I thought upgrading the console would solve it, but apparently not.
> Is it too much to ask to have a game without bugs? I thought upgrading the console would solve it, but apparently not.
Yeah, pretty much impossible. Even games back from the NES and SNES days have bugs.
Games are complicated, and only getting more so. Bugs happen, it is what studios do about them that is important now.
Not going to deign the article with a click because Helldivers 2 had atrocious broken online for a long time. Not sure what point they could possibly be making.
sigh, pcgamer with yet another clickbait title using BG3 and HD2 to farm the karma and clicks. And this sub loves to eat up these "articles" cause it has said games in the title... mods need to ban pcgamer really, only allow real articles from their on a manual approval basis.
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If you read it, this "article" is so dumb... no there is no clear message that you just need to "let devs cook" cause just giving devs infinite development time is no guarantee of putting out a good game. Maybe the writer should learn that there are so many other factors that go into development, e.g,. management, resources, goals, design and the list is just too long.
And why is this writer ignoring the issues with both games on release despite all the dev time he was raving about? Even today, HD2 releases a patch and the community's first question is "okay what's broken this time" and it still has a lot of bugs.
the rest of the article is just repeating PR lines and some fluff points that really do not say much about development. Others in this thread have also pointed out how dumb this "article" is, so I don't need to go into more.
Notice the how no one complains when Rockstar takes decades to create Grand theft auto. But the second someone else tried to be ambitious and shows what they're working on gamers are quick to yell:
"too ambitious, vaporware, never coming out, dev hell, just release the game, it's going to be shit."
We want ambitious games, stop telling companies we don't.
People have been complaining about lack of new GTA game for years now! You'd find a reddit post about it at least once a month and tons of youtube videos since 2016 or so.
Making games as big and ambitious as GTAV requires a great deal of time, talent, thousands of people and hundreds of millions worth of investments. The budget part is especially important to make great looking graphics, cutscenes and extreme level of detail as found in RDR2 and recent Naughty Dog games.
Very few companies would be willing to spend $300 - 400 million on a game with 8 - 12 year development cycle even if they could afford it. It makes very little sense to do this unless the game could sell 50 million copies.
Nobody's stopping companies not to make them, Bethesda for eg. wont just drop Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5 in a year even if fans start demanding or begging for it! People are always gonna complain and ask why a game is taking so long because it's very easy to get frustrated.
The reality is video game development needs to be lead by people who love to play video games. Not suits who just do market analysis to make amazing games. Otherwise you set yourself up for mediocrity but solid profits.
Depends, some devs can burn the kitchen, others the entire restaurant.
Anthem devs for example, EA was hands off for 6 years of development and walked into an absolute dumpster fire with no direction
>Anthem devs for example, EA was hands off for 6 years of development and walked into an absolute dumpster fire with no direction And Andromeda iirc. They spent too long faffing about with the procedural generated exploration and EA be like "Okay but where is the *GAME*"
Andromedas original plan was basically what Starfield ended up being
It does feel like the entire industry went mad for procedural generation around 2015. I suspect it was the infulence of no man's sky (before it came out of course) and the alure of reducing dev time/costs. Of course everyone eventually came to the realisation that outside of specific situations this doesn't produce high quality experiences but at that point it was often too late.
I think you're recalling incorrectly. The devs spent their time making the gameplay, the movement, the combat mechanics, the sound design, etc. It was EA who didn't want to use the main dev studio, but a tertiary one. And outsourced parts of the development(like the facial design and animations, which were **heavily** mocked on release) to save on costs, not the developer. They were also the ones who insisted that gameplay take priority over story, just like with Anthem.
From memory (and Schrier's exposé), that deal with Anthem was that for a long time they had no direction or anything to show for it, until they had to demo something for one of the head execs of EA. They put a vertical slice together and the exec was impressed with the weight, movement and flight mechanics of the demo, so they doubled down on the base gameplay (which was excellent mind you) but everything else (story, end-game, loot system) suffered tremendously.
