thats a shitty excuse if i ever heard one
More like it’s a shitty headline. The article shows there’s a little more to it, specifically that it was going to go over budget and they hadn’t figured out what they were gonna do.
man who normally buys “narrative-driven, story-rich games” forced to put his money back into his wallet
Anything good you can recommend? Haven’t seen much good since Witcher 3… And before that, maybe Gothic 2 or Oblivion.
If you liked the story driven elements of TW3 you might like Cyberpunk 2077. Its very similar story and eigime wise since they’re both made by CDPR, but obviously very different thematically. God of War is another story driven narrative driven game I enjoyed.
Since The Witcher 3 came out, my favorite video game stories have been Disco Elysium, Cyberpunk 2077, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, Alan Wake 2, Citizen Sleeper, and Metaphor: ReFantazio. I also really liked Death Stranding, but Kojima’s not for everyone.
Baldurs gate 3? One of the best games I ever played.
I haven’t played it, but based on everything I’ve read about it, that alone puts the headline to shame.
This man is spitting straight fire.
You know, maybe i dont know enough about games as i am a casual these days, aside from baldurs gate 3 which is a fucking masterpiece, i really like the 2 (soon to be 3) star wars jedi games outcast and survivour. They are like a much easier souls mixed with the 3d prince of persia (sands of time, warrior within, two thrones) games but are very story driven. I am very excited to see what will happen in the final game in the trilogy qhen it comes out.
Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2, if you haven’t played already. Think of them as the stepping stones for BG3.
Spec Ops: The Line is a 3rd person shooter with an incredible story, I think it takes 4-6 hours to go through the campaign. Short when compared to RPGs, but worth the time. People also talk about Titanfall 2’s campaign being great, I haven’t played it yet.
Mass Effect trilogy is also very good, mainly the 2nd game. The first game is the jankiest of the bunch and the 3rd is much better after all the DLC, though I still don’t like how the optional Paragon/Renegade prompts from 2 became obligatory QTE in 3.
…Yakuza
Bros being bros forever.
I’ve been loving Metaphor recently
Currently sucked into Kingdom Come Deliverance, which is similar to TW3 in that it’s a first person story driven game, but set in IRL 1403 Bohemia instead of the fantasy setting. Very good historical storytelling, I think.
TW3 is third person
I’ve a love/hate relationship with Rogue Trader 40k. I fucking love it, literally everything about it, but I also hate it because it will end at some point.
The title is a bit missleading considering that the actual article mentions a lot other problems that plagued the development.
Project 8 faced both progress and challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult, but some quality improvements were achieved. However, critical issues persisted, causing delays and budget increases. The latest review revealed unresolved problems needing more time and money, along with revised sales forecasts, raising doubts about the project’s profitability.
– TLDR by Microsoft copilotWhile there’s still demand for “narrative-driven story-rich games” one should keep realistic expectations. For this genre I feel smaller scope and indie developers work much better.
I think it’s probably true though. I pitched my game to them and they graciously responded and said they are looking into publishing narrative driven games but rather mechanically complex games.
Oof.
“The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult,”
Makes me suspect they were woefully behind the rest of the field in development practices. My team, and many others, gained productivity when all the wasteful manager ego stroking in-person meetings stopped.
Alternately, it tells us they rely on a weird dev kit with a lot of esoteric hardware. Though I would still call that out as being super out of date. Nothing is particularly hard to emulate today, for teams that prioritize having rebuildable test environmenta.
Just wild.
Bummer about the layoffs. Probably won’t fix their agility problem, though.
Typical infantile C-suite logic “I didn’t do X well, therefore X is impossible and no one can do X! It’s not my fault, I swear!”
Maybe the people are just out of touch? I’m sure that’s it.
No it’s the gamers who are wrong
Obviously this is just me, but here is a list of the last 5 games I purchased that were not smaller indie titles:
Stalker 2, Elden ring, remnant 2, bg3, dragon’s dogma 2
You could argue that remnant is intended for multiplayer and you could argue that maybe only bg3 and stalker and really narrative driven but the truth is, anymore I tend to buy single player and stream to my friends than I do actually play mp games. The only mp game i was tempted by was Helldivers and I was just too busy at the time.
Anything else are steam deck friendly indie games. I buy a lot of those, and bought a lot even before I had a deck.
In my anecdotal experience, when I see x game is multiplayer, or live service, or just not an experience I can enjoy on my own time I tune it out. For example, I always bought Diablo games but I don’t own 4.
I also immediately think of some other big ones that I opted out of, like Wukong. People fucking love single player games when they are good games. I think the real issue is developing a good game is hard. Developing a game with dark practices and otherwise addicting (but not necessarily fun) gameplay is a much easier way to make uninspired games made by committee.
It’s just easier to point the blame at the market than actually admit that upon self reflection you realized it is best to avoid the hard part of game development.
I liked Frostpunk and would have loved a story driven game in that universe.
I’m going to guess they mean narrative-driven “games” like Hellblade or Indika, which were all narrative and almost no game.
even so they both were extremely well received
If Frostpunk is their idea of a “narrative-driven, story-rich game”, I can see why they have concerns.
That’s not how anyone describes that game, and if they did, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been canceled. Frostpunk did pretty well.
Sony has been screaming the exact opposite of this and it continues to garner them a fuck ton of cash. You don’t even need Sony money to do it, as per Baldurs gate that many are also referencing here in the comments.
There’s no way they actually believe that, the C-suite simply can’t stop salivating over the potential money a live service game can potentially provide
This is exactly it. They don’t like their profit margin.
