T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s finally happening. Cyberpunk 2077 will release tomorrow. Well, technically it comes out at midnight on Thursday, but due to time zone differences that means I’ll get access to it Wednesday evening. I have the game preloaded. Now we’re just waiting for someone at CDPR to throw the switch.
Obviously the hype for this game is sky-high. For a lot of people, this is a chance to play a cool game from a renowned developer that we’ve been anticipating since 2012. But I get the sense that for a lot of us, the stakes are a bit higher.
Sure, it will be disappointing if the game isn’t any good. I hate when games disappoint me. But this isn’t just about whether Cyberpunk 2077 is any good. This is about whether or not the concept of a big-budget, content-rich, story-focused single-player game is still viable.
I can only speak for myself, of course. But informally I gather a lot of other folks – mostly old-timer Gen-X people like me – are seeing this game as a chance to make A STATEMENT about what the audience wants and is willing to pay for. If this game makes a billion dollars and sweeps the 2021 awards, maybe it will send a strong signal to the publishers that they’ve been neglecting a non-trivial number of consumers.
This has been a long time in coming. The publishers have been promising, pushing, and praying for an all-multiplayer world since 2006Actually longer than that, but I think the mid-aughts is when things began to move in that direction.. Like I said back in that 2006 post: I think this is something that publishers want more than the players, but I’ll admit that multiplayer has encroached on the single-player market in ways I didn’t think were possible back then.
When I wrote that 2006 article, there was a fairly clear line between single-player and multi-player. Deus Ex was an inescapably immersive single-player experience, and World of Warcraft was a multi-player one. I thought the publishers were proposing to give us more of the latter and less of the former. What I didn’t foresee is that the publishers would try to erase the line between the two.
Now we’ve had over a decade of games where multiplayer bullshit was wedged into our single-player games. At launch Mass Effect 3 required you to play online to maximize your options in the single-player campaign. The KOTOR series somehow became an MMO while retaining the conceit of a “main character”. Games added built-in streaming, leaderboards, drop-in co-op, social media connectivity, disconnected online shooter modes, in-game notifications about what achievements your friends have acquired, and central servers pushing in-game events. And that’s not even mentioning the ongoing nightmare of LIIVE SERVICE titles turning our games into second jobs and slot machines that attack the core appeal of playing a game. The push for a more “connected” experience has been a horrendous disaster for those of us who use games to get away from all of the jabbering social interactions of the real world.
But hey, if that’s what the market wants, then who am I to complain? The publishers are making lots of money, so my bellyaching doesn’t matter.
Right?
An Analogy
So it’s 2006 and Walter Disney is somehow still alive and running his massive entertainment empire, despite being 105 years old. He’s looking for a way to increase profits in his park, when he hears how much the Adult Entertainment industry makes every year. So he decides to branch out. His imagineers devise a new character: Princess Tiddy. She’s a buxom young maiden drawn in the style of a Disney Princess. Tiddy gets her own Gentleman’s Club in Disney World, right on Main Street leading up to the big castle.
And what do you know? Profits are up! Young men book the place for bachelor parties, and old guys book the place for retirement parties. Single dads with shared custody spend their court-mandated weekend by shoving their kids in the direction of Space Mountain and then ducking in to visit with the princess and her “friends”. You can make a ton of cash selling overpriced drinks and lapdances to horny guys, and these dudes understandably have a lot more disposable income than married men.
While Uncle Walt is busy counting his cash, he doesn’t notice the changes happening inside his park. Drunken young guys stagger out of the club to throw up on rollercoasters and clumsily hit on the young mothers in the park. There are reports of women getting groped while standing in line. The area around the Tiddy Bar takes on a dangerous, lurid feel.
The next year, a lot of families decide to take their vacation somewhere else. But Walt doesn’t notice, because he’s expanding the Tiddy Bar and building a hotel specifically for his new nudie bar patrons. Tiddy gets her own show on the Playboy channel. Disney comes out with Prince Beefcake, who gets his own, smaller club in the shadow of the Tiddy Bar.
When Walt finally gets around to looking at the books, he notices that family attendance is way down, but lapdance profits are way up. He concludes that he’s a marketing genius. Obviously family entertainment is in decline, and he was smart to pivot to Tits & Booze just before that happened.
Of course, that’s not what really happened. The reality is that he’s destroying his core business, and there’s no reason he couldn’t be making money from both markets if he’d had the wit to keep them separate. Family Entertainment profits aren’t down because people don’t want it anymore, they’re down because he’s made his product hostile to his original customers!
This is what I think happened to single-player games. They aren’t less popularI’m just accepting the claims of the publishers that single-player really is less popular. They don’t share numbers so we have to take their word for it. For the purposes of this article, let’s just pretend we believe them. because everyone wants always-online, they’re less popular because publishers added a bunch of social-medial-shared-experience-always-connected garbage that harmed the product.
But What Do I Know?
I can’t prove any of this, of course. The above analogy is based entirely on my own experience as a video game enthusiast. Things were great in the old days, but as the world of connected gaming encroached on single-player experiences, my enjoyment of the product has gone down.
I’ll admit it’s inaccurate to blame all of gaming’s woes on multiplayer. Publishers want their games to capture the prestige of Hollywood, but at the same time they have no idea how to appraise stories or acquire writing talent. So we end up with enormously expensive cutscenes telling childish, sanctimonious, tedious, incoherent, and idiotic stories. I don’t pretend that the original Deus Ex was a brilliant story, but as a crazy B-movie cyberpunk spy thriller it was more cohesive than either of the recent entries in the series, which aspired to be profound and came off as muddled and sophomoric. The sardonic and brooding Garret of the original Thief wasn’t the most ambitious character ever devised, but he was a thousand times more likeable and interesting than the obnoxious and repulsive Aiden Pearce, despite Aiden embodying the same archetype and having an order of magnitude more budget behind himOkay, that’s a guess. I don’t have hard numbers for the budget of either game. But it’s a very safe guess.. This trend of “more story, worse story” sucks, but we can’t blame it on the general push for Multiplayer Everything.
But while we can’t blame everything on the push for more “connected experiences”, I think we can blame it for a lot of the most destructive trends. To me it feels like the end goal is to tie every game to a server. Once that happens, you’ll have to buy the sequel at launch not because the new game is better, but because the old game vanished from existence when they took the servers offline.
If we follow the trend line of the last few years, then it seems like all hope is lost. Sooner or later this garbage will come to your preferred genre. At that point you’ll have three choices:
- Swallow the overpriced, deeply frustrating, artistically empty, cynically monetized slop that the publishers serve up this year.
- Give up on the AAA experience and live in the world of indies and retro games forever.
- Find a new hobby.
But!
But maybe that’s not where we’re headed. Yes, loot box live service trash was pretty hot for a couple of years, but maybe that wasn’t the market accepting the new norm. Maybe it just took consumers a couple of years to realize that the Magic Kingdom had been turned into Vegas. The twin failures of Anthem and Marvel’s Avengers are perhaps enough to get the attention of the big publishers and get them to question their assumptions. The bigger the losses, the more clear the signal.
(Note to fans who were looking forward to these games: I’m not glad the games were bad, and I’m not happy to see you disappointed. I’m just happy that the games lost money as a result of being bad.)
Which brings me back to Cyberpunk 2077. This game is riding such a massive wave of hype that it’s hard to not get my hopes up. If this thing could be enough of an industry-shaking blockbuster, then maybe the publishers will take notice. They love to chase whatever made money the previous year, so it would be great if the Next Big Trend was a shift back towards single-player experiences.
Then again, that’s a lot to ask of one title. And the publishers could just as easily learn the wrong lessons. Maybe they’ll assume the game was a hit because “the cyberpunk genre was big that year”. Maybe they’ll assume the good sales were the result of the nudity and violence. Maybe they’ll assume the success was due to the celebrity stunt-casting of Keanu Reeves. Even if this game knocks it out of the park, that’s not a guarantee that Bobby Kotick and Andrew Wilson will learn the right lessons. And on top of all that, there’s still a chance the game won’t be particularly good or successfulI’m sure sales will be great. But this game was in development for a long time, so it needs to sell like CRAZY to make enough money to get the other publishers excited..
Still, it would be wonderfully ironic if the game about a fantastical corporate dystopia acted as a pushback against our mundane corporate dystopia.
I realize this entire post is basically a great big 2,000 word version of Old Man Yells at Cloud. I can’t help it. This hobby is usually going out of its way to annoy me, and for one brief moment it feels like the good old days. I can buy a single-player game and know I’m getting the full experience without worrying I might be missing out if I don’t get the Day 1 DLC. I don’t have to log in to ask if I can play. I don’t need to read an online guide to figure out which overpriced edition of the game has the features I want. I know ahead of time the developers didn’t make the game extra-grindy so they could sell me a solution to the problem they created. No immersion-breaking prompts to hot-join random strangers. No community events. No lootbox bullshit. No in-game advertisements. No prompts to connect on social media. No outrageous platform-specific content locks. No clumsy artificial incentives pushing single-player types to engage with the multiplayer modes.
Yes, maybe it’s silly that I wrote this post. But it’s even more silly that this topic is up for discussion at all. Why does this need to be such a big deal? This is exactly what millions of fans ask for every year, and it’s what TakeTwo, Electronic Arts, Activision, and Ubisoft refuse to give us, over and over again. The crap I listed in the previous paragraph isn’t some insurmountable task. It’s just a lack of unwanted features. I love that I’m getting my no-bullshit cyberpunk RPG shooter this year, but I bet millions of other people would enjoy a no-bullshit version of Assassin’s Creed, Doom, a Marvel Superhero game, a stealth shooter, and a dozen other things.
If this is all we get, then I really hope it’s big enough to make the publishers pay attention to us again. And even if we don’t get that, it would be really nice if the Cyberpunk sales numbers could serve as a “fuck you” to the publishers that polluted this hobby with their crass bullshit.
Sorry for being so cranky. I think I’ll be in a better mood tomorrow when the game launches.
Footnotes:
[1] Actually longer than that, but I think the mid-aughts is when things began to move in that direction.
[2] I’m just accepting the claims of the publishers that single-player really is less popular. They don’t share numbers so we have to take their word for it. For the purposes of this article, let’s just pretend we believe them.
[3] Okay, that’s a guess. I don’t have hard numbers for the budget of either game. But it’s a very safe guess.
[4] I’m sure sales will be great. But this game was in development for a long time, so it needs to sell like CRAZY to make enough money to get the other publishers excited.
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God this is such a therapeutic read. It has put into words everything ive found frustrating about games for so long. I know im not alone in thinking like this, but when everyone i know in real life like online gaming, sometimes its nice to hear someone else say it!
I’m farther ahead – I’ve been living in the land of Indies[1] and Retro for…over a decade now? :)
[1] and mid-size game studios.
If you end up doing the same with movies, books and music, you’re officially considered an old fella and can apply for an AARP card by mail.
I’ll second this. Though in my case it’s in part also a consequence of my reliable workhorse starting to seem more like a potato with delusions of grandeur as the years go by.
Rant about this game’s unsavory development incoming.
As someone who loves their long-form techno-future story rich RPG’s, I have only one addition:
Screw this game and the company it rode in on.
Maybe its a masterpiece that heralds a new RPG rennaissance and exceeds all the hype it was given. I don’t care. It wasn’t worth the suffering this thing caused.
This company abused and injured its staff over a video game. They stood by while their fans sent death threats over a video game. They boasted how they didn’t hurt their workers, even as they forced those people past their breaking points over a video game.
People had mental breakdowns making this game. People destroyed their marriages for this game. People ruined their bodies and minds for this game. And none of it needed to happen.
Whatever Cyberpunk turns out to be, it wasn’t worth it.
*Runs back on stage*
And before we forget:
– This game has some serious transphobic content that they never fixed. – Some sections in this game give people seizures. And not in a “we put up this warning to avoid legal problems” kind of way. The flickering they use is what actual docters use to induce seizures in patients for diagnoses. Playing this game can literally kill you.
I confess I haven’t read enough about all the crunching situation to know how it went, but this^ is an outright lie. You have to stop swallowing what the sensationalist press tells you. Not everything is transphobic.
You’re the second person in this thread to have implicitly claimed to have played the game, before it will be released.
Is there any reason they wouldn’t have access to the same previews that people making the other claim have?
In any case, I’ve seen this comment thread before, and where some people see transphobia, others see trans-representation which they like. I think it’s best for both sides to wait until they’ve played the game, and then be very specific about what they’re referring to and why they personally like or dislike it.
That’s an incredibly flawed deduction. I thought it was evident we were both drawing conclusions from the available information about the game. My point was that his particular conclusion was incorrect. At no point I ever implied that either of us had actually played the game.
When you say that something is an outright lie, you make a claim of certainty about it.
Perhaps moon logic is expected when the topic is bizarro world, but still. How do you reconcile the original poster claiming “this game HAS some SERIOUS transphobic content they NEVER fixed”? Is there no certainty expressed in any of the capitalized words?
Reconcile it with what?
Nevermind the state of the game, “lie” is a claim about the intent of the speaker, and I don’t think anyone has perfected the internet mindreading necessary to tell whether or not Junger believed the claim.
So if you say something that isn’t true but you believe it to be true is it not a lie?
Welcome to epistemology today, everyone.
Yes, we call that “being mistaken”.
Ana apparently whether or not a claim is a lie is not dependent on whether it is true.
Shamus has written a few times about crunch and how it works in terms of games. In fact I believe he wrote one directly pertaining to CD Projekt and their comments in regards to crunch. And that ultimately for a lot of projects crunch is an unfortunate reality. Now having constant crunch is detrimental to everyone and the project but I don’t want to make comment on how devastating Cyberpunk’s was since I don’t know. I’ll be honest I google’d and couldn’t find any mention of ruined marriages but it may have happened, I don’t know.
Now I’m going to try my best to skirt no politics and if I fail feel free to delete this. So…transphobia. I know there have been a multitude of issues surrounding this, particularly their twitter manager and that they apologized for some of it. I once again googled and found 2 articles talking about continued transphobia in game and I’ll be honest when I say I don’t see it. We have the “Mix it up” poster which may very well upset people but I don’t believe it’s trying to make any statement in regards to transexuals. It seems to me it’s a company selling a “be what you want to be” even if that includes being an attractive woman with a massive penis. And it’s not anything new. We had bethesda change all their twitter logos to the pride flag except for their middle east and russian accounts. Companies are always trying to bandwagon on the newest movements for profit and it seems a cyberpunk future would involve that as well. The other thing I saw mentioned was that if you choose she/her pronouns then you can’t have a male voice and vice versa and it seems odd you can’t have all voices but I’m sure it can be fixed with a mod. It’s possible that CD will add it as well since it seems more of an oversight than a direct malicious attack. A simple “o the player wants to be a female therefore we give them female voices” type of deal. I hope that’s the case and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Finally, and this one I disagree with a lot. They said that because a ciswoman cosplayed as the “Mix it up” girl and made it to their cosplay finals that CD is transphobic. Who cares what gender a cosplayer is? We’ve seen female Links and male Princess Peaches. If someone sees “Mix it up” girl and loves the aesthetic and wants to cosplay it why not? If anything it comes from a place of love not hate. It’s not there to slight anyone and restricting who can and cannot cosplay certain characters based on their sexual orientation seems restrictive and gatekeepery.
I don’t want to downplay your anger. If you despise CD with all your heart then by all means. Now I’ll throw myself under the bus here and say that the problems you’ve laid out mean nothing to me personally and would not stop me playing the game (the lack of a computer strong enough to run it does that). Your feelings are perfectly valid but I also believe that mine are too when I say I don’t see transphobia and don’t even give it a consideration unless I were to come across dialogue or a scene in game which directly attacks them. Also, I really hope that they add an accessibility option to fix the flickering though again I don’t think they were hoping to kill anyone with it.