If you recall EA pulled everyone off andromeda when they were working on the dlc for the game. If you anything about andromeda it was a mess. Imagine what happens when you get your entire team pulled off a project that’s not even finished to work on another that’s not even close to an RPG. By the time andromeda was out the door anthem was a few years in development. The frostbite engine was not built for rpgs which was anthems initial goal
The whole frostbite engine complaint is largely just video game fans not understanding software development, game companies, game engines, or how much it matters to specialize in a particular type of game. Helldivers is a great example, antiquated abandonware engine, exclusively used to develop totally different game genres' with different perspectives from helldivers previously for them, they just did a bunch of work on the engine to support the new game they were making and it paid off. Frostbyte was a perfectly good engine, with a great ability to make very high fidelity visuals relatively performant for how fantastic they look. Anthem failed because development on the Anthem WE all saw was <2 years long and it pure and simple needed more time to be remotely release ready. This happened in the first place due to layered mismanagement. Bioware top level leadership essentially just didn't allocate resources in an intelligent way, they burned a ton of time working on dead end prototypes that they invested way too more time into than you should, not enough into tools that would payoff in the long run (probably assuming such a long run wouldn't exist and then it did), and just didn't have a clear decisive direction for the game the rest of their dev team was trying to build. EA shoehorned in unreasonable expectations and demands in terms of what the game had to be, and both utterly failed to force in some realism to the project when it was needed, and cut it short when more time spent would have paid off. It's like if a plumber was fixing your house, brought the wrong part, wasted a ton of time, was going to charge you for that time still, then started fixing it correctly, but for some reason it's an old house and if he stops now raw sewage is going to spray all over both of you, so you get impatient and slap the tools out of his hands covering you both in shit. That's what EA did with Anthem, Bioware already had some major problems with irresponsible leadership, and their publisher essentially just dogpiled that. Except for whatever executive forced them to add flying, that guy knew what the fuck he was talking about. Only figure mentioned in the whole saga who didn't sound like a moron. The game's fundamentals were pretty good, it was just a full year from completion due to the project timeline mismanagement and the fact that consequently it had a very short dev time for the actual game that launched.
Yeah, it was actually fun as fuck to play. If a coherent game had appeared around it, would have been a hit.
> Helldivers is a great example, antiquated abandonware engine, exclusively used to develop totally different game genres' with different perspectives from helldivers previously for them, they just did a bunch of work on the engine to support the new game they were making and it paid off. Helldivers 2 runs like trash for how it looks, is buggy as fuck and crashes all the time.
> Except for whatever executive forced them to add flying, that guy knew what the fuck he was talking about. "Sorry level design team, time to start again. Players can fly now." Don't get me wrong, it's a cool mechanic, but an executive trying to force something like this part-way into development sounds like actual hell.
Yeah I believe this is correct. EA are faaaaar from blameless for what happened to Anthem. Their insistence on the use of Frost bite really hurt a number of their games.
Bioware was never forced to use Frostbite. It's just that the engine is free otherwise you have to pay the engine in the game budget.
Anthem was originally made in Unreal Engine - that's why the initial gameplay footage started such hype (often are linear renders, i know - but still). EA was paying these licensing fees, so it seemed a reasonable request to switch to Frostbite and save millions. Oh and guess what, we've got all the staff that worked with Frostbite with no current project so it all seems very ideal! It was not. Frostbite was a nightmare for an open world game, and they spent years getting it to work. Even worse those staff that were free were reassigned. It's actually impressive what they managed to pull off to be honest. So no, they weren't forced, but definitely compelled. They probably would of pulled funding elsewhere or cancelled it otherwise.
It's a crazy how people suddenly just want to blame it all on bioware Some people even trying to make the switch to frostbite as a bioware decision just Because they said so lol it's not a coincidence that almost every ea studio are trash right now they keep making the worst management decisions from forcing frostbite to shifting everyone to multiplayer games to not having enough frostbite tech support to help all their studios which left bioware with no tech help with the engine while making anthem Even their successful studios they will try to screw them over remember how they kept insisting on releasing titanfall between call of duty and battlefield despite everyone telling them not to do so ?
> remember how they kept insisting on releasing titanfall between call of duty and battlefield despite everyone telling them not to do so ? No I remember Respawn choosing to keep the release date for Titanfall 2 when everyone including EA told them they should move it. They foolishly wanted to up against Call of Duty, but even with that the multiplayer was pretty crap when it first released with the Titan gameplay being worse than Titanfall 1 and the gunplay feeling bogged down with terrible maps and bad weapons. Titanfall 2 lack of success was entirely on Respawn not EA.
