ampersandrew

Why so many Steam games have weirdly similar (and forgettable) names Top of mind for me after reading this article is that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet should just be called The Heretic Prophet, and Horizon: Zero Dawn should have just been called Zero Dawn.

For Warhorse's 15th birthday, we chatted with its co-founder about the demand for 'grown-up' RPGs, AI, why games are too cheap, and his role in the collapse of communism

Xbox planning to lay off hundreds of employees this week | via Wario64 Wario64 linked because the original is gated. This would be part of the 1600 layoffs coming over a 12 month period. My guess is any studio that’s about to ship a game, like Gears of War: E-Day, is going to be targeted most.

Ubisoft begin removing Ubisoft Connect from Steam with the new Ubisoft Connect Services I’m glad it’s highlighted on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown in particular, because that was the first game I’d bought from Ubisoft in years, and the extra launcher deterred me from considering buying any of their other games for a long while still. EA still has launchers on older games like It Takes Two and A Way Out and Dragon Age II and Inquisition that create obstacles for LInux compatibility and offline play, but newer titles like Split Fiction and The Veilguard no longer have the extra launcher problem. It’s good to see Ubisoft following this trend, and hopefully they can stop standing in the way of their own success.

The Next Chapter for Bungie Reworking Marathon and restoring “vaulted” content to Destiny are the highlights.

Upcoming Changes to XBOX Cloud Gaming [time limits] Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours / month Game Pass Premium: 10 hours / month Game Pass Essential: 5 hours / month And if you’ll allow me to editorialize, there’s a popular enough conspiracy theory that these platforms want to funnel you into cloud gaming for constant subscription revenue. I think the Why We’re Making These Changes section is exactly why these services will never be able to deliver that service at a price people are willing to pay. It’s expensive to provide this service, and they’re making sure they don’t lose any money on it by charging at least what it costs to provide.

StarCraft II is one of my favorite games ever, but I have no faith in modern Blizzard to make a game that isn’t wrapped in trappings that would piss me off. Back in 2010, it was extremely annoying that the game required an internet connection and made us go through all sorts of wacky solutions just to have a LAN party. Nowadays, an online-only game is a non-starter for me. The story in SC2 jumped the shark after the Wings of Liberty campaign anyway.

Marathon did not hit, and they laid off half the studio.

And even if it was, we’re long past the point of voting with your wallet anymore in this age of tech oligopolies. Respectfully, the hell we are. Telling yourself there’s nothing we can do about it perpetuates the cycle. For one thing, you could probably stick to just the physical media that already exists and never run out of great video games to play, and besides that, depending on what’s important to you, there’s DRM-free games.

Anyone who’s looked at Steam forums lately might see a good argument for not having them, because the average person there sucks. It’s a shame, because it’s often one of the few places you can get a direct response from the developers, but you need to wade through people complaining about woke and demanding refunds because the online population died off like they all do.

They’re reworking it into something else now in an attempt to salvage it, but for me personally, unless that involves being able to host the server myself, I’m not giving it the time of day.

Destiny was running the studio into the ground regardless of Marathon. Behind the scenes reporting says it had been a while since Destiny turned a profit, and by the time The Final Shape came out, the damage was already done. The reason they’re not continuing with it is that it just burns through money.

The other gaming-related thing he’s famous for is being responsible for Sneak King, the official Burger King Xbox 360 stealth game about sneaking around as the Burger King mascot to feed people Whoppers or something.

Microsoft’s Xbox to Shift Obsidian Studio to New ‘Fallout’ Video Game The layoffs at one of your studios most able to ship games is a bonkers, stupid decision; but pivoting Obsidian to making a new Fallout game is a good business decision if you don’t care about what your creatives feel led to create.

Did you miss the drug and fast food commercials?

And Xbox.

“Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch,” Darrah continued. “I don’t know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.” This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game. Fuck, man…all the reasons to do so are spelled out right there.

Oh my. If you didn’t sense the parody in those ads, I fear that satire is lost on you.

It’s got a 61 on OpenCritic, and Brad Shoemaker of NextLander said he thought long and hard about giving it 1/5 stars at the time (ultimately giving it a 2/5) because the game didn’t even really work when it launched. That wouldn’t really indicate it was just something the internet wanted to hate that week.

I’m glad you enjoyed it, but that reputation spread because reviewers had a bad time with it. It wasn’t, like you said, because the internet just needed something to hate that week. And since it never got a No Man’s Sky esque update, I doubt the consensus on it would have changed much even if more people had given it a try after the fact. They certainly had the opportunity with steep discounts over the past few years. In that time, Destiny got plenty more attention and two or three other Borderlands games came out.

A big site redesign just happened at Giant Bomb, so I can’t view the review, but there’s typically a difference between an always-online game not working and some of the things you listed. Cyberpunk was reviewed on PC, and it mostly worked fine for a lot of people on PC, which is what the early review codes were sent out for. Skyrim crashed a lot but kept plenty of auto saves so you rarely lost progress. In an always online game, the functionality just isn’t there if the problems are related to server infrastructure. In fact, this is rarely punished in review scores, and the likes of the latest Flight Simulator are the exception rather than the rule for it. But even when there weren’t infrastructure problems, people still weren’t thrilled with the game that was there when it worked.

Look, it wouldn’t have been a huge improvement to just call it Zero Dawn, but at least you get past the gore of the unnecessary colon they talk about in the article. All three of the words in Horizon: Zero Dawn probably have a high hit rate if you’re searching for titles on Steam, but getting rid of the colon would still have made it a more interesting title. I did pull those as examples of bad title trends called out in the article, but the likes of Sony can muscle past problems with a bad title by throwing money at it, and if you’re just one of a few dozen indies in the middle of a Keighley showcase, you don’t have that luxury.

See the article’s debate over adding the colon to the first entry in a series, and I basically share the same viewpoint. If the first entry was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, it would have been much harder to solidify itself with people learning of this thing for the first time. See my comments elsewhere in this thread here with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun as a first entry for a series that didn’t take and how I don’t think Horizon aptly describes its game or story.

Your listed examples would get far closer to proving the opposite, as I said in that comment chain.

You picked excellent titles and called them forgettable, one of which was a textbook example listed in the article as to how to choose a good name for a video game. You “proved” that picking good titles for video games helps them sell. Your choices for “forgettable” titles were, in my opinion, so bad that I’m surprised you didn’t list a top tier title like No Man’s Sky. And besides, Horizon: Zero Dawn is a successful video game, at least in part, because it doesn’t have the same discoverability problems that the developers do that are targeted by this article and Failbetter Games.

Rise of the Shadow of the Tomb Raider did both of them.

Zero Dawn was a thing in the game’s back story that explained how everything came to be. Horizon was a throwaway word in a monologue toward the end of the game, and they probably also risked brand trouble with Forza: Horizon, which predated it. That’s my case anyway. “Horizon” seemed a bad fit for that game’s title.

I’ve only played the first game, and they for sure mention Zero Dawn.