I mean the former leads (or at least one of them) say the game was ready for Early Access, the publisher says it wasn’t. This could be the deciding factor if the studio gets the bonus or not.

Although today the publisher said some previously leaked slides were real, that show how the potential EA release fell way behind schedule over the years and would have been pretty bare-bones and that a delay would have made sense.

Yes. That’s why I said nobody really knows at this point, except the people involved.

The leads allegedly also were looking to gain $225 Million dollars (supposedly 90% of a $250 Million bonus), so of course they are saying the game is ready.

Charlie Cleveland did say they were going to split the bonus with the team, but imma be honest, why not put that into writing? Why take that huge cut in the first place, and then trust that the leads are going to do the right thing.

I don’t think at this point you can really be sure of anything. Since the former leads have said they’ve filed a lawsuit (but not for what they’re suing), it’ll most likely come out at one point.

My assumption is that Krafton expected the leads to put in 12 hour days 7 days a week to meet ridiculous expectations and the leads took some vacation time or something along those lines.

This is from the lead himself, on his movie production website:

I’m Charlie Cleveland and I’ve been designing video games for over 25 years. I founded Unknown Worlds and built games like Natural Selection, Natural Selection 2, Subnautica and Moonbreaker. I absolutely love making games but wanted to try something new.

At the end of 2023, I left San Francisco after almost 20 years and moved to Los Angeles to reset my life. Instead of taking it easy, I now find myself working on multiple film projects. It’s amazing how fast it’s all happening - being right in the thick of things makes it so much easier to meet like-minded people!

Also, according to this link, he’s taking a break from making video games, for at least a couple of months now, before all this stuff was out.

It might not be as one-sided as you think. But right now it’s he said, she said, so nobody really knows.

In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.

Ok, but what if…you just kill bosses in five hits, because they don’t have any HP?

It’s an overexaggeration of course, but the enemies definitely have a lot less HP than in coop, not even just 1/3 or whatever (seemingly).

Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.

From what I saw, solo is a lot easier than coop (streams of the game, not played it myself yet). Enemies have basically no HP, and you can predict what they do, just like in a normal Souls game. Also, you’re not getting matched with randoms.

If you’re playing with friends, sit in voice chat, that might get easier for you again.

I think the indie games genre is just a vibe, not if something is really independent or not.

Like nobody is calling Witcher or Cyberpunk an indie game, even though it didn’t have an outside publisher. Conversely, most people would probably say Bastion or Journey are indie games, even though Warner and Sony published the games.

Ok? It was a temporary voice file that the devs forgot to remove or replace. And people immediately screamed that Blizzard is trying to sneak AI into the game.

Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I’m… kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic

Diablo 4 had this recently, where an obviously Microsoft Sam like robot voice made it through, and a few people lost their minds.

Nope, the game is and will probably always be spammy. Everyone has unlimited ammo. I definitely prefer this btw.

There’s map control of course, just not like arena shooters. Most maps have changing objectives, around which the fights happen.

Instead of more difficult weapons you’re managing your abilities and cooldowns.

That’s just the kind of game OW is.

I’ve been playing for about two months now, after a multi-year break from the game. Just casual, not competitive (although Stadium is classified as competitive). It’s great.

Two bad things for me. Flex Queue means Tank, which sucks, because I’d like to play all roles, but now have to just queue DPS/Heal. Also, the matchmaker is shit, so most games are relatively one-sided (Quick Play and Stadium).

to this day, I still have no idea how DOS and DOS2 are related plotwise

They’re in the same world, but a thousand years apart or something, so there is no real connection.

Small references to the first game with books, maybe dialog a few times, nothing major.

It’s a dumb hypothetical, because of a dumb question.

Depends on who you ask. Square might have projected 15m sales on the first day, in which case it did.

BG3 tried it with Bear sex. I guess we aren’t ready for that yet, but our kids are gonna love it.

BG3 and Cyberpunk have boobs and were a success, which would support that statement. But Wukong, Palword, and Monster Hunter Wilds were even more successful (according to concurrent Steam players), which means animals are the true secret to success.

The only thing I know is that access to the specific purchase might get blocked, if there’s a payment issue. Not Steam directly, but a friend of mine once bought Diablo 3 for WoW gold on Battle.net, something happened after a while, and he lost access to the game, dunno if the other side refunded the game or whatever. All the other games still worked, but he’d have to buy D3 again to play it. I would be surprised if Steam blocks the whole account.

If they mean you buy a game, then there’s a problem with payment, but they should still let you download and play, that’s dumb.

The part about Steam Support being extremely slow is also old news. I think that’s been a lot better for years now. I don’t know if it was around the time they were forced to implement refunds, but I think that’s all outsourced now, and you don’t have to hope a Valve dev checks the support mailbox anymore.

I’m not interested in the Switch 2, but things like that are why I thought about buying one for like a second, just to have a low firmware one.

Finally, some real examples, where EGS is better than Steam, that actually impact people and might make them use EGS. Price is probably the most important one. If someone from Argentina pays like half as much on EGS as they would on Steam (don’t know how much it actually is), because EGS actually accepts their local currency and they don’t have to pay in USD or something, then it makes sense to switch to EGS

Also, EGS is better for devs than Steam, with revenue share, now even more so, as mentioned in the post. I don’t think a lot of people will buy on EGS solely for that reason, but it is something.

The OP says global preloading and gifting are going live soon

That’s why I mentioned them. You basically said, people (maybe unjustly) talk shit about EGS because of missing features like that, when they also have some advantages over Steam, and then talk about the most mundane stuff. “I might not be able to pre-load this game, but at least I can cap my download at 13468kb/s.” Those two are not the same.

It was very convenient to have everything in one place

As I said, with the button to switch to the Chat inside the Steam app, it’s basically the same. What is the real difference of clicking that button and switching to a different app, compared to clicking that button and switching to a new screen inside the same app? I genuinely can’t think of one. You could argue a separate app is better, because now you can open both apps at the same time in split screen, so you can browse the store or community pages, while chatting (I wouldn’t do that, but it’s possible).

I’m not sure the discounts offered via bundles on Steam are an overall better deal compared to Epic offering cashback of 5% on everything, sometimes increased to 20% (like now)

Probably not, most of the time, and this post doesn’t detail what bundling for EGS means. Steam has normal game bundles and the Complete-your-Collection bundles, which is dynamic and can give some extra discounts.

However, with Steam keys from legit third-party sites, you might get an even better deal at times, maybe better than on EGS, so I don’t really know where it’s the cheapest.

Wishlisting specific Game Editions would be nice, but how are you comparing nice-to-have features like that or custom download limits to stuff like Pre-Loading, Gifting, Bundles, etc.

For me, a separate Chat app for Steam is also a complete non-issue. I can’t really think of anything, that would improve, if it was integrated in the normal Steam app. Separate download and one initial login less? You can launch the Chat app from the Steam app itself, so you don’t even save that single extra tap to launch it, and for the user it’s basically the same as an integrated chat.