Category Archives: Commentary
Retroid Pocket 6 and Nostalgia Horizon
I previously purchased and just now received (a month later) a Retroid Pocket 6 (RP6).
The total was $275. “But, Azuriel, don’t you already have two retro handhelds?” I do. “Then surely you are using them so much that an upgraded experience is warranted?” Hahaha.
Here’s the thing: I considered the RP6 a defensive purchase. Do I need it? No, my PC plays everything I could possibly want, including the very games being emulated. But will I always be able to power my PC to play some dumb game or another? Who knows. Plus, prices are only going up.
I’m not here saying that the RP6 is necessarily a prepping item, but I do know that it is a complete package that is capable of playing all the games I have nostalgia for. My prior handhelds could do up to PS1/N64, but the lack of an analog stick made those difficult (despite the PS1 not having a stick…). Plus, you know, it also does Switch, a bunch of Steam games via GameNative, Android ports, and some fancy shit like plugging into a TV and operating like a mini-console. We’ll see how that works out.
That phrase though, “All the games I have nostalgia for,” got me thinking. When I look back, the PS2 is very much the caboose of my nostalgia train. I technically had a GameCube and a PS3, but the library of games I played on those two combined are dwarfed by anything I played elsewhere. I never purchased a PS4 or PS5, nor any Xbox console. I pretty much went from PS2 to a straight PC, playing Battlefield 2, then Magic Online, then World of Warcraft, then a decade-long fugue state and yada yada here we are.
But… why? Why do I feel no nostalgia for games past PS2?
The simple answer that comes to mind is the coincidental end of an age: I had graduated college and started the 9-5 drudgery of adult existence right when the PS2 “ended.” That feels about right. At the same time though… it doesn’t really explain why I don’t feel nostalgia for games like Command & Conquer, Diablo 2, DOOM, and Fallout 1 & 2, all of which I played on PC within that same window.
Is it because the PC “era” more fuzzy? I have changed computers several times over the intervening decades, but still interact with the games using the same keyboard and mouse interface. In contrast, I had to relearn like nine different controller types in that same period. Hmm. Nah, that doesn’t feel like a legitimate reason.
The only thing left that comes to mind is, perhaps, that the nostalgia is tied to specific (social) memories. Games like FF7 blew my high school mind, but it was further cemented in memory when I then started bringing all my friends over to watch the cinematics (after loading one of the many specific save files curated for that purpose). There was nostalgia for GoldenEye after probably a dozen or more weeks of split-screen multiplayer deathmatch parties. Facility + Proximity Mine only = hilarity ensued. I have some very formative (and social!) memories surrounding Command & Conquer that I may share at a later time, but few other kids my age had PCs available, let alone games for them.
Anyway, there it is. Retroid Pocket 6 acquired.
[E33] Back on the Horse
After a quick, 250-hour detour through Mewgenics and Slay the Spire 2, I am back on the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (E33) horse.
It’s a very beautiful horse. Very sleek, powerful. Just wish I didn’t have to muck the stall all the time.
As before, it all comes down to the combat system. In short, I do not find it fun at all. There are certain aspects of the pre-combat planning bits that I do find engaging. There is a ton of customization when it comes to choosing which Pictos (passives) to have active, with synergies and combos galore. Indeed, the whole thing actively reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics and the the Job system, where you could mix and match certain abilities together. Every time I pick up a new Picto, I start reviewing the whole list and see where it generates new interactions.
The actual battle execution is just not my cup of tea. I’m no longer “punishing myself” by trying to Parry every enemy attack, and just using Dodge instead. This has improved the experience quite a bit, or at least lowered the frustration, but fundamentally combat is still just a long series of Quick Time Events. You have to Dodge/Parry in games like Dark Souls too, but you can also strafe, run away, approach at different angles, and so on, which makes the Dodge/Parry feel less binary overall. Not so in E33.
It also doesn’t help that all the fun and exciting parts of combat are heavily focused on the Dodge/Parry mechanics. If you successfully Parry every attack in a sequence, you gain AP and deal immense counter-damage and greatly increase the Break bar. With the right Pictos, you also heal and get a bunch of other bonuses. Dodging attacks gives you like 1 AP total, if you have the appropriate Picto equipped. Granted, certain Picto combinations can give you AP for face-tanking if you don’t want to press buttons at all, but the point is that very clearly the game puts the ideal “Parry everything” reward front and center. So even though I am progressing through the game just fine, it certainly feels like I’m just not engaging with like half of it.