The game, and CD Projekt Red, have hurt no one. People have ripped out their own hair and rent their own garments over the game, but that is their doing.
The fans haven’t been sending death threats. that’s the Authoritarian Left who demand they be allowed to control other’s thoughts and expressions that have sent death threats.
8 extra hours a week is not “past the breaking point”. Especially not when those very workers were asked if they wanted to ‘crunch’ in order to meet this end of year deadline and make a higher bonus, or push the deadline off, again, and make a lesser (if any) bonus next year.
Where was the Left’s concern when I was working 60 hours a week for years? Heck, where is their concern now? I work at least 8 extra hours a week every week.
The only people ruining anything are the Authoritarian Left.
I agree with this one sentence completely.
Treating trans characters like they were just like everyone else is not transphobia. It’s the complete and total opposite of that.
Yeah, one reviewer and the problem is being fixed. That’s, you know, part of bug fixing. Apparently none of the playtesters were epileptics.
I think you may be breaking the “No politics” rule there just a bit.
Woah! What are you doing? I feel like that old Community Meme where Troy comes back from getting pizza to find the whole place on fire.
You could have gotten away with this if you’d omitted the swipes at “the left”, but now this comment is basically a huge political “Come at me bro”.
Thread closed. Not cool. :(
If you that the hill you’ve chosen, feel free, I won’t contest it. But if you refuse to play any game where the devs crunched on, you’ll have to pass on literally all AAA and most mid-size devs and indie games (I’d even say that for small indies, the pressure is worse than mid-size, because the difference between making it and losing your livelihood is much smaller than in a mid-size company).
“And none of it needed to happen.”
I’ll argue that it wasn’t necessary for the game to be finished, but it was required for the company to have a chance of getting a return on that game, since it had been in development for years and missing the end-of-year period would have been ruinous for CD:Project.
A note: using phrases like “Authoritarian Left” is a good indicator that you are talking about politics. You shouldn’t do that here.
I think you’re responding to the wrong comment here. Needed to go up one more.
Whoops. My apologies.
Original thread was closed, so I’ll write a couple of thoughts here. OP described the “Mix It Up” poster and some iffy tweets as ‘serious transphobia’, which is culture wars argument that saw some mileage in the more woke gaming websites. Is it fine to bring up Religious Right talking points if they’re couched in terms of indecency and protecting children? Or to use a more topical example, if I go on a tangent, complaining about lack of electoral integrity and 3-letter agency officials overruling the will of people, is the person who escalates by calling me a MAGAtard the only one at fault?
It seems to me that a common mark of an ideologue is not seeing one’s political ideology as such, but merely as compassion, being educated or some such. Therefore ‘no politics’ don’t really apply to them, even if they make minimum effort to put their talking points in more general terms. Now, there is obviously no one correct answer to this, and Shamus is the one who makes the judgment, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this play out here. I recall a barrage of call-outs when he, horror of horrors, misgendered the robot FL4K from BL3.
It is tricky. It’s tricky for people who want to discuss sensitive topics and can’t be sure where the line is. It’s also tricky for me to figure out when to jump in. Like, As soon as someone brings up “transphobia” in regards to CP2077, I know where that’s going. Either they will make it political, or the person arguing with them will do it. (Or the person arguing with THEM, etc.) At some point it’s clear the thread is out of hand, but it’s not always clear who crossed the line first.
Some people think the game is insensitive to trans people based on the “mix it up” ad. Some people think the game is trans-positive because you can build a trans character with whatever parts you like. (I don’t know anything about this. I’m just going by what I’ve read.)
I think it’s an interesting discussion. As someone who isn’t trans, I find it really interesting to see what trans people have to say about this sort of thing, both as a reaction to the game and as a thought experiment about what it would mean to be trans in a world where people can literally add and remove body parts at will.
But it’s very hard to have this conversation because there’s always a couple of people who show up with the attitude of “everyone who disagrees with me is evil and stupid”.
As an actual trans person…. the game’s treatment of trans people seems bland and corporate. Which is bad, I don’t like being commoditized.
I can definitely see where you’re coming from, but aside from the baffling way they tied voice gender to pronouns, I feel like the setting commodifying even nonbinary gender expression is exactly the point? The ‘Mix It Up’ poster is explicitly a piece of in-universe advertising; it’s clumsy, it’s raunchy, it’s downright shameless… and it’s made by a soulless, exploitative, money-hungry corporation. You just know that the very second it is profitable to acknowledge trans* individuals, corporations will add them to the list of demographics they can pander shamelessly to.
I feel like the point of the ‘Mix It Up’ ad is to demonstrate to the viewer that trans* rights are accepted enough that the corporations dominating the setting see an opportunity to use exploitative representations of trans* individuals as nothing more than marketing material. However, I really feel like CDPR should have led with more respectable trans* characters before they showed the worst outcome of widespread trans acceptance. All people are going to think of when they hear about CP2077’s transgenderism is the “DUDE LOOK AT THAT CHICK WITH A DICK” poster instead of its trans characters (if there are any– and I sincerely hope there are).
I think you hit the nail on the head, DrBones. By not leading with (and maybe not having any) genuine representation, the line between the in-universe marketing and real life marketing gets blurred.
It’s not like they lead their real-life marketing efforts with that poster, it was visible for a couple of seconds as one of many unremarkable posters on a wall during a lengthy early gameplay demo, it was the very opposite of “DUDE LOOK AT THAT”. Despite its obscurity, the internet screenshotted and obsessed over that poster in particular when I’m guessing no one in the marketing department had even thought about what in-game posters were in the demo. If this is all people are going to think about, that’s more about people than CDPR.
I get what you’re saying. I think we see this from different perspectives. You’re right, CDPR probably didn’t consider it at all.
I can see how it might look like people are just being overly nitpicky about a background element. To me though, the fact that it’s a background element is part of the problem. We live in a world where trans people are already marginalized and pushed into a corner. It doesn’t feel great that the game’s only portrayals of us (that I’m aware of) are in these heavily sexualised, caricature background elements. That feels pretty bad. As I said in another comment, why include it in the game at all if you’re not going to take it seriously? All that does is contribute to an existing problem.
This is the part I don’t get, how does this poster actually make the world worse? Is the poster some kind of morally corrosive element that will motivate its audience to do bad things like rock and roll was supposed to (if so what, please explain), or is it just that some people don’t like to look at it and for obvious reasons one generally shouldn’t fill games with things that (some of) the audience doesn’t like to look at?
Hi Ninety-Three, can’t reply to your comment directly:
It’s for the same reasons people don’t like racist caricatures of black people in the media they consume: it creates a false representation of an already often misrepresented group, which can fuel more bigotry. Even if such a caricature were in-universe, it probably wouldn’t be received well, especially if the work itself lacked any actual black characters.
I guess the question is whether the responsibility is on the creator to not spread this kind of thing or on the person consuming the media to be aware of the context of what they’re looking at. That comes down to your personal values, but I personally believe it should be both.
That doesn’t mean I can or would tell CDPR or any other company what to do (me not liking something isn’t enough for that), just that I hope they’re aware of the consequences of what they do.
“We live in a world where trans people are already marginalized and pushed into a corner”
This is not true. Trans people are a microscopic percentage of the world’s population yet for that are wildly _over_represented in online and popular culture as well as regularly celebrated by corporations and governments (and in many places, failure to participate in those celebrations can have genuine negative consequences.) You aren’t marginalized or pushed anywhere.
Why would you do this? Why would you make an argument where you explain someone’s life experience to them? What kind of answer were you expecting? “Oh wow. I thought I had it rough until you told me I didn’t. Thanks for that.”
You could have argued this from the perspective of, “I don’t see how you’re marginalized.” Then maybe they could have explained their position and you could decide for yourself if it made any sense to you or not.
I guess this technically doesn’t break the “no politics” rule, but it’s still a horrible way to engage with another person on a sensitive subject.
Thread closed.
This only works if you comment on it. That’s the issue. CDPR isn’t interested in having a discussion on the exploitation of transgender individuals as objects of fetish. It’s just there. It’s exploitative by CDPR, and the game would be better with he ads stripped. It does detract from my enjoyment every time I run into one.
From an in-setting perspective – why shouldn’t corporations exploit trangender bodies as much as they do cisgender ones? And as far as I can tell, based similar settings… transgender people are completely indistinguishable from cisgender people, unless they choose not to be. Completely, perfectly Transitioning is completely trivial, and there’s absolutely no stigma affiliated with it.
… The real question is “Where’s the exploitation of all the Furries?” With the ease of access to body modifications and the like, where are the corporations trying to cash in on those of us who even today spend stupid amounts of money on the desire to be significantly fluffier?
Yeah, even Batman Beyond had teens splicing their DNA to get animal traits.
Hey Shamus, first time commenter but long time reader. Wanted to pitch in my two cents as a trans woman.
You’re 100% right that there’s a lot of really interesting things to explore with the trans experience and gender in general in a cyberpunk setting. Unfortunately, based on what I’ve read and seen about the game (haven’t played it of course), it doesn’t sound like the game is actually interested in exploring these things. There are no actual trans characters (some very queer coded ones, though), and making V trans doesn’t actually let you explore any of those ideas in the game.
Another issue is that your voice is tied to your pronouns – why? I’m not a game designer so maybe this is more complicated to solve than I know, but it doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to split that into two different flags for the game to read. I have a deep voice myself, but that doesn’t change the fact that I prefer she/her pronouns. It would be nice to have that reflected in the game.
All that adds up to a lack of actual trans representation, so when you consider the “mix it up” ad, I’m sure you can understand stratigo’s comment about feeling like we’re a commodity. It doesn’t feel great when we’re only there to be sexualised.
I can’t make assumptions about what goes on behind the scenes at CD Projekt, but to me it doesn’t sound like they had intentionally malicious intentions – but they’re lacking intentionally good intentions, too. If they weren’t ready to take this topic seriously, it maybe shouldn’t have been in the game at all.
I’m still looking forward to playing it for other reasons, and I’ll be thrilled if it turns out to handle trans topics better than it seems, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
As a cisgender person, I know my opinion might be ignorant, but wouldn’t it be seen as somewhat offensive if a trans female character had the default male voice?
It’s not like it was a no-win scenario, though. They could have hired trans voice actors in addition to the cisgender ones. And I suppose if they want the brownie points for representation, that’s the least they could have done.
If they had made it mandatory that a trans female V had the masculine voice (and vice versa), yeah, that would definitely be offensive. But having it be optional, whether your V is trans or not (it’s the future, maybe they just got an implanted larynx or something), just means more options, which is a win for everyone in an RPG I think.
It’s nice that they tried. It just feels like they didn’t bother asking any actual trans people for input, and instead they just made some assumptions and called it a day.
It is optional. V can have either voice as any combo of sex. Since I had the option to choose both about 2 hours ago
Thanks! Either what I read before was mistaken or that was changed in a patch. Good to know.
Lottie can’t reply to you. I am assuming it’s the day 1 patch. Also you are welcome :)
But the question is.. if my female-silhouetted, tits-and-penis-bearing, trans woman V has a “male” (i.e: lower pitched) voice, will she be forced to use “he/him” pronouns?
That’s what people are complaining about, that pronoun choice is tied to voice choice.
I suspect it might have something to do with dialogue and voice acting. In fully voice acted games with selectable gender, they have to record some lines twice, once for a male protagonist and another for a female protagonist, with the corresponding pronouns. And there are also some lines that are exclusive to one specific gender.
An obvious solution would be to have gender identity be selectable independently of body parts, instead of being tied to one specific physiological feature (in this case, the voice). But there’s some inconveniences with that approach. Just because a line is uttered in a male voice, we can’t assume it came from a male-identifying person. So if you needed to make V say something like “I’m a smart man/woman”, then you would have to record four lines of voiced dialog for just that one line of text:
Male-V (male voice): “I’m a smart man”
Male-V (female voice): “I’m a smart man”
Female-V (female voice): “I’m a smart woman”
Female-V (male voice): “I’m a smart woman”
It’s not a lot of work for just one line. But if you have enough of these, it adds up. Which means spending more time and money. And to boot, having so many gender/voice combinations exponentially increases the chances that a mistake in dialog may be made somewhere down the line, and nobody will notice it until it’s too late, and then you’ll have something like, say, a character misgendering V for no reason in the middle of a conversation, or worse, V misgendering themselves for no reason.
Again, I’m not a game developer and I’m not sure if that’s exactly how it works, but my point is: in fully voice-acted games, you have to make some compromises.
You see this all the time in games like Mass Effect, where you can choose the gender of the protagonist and even their first name, but they will ALWAYS be refered to as “Shepard“, whether they are male or female, whether their name is “John”, “Jane” or “Aethelstan”.
I’m not trying to “defend” CDPR (nor judge them), I’m just trying to see where they are coming from and why such a decision was made.
About the only reason I could think of is that in many languages the grammar or choice of vocabulary of first person statements changes based on your own gender. That’s not really the case in English, but for other languages that would seriously increase the voice recordings if you want to avoid awkward dialogue.
As an example, in Polish the phrase “I am tall.” would be “Jestem wysoki.” if you are male, but “Jestem wysoka.” if you are female.
I had forgotten about this! Which is weird since my native language has grammatical gender. Excellent point.
It’s more than just this – in some languages every reference to a person is also gendered, without a neutral alternative. I can’t count the number of times the localization department pinged me at work with questions like “is the assassination target in this mission male or female?”
Taking this into account, in a broadly localized game you effectively double the amount of voice acting required if the “female” and “male” voices need to also come from theoretical speakers of both genders, even if the prospect might have been feasible in English (if still very finnicky – think of all the timing/tone/volume mismatches that need to be edited to let you cut different pronouns into each spoken line).
Trust me, I know. I am a native speaker of one of those languages.
Welcome to the site! :)
Does every game in the world have to explore representation of this issue?
No.
But, CP2077 is uniquely poised to explore trans from a setting perspective of “trans is normal”. Which from what I gather it is doing and that’s upsetting people for… reasons.
Why do you feel the need to debate this point? Lottie didn’t claim EVERY game needed to explore representation. Earlier in this thread I said it was interesting to hear trans people to react to a game doing something new. Lottie was literally just answering my question.
Also, I really appreciated Lottie’s comment because she talked about how she felt rather than projecting malice onto the developers.
It’s helpful when people say, “This makes me feel uncomfortable and I don’t like it for reason X.” I might not always agree on the particular issue, but it’s really useful to understand where someone is coming from and why they feel the way they do.
That sort of comment is far more helpful than, “I don’t like this, therefore the people who made this are evil and bad.” Lottie made the first kind of argument, not the second. I really appreciate that.
I’m right there with you Shamus; other than CDPR’s stuff, I’d pretty much given up on AAA gaming for the last 10 years or so. Unfortunately it sounds like the release version of CP2077 is going to be VERY buggy, so be prepared. I’m definitely planning to buy the game at some point, but probably not until they release the ‘Complete Edition’ in six months or a year or whatever… by which time I might actually have a computer capable of running it.
I bought it because it seems to be at least reasonable in quality and because it’s a modern AAA releasing for a mere 50 quid, which I think is surprisingly decent of CDPR.
That’s where I’m at, too. I do want to give it a shot, but I have a lower-end gaming pc, and the versions for the consoles I DO have sound like they are in awful shape. So I’ll be waiting a while either way.
I mean, AAA single-player launches are still very much a thing and they sell a lot. Sony exclusives are mostly this (God of War, Spider-Man, The Last of Us, etc.) and mostly none of them come with online integration (yeah, in the late PS3 a couple of these came with online modes, but they seem to have learned the lesson for the PS4 era). Nintendo’s first party games are almost exclusively single-player only.
