All developers eventually become “soulless corporations grinding away at an IP to maximize profits for the next quarter.” They have to, because otherwise they die forever and take their IPs with them to the grave or sell them to corporations.

Support who you want, but understand that the developers who work for Ubisoft, at the very least some of them, have passion and good ideas. There are circumstances that can lead to those people not being at the surface or even being intentionally held back/bullied from realizing those ideas.

I partially disagree. I don’t want Ubisoft to die. I want them to make good and fun games, like they used to 15 years ago. I want AAA to be like it once was. And I reward when AAA games are like that by buying them.

Gamers want to give our money to developers and publishers. But we want good quality games that at the very least match (but ideally surpass) the quality of experiences we used to get in the past. Recently, Ubisoft has not been providing that, and thus Ubisoft sales have been plummeting. Now, is this a failure of executives? Developers? I say likely both.

Give the developers autonomy for one game, where there is zero executive involvement in the development and see how it goes. If it does well, then just let them make another game with full autonomy. If it goes poorly, make employment cuts on the team or move them around because clearly they didn’t do well even without executive direction. But also keep in mind if another huge competitor takes over, like releasing next to GTA6, pretty much every other games sales will suffer most likely (unless its $100 at launch lol).

Its not a hard decision to make when it comes to business. Any person with a single braincell can see this. The problem is that giving a studio full autonomy is a financial risk. There is great potential for failure when executives feel like they have no control. Businesses are too risk averse now to make such simple decisions. They would rather maintain control of a sinking ship instead of giving crew members autonomy to try to right the ship. Its crazy to me.

The Adventures of Cookie & Cream 2, lets go

Wait until you get to the real Star Trek, the actual good ones. Next Generation, DS9, Voyager, etc. Whatever they’re making now is literally garbage compared to what they used to make.

But to be fair, that is exactly the same case as Star Wars. Used to be pretty good, now Disney has run it into the floor.

What? I thought Ubisoft was saying sales were really strong and how Outlaws was such a big success?

I’m going to guess this is the exact same case with Assassins Creed. An AC game set in feudal Japan should have been a Grand Slam. Literally everyone wanted it. But leave it up to Ubisoft to find ways to make money from a printer drop right into the shredder.

It’s more than just bugs and “blandness.” Clearly people aren’t buying what Ubisoft is making, and they keep changing stuff but none of the things they change are the reasons people aren’t buying their games. It is crazy to me that executives continue to learn the wrong lesson from failed games 100% of the time. And then they ignore gamers when we straight up tell them what they should have changed. Crazy.

Its was similar in some way, but it was also very different in others.

With the exception of Ghost Recon 1, which was first person, the series was always a third person shooter genre, but it occasionally was first person depending on the platform and the game (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 is in first person only for PS2, Xbox, and PC, but is optionally third person on Xbox 360. GRAW 2 is in third person for all platforms). Most Ghost Recon games are third person, and this was likely an intentional choice to make a game that does not directly compete with Rainbow Six, another Ubisoft series.

Ghost Recon had some semblance of realism, but not on the level of Rainbow Six and definitely not on the level of Ready or Not. Rainbow Six in its later years also began to lose its realistic style and became more and more fanciful, culminating in Siege having crossovers that don’t make sense for the game or genre (I love NieR, but 2B does not belong in Rainbow Six, and her model in the game looks awful anyway).

Ghost Recons biggest difference is that Ghost Recon has a military focus, whereas Rainbow Six is more focused on SWAT or counterterrorism efforts. To this end, Rainbow Six often featured levels with enclosed spaces such as the inside of buildings or airplanes and a lot of close quarters combat, while Ghost Recon favors more open maps and long range encounters. Ghost Recon also featured vehicles and vehicular combat sections while Rainbow Six generally did not. For example, Ghost Recon would sometimes have a helicopter or tank appear to assist your squad in combat, perhaps against another enemy vehicle. If Rainbow Six ever featured a vehicle, it definitely wasnt a tank assisting your squad, and at most was a helicopter shooting through building glass or something similar.

Yeah, it was Rainbow Six, not Ghost Recon lol.

It’s this. Japanese businesses almost always only truly care about the Japanese market. If something does well in foreign countries but does poorly in Japan, it can be expected that product will never be made again, or changes will be made to attempt to make it sell more in Japan, even if that means alienating the rest of the foreign market that already liked the way it was.

I only bring up RE4 since it released in 2005. Morrowind is even older at 2002. My point was more that there aren’t any indie games that match the content or polish of those games, as old as they are.

