Just stay away from the knockoff Steam Deck: Kill the Freeman.

To be fair to Capcom, they did release Ace Attorney 3 quickly and it was the peak of the franchise.

Hey anyone wanna play fallout 76?

Indeed. I always read in forums people asking if NMS is worth playing now. Imagine if it had a great launch from the beginning. It would’ve been much more successful and wouldn’t have a bad reputation like it does know.

Out of all my VR games almost none make it into double digits playtime (notable exceptions, Beat Saber and Boneworks) but I have logged hundreds of hours in NMS VR. No other VR experience comes close in terms of content.

I mean, IMO it’s good enough to get your moneys worth out of it, its a hell of a lot of fun actually. It’s just that the main storyline is relatively short and the gameplay loop after completing the main story is not engaging enough to make it one of those games that you end up sinking 500+ hours into. To me that puts it in the same tier as Subnautica.

Same goes for Cyberpunk 2077 tbh.

Also, while some genres can be fixed after release, some can’t because they aren’t very replayable.

A number of adventure games, for example – you’re probably not going to play through them many times. If you blow the initial release, you kind of blew the experience.

the steam reviews won’t reflect the change in quality.

Actually, Steam now does have two separate ratings. One is for lifetime rating, and the other is for recent ratings.

I mean, modern games are many times more complex so the idea of putting out a “finished” game these days is more like “this is an acceptable level of bugs/most players won’t hit this.” The problem is that the acceptable level has shifted way too fucking far in the wrong direction to the point where in some cases we’re barely getting an alpha, much less a beta. In general, I have no problem with companies putting out good games that get better, like tuning for performance so you get better FPS, it’s player on lower spec machines, etc. I don’t like the idea of paying to be a beta tester for two years, and not getting the good game until way later.

I’m not arguing in favor of companies putting out shoddy gamesor the practice of games needing patches to fix glaring issues, but suggesting that the 90s and early 2000s were the days of totally flawless games seems like a result of survivorship bias.

We remember the great games from those days, but there were mountains of shovelware games releasing with all the problems we see today.

Even many good or great games from those days have problems that either remain unfixed, or have only been fixed years later by fans.

I fucking loved the Forsaken expansion and felt that it was worth the money. I got Black Armory not realizing it wasn’t an expansion like Forsaken and was so fucking disappointed. I eventually quit because they kept making the game worse.

You mean if they’d been competent show runners in the first place.

The show was great when it was based off of good writing.

Then it got sketchy as they had to rely on GRRM’s notes.

Then the notes got more vague, and season 7 and 8 turned into garbage.

Conclusion: D&D were mediocre show runners who couldn’t hire competent writers, and thought game of thrones was about subverting expectations instead of strong character arcs.

Justifiably, it lost them their next gig.

HBO was willing to wait for good seasons. But D&D wanted to get into a Star Wars contract with Disney. They rushed season 8 out the door with lazy writing to get that Star Wars deal.

After season 8 traumatized GOT fans and bombed in reviews, Disney backed out of the deal, and D&D have fallen into obscurity.

My understanding is that the released game was not a “descendant” of that 2001 preview. The game was totally scrapped and then a new iteration was started years later which is what eventually was released. So it’s not like the game was actually being worked on for a decade. More like the released game (which was only built over a couple of years) had the same name as a scrapped game from a decade prior.

Welly wait for Star Citizen now… :-D

IIRC, though, that isn’t “give developer some more money and keep plugging”. It was “take the game in its current state, hand it to another developer to get it into a releasable state, and ship it”.

googles

Yeah. Basically, 3D Realms just kept kicking the can down the road. Gearbox took over, cleaned up what was there, and shipped it in half a year. It wasn’t the perfect, ideal 3D FPS, but I suspect that cleaning up what was there and making what return was possible (and at least getting the people who had preordered the game many years back) was probably the right move. I don’t think that 3D Realms was going to produce a huge success if they had another two years or something. It probably would have been a good idea to have wrapped up the project several years earlier than was the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever

