Goodeye8

Except the extraction shooter genre is one of the hardest to penetrate because there are too many interconnected systems that all have to work together and even the most successful extraction shooters struggle with getting all of the systems to together in perfect harmony.

The answer is kinda yes and no but more towards no because it was conceived as a successor to Black Desert and was originally set as a prequel to Black Desert but during development it became its own universe and the final product isn’t even in the same genre as Black Desert. But like Dark Souls isn’t in the same universe as Demons souls either and is still a spiritual successor if you want to consider Crimson Desert as a sort of a single-player successor to Black Desert online I guess that’s probably somewhat true. I can’t really say because I’ve never played Black Desert Online. For me personally MMO vs single-player is a big enough difference to not consider it a successor.

I didn’t say marketing isn’t powerful. Marketing is a pretty easy way to sell units, it’s why AAA games have insane marketing budgets. But marketing doesn’t guarantee 5 million units (which is what the other person claimed) and if a game reaches 5 million units sold without going through the average AAA marketing strategy that is a pretty significant thing because it is a sign that there is something to the game.

I think we’re in agreement here.

And my point is that if you asked your normie gamer, which really didn’t exist in the same form, in 2005 who Bungie is — you’d mostly get question marks.

I doubt it. By 2005 people already knew Bungie. Halo was a critical and commercial success and Halo 2 had released a year prior and not only was highly anticipated but ended up as a system seller for Xbox. If you were gaming in 2005 you’d know about Bungie. Had it been about Bungie in 2001 then a normie would give you question marks because at that point Bungie was pretty much unknown. Marathon games were on Mac, they made a RTS game and Oni, which wasn’t all that big of a hit. Halo is what put Bungie on the map and Halo 2 made them very much a household name.

And that’s my point with Crimson Desert as well. Pearl Abyss made BDO before, but they’re still very much an unknown developer. They don’t get the kind of benefit of doubt Bungie or Bioware or Blizzard tend to get. Crimson Desert is the hit that puts weight behind the Pearl Abyss name. The next Pearl Abyss is going to get more eyes because of Crimson Desert.

This would be relevant except that Marathon only sold as well as it did because of the heavy marketing push.

Again, that’s largely my point. You can’t market a game and just sell 5 million units. Marathon sold 1.2 million units because a) it’s a Bungie game so people would be paying attention to it and b) it had heavy marketing behind it. It would’ve sold even less without those two things, but that’s besides the point. The idea that you can just sell 5 million units through marketing is simply not true and Marathon proves it.

You can argue everything before launch wasn’t organic if you want to, I don’t care enough to argue over your cynicism, but post-launch it has been organic. If the game was a steaming pile of shit none of the before release “astroturfing” would matter a month after release, the game would have a player count nosedive like Highguard and it would be what people consider “a dead game”. But it’s not having that nose-dive, it has a fairly small decay considering last sunday peak playercount was almost the same as the first peak after launch. Furthermore the reviews have gone from mixed at launch to very positive. Those things don’t happen when the hype is manufactured.

People aren’t making Youtube videos on Crimson Desert combos or puzzle solving videos or why you should engage with the camp management system or etc because Pearl Abyss is paying them, the videos get made because people want to make those videos and talk about the game. You don’t get a RDR2 artist glazing the water simulation (which BTW is a video I very much recommend watching because it’s a nerd nerding out about nerdy things and IMO those are always the best videos) unless there’s something to glaze, Pearl Abyss isn’t going to pay their competition to glaze them.

My point is that if you took a normie gamer and asked them who Pearl Abyss is they wouldn’t know just like they wouldn’t know who Frontier Developments is. They might know if you mention BDO or ED but that’s not the same as asking who the studio is. If you ask who Bungie is they will know.

The comparison to Marathon was explicitly to debunk the idea that you can sell 5 million units simply by doing marketing. That was the extent of the comparison. But to bring it back to my point here, the reason we’re even talking about Marathon is because of Bungie. If Pearl Abyss had made Marathon we wouldn’t be talking about it because nobody would be giving a shit about a failed extraction shooter. People gave Marathon a chance because it’s made by Bungie. Some people bought Marathon only because they believed Bungie is going to pull out another banger.

Just because the space Sim crowd knows who Frontier Developments is doesn’t mean the rest of the gaming space knows who they are. Pearl abyss may be known in the niche they were in before but they’ve made a game with mainstream appeal and for many people Pearl Abyss is a name they’re hearing for the first time.

Marketing doesn’t guarantee 5 million sales. Just look at Marathon. Insane marketing push for a game made by a beloved studio sold only 1.2 million units. And the marketing was excellent, clearly better than the game itself. This is a piece of art.

But where’s the marketing? Where’s the established franchise to coast upon? Where’s the developer reputation to guarantee sales? Pearl Abyss is a pretty much unknown developer, Crimson desert is a new IP and the only marketing I’ve seen is essentially word of mouth. For a game to organically sell 5 million units is a pretty big deal.

I’d take it a step further, ditch the combat gameplay entirely. Make Witcher 3 in the style of Disco Elysium. Put the emphasis on storytelling and actual RPG stats. Combat will be less common but can be solved through play by play decision trees making each encounter more memorable.

I don’t think Sony is discovering anything. They’ve said the focus this year isn’t on console sales but rather the bigger monetization of the existing userbase. They probably thought that since they’re not planning on selling a lot of units anyway they might as well ask extra from anyone determined to get one.