It has been the same story for years:
– Publisher claims AAA games need online features to remain interesting to the public.
– Some AAA single-player game releases without any kind of online features and rises to the top of the sales charts.
– Publishers believe the game sold for some element unrelated to its quality (such as “superheroes are in!”).
– Publishers demand that element to be put in their next game, praising themselves for their ideas if it succeeds and blaming literally anyone else if it fails, never taking a moment to consider they might be doing something wrong.
I really doubt Cyberpunkis going to make much of a dent either way. Historically, it takes quite a while for executives to zero in on a problem that they’ve made for themselves and get rid of it. How long did it take for online passes to stop existing? Marvel’s Avengers should have never been a live-service game if they had considered for a moment how the majority of these games have absolutely failed, so it’s gonna be a few years before they stop trying to make live-service games. In other media, Hollywood still hasn’t figured out that taking an established franchise and replacing the male main characters for women isn’t a surefire recipe for big bucks, so we have a few more years of blockbusters losing money and blaming it all on sexism rather than realizing that a silly gimmick is not enough to sell a movie.
Eh, I’m already more or less on 2. Between unfulfilling experiences, ridiculous requirements and stupid, annoying exclusivity deals there are a lot of games I’ve had to pass on and I still have literally thousands of options for games to play that I’ve never touched before. I certainly don’t feel the need to find a new hobby. I assume I might if I only ever cared about the new stuff, but eh.
A Sony report leaked recently, and according to their data players are spending more time on single-player games. It was under a presentation with the headline “Single player games are dead” and then the rest of the presentation was explaining, no they’re not.
https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/mustafa-mahmoud/single-player-games-are-more-popular-than-multiplayer-reports-sony/
(This is a link, but not _the_ link which I can’t find right now).
They might be one of the only companies clued up on that message though. In the 2020 fan choice videogame awards, 3 of the 5 nominees are published by Sony (and they’re all singleplayer game). And they don’t even include things like the Demons Souls rerelease this year
Hmm… Come to think about it, a LOT of AAA game that’s pure single player I’ve enjoyed and/or heard good things about in the last few years was either Sony backed at least in part, or on PS4 first.
God Of War. Horizon Zero Dawn. Death Stranding. Bloodborne, depending on how you count the Dark Souls like mostly-PVE-but-some-online.
Can think of a few more titles like Sekiro or Devil May Cry 5, but even titles like Control & Metro: Exodus got backed by Epic instead.
I’m going to have to side with those games as being multiplayer. I say this as someone who does just about everything possible to avoid the possibility of player-versus-player combat in them (don’t get me started on the guy hanging around the second area of Demon’s Souls with gear-destroying equipment).
I’m playing the PS3 incarnation of Demon’s Souls right now, and its servers have been turned off for some time. The experience is a much emptier one in offline mode. Part of why I initially walked away from Bloodborne and Dark Souls II was the loneliness the games’ atmospheres press on you. Without the moments of commiseration when I see a bloodstain of someone who panic-rolled into an abyss, and without the messages hinting that the tempting chest is actually a mimic, the gloom of the settings was just too much for me.
This is also my experience. It’s weird because the games are perfectly functional offline, in fact I’ve played DS for the first time with my computer literally unplugged from the internet because I hated the idea of PvP interrupting the already challenging game, but they really managed to capture that “message in a bottle” hopeful feel you get from seeing other player’s shadows/messages/bloodstains, the idea that among the oppressive darkness of the game “there are other people out there”.
To be clear, I think the core gameplay is perfectly fine singleplayer, but in this particular case the games actually do benefit from the multiplayer component and in a way that goes beyond pure mechanics.
On the one hand, I want to hard disagree, because I played DS1 completely offline (due to the outside account rigamarole, just no), and it was perfectly fine- the empty lonliness even counting as a unique and effective feature. But then I also played 2-3 at launch and it was a hell of a party just a step away from the “MMO” I never knew I always wanted, and 3 in particular has some massive “secrets” behind hidden doors that online means you’ll never miss, but offline could leave you completely unaware of.
Which, after I beat Hollow Knight and found out there was hidden stuff of massive import that I’d missed even though I’d thought I’d done a good job looking- I was kinda pissed. Though the tarnishing of Hollow Knight also includes their giant pile of “postgame” dlc content.
>>In other media, Hollywood still hasn’t figured out that taking an established franchise and replacing the male main characters for women isn’t a surefire recipe for big bucks
This is something that irritates me because it’s so low effort that it’s pretty insulting. “Hey, we made X a GURL!! Aren’t YOU a GURL too? You will love X!” Okay, but you forgot to make X an interesting, three-dimensional character. A vulva is not a shortcut to character development. It’s standard issue equipment that half of us are walking around with.
Also, I actually think a movie about a female Bond could be pretty interesting. Bonde doesn’t do things the same way Bond did. Set up some conflict between them – she’s the young whippersnapper who thinks she knows it all, he’s the grizzled veteran who thinks kids today have dumb ideas – and put them in a situation where they have to work together and use both of their skill sets to get the job done. Add some gadgets, explosions, a car chase, snappy dialogue, resist the urge to add sexual tension between Bond and Bonde, and you’ve got a fun, entertaining flick people will enjoy. (Not me, but I’m a curmudgeon.) It could even be more than that if Bonde’s character is well developed (we already know Bond pretty well, so he doesn’t need as much development).
But that would take work, so instead let’s just say BOND IS A GURL!!! and sit back and wait for the cash to roll in.
(I actually have no idea if there really is a plan to make Bond a woman (see above in re: curmudgeon; I ignore pop culture as much as possible). It just seems like something Hollywood would do and think was groundbreaking.)
There are rumors of retiring James Bond after Bond25, and making movies about new female agent 007, that was hired after him. No idea if its true or not (plus my hype for Bond25 died, after waiting for so long, tbh)
A quick googling shows me some news articles from last year saying there would be a female 007, then articles from this year that a female 007 has been ruled out. So maybe it was never committed to?
There’s probably some confusion because Lashana Lynch is playing 007 in the next Bond film, but she’s not James Bond: ostensibly the plot involves Daniel Craig’s Bond coming out of retirement to find that Lynch’s character has been assigned his old Double-O number.
I have not heard a word about who might be replacing Craig as James Bond, but I have heard rumours that the franchise might be up for auction to one of the streaming services after No Time to Die comes out so maybe the winner of that will have new ideas what direction they want to steer the franchise in.
Barbara Broccoli (the rights holder) said last year while she could see Bond being played by an actor of color (or colour on that side of the pond), he would always be male. Which isn’t to say, like in No Time To Die, 007 could never be a woman.
Damn straight. I’m female but don’t have any particular preference for male or female main characters, either in movies or video games (even ones where you create your own PC). Perhaps I’m unusual in that, but either way I want to see female leads who are strong original characters in their own right, not just inferior versions of pre-existing male characters.
Here’s the thing. There’s already a relatively obscure but still popular character who is the female equivalent of James Bond. She’s called “Modesty Blaise” and despite having a series of acclaimed comic strips and novels there’s been very little effort in bringing her to the big screen. There’s been a couple of series pilots that never got a series, a comedy action film that was in-name-only and some direct-to-video thing.
The craziest part is that Quentin Tarantino has wanted to direct a Modesty Blaise movie for years and Neil Gaiman prepared a script treatment, yet nothing has materialized. Tarantino! And Gaiman! How can you have those two guys interested in this amazing property and do nothing with them? This is like the whole “Silent Hills” deal. Oh, but sure, let’s make a female Plastic Man film. That’ll bring the big bucks, eh?
Seriously, this is why it angers me when people reason that executives must be in power because they know what they’re doing. No, it’s clear that sometime it’s despite of it.
Oh I’ve read some of the books – they’re pretty fun. I picked some versions in a German second-hand bookshop, so I reckon it must have been a pretty successful series if they’d spread internationally like that.
I looked up Modesty Blaise on Tvtropes.org after reading this post, and now I’m tempted to read the books myself.
…I can’t imagine what a Quentin Tarantino Bond film would look like.
A spy movie with racial slurs, drug use and weird monologues.
It’s Tarantino’s Star Trek that I can’t imagine – and that one might happen
A movie that’s not based on another movie? Is that even legal?
I will make it legal.
And then make a movie about the process.
Which I will then do a remake of!
Can I do the
direct to DVDdirect to streaming cheap parody? I promise I’ll do the blandest, most inoffensive hack job ever.I would accept nothing less! Just make sure to make a ton of obvious, unfunny references to other movies!
I read a few of the collected editions, they’re fun. They could easily be updated for an adaptation.
I think a problem is that the recent crop of female-led action films rarely let their leads actually be fun. They’re almost always extremely serious and grim assassins in dark, gritty stories. Most similar films from 15, 20 years ago haven’t fully aged well, but Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft always looked like she was enjoying herself, Zhang Ziyi sold fighting as liberating in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the Kill Bill films are cartoonishly over-the-top, and Geena Davis was having a ball in The Long Kiss Goodnight and that terrible pirate movie. It’s time to bring back some of that energy.
Oh, man, I thought I was the only one who remembered Cutthroat Island. It had a SNES videogame and everything. It wasn’t really much better than the movie, though. Generic action with no heart. But yeah, Geena was clearly having fun, like Raul Julia in Street Fighter.
Cutthroat Island is decent film. It’s not great cinema, and it has clunky moments -but it is a plenty enjoyable film and among the few movies to really show a broad-side to broad-side battle. Which as an old Hornblower fan (the Gregory Peck one), I like to see.
I do not get the hate this movie provokes. And I regret it torpedoed Gina Davis’ marriage and career. It wasn’t *that* bad.
I’ve never understood the push to online features in single player experiences to be about keeping games interested, or even profit. To me, it’s always been about control. Both of players’ time, and of their rights over their property, especially when it comes to resale.
This.
From what I understand, it’s about preventing piracy and the sale of pre-owned games.
That, and making sure patches to the game are no longer “optional”, which also allows them to release half broken buggy games and just patch them later.
I don’t think this is as dramatic as you make it out to be. There has already been a definite shift in the direction of single-player, with the obviously visible turning point being God of War, and Sony has been pushing very hard in that direction ever since.
We will most likely see a few more swings of the pendulum during our lifetimes.
I’ve finally come to the end of my World of Warcraft time and what I find interesting is that WoW has very much become more of a single player game. I played through Legion and Battle for Azeroth and I played by myself the whole time and each zone has a storyline, there are cut scenes, set piece battles, a whole bunch of things that aren’t multiplayer. The characters you interact with are no longer “random outpost grunt” but named npcs relevant to the plot. Now granted there are still dungeons, raids, and group quests (The bane of my existence. Seriously why are these here? No one likes them.) and unfortunately if you want the full story experience you do need to go through them but what I got solo was good enough. And I’ll now put it aside for another 3-5 years and move on to more fulfilling games like Total Warhammer 2 which i one of my favourite games of all time.
I concur. I come back to WoW from time to time, play the new content patch, farm mounts. That’s what I do in the game, raise the collected mounts number. Mounts are forever, while gear only lasts until next patch.
Sometimes I need to raise my ‘item level’, at which point I hop into dungeons and raids with randomly assigned player controlled NPCs to get some loot.
Nothing in the game is social anymore (like it was in vanilla and tbc), but the thing I’ve realized is – neither am I.
That was an important part of WoW‘s original appeal. Sure, you can look at WoW Classic and see how much worse the single player experience was and how much they were pushing for players to group, but compared to the big names in MMOs at the time (EverQuest, Final Fantasy XI, or even City of Heroes) which actively punished you for not finding a group (or in CoH‘s case there was the option of a horribly broken build).
A friend of mine, a year or two before WoW‘s launch, was playing a warrior (mid 20s, I think) in EverQuest solo. He’d sit at the edge of a zone, grab a mob, then either kill the monster or flee across the zone border if the fight started heading south. Then he’d spend ten, fifteen minutes with his character just sitting on the ground regenning his health.
In WoW, level-appropriate monsters were shorter fights, you hit more buttons (the EQ warrior had one button to press if he didn’t need to taunt), you didn’t risk experience points or your gear (a corpse run in WoW saves you from a debuff and some repair costs; a corpse run in EQ was the only way to get back the gear in your inventory), and it generally took less than a minute (between bandages and food) to recover enough health for the next fight.
In short, WoW‘s killer feature was convenience; you could get fun done on your schedule, and there was extra stuff if you had a group. It’s no wonder Blizzard leaned into that.
I’ve never really been interested in AAA games, so #2 has been basically my entire gaming life. I’m not against them or anything, I just generally play games for the mechanics more than the story so AAA games all tend to be pretty boringly similar in that regard from my point of view. I’m happy for those people looking forward to this sort of thing (one of my friends is pretty excited about it). :)
The best games are the ones with both story and mechanics, like Rimworld! :D
Yeah, Rimworld is great. I haven’t played it since the early ’90s, but I recently found it again on The Internet Archive, so I should give it another go.
Eh, this is a rather dated, “PC Gaming Is Dying”-era thing to say. Yes, they’re viable – Skyrim and Witcher 3 saw to that years ago.
But the story in Skyrim was convoluted and full of nonsense.
My first playthrough of Skyrim, I did exactly what my character would do.
Which is to say, I escaped Helgen, realized that I had no motivation whatsoever to continue the plot, then put the game down and never touched it again for like four years.
Yet another way that Morrowind was better. Escape prison, and either follow the plot you are given or not.
You don’t escape prison in Morrowind, you’re released. You do escape prison in Oblivion and it’s also better than Skyrim.
It’s still an escape if you’re thrown out by the guards.
Let’s be honest, the story in the Witcher was convoluted and full of nonsense. It’s about extradimensional elves hunting Snow White while the Huntsman decides whether or not he wants to sleep with Maleficent. Oh, and there’s a war on but that’s not important.
The difference is that the big story beats, and more importantly the emotional beats of the story actually worked. And the story’s presentation was so much better.
I know this is no appropriate defense, but.. the story makes a lot more sense if you already read the seven (!) Witcher books before playing the game.
Yeah, I know.
I know. I was just poking a little fun.
The Witcher 3 criticism on this site rightly pointed out how much the main story relies on red herrings, wild goose chases, diversions, and long tangents. And yet, it still works, because while on paper things like:
‘You go to Novigrad to find Dandelion who may have seen Ciri, however he’s been captured by the Eternal Fire, so you have to first find out where he is and then break him out just to find out… that she’s gone’
are ridiculous, the way it’s done in game works because the characters are interesting, the relationships are textured and the choices are good. It’s a ridiculous story that only really feel ridiculous when you view it from a distance. From within the story, it’s great.
A 2011 and a 2015 game have proven beyond a doubt that a segment of the market will continue to survive? Really?
Note that the trend Shamus describes has been rolling along inexorably since 2006. I think what Skyrim has proven is that it really doesn’t matter how successful 2077 is, none of the big players are going to question the always-online bullshit for single-player games.
Calling it now: if Cyberpunk knocks it out of the park we’re going to get a slew of hamfisted “our own special take(s)” of Cyberpunk, but with overbearing DLC and social media integration because “that’s the only way you can pay for all this development time you entitled snowflakes” (paraphrasing). It’s happened too many time already for me to see it going any other way.
Agreed.
To be fair, the Witcher 3’s sales in the years after its release have been very good.
Sorry, but when was Skyrim story-focused?
It’s certainly not setting-focused, character-focused, or gameplay-focused.
It’s exploration focused. I say this because that’s the only thing about it that could reasonably be called a focus.
