I still play Skyrim off and on. Haven't touched the apparently final DLC. I guess I don't need to feel bad about not waiting for a GOTY edition.
Video Game News and Miscellany
- Thread starter figmentPez
- Start date
Hmm... I may need to send my bag of caps only halfway full if they are already looking to get to work on the next Fallout title.
I never mentioned 2nd and 3rd helpings....
Man, it's kind of disappointing.
Bethesda hasn't made amazing DLC for their games since Oblivion's Shivering Isles. They've made OK DLC, but nothing great.[DOUBLEPOST=1366093274][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, this Friday's episode of the Comedy Button is going to be another GFW reunion which to me, is fucking fantastic. GFW is why I listen to podcasts. For a show on PC gaming, they never failed to make me laugh and fill me with insights into many subjects. Best podcast ever.
Bethesda hasn't made amazing DLC for their games since Oblivion's Shivering Isles. They've made OK DLC, but nothing great.[DOUBLEPOST=1366093274][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, this Friday's episode of the Comedy Button is going to be another GFW reunion which to me, is fucking fantastic. GFW is why I listen to podcasts. For a show on PC gaming, they never failed to make me laugh and fill me with insights into many subjects. Best podcast ever.
I thought some of the stuff for New Vegas was pretty damn good.
The games market is suffering from something a lot of other markets are suffering from as well: some companies are becoming too big, and thus start eqyuating themselves with the market. See: banks "too big to fail", Nestlé and Kraft in food processing, and others.
It would be a far better world if, in almost every market place that exist right now, there were more and smaller entitirs fighting with each other in service quality and innovation instead of large multinationals only interested in competing over lowest price and highest margin. It's management-for-management's-sake that's levelling all markets and destroying unique flavours. A manager of a car firm should probably be a good manager, but also know about cars. Directors at EA should probably care more about games than about meeting their projections.
It would be a far better world if, in almost every market place that exist right now, there were more and smaller entitirs fighting with each other in service quality and innovation instead of large multinationals only interested in competing over lowest price and highest margin. It's management-for-management's-sake that's levelling all markets and destroying unique flavours. A manager of a car firm should probably be a good manager, but also know about cars. Directors at EA should probably care more about games than about meeting their projections.
What a slap in the face to FF7-8-9 fans:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/391763/final-fantasy-x-vita-video-shows-hd-character-models/
and also confirmed
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/396770/final-fantasy-x-hd-to-include-ff-x-2-hd-on-ps3/
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/391763/final-fantasy-x-vita-video-shows-hd-character-models/
and also confirmed
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/396770/final-fantasy-x-hd-to-include-ff-x-2-hd-on-ps3/
Dear Square-Enix,
May I politely say NOBODY CARES NOBODY CARES NOBODY FUCKING CAAAARESSSS!
Sincerely,
Humans.
Again, New Vegas was made by Obsidian, not Bethesda.
It's not about money, it's about pride. They've already stated more than once that the company sees remaking FF7 as the day they have lost all creativity, because it would be admitting they couldn't do any better than a 10+ year old game. It would also cost them a SHIT LOAD of money to do because they'd have to create all new 3d environments and basically redesign the game from the ground up. It would mean spending the same amount of time it takes to make an all new, original FF game on rebuilding an old one.
The reason they did FFX instead of 7-8-9 is mainly because they'd have to create 3d environments. FFX and X-2 already have them, so all they had to do was improve the graphics.
I completely forgot about that. My apologies.
*EDIT* Sorry about the quadruple post...? I have no idea why that happened.
figmentPez
Staff member
While the graphics would be a pretty huge investment, hopefully other parts of the game like mechanics, story and other stuff wouldn't have to be retooled nearly as much, so would save some development cost...
Unless modern Final Fantasy games just don't spend any time or money at all thinking about mechanics and story.
Actually, I love FFX and have no problem with it being re-realeased, considering that and X-2 are going to be the International versions we never got. I'd like them to do the same with XII, in all honesty, if it were a Zodiac system release.
That's because Obsidian isn't Bethesda. They put together a series of separate stories that tied together with an overall narrative.
And it was already dealt with a bunch above.
Those things aren't really where the cost factor is in game-dev (at least for a single-player RPG). There's just not that many collective man-hours there compared to actually building the world.
All they have to do with FFX is re-build the game with higher-res textures (they've said they're remastering it, not re-doing it entirely). They're probably not even changing poly-counts for anything, just upping texture res/quality.
