Never once claimed to be smart, for someone claiming to be so smart, reading comprehension is not your forte. If minimum A -> B is a pretty easy concept to grasp.

Regarding the purported success of Avowed I just have to sit and wait for the other shoe to drop, so, I’m good. See ya at the next layoff party.

Let’s put the marketing cope for the absolute flop aside (marketing can get anyone to install a game on gamepass for “free”, we’ve seen with HiFi Rush and Veilguard that mimdgame is complete trash at predicting anything).

I like games, what I don’t like is being advertised a deep RPG from one of the old greats, paying 70€ and refunding because I was not served an RPG but a middle of the road first person fantasy shooter with a static world and a bunch of numbers on weapons, that are even more insignificant that the RPG elements of destiny. Logically that creates antibodies towards what was supposed to be a great game and, conversely, ended up as a mindless shooter that would not be out of place among steam greenlight projects.

Avowed is not a good game, it’s a C, painfully mediocre and unimaginative. Coming from Obsidian, with 6y of development and after the ad campaign they did, together with asking for 70€ upront!? Fuck that noise, that is unacceptable. Of course, Microsoft has a great marketing team, so they created a culture war around the game, if you like it, you’re woke, if you don’t, you’re a chud. This poisons the well and destroys the discussion about how one of the dearest RPG developers in the West is now writing characters that sound like they were written by chat GPT. There’s a reason the best RPGs of the past few years come from independent European devs and the best Action games come from Japan… So, keep your dearest mediocre game and your culture wars, Obsidian lost yet another fan and because of people burying their head in the sand, they won’t know about the very large amount they lost… Well, they kinda do, looking at Grounded (not a masterpiece but a mediocre game like Avowed that conversely did not promise the wprld), priced at max 39€, and already for a long time on gamepass, 30k peak, current 3,5k. Avowed, the deep RPG, 19k peak, 2,8k current. Avowed flopped hard. Keep your feelings about the game however you want, it’s quite obvious for anyone with two neurons avowed flopped and is yet another symptom of the “mobile game” trajectory a lot of US American devs are taking due to the subscription model becoming ubiquitous. Strap in for the slop avalanche à lá Netflix.

It’s a AAA studio and it’s part of the MS roster.

Clearly Avellone did something right, other than the great pentiment (which started as a rogue project), they have yet to release anything of note since he left.

Resounding success, barely anyone touched it outside game pass.

The publicly available data for those 6M comes from mimdgame, which is as reliable as divination.

There is a large contingent of people who don’t like romance mechanics in their RPGs, often for the reasons she states in the article

Give me an example of an Obsidian RPG romance option where the character becomes a yes person? My argument is that reason is bullshit, either that or we hear it from the director that they believe Obsidian doesn’t have the talent to write such characters. You know what, that actually makes sense, the talent is not there, clearly.

They should change their motto to: Obsidian, making mobile games for simpletons

doesn’t have a really firm metric

Translation: Numbers look like shait otherwise we’d brag about them.

It’s always a bit of a letdown when you see a character who has a clear personality, and goals and interests, and suddenly, in the service of this romance that the player has embarked on with them, they now become the player’s yes-person

Looks at Dragon age Origins and Morrigan… How do these people, with 0 knowledge of the actual medium they work in, get to leadership positions? Was it a tokenism thing? To see how the brilliant Avelone got pushed out years ago, and clearly incompetent people are now promoted is truly baffling .

*Andy Wilson

It would have been better if it were a live service

It must have been the Russians /s

Alternative title: “Tech debt saves customer data from wide distribution to the highest bidder…”

US americans trying to cash in on discontent with buzzwords like AI and trying to steal the thunder of actual worthy alternatives like lemmy. The fact Ohanian is part of the founders immediately places it into the shit tier bucket for me.

BaD oNlInE pErSoN iS uNhApPy WiTh GaMe I lIkE, wHaT a CoNdEsCeNdInG pRiCk.

Oink oink

edit: 10/10 chances this system evolved to render some VAs unemployed. Especially from a Microsoft studio.

My fault for throwing pearls to pigs.

Where’s the helldivers II crowd that caused a major fuss? This one is flying under the radar. Is it because Forza is just meh?

I gave you plenty of evidence, you just decided to ignore it because for some ungodly reason you attached your personal value to it.

70€ for a PC it better be better than just meh and deliver what was promised by the adverts. I work to have those 70€, if a company lies and overcharges, sure as shit it’s a 1. They advertised a completely different game than what was delivered. And this is after 6y.

You’re basically the equivalent to a Taylor Swift fan arguing with people who don’t equate her music to Bach or Brahms…

Try stabbing an NPC, let me know how it reacts.

Literally the first dialogue with Garryck. It’s like it was Va’d by different people depending on your answers.

“That’s the imperial envoy you’re talking to, show some respect” - lol perfect deadpan delivery, emotional delivery is for losers.

And that’s before mentioning all the other missing perks of past obsidian games, like the interactivity of the world. It’s like a single player shooter stuck in an MMO world.

But good for you, you like it, all 4 of you.

Basically, they outscalped the scalpers…

Other than interacting with Kai everything else sounds like it was written by GPT3.o

It feels and plays like a game designed by an AI. Not bad, also not good.

Don’t know why they’re being downvoted, it fits the definition.

Brother, picking on your example, Avowed had the gall to charge 11€ more than KCD2 while offering a facsimile of what it promised while KCD2 improved upon their past game in every way. The polarisation stems from a game published by one of the richest companies in the world and in production for over 6y delivering a mediocre experience (at best) when compared to CHEAPER offerings that do much more. In truth, it’s not polarisation, it’s requiring a modicum of quality for your money. I returned it because I was advertised an Obsidian RPG and got a linear shooter with barely any choices and performance issues that would not be foreign in a mobile marketplace. That’s the future gamepass brings, slop. Luckily, there’s US indie, Asian and European developers making good games, KCD2 or BG3 being such examples. Shit, even Lords of the Fallen is a better experience than Avowed as people were delivered the experience that was promised in the promotional materials at less than 70€.

Edit: Dragon Age was technically well executed, but, again, as an RPG, it had little to offer. Would be another game perfect for a mobile app store. The total sales of that game and predicted sales of avowed confirm as much, it’s shovelware capitalising on a franchise name to drive sales while having no craft or passion behind it. If you read the reviews for avowed, the overwhelming majority of the thumbs up reviews complain the game is not worth the price of admission and it’s a mid game at best.