Very few games do. So few that the ones that hold a high player base or even grow are anomalies. This one is making strange moves like being a fighting game that, at least at launch, can’t be played offline and costs $240 to stock with every character for local tournaments.
I think enough people have been exposed to enough subscription services that customers have started taking inventory of what they’re paying per month that they didn’t used to do, which means often signing up for a month and then quitting. I’m simultaneously surprised and not surprised that the access to online multiplayer only accounts for about 30% of the reason people subscribe to these things, but then those same customers doing that same accounting of their personal finances have probably done the math to realize that, long term, it’s cheaper to just play games online on PC, which is leading to consoles performing the way they’re performing lately.
I agree, it does, and it does. In many cases it’s necessary for the survival of the company once you’ve committed to release dates and marketing expenses. Larian ought to have enough cushion for their next project that requiring it makes even less sense.
Release windows can make or break a game, and they were counter programming Starfield, which they expected to be a bigger deal. I would interpret “a bit of crunch” to be a few weeks rather than the several month death march you hear about in game development all the time.
I feel like if he were a user, he’d have been caught by now, and losing a brother (iirc) to addiction is a solid enough reason to expect sobriety of him.
Yeah, these parts were great but do not require an open world. Contrary to the developer’s comments, having agency or autonomy in a game is not at odds with being linear. More often than not, making a game open world just leads to those problems you pointed out.
The divine beasts are not identical, though they are shorter than traditionally Zelda dungeons. The overworld has a ton to find; you just didn’t find it.
Breath of the Wild’s equivalent to dungeons were the beasts, not the shrines. The activities in the overworld were only the same in that they ended in a shrine, but the things you did to unlock them were generally very different. Half of them aren’t even visible at first. The people who thought that world was empty just didn’t find what was hidden in the negative space.