I remember playing 2 and one point going “wait, that’s it?” and that actually was it. I get that it’s a more casual experience than Project Zomboid but I think it would benefit from a bit more complexity.

Well that’s easily disproven by the fact that they boldly put “Nvidia ❤ Palantir ❤ Dell” in the same GTK Keynote. They don’t care about hiding their Palantir partnership because all they see from that partnership are $$$. DLSS5 was showcased because the AI hype is dying down and at this point Nvidia stock lives on the AI hype. Nvidia stock 3 years ago (which was the early stages of the AI hype) was ~$28, now it’s ~$174. We’re about the experience another one of those once in a lifetime economic crashes when the AI hype dies down and Nvidia stock plummets.

If Sweeney wanted to sell Epic he wouldn’t continue the legal battles with Apple, the storefront fight with Valve and he wouldn’t be laying off people to try and stay afloat. If you’re planning to sell you’re going to make the company look as strong as it has never looked before. You’d drop the moneysink lawsuit with Apple, the storefront fight with Steam and you’d stack the Fortnite calendar to have the highest engagement it has ever had and you’d be promoting the living shit out of Unreal engine (Either through some insane new feature or by announcing a new engine) and you’d release Alan Wake 2 on Steam to make the publishing side also look good. And just to be sure you’d throw out some potential new game ideas to show that you haven’t forgotten being a game dev. In short you’d have to show consistently good revenue and really great growth potential. If you want to good example how that looks like look at Bungie getting sold to Sony.

Nothing Sweeney is doing is indicating he’s planning on cashing out. If there’s going to be a sale it’s going to be out of desperation and I doubt Epic is in that dire of a state.

I didn’t think you meant it negatively because you were pretty positive about the game. I just had an issue with the eurojank label because it sets up certain expectations that IMO are not in the game. It’s like there are games some people ignore because they’re called soulslikes and those people will ignore games they might enjoy because those games have incorrectly received the “soulslike” label. Calling Tainted Grail eurojank can have the same effect where people who might enjoy the game are turned away by that label.

Something about calling it eurojank rubs me the wrong way. It’s not AAA quality but it’s also not “learn this overly complex system to understand how the game is supposed to be played” vibe that eurojank generally has. It’s lacking some polish (there’s a pun in there somewhere on the account of the developers being Polish) but it’s still relatively easy to pick up and enjoy.

I’d much rather describe it as “if The Elder Scrolls 6 sucks this is the game people will bring up to say what TES6 should’ve been like”.

It’s his job to navigate the company through this shit economy and he failed at his job. But his failure is put on the 1000 people who got laid off while he gets to continue sitting in his little castle acting like there was nothing he could do. If you want to ride his dick go ahead, I’ve got no sympathy for a failure who didn’t learn the first time around (because it’s not even 3 years from the last layoffs) and suffers no consequences for his failure.

You don’t even get why he’s being called stupid but let’s address what you said first. Would you rather get a 6 months severance and a very little opportunities to get rehired is almost impossible or keep your current job? Unless you’re stupid you’d rather keep your job. The 6 months severance with health care doesn’t matter when you’re being thrown overboard.

And he’s being called stupid because he’s throwing people overboard to keep his ship going and he’s trying to pass it off as “they’ll survive” like he’s done nothing wrong. He’d genuinely would look smarter if he just shut the fuck up and take the layoff criticisms on the chin. But you know, much like Randy Pitchford, Sweeney loves to put his foot in his mouth.

I think that’s more of an issue with OLED being really expensive. From what I’ve checked going from 16:9 IPS to 21:9 IPS should be roughly the same the price increase (percentage-wise) as going from 16:9 OLED to 21:9 OLED. Besides the bigger screen simply costing more going from 16:9 to 21:9 doesn’t really increase the cost of the monitor. It’s just the OLED itself that makes it cost so much, at least in theory.

Having used a 34 inch 21:9 monitor for over 3 years now I can’t go back to 16:9 anymore. 16:9 just feels so small. With 21:9 the extra space on the sides feel just big enough to feel so much more immersive. With my monitor it’s like the screen cuts off just where my peripheral starts so my whole focus is on the screen. I can get so much more immersed in it because all I see is the game. And just like with the images, my god how much better games look when you give it more horizontal space for framing.

It’s clear to see from the Fragile image where 16:9 stops and 21:9 continues. The left edge of 16:9 would start just left from her name and the right edge of 16:9 would be either right past her left shoulder or just cutting off the edge of her shoulder. Everything left from her name and right from her shoulder is what you don’t see in 16:9. Which isn’t that impressive on Fragiles image because there’s nothing interesting in the background. But if you look at Sam feeding the baby you see how much 21:9 adds. In 16:9 you probably see the baby on the left, Sam on the right and the only part of the room you see is the boring part between the two. Now add in the extra space from 21:9 and the room becomes more alive. You see the books behind the baby, the plant and cupboards? on the right, the whole bowl with the apple on the bottom right (the apple you probably can’t even see in 16:9) and for me it stops being just Sam and baby and becomes Sam and baby in this room. They don’t exist in some nondescript space, they exist in an actual room.

Seriously, if you want to enhance your gaming experience I completely recommend getting an ultrawide monitor. It is a game changer.