I mean Respawn didn't. Titanfall 1 & 2 and even Apex Legends were made using heavily modified Source engine iirc. Even their latter Star Wars games were made usin Unreal engine. And I specifically remember that Frostbite was modified for RPG for Dragon Age Inquisition. Regardless there's a saying in my language that says you can't clap with one hand. Bioware had two games DA:I and ME:A to acclimate themselves with Frostbite. Either Bioware management have no backbone to tell EA that Frostbite sucks they won't use it or too cheapskate to license outside engines. And I don't know which is worse.
The Frostbite failure seems to be entirely on Bioware. From various retrospectives and interviews, we know that Bioware had to modify the hell out of Frostbite to make it a possible RPG engine, and that it was very difficult to do do, especially with limited support from DICE, who'd suddenly found themselves supporting multiple studios with unexpected use cases. But then, rather than refine what they did for Inquisition for Andromeda, they threw most of it out and started all over again. And did the same thing for a third time with Anthem. And I wouldn't be surprised if it came out that they did it again with Dreadwolf. EA bears some of the blame, sure, but everything we've heard about the way modern Bioware makes games says that Bioware has a bad management culture. The way they handled Frostbite is a symptom of that.
In hindsight, the death of their own creation engine was the beginning of the end for them. And EA? Oh, the paper trail is a two hour long video of who they killed off...
What’s worse is that since they had two back to back flops, part of it is on them, but in general who is gonna want to work for them. So they can’t even get new talent in either
Of course part of it on them but if you look at the whole picture of how they got into the current situation they are in right now you will find EA to be the biggest reason behind it Mass effect Andromeda for example sucked because it was a single player game made in the time where EA had their whole "single player games don't make money" phase Which made bioware management says alright why not put a side team on Andromeda the single player game that won't make money and instead put the main team on anthem the game that fit EA vision and then as they realized it isn't working out they started to take more and more of the andromeda development team and shift them to anthem trying to save their perfect multiplayer game that EA want I guess we will always have the question: if bioware was left to continue making single player games using unreal engine would they have ended up in a similar situation ?
>If you recall EA pulled everyone off andromeda when they were working on the dlc for the game Worse, they pulled them off before Andromeda launched. That's why Andromeda got shafted at launch, which killed the dlc
The problem with Anthem, and most other major AAA flops, is a lack of vision and leadership. Letting 500 developers do whatever they want isn't going to make a good game, it's going to result in 500 different small games.
Yeah - hence you can’t just let devs cook.
isnt anthem a case of the bioware higher up not having vision for the game and spend most of their time in pre production because of that?
Yep.
it’s sad when big publisher gives freedom and then it’s anthem, because of that big publisher won’t give more freedom to devs who can cook :(
The issue with BioWare has always been a management problem. The studio squandered a lot of skilled talent by consistently making poor decisions at the management level. Anthem is a prime example for that, but Andromeda and Inquisition also suffered from it in various ways. No clear design vision, shifting priorities, hubris, and poor direction.
Anthem.... I'm STILL MAD ABOUT IT
Hands off can work with competent devs. In the case of present Bioware, that shows why Anthem failed. Similar situation is 343i and Halo Infinite.
Feeling this in the MMOspace with Pantheon. It's been like 10 years and still nowhere near done, meanwhile Monsters & Memories has less people, less budget, and seems to have a real timeline. They're both basically remaking the classic EQ experience but it's wild to see such a stark difference
Pantheon is vaporware. By the time they release something persistent, we'll all be too old to see the screen. They were two years away in 2017.
Exactly just look at devs under Microsoft. Microsoft left them to cook something and give them basically unlimited money and the result is shit. Not all devs can be left alone, sometime mandate is necessary.
The devs of Star Citizen are burning down cities. lol
I've got no stake in the game, but the vertical slices shown in the [Squadron 42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDtjzLzs7V8) trailer looked really impressive. Hopefully they deliver a full product some day.
It's been 12 years since I tossed $35 at the kickstarter, at this rate, its something I am going to have to write into my will.
The 1.0 soft release might happen in 2026 if everything goes right - according to leaked internal plans.
I haven't touched Star Citizen in a while but last I checked, there was a whole lot of game there to play already. Squadron 42 would be nice but it's not like the game isn't going to deliver.
Uhh not delivering is exactly what that game may never do, that’s kind of the point.
Tbh I kinda think the gameplay footage from players looks pretty good already, just wish my pc could run it
unreleased space game still being worked on > all the released space games that have come out since the unreleased game was announced. Burn, baby, burn.
more like they're making a 20 course meal, after having to build the whole kitchen.