Ah, so managerial problems again who would have thought but that’s OK we that make the things can suffer a little more
Larian rn:
To be fair, BG3 is like bottled lightning, and I think it’s unreasonable to expect many (if any) other studios to produce something like that.
Even the Divinity games were way above par, with a much more lukewarm (but not unsuccessful, I guess?) reception.
Shit I loved Divinity Original Sin and the sequel, but even I don’t think Larian could match or exceed BG3
Thats the studio head talking bullahit.
Not the actual creatorsDid we already forget that BG3 existed like once year later…?
Cyberpunk 2077, RDR2 still wasn’t that long ago, Dragon Age Veilguard was actually a success convincing even EA, Star Wars Jedi series, the list goes on. It just has to be a good story, you can’t just slap some boring ass story in there.
Odd to say Veilguard was a success when from what I can tell, one of the few things uniting the very fractured and divided gaming community this year was that the writing in Veilguard was horrible. And you know that’s true when the various members of that community can give their own varied reasons why the writing was horrible and they would all be valid.
I only see that in some communities. Most of the people that hate on veilguard, from what I’ve seen, either haven’t played the game or are clipping parts out of context.
The complaints I’ve seen that aren’t “dur hur, binary qunari” talk about the shaky dialogue in the beginning, where things felt awkward and clunky, like a new team forming. I’ll give credence to the complaints about some depth being lost in the characters versus other games in the series, but I think those people feel that way because Inquisituon was a bloated mess (that I love) and they’ve played 1 and 2 so many times in different ways they’re meshing all the dialogue into one. Playing through veilguard a second time, and watching my partner take different choices than me, made the characters on par with Mass Effect 2 allies. Which, I’d say isn’t an accomplishment so much as a mild chastisement that it hasn’t improved since then.
Haven’t played, but I found this (negative) review compelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF-Kd2BBpx8
He did play through the whole game.
But, to drive home in case it isn’t clear, I love Dragon Age and I think this one ranks higher than Inquisition (but not trespasser DLC), on par with 2, and above 1 for me. I do not think it’s a Pinnacle of modern writing, it definitely suffered from some development struggles and that comes through in the final act as things get a little rushed and content feels more like a drip than a faucet. But then it wraps up well, or I thought it did.
It can use improvements, but I feel about it as i felt about 2 when it came out. “This is a change, and I’m not sure it’s what i wanted, but I do like the universe and the combat is a lot of fun and the characters as a whole are interesting”.
Veilguard is far from success, and it’s because it’s the worst-written DA game to date. And that is on EA. They had every chance to make it a good game (as the art book they published shows just what a good story it was shaping up to be before EA forced them to start over for a live service version) but they chose to waste everyone’s time for 10 years by changing their mind mid development multiple times, firing the veteran team members right in the middle of development…
Dragon Age Veilguard was actually a success
They finally confirmed or denied this claim?
If the leaks to be trusted, they expected to sell 10 million copies but now they’re talking about they maybe can sell 3 million copies for the lifetime of the game.
In others words, not a success, pretty bad for a IP so famous like Dragon Age
It was very telling EA announced almost right after the launch that they won’t release any DLC’s and they’re moving the team to ME5 already. If that was not the sign EA left DA:V for dead, I don’t know what was.
Back of the napkin math says they’ve already sold about 1.5M on Steam so far. A handful of sales like they one they’ve got right now should help them easily blow past 3.
Aren’t those awful numbers? Like, a big successful AAA grant does way more than 1.5mil in it’s first week. If interest was there they’d be over 3mil by now.
It’s all going to be relative to what they spent, which I don’t know. If they only spent $70M, they already made their money back. It’s looking like they’ll probably make their money back regardless, unless they spent an entire GTA6 on this thing, which I doubt. These are also only the Steam numbers that I’m calculating based on how many reviews it has; the PS5 version likely did quite well too.
Honestly I can’t think of a recent game I enjoyed that wasn’t a narrative-driven story rich game.
Doom eternal comes to mind
It had a bit of narrative (killing the corrupted son of the traitor out of mercy and to save the world, killing the corrupted angel like beings because they are a threat to humanity), but you’re right, what really drives you is the fun gameplay loop and the challenge of escalating difficulty.
They’re the only games I enjoy. And I could’ve sworn I’ve seen people all over the internet lamenting the loss of story-driven single player games in this era of GTA online. These douchebags are either salivating looking at GTA online profitability and talking bullshit or they’re so goddamn deluded with their head so far up their own ass that they can’t tell their colon from their pancreas.
On the topic, anyway: my favorite games are RDR2, Cyberpunk, and Alan Wake 2. I wasn’t always a gamer, but the graphics have gotten so good and the stories so involved (in these here specifically) that I became one later in life. But now I’ve played all three of those games to death. Do you have any recs for similar games I might enjoy? I was just looking around the PS store and felt like I was swimming through nonsense. I really wanted to play Stalker 2, but it’s not out for PS5 yet. The next game I’m eyeing is a silent Hill 2 remake. Not a big fantasy person, either. I like stories with their feet in the real world. Don’t mean to single you out to give me advice, but figured I’d ask in case you had something you really liked.
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Did these developers completely miss Baldurs Gate 3
We could spend all day and night listing successful SP games, I bet they canceled it because the game was just bad.
I think highlighting the success story is kind of missing both the great circumstances Larian built that game under, and the giant mountain of singleplayer games that are pretty good, but hit no success at all.
