Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
There's a soft-ball interview Todd Howard did with... I wanna say IGN... could'a been Gamespot.

Anyway, in that he talks about the longevity of Skyrim and the fact that after all these years people are still playing it. But the crux of what he says (beyond all the corporate speak) is that he hates that Skyrim is its own package, and that Bethesda has no way to engage with Skyrim fans.

What he's saying is that they cannot monetise Skyrim, and that he hates that.

The next Elder Scrolls game is going to be the shell-i-est shell of a shell game you ever did see. A Live Service to end all live services. Hell, access to the graphics options menu might end up being DLC. The only way to change the volume in the game might be something you need to pre-order. Expect at least 4-8 different types of currency, with at least half of them being premium currency. Remember the character creation screen from the start of Skyrim? That'll be replaced with an in-game store.

Didn0t they allready test the waters with F76, i mean common.
Only issue it is skyrim and all people get skyrim, (except me never got it i'll wait for the fridge version). It is gonna be a removed. At this point if' we'd bet we would nearly get a 100: 1 ratio

Pretty much exactly what they did with Fallout 76.

Somewhat side-stepping the topic but on the subject of Strategy games has anybody tried out the 4X strategy game series the 'Endless' Series (endless legend and endless space 2 but dungeon of the endless was fun too). They seem like an up and comer that seems to be about listening to fan feedback a lot. The games are good too. Endless Space was a bit basic but it was their first game to my knowledge. Everything since then got much, much better.

They got taken in by Sega as the publisher at least so i'm a bit worried. I very much love how the playstyle and where and what you can build and what takes priority for each faction is a pretty big deal.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Somewhat side-stepping the topic but on the subject of Strategy games has anybody tried out the 4X strategy game series the 'Endless' Series (endless legend and endless space 2 but dungeon of the endless was fun too). They seem like an up and comer that seems to be about listening to fan feedback a lot. The games are good too. Endless Space was a bit basic but it was their first game to my knowledge. Everything since then got much, much better.

They got taken in by Sega as the publisher at least so i'm a bit worried. I very much love how the playstyle and where and what you can build and what takes priority for each faction is a pretty big deal.

I think the Endless games are some of the most beautiful games to come out in a long while in terms of the artistic direction and creativity of their team. Endless Legends is a really great fantasy game with some neat designs that really feels like a very solid fun game. It also has a bit more strategy to their battles as you set rough orders and then have to see if your units move into the correct places as the battle plays out; with the enemy able to mess up your movement with theirs.

Overall though they are still not "high" strategy battles, but they are pleasing to engage with and the empire building and expansion is deep enough.

Some dislike their combat systems, but honestly most 4* tend to have pretty bland combat as it is - Stellaris for all its great ideas has pretty much the same "charge everything see if you win" approach whereby you, again, aren't really controlling units just mashing them together. So its about the same sort of experience.


They also have a great feedback system as you've already noted and their developers seem to really enjoy working in the worlds they create and have energy and fun with them. I don't think the sega publishing has had a bad effect on them in the least and I'd be very interested to see if they go for an Endless Legends 2

Stellaris is more about fleet and ship design than actual combat tactics, yeah.

Eumerin wrote:
Anyone remember Titus? They used to own a number of companies, including Interplay. As the current big companies fade, they'll open up holes in the market that will be filled by other, newer companies. That's the way that the market works.

To be fair, Titus (and Interplay, though it still technically exists) fell because of behind-the-scenes financial shenanigans, not changes in the market or games.

Voss wrote:

Eumerin wrote:
Anyone remember Titus? They used to own a number of companies, including Interplay. As the current big companies fade, they'll open up holes in the market that will be filled by other, newer companies. That's the way that the market works.

To be fair, Titus (and Interplay, though it still technically exists) fell because of behind-the-scenes financial shenanigans, not changes in the market or games.