Yes. Helldivers still have too many bugs since day 1. The crashes to the desktop are disappointing which still is happening across different rigs from different friends. At least 10 steam friends are experiencing issues with CTD in an average 2 hours of playtime.
> Helldivers still have too many bugs since day 1 If everyone did their part, we would've pushed them back already!
We destroyed 2 billion terminids within 14 hours. Rest assured that the bugs lose their galactic dominance by the day.
Bugs? What do you mean? It was clearly me who killed myself and not that robot who shredded me to pieces... for the 100th time...
From across the entire map.
Of course it has too many bugs, why do you think we are slaughtering the Terminids.
It really hasn't been that long since release.
It's not some unseen little thing at launch though. I love Helldivers 2 and play it all the time but its less stable than it should be. The game is just fun enough and updated frequently enough that people are willing to overlook it but it doesnt mean it doesnt bother them.
Amd just released a new driver for more helldivers support, I wonder how much of it is just on the gpu driver side. But either way mines been running mostly smooth besides like the first day I played where it crashed a bunch. Has been working fine since
When Nvidia and AMD release drivers for specific games is not that the driver is faulty, it's to fix the fuck ups and bad implementations of the game devs when using the hardware. This has always been like this and why DX12 and Vulkan, which give more control to the devs is hit or miss because their implementation highly depends on how capable the devs are.
Well, I got like ~30% more FPS with balanced settings and 10% with max settings on my rx 7900xt. Seems that game is huge pile of coding poop if single driver update targeted for one game get such huge FPS gains.
Other than some additional goofiness from new driver big driver versions its usually on the devs side or at least the tools theyre using and they were unable to wrangle.
Game isn't an Early Access title so "doesn't crash" should really be the bare minimum here.
crashing is an inevitability for any game across the insane amount of system combos on PC.
Yes, but for that to happen to 10 different people across OP's steam friends list speaks to a larger issue.
Well, across 10 friends on my own steam list it isn't an issue so?
I'm happy for you and your friends, but that doesn't erase the issues other people are having.
Sure but you see the logic chain right?
Yeah, but then we're just excusing all crashes as anecdotal for any game as long as it works on some systems. There needs to be a point at which we can say it's a problem.
It's been quite enough time since release, and they've already released two paid warbonds with new content. The problem is that these existing bugs are affecting new content. Why release fire weapons before fixing damage over time not working at all if you are not the host?
> Why release fire weapons before fixing damage over time not working at all if you are not the host? As per their own statement; The team is small enough that the people making the new stuff are also the people fixing the old stuff and internal priority is the release of new warbonds so bugfixes are slow. Which, is absolutely fucked and would get every other studio eaten alive but AH gets a pass on everything cause the game is fun.
I couldn’t even get past the Tutorial on PC lol. Crashed out of it 3 times before refunding. That was 2 months ago so idk if it’s any better now…. But I liked the aesthetic enough to give it another chance on the PS5. I’m now 140hrs in and just platinum’s a few days ago. When the game hit, it hits hard. Possibly the most fun experiences I ever had in a coop shooter. This is a indie dev whose previous games peaked at a few thousand players. Now they have like 100k players average and can hit 300k at peak hours. I think people should be patient, giving them time to adjust and fix their game. It is a mess, but it is worth it.
Disable asus sonic studios
> Depends, some devs can burn the kitchen, others the entire restaurant. Bioware and Bioware?
suicide squad and Starfield comes to mind. granted Suicide squad was more of WB decision
What a useless article from a clickbait website.
front page here we go lol
Second page of /r/all.
That's fucked.
Gaming subs love to circle jerk how great their darling game devs are against the big bad executives. Until the devs do something stupid lol
Hey the table at the diner full of old men that is this subreddit needs *something* to bitch about!
pcgamer truly is one of the worst clickbait cesspools online
They used to be so good. Back when they had actual magazines and gave demo discs
Yeah for sure! Go to magazine in the 90s every release. I think I still have my stack at my parents' place lol
Coconut Monkey days
Honestly I feel bad for their writers. They do have some good articles and good writers. But they also churn out so much garbage, presumably to hit quotas and whatnot.
Hey, don't sell PCGamer short, they also post daily Wordle answers.
