Half Life 3 is super late
At some point the Late vs Suck balance will tip the scales of So Late That the Customers Lost Interest or Died
I played hl2 as a teen.
One of my kids just finished episode 2 and asked me when the next one was coming out. I was like “oh bud I got some bad news for ya”.
It’s generational disappointment at this point.
Bungie announced a new Marathon game
Which is more inspired by rather than a full on sequel from what I’ve heard.
Am not sure there’s a way for them to release HL3 and don’t disappoint huge number of people. Not because they suck at making games but because expectations have grown so so so much they are downright unachievable now.
The logical end point of that argument is not everyone is going to be happy with everything so why release anything.
Is it?
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tbf that’s a lot easier to say when you’re the president of one of the richest companies in the industry. I don’t disagree, but not everybody has the resources to just keep developing forever, and that’s easy to forget too.
It’s often enough AAA with tons of money that force insane crunch to hit a release date and still have buggy, uncompleted games.
In the documentary this quote is from he said that about thr development of HL1. To be fair the devs themselves said they voluntairily crunched quite a bit and had some time constraints at the end of the game.
The context for this was them deciding to take the time to finish the game properly even if they were no longer going to get paid to do it (the publisher would stop funding).
The real question is… Can indie games publishers afford the delay of a game?
Valve was a completely new company then. They weren’t going indie, but Sierra didn’t pay them for the remake of Half-Life. In the documentary they talk about financing it by creating Half-Life: Day One.
Chet Falizek, a dev who led L4D and a couple other games at valve talks about this a lot on TikTok, now that he’s running an indie studio. He’s a cool guy, would fit in on .ml or something for sure.
Yes. If I can wait for the Dune movie in February, video game nerds can also wait.
It’s up to the companies to coast and ration their resources accordingly.
Implying they’re not passing on whatever that “costs” them to the studio…
Depends on the circumstances. Small self funded team, part time? Can probably delay indefinitely.
Generally they would fare better than AAA studios who are beholden to their publisher to release no matter what.
Usually publishers have multiple products in development simultaneously with varying degrees of investment, the more money invested into a studio to develop a game the more urgent they want it finished.
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Nah star citizen was a scam first, game second. If it ever produces a game it will have been purely incidental to continuing to run the scam and milk those whales
Yes, landing is difficult.
There is delaying to release a higher quality product and delaying while having features creep… Not the same thing.
I kind of believe Chris Roberts himself is just an overambitious perfectionist. He pulled the same kind of bullshit with Freelancer, which only released because Microsoft put its foot down.
I can also believe that a lot of the top people around him are grifters feeding his ambition and perfectionism to keep the gravy train running.
Either way, they got my Kickstarter money so the only entertainment I’ll ever get from that game is opining about it like I know anything.
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Joke on him, often game gets delayed under this exact pretext and it suck anyway.
I think it becomes a mixture of too early and delaying.
Some games clearly need another year to finish but they delay it for half a year and wont allow more for themselves
While this was true in a pre-Steam world, it hasn’t been true for a while.
See Terraria (which didn’t suck, but was lackluster compared to how the game is now), No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077.
I don’t have a problem when small studios do it for games like Terraria and No Man’s Sky. It keeps them solvent without having to attach themselves to a big publisher.
I do have a problem when a giant, established company does it, as is the case for Cyberpunk 2077.
There’s also a recent trend of “forever games”, where it’s clear that the goal is to keep you playing it perpetually. It has both upsides and downsides. These games tend to change intensely over the years. Minecraft is such an example.
Cyberpunk and NMS did exceptionally decent first day numbers…and then they didn’t do exceptionally decent numbers due to the well-deserved backlash. They would have sold even more copies over the last 5 years if they didn’t scare half of the gaming industry away initially. You have to work really damn hard to save your game from death. Case in point: Bethesda isn’t working to save Redfall and it shows.
Whenever I hear this quote I also think of the developers/publishers. They need to have a good reputation so people buy their games.