In 1996, 3D Realms released Duke Nukem 3D. Set apart from other first-person shooter games by its adult humor and interactive world, it received positive reviews and sold around 3.5 million copies.[8] 3D Realms co-founder George Broussard announced the sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, on April 27, 1997,[9] which he expected to be released by Christmas 1998. The game was widely anticipated.[8] Scott Miller, 3D Realms’ co-founder, felt the Duke Nukem franchise would last for decades across many iterations, like James Bond or Mario.[8] Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.[8] 3D Realms also began developing a 2D version of Duke Nukem Forever, which was canceled due to the rising popularity of 3D games.[10]

Rather than create a new game engine, 3D Realms began development using Id Software’s Quake II engine.[8] They demonstrated the first Duke Nukem Forever trailer at the E3 convention in May 1998. Critics were impressed by its cinematic presentation and action scenes, with combat on a moving truck.[8] According to staff, Broussard became obsessed with incorporating new technology and features from competing games and could not bear for Duke Nukem Forever to be perceived as outdated.[8] Weeks after E3, he announced that 3D Realms had switched to Unreal Engine, a new engine with better rendering capabilities for large spaces, requiring a reboot of the project.[8] In 1999, they switched engines again, to a newer version of Unreal Engine.[8]

By 2000, Duke Nukem Forever was still far from complete. A developer who joined that year described it as a series of chaotic tech demos, and the staff felt that Broussard had no fixed idea of what the final game would be.[8] As the success of Duke Nukem 3D meant that 3D Realms did not require external funding, they lacked deadlines or financial pressure that could have driven the project. Broussard became defiant in response to questions from fans and journalists, saying it would be released “when it’s done”.[8] In December 2000, the rights to publish Duke Nukem Forever were purchased by Take-Two Interactive, which hoped to release it the following year.[11] By 2001, Duke Nukem Forever was being cited as a high-profile case of vaporware, and Wired gave it the “vaporware of the year” award.[12]

At E3 2001, 3D Realms released another trailer, the first public view of Duke Nukem Forever in three years. It received a positive response, and the team was elated, feeling that they were ahead of their competitors. However, Broussard still failed to present a vision for a final product. One employee felt that Miller and Broussard were developing “with a 1995 mentality”, with a team much smaller than other major games of the time. By 2003, only 18 people were working on Duke Nukem Forever full time.[8] In a 2006 presentation, Broussard told a journalist the team had “fucked up” and had restarted development.[8] By August 2006, around half the team had left, frustrated by the lack of progress.[8]

According to Miller, the Canadian studio Digital Extremes was willing to take over the project in 2004, but the proposal was rejected by others at 3D Realms. Miller later described this as a “fatal suicide shot”.[13] In 2007, 3D Realms hired Raphael van Lierop as the new creative director. He was impressed by the game and felt it could be finished within a year, but Broussard disagreed.[8] 3D Realms hired aggressively to expand the team to about 35 people. Brian Hook, the new creative lead, became the first employee to push back against Broussard.[8] In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] However, a small team of ex-employees, which would later become Triptych Games, continued developing the game from their homes.[14]

In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.[16] It holds the Guinness world record for the longest development for a video game, at 14 years and 44 days,[17] though this period was exceeded in 2022 by Beyond Good and Evil 2.[18]

In 2022, Miller released a blog post on the Apogee website about 3D Realms’ failure to complete Duke Nukem Forever. He attributed it to three major factors: understaffing, repeated engine changes and a lack of planning.[13] On Twitter, Broussard responded that Miller’s claims were “nonsense”, described him as manipulative and narcissistic, and accused him of blaming others. He blamed Miller for the loss of 3D Realms and the Duke Nukem intellectual property.[13]

I think that one key phrase there might be important: “As the success of Duke Nukem 3D meant that 3D Realms did not require external funding, they lacked deadlines or financial pressure that could have driven the project.” Like, this is maybe a good example of where they really did need someone outside the project to say “I need you to get milestones and a schedule in shape”, and where more money and time isn’t the right answer. It’s not that the project is on the cusp of amazing success and the people managing the project just mis-estimated the schedule by several months. It’s that they just aren’t anywhere near where they want to be and don’t have a realistic roadmap for getting there.

Yeah I don’t know why you’re getting down voted. Obesity shortens life expectancy by around 10 years. Life expectancy for men in the US was at 79 years before covid (it is now down to 73 years). Gabe is currently 61 years old so he can be expected to die by the end of this decade.