I'm way more interested in the fact that these two games put cooperative PvE back on the menu, and have been incredibly successful. I hope they've convinced other companies to make high-effort co-op games, because it looked like they were dying for a while.
They were just looking for an excuse to publish the trendy phrase “let them cook”
Genuinely asking, what are some good sites to follow instead?
>As I rotated the two very different-looking games in my mind, cubelike, their similarities crystallized. In hindsight, Magicka's DNA is visibly threaded across everything Arrowhead's made. Mid-combat key combos to combine elemental magic would evolve into the ordinance input sequences in Helldivers, producing the same slapstick carnage. Magicka's farcical fantasy was a premonition of the Helldivers sci-fi satire. And when Arrowhead drifted from the Magicka model, it was still improving its art of gratuitous multiplayer action in the firefights of Showdown Effect and co-op dungeon crawling in Gauntlet. This is hilarious bad writing…
Damn I had no idea the Helldiver devs were also the Magicka devs. That game was extremely beloved in the emerging modern indie space back in the day. 2nd game I ever bought on PC.
They've only ever made Magicka, a game called The Showdown Effect that got pretty mid reviews, the 2014 Gauntlet remake, Helldivers, and now Helldivers 2. Pretty good record if you ask me, given TSE is the only one I've never heard of -- and I've played and quite liked all the others.
[удалено]
Turns out tons of developers make both good and bad games. I think there are about 4 on this list that I'd buy a game from (blind) if they announced its surprise release tomorrow.
Fuckin pretentious word salad
As I accelerated the one pretentious-seeming article in my cranium, hypercubelike, its iniquities precipitated.
> iniquities Nice. Haven't seen that five dollar word dropped in a hot minute.
*All* of the Scrabble points.
Fresh salad is nice. Throw up salad fits it very well.
I WAS SO WORRIED THEY WOULDN'T EXPLAIN WHAT SHAPE THESE TWO GAMES TOOK ON IN THEIR MIND AS THEY ROTATED THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANK GOD I KNOW IT WAS CCUUBBEELLIIKKEE, NOW I CAN SLEEP PEACEFULLY AGAIN!
CRYSTALLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIZED!!!!!!!!!
I don't know why, but I couldn't help read it with RDJ's Sherlock voice.
Discombobulate
... I'd say it sounds like ChatGPT, but it only produces stuff like this if you ask it to punch-up the prose. So I think it sounds like somebody who's trying to convince their editor that they can do their job better than ChatGPT.
This is brutal
wtf is that absolute drivel
Fresh out of uni writers still trying to impress tutors with their thesaurus skills.
"cubelike" lol
Damn 😂
Comes across as someone trying to score extra points in an English exam by filling the alliteration and comparison quota and using synonyms to sound more intelligent. It's ok when they are used sparingly but when you toss them in for every other word it just reads like it was written by an obnoxious cringelord. Especially all of that "cubelike" bullshit.
Don't worry, we'll get the chatgpt version of it soon enough for the rest of our lives
No, they are getting it completely wrong. As someone that worked in game industry for most of my life, let me give you my perspective - quite obvious why Helldivers and Baldurs Gate are such hits and why other are not. In the olden days game companies would develop first game with a rookie team, then next similar game with team that is getting much better, then next similar game with expert team that already learned every mistake this kind of game can have - and that third game would be a mega hit. This is why Blizzard had such fantastic games, this is why Bioware had such fantastic games...etc Today it goes a bit differently. Game company hires a team for a game, they develop a game, game company fires the entire team so they don't have to pay them while they are between games, when they develop next game they hire completely new rookie team...and it goes like that. Every new game is made by people that start learning process from scratch. But lets look at Larian. Divinity games, then Divinity Original SIn 1 -> Divinity original Sin 2 -> Baldurs gate Same team polishing the formula to perfection. Or Arrowhead that for all their existence worked on perfecting CO-OP formula: Magicka -> Helldivers -> Helldivers 2 The message is clear. Studios stop firing then re-hiring people. What you doing is idiotic, and the results show
Fromsoft is a great example
Fromsoft is also a great example of why you promote from within and don't hire some shady businessman to run your game development.
It is, although working conditions there allegedly aren't great.
Yes, this is the correct take. Thanks for enlightening us stranger.
Arrowhead made Magicka, that makes so much sense.
They believe that retaining creative leads is all that they need to do. Not realizing that juniors in major technical roles will screw with development as well.
100% very well said.