Which… is probably accurate, honestly. If this wasn’t Expedition 33, I would have stopped playing.
Luckily (?), it is Expedition 33, and I am committed to seeing it through. All the positives about the characters, the emotions, the evocative environments that remind me of Journey are still there. There is something special to be said about a game that compels you to take 5-10 screenshots a session, including of the dialog.
And so, I continue on. For those that come after.
Entry Point
I am flabbergasted how any of us beat videogames as kids.
Little Man has been playing a lot of videogames with me lately, with some mix of modern and retro titles. The struggle is finding what I would consider a good entry point to the medium. Back in the day, we obviously had no choice in the matter – “you get what you get, and don’t throw a fit.” I personally started on the NES with Super Mario Bros and eventually Super Mario Bros 3, but I always remembered how much better Super Mario World felt once the SNES came out. So, having tandem-completed Super Mario Odyssey (twice!), I thought that handing over the controller (or specifically the RG35XXSP) to Little Man and letting him play Super Mario World solo would be a good idea.
Spoiler: it was not.
Even when I took over to help him out of a particularly hard part, I came to realize how much of Super Mario World consisted entirely of hard spots. It is also difficult to fully appreciate how bizarre the concept of holding down the run button 100% of the time is in a platformer. Seriously, just try playing any non-3D Mario game without running. It’s painful. And yet… why build it that way in the first place?
Anyway, I backed off of Mario platformers and introduced him to Kirby instead. Specifically, Kirby Super Star for the SNES. This ended up being a much better entry point, for several reasons. First, Kirby has an HP bar, which means you can take multiple hits from enemies while you learn their attack patterns. Second, Kirby can float, which eases you into platforming elements. Third, you can create an AI companion any time you have a power, which immensely helps you with bosses and surviving the level in general. There were still some tricky bits to the game, but the “training wheels” helped Little Man build confidence and develop controller-based skills.
Once Kirby was exhausted, we moved back to Super Mario Wonder on the Switch. There is a lot to like how Nintendo designed co-op in Wonder. When one player dies, they come back as a ghost that can float around for 5 seconds, reviving if they touch the surviving player. Later on though, there are some levels in which being revived will result in you immediately dying again, and “giving up” simply means draining both players of any extra lives. At that point, I had Little Man play solo and try a given level 3-4 times before he could tag out. It took a while, and I ended up playing the final parts of the game entirely myself, but we beat Wonder a few weeks ago.
The next game I wanted him to try playing was Super Mario 64. “It’s got platforming, but you don’t die in one hit. Should be fine.” Spoiler: it was not fine. In fact, it was one of the most disillusioning experiences I’ve had in quite some time. I remember spending a lot of time with Mario 64. I remember fully completing the game with 120 stars. I remember it being a great game.
What I apparently didn’t remember is the godawful camera. Like, legitimately bad. Even I had issues walking inside the castle, camera gyrating wildly while Mario starts drunkenly spinning in circles. Did the novelty of three dimensions paper over the terrible-feeling controls and camera? I let Little Man play for a bit, and then helped him get a few of the Stars to unlock other levels. I went into the Snow level and then tried the slide race… five (5) times. Never even made it past the first turn. WTF, mate.
Maybe it’s the official Nintendo emulator, maybe it’s the joy-cons, maybe the N64 claw controller was better at that specific task, maybe I’m just older and/or used to other (better) control schemes. Regardless… it just feels bad. It’s one thing to know you can’t go home again, but it’s another driving there anyway only to be surprised at the smoking ruins of your remembered youth.
Of course, there are games from that era and before that do hold up. I have no doubt that Super Mario World will make another appearance once Little Man is a bit older and has more platforming skills under his belt. And once he can read at an appropriate level, there are some classic RPGs that I would love to introduce him to. That said… yikes. I purchased Super Mario Galaxy 1 + 2 recently as a sort of Odyssey replacement (plus I never played them), and I’m starting to sweat. Surely this won’t be another Mario 64 moment… will it? And what do kids even start playing these days?
