And after all that, the fans will shit on you and call you a shit dev because you failed your impossible task.
Honestly, it's partly on the fans. Not enough people understand to be angry at the investors instead of the developers, who are essentially just scapegoats. Everyone gets fucked in the end except for the CEO and their Board of Directors. The frustration lies in how we remediate this as consumers who don't want to boycott our favorite AAA-title games that get churned out yearly.
And don't even get me started on...
shivers
Early Access
You say that but when Cyberpunk fell flat on its face, everyone immediately called out CDPR corporate specifically for putting investors over developers.
The bigger problem is media blaming devs. The gaming media has always been illegitimate and has to bend the knee to studios so they won’t call out the corporate shitshow.
All this to say: I love coverage by Jason Schreier and James Stephanie Sterling for filling the hole of gaming corporate cynicism that totalbiscuit (rip) left in my heart
Half the problem is one of terms. Some say devs, and they mean everyone in the dev company, from producers to designers to managers to the actual code writers. Some say devs, and they just mean the actual code writers.
boggles my mind that game devs don't unionize, like.. what do they expect? of course they're gonna be exploited without a union
I imagine that if they try to unionize, the large game companies will just cut off their income until they either become bankrupt or until they crack.
And then they will get their ass fined in a way that they will go bankrupt instead.
Not in America. The corporations are pretty much the actual government and the government are pretty much just puppets that the corporations can lobby at any point without repercussions.
At the very least that is how it feels.
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Hot take but I blame gamers stuffing the pockets of these sort of publishers by lapping up early access and pre orders. It gives publishers no incentive whatsoever to change their ways because they still have the only thing they truly care about: money.
It's absolutely the gamers. They're in a competition with Apple fans to see who will purchase literally anything a company makes. Patient gamers is where it's at. Buy the good games a few years after release with all the bugs fixed, extra content, and on sale.
with the enormous amount of old games available for trivial cost, and games like terraria, stardew valley, and deep rock galactic which cost less than a AAA title and the devs just sort of refuse to stop updating their game for free, we're at a point where dropping 70 dollars on a game is just self harm.
why place the blame on the millions of people buying the games instead of the few dozen companies making the games? do you think it’s easier to get a million people to change?
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Doesn't matter what is easier or the numbers involved. Fact is power lies in the money spent by millions funneled to a dozen, making them so potent. Millions don't even need to change their ways, even a significant minority can start making bottom lines bleed like a mf.
Comedian Frank Caliendo used to do an impression of John Madden:
"You know what I'm thankful for? Kids who pay sixty bucks each year for what is basically the same video game. A-heh-heh-heh, cha-ching!"
It's even worse when Bethesda does it because they split the modding community. LE, SE and AE are not compatible with each other's mods.
I've never been a fan of Final Fantasy 7, I wish they'd move on from it. I know it's not all the same game, but between remakes and spin-offs etc, I feel like there's been a dozen ff7 related games out there
I think 7 has a much more relevant story that resonates with this cluster of generations though. I've never been a fan of it but I appreciated the remake and crisis core was a fun psp game and it was my only psp game.
The story though somehow takes government in bed with corporate greed, the climate change, and how greed and people in power continue to exploit and cause damage. Then they wrap it up in the perfect fantasy allegory that can translate through decades. It's basically been post-Regan consequences in an escalating nutshell.
Along with that being touted as the best game simply because in 97 it was ground breaking. Like I don't think if Mikcey mouse would be such a cultural icon if it came out 5 years ago instead of uh... wow damn nearly 100? Woah.
Oh shit yeah eta all that said yeah I really didn't enjoy the original but found the remake fun and appreciated the plot line of that uh... episode? Season?
The graphics were a DRASTIC CHANGE dude! And the mini game was fun! I replayed both during covid and 8 was definitely much more fun.
I hated those cartoony, blocky graphics in 7 so I really liked the graphics for 8. And the music in 8 is really memorable too.
ff8 was... Something...
It was good, the second half of the game was really "wtf"-inducing for me.
Overall I'm a FFVI fan to the core, 3D era has to be FFIX. Never cared much for FFVII
I haven't played even a quarter of the trash Square Enix put out after final fantasy 7. They've ruined my favorite childhood game with a remake that is a reimagining of the game (but they marketed part one as a remake, basically lying about what it was). And yeah, now I kinda wish they would too.
They kept darts and squats and just as bad as I remember them being too. The impression I got from playing the main game was that Ff7r isn't really a remake so much as an intro to a sequel in a sort of steins gate alternate world line kind of way. With some flashbacks to things that never happened as far as I could remember at least, and presumably not that the characters experiencing them could either.
Yeah, they changed the story quiet a bit. I had been following the development pretty closely with the remake part 1, and any news about its release. I remember thinking it would be the same game, but updated graphics, modern combat for a more modern audience, and removing/changing situations that didn't age very well.
Turned out what they actually did was completely change the story, and fluff up Midgard with pointless shit to extend ut to 40 hours.
All of that after saying they couldn't possibly put the whole game into one single disk experience.
Lol yeah the disk space is bullshit, and the game is quite filler-y. I guess they had to increase how much of the players time they wasted after having reduced the battle grinding.
I vaguely recall something about making it 3 discs something something throwback to the original, but it really seems like a more presentable version of release now, finish later. This way they can release a third of a game at an appalling 100 cad, then do it again two more times later, and fewer people will complain because the game didn't bug out or under deliver like all the latest hype games seem to.
Having played it free via steam library sharing though I still enjoyed it. If I had to pay that idiotic price for a third of a game at best I wouldn't have even played it.
I actually moved the artist's information to the middle of the image so that I didn't crop it out. So thank you ;)
But but but! The next CoD has different gun skins! That makes it a completely different game that isn't like the last game at all! /s