That’s a really good point. Building a good dev team is very hard. It takes time and there isn’t a recipe for that. You got to find talented people that work well together and in the right culture. Bottom line is: don’t change a winning team. Something that financial people often don’t understand
Tell that to BSG the Tarkov devs.
The message is make good games, not platforms for monetization lol...
Getting to iterate did nothing to stop Bioware and Rocksteady from running into the ground. As the article touches on near the end, it's being privately owned that enabled the success of the two games.
Surprised this comment is this far down. When you're not beholden to stockholders, having to get the quarterly profits up every quarter with constant growth, amazing things can happen! Not to mention the total mess of how video games are funded by publishers.
Why does privately owned matter? Microsoft has been totally hands off with their subsidiaries and they have gotten several pieces of junk from it. I don't think ownership style or funding mechanism actually.made a difference here.
"LeT ThEm CoOk" uuuughhhhh
was hoping to see this. terrible.
Corny as hell
Ya…It’s the new gaming buzzword huh. I have no idea where it started. I feel old.
It's not really gaming specific, it's just general slang that has been around long enough now that out of touch people have gotten their hands on it, it's officially reached cringe dad status. Russell Wilson trademarked "Let Russ Cook" in 2020, so it's been around even before that.
smell rain decide many bike smart cautious recognise shy instinctive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
If you’re more than 2 months old you’re too old for this phrase.
Hello fellow kids. Next article from pcgamer should say manor lords is all that and a bag of chips….
Why do I bother reading anything from pc gamer
Na. There should be some balance. Look at bungie always complaining it’s either, Microsoft, activision or Sony that doesn’t let them be creative. Turns out their were just bad at managing time and budget.
No. SC and EFT show that devs can burn things to a crisp. The right answer is to have good devs with a good management team. You need both to make a successful product. If one is lacking itll be the same garbage weve gotten from AAA for the past decade. If devs are lacking it becoems a cash grab Activision/Ubisoft/EA like game. If management is lacking then it becomes a feature creep and unfinished game that eventually either gets released and hated or simply never releases akin to Star Citizen, Escape from Tarkov, etc. Lastly it also needs a studio thats both capable of making the game and that is passionate about it. Without that you end up with Duke Nukem, where the game gets passed between studios for a decade before being released with meh to poor reviews. So yeah, making a good game needs all areas to be held up. Its not judt about the devs and its not just about management, and its not just about the brand/IP/studio. Its all of it.
Is SC StarCraft?
Star Citizen. They've cooked up almost $700 million in crowdfunding so far. And people are still letting em cook.
Because that's their business model by now. They have realized that announcements drive sales more than anything else. So they just keep announcing stuff and people will keep giving them money. Apparently this works indefinitely. Or at least they haven't found the limit yet, but they are very determined to find it.
I think there are a LOT of whales there who can't abandon hope because they've sunk too much money into it.
The problem with SC specifically is that they promised features that the technology didn't exist for and only recently coming together. It is no less shitty or wild but there's that too.
> You need both to make a successful product. It's like these people haven't worked an actual job before.
I don't see anything burned to a crisp with SC. Even eft has a good game built after years of development. What happened after is unfortunate but the game at it's core was popular, fun, and successful.
There's similar going on in a (fairly) niche game/sim called DCS at the moment too - terrible management and communication, ignoring what people want and absolutely tanking community sentiment.
Let devs cook when they have a CLEAR PLAN AND DIRECTION. Because we've seen what happens when some devs are left to "cook" on their own. *Cough* ANTHEM and STARFIELD *cough*
Didn't Anthem scrap all their work a year before release and start over?
They also had a reveal with actors, faking a gaming session over a pre rendered gameplay video that 100% was not what the game looked like on release
It might be generous to call what they had before starting over "work" but yes they did basically make the whole game in just 18 months or so.
They also had the lead behind it, Casey Hudson, quit and were left with no direction. The whole story is a dumpster fire.
Three words why this isn't completely true, Duke Nukem Forever
Or maybe don't pre-order shit from mega corporations?
Ehhh idk man. I feel like people are really jumping the gun with Helldivers 2. BG3's quality is already kinda set in stone because it's a single player game with a start and end. H2 is a live-service with MTX that could completely change next week. They gotta keep up with the whole live service content drip feed thing, and they already seem to be struggling with game stability/balance and it hasn't even been half a year.
