Looking forward to the Dragon Age go-kart racing game.

Thanks. It would be really interesting to know what’s going on behind the scenes. My understanding is that once a live service game makes it to the big leagues, like D2, resources aren’t a problem if they get reinvested into development. For example, Genshin gets an annual budget of around $200m (basically one AAA a year), and pushes updates on a 6 week cycle. These big income earning projects all ought to be capable of doing crazy stuff that other studios can’t match.

What sometimes happens is that the company milks the game to fund other stuff, so not enough is reinvested (like FFXIV). But it’s so strange to see it happening to Bungie, because the whole point of the Sony acquisition was to have a healthy ongoing live service game.

Thanks. That sounds remarkably like the same slump FFXIV is currently in, actually. You’d think professional writers would be able to see this problem coming a long way away, and find a way to pivot smoothly to the next storyline. Especially with so much $$ at stake in a live service game.

Out of the loop. Why is Destiny 2 sinking? Didn’t the game use to print money? Did the money not get reinvested back into the live service (like how FFXIV funds get vacuumed away to prop up the rest of Square Enix), or did Bungie make some bad artistic choices, or what?

It’s wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.

At this point, Western gaming companies’ monetization schemes are becoming worse than gacha, so you may as well go play Genshin Impact ;-)

Half of this article’s word count seems to be the writer snarking about how he doesn’t care about these games and doesn’t know much about them. I guess it’s good to show contempt for your audience…

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

I find Pathfinder 2e (and D&D 3e before it) way clunkier. Maintaining a level-appropriate power level requires stacking buffs like the Overlord meme, and if you decline to do so, you’re just crippling your character. It’s bad enough that auto-buffing mods are considered mandatory for the Pathfinder CRPGs.

Lots of RPGs allow rest cheesing. Even if you don’t let players rest in random locations like BG3 does, the players can always hoof it back to town to rest. Attempts to prevent this kind of cheesing often end up feeling unduly punishing and un-fun. It’s not a tabletop vs computer issue.

DOS2 fights felt much more like a slog than BG3. Especially in higher difficulties, every battlefield ended up a nightmarish soup of elemental surfaces, which got old after awhile. I also found whittling down enemy toughness bars un-fun.

Personally, I liked both the BG3 and DOS1 systems better than DOS2.