Its mostly a limit of indie in general. Not enough money or time to match AAA games of even 20 years ago. AA absolutely should be at minimum matching 20 year old games, but even the funding AA gets should be enough for AAA games from 2010.

I would argue that is not true. I don’t see many Indie games that match AAA games from 2010 in polish or content, honestly. Maybe there are a few, but I cannot think of any off the too of my head. Most are like AAA of 25+ years ago.

On a technical level it may be achievable that an Indie game matches a 2010 AAA game, but I think mechanically speaking that has not happened yet. Indie games have a hard time even matching the content and polish of 20 year old games from 2005. Where is the Indie Resident Evil 4, or Elder Scrolls III Morrowind? Some Indie games try to compete, but they either aren’t polished enough, look like they released in 1999, or are too short in content to compare to those games.

We need to go back. Everything now is too sterile. Publishers do not take any risks on games anymore. We don’t get games like Illbleed or Burnout from AAA funding anymore. Games that look at a genre and really ask what actually belongs in that genre.

Nowadays its all unoptimized Unreal Engine copy-paste Over the Shoulder perspective slop.

Indie is being more experimental these days simply because of how easy it is to develop video games now, but still lacks the necessary funding to create experiences on par with what AAA can offer.

Whatever you are willing to pay, since they are most likely looking for a new job. They have experience in damage stacking and liability research. And stapling.

Well hopefully this means SAGs wanted clause that forced non-union actors to join SAG or leave a project after I think 3 (?) sessions on a job is NOT approved.

People can join a union if they want, but nobody should be forced to join a union against their will.

That’s basically the point of a tariff; to discourage people from buying foreign goods and to encourage production and sale of domestic goods instead.

The only times it doesn’t work correctly is when too much of the general populace refuses to do the work necessary to create production, domestic regulations make production locally too prohibitively expensive, and/or when domestic product manufacturers raise their prices to match the new higher tariffed prices, effectively cancelling the intended benefits of a tariff.

The USA right now is kinda seeing the effects of all 3. It has been so reliant on imports for such a long time that trying to cut that off all at once is having a more pronounced effect than if its import reliance was curtailed more slowly and started a while ago. And since there is no regulation (AFAIK) saying that domestic good prices cannot raise to match imported good prices when tariffed, that doesn’t help either. Businesses want the most money, and if all the other options for a product are $150 and their domestic one is only $50, without law saying they can’t match those other prices businesses feel like they are leaving $100 on the table.

Game studios don’t only work on one game at a time, especially not big studios like Bethesda.

Give players a copy of the server so they can host their own, or patch the game to allow direct connections like games used to have in the 90s and 00s?

I would just like to mention that it is called “gacha” not “gotcha.”

“Gacha” is short for the Japanese term gachapon, which means “capsule toy.” You remember gumball machines? You put a quarter in and twist the handle and a gumball comes out. Gachapon is like that, but with a small plastic ball with a random toy inside. Those are less common than the gumball machines, but there were also some that had sticker/temporary tattoo sheets and those hard candies that looks like fruits(mostly bananas).

Gachapon is a bit different from gambling. Gambling comes with the inherent understanding that you have a chance to lose. With gachapon, you always get exactly what you are paying for: a random capsule toy. You just don’t get to pick which one you get. With gachapon, you always “win,” there is no chance that your money is spent and you get nothing in return. This is why games with gacha mechanics makes duplicates of characters or items useful. Whatever you get is still useful to you, even if you don’t get what you wanted.

I think you already understand the negative aspects of gachapon, but I just wanted to add that little bit of information.

Look, I am still using a GTX 1080 Ti (GOATED GPU btw, best dollar per performance value probably ever) because GPUs are too expensive. $700 USD for a low-mid tier card, or $1000+ for a card that should (and usually does) give good lasting value. I don’t see where anyone is buying a PC for less than $500 and it has better performance than a PS5, but I suppose it is possible this is a result of Price Discrimination, since I am in California.

NVidia is showing what PlayStation will look like when it feels there is actually zero competition. Xbox, so long as its hardware exists, is a constant threat to PlayStation keeping a lot of things in check. Once Xbox completely disappears, PlayStation will have no competition. Then Sony can set the prices however they want and nobody can do anything about it except pay up, or don’t.

Well, everyone say hello to the $1000+ PlayStation 6.

What’re you going to do, buy an Xbox? Build a PC with a GPU alone that costs almost the same?

No Xbox means Sony gains a monopoly on the console market. Unless Nintendo decides to actually compete with regular hardware again, which they won’t.