[Fake Edit] It’s been a while since I drafted this post, but we have since beat Mario Galaxy and are on the tail-end of Galaxy 2. Thankfully, it was not as bad as Mario 64… but it’s still a bit rough. For one thing: holy nausea, Batman! I cannot remember the last game that made me motion sick from its inherent design, but Galaxy’s whole schtick of running across little planetoids has not landed well.
That said, Little Man has made some significant progress in terms of timing and problem-solving in a 3D space. There are some aspects he Nopes right out of immediately – usually having to do with countdown timers and such, which is totally understandable – but there have been a few times where he has completed a full level by himself. Can’t wait to see if I can get him into the Zelda series next.
Game Development is Expensive for Dumb Reasons
The average AAA game costs $300 million or more to develop. And as Jason Schreier points out, all that money is for… salaries.
Exact budgets of video-game productions can be tough to corroborate (more transparency from publishers would be nice!) but the numbers I’ve heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more — sometimes much more! — which I think helps explain the current state of the industry
To address some frequently asked questions:
- These are US and Canada productions. If you’re wondering why game X cost so much less, it was probably made elsewhere
- These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock)
Schreier also has a potentially paywalled article that goes into a bit more in-depth, but the short version is that an employee in LA can cost $15,000-$20,000 per month, when considering the full compensation package (salary + benefits). Average that out and a 100-person team budget is $21 million per year. Double that for a 200-person team, etc. That’s your starting point. Now factor in that the game is going to take 5-6 years to develop, and there you go.
But the question we should be asking is: why does it take 5-6 years to develop a game?
The answer may surprise you!
…or not, if you’ve ever worked on a group and/or work project before. It’s scope creep, mismanagement, executive meddling, and a whole lot of hurrying up and waiting. And not anything about fancy graphics.
Everyone who’s worked in the video-game industry for more than a few years has their own horror story. There’s the feature that gets canceled because the CEO’s teenage kid didn’t like it, or the level that everyone knows is going to get axed but that they all have to keep working on because the cancellation hasn’t officially been communicated yet. Or maybe it already has been canceled and nobody told the audio team.
It’s worth noting that video games do need ample iteration to be good, and some of the most successful games have been the result of so-called “wasted” work. Cuts and cancellations are not always a mistake. But there are also countless examples of teams of hundreds floundering in pre-production as they try to figure out what a game’s “core loop” will actually look like.
The very latest example is Edios Montreal cancelling Wildlands, a game that made it all the way into the final debugging phase before being axed this week. Reportedly, it had been “struggling for years, with 4 different game engines used throughout development, narrative direction conflicts, and a budget that had exploded to several hundred million.” The boondoggle also caused a new Deus Ex game to be cancelled, which makes it extra tragic and dumb to me. Nobody asked for this.
The corollary are games in which devs just sort of muck around or go down blind alleys for 4+ years, and then suddenly a completely different finished product emerges 18 (crunched) months later. My favorite example of this is Mass Effect: Andromeda. Instead of following the winning formula of the epic sci-fi trilogy that created it, the devs thought it fruitful to… have the protagonist explore hundreds procedurally-generated worlds.
“They were creating planets and they were able to drive around it, and the mechanics of it were there,” said a person who worked on the game. “I think what they were struggling with was that it was never fun. They were never able to do it in a way that’s compelling, where like, ‘OK, now imagine doing this a hundred more times or a thousand more times.’”
Nearly all of the shortcomings of Andromeda originated from this outrageous scope, along with being forced to use the Frostbite engine. Plus, all the staffing changes, directors leaving, downtime from having devs in three different timezones working together, etc, etc etc. So maybe a lot of things.
Another example? The as-yet unreleased Subnautica 2. Sure, the obvious issue was Krafton’s CEO trying to personally sabotage a payout to the founders. But a hitherto unreported element to the overall story is how the team was floundering. This part was deep within the court records (PDF):
Despite their distance from the heart of the studio, Cleveland and McGuire’s involvement paid off. In the spring of 2024, McGuire teamed up with Cleveland to build a prototype of Subnautica 2 to help guide the team. When it became clear that the existing leadership structure was not working, the Key Employees made a change. The studio replaced Kalina and elevated Anthony Gallegos to lead designer. “[T]he progress of the game . . . completely took off.” This successful course correction set the stage for Cleveland and McGuire to formalize their new roles.
