Gaming industry meltdown

We need you to deliver this item, across the map, then when you get to the location, you'll find the gate is locked, and because it's a game, you can't climb over it, or go round it. To open the gate, you need to find out why the gate it locked, then someone will say there's a bunch of trouble in the village, so please defeat waves of enemies, then we'll open the gate. Then deliver the item, go back across the map,  for the NPC to say THANK YOU AND XP+++++++++++.

Yeah modern gaming is the pits. 

Don't jinx it, man...

My eyes light up when I see a game with a 10 hour story. There are only so many massive open world games I can cope with every year.

I dropped out a while ago from buying console games anywhere near full price, I had the ps5 on release day and sold it soon after to go back to the PC.

I miss games being designed around a new talent or weapon per level and not just talent trees with options of 1% crit or 1% damage and trying to work out which is better, finding out you choose wrong and needing to respect.

The return to the office will be code for ‘we’re going to ruin your mental and physical health with the coming crunch and staff abuse’ that they are famous for.

Yeah, I love open world games. My point was they just started to get stuff added for the sake of it to pad out the value.

Obviously not every open world game is like that. But far too many have been like that, especially when they first starting to get really popular.

I think Larian, and BG3 specifically, is an edge case and it's hard to generalise from that to how the industry should be. If BG3 had bombed (or even just been a bit average and not earned megabucks) then it would just as easily served as a example of how putting all your resources in a single title is an unwise business decision. And tbf, it *is*. Movie studios and record companies have worked this out long a go: they put resources in to acts/titles/talent with an expectation that some will fail. In the music industry it's actually *most* that never make back their initial signing advance.

Games industry doesn't work like this. Every title has to make it, or people ask questions. Even larger publishers like Ubi seem to go all in for every title. As a secondary consequence, that also then means large games tend to be unadventurous.

Larian have been serially very lucky with their last couple of titles. Yes, "talent" contributed massively to that, but talent can be hard to rely on in creative work.

(also yeah, I know didn't Todd Howard say a similar thing about BG3 setting unrealistic expectations and get piled on for it? Well, just because Starfield was shit it doesn't make him wrong.)

It took me 32 hours to finish FF7 back in the day and I don’t know why I still remember that.

Also, when is it Nintendo’s turn to announce cuts?

Yeah my mate was saying in Sony London it's fairly similar. On their Slack channel it's basically turned into Reddit.. just loads of shitting on Sony.