Won't argue with that. My understanding is that Interplay specifically fell because Titus basically stripped it of cash before off-loading it. And that, of course, led directly to the sale of Fallout to Bethesda. But the larger point still stands. Companies come and go. One of these days, it'll be EA's turn. One of these days, it'll be Activision's turn. And new companies will rise up to take their place.

The only question is how long.

 Melissia wrote:
Pretty much exactly what they did with Fallout 76.

A Fallout game without NPCs, quests or even a plot!

But you could fight Dragons like in Skyrim.

The AAA industry as a whole tends to be trend chasers and the series that define it generally live or die by how well they adapt to the new innovation that makes it big. We heavily saw this in the late 90's as big franchises tried to be relevant in 3D and again as competitive multiplayer or open world single player games became the norm. Right now, everything is converging onto co-op multiplayer in open worlds and not every property maintains its identity when shoved into that suit.

Part of why Nintendo's franchises never really die off is simply because Nintendo attempts to be an innovator and doesn't waste much effort trying to make their franchises something they're not unless they try to make them something new.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
Pretty much exactly what they did with Fallout 76.

A Fallout game without NPCs, quests or even a plot!

But you could fight Dragons like in Skyrim.

I mean how they also handled Hackers, developer room break ins etc was even more funny.


The Internet Historian made a fairly nice video all about Fallout76.
There's also a vide online containing over 1000 bugs i belive.

Look at it positively, due to Bethesdas incompetence they might feth over Skyrim v2.0 the monetization boogaloo, and i for one would be happy.

Fallout76 looks like a tech demo/PoC that wasn't going to go on to Production - but they figured some people might want to play it anyways.

If that's true, it makes a lot of sense. That would be totally reasonable. And it's a great game as a result.

If that's not true, and it's a full-effort "real game", it's a terrible shame piece of garbage.

I have no idea which is true.

Actually its neither. Too many features are ripped straight out of FO4 and barely modified.

If its a test of anything, its of their server tech and multiplayer software.

Voss wrote:
Actually its neither. Too many features are ripped straight out of FO4 and barely modified.

If its a test of anything, its of their server tech and multiplayer software.

It's a assetflip reminiscent of steam assetflips with the audacity of demanding fullprice and besmerching a loved franchise.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
So far as i know a lot of the bigger old game series from EA and bethesda seem to be going extinct. Wolfenstein seems to get bad reviews from anybody that's actually played the game (basically being a looter shooter with connection problems between the co-op partners). EA is to game franchises like the asteroid was to the dinosaurs. Mass effect is pretty much dead. The last Battlefield game i know of did poorly. Overall there's probably only a few AAA game series that are any good anymore (anything from CD projekt red or the main xcom games). I'll let you guys fill in the rest of what you think is good or bad.

The wolfenstein game is a little cheap gimmick to tide fans over until 3 gets a launch, probably next year. Bethesda is actually riding high right now, even FO76 has a fairly stable player base.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Bharring wrote:
Fallout76 looks like a tech demo/PoC that wasn't going to go on to Production - but they figured some people might want to play it anyways.

If that's true, it makes a lot of sense. That would be totally reasonable. And it's a great game as a result.

If that's not true, and it's a full-effort "real game", it's a terrible shame piece of garbage.

I have no idea which is true.

Um. It was clearly made to be a live-service game in order to jump Bethesda into the F2P market.

 Togusa wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
So far as i know a lot of the bigger old game series from EA and bethesda seem to be going extinct. Wolfenstein seems to get bad reviews from anybody that's actually played the game (basically being a looter shooter with connection problems between the co-op partners). EA is to game franchises like the asteroid was to the dinosaurs. Mass effect is pretty much dead. The last Battlefield game i know of did poorly. Overall there's probably only a few AAA game series that are any good anymore (anything from CD projekt red or the main xcom games). I'll let you guys fill in the rest of what you think is good or bad.

The wolfenstein game is a little cheap gimmick to tide fans over until 3 gets a launch, probably next year. Bethesda is actually riding high right now, even FO76 has a fairly stable player base.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Bharring wrote:
Fallout76 looks like a tech demo/PoC that wasn't going to go on to Production - but they figured some people might want to play it anyways.