It’s meme-focused. Because that’s certainly the part of the game that’s endured the longest…
Bug-focused. Being stalked by dragon skeletons, shopkeepers trying to murder me over a misclick, NPCs falling out of the sky at me…the bugs are what I remember most of that game.
Skyrim is pretty setting-focused. The setting isn’t deep, but the game does a great job of presenting it.
Graphics focused: the graphics aren’t great, but the engine does an adequate job of rendering them?
It’s one of the few games that presents such a broad setting and lets you loose into it, without too much immersion-breaking nonsense. (Hello, UBISOFT.)
If it were one of the few games that had a 3D rendering engine, calling it graphics-focused would be pretty fair.
There’s not a lot of setting. There are a couple different types of caves, cities, towns, and dweomer ruins, none of which have any meaningful relationship with each other, just the quest links.
I’m sympathetic, Shamus, but games and gaming are always changing and it’s not always publishers’ fault when it happens. I can easily imagine an article very much like this written in, say, the late 80s or early 90s complaining about the decline of text adventures. “Why can’t Big Gaming keep making the kind of games I like?” Well, in the case of text adventures it was because (a) technology changed, (b) the audience for games changed, and (c) the audience’s tastes changed. I suppose you could blame publishers for the change if you really wanted to; they definitely re-directed their investments from less-profitable text adventures to more-profitable everything else. But publishers weren’t responsible for the cheaper, more powerful computers and consoles that made the shift towards other kinds of games possible in the first place. Nor were publishers responsible for the fact that so many of the households that bought the cheaper, more powerful hardware simply weren’t interested in text adventures. I think you can tell a similar story about modern gaming. Processor and GPUs get faster. Memory gets cheaper. Storage gets bigger. The internet gets faster, cheaper, and more commonplace. New kinds of games become possible. Large numbers of people discover that they like those kinds of games. And so publisher money flows towards those kinds of games.
A whole lot of genres have fallen from AAA grace in gaming’s relatively short history. Text adventures are merely the oldest one I can think of. In approximately chronological order, there’s also : 2D shoot-em-ups, 2D brawlers, flight sims, space sims, racing games, turn-based strategy games, and real-time strategy games. No doubt there are others as well. Now all of those genres still exist and I’m very certain that if I went to look at Steam right now I could find new games in each of them. However, they haven’t been AAA in a very long time. In some cases, that’s probably because the audience for the genre simply isn’t big enough to justify a AAA budget. In the others, however, I think it’s because the genre simply doesn’t lend itself well to AAA, which, to be perfectly honest, is mostly a matter of graphics these days. Can you imagine a turn-based strategy game with, say, Call of Duty’s graphics? I can’t. Or, rather, I can, but I don’t think it would be a good turn-based strategy game.
I still occasionally fire up Zork…
If I had Zork, I’d probably do the same. Alas, the only Infocom game I ever got anywhere with was Wishbringer.
I really want to like Infocom games… but boy oh boy, do the authors and I ever not think alike. It isn’t always even like they’ve got that whole Old Man Murray rant on the cat syrup mustache puzzle… I often read the answers to Infocom problems, and they make reasonable sense… while at the same time just being something I never would have tried no matter how long you waited.
The only Infocom game I have ever legitimately completed on my own, with no help, is Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail Of It, which is (as the article says) unique in the Infocom catalog in that rather than being an adventure game, it’s a word play game. For instance, there’s a section of the game that resembles a normal adventure game, but your only inventory item is a “jack”. What’s the jack? It’s whatever sort of jack you need; a jackpot, a car jack, a jack-in-the-box, etc., which you invoke simply by using it in the correct way for the situation. Could only work as a text adventure. There’s another section based on taking common idioms both figuratively and literally at the same time. Fun little game.
I’ve sometimes wondered if the same reason I tore through that in almost one sitting with no blocks, despite (as Wikipedia says) consensus is that this game is at least medium difficult and may be expert, is the same reason I literally can’t finish the first puzzle in Zork. I’m sympatico with the bizarre, weird one in the catalog, which unfortunately leaves me completely out of step with the main catalog.
I also really should try finishing Zork, I’ve only managed to get through Enchanter so far.
Internet Archive (archive.org) should have all the old Infocom games available in their arcade. Some are even playable online in a web browser window.
There’s even a 30th Anniversary version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with graphics free-to-play online at BBC Radio.
Shamus isn’t lamenting the increased graphical fidelity or other features which are helped by the advance of technology; The push for teams, competition, and other multi-player features at the expense of story, characters, etc, is what he’s after.
I’m aware. That’s why I specifically mentioned the internet getting faster, cheaper, and more commonplace. Technological change drives change in games. Sometimes the technology in question is processors, sometimes it’s storage (e.g., the CD-ROM), sometimes it’s GPUs, and sometimes it’s the internet, but it’s all the same phenomenon. Something new comes along and new kinds of games become possible and sometimes popular.
Infocom actually died because it was bought by Activision and run into the ground with crunch and tight deadlines, and being the vanguard of text adventures, the genre went with them.
Infocom got bought by a publisher, because, like many independent developers before them, they weren’t doing so hot on their own. Text adventures would have died even if Infocom had managed to stay independent.
People sell to publishers for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with failing as a business. In fact, the idea that publishers buy failing companies is actually kind of ridiculous.
Developers sell out to publishers for lots of reasons, it’s true, but I can’t see why you think that financial difficulty isn’t one them.
To add some additional nuance to this:
I remember when iD Software went to Bethesda. John Carmack said that the rationale was that games were too risky. It’s not that they were in financial difficulty at the moment, but instead it was the concern that games had become so expensive that a single flop can ruin you.
This makes sense to me. You don’t want to wait until you’ve got a flop on your hands and you’re in debt. Then a publisher can set whatever terms they want. You’re going out of business so you have to take whatever they offer.
On the other hand, if you sell when you’re healthy, then you’ve got some negotiating power. And now you’ve got a publisher backing you, so a single flop won’t kill your studio.
I image that as a developer, you’re looking for several things in a publisher:
* “Insurance”: If a game flops, you won’t go out of business right away because the parent company has money from all of the non-flops.
* Stability: In the 90s, you’d often start building a game and then shop it around to different publishers while it was being made. I gather that process was stressful and time-consuming, since you needed to stop development to throw together a demo. After a decade of that, I’ll bet it sounds real nice to have a single publisher. It’s the difference between doing random contract work and having a steady job.
* It’s nice to have someone handle all of the large-scale logistics. The publisher can do distribution, support, and marketing, and the studio can focus on production.
It’s a model that makes sense. The only problem is that most of the people running publishing houses are outrageously incompetent.
I don’t dispute any of this, Shamus. It seems very reasonable and it’s perfectly consistent with statements I’ve heard from other developers, like Louis Castle, co-founder of Westwood.
Contrary to Krellen’s claims, however, Infocom was in bad financial shape before it was acquired. The company lost a lot of money between 1984 and 1986 partly because of an ill-fated venture into relational database software and partly because of an unexpected 30% decrease in games sales. Some of the company’s founders apparently had to mortgage their houses in order to keep the company going while they looked for a buyer. (You can read all about it in this Digital Antiquarian article.) The choice was Activision or bankruptcy. The truth, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, is that companies buy other, failing companies literally all the time.
Of course they do. Not always successfully, but still.
The company I work for WAS a big player in its field in Europe – but was the victim of a cyber attack and pretty much bankrupt and completely out of business. We were bought out by one of the biggest US companies in our field, because they thought they could make us profitable again. Scale, better business practices, more oversight, different management style, whatever.
Same has happened a thousand times. You see a company going under, and you think you can do better. And frankly, often, you can.
So efficient market hypothesis question (or maybe just a “can you focus on the positive for a bit” question):
If most people running publishing houses are outrageously incompetent, why hasn’t a competently run publishing house outcompeted them yet? Or are we in the process of seeing that, it just takes awhile to drain the momentum out of the ones that are dying?
What publishing houses today are not run by people who are outrageously incompetent? Are there any that are particularly competent?
“why hasn’t a competently run publishing house outcompeted them yet?”
That’s a totally fair question, and to be honest I don’t have a good answer. A lot of these companies are doing VERY well despite HUGE mistakes, and I can’t explain that away without getting into impossible-to-prove speculations about the economics of the hobby.
But to answer your question about well-run companies:
I think Valve is a well-run company that’s been running circles around them for almost two decades now. Valve isn’t out-competing them in terms of games, but Valve did have the foresight and knowledge to build Steam. That’s costing the publishers 30% on every digital PC sale. That’s huge, and after 16 years most of them still haven’t figured out how to build a proper rival.
Japan’s big three: Nintendo, Sony, and Sega – They all exhibit behavior that indicates their leadership understands the industry. They might make a lot of decisions I don’t like, but those decisions aren’t the product or ignorance and incompetence. (Sony’s recent stumble with Marvel’s Avengers seems pretty bone-headed, though. But that’s *probably* a one-off.)
Ubisoft is a strange creature and I can’t figure them out. They’ve got their cookie-cutter games that make it seem like the company is hostile to innovation and risk, but then you’ve got extreme-risk stuff like Beyond Good and Evil 2. (Not to mention their mid-budget offerings which are apparently really strong.) This year they were in the middle of a scandal for having toxic working conditions, but I’ve heard from other people that some Ubisoft studios are stable and organized and don’t have a bunch of drama. I can point to some things Ubi does that are bafflingly uninformed, but you can also find instances where they seem to know what they’re doing. Getting a feel for the company is really hard, and my GUESS is that the top leadership is a bit hands-off, and the company is divided into isolated silos. Some of those silos are run well, and some aren’t. Maybe?
The two big incompetent ones are Activision and EA, and I admit that a lot of the time when I rage about “the industry” I’m complaining about these two. They own a lot of the industry, and they control a big chunk of the games in my wheelhouse. EA is shielded from a lot of their fuckups by their sports exclusives, and Activision is bolstered by Call of Duty and Blizzard. Both companies are run by morons who don’t understand games, have never developed games, and have no particular interest in the hobby or in gaming technology.
CDPR is an interesting creature. I love GoG. I love their games. They’re not incompetent the way that EA is incompetent. They clearly understand games and what consumers want. And they seem to have their heart in the right place. But they have TERRIBLE project management problems. I don’t know if it’s poor planning, scope creep, or lack of organizational skills, but the way their projects seem to crunch their way into repeated delays would be comical if it wasn’t so heartbreaking.
I was wondering why Sega was on this list because I was only aware of their retro stuff (plus Streets of Rage 4, but as far as I know the only thing Sega did was to allow them to use the IP). I didn’t even know/remember that they were behind Yakuza and Bayonetta!
Regarding Ubisoft, playing it ultra-safe with your high-budget cash cow and experimenting with mid-budget titles seems like a good strategy. In fact, didn’t you suggest something like that in your “How to rule This Dumb Industry” post?
This is just my impression, but it might help to consider Ubisoft like a lenient restaurant franchise: the “flavour” of the menu is controlled at the top and will always contain certain brand items, but the way each restaurant is run is up to its local owner. The restaurants can still serve local specialties and their cooking methods, hours, and staffing are up to them, but they need to satisfy the head office’s detailed expectations for each menu item before they can serve them, which is why some things are the same no matter which restaurant you eat at.
This is why many big titles can have so much in common despite being from different studios (they all need a go-ahead from the top, which has specific expectations but might decide to take a risk and okay a different offering from time to time), yet management styles and how each game is made can differ greatly from place to place. Doesn’t really explain the risk-nothing/risk-a-lot decisions, but it does explain how some studios can be nice and ordinary places to work while others are simultaneously blowing up with harassment scandals.
Just a small thing: Marvel’s Avengers was Square Enix, they had both Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal waste their time on it.
I figured Shamus is referring to the ‘only we can offer you Spider-Man!’ situation. Given how long Sony held out against cross-play on its platforms, I can’t feign surprise.
Possible reasons for the why.
1. A publisher being competent can only outcompete incompetent ones if the developers are informed and concerned enough to seek out competent publishers. But most of them primarily want financial security, and they don’t have it without a publisher, so beggars can’t be choosers means the first available publisher outcompetes high quality.
2. Publishing is all about providing money for development and advertising, which means you need a lot of money to enter the game. That means you have to already have other income sources, which means the people able to try are likely to already have fixed ideas from other industries about how to make money.
3. Square-cube law. A competent publisher is likely competent because they know their own limits, which means at some point they’ll only hire new people to replace losses and won’t be a major option for new developers anymore. Or they’ll keep hiring until they can’t keep up with themselves and become incompetent.
Companies do buy failing companies, though, usually because they think that they can turn it around by changing the management, and since it’s failing they can get the company’s assets for cheap.
Kind of like how Marvel and DC were bought by DIsney and WB- the companies were failing horribly, but Disney made at outrageous amount of money by acquiring Marvel’s IPs and turning them into the MCU.
I meant to say only buy failing companies, because that was the implication in John’s reply above me.
Well, as long as we’re making corrections and retractions, let me state for the record that I never intended to imply any such thing. Infocom, however, was very much a failing company. Activision didn’t kill it. Activision put it on life support and kept it alive for I believe about four years past the point where it would otherwise have died a natural death.
Tiddy Bar. I see what you did there.
Marvel’s Avengers….I am such a Marvel fanboy I did buy the game. And the reviewers are correct, the SINGLE player campaign was probably the best part of it.
The multiplayer grind? Not for me. I stopped playing almost immediately after I “beat the game”.
Man, if they made a polished, more complete single player game…wow, that would have been great.
Great article. For what it’s worth, I already chose 2. It doesn’t help that I’ve already been pessimistic about AAA for long enough that my computer is in no way near good enough to play Cyberpunk.
If it helps to lower expectations for Cyberpunk 2077, according to some reviewers, the main quest overall is kind of weak and feels disconnected from the side quests (but apparently not vice versa). The story of this game was allegedly cobbled together just a year ago due to the hellish and chaotic production and it shows according to them. It also seems to suffer from the same problem Bethesda games have in that the plot is simultaneously urgent while still feeling inconsequential as to not interrupt when you’re just exploring the world or doing sidequests.
Also bugs but that’s par for the course for these types of games.
To be honest, I never understood the sky-high expectations for Cyberpunk 2077. I mean, I was always going to play it and I know I’ll enjoy it, but I also enjoy eurojank RPGs made by the likes of Piranha Bytes and Spiders. And, if we’re being honest, that’s what CDPR were always making – deep, well-crafted games that were at the same time very, very ‘cRPG’, if you get what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Witcher trilogy to bits, but I never expected Cyberpunk 2077 to be anything more than a mix between The Witcher 3 and Fallout New Vegas – that is to say, something utterly amazing for a player like me, but not remotely a game-changer for the industry.
Oh good, let me join you people in the “not that hyped” corner, I kind of wanted to share but was worried about yucking everybody’s yum. This is literally what I expect from this, a solid game but not something that will bring world peace. Not to mention that myself personally I’ve actually felt a little burnt out on CP2077 because of all the hype and the fanatical following developing around the game before it’s even released.
Like, at this point it’s this self-perpetuating myth of the industrychanging unstoppable juggernaut of a game with other games moving their release dates from the pre-holiday period into the reputedly much less attractive Q1 of the next year and people commenting with things like “well Everspace 2 would have been really cool if it released in 2020 but they moved it to 2021 and gaming will be very different after Cyberpunk”. I mean, Witcher 3 was… good? But it’s not like I’ve found religion because of it.
The hype probably has something to do with the mystique generated by the six year period where there was barely any information on the game combined with The Witcher 3 being a really great game.
I’m also in the “I’m not that hyped.” I mean, I’m hyped. If I don’t get it for Christmas, it will be my first post-Christmas purchase. But I’m not sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for it. CDPR made good games in the Witcher, and I like Keanu Reaves -so I’m here for this.
