Hasbro, not WotC. Wizards of the Coast is just an old name that no longer carries any meaning, like Netscape or Obsidian Entertainment.

Hasbro makes all of the decisions now.

Look up Soma Transmissions. There was also a bunch of short stories about the game. The one about climbing the big orbital gun to the top really stuck with me.

And there was more characters than just the scary proxy things.

Soma is far far more than a horror game. The horror aspects are secondary to the transhumanist questions it raised every hour you were playing it.

Unepic wasn’t bad, but doesn’t hold a candle to Terraria. It’s still my favorite sandbox game.

The fact that this headline has to call out the studio that made a 30-year-old game speaks volumes as to why they have to lay people off.

It’s been especially bad over the last year. WB is in freefall at this point.

It seems it would be pretty easy to blame this on David Zaslav, but the games department specifically has been fucking up like never before: Mortal Kombat, Multiversus, Gollum, Kill the Justice League. Just name a WB game that came out, and it’s been an abysmal failure, with similar games from other studios doing much much better.

I second Disco Elysium’s voice acting and also all of Supergiant Games catalogue, especially Bastion, Transistor, and Hades. Portal 2 is the most hilarious video game of all time, and a major part of that is its voice acting.

The Stanley Parable, Borderlands 1/2, Prey, System Shock 1/2, the Bioshock series, SOMA, the new Doom games, Path of Exile, all elevated by their voice acting.

You really trust the US government to control your communications? Especially given the last 20 years?

No, I don’t trust right-wing Nazis to control my communications. And I sure as fuck trust the government more than I trust greedy corporations. The problem is that the corporations have been fucking up the capitalistic/democratic balance for the last 50 years.

The raw SMTP landscape on the internet is such a shitshow. Setting up a SMTP server requires so many goddamn condoms that you might as well just give up and start using some other professional email service. Or you set it up just to forward email to a GMail account, and even then, Gmail bitches about how much spam you’re forwarding it and blocks you for a time.

Especially from places like RPS and Kotaku.

Fable already came out, and it was a pretty mid game. Why are we doing this again?

They have conferences about ActivityPub. Why isn’t W3C trying to fix this mess in newer backwards-incompatible versions? The time to do it is now, not later, because it would involve a major version and years of pushing for adoption. The lack of standardization of basic concepts is why integrations of different types of implementations is a broken mess, which is the whole fucking point of ActivityPub! Now, we have to compete with ATProto, which has different kinds of problems, and it’s very possible that it just wins out and kills ActivityPub.

This reminds of the early days of SMTP, where there was zero thought behind security, and that created an entire spam industry.

PeerTube integration into Lemmy is still shit, poorly implemented, and rarely linked by Lemmy admins.

Huh? For £70 I’m getting

Based on what? You don’t actually know until it gets released. Sure, past history and reputation are certainly things to factor in, but we’ve seen plenty of major gaming companies shit the bed, despite their reputations.

Wait until it launches and the reviews come in.

Release timing is always a critical thing to think about, whether you’re talking about games, movies, TV series, or toys.

The portal gun doesn’t really fit in a Half-Life game. The mechanics of the gun almost demand an enclosed space, with flat surfaces and puzzles that require the player to understand that they’re solving a puzzle. The portal gun would break the outside world too easily, as players figure out how to just zoom past everything, and not follow the linear path that FPSs like Half-Life guide towards. Testing surfaces for game breaks and boundary checks would be a QA nightmare. It doesn’t kill enemies in any useful way, which is the primary function of a FPS weapon.

It is a puzzle gun, in a puzzle game. And that’s okay.

BG3 is the triplest of triple-A. It’s a four studio game with a budget in the hundreds of millions, a major IP license and half a decade of development.

The budget was $25 million for BG3, not hundreds of millions. It is not a “four-studio game”. It’s ties to D&D are far far easier to license than most IP, since it’s literally called the Open Game License.

Concord cost $400 million. The latest CoD game cost $600 million. Starfield was $200 million. The latest Assassin’s Creed was $300 million.

If anything, the AAA guys are still raking it in.

Ubisoft is in trouble. EA is in trouble. Games divisions for Sony, Microsoft, and WB are in trouble. These are all AAA studios, not the “middle of the pack”.

Soon.

AAA studios are bleeding money out of every orifice because nobody gives a shit about their bland and boring games. BG3 was where the potentials started to show, but it’s going to take another few years of studios tripping over themselves before the ones with actual cash are going to start investing elsewhere.

He’s definitely right that the industry isn’t throwing money at the wall to see what sticks anymore.

Depends on what you mean by “the industry”. The indie scene is doing exactly that. Every flavor of game in every type of combination is being done right now, all at the same time.

It’s a thing you can look up on search engines or Wikipedia very easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTuber

Yes, it’s essentially this except with games, and PC Gamer is still kind of in the middle of the chain here.

I wish they would link to the original GDC talk, at least. Instead, all of their “sources” are their own articles.