If that's true, it makes a lot of sense. That would be totally reasonable. And it's a great game as a result.

If that's not true, and it's a full-effort "real game", it's a terrible shame piece of garbage.

I have no idea which is true.

Um. It was clearly made to be a live-service game in order to jump Bethesda into the F2P market.

Not f2p, it was an attempt at a live Service premium game like GTA online with a pricetag.
Altough with repairkits and other ease of live add ons it severly resenbles Fee to play games.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Togusa wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
So far as i know a lot of the bigger old game series from EA and bethesda seem to be going extinct. Wolfenstein seems to get bad reviews from anybody that's actually played the game (basically being a looter shooter with connection problems between the co-op partners). EA is to game franchises like the asteroid was to the dinosaurs. Mass effect is pretty much dead. The last Battlefield game i know of did poorly. Overall there's probably only a few AAA game series that are any good anymore (anything from CD projekt red or the main xcom games). I'll let you guys fill in the rest of what you think is good or bad.

The wolfenstein game is a little cheap gimmick to tide fans over until 3 gets a launch, probably next year. Bethesda is actually riding high right now, even FO76 has a fairly stable player base.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Bharring wrote:
Fallout76 looks like a tech demo/PoC that wasn't going to go on to Production - but they figured some people might want to play it anyways.

If that's true, it makes a lot of sense. That would be totally reasonable. And it's a great game as a result.

If that's not true, and it's a full-effort "real game", it's a terrible shame piece of garbage.

I have no idea which is true.

Um. It was clearly made to be a live-service game in order to jump Bethesda into the F2P market.

Not f2p, it was an attempt at a live Service premium game like GTA online with a pricetag.
Altough with repairkits and other ease of live add ons it severly resenbles Fee to play games.

Good point, I am not really well up on the terminology these days. :S

Tbf i am only up with terminoligy since i am forced due to my studies (Philosophy) and because i have that itch for a really good game and got Burned with battlefield and Fallout 4.

So i started informing myself a bit.
Still atm it's a gakshow bar non from the medium to large publishers.
Everyone and their mother trying to sell live Services.

I suspect that the term you were looking for is "subscription-less".

Games like WoW and FFXIV require a subscription. Games like GW2 and Division require an initial purchase, but are free after that. Games like Candy Crush are free to play.

I also doubt the big AAA games are dying, they just lose their veteran audience, which will not put up with their gak.

And the lower numbers are overall compensated by monetisation. (overmonetisation, etc) Including but not limited to:
fee2play models,
Ease of life sales,
Slashing up games into preorder etc DLC's /taking parts of games hostage,
DLC that should've been basegame content (looking at you paradox)
Artificial Grind and denial of options to skip it in single player games in order to sell time savers (Ubisoft)
P2W most recently with actibliz in COD,
P2W matchmaking again see actibliz,
Live service scams like GTAV online casino and sharkcards,
Capitalizing on cheaper development costs (yes development costs actually have gone down in the recent years, much more then inflation has gone up so that 60 $ game as before is actually costing the company to make much less)


Yeah that is about it for the Tripple A industry, games get worse, they compensate their gakky sales numbers with microtransactions and monetization.

Not Online!!! wrote:
yes development costs actually have gone down in the recent years

I'm curious as to why you think this is the case?

It's something that could use clarification.

On the one hand, yes, development costs are down. A one-man team can throw out today the kind of game you needed two dozen people for twenty years ago. Technology and tools have advanced that you can put together a quality game with way less than you used to need.

At the same time, they're not down at all because game publishers, particularly the big house AAA publishers, finance games the way Hollywood finances movies: pour increasing amounts of money into the project and hope for a big return. Which arguably is not working the way they would like.

Development cycles for a game like Call of Duty are pretty cheap. They have constant rotations of staff working on two year cycles to put those games out. It's not that expensive.