Now, I’m not going to sit and claim that game development is easy in a Rest of the Owl type of way. Any commercially creative endeavor involves a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. But what I think we as consumers need to start scrutinizing more is the volume of spaghetti, and why the throwers keep getting spun around a bunch of times before the toss. Or why people who can’t boil water and hate pasta anyway are making spaghetti in the first place.
The bottom line is that there’s not a good reason for games to cost $300+ million, nor is there a compelling reason consumers should subsidize these costs with higher MSRPs or microtransactions. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, won 436 industry awards, including Game of the Year, on a reported budget of less than $10 million. It apparently still took 5 years to develop, so clearly the Sandfall devs weren’t making LA money. Nevertheless, try and argue with the results.
Or maybe we just… let nature take its course as the industry winnows itself.
Priced In
If you haven’t heard the news, Sony announced that they are raising the prices of the PlayStation 5. Again. The disc-less version is now $600, and the Pro costs $900 MSRP. Nine hundred dollars. This comes on top of price increases of last year. As a reminder, the disc-less version launched in 2020 for $4001. Sony isn’t alone with price increases, of course, with Microsoft hiking the price of their lagging console several times in addition to Game Pass Ultimate. It seems inevitable that Nintendo will eventually follow suit with the Switch 2, despite trying to raise peripheral prices to compensate.
Meanwhile, game studios have been shedding workers at breakneck speeds. Just this past week, Epic Games laid off over a thousand people (with $500 million in additional cuts) amidst lower Fortnite engagement. Overall, the industry lost 45,000 jobs in the last four years. Some of this is attributed to a post-COVID correction, when apparently every studio hired anyone they could and greenlit even the dumbest of live-service games (Concord, Highguard, etc), ironically chasing (fewer) Fortnite dollars.
The other part of it is simple economics. If the average budget for a AAA game is $300 million, even with no storefront cuts and a price of $80, it would still require 3.75 million copies to be sold to break even. A more realistic figure would be 70% of a $70 game, putting it at 6.2 million sales. Again, just to get back to $0, let alone show any profit. GTA 5 sold 225 million copies worldwide, so yeah, it’s still possible to make bank on certain bets. I’m also guessing that GTA 6 will make back its $1 billion budget.
On the other hand, if people have to buy a $900 console just to play it… I dunno.
This very well may be the tipping point beyond which AAA no longer becomes economical viable. Think about the PlayStation 6, which is assumed to be coming out in late 2027 or 2028. Do you believe the base model will be coming out for less than $700? And if you’re willing to drop that amount of money for the next-gen system, will you be satisfied with games that do not require the level of graphical fidelity it would provide? At the same time, it’s going to be difficult for game developers to hit those break-even sales figures if the userbase is balking at the price of the console.
One thing that I think about is whether this whole trajectory is already “priced in,” so to speak. Game development cycles are 5-6 years long, so it makes sense how all these live-service games, started in the most irrational of COVID exuberances, are simultaneously returning to Earth at terminal velocity. Concord et tal failing is one thing though; Fortnite eating its own tail is quite another. Remember when everyone started releasing MMOs trying to chase that World of Warcraft subscription money? After that development cycle of failure – during which WoW declined all on its own – we did not see a renewed interest in full-priced subscription MMOs. The industry moved on to F2P and live-service.
Well, the tides are shifting again. But where is the next sandbar? Are there any left? And if there is, can anyone afford to build on it again?
I suppose we’ll find out around, uh *checks calendar*, 2031. Just in time for Fallout 5.
1 Inflation puts $400 in 2020 as being $750 today. Which… holy shit. Nevertheless, that isn’t how it normally works.
Subnautica May Day… Maybe
Remember all the legal shenanigans surrounding Subnautica 2 from last year? If not, the basic gist was that Krafton bought Unknown Worlds several years ago for $500 million, with an additional $250 million bonus available if Subnautica 2 hit certain sales milestones by 2025. As the deadline approached, it was looking like Subnautica 2 might squeak into Early Access in time after all, and possibly trigger the payout. Then Krafton fired the founders for alleged nonfeasance, and otherwise muddied the waters as much as possible. Litigation has been ongoing ever since.