But the last game I got on hype was Outer Worlds and I hated that game with a passion and was glad I got it 40% off.
It’s just a game. I hope it’s a good game. I expect it to not suck, and provide hours of fun.
If it does that, I’m happy.
I certainly hope the entire games industry doesn’t hang on this game, because if it does, we’re already screwed.
Oh, I love that trope.
“Hero! The land is in dire straights! One third is under constant assault by dragons. Another third is under unrelenting assault by an overwhelming alien force. The remaining third is under constant darkness as a Dark Old One twists the very fabric of reality and people’s souls, turning them into monstrous abominations. At every border, reality itself twists as the factions fight for dominance. Everywhere, hope and love are dead as people struggle just to survive, turning on friends and family alike for scraps of food; somehow, rather than unity people are turning on each other as every conflict ever rises again more urgently than ever. Even the Hatfields and McCoys are feuding with each other again! Surely humanity can’t survive more than another couple of weeks without help. Only you can help! Will you?”
“Yeah, sure, but, you know, first, I’m gonna raise ten or twenty generations of crops so I can buff my farming skill far enough ingredients to raise my brewing skills up enough to get the ultimate potion before the first quest, then I’ve got 100 lost dogs to find to open up the best romance option, 50 lawns to mow, and then there’s the quest where I have to stand in the same place for 12 hours for a certain cloud to get close enough to jump on… I can get to you in… let’s see… 23 years? 23 years sound good?”
“Yeah, that’s cool. Keep in touch!”
That’s every open world game, though. The Witcher 3 didn’t force you to engage with the main quest if you wanted to screw around and find all of the armor or whatever. Honestly, I’ve never been particularly hyped for this game. I expect it to be a lot like The Witcher 3, well written, layered quests that will be great when you like the story and feel monotonous when you aren’t into it. The world will look rich, but most of it will be set dressing. Choices will have little effect on anything important, and will instead just add little nuances to individual character or story beats. I’ll play it once the bugs are patched and the price comes down, but it’s not that exciting to me. Hopefully, the combat’s more interesting than The Witcher 3.
The distracted-hero thing worked better for me in the Witcher games than in, say, Arkham City. About 90% of the Witcher books consists of Geralt getting sidetracked from his main quest by annoyances he doesn’t have time for.
I think the difference is that The Witcher 3 doesn’t start off very urgent, the stakes are still low and you’re just tracking leads to Ciri. All that “saving the multiverse” stuff happens much later into the story. Same with other good RPGs like VTMB and New Vegas, you only become a really important player whose vital to the fate of the setting in the story once you’ve progressed deep enough into it.
I would argue that to Geralt, finding Ciri is an urgent matter. It’s better written, but it’s not terribly different from the Fallout 4 setup.
This is basically my list of gripes with many recent titles, single- and multi-player, you only forgot one point:
Battle passes.
I consider most of them an outright scam, the rest are “only” a total rip-off. You want me to pay for a ticket that lets me participate in a grind of many weeks where I am railroaded into playstyles and activities, progress is time-gated, there is also a deadline, and you are so generous to give me the option to purchase progress directly, for rewards that cannot be attained if I miss that window of time partially or entirely for any reason. Every single detail of that proposition is insulting.
“Every single detail of that proposition is insulting.”
Oh, yes, completely by design, because the entire purpose is to hack the people’s brains who do jump through those hoops to make them feel superior to those who don’t, which means that as someone unwilling to do so, you are being placed in the inferior position in the social hierarchy. Our brains are programmed to find that very un-fun, and, once you consciously realize what’s going on… why would you sign up for that on purpose?
It’s not a terribly frequently discussed aspect of the whole lootbox thing, which mostly focuses on the (correct) Skinner box aspects, but the hacking of the social aspects of the human brain to convert your desire to be high on some hierarchy into cash for a corporation should probably be discussed more often. I’m not sure it’s not the more insidious aspect; I’m teaching my kids how to deal with Skinner boxes as it’s a part of life anyhow, but I think the best way to deal with companies pulling that sort of social hack is just to stay as far away as possible.
We played a bit of Fortnite, because the game itself isn’t half-bad, but I ended up shadow-banning it (i.e., didn’t tell them I banned it, just sort of moved them away from it and deleted it once their attention was off of it for a couple of days) for this reason. I didn’t want them in a community that puts them in the social hierarchy based on how much money you give Epic for the latest skins.
(I’d guess this is where “toxic” elements gamer culture really comes from too; people acting like total top-of-the-heap bullies because the game is telling their brains they’re the top of the hierarchy now, often for people very unused to being there, and they act in very annoying ways as a result, and the rest of us, well, rather disagree with their assessment of being way above us on the hierarchy.)
Honestly, if people want to claw over other players to be the top dog of the videogame pile, I’m in favor of them having to lose real-world value to do it. Who’s the real winner here, and such.
Battle passes are generally a fair value when it comes to price per cosmetic. It also encourages you to PLAY the game to get items, rather than just burning cash. Or if you do want to play the game and MUST have a cosmetic NOW, you’ll shell out the extra dollars for the battle pass level. Letting whales whale is a good thing for F2P games.
The concept of a Battle Pass is the only thing I liked from Fortnite. On a budget, they’re very fair ordeals. And if the pass is terrible, you just don’t buy it. Battle passes are much more healthy for F2P games-as-a-service, because they define a set period where developers can expect a certain amount of money.
Meanwhile games like WoW, that have a set cost per month are harder for newer players to get into, AND long term are obviously overpriced. $180/year for a sub (paid monthly)? That’s crazy.
I’ve got a friend who gets Fortnite battle passes for the extra season challenges rather than the cosmetics. I thought that was quite an interesting motivation
Ive always liked assassins creed even though i know it has a lot of problems. The flow of the game where you slowly tick off boxes on a map feels a bit like collect-a-tons. It gives me a similar satisfaction of cleaning up a place. However with syndicate it already started to feel bad because of a level system, meaning that i couldnt do the final boxing match as attacking even once into a blocking level 9 enemy as level 4 would cause them to counterattack and deal critical damage (yes, the enemies got better fighting AI if you were underleveled and would always counter you the moment you attacked into their block, while if you were high level yourself they would rarely do so). At least stealth still worked as a hidden blade still was a oneshot. I skipped origins, but then got to odessey. In Odyssey the equivalent of a hidden blade attack only dealt a lot of damage. So if you were underleveled it would maybe do 50% of someone’s HP and then you would have to kill him with chip damage, That and the amount of points of interest have ballooned over the years. Witcher 3 was so big i just gave up after a while and rushed through skellige to see the ending.
Im now playing a sidescrolling action indie game (primal light), and its good to be back. Just platforming, attacking monsters, and defeating a boss at the end. Only two problems i have is that diverging paths arent properly signposted, and that you cant see the boss’s healthbar.
I have mixed feelings about the whole collect-a-thon model. In theory, I hate it. It sounds awful, doesn’t it? In practice, however, sometimes I like it. It depends on what you have to do in order to get the collectibles. In Shadow of Mordor, the collectables themselves were completely pointless, but I enjoyed skulking my way through orcish strongholds, sneaking and shanking my way to some obscure corner in order to find a whatever, and then sneaking and shanking my way back out again. The sneaking and shanking were by far my favorite part of that game and any excuse to indulge in that behavior (and to avoid doing the frequently awful story missions) was very welcome. In Arkham Origins I hated it. In order to get all of the Riddler trophies (or whatever they were) the game expected to me to solve tedious puzzles using awkwardly controlled gadgets that I had previously never seen any reason to bother with. It was an awful chore without a worthwhile reward and I gave up on it very quickly.
I’m generally a fan of the collect-em-all games (I just finished Shadow of War and got everything), but when I had to do one of the Arkhams (I think it was Arkham Knight), there was a glitch that made it so one of the Riddler ones was literally impossible to get, and while they fixed it later, you had to start a new game for the fix to work. Super frustrating.
I think collect-a-thons work best when they’re giving you an excuse to travel the map/fight enemies/solve puzzles if those things have solid mechanics behind them and are fun to do in and of themselves, and if the things you’re collecting have actual gameplay value. Getting health containers in Metorid Prime, for example. I could also spend all day running around a map in Destiny collecting resources because the combat is fun enough to support it.
What I have zero tolerance for is having to scour every inch of a gigantic map full of clutter to spot the one object on the ground that I’m looking for, and if I collect 100 of them I get, like, an extra cutscene or something. Arkham Asylum was perfect for me, but by Arkham Knight I was losing patience for it.
In general, I’ve found that the increased graphical fidelity has made searching maps less fun unless they’re designed well. It used to be that you had few enough details on the screen that it was easy to spot something important. Now it can really be hard to separate the gameplay items from the background.
I have my own share of “old man yells at cloud”-style complaints about the industry, but are we truly lacking for good single-player experiences in the year 2020? Because my backlog is gigantic, and it’s mostly single-player stuff. It includes huge RPGs like Wasteland 3 and Pathfinder and Greedfall, adventure games like Beautiful Desolation and Hitman 2 (yes, Hitman is a goddamn adventure game, fight me). Sure, a decent chunk of it is “indie” or AA or whatever, but does it really matter?
The only truly missing genre today is the big-budget immersive sim, and is it really the industry’s fault that no one bought Prey or Mankind Divided or Dishonored 2? Sadly, I’m not so sure. After all, the publishers did bankroll those games, only to see that the demand just doesn’t match the amount of resources, both human and financial, that these games require. Which breaks my heart, sure, but I’m too busy playing Hades, Spiritfarer and Desperados III to actually all that be sad about it.
Now I’m just imagining the Indiana Jones theme playing as Agent 47 rushes to kill his target.
Eh, if Agent 47 is rushing to do anything at any point in the game, I’d argue you’re playing the game wrong. Brisk walking at best, especially near the target. As far as I’m concerned, the last two games especially are just point-and-click games in heavy disguise.
Unless you are Kotti, that is
Depends, I view Hitman as a sandbox game so in some playthroughs, I take it seriously but at other times when I’m feeling bored or creative, I mess around in the level and with the weapons. I do run constantly when the map is especially big and all the targets are spread out across.
Imagine Fester Shinetop as a secret identity of #47. When he tries to drown Guybrush, it’s just to make his death look like an accident.
Well Hitman 2 (I’m assuming you’re referring to the game released in 2018 here) doesn’t count for the purposes of the point this article was making, since it will be effectively bricked when they turn off the servers for it. Also, the rather large amount of live service guff, and time gated content this new Hitman series has sunk deep into, doesn’t help its case either. And, no, I’m not referring to the episodic release of 2016 when I say that.
And, reading further into your post, neither does Mankind Divided, really. Like, why is the game with the notorious ‘Augment your Pre-order’ campaign, with tacked on timesaver microtransactions, listed amongst the ‘pure’ single player games?
I don’t see how pre-orders affect whether or not a game is ‘pure’ single-player in any way, and the whole thing with the microtransactions in MD was blown way out of proportions. Actually, ‘tacked on’ is completely right – the game systems were in no way skewed to push you towards paying for Praxis points or any other resources. The game practically showered you with stuff. But it was there as an option for the impatient. In no way did that option affect the experience for anyone else.
As for Hitman, sure, the threat of dead servers is kinda hanging over that one, although, to be fair, it will remain extremely playable even in the worse-case scenario, and still be one of the better single-player games around.
But, ultimately, I think that what’s being discussed here doesn’t boil down to the strictly technical question of whether a game uses a server or features optional microtransactions, but rather whether it’s built with connectivity and ‘live service’ in mind or not. And in that regard the rebooted Hitman 2, for all its online features, is more original Hitman 2 than it is, say, Destiny.
IIRC, wasn’t Dishonored from the age of trying to turn everything into/market it as a shooter (same with the new Deus Ex’s for that matter)? When I mostly replayed Prey/played Moocrash recently, I watched the trailer vids on the steam page, and they make it look like it’s supposed to be Doom. Just, not representative of what the game incentivizes at all, not of the “immersive sim” game it is. And its own name and liscencing bs only seems to make things more negative (I’ve heard the original game was bad and leaned on bad Native American stereotypes, and that there actually was a sequel to the original Prey which was shaping up okay before being taken over and replaced with the one we actually got). Meanwhile the new Deus Ex were all zomg cover shooter, and Mankind Divided was falling on its face with “aug lives matter,”, and I think a lot of people actually rather disliked Dishonored’s forced all in light/dark “moral” choice (which was also in a time of everything having a Moral Choice)?
So if they industry marketed them completely wrong, and shoved in mechanics people didn’t want, and wouldn’t even produce what is now called “Prey” without some sort of studio/liscencing bullshit, yeah that’d be “their” fault.
Hell, I don’t even necessarily disagree with the conceit that “immersive sim” games just aren’t a big enough market compared to the lol$ of generic shooters and MMOs, but, as Shamus has noted before, Prey is the only one to come out in years that actually did the thing with no bullshit. If Shamus is representative of that market (and even played the Deus Ex and Dishonoured I couldn’t be bothered to), then regardless of how big it is, that market still isn’t being served or even marketed to correctly.
I’m curious, what’s the appeal of playing single-player games at the time of release? Why not wait a year, by which time they’ll cost less (on sale), be less risky (reviews), have more content (DLC, free and otherwise), and generally be better (bug fixes, feedback, etc)?
Is it FOMO? Is it spoilers? Site & socials content? By definition, its only a personal experience that is being sought, so unless you’re going to drop dead before then (and I hope not), why rush? What might cause the solo experience to be meaningfully worse in a year or two’s time?
My feelings exactly.
I suppose it helps that my soul has died over the last few decades, and I find no games actually super duper exciting me anymore. The last one to do that was Factorio, when Shamus talked about it on here some 4 years ago. And that game I did buy almost immediately (I played the demo for a few days, then had to buy it).
So maybe you and me are just too jaded to be excited enough for things to be reckless with our money and time, most of the time.
That’s actually a great question. I’m usually a patient gamer, but I still pre-ordered and pre-loaded Cyberpunk 2077 and will be playing it on day 1, work permitting. Like a total sucker. More often than not, I think, it’s just pure lack of patience, at least for me. For people who are active in online gaming communities (or offline ones, if one can imagine that), it’s FOMO, to be sure. Everyone wants to be part of the conversation. Which isn’t as silly as you might think – after all, culture and entertainment is there as a touchstone, something to discuss and to connect over. “Hey, have you seen that movie?” is probably the ultimate icebreaker.
Not enough people buying the games at release and the publishers deciding to make a liiiive service next time?
As much as I get that point and find it to be true to an extent, I need to point out that it’s weird to expect people to keep buying a version of the game that’s simultaneously the most expensive and also objectively the worst. Even games that are in a decent state at the time of release are usually vastly improved in the following months. Either release games in a more finished and tested condition, or adjust your business model to account for the few early adopters and the steady trickle of patient gamers that would be buying the patched and steadily discounted versions in the following months.
I don’t like this. I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but even if you are I don’t like the implication that I, as an individual consumer, have an obligation to buy specific games or even specific kinds of games at release or at any other time. The choices of developers and publishers are not my doing and not my responsibility. I’m not going to buy a video game that I don’t want at a price I’d rather not pay on the off chance that somebody might make another one like it some time in the future.
I was just answering Adam’s question; publishers getting the impression that “those games don’t sell” is the entirety of “bad things that might happen if I don’t buy games at full price”. We already know they focus on sales at launch in particular.
Let’s face it though; the Arts Council isn’t going to fund the next Deus Ex, is it?
I don’t think that’s what he was saying at all. You’re not obligated to support a developer whose work you don’t like, but the stuff you do like isn’t going to get made if people don’t spend money on it. That’s just plain economics. We wouldn’t have this blog if people didn’t give to Shamus’ Patreon.