Then you have big multi-year projects like Tomb Raider's 2014 rebook and Anthem, that get mountains of money poured into them hoping for huge paybacks that don't materialize because the games market is not the movie market.

So yes, development has gotten "cheaper." But I don't think that's done anything to affect retail prices as much as consumers already thinking games cost too much. Developers have mostly sunk their savings by spending even more money in pursuit of bigger payouts at the AAA level. The beneficiaries of cheaper development costs are mostly indie and small-house developers.

A.T. wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
yes development costs actually have gone down in the recent years

I'm curious as to why you think this is the case?

this for once.

Improved engines with longer life circles. For generations used slightly modified engines (cough fallout 76 dragons?)
Engines for lease.
Etc.
Groundwork is rarely done these days, for engines, and that is generally what cost as much.
With stable console generations it also alows for lazyness in update cycles to these engines, leading to masterpieces like Bethesdas still sticking around.

Not Online!!! wrote:
this for once.

Boglins, that's a blast from the past.

From a quick skim of the video he states outright that the costs of making the game have gone up (just under 2 minutes in), and the rest of the video is the argument that the games are being sold in an excessively piecemeal way to disguise the actual purchase cost of the full thing.

The sheer number of people required for content generation can be pretty crazy. Which is not to say that some developers and publishers arn't rinsing it for all it's worth.

Not Online!!! wrote:
With stable console generations it also alows for lazyness in update cycles to these engines

It's a two edged sword IMO. People expect things to improve year on year and if the hardware isn't getting faster then it's the engine that needs to get faster instead.

A.T. wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
this for once.

Boglins, that's a blast from the past.

From a quick skim of the video he states outright that the costs of making the game have gone up (just under 2 minutes in), and the rest of the video is the argument that the games are being sold in an excessively piecemeal way to disguise the actual purchase cost of the full thing.

The sheer number of people required for content generation can be pretty crazy. Which is not to say that some developers and publishers arn't rinsing it for all it's worth.

Not Online!!! wrote:
With stable console generations it also alows for lazyness in update cycles to these engines

It's a two edged sword IMO. People expect things to improve year on year and if the hardware isn't getting faster then it's the engine that needs to get faster instead.

OK another exemple, a purely PC exemple, where you don't have stable hardware.
Total war.
Since ETW the same gak engine, slightly modified and one of the reasons why melee ever since sucked in results and outnumbering became irelevant since a Elite unit just can tank them. (WHTW 1 -2 not withholding due to actual improvements but we are still talking about nigh a decade of the same cheap engine)

Not Online!!! wrote:
Since ETW the same gak engine, slightly modified and one of the reasons why melee ever since sucked in results and outnumbering became irelevant since a Elite unit just can tank them.

I'm not familiar with the total war series, but you are describing game logic not engine code.

But a company re-using an old engine past its sell by date doesn't equate to game development costs in general going are down, nor is it a new thing.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Tbf i am only up with terminoligy since i am forced due to my studies (Philosophy) and because i have that itch for a really good game and got Burned with battlefield and Fallout 4.

So i started informing myself a bit.
Still atm it's a gakshow bar non from the medium to large publishers.
Everyone and their mother trying to sell live Services.

FO4 isn't as bad as I originally thought. When it came out I dumped around 50 hours into it and I hated it.

Recently I've gone back with the intent of beating all the game, and I'm about 140 hours in. Having a lot of fun, looking forward to trying out some mods and stuff. Far Harbor and Nuka World are great, it's a shame those who wrote these DLCs didn't write the main game!

 Togusa wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Tbf i am only up with terminoligy since i am forced due to my studies (Philosophy) and because i have that itch for a really good game and got Burned with battlefield and Fallout 4.

So i started informing myself a bit.
Still atm it's a gakshow bar non from the medium to large publishers.
Everyone and their mother trying to sell live Services.

FO4 isn't as bad as I originally thought. When it came out I dumped around 50 hours into it and I hated it.

