ThomasHL

That turns it from a never play to a might play for rme

People are reading way too much into this, its a game in a bin. It's not disrespecting Neversoft

And it could mean anything. It could be about Activision binning off the franchise

I'm not a military shooter guy, and even I feel like this is too much.

Respect the core fantasy at least a little bit

I tried Jusant but I just didn't find the climbing engaging enough. Cairn seems to be what I was looking for

I can't believe the number of people suggesting if FFXVI sold more than Metaphor it must have been a success.

It takes one glance to see the budgets of the two games are not close to the same. Metaphor has a much cheaper aesthetic and relies on a lot of very repetitive dungeons. FFXVI is heavily reliant on expensive cinematics and action set pieces.

Selling 50% more doesn't mean squat if the game took 60% more to make. And if they made FFXVI cheaper there's no guarantee it would have sold the numbers it did.

The question for Square Enix is, if Metaphor is a success financially and FFXVI isn't, are they making the right kind of game? Could they make something less cinematic, less photorealistic that still sold well.

How do keepers work? Is it a dedicated role, or can anyone in a game run into goal? Is it difficult to get people to play keeper?

Here's a rough estimate of the absolute max #4 is in sales.

Let's assume every single person in the UK owns Hogwarts Legacy - not household, not every console, every person.

And let's assume as many people are buying it this week as the first week it launched.

There's 68 million people in the UK, and Hogwarts has been on sale for 100 weeks. So that would mean #4 sold less than 680,000 copies.

If you think 1 in 10 people in the UK own a physical copy Hogwarts Legacy, we're down to #4 being at it's very most 68,000 sales already.

Now actually Hogwarts Legacy sold 870k physical copies in its first year. So a much more realistic, but still way too large, maximum number of sales for #4 would be 870k / 52 ~ 16,000 copies. That assumes legacy is selling as well this week as it sold on launch.

I don't think it's realistic to think #4 represents even 10,000 sales. I wouldn't be shocked if it was under 1k

#4 in physical media means nothing. Hogwarts Legacy sells well, but it's not selling a million copies every week. Otherwise it would have sold 100 million games or something by now.

And MindsEye was less than that.

I bet a lot of weeks there's only one chart position which has any number of sales worth speaking about. Remember even Gollum charted

Meanwhile Final Fantasy Magic The Gathering cards are set to outsell Lord of the Rings and Spiderman. The audience is there, they just need to deliver

Witcher music, Witcher combat. Not Witcher writing or polish yet

I'm addicted to the Cairn demo. I genuinely think playing this game will make me a better climber in real life. That's how legit the climbing mechanics are.

I was already going to buy it, because I love Haven, but this game is everything a climbing game should be

I've tried the demo and this climbing system is legit! This is the game I wanted Jusant to be

I'm very excited for this. I love Haven and I've only grown to love it more with time. I've been waiting for their next game for a long time.

Jusant felt a little too simple, I wanted something a bit more challenging and technical. There were loads of different real climbing techniques in that trailer. And the vibe looks incredible.

And that music!

EA used to be so big. Nowadays they've got so little going on. Just clinging to their couple of successful franchises and hoping they can resurrect a few others

Andor really is that good

Souls like combat, high difficulty with no levelling, weapon degradation, crafting, weak story, weak art - I think it would be harder for a game to be more outside my niche.

All it needed was first-person and six different currencies

Now we know why Ghosts of Yotei got a release date

I feel like I'm missing a piece of information. Is the US price adjusted for tariffs? Has there been wild inflation in the supply chain? Have sales slipped below some threshold which means they don't get efficiencies of scale?

I just don't understand how Microsoft would charge more for a lower power console. The must still prefer someone buys an Xbox, right? Someone who owns an Xbox is more likely to get Gamepass than someone who owns a PS5.

That two minute trailer is a minute too long

@GeeEssEff Loads of currencies is such a turn-off these days. Don't make the game look like an accountancy project

Fortiche have really started a new movement with their Arcane aesthetics

I'm up for it, but it's got to have an edge to it.