Not only would the 2D environments in FF7 need to be completely re-done since they're just pixel art, higher res textures on the same poly-count characters would just look like ass. They'd have to re-do the game entirely. And while I admit that I want that, they clearly don't want to spend the money for it.
Did they say they're losing money on the game or just that expected sell-through won't meet last year's projections? Neither one is good, but one is actually bad while the other is just them giving stupid guidance to their investors.
4 million units of Tomb Raider sold is $200,000,000 in revenue. How the fuck could they lose money on that?
They only make around $30/unit of that after platform royalties, retailer margin, cost of goods/distro, and buyback. So that's down to $120M.
A modern AAA console title costs around $30-40M in napkin math to make (100-200 people at an average of $75K/person salary+benefits for 2-3 years plus assorted equipment and rent, etc, etc), and then you can add on just as much for marketing. That brings the quick cost to possibly $80M, for a $40M profit. Which is enough to fund (but not market) a new game.
(Though this is not "losing money" exactly, but it's definitely not a good cost model).
GasBandit
Staff member
I suspect, as specialko is saying, that it's not that they lost money on it, it's that they didn't make as much as they told their investors/submitted earnings projections for the amount that they would.
Square lost 70 million in 2012 and called their best games "loss leaders".
There's no exact numbers known.[DOUBLEPOST=1366151596][/DOUBLEPOST]I'm sure a HUUUUUUUGE problem at Square is the company continuing to try make something out of the unmitigated disaster that is Final Fantasy 14.
Yeah, they should have just pulled the plug on that. I think the other issue is people just losing faith in them. XIII was mediocre in its best parts, XIII-2 was called a better game but that's not saying a lot, and there's so many things US gamers want from them that SE won't deliver. Various localizations and ports, sequels to fairly successful and well-received IPs, and hell even XIII-Versus which has been talked about for at least 5 years now, I think.
I think I mentioned it before but yeah, it's the fault of the current director. He experimented with the more linear cinematic-focus in X and it did well, so he replicated it in XIII to an extreme. XII, to me, was good, and I wish they'd steer back to that or even IX instead of this weird tunnel-vision deal.
It's kind of sad... I'm at the point where I -WANT- Square Enix to go bankrupt, if only so someone else will buy the properties, get a fucking clue, and start producing what people want.
I hate their current director. I can't remember his name, but he's a misogynist fuckhead who's the reason Parasite Eve 3/3rd Birthday was such a disaster, among many other games. You can pretty much draw a quality line for SE between when Hironobu Sakaguchi was heading the projects and when he left the company. So many good titles are his name ... and then comes the other guy.
I understand why SE keeps at it with FFXIII; they're trying to squeeze all they can out of the same engine. It just happens to suck. For the record, I like FFX a lot myself and I understand why they can easily reprocess the game without having to do much. At last SE can do that much right--Konami couldn't do that.
Rumor has it FF Versus XIII will be dropping the XIII part of its name to disassociate it from the FFXIII series. That sounds like the new CEO has a better idea of how people are looking at the franchise than the last one.
I understand why SE keeps at it with FFXIII; they're trying to squeeze all they can out of the same engine. It just happens to suck. For the record, I like FFX a lot myself and I understand why they can easily reprocess the game without having to do much. At last SE can do that much right--Konami couldn't do that.
Rumor has it FF Versus XIII will be dropping the XIII part of its name to disassociate it from the FFXIII series. That sounds like the new CEO has a better idea of how people are looking at the franchise than the last one.
There's not a lot of recurring characters in the FF series other than themese/spells/summons and a few background characters. What's to stop another company from simply making a good jRPG on their own? Is the name that important?
It matters if you want to make huge wads of cash on re-made Final Fantasy 6-9. It also matters if you want to do stuff with pre-established worlds like Ivalice (which has something like 10+ games set in it's world right now).
There was Enix, but ... And of course, Atlus is doing fine, but they've yet to reach big fame like Final Fantasy has outside of Japan. People wouldn't have bought FFXIII if it wasn't called Final Fantasy.
It's too bad, because Atlus is making a lot of bold moves in what it brings over, and they're generally solid games. The problem is they sometimes get a little too niche and don't see the success they should.
Yeah, I agree. While the Persona series seems to have found an audience, stuff like Code of Princess is really for people who feel enlivened by seeing the Game Over screen, and much of the SMT series is pretty difficult compared to Final Fantasy.
Or the Disgaea games, which take grinding to a whole new, terrifying level.
Edit: Oop, my mistake, Atlus only published the first. Nippon Ichi opened a US branch for the rest.
Edit: Oop, my mistake, Atlus only published the first. Nippon Ichi opened a US branch for the rest.