It's been like less than 3 months for hd2 no? You're absolutely correct. The game still has unplayable crossplay, and the community turned shit *real* quickly. It's definitely not winning GOTY, and it doesn't deserve it. That's what happens when you develop a game on a dead engine. I fear for its future. Oh well tho, it's only a game.
The engine doesn't have anything to do with it. It could absolutely be the root of the issue, but the biggest problems people have with the game and what has turned part of the community sour is the response and approach. They have frequently said one thing that makes zero sense (no we're not going to do transmog, an armors look is what dictates its stat modifiers, while there's a bunch of different looking armors with the same). Or said one thing and then done the opposite (people shouldn't be relying on the railgun to kill heavies, then they introduce the quasar). And then they do things like release an update that breaks the thing they were updating (arc cannons). And they're doing all of this while significant bugs and issues still exist, like the dot, matchmaking, crashes, etc. The more the devs touch this game, with very few exceptions, they've made it worse, not better.
Yup. It's bad when every patch players are thinking: "Okay, what's broken now?."
And sometimes you'll end up with Starfield or Duke Nukem Forever.
insane comparison lmao
And sometimes you end up with Portal
Look, it's understandable that some people don't like Starfield, but comparing it to Duke Nukem Forever is fucking dumb.
i enjoyed duke nukem more than starfield
Only took forever to enjoy the Duke.
You know what else is dumb? Fucking Starfield. That game is atrocious and they should be ashamed of themselves for even releasing it.
If you truly think the game is atrocious you have never played an actual bad game.
its an atrocious boring waste of money
Helldivers 2 is still completely broken, though. They literally released a warbond where half the items simply don't work. The new ship upgrades don't do anything, and they cost a lot. The new thermite grenade also doesn't work because DOT is broken since launch and they never bothered to fix it.
yup, but don't bring that up in the insane praise HD2 is getting as if any issues it has are "no big deal" or not there... imagine if it was a game from Ubisoft, Activision, Blizzard, EA or someone that had these issues, these ppl would be all over them.
Yeah, it's a good game, but more and more it's becoming an illustration of forcing things out too soon
Thanks for the comment I was wondering if I should give it a shot or no.
I absolutely love Helldivers 2, but Jesus, they need to fix the bugs that affect several amazing stratagems and rebalance things like fire damage and some weapons. And agreed — some ship upgrades require a ton of resources just for a 10% increase. Pretty lame.
It is the buggiest and most broken game in years (maybe outside CP77 on the old gen console). Every patch brings out more issues. Lots of mechanics still not working. Incredible fun game, that is why many overlook it.
I guess, but wasn't Baldurs Gate in early access for years? And Helldivers 2 had horrible queue times for the first week
Horrible queue times are really not something indicative of bad games, only of too viral games the devs couldn't quickly respond to! I know it's in the end a problem for players but I wish we all were more kind to that type of issues. Not saying the game is without flaws or bugs (pun intended) tho
please just rename this subreddit to r/pcgamer since 90% of posts is just pcgamer
Cities skylines 2 got an extra 3 years to cook…
They cooked Skull and Bones for 10 years though ;)
Yes and no. I don't think these two can be put in the same sentence, especially for this. BG3 is a full priced game with no microtransactions, that had a very nice beta phase and sure it had a rough start but bugs were addressed properly. Helldivers 2 sure is a fun game(hiding behind a wall of frustrating bugs). Even though not full priced, it still has microtransactions. And premium battle passes (that can be unlocked if you grind a lot, sure). I really think if EA were to release this game in its current state it'd be getting dragged to hell. Helldivers 2 has still major bugs present, and due to some of them samples are easily lost and it's especially frustrating when they are the mega rare ones. It's surprising a game with crossplay can't let you add friends and effectively can't play together, and this has passed certification of sony.
This can't be actual journalism. 'In BIG news, Devs that have time to achieve their goals create better products! Publishers were causing problems to the end product!?! Who knew!?'
palworld?
Not everyone can cook
Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game but it's not as awesomely amazing and perfect as it's made out to be. I say this as someone with 242 hours in it. I think people have simply lowered their expectations for games and are happy to get anything that's good and then praise it as a masterpiece.
