The success of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG has kicked off a fiery debate about game development, AAA costs, and players’ expectations

The success of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG has kicked off a fiery debate about game development, AAA costs, and players’ expectations

  •  autumn   ( @autumn@reddthat.com ) English
    46•1 year ago

    Maybe AAA games just don’t need to be as large or sprawling. Release one full campaign with everything you need included in the price. Then if it does well offer dlc.

    As the article points out, balder’s gate was early access for 3 years, sold at full price, and still has bugs. It’s not an exception to the rule, larian just delivered a good product that had good source material behind it.

    •  PlantJam   ( @PlantJam@beehaw.org ) English
      11•1 year ago

      I personally like the early access model. You get the choice to play the game now, as-is, or wait for the developers to call it finished. Last Epoch is a great example. In its current state, it is absolutely not finished. It still gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment, though, and I expect I’ll get hundreds more when I revisit it again when it’s officially launched.

      •  bionicjoey   ( @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ) 
        1•1 year ago

        The important caveat with EA is that the devs actually substantially expand on the early access experience. If they just spend a year or two doing minor bugfixes and then release the game it won’t go over super well. Especially if they reduced scope during early access. I’m thinking of something like Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord, where the devs had described so many things they wanted to do with the game, but then didn’t realize many of those goals between when it went into EA and when it released.

    •  PenguinTD   ( @PenguinTD@lemmy.ca ) English
      9•1 year ago

      it’s good enough so when I encounter glitches I simply laugh and move on.

      some of the glitches I’ve encountered so far:

      • animated door(or wall) loop back to closed “frame” but the collision is already moved away so you can walk through the door(or wall)
      • ranged attack/spell sometimes doesn’t calculate the path correctly when you hover over the target, so you have to manually move yourself and try again. Some times the path blocked calculation is wrong and you could waste spells.(especially for big enough creatures)
      • animation glitches during conversation. or right after loading.(mostly on NPCs.)
      • some stuff looks reachable but due to path finding for char to “get it” it becomes unreachable. (sometimes can use mage hand to get around this if said stuff is light and not fragile.)
    •  FIash Mob #5678   ( @FlashMobOfOne@beehaw.org ) English
      7•1 year ago

      That’s what Solasta did. (Developer: Tactical Adventures)

      Then we got two more fully-fleshed adventures as DLC’s, which I was more than happy to buy.

      Find good developers and then (if you can) pay full price so they can keep making great, microtransaction-free games.