A generic XCom clone isn't going to suck me in. Show me why it's cool that it's Star Wars

Bungie makes good games, and I've never played an extraction shooter, so I'd like to try it out.

But I can't but something to 'try it out' so it's going to depend a lot on what other people say once the game comes out

Chris Avellone was easily Obsidian's best writer. I know there are a lot of Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 fans out there, but to my mind Obsidian haven't topped Tyranny in a long while.

And if you look at the things he's been involved with since (admittedly, not as the creative lead) - Divinity Original Sins 2, Prey, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Jedi Fallen Order ... those are good stories

@Puketapu this isn't really the same genre as rivals. It's an extraction shooter - so more focus around sessions of co-op based PvE but where you risk encountering other players DayZ style

I don't even know what I'd want from a Minecraft movie?

I think something Lego Movie / Barbie movie esque - about creativity and the way people interact with each other in Minecraft.

But it's not like the Mario movie where just seeing the visuals of Mario is pleasant enough, or Sonic where you have actual characters to tell stories about

I don't enjoy weapon durability except where the game is literally designed around picking it up, bashing a few times, and then grabbing something else (The Last Of Us style).

This sounds like the worst. I hate the busy work of repairing weapons midfight. If I'm struggling against a boss I don't want to also think about my weapon durability.

If I can keep a weapon long enough to grow attached to it, don't take it away from me. It's unpleasant timewasting

@themightyant it's sad that Red Faction Guerilla is still the benchmark to beat on destructible environments. That's a 16 year old game!

I rarely buy games on release so it doesn't affect me either way.

Companies can charge what they like for games. I've got something like 40+ high quality games on my wishlist. I can wait and I'll buy it at a price I feel is good for me.

Pentiment isn't a particularly console game - being so test heavy.

I enjoyed it, and I loved the stylism, but it did the LA Noire murder mystery structure which I hate - where you know there is a bigger figure behind the murders (and I knew who it was one from early in Act One) but you can't do anything about it and are forced to ignore it until the end of the game.

This is going to go under the radar if they don't show off more

...and if there isn't more to show.

I'm excited for Cairn - the next game from the makers of Haven, focused on physics based rock climbing

It's probably coming out in 2029. They're not going to announce a later game before an earlier one.

I don't want TLOU3. I'd be happy with another Uncharted, I don't really mind who the protagonist is. My preference would still be for a new game over a sequel

@Northern_munkey Ah sorry! Thank you for the patient reply

@Northern_munkey if you read the article though, the actual detail of the article is interesting here.

He wasn't saying games shouldn't be long, which is mostly what I took away from your comment.

He was using it more in the sense that the time you spend in the game should be challenging and meaningful. And that's good right? RPGs have always had too much filler. But he's also saying repeating levels isn't meaningful and that's where I'm not so sure. Then again Persona traditionally mixed repeating levels with One Hit Kill attacks from random mooks, which was very *****.

Also Metaphor has one of the most time wasting features of the series: that you can regen SP by grinding in dungeons (very slowly). That's the kind of time wasting I could do without.

@Northern_munkey you were very passionate for someone not actually talking about the article. I think what Goto is saying is interesting because it's about more than just length - it's about battles feeling difficult enough to be interesting but also not repeating whole dungeons like early Personas.

The first bit I'm definitely on board with, but im not sure either way whether repeating battles is the sweet spot, or repeating one level of a dungeon.

@Northern_munkey Does the rewind feature on Metaphor genuinely bother you this much?

Or was this just a kind of general topic, less about what Goto was saying here. Because he's not saying people want short RPGs - Metaphor is not a short RPG.

I'm not convinced Goto is right though. The souls genre is also the most popular thing around at the moment, so it's not like people are afraid of repeating things.

@Boxmonkey if Tencent are putting a billion into the new company, they can't be that mad.