It’s just like every other complain about “The gaming industry isn’t giving me X or putting enough Y in their games”- it’s up to the people who want those things to pay enough money to make them worth creating. Who else do you expect to bankroll single-player games if you’re not buying them?
Everyone else. It’s their millions of dollars that fund future games. My $60 is of no consequence and makes no difference to anyone but me.
So what happens when “everyone else” decides that “everyone else” should be funding the game?
Then I presume that the game–whatever game it is that we’re talking about, which, frankly, is not very clear to me at this point–doesn’t get made. That’s fine. I’m not demanding that other people put their money where my mouth is. (Which is what you appear to be doing, just so you know.) Other people’s game purchases aren’t my responsibility and they aren’t any of my business either. Other people will fund the game, so to speak, or they won’t. It’s not up to me. If they don’t, then I might be a little bit sad that some hypothetical game didn’t get made, but I’ll get over it. There are always other games and even other hobbies if it comes to that.
I’m very much with you that no-one should ever feel an obligation to purchase something ‘to support the industry’, and that the only decision should be ‘do I want to buy this game for myself?’
But if you rephrase what they’re saying a bit, it boils down to if not enough people want to play a game at the price point that’s profitable, then it’s not going to get made. So if a £60 single-player launch game doesn’t satisfy you and enough other people with similar mindsets and that’s the price it needs to be profitable, then it won’t get made.
That’s not a reason to buy the game for £60 though. It’s just an economic reality of the world. I’m sure I’d go parachuting every weekend if it cost £10, but it doesn’t so I don’t go parachuting.
I like this answer (as an answer to my original question, I definitely do not like the implications of it in the real world!). It is, however, a more meta answer than I intended! (and yes, I did read “liiiive service” with Jim Sterling’s voice in my head for the full effect)
Akin to Pateron / Kickstarter / et al, a day-zero purchase of a solo game could be indeed considered as “voting with your wallet” for what should be made.
It’s also interesting that it reflects upon sequels (literal or spiritual) of a game. Since they would take time to make, a new IP with a surge of popularity (compared to a “cult classic” or a “flash in the pan”) is going to be more inviting to fund a sequel to. In The Old Days, such a popularity surge would mean more DLC or more Expansions (and them being good value for money). In The Rotten Now however, such things are planned long in advance and a much worse value proposition.
I do wonder if this is the best way to the goal however – maybe a Kickstarter to take out a full page advert proclaiming “We want more of X” would be a clearer signal!
On top of these, if I’m excited about a game it’s because it’s offering something I don’t think my other games are (even if it’s just “I haven’t played this one yet”), which means if I hold off for a year that gap can’t be filled.
Plus playing PS4 games offline means they never get patches or DLC, so the only difference is price.
Not that I buy them new, but I’ve bought a few games immediately after finding out about them: Torchlight 2 and Phantom Brave were both scratching very specific itches, and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass was just really engrossing. (Yes I’m plugging games I like again.)
For me it is definitely spoilers. Avoiding spoilers for Cyberpunk for the next 6 months is going to be hard, and I would like to experience the story with a fresh mind.
Yes, to all of those, plus impatience. But honestly the biggest thing is the presence of a binary release date always makes me enjoy a game far more. The process of waiting for release, getting excited and playing it right away heightens the whole experience.
I’ll mention you can create a similar feeling by ordering an older game through the mail. Yakuza: Like A Dragon will be here any day now!
Aside from spoilers (which are easy enough to avoid if you don’t social media/reddit/etc), and impatience (as an anime fan I should be well inoculated to long/never sequel waits), there’s just the desire to be part of the “times”. If you do have any friends, coworkers, or even just youtubes or streamers playing the new thing, even if they’re not spoiling or doing content that you have to skip, it’s still nice to know that you’re playing the same game as everyone else. The shared experience. IRL, stuff happens and it happens at the same time relative to everyone. Sure, you can wait a year to pick up a game after the bugfixes are in and the price has dropped, but then, by definition, you did not have the same experience, even for a 100% single-player game. The world will move on, any current events or moods that you/people had wen they were playing it will be gone. Any discussion you do have will be of a past game for them, which they finished months or years ago, their opinions formed, details forgotten, etc.
Always living with 6 months or more of a disconnect from what your “peers” are interested in is doable, but how much of an incentive is required to make it palatable depends on the person. And even if you have your own group of friends on the same timer, outside media is always slave to current events.
In some cases spoilers, my Google feed tends to send me stuff I am interested in and it is often games I would buy. I do try to wait though in most cases. Heck, I won’t be getting Cyberpunk 2077 until I upgrade my computer, which I don’t plan on doing for at least 3-4 months.
Well, back in my day, games used to be released in an actual, completed state. I used to buy a lot of games at launch because I had been following their development, talked about them on forums, and was excited to play them. That’s pretty rare nowadays, since the AAA space has gone in a direction I don’t much like. I also don’t follow gaming websites or forums anymore.
Cyberpunk 2077 is coming out at a pretty good time for me- one day before my birthday, and I’ll have a 3-day weekend and time off during the Christmas holidays to play it. I’m playing on buying it Thursday and binging on it Friday. I’d have bought Baldur’s Gate 3 at launch if it hadn’t launched as Early Access.
Time for the obligatory XKCD. Which, by the way, is quite pertinent for me as I only played Portal 2 last year (Portal 1 I played closer to release, though).
Things Are Great but I’m Angry for Some Reason
I’m sure I could come up with a few reasons why someone would be unhappy in 2020.
There are still a lot of good single player games coming out these days, but they seem to be mainly console exclusives so if you only/mainly play on PC you might have missed them. I ended up buying a PS4 a couple of years ago just because they had so many good-looking exclusives. Look at some of the best ones from the last few years:
PS4 had games like God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Persona 5, etc.
Nintendo Switch has games like Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Paper Mario: Origami King, Octopath Traveler, etc.
Most big multiplatform games are either multiplayer FPS’s or live service action games, which is a hard pass for me. I honestly can’t remember the last time I bought a game that wasn’t either indie or a console exclusive. Maybe The Witcher 3?
I’d have really loved if Nintendo ported their single-player Marios, and the asynchronous multiplayer Marios (i.e. Mario Maker 1 & 2) to computers. The games are less demanding of hardware than many other computer games, and controllers are plentiful. Dang walled gardens. :(
Yeah, exclusives are a bit of a pain. I’d call out you-know-who, but I think the comment section for this post has had enough drama.
One connection to draw here is that the publishers who make really good single player games have very reliable income sources – usually outside of just ‘selling games’. The console publishers in particular make good games to sell consoles rather than to sell games.
My guess is to make good games you need a money source that will let you delay something as long as it takes, and something that can keep your staff employed even after a misfire. And when you have that you can make money from selling quality. It’s the variance that gets you, not the expected value
If CD Projekt didn’t have millions of extra cash sitting in a money pile, then they have to release Cyberpunk 16th April 2020 (their original date) because otherwise staff don’t get paid. The game has a good heart but it’s so buggy that it gets panned by a lot of people and doesn’t sell as well as they hoped. Then that means they have less money to produce the next game, so they have to fire some staff which affects the quality of the next game…
Considering the “Open all deer season” sign, I would be disappointed if the exotic dancers were not actual deer themselves.
Indie and retro games is certainly not the worst outcome. There’s some good stories and characters in those (reminder that Weird And Unfortunate Things Are Happening is free.) The big thing they’re missing is branching dialogue conversation options, which I think is mostly relegated to visual novels, if there.
I heard it’s a great place for stag parties.
Be careful to never confuse a “buck’s night” for a “bucks night”.
Holy hell, I forgot about Disco Elysium, the most branching dialogue conversation game you can find.
So yeah, no downside to Indie side.
I guess nobody should tell Shamus about Cyberpunk 2077 Online….
I think this is more or less the same choice being offered by all my media these days, from films to tabletop games.
I completely agree. I’ve been taking the new hobby route when it comes to gaming (nobody is going to make a AAA game I want to play; requirement #1 is absolutely no quick time events or anything else requiring me to be able to actually remember in under half a second which button is the triangle and which is the square). For pretty much all other media, it’s old stuff (I can’t remember the last time I read a book or watched a movie from this century, other than kid movies. Hell, I barely read books from the *20th* century) or indies for me.
Like Shamus, I mostly just dislike the “games as service” model. I prefer single-player experiences with no intrusive ads or pop-ups and strong limits on microtransactions. Unlike Shamus, I’m much more of a doomer who thinks these trends are mostly inevitable and irreversible.
If we had more mid-size devs and publishers, the problems with AAA chasing the largest market / lowest common denominator wouldn’t be such a big deal. It seems like there’s a gap there, to me anyways. :)
There’s a gap, for sure, but it’s not an easy one to fill. My suspicion is that it’s just too difficult and uneconomical compared to the alternatives. People like us want things like “quality writing,” which is hard to do and uncertain in way that can’t be solved by just throwing money at the problem. You need genuine creatives and talent and vision, who can be (relatively) expensive and, more importantly, fickle and hard to replicate. How do you attract these people away from AAA paydays?
Honestly, I think the latter part wouldn’t be difficult. The AAA games industry in general is saturated with new workers, which means developer-level talent is often undervalued and turnover is high. It’s actually a great environment to pick up some skilled folks for your new mid-sized studio!
Trouble is, you also need to pay them fairly, convince them you won’t fall apart to budgetary or management concerns or crunch them to death, and will actually ship a game, profit, and stabilize at the end of the day. Speaking personally, what keeps me from joining smaller local studios is that my day job is stable, has minimal crunch, and raises my profile – while a small studio could fail catastrophically at any of those points, at any time.
A not-inconsequential portion of the AAA turnover do found their own smaller studios, but sadly we’ve yet to see many success stories or the kinds of experimental games that were so common in the late 90’s/early 00’s. Supergiant Games comes to mind as a breakout success from AAA origins, but outside of that I can only think of mid-sized Japanese studios with workhorse franchises that keep on trucking for a long time in this space (Sandlot with EDF, Nippon Ichi with Disgaea, FromSoft before Dark Souls got so big, arguably Intelligent Systems with Fire Emblem).
What kinds of tabletop games are you talking about? I don’t know about Warhammer or P&P RPGs, but with board games, it’s the indies especially that go overboard with FOMO Kickstarter exclusives and stretch goal feature creep. (Though there also are some decidedly-not-indie companies that use Kickstarter as a pre-order platform, doing the same thing.)
Pen and paper games. I should have been more specific since I don’t really follow the board game or war game communities.
The big names in pen and paper RPGs seem to be most interested in selling geek merchandise and attracting a larger mainstream audience through pop culture tie-ins. The games themselves seem to be increasingly mediocre rehashes of old stuff or desperate grasping for something fresh with no real vision. Smaller publishers tend be either barely scraping by (like my beloved GURPS) or irretrievably up their own ass (like some in the OSR). The best advice I’ve seen is to find a good group of people who check their bullshit at the door and have a good time, pick any game you like, and then ignore what’s going on in the larger RPG industry.
I want to believe that Cyberpunk 2077 will make publishers sit up and take notice that single-player games are still viable, but I think if that were to happen, it would have happened with the Witcher 3.
Witcher 3 not only sold well on multiple platforms, it sold well on multiple forms of media. The original novels and the Netflix series did well enough, and provided additional sales for the games, which provided more attention for the books and series.
It was a 300-pound gorilla of a single player game that got critical and customer acclaim without resorting to in game loot-boxes, forced multiplayer mechanics, in-game advertisements, or even DRM.
Game executives marveled at its success before they went right back to developing games with in game loot-boxes, forced multiplayer mechanics, in-game advertisements, and DRM.
I’ll likely enjoy Cyberpunk, but I’m skeptical of its ability to change the market.
I think it won’t change anything. There is a market for massive, open world games that are single player only. It is, however, a market that’s extremely expensive to make games for and thus very risky to enter. Hence why there are only really three companies in it: Bethesda, Rockstar and CDPR (Volition might still be in it, depending on if the rumors of Saint’s Row 4 are true). In total there are about 5-6 game series that are in the market but they are all also held in pretty high esteem.
It is the sad truth of market forces that EA, Ubisoft or other publishers will not take the insane risk of trying to break into that market when they can make similar games, slap Games as a Service stuff on it and then make money hand over fist on MX and endless DLC. For the players in the market, it is certainly lucrative however and I can’t see Bethesda, Rockstar or CDPR leave it anytime soon. At most Bethesda is trying to break into the MMO and Semi-MMO scenes with ESO and Fo76, but that’s obviously an attempt to avoid putting all their eggs in one fragile basket.
I probably play Devil’s Advocate too much, but if I wanted to risk my money on a project, I’d look at the mediocre games that make money rather than the great ones.
The lesson of The Witcher 3 is ‘really great games sell well’. The lesson of ‘Watchdogs’ is mediocre open-world collectathons sell well.
One of those sounds easier than the other.
The real trick would be to find mediocre games that sell well but don’t currently have a lot of competition.
And the idea isn’t to make mediocre games. It’s to make the best game possible. But it’s nice to know that even if you fail you’ll still get your money back.
Actually I’ll disagree with that, I’d wager real money that the explicit goal of ppl at the top of EA and Ubisoft and stuff IS to make explicitly mediocre games – cos then you can get the customer to happily abandon them for your new hotness later on. Also, games that are tantalisingly almost good, almost fun, almost enjoyable – well, I’m not an expert but those sound like the best games for getting ppl to spend small amounts of money regularly looking to get over that peak into actually good, actually fun, actually enjoyable.
Mayhaps, this is certainly how mobile games work. AAA gaming is so expensive however that you don’t really want to risk your money on “mediocre, will reach sales expectations” but need to go for “genre defining, will break all kinds of sales records”. Unless you’re Activision and can go for a safe Call of Duty every year (which still has absolutely insane production values, mind), any player in the AAA space needs to aim for the rafters with every swing. Because if you don’t, if your game gets bad word of mouth you will probably lose money.
The AAA space is largely defined by game series and great games earlier in the series is a great way to guarantee sales for upcoming titles. Games like Battlefield and Assassin’s Creed might catch a lot of flak for being generic AAA-experiences, but they sell well and they do so because people have come to trust them as series that deliver consistent quality. When AC: Unity/Syndicate were written off as kind of poor and rote, Ubi was quick to re-tool and re-imagine the AC brand as to retain sales. Battlefield V was met with such bad reception that it was obviously canned way before its intended Game as Service cycle was up and EA are now making sure that the next Battlefield will come out strong as to retain brand value.
Being mediocre is fine for the A or AA scene and mobile gaming, where games are expected to be play-and-forget, but for the AAA scene you need to be the game that “everyone” talks about and which is so imposing that other developers reschedule releases to avoid clashing with you. Cyberpunk has that hype down, tomorrow we’ll know if the bugs drag it down and mark CDPR as the next Obsidian or if they’ll cement their reputation as the new big dog in the open world genre.
I think I didn’t make myself clear enough. I’m not talking about aiming to make mediocre games. What I mean is, when looking for a lesson to copy from the industry, I’d look for mediocre games that sold well – that tells me there’s a good route to profitability there.
The problem with looking at games like The Witcher 3, or The Last of Us selling well and thinking ‘I should copy that’ is it’s really hard to make games that good. They’re not good lessons for other publishers because the chances are you’re not going to make The Witcher 3 on your first attempt – CD Projekt didn’t. It would be like looking at the Mona Lisa and saying ‘oh so all we need to do is make portraits’.
The real indicator would be say, if Greedfall sold really well. Because if Greedfall sold well, you can beat that.
To be honest, I’ll probably never play Cyberpunk 2077. The only CDPR game I’ve ever played was the enhanced version of the first Witcher, and I didn’t finish it (not really the game’s fault, mind you — I got distracted by something else).