I think that’s why EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Activision, etc sales have gone down. I will not say that gamers react fairly when it comes to unfinished game releases, but it takes one bad game to ruin a developer. Especially when you consider how small the margins are or if they are publicly traded. Even developers with good games have recently been going out of business because it’s not sustainable.
I also think of their legacies. Especially in a post-steam world, a game with a good legacy will continue to sell for much longer. I don’t think a game like Watch Dogs ever got rid of the stink surrounding it, even though it isn’t a bad game to go back to nowadays.
suck is forever
Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it when a game sucks instead of the responsibility being on the publisher to release updates until the game resembles what was originally advertised? Games aren’t on ROM cartridges anymore, you can still improve the game after it’s released.
Look, No Man’s Sky set the precedent for what you’re supposed to do when your game sucks at launch. And we should expect nothing less from game studios with ten times the person-power and money.
No Man’s Sky is a great redemption arc, but it would have been better if the game hadn’t sucked at launch
Yeah, if a product is sold, I expect it to work for the most part. Now, mistakes happen, and not much to do about very obscure things and it’s great if thing can be added afterwards.
But what I want, and this is apparently wild, is a finished 1.0 product that works as expected.
I have no proof but in my eyes it all smells like Sony and other gaming news are to blame. They hyped up the game to unachievable levels and then held Hellogames to the previously set deadline. I am very happy they sat down and finished the game, although there is new content patch ever few months still. Gave them those 60$ happily even though it’s not my kind of game.
Obviously sucking at launch is bad. But it’s inevitable that some games will suffer that fate and as No Man’s Sky showed, that’s no excuse for the game continuing to suck after launch.
Yeah, if their publisher hadn’t forced them to release in its unfinished state, it would’ve been a lot better.
I was gonna write. I agree with him but No Man’s Sky kinda defeats his point.
It’s not a redemption arc, it’s a people forgetting it exists except for those who want mediocre resource accumulation simulators.
Gabe was talking about the making of Half Life, back when you shipped your disc and that was that. And the game was, apparently, crapola.
Same kind of deal with the original Deus Ex. It was a spaghetti of poorly interacting systems until the devs were able to make it all click together.
Gabe was talking about the making of Half Life, back when you shipped your disc and that was that. And the game was, apparently, crapola.
There were patch and updates back in the day. The problem was that not everybody had a good internet connection or a connection at all, during the 90’s.
Games like Daikatana and SiN were flops due to bugs that required patches to fix.
I remember getting patches on my PC gamer discs. Good times
It’s because that’s how capitalism works. If you keep buying stuff from the same source without due diligence, you can’t be surprised when you get stuck with another sucky game.
The only incentive to spend resources on fixing a game is to preserve reputation for future games.
Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it
They’re expected to do it because that’s exactly what they do, every time.
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And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.
Really? Most of the audience?
Seriously this take is fucked up. Let’s put gamers in a bucket of mental cases because they like to play Tetris lol
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Let’s dig that hole deeper my dude!
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- The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.
I haven’t seen significant numbers of people complaining that their drip feed of content isn’t coming fast enough. I’ve seen people complaining about spending a non-trivial amount of money on a visibly broken game that clearly had plenty of developer resources for microtransactions and loot boxes.
Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.
Being a game developer had its moments but was still easily the worst job I’ve ever had, predominantly due to the community.
That said, I still wouldn’t go diagnosing millions of people with some bullshit I just made up.
Fair point, even with upgrades a la Cyberpunk 2077, the lost sales out of the gate are unlikely to be made up a year and a half later when they release the game they should have released in the first place
Makes me think of old school Blizzard. Rest in peace.
I always thought that Miyamoto quote was real too!
Sick of hearing about this this loser, go away already
How did Gabe Newell offend you?
The dude has been a bastion of how to run a company that delights its end-users and doing their best to run a company ethically. A staunch group of people that believe in right-to-repair as well as believing in modding and community growth of games.
Yes there’s issues on the publisher/developmer side of things, however Valve constantly works with studios to help mitigate these pain points and on-board to their platform.