Recently I've gone back with the intent of beating all the game, and I'm about 140 hours in. Having a lot of fun, looking forward to trying out some mods and stuff. Far Harbor and Nuka World are great, it's a shame those who wrote these DLCs didn't write the main game!

Go to Far harbour ASAP, imagine a morally grey story with interesting charachters.

However the main story is just bad for fallout, that is if you regard 1-2 and New Vegas as the og. Even F3 had more to it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

A.T. wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Since ETW the same gak engine, slightly modified and one of the reasons why melee ever since sucked in results and outnumbering became irelevant since a Elite unit just can tank them.

I'm not familiar with the total war series, but you are describing game logic not engine code.

But a company re-using an old engine past its sell by date doesn't equate to game development costs in general going are down, nor is it a new thing.

It does though, you can look at the sales reports for Sega etc.
Development cost is down. PR is Up.
EA recently showed it's numbers and there was more money made with Microtransactions than with regular sales, also development is down since years.. If development is down then yes producing games got cheaper no?

Not Online!!! wrote:
It does though, you can look at the sales reports for Sega etc.
Development cost is down. PR is Up.

Segas financial report is 151 pages long, and their site lists all of two upcoming releases in 2019 - an HD version of super monkey ball and a reboxed megadrive emulator.

Not Online!!! wrote:
EA recently showed it's numbers and there was more money made with Microtransactions than with regular sales, also development is down since years.. If development is down then yes producing games got cheaper no?

No, it means you are making less/smaller games (or in the case of publishers like EA are hiring people to make smaller/less games - or perhaps just squeezing them harder).

The primary costs of making a game are staff (and their support), licencing, outsourcing (including voice actors/etc), and PR. None of those things have gotten cheaper, nor has the cut that steam or third party engines take come down.

A.T. wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
It does though, you can look at the sales reports for Sega etc.
Development cost is down. PR is Up.

Segas financial report is 151 pages long, and their site lists all of two upcoming releases in 2019 - an HD version of super monkey ball and a reboxed megadrive emulator.

Not Online!!! wrote:
EA recently showed it's numbers and there was more money made with Microtransactions than with regular sales, also development is down since years.. If development is down then yes producing games got cheaper no?

No, it means you are making less/smaller games (or in the case of publishers like EA are hiring people to make smaller/less games - or perhaps just squeezing them harder).

The primary costs of making a game are staff (and their support), licencing, outsourcing (including voice actors/etc), and PR. None of those things have gotten cheaper, nor has the cut that steam or third party engines take come down.

MHM; and why are the games smaller in the first place?
(i guess because either A carved up DLC / Microtransaction messes or B life service BS.)
And guess is really the only thing we can do.
All we know is that the numbers went down.

Not Online!!! wrote:


MHM; and why are the games smaller in the first place?.

Partly because companies get a lot more data back about how people play games, without the bias of surveys (ie, directly from time played and achievements from steam and Xbox Live and whatever). Despite what people think, achievements aren't really for players. They're for devs.

To use Total Warhammer 2 as an example. 12.6% of all players on steam (globally, unless they've specifically taken the effort to play offline and/or hide their data in someway) won a campaign as the high elves It drops to 7% for TK, and Lizards, 6% for dark elves, 4.3% for Vampire Coast and 3.5% for skaven. That tells them a lot, not only about popularity of factions, but how few people bother to get to the end.
The number of people who bother to even play a single multiplayer battle is less than 30%. That tells them a lot of how to assign resources, no matter how people on forums whine about their priorities, there's a really good reason for neglecting certain gameplay aspects. [A better question is why CA puts so much time into multiplayer, to be honest)


Combine with time played and more traditional games, and developers get a very accurate idea that most people play a game for maybe 20 hours and many to most don't ever bother to finish them. So making long, complicated games is literally wasting their time and money for a lot of genres. So they don't.

Sucks for those of who like them, but based on the data they get, a reasonable approach for game studios.