Pillars 2 was already fully voiced, give or take some narration, and RPGs are more evergreen than a subgenre of first-person shooter. And I'll never forgive reviewers for dinging Outer Worlds for its scope. That's not a bug; it's a feature.
Could be. If so, they did fantastic work for only $4.4M. The entire console business is in the process of being turned on its head, so nothing is predictable anymore, but if the world still worked now the way it did a few years ago, you'd eat the cost of making a must-play game knowing that you weren't going to make your money back just to get eyes on your brand and console. Two years ago, Microsoft might have agreed. Now it's anyone's guess.
You think Pillars of Eternity II was only made for $5M? I'd be shocked. But still, assets made for Avowed could be ported right over to a theoretical PoE3, and that saves time and money. Here's hoping. I'll bet it happens, even if it isn't the BG3 competitor version.
If I was Microsoft and I saw Baldur's Gate 3 pop off, and I owned Obsidian and Pillars of Eternity, I would leverage the work they're doing with Avowed to prop up Pillars of Eternity III as "our Baldur's Gate 3". In a worst case, I'd imagine Obsidian would continue to intelligently manage their development resources to work more efficiently and release games more regularly than basically any other developer their size.
Then again, if I was Microsoft, I wouldn't shutter the studio that just made a game of the year contender, so who knows?
I don't need much. Shadows of Doubt's objective is "solve this murder", and for this game, maybe it's "amass a ton of money so that you can X". Just something to propel me forward to come up with a way to achieve it, because I won't be a baker for the sake of being a baker, probably.
The examples of games that made a comeback were No Man's Sky, a sandbox game missing features where, development-wise, it's very feasible to add in missing promised features; and Cyberpunk, a game with good bones that didn't function a lot of the time. Starfield's problems are deeper than that, at least from my perspective.
The tech tree and leveling system is "improve by doing", which runs into the same problems those systems always run into, which is why no one else does them anymore. It incentivizes me to get shot in combat on purpose so that I can improve my healing, and other stupid behaviors like that. So many of the quests are thoughtless fetch quests with nothing interesting along the way, and the game would actually be better with their omission than their inclusion. The endgame mechanic is an interesting one on paper, but seeing as the major quest lines only really play out one or two slightly different ways, there's not much that's interesting about going back to them, and you can also do all of them in a single playthrough, so there's no need to engage in the endgame mechanic to see it. These are some of the problems that can be fixed but will likely be so costly and time consuming when there are Elder Scrolls and Fallout games to be made that I doubt it'll ever happen.
The more fundamental flaws are that you can't spec your character to interact with the world in wildly different ways and get clever with its systems; the universe doesn't flow together the way that one of their terrestrial open worlds from before do, and fast travel is now mandatory; and the story walks right up to an interesting sci-fi story and stops just short of being good. To change these things sounds a lot like making an entirely different game.
That was the comparison they're establishing, not that it's a colony management game, yes. But neither is this game indicating it's anything like the Sims; Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld would have more in common with that.
Not according to the voice over or description in the video. It's also why they quote a Dwarf Fortress developer in the opening seconds, talking about how impressive the simulation is. Dwarf Fortress in that it's simulating this entire city for you to mess with, but the different take being that you seem to only control one person in it.
I can't even think of a mobile game in the ballpark of what this is doing, but its closest competitors are Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, which aren't exactly known for being lookers either.
Now let's see how they screw up the multiplayer. The world could use more FPS games closer to the original Perfect Dark than what we typically get out of the genre now.
There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn't butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn't stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn't make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.
I've been fairly nostalgic for 6th gen consoles lately. Not that it was some magic time for video games, but there were certainly genres that were well represented back then that aren't so much today, like stealth games, arcade racing games, and campaign first person shooters with co-op and split-screen deathmatch. These days, every multiplayer game is designed to be played forever or not at all, rather than being designed to be fun with friends a handful of times.
Games also came out at a rapid clip, with most sequels coming out only a year later. Sure, some of that was due to crunch that we were oblivious to, but even if that cadence were twice as long, it would still be a huge improvement over development cycles today. Most single player games these days are open world by default, as though that's the natural goal for all video games, no matter how many of them it's made worse and no matter how much time and money it takes to make them.
Edit: I was half-awake enough while typing this that I ended up going almost opposite of the prompt, but so much to say that no era was all sunshine and rainbows, so I'll never be fully nostalgic for any era.
