The wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook
The studios behind these mega hits spent more than a decade iterating on their favorite design ideas until they went supernova.
Very poignant point being made here about employee retention. Mass layoffs are a sledgehammer to institutional knowledge in companies, and retention and advancement of entire teams does the opposite.
A company literally cannot learn lessons from successes and failures. That's done by employees in the company. Lose the experience, and you have to start again.
Yeah. I also don’t see how one could stay motivated if one knows that they’re like to be let go once the current project is about wrapped up.
Fuck. Yes.
p.s. in true fashion, no I didn't click through. 🤪
Interesting read. The airport argued against a short term development model and taxes back a years, maybe even decades long search for the right game formula and it's perfection. I found it especially interesting how he showed the path from Magica to Helldivers and the retention of core mechanics over the games.
The studios behind these mega hits spent more than a decade iterating on their favorite design ideas until they went supernova.
With what money? If I had 10 years to iterate on code without releasing it, I too could come up with something nice. Could.
They made a bunch from magicka but I'm not sure about their other games.
Looks like Manor Lords might be the next on the list
I’m happy for people who like these games, but I am so tired of seeing articles about them in my feeds. They are still companies, they still don’t care about you, just your money, but everyone acts like these two are their best friends and the saviors of gaming.
Sure, they like money. Who doesn't? But you have to admit there's a big difference between what Larian gave us for $60 with Baldur's Gate, and shit like $65 mounts in Diablo and $80 melee weapons in CoD and the various other chicanery ActiBlizz and other truly greedy companies have been pulling.
As such, in addition to liking money, I would argue the people at Larian genuinely care about making a good game that people enjoy. Cuz if it was ONLY about the money, they would've made a much different game. I imagine it helps not being a publicly traded company.
I think it’s actually simpler than that. It’s a thing that used to be a lot more common decades ago. They have talented people, those people made a good product, and as a result the product effectively sold itself.
Just goes to show that there’s a road to commercial success that doesn’t involve treating your users and customers as a resource to exploit, and it’s causing all the other gaming company CEOs to lose their fucking minds because this is starting to turn into an industry-wide grassroots rebellion.
I like how this article specifically mentions two popular games at the moment. That's SEO for ya. This article could easily be told without mentioning either of these games, but if they did that, then they wouldn't get traffic from people who like those games. They'd have to actually write something worth reading.
The article would be a lot less convincing if it didn't present the clear evidence provided by those games. They are important in this context because there aren't a lot of games like them coming out today.
Helldivers 2 is definitely undercooked. It's probably one of the most unstable games I've ever played. I've experienced more crashes in 50 hours of HD2 than in 250 hours of vanilla Fallout 4 and 150 hours of lightly modded Skyrim Special Edition put together.
Not to mention the extremely strange bugs that pop up every new update. My friend would often get downright bluescreens from the game, sometimes he would be cursed and completely unable to be called in as reinforcement. The reinforcement beacon would just disappear after a few seconds. Other players on the team would still be called in, just not him.
Then the fact that flamethrowers didn't work properly for anyone but the host for a long time, so Arrowhead responded by buffing fire damage in general. Cue the flamethrower still not working, and flamethrower enemies like the Hulk simply instakilling you instead. I'm not even sure if they've fixed that one yet.
Or armor values not working for a long time after launch. Or the kill messages when you die being completely up in the air, many times displaying that you were killed by a teammate or yourself when you get swarmed with enemies or thrown off a cliff. I've been accused of a lot of teamkills because of that. Or how shooting down an automaton dropship would have a 50% chance of actually killing the enemies under it, and a 50% chance of giving them a big bunker they can clip through and shoot out of, but you can't shoot them back. Or Pelican 1 not landing for over a minute, just hovering in the air not even shooting at enemies. Then there were all the times that picking up medals or super credits inside the map would just paralyze your character completely, making you unable to move at all until you take some damage.
I really do not understand the online gamer circlejerk that has formed around this game. Is it the Battlefield Helldiver momentsTM? Screaming at ragdolls with your friends?
