They’re building up their own universe, practically the world started in Duke Nukem but minus Duke because 2k owns him (or is it Gearbox/Embracer?). Bombshell/Ion Fury/Phantom Fury is the other one, as Shelly is ex-GDF, and IIRC was a cut character from one of the Duke Nukem games.

If you’re looking for another one of those, there’s a good chance they nailed it. For me, however, I think I’d like to see a different take on the genre

This is something where I think 3D Realms is leaning into nostalgia, heavily, mostly for boomer shooters. There’s a bunch of games I look at where I can’t blame them for riding the wave of popularity for retro because they’re in the business of selling stuff, but after so many it comes across as pandering and missed opportunities for pushing forwards. Maybe it’s because I’ve already ‘done’ the originals and these throwbacks don’t really offer anything to me, but they do for people that weren’t around for them.

I haven’t played BG3 yet, but RPG/CRPGs is a big one where I wonder ho much could be done with one specifically rooted in being played on a video game, rather than rooted in tabletop. The Owlcat Pathfinder games are a prime example, they’re great adaptations of the tabletop adventure paths, but I’d love to see something more ‘native’ to the video game medium.

I think for a lot of people “steam” has become synonymous with PC, it is ‘the platform’ for them, and that’s before you get into the semi-religious attitude some people have towards it. I could go into a big long rant about how I think the whole situation is a damn shame, but I don’t have the energy right now.

Go take a look at https://www.cgwmuseum.org/ - Computer Gaming World scans from when they started in 1981 and the primordial soup of the games industry was still trying to figure things out. There’s a variety of prices in the mail order listings, but within a few years there’s a bunch of titles that go for around the $50 level.

It’s not just graphics, if anything BG3 is light on graphics horsepower needed, and from a quick scan around is a bit heavy on RAM.

From previous developer comments part of the issue seems to be the world simulation plus split screen. If you split your party the whole current map has to be running/simulated all the time, you can’t freeze/unload different areas as you walk away, and that includes keeping track of objects for physics - ever notice how bethesda games don’t have many physics objects outside? Think along similar lines to a dedicated server that runs without graphics - just all the world, characters and object meshes, or a large world MMO that has to keep track of what players are doing at different ends of a continent.

Adding graphics back into it, when the party splits up they’re probably looking at different things increasing the breadth of content that has to be loaded. They might be able to cut down textures, but it could mean being more brutal with cuts than Larian wants because they don’t want their game to look like shit.

Intel are the real black horse to watch regarding OEMs, if they can get a good CPU+GPU or APU offering bundled up then I can see that being a threat. They’re already kicking AMD’s ass in the CPU department (in terms of sales) for OEM machines because of the good relationships they have with the big builders.

That said, intel also has designs on GPUs for servers. It also relies on Arc not shitting the bed, but you can say that about any company - for the foreseeable future I don’t think they need to be high-end, just competent and with a pricing wedge between them and nvidia/AMD.

Probably shrug and go back to what they were already doing. Certain gamers have been trying to push the “indies are going to destroy publishers with this one weird trick” angle for years, while the big titles continue to sell. If they’re profit oriented they wouldn’t continue to put out a series that wasn’t selling well enough, if you want an example of a series that is “dead” take a look at Medal of Honor.

Until the geforce3/radeon8500 GPUs weren’t programmable, and then you’re looking at the geforce8 in 2007 when CUDA came into it. They’ve been building up to this a long time, including data centre cards. This isn’t a new thing recently, they’re trying to get the most reward out of what they’ve been investing into while the wave lasts.

As much as I’d love to do an upgrade to my PC, gamers definitely don’t own the type of technology. It’s like some people hoping for VR gaming to take off, even if gaming was where a lot of the technologies that it relies upon ‘grew up’, there’s no obligation that VR gaming had to be a thing. Companies definitely don’t care where their money comes from.

Bear in mind that for their previous games, they didn’t start off awesome, they grew from doing Venetica, to Lords of the Fallen, then The Surge and The Surge 2 where the general attitude was Surge 2 ended up as a very good souls-like. This is a new direction for them so it would have been outstanding if they managed to hit perfection on their first try. Hopefully it does well enough so they can keep iterating.

The world is messy, ugly in places, and complicated. If you’re concerned about certain topics then certain products you might otherwise enjoy will be tainted by association. You’ll have to make your own decision on what has higher priority to you, play the hot new game or not allow a few bucks find their way to whoever you don’t like.

Something to remember is that the world is hugely interconnected now, and even for a nice product, how do you know it isn’t ‘tainted’ by someone associated with it being a scumbag but they have the brains to keep their mouth shut. It’s not as though indies is a “no assholes allowed” club.

I always made me raise an eyebrow when some gamers were cheering their acquisition after acquisition with some expectation they’d act differently to any other company (gaming or otherwise) just because they weren’t as much of a recognized “bad publisher” name. Even if they have different strategies I really wonder if people think different companies have different realities to live in that’d make them immune from having to close divisions or do lay-offs

If anything you need to go back to Bioware selling premium modules for NWN, or MS/Bungie selling map packs for Halo2. If anything Activision are a pretty conservative company and only dive in when someone else has proven a scheme works.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator