If your budget can fit in <$30m and release on PC it’s never been better, and luckily that’s enough budget to do pretty much everything pre-open world extravaganzas
Above that and the budget is so high the only answer everyone knows is to drive engagement to last months and slowly because you can get sustained revenue then, and this has correspondingly led to smaller portfolios among big studios. Only Ubisoft has really mastered efficiently spreading a huge game over multiple studios, but on the other hand, their games play like products created to spec over multiple studios
I’m pretty sure this will break when someone gets a Netflix-like subscription model working, Microsoft and Sony seem very close to making it happen. Google appears hapless, the land developer opening new subdivisions in the Florida swamp in 2009
there are like one or two or three really good ones a year still and they aren’t hurting anybody
I mean other than being huge creaking overdesigned mass market entertainment with questionable to bad labour practices and exploitative engagement loops
but really it’s just the television industry with poorer worker organizing and a slightly more demented notion of prestige
it’s still miraculous whenever a large sum of money is brought to bear on something actually worthwhile
boring response: AAA status is probably a Veblen good and so someone like Rockstar redefining how big a game budget can be will push other AAA studios down to AA unless they get bigger, beefier, swolier in response
AAA companies should be dissolved, their wealth distributed amongst independent devs and all professional game developers should have to become farmers or some shit. it will teach you all a lesson
Seriously, fuck that. I’ve been playing FPSs since before they used a mouse and I played the 2016 Doom on a low difficulty level recently because I just wanted to have a good time and it definitely is a good time that way. I’ll protect you from the haters, just play these games on the lowest difficulty or whatever. It’s there for a reason, it wants to be played. The mocking difficulty names are a bit weird I agree but don’t take them seriously
It is not structured like any other Wolfenstein game except perhaps the 2009 Raven one that’s loosely hub-based. It is most similar to ODST’s overworld sections if they were beefed up to Deus Ex/Dishonored detail.
The level-up system isn’t that much more different than before. The main differences are a) you now get an allotment of points to spend on upgrades like any other skill tree, but most like Prey/Dishonored and b) enemy health/dmg scales and you’re allocating your armor/health split.
I would definitely not play this alone or play it at all if you don’t like the modern stabs at immersive sims.
The art is gorgeous (Nazi shit notwithstanding) and much more interesting than TNC’s mostly industrial settings. The music is a step down from TNC’s world-class butt rock. Story has been thin so far, can’t really speak to it, but I am loling at the twins.