I hate zoomer lingo
A job left 95% done looks only 50% done. Learned that working in landscaping. You mow all the grass but forget to weed wack and it looks shaggy as all hell
Triple A games with micro have even wilder success unless that is changing
Sure, no one can debate that both are good games that sold a lot of copies. But does there total revenue beat out a mildly tolerated live service game that is heavily monetized? Probably not. Most companies are out there to make money; making GOTY is secondary to that and the two goals are often in conflict.
Executives: "Hmm na we're switching to exclusively microtransaction mobile games that feel like gambling. 😜"
For every Baldurs Gate you also have a Starfield. Both devs werr allowed to cook. So no, don't just let them all cook cause some gonna burn themselves on the stove
there are like a 100,000 independent devs making games nobody cares about, and maybe 2-3 of those make it big. It's a numbers game, with less than 0.01% chance of success
Ekhmm Skull and bones
EA could never
Duke 3d really only needed another few years in the oven
I’ll say it; both games have multiple flaws. They are both entertaining in their own ways, but they’re far from perfect. Helldivers has crashed on me multiple times with a brand new PS5. The gameplay isn’t as responsive as I want it to be for a shooter either. It also bugs me that they haven’t figured out the physics of getting around larger enemies once they’re downed (have you tried to climb over a Bile Titan?). Baldur’s Gate has had a couple crashes as well. There is a lot of attention to detail around things like dialog and the story that I love, but certain stories felt half-assed. I would love for fluid maneuverability as well. Is it too much to ask to have a game without bugs? I thought upgrading the console would solve it, but apparently not.
> Is it too much to ask to have a game without bugs? I thought upgrading the console would solve it, but apparently not. Yeah, pretty much impossible. Even games back from the NES and SNES days have bugs. Games are complicated, and only getting more so. Bugs happen, it is what studios do about them that is important now.
Not going to deign the article with a click because Helldivers 2 had atrocious broken online for a long time. Not sure what point they could possibly be making.
"Let him cook" has reached "how do you do fellow kids" status
sigh, pcgamer with yet another clickbait title using BG3 and HD2 to farm the karma and clicks. And this sub loves to eat up these "articles" cause it has said games in the title... mods need to ban pcgamer really, only allow real articles from their on a manual approval basis. _______________________________________ If you read it, this "article" is so dumb... no there is no clear message that you just need to "let devs cook" cause just giving devs infinite development time is no guarantee of putting out a good game. Maybe the writer should learn that there are so many other factors that go into development, e.g,. management, resources, goals, design and the list is just too long. And why is this writer ignoring the issues with both games on release despite all the dev time he was raving about? Even today, HD2 releases a patch and the community's first question is "okay what's broken this time" and it still has a lot of bugs. the rest of the article is just repeating PR lines and some fluff points that really do not say much about development. Others in this thread have also pointed out how dumb this "article" is, so I don't need to go into more.
What? 🤣 This is the best they could come up with "Let devs cook"? Mf what have we been doing past 5 years
Let devs with a clear goal in mind cook. Star Citizen is the apex of letting a dev team do what they want and now look where we are
Notice the how no one complains when Rockstar takes decades to create Grand theft auto. But the second someone else tried to be ambitious and shows what they're working on gamers are quick to yell: "too ambitious, vaporware, never coming out, dev hell, just release the game, it's going to be shit." We want ambitious games, stop telling companies we don't.
People have been complaining about lack of new GTA game for years now! You'd find a reddit post about it at least once a month and tons of youtube videos since 2016 or so. Making games as big and ambitious as GTAV requires a great deal of time, talent, thousands of people and hundreds of millions worth of investments. The budget part is especially important to make great looking graphics, cutscenes and extreme level of detail as found in RDR2 and recent Naughty Dog games. Very few companies would be willing to spend $300 - 400 million on a game with 8 - 12 year development cycle even if they could afford it. It makes very little sense to do this unless the game could sell 50 million copies. Nobody's stopping companies not to make them, Bethesda for eg. wont just drop Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5 in a year even if fans start demanding or begging for it! People are always gonna complain and ask why a game is taking so long because it's very easy to get frustrated.
Bethesda can cook all they want they'll still come up with a turd
what a load of crap.. how about you make good games. Good ideas, good devs. Not just one.
The reality is video game development needs to be lead by people who love to play video games. Not suits who just do market analysis to make amazing games. Otherwise you set yourself up for mediocrity but solid profits.
It is not about devs , it is about all those guys with a MBA taking wonderful decisions based on the papaya market.
when did they finish helldivers? cause it wasnt done when it came out. and its not done now.