My guess would be that this company is 25% owned by Tencent and 75% owned by Ubisoft (as it's still an Ubisoft subsidiary). If that's how it works, Tencent basically own 62.5% of the new company.

In which case maybe Tencent initiated the move, because they don't want to invest a billion into the sinking ship - just the valuable stuff.

I think I've only played two PS5 games this entire generation that were actual current gen only games.

Elsewhere they've also got breakdowns of platform splits and physical media versus digital media.

The majority of their sales for The Witcher are on PC (43%) followed by playstation (38%) in 2024. You can see the absolute collapse of Xbox - they had 23% of Witcher 3 sales in 2015 and only 8% by 2024.

When the Witcher 3 launched in 2015, 21% of it's consoles sales were digital. When Cyberpunk launched in 2020, 75% of it's consoles sales were digital.

Three caveats to the last one 1) It was 2020, so COVID, way less people going to stores 2) This doesn't count people who bought second hand copies 3) Console sales were terrible generally at launch because the game ran terribly

Haven is one of those games that has stuck with me long after I played it.

It had a really lovely atmosphere and it was so good at capturing a really sincere relationship. Skating around the world to that music never got old.

Development costs = staff wages * man hours to make the game.

People look a lot at the second bit of that (time to make game) but not so much at the first part.

Warhorse Studios pays their senior artists $20,000 a year - and that's fine because $20,000 is a nice salary in the Czech Republic. If people's salaries are 7 times lower, the game costs 7 times less to make.

Japan's salaries have been pretty statistic for a long time, which has helped keep Japanese development costs lower.

I suspect similarly, you'd find development costs in the UK haven't risen nearly as much as the US.

Even CD Projekt were helped with their start by much lower salaries in Poland back in the day

In the end, it might be uncomfortable for studios in the richer nations, but globally we're going to see more and more companies in less rich regions make great games. Tech skills are universal now, you can make a great game anywhere.

Children of Morta complete edition is £5.50.

This is a beautiful co-op roguelike that's my go to game with a friend. The co-op is offline based, but that's even better because with share play you can play it online even if only one person needs to own a copy.

Fun combat, great characters, heaps of heart

(it's already on Extra if you have that. But I found I was only using Extra for Morta, so it was cheaper just to buy it)

I recommend checking out the full interview. They've got a really interesting perspective. They talked about how dangerous it is to work directly on tie-in games (because the film directors/producers can and do kill the projects if it doesn't fit their taste).

They mention how clueless execs can be (a WB exec asked for some bullet points explaining the plot of Lord of the Rings - even though LotR was one of WBs most successful properties owned).

And they talked about how important it is to keep teams together and how hard that is. She says she actually stepped down when WB asked her to make a second round of redundancies because she wasn't prepared to do it again. And they used the distraction of her stepping down to delay the redundancies until WB got out of the tight spot and didn't need to make them.

@themightyant just to be clear, what I was implying is that it's crazy to make such a big outcry over a game before it even came out.

I agree that we don't know sales figures and it's fine to wait on them, but the fact of the matter is some people declared the game a failure before anyone had even played it, and that was silly then, and it's silly now.

Maybe we could start a new tradition where we actually wait for a game to release before we declare it broke.

@lazarus11 that's mostly just wages though. The average household income in the Czech Republic is $11,700.

In the US it's $80,600 dollars. If it costs 7 times more to employ someone, the game is going to cost a lot more.

(Incidentally 60 million times 7 is 420 million).

Warhorse studios pays a senior artist $20,000 a year. No-one in the US is going to accept that.

That's why more and more game development is getting offshored to countries with lower wages.

Every Saints Row game was a mess, but some of them were hot messes

I didn't know the writer of Metro 2033 had to flee Russia. Massive respect to him for sticking to his morals even when they can literally get you killed

There are already plenty of great games about faith and religion. I'm definitely up for it.

A lonely game? Not quite so up for it. Naughty Dog have been on a bit of a downer streak.