However, I hope the game succeeds, simply because I want GOG to continue to exist. Even if I never get around to buying and installing Betrayal at Krondor, or if I never put The Longest Journey back on my computer, I still smile when I think about the fact that I can.
It’s interesting that you assume that GoG’s existence is dependent upon CD Projekt RED’s success. I’ve assumed it was the other way around.
You may be right; I have no insight into the financials. I just didn’t figure a minority share of the PC gaming market would be enough to keep the doors open.
Of course, it could be that the failure of one dooms the other, no matter what.
CD Projekt RED publish their annual returns so it’s fairly easy to check it out. The answer is that GOG often struggles to break even and it almost certainly only exists (at least in it’s current form) because of CD Projekt Red’s success with games (including that GOG provides such a good platform for selling those games).
GOG has slowly, if not yet taken over as my preferred online store at least nudged it’s way into contention as a genuine place to shop rather than just a place to indulge nostalgia. Their launcher linking to other stores is a big factor in that.
Shamus, VR games are young (and niche) enough to not yet get infected with “live service”, “surprise mechanics”, and all that crap (but the harbingers are here – https://uploadvr.com/population-one-microtransactions/ ).
So give VR games a chance – there is ton of fully singleplayer-only games, either gameplay focused (majority), or story focused (minority). I have never seen in a VR game a notifications that servers went offline :)
Crytek, Epic Games, Insomniac, inXile, Ready At Dawn, 4A Games, Gunfire Games and other developers made a lot of good VR games
I wish I had the money for vr. My pc is like 5 years old at least, and at this point I’m going ps5 to save money
Whit if I told that a device called Oculus Quest 2 is a fully standalone mobile VR console for $299?
The biggest caveat – it’s owned by Facebook.
I’ve thought about it for a while, and I think Shamus actually has the trend backwards in his parable about adult entertainment and Disney. In reality, something like Disney with broad, mass-market appeal, pushes out niche operations like strip clubs. Look at Las Vegas, for example. It has worked hard to shed that Sin City, “what happens in Vegas” angle in favor of something blander and inoffensive in order to attract families on vacation and corporate seminars. There’s simply much more money to be made by appealing to the latter than the former.
The surge in popularity of gaming and the money pouring into it suggests that the mass market consumers are not as put off by the stuff that bothers Shamus (and me). It’s obviously possible to make a great game without microtransactions and such, but that will be like leaving money on the table. The business folks, and certainly investors, will demand that every source of revenue be captured.
Looking at my recently played list from the past few months on steam, they’re either all old (before 2012), indie/AA or the rare AAA experience that doesn’t thrust a bunch of garbage down your throat (Dark Souls 1/3 and Prey). Honestly, skipping all the interminable Ubisoft sequels is perfectly doable whilst still gaming with variety, especially on PC (not sure how accessible indies are on consoles nowadays). We may be past the PS2 days where hardware was in the goldilocks zone of “powerful enough to do interesting things” and “cheap enough to develop for that publishers can take risks”, but we’re now in the golden era of the indie, where anyone can make an amazing game that’s innovative and does stuff AAA devs wouldn’t even think of.
Regardless of whether or not we lose the fight in the AAA space, the gaming industry is large enough for us to carve out a niche for ourselves. I just view the occaisional AAA studio that isn’t awful, like FROMSOFT, CDPR or Arkane as a little bonus treat. Besides, I think the crazy number of remakes/remasters shows that publishers know that there is some market for old-style games.
And that is why I buy my games on GOG only these days. It’s not in any vain hope to correct the market. It’s because they sell games like I love them: No internet connection, no DRM, no launcher necessary. Just download the installer, install wherever and whenever, and play.
Did I preorder Cyberpunk? Yeah, even though pre-orders are a big NO from me otherwise. I id not preorder for the game. Might be shite, buggy, whatever. Hell, since I refuse to use Galaxy, I can’t even preload it anyway, and my internet connection is so bad that downloading the installer will take 10+ hours. And if GOG decides to push an update to it while I download, I have to restart the process, because the installer file versions don’t match up any longer.
So I bought it in the secure knowledge that I won’t be able to play at launch anyway. Nor do I particularly want to, if I am being honest. The risk of a binge is too high.
…So, why did I pre-order? Because I’m also one of those old Xennials, and the industry is, with just about the only exception being GOG, gone down the collective shitter (please excuse my Klatchian). But buying through GOG lets me truly enjoy my games, let me relish my escapism, and offer me products that are “done transactions”: It’s mine now, and it does what I want. It does not nag me, it does not socially pressure me, it does not FOMO me, it. Is. Just. A. Game. MY game.
So I invested a tiny bit in CD Projekt. …Well, maybe it was a bit of making a statement.
And I like to think that some publishers are slowly catching on. Bethesda recently released thev Dishonored series there as well as Wolfenstein TNO/OB and Prey. Sony (frakking SONY) is selling horizon Zero Dawn on it. I got all four Arkham games for 25 Euros there. Control and metro Exodus? Also there.
>>Xennial
Since we’re talking games anyway, we should definitely use the Generation Oregon Trail label!
Hah, you got me. It had even written “Oregon Trail Generation”, but then it occurred to me that I personally played it for maybe half an hour, and found it disingenuous of me to use it (I’m more of a Doomer myself).
But you are right, and Oregon Trail Generation would have been a better fit.
Thanks for the heads up on exodus and zero dawn! It’s wishlisting time!
I believe these things are mutually exclusive and cannot exist in a single place. In fact, I don’t believe any two of them can co-exist.
The thing that makes games “big budget” is graphics. Systems, writing, even voice acting are tiny little line items next to the armies of animators and artists modern graphics require. Even paying for a team of high-quality writers to make several branching paths like a real TV series writers’ room would never touch that budget, but the realistic budget to make photorealistic graphics for that writers’ room branching path likely does not exist even at Apple.
A focus on the story requires … well, focus. And focus cuts down on content, so you’ll never have a good story focus that is also content rich. The richness of content will always dilute the focus of your story – to the story’s detriment.
And as for big-budget and story focused, the industry has demonstrated time and time again that for some reason, that focus on high production value always comes at the cost of the story. The story always suffers in some way due to the budget – maybe a vital rewrite can’t be done because there’s no time to re-record the voice acted lines, or a technical hurdle cannot be overcome, requiring large sections of the story to be cut that relied on it. This is the combo the game industry has been attempting for at least a decade now and it seems pretty clear they’re not going to be squaring that circle any time soon.
I just can’t be hyped for AAA games. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a 3A game. I kinda hate graphics.
So which of the three would you say Cyberpunk 2077 will be missing? Perhaps big budget, but I would argue that it is in AAA territory, even if it isn’t one of the most expensive AAA games.
(Of course we don’t really know whether content or story will be missing yet, but I’m curious on expectations :-) )
I think story. Fallout New Vegas also has a pretty simple main story. The fun is in all the quests (i.e. content).
Mass Effect has a fun story, but the UNC quests (lots of content) were not as good. (I still enjoyed them though).
I think it’s big budget, and will by definition absolutely fail to be story-focused. I suspect the breadth of content will be shallow and repetitive, thus failing on content-rich as well. I just don’t think AAA games can do story sandboxes. Spending that much time and money on graphics and animations makes it literally impossible.
Sounds like a good time to plug Yakuza 0 again. The story’s got some wonkiness here and there but it’s very engaging the whole way through. And the sidequests have absolutely nothing to do with the main story and go completely insane.
Your analogy pics made me think of GTAV. I believe I had my black guy visit the club so much that he ended up with a stripper girlfriend. He also assassinated enough guys to get a swanky LeBron-level apartment in the hills. Ahh, worldly success outside the basement … Hmm, maybe I should give it a replay.
I’ve heard this entire post twice I’m still trying to figure out how the success of this game is supposed to change things if Red Dead Redemption 2 didn’t.
Big industry shifts don’t happen on a dime, I would say. It may take a few successes to have the execs spot a pattern. Sony also recently affirmed that they see single player games as a stronger pillar of their business than they used to (and they do cater to the single player market with games like GoW, Horizon Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima).
The difference to other “flash” successes like how Pubg brought Battle Royale to the scene, or how WoW pupularized MMOs is that “single player game” has always been a staple of the industry. It’s not new, and that means that there is a certain reluctance by big businesses to cater to it, because it may look like “falling back” instead of “making progress”. It’s not “new markets”-levels of appeal to those corporations, and therefore may require (significantly?) more evidence that it does, indeed, still bring the money in.
Everyone’s getting hyped for this game, and here I am, playing The Outer Worlds in potato mode, knowing full well my poor laptop will never be able to run Cyberpunk 2077 at a satisfying framerate (or it might, but honestly I don’t count on it).
Hope you guys have fun once it’s out.
You can play Outer Worlds on your laptop? :-)
I might be able to get New Vegas to run on the GOGBox, but that’s about the edge of what I’d expect.
If you have good internet, you might consider streaming it – a month of GeforceNow is £5. (Try the free version with some other game first to see if it’s playable for you).
Yeah, about that, I live in a place where the only internet I have is via my phone data, and these days, thanks to the quarantine and me working from home, all my internet goes towards work. I managed to download 3 games since March. Streaming is 100% out of the question.
Let’s not forget that the crunch to make this game was MUCH more severe than you thought it was in the last article you wrote about.
Honestly I’d love for you to write an article saying that even for games that are good, intense crunch isn’t acceptable. But I have a feeling that CDPR will get the pass if the game is all it is hoped to be. Which is sad.
Also the seizure stuff also induces migraines, so, uh, play carefully yeah?
Agree with everything, if nothing else the success of things like outer worlds and outer wilds shows a trend toward single player again.
There’s also the fact that Bethesda, which was an enormous player in that space, has been MIA from it since Fallout 4. If they come out with another Skyrim we might see some people tempted to make some more clones of it.
Shamus drops a shocking “Tiddy Bars Maybe Not As Glamorous As Video Games Led Us To Believe?” exposé!
Well, two things will happen if cyberpunk is massively successful.
Scenario 1) “Nah, fifa and cod make us the same money for less and we can just recycle over and over”
Scenario 2) They will rush a big budget open world rpg, neglect writing and game design, then go “see, we told you people hate single player games”
Honestly i’m just glad a game like cp77 exists at all
I think I’m going to love Cyberpunk 2077. The futurism and options already released offers a level of personal customization that was not possible or even desirable in Wild Hunt. And it’s IP that is almost completely open to CDPR’s interpretation, so there is an excellent chance to see top-tier writing.
I don’t play most AAA games at launch, and only got Watch Dogs: Legion because I liked the gameplay concepts. Trust me: they got old fast. CDPR is going to have many more options to customize my gameplay and style than WD:L ever did, and that’s one of the many reasons I’m totally hyped for it.
Shamus said: “They aren’t less popular[2] because everyone wants always-online, they’re less popular because publishers added a bunch of social-medial-shared-experience-always-connected garbage that harmed the product.”
And they’re often less popular because they expect you to pay $70+ dollars for a game with a *shockingly* tiny amount of content.
DDO is actually just about the first multiplayer game I’ve actually enjoyed, and that’s largely because it’s ASTONISHINGLY griefing-proof. There is very, very little you can do to really screw up someone else’s gaming experience, and worst case scenario they just leave the quest instance and drop group and they never have to deal with you again. You can do almost everything solo if you really want to. (When I started playing, this wasn’t exactly true, but it’s gotten better every single year I’ve been playing the game. They don’t encourage soloing, but if you just don’t want to deal with people, you do not have to and you can still play.) Likewise you can only play with people you know. Or you can play with any random yabbo. Or some combination of the three at different times. Pair that with a ridiculous amount of content (622 quests as of latest expansion–for comparison, Skyrim has 273 quests if you leave off the infinite repeating “radiant” quests.)
I tried playing SWTOR and apart from really detesting the Wow-clone combat I couldn’t really get into it. The game felt like it was constantly yanking me away from the interesting stuff. You’d just get in to doing something and NOPE now you have to go do something else to progress.
I’ve played Grim Dawn and Diablo 2 and 3 and Divinity Original Sin 2, and multiplayer always eventually drives me nuts because people are either rushing ahead and yelling “come do this! Come click this! come help me fight this!” or else spending 20 minutes faffing around in town for no reason. Look, if you’re going to zoom ahead, as far as I’m concerned you’ve committed to soloing whatever your dumbass pulls. I don’t care if you only wanted to play multiplayer because you wanted help with that one boss you keep dying on, we’re doing EVERYTHING. Want to keep playing once I’m gone? Make a second character and play that one. Don’t keep playing this character and expect me to catch up to you. Likewise if you say “I need to sell” that means you portal back to town, hit the “sell everything” button, and come RIGHT back. You don’t decide to revise your entire gear layout and re-enchant everything. Do that when the session is over and nobody’s waiting on you.
What else have I played . . . Anthem, which had probably the worst multiplayer of any game I’ve played in the past 20 years. It was so badly implemented that you have to question whether ANY of the developers had EVER played a genuinely multiplayer game. I mean, seriously, just off the top of my head:
1. They had you name your character and pick a face (!?) at the start of the game and your in-game name (and face) are never seen again. Instead, they broadcast your ORIGIN USERNAME to every rando you group with.
2. There’s no text chat or in-game messaging of ANY kind, the ONLY way to communicate with other players is to join a mission with them and talk to them using voice.
3. There’s no region sorting so chances are very, very high that you will not share a language with ANYONE in your group.
4. There’s no mechanic to make people wait before starting the mission, so if your computer loads a bit slowly (on a game with nightmarishly awful loading screen times), when you appear in the mission everyone is gone. And then the mission map force-teleports you to “catch up” with the group. The “leash” distance is SO SHORT (and the overall map is SO TINY) and people move SO FAST that the frontrunner might successfully exit the new area before you’ve finished loading in to that one. So your “mission” consists of constant out-of-range warnings and forced leashing where you get to the new zone just in time to see everyone leave. Delightful.
Hence why DDO is still the only really multiplayer game that I actually play. I’d love to play more single-player stuff, but that seems to have been taken over by indies of varying levels of quality, perhaps because it seems to take the AAA studios 5+ years to put out a game these days.
I wonder if that’s really it . . . they’ve just become so constitutionally incapable of putting out a game in a reasonable amount of time (I’d say 2.5 to 3 years is about the sweet spot from what I’ve seen) that they simply can’t survive on a game that their players won’t keep playing for 5+ years.
Your post reminded me of the Ultima Online Legacy announcement. I haven’t played Ultima Online in seventeen years, but anything with “Ultima Online” and “Legacy” in the same sentence is going to get my attention. Player-run shards were always too low-population to give me the feeling of existing in a busy world, so my hopes here are high.
I don’t know when you did play SWTOR, but for what it’s worth a few years ago, the devs reduced the amount of grind you have to do to progress, so if one wants just to experience the class stories in solo mode, while ignoring most of the MMO part*, it’s possible, though it might not be what you were interested in. I also played a few MP dungeons/raids (I forgot the exact term) with random players using the group finders and it’s been a fun experience, even if I was usually carried by the other players, who were rather tolerant of my inexperience, as long as I told them at the start; they’d usually give a few indications, usually for boss fights.
* I consider SWTOR a game that’s pulled in two opposite directions, between it being a MMO and being game focused on set, class-specific storylines, with the design demands of one direction detracting the other direction. I think it would have been better as one or two solo SW RPGs. Though in the end you can (in the current iteration of the game) ignore one part and focus on the other, I did a little of both.
I tried this not too long ago when they started offering free-to-play, but I found the game so obnoxious for free play that I couldn’t really settle in to the story, and I don’t like the wow-clone gameplay ANYWAY, so it was going to be a pretty hard sell for me.
