Gaming
Quality RPGs: How Much? It’s always rising
PC Gamer recently hosted an RPG roundtable where veterans like CD Projekt Red’s Pawel Sasko (quest director on Cyberpunk 2077) and Mike Laidlaw (Dragon Age lead designer) addressed some of the genre’s biggest issues.
The AAA arms race, especially the price of cutting-edge tech, top-tier development talent, and rising player expectations, was cited as a driving factor that needs to be addressed. Cyberpunk, which cost over $310 million, symbolizes the issue, and Pawel adds color: “When it comes to triple-A, we are just running at a f*cking wall, I think, and we’re gonna crash on that wall really soon.”
Core gamers expect a lot from sprawling, immersive, aesthetically pleasing RPGs and modern single-player games. Video games are already cheap per hour, so if we want them to keep pushing the envelope, we’ll have to pay more.
“As soon as you’re delivering something that starts to be cinematic, you then are essentially inviting comparison to the most cinematic things,” Laidlaw says of role-playing developers’ biggest challenge. You’re keeping up with Cyberpunk or Naughty Dog.”
Pawel cites Disco Elysium as an example of a groundbreaking RPG made on a budget. Its branching-narrative structure, top-down perspective, and quality writing make this possible. Words are cheap.
Thus, roleplayers should prepare for an economic imperative. Because gamers still insist on paying $70 for big, beautiful RPGs, something has to give. Will you pay? Would an increase make you seek entertainment elsewhere?
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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