I think I gave it a fair chance.
I also tried it after it went F2P and bounced off of the WOW-clone gameplay. Reducing the grind doesn’t help much when you just don’t like it. Books have zero WOW gameplay, after all.
The worst part was that when I got around to play it, they had streamlined the skill tree to be completely linear. You chose a subclass at some point and that’s almost all the choice you have. So I couldn’t even mess around with builds.
I can tell you that, personally, I haven’t been buying very many AAA single-player games in the last few years because I hate the spectacle-over-mechanics philosophy that became so dominant. I don’t want to sit through your big, dumb set piece sequence that leaves me with zero agency. I don’t want button-mashing combat with zero challenge that’s dominated and interrupted by overblown animations that I have to watch 2,000 times. I don’t want to have to constantly stop playing the game to watch some scripted sequence. I don’t want to sit through an hour of cutscenes, barely-interactable tutorials, and other garbage before you let me play the damn game.
The AAA single-player game space has been pretty barren for me this entire console generation.
Yeah, depending on what counts as AAA I’ve been pretty much staying away from it as well. Persona 5 is the last one that might be in that category that I’ve actually played, I think, at least of the recent ones. I have Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 for the Switch but haven’t played it yet, and the other games I got for that system are much less known. The games just don’t really seem all that appealing, and seem to either be games with gameplay I dislike or games that seem to be things that were done better before.
If you haven’t played Horizon: Zero Dawn, I’d (cautiously) recommend it. I really enjoyed it even though it did have some jankiness (what is a game without jank? A boring game, that’s what it is).
But I can totally understand people being exhausted with that kind of open world game.
I decided to try Immortals: Fenyx Rising. It’s a fun Breath of the Wild knockoff, and since I don’t have a Switch, I don’t have a basis for comparison that might ruin the game for someone else. As far as gameplay goes, it’s fine. There’s nothing amazing about the combat, but it’s solid. The exploration mechanics like climbing and gliding look directly ripped off from Breath of the Wild. The puzzles so far aren’t annoying or repetitive, but I’m still early. The story plays around with Greek mythology, which is something I’ve always enjoyed. I’d recommend it provided you can enjoy cutesy world and character design and don’t mind every bit of dialog being jokey.
>I don’t have a basis for comparison that might ruin the game for someone else.
That’s not a huge problem for me, since I found BotW to be a somewhat great, but heavily flawed game. I remember describing it as “The best game you’ll ever completely forget about the day after you finish playing it”. They had a very solid set of open world physics and travel mechanics, but the game they built on top of it had an overriding shallowness to it (as in “compares unfavorably to Fallout 4” levels of shallow, including the narrative). I’d love to see a game improve on the formula.
The only thing I can say it improves on for sure, at least from my perspective, is the weapon degradation. There is none, so you don’t have to constantly switch weapons or avoid using anything because you don’t want to break it. That seemed like the absolute worst part of Breath of the Wild based on what I saw and read about it. I mean, I find Greek mythology a more interesting backdrop than Hyrule, but that’s entirely subjective. It doesn’t seem like a particularly deep story so far.
BotW didn’t really do a very good job of using Hyrule as a backdrop. The game was beautiful, but most of it felt like generic forest/desert/mountain/plains/etc. There weren’t a whole lot of locations that really had any character to them.
I went for a walk this morning, and all the birds in my neighborhood had neon ground effect lighting. CDPR is really going all out with this CP 2077 launch day advertising.
I think you might just be living near an oil spill.
I don’t disagree with the general thrust of your article, Shamus, but I do think you’re taking something of a narrow view.
There’s broader industrial, societal, and technological change at work here as well. You know what the push for always online, privacy invading, socially connected, micro-transaction trends in games most strongly reminds me of?
Internet of things. Social media integration and data harvesting. Data analytics (if there isn’t somebody at publishers looking at achievements completion rates cross-checked with whatever demographic data they can connect to it, I’ll eat one of my sweat-stained caps). Psychology in marketing (I’ve taken a trip down mobile gaming for the first time this week; observing all of the bells and whistles in a skinner box like Top War: Battle Game was an educational experience). Consolidation of media, particularly entertainment, into a few big players who chase large investment, large payoff products, particularly in movies (observe how the fad of big money blockbuster cinematic universes has grown right alongside the blobbing of AAA game development this past decade; while the latter trend predates the former, I suspect the former has a longer tail going all the way back at least to the emergence of the blockbusters in the 70s). Streaming. Cloud computing and storage.
These aren’t simply technological innovations that gaming is making use of; these are defining developments in Information Age technology that chart the direction of business and culture.
My broad point is that the trend you’ve observed in big budget videogames that you lament is not one independent to big budget videogames. Unfortunately, this means that the trend will not be wholly or even partially reversed through a change in circumstances independent to big budget videogames.
I also take umbrage with your analogy. It assumes Mr. Disney is the only person involved in the decision tree whereby Titty Bar takes over Magic Kingdom. It does not account for the manager of Titty Bar intentionally undermining the performance of Magic Kingdom, massaging his numbers, and presenting misleading statistics to Mr. Disney upon which decisions will be made, in order for the manager to advance his own position. And I think that sort of corporate corruption explains the observable corporate misunderstandings of the industry better than the assumption that nobody at these massive corporations has a better than sophomore understanding of data analytics.
Hope the game is good though! Not particularly hyped for it. I’m mainly hoping for something along the lines of Deus Ex Human Revolution, but bigger.
The first half of the article is pretty much what I haven’t had the eloquence to say myself. I consciously avoid multiplayer-only games, because I like to play by myself. I don’t want to depend on an online community to provide me with my entertainment, and I dislike folk wedging multi-player into games that should simply be single-player.
I had a similar experience (just in a different way) with the Mass Effect trilogy. Mass Effect 1 was a RPG with shooter elements, and Mass Effect 3 was a shooter with roleplaying elements. (You could even turn off the roleplaying elements by auto-generating the dialogue instead of making dialogue choices yourself.)
I see Cyberpunk 2077 as a chance to both prove that single-player games are still viable and still entertaining to us and also that RPGs are still viable and still entertaining to us.
It’ll really suck for those of us who still enjoy single-player RPGs if it turns out it’s bad.
I’m over 200 comments late to the party and don’t have time to read everything. Sadly, this means I’ll likely repeat things that have already been said.
Watching SkillUp’s review of Cyberpunk 2077, I was actually struck with how obscene these ambitious projects are. Cyberpunk 2077 has taken eight years of development, and it’s still coming in as a hot mess needing patches for bugs and glitches. Sure, there’s a Day One patch, but does everyone really expect that to truly eliminate all the pre-release problems? I highly doubt it. To me, when I consider the game’s scale, I can’t help but ask myself if it was actually worth it.
I think the greater question is whether a single-player, story-focused game needs to have the most amazing visuals and largest world possible when there are plenty of examples of AA developers making solid experiences with an emphasis on story (the Yakuza franchise certainly comes to mind). Then again, I also grew up as a console gamer, so while I loved the massive epics of Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda, I feel like that creates a different foundation of preferences and priorities than Baldur’s Gate and Fallout do.
Regardless, it’s not that single-player games are dead. Sony themselves have proven that. Ghost of Tsushima just won Player’s Voice for the Game Awards. While it has a multiplayer component, it was a free download added later and is kept completely separate from the core game. God of War was a linear action game without a single online component. The Last of Us Part 2 is also a single player game. Spider-Man and its sequel, Miles Morales, are single-player games.
Now, because they own the PlayStation they don’t necessarily have to worry about the longevity of these individual games. Which is what’s really going on with the likes of Activision, EA, and Ubisoft. “How do we not only keep people playing this game, but sinking money into it?” It’s not about trends or what players want, it’s about bottom lines. Each of these publishers wants a game like Destiny. What I’d be afraid of is this effort evolving now that Genshin Impact has made a splash. It’s free-to-play and relies on GACHA pretty heavily.
But in the end, I think the biggest problem is figuring out what it is players as a whole really want. Ten years ago I was writing for a “Gamer’s Social Network” where the vast majority of its userbase were high school or early College (I, meanwhile, had just graduated College and entered the work force). These were kids that loved Activision because they made “good games”, and faithfully bought Call of Duty every year… and loved it. These were kids that had no interest in Dragon Age: Origins. When Halo 4 was announced, they were excited to “play as Master Chief again” because playing as the Drop Trooper or other Spartan in ODST and Reach were clearly so different.
At the time, it felt like they dominated gaming. But as the decade has worn on, Dark Souls reminded everyone that it can be fun to play a game that doesn’t play itself for you, and Sony’s prestige games have become more and more huge, those players have either expanded or have been revealed to never have been the majority. Right now, we have FortNite as “one of the biggest games ever”, but for how much longer?
To me, the best thing about gaming is how absolutely huge it is, and that technology has reached the point where a modest team can put together something awesome. My month has been filled with Chronos: Before the Ashes, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Hades, and Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin. With the exception of Yakuza, none of them are “story first” as you desire or have as your foundation. However, my brother just bought Empire of Sin, which is basically X-Com meets a Paradox game and is therefore right up his alley.
The way I see it, the hardest habit for us old-timey gamers to break is the one where we care about “the big names and big games”. There’s so much gaming content out there, and I highly doubt Cyberpunk 2077 is going to convince the corporate suits that a game that you buy once and then you’re done with is worth it. But there’s plenty more out there worth playing.
Every so often AAA puts out a gem, but the real diamonds are in the AA and indie space.
> But in the end, I think the biggest problem is figuring out what it is players as a whole really want.
But can we treat gamers as a monolithic whole in the first place? People game for vastly different reasons, and those can change as time goes on as well. I’ve been playing PC games for 25 years now, and still, I do not get titles like CoD or Battlefield. I tried some versions, and they do nothing for me.
On the other hand, I go nuts for a carefully crafted world (which is why I adore ME1) – that is what I really want. But I also know people who would not give a rat’s ass about the setting if you paid them, and will skip dialogue, written lore, and generally just try to get at the mechanical game play: We basically want opposite things from our games.
Or take people whose main joy is 100%ing games. Again: That’s the opposite of me. I actively avoid achievements; Not only do they tend to spoil parts of the game, but they also create this weird meta layer that is a continual reminder that you play a game (instead of maintaining immersion).
It’s like trying to find out what “readers” like to read: there may not be a unified answer, and that’s part of the beauty: There is no “one thing fits everyone” product. There always is room for an enterprising author or developer with a good idea, and find an audience.
In fact, my personal observation is that AAA seems to be a gateway to gaming in some ways: It’s flashy and accessible, but I find that many gamers after a time grow out of it, experience it as increasingly empty and shallow – and either leave the hobby, or go looking for “deeper”/more niche titles, and often find what they enjoy in the Indie/AA space.
I think this is what I tried and failed to get at: that “gamers” aren’t this monolithic thing, and figuring out “what players want” is kind of futile since it’s so big and diverse. Sales numbers won’t tell you why each individual player bought that game in particular. For example, I play Halo for the campaign. How many people played it for the multiplayer and never even finished the campaign? Assuming they started it at all?
Which is where I don’t think it’s about these publishers trying to predict what players want, though they may actually believe it. It’s more about trying to convince everyone they want this type of game that happens to be the most profitable. Fortunately, fifteen years after that post Shamus referenced from 2006, we still see developers of all budgets dedicated to single-player gaming, even if they are rarely the biggest budget.
Which means, to me, story-driven single-player experiences aren’t going away, and that’s a good thing.
Bobby Kotick and whatever CEO of the week is the hate target of gamers just don’t care about the ‘experience’ of playing a game. All they care about is the bottom line, and games that make money not just from the initial sale, but engagement over several years with microtransactions and DLC and subscription fees will make more money than a single player title that took 7 years to develop.
Even if this specific game is excellent, any lesson that a powerful person is willing to accept is that a game like this is the exception that proves the rule, and they’d rather shit out a dozen games with a single/multiplayer microtransaction model than one really excellent singleplayer game that takes an incredible amount of development time.
You can’t really explain why singleplayer games aren’t being made like they are used to, without going deep into the market forces that made them successful twenty years ago, and the forces preventing them from being developed today. And you really can’t go too deep on how to ‘fix’ those without getting political, IMO.
Coming back to this a couple of days later, it’s almost funny how Shamus’ fear was entirely overshadowed by all the ridiculous (and not so ridiculous) controversy regarding the game’s launch. No one is even touching the subject of multiplayer, but there’s a lot of stupid, ridiculous, misplaced rage from gaming, er, “journalists” who are angry at the game for various preposterous reasons (some of which aren’t even close to being related to real problems) and the entirely legitimate complaints about poor optimization.
Then, of course, the latter group is subdivided into different flavors of reaction, from apologists (“You didn’t want them to crunch and you didn’t want them to delay, so this is what we got”) to doomsayers (“CDPR is dead. Surely they’ll disband after this”). I like to think I’m in the more reasonable middle. I understand that a game with this complexity is going to have issues, and a longer development cycle isn’t guarantee of a better product, considering that they have to constantly change stuff to keep up, but on the other hand some of these optimization issues are inexcusable. Like the game crashing if your CPU isn’t AVX compatible, which was promptly solved by a fan patch a few hours after launch.
It’s also very clear that a lot of people were expecting a different kind of game and are being upset that the game is not what they expected and, as you know, for some people “not what I expected” equals “literally the worst thing ever!!!!111”. I’m finding it fun so far, even if it doesn’t run particularly smoothly on my PC (which, to be fair, is certainly quite old and frankly I shouldn’t even be attempting to run a game of this caliber in it; I guess the fact that it even runs at all is commendable).
I gave up on the AAA experience and have been living in the world of indies and retro games for many years now. I had nothing to say about Cyberpunk 2077. Everything I saw of Cyberpunk 2077 before now never really appealed to me. It wasn’t my type of game.
Due to the zeitgeist I watched some footage… and omg this game is not for me. Like if a developer deliberately designed an ‘anti-Steve’ game, this is what they would come up with. The only things missing for me to perfectly hate it is micro-transactions and drop-in PVP. I thought Death Stranding was bad. This is seriously one of the ugliest aesthetics I’ve ever seen.
Perfect ‘game of the year’ for 2020. Because for me, is the Covid-19 of video games. Now if you’ll excuse me there are some clouds that need yelling at.
I think I saw an article where they specifically said they were angling for the anti-Steve demographic.
First it was WoW clones. Then it was live service games. Then lootboxes. Now the big craze is “games that Steve hates.”
This is a huge improvement! (Unless you’re Steve.)
Thanks for that! Literally laughed at loud.
There is so much you could do with this…
Age of Steve Pyres. A RTS game set in the 17th century where you burn male witches (called Steve) at the stake to fuel your economy.
Genesis: Adam and Steve. A rpg were you play as Adam and can blame Steve for the fall of humanity to sin and for the banishment from paradise. Great game!
I don’t recommend playing the sequel, where you blame Steve for Abel’s death due to his allegedly poor parenting skills. It was a bit lackluster compared to the original.
upcoming titles:
The Witcher: Steve Hunt
Fallout: New Steve Ash
I wonder what other anti-Steve games are out there!
A year after reading this article, I learned that Disney actually did have a nightclub complex in Disney World Florida, called “Pleasure Island”.
It was more family-friendly than it sounds (no strippers for you), and it had a weirdly elaborate backstory centered around the island’s supposed founder, Merryweather Pleasure. There were concepts like a fireworks-themed restaurant, a stand-up comedy show with parodies of Disney properties and the Disney park experience, a bunch of themed dance clubs, and apparently there were scrapped plans for a Disney-villains-themed bar, which sounds awesome.
I closed in 2008, but I’m not sure why.