Until now, anyway. A judge rejected Krafton’s claims, ordered the former CEO Ted Gill reinstated, and the $250 million bonus deadline extended until September 2026:
“Frustrated by the Key Employees’ refusal to forfeit operation control and facing a nine-figure liability, Krafton went searching for a pretext,” the judge wrote, slamming Krafton’s previous claims that Gill and others had “abandoned their responsibilities.”
“Krafton’s true focus in June 2025 was avoiding its financial exposure,” the judge wrote. “It knew Subnautica 2 was poised to achieve a $250 million earnout, which Kim viewed as a catastrophic failure. Krafton undertook ‘Project X’ to either force a deal on the earnout or execute a ‘takeover’ of the studio. Terminating the Founders was one tactic explored and ultimately chosen by Krafton to accomplish its goal.”
If you were curious about the “financial exposure”:
Eligibility for the performance-based earnout is determined by Unknown Worlds’ revenue through December 31, 2025, with an option to extend the earnout period through June 2026. The earnout formula is highly leveraged. If Unknown Worlds surpasses a revenue threshold of $69.8 million, Krafton must pay $3.12 for each additional dollar of revenue generated, up to the $250 million cap.
To better visualize this, here’s a spreadsheet I made:
| Subnautica 2 Revenue | Krafton | Unknown Worlds |
| $69,800,000.00 | $69,800,000.00 | $0.00 |
| $92,171,794.87 | $0.00 | $69,800,000.00 |
| $149,928,205.13 | -$100,071,794.87 | $250,000,000.00 |
| $250,000,000.00 | $0.00 | $250,000,000.00 |
| $319,800,000.00 | $69,800,000.00 | $250,000,000.00 |
So, if Subnautica 2 earns $69.8 million, Krafton keeps all the revenue. Each dollar after that is exponentially worse to the point that Krafton is potentially $100 million in the hole if the game caps out at $150 million in revenue. It’s not until after almost $320 million in total revenue that Krafton gets back the original $69.8 million they “start” with. I don’t know if these bonus payout schemes are normal in the industry, but is it not obvious how much corporate fuckery it invites?
Incidentally, the court records indicated that Krafton’s own finance team estimated over 1.67 million copies sold by Q4 2025 (from an August 2025 early access launch), which would trigger a payout between $191 million and $242 million. So, yeah, right in that Krafton “dead zone” of negative money.
The entire court PDF was a fascinating read, by the way. Back in November, I remember reading an article alleging that Krafton CEO Changhan Kim – the same guy who spearheaded the acquisition in the first place – tried to get Legal to get out of the contract. When he was told by Legal that Krafton would still have to pay out the bonus, he turned to ChatGPT for advice… which also said it was a bad idea. Nevertheless, Kim persisted until ChatGPT spit out an approach that he enacted almost verbatim. The allegation certainly had some “big if true” energy to it. And, well, it was true.
185 Kim Tr. 440-41. Kim admitted at trial that he had deleted specific, relevant ChatGPT logs. Id. at 441. This particular chat was deleted. Id.
Woof.
Anyway, problem solved, Subnautica 2 is on track for a May 2026 early access release!
…or is it?
In another burst of last minute corporate fuckery, Steve Papoutsis (the Krafton-appointed CEO who replaced Ted Gill) sent out an internal memo to the Subnautica 2 team congratulating them on their hard work and saying Krafton has green-lit the release of the game into Early Access in May. This memo was then “leaked” to the world and Krafton acknowledged its veracity to IGN. Which is cool and all, aside from the fact that Ted Gill had yet to be reinstated as CEO, from which he was illegally removed. Motions are already being filed, and Krafton’s argument appears to be that the release date determination came before the judgment, so haha, oops, we did nothing wrong.
So… maybe not May? It’s very possible that the actual developers of Subnautica 2 have been keeping their nose to the grindstone this whole time and the game is ready to go. Or maybe ChatGPT told Krafton executives that their best bet was a reduced-fanfare rollout and hope expected revenue was depressed as a result, thereby limiting liabilities. I’ve certainly heard people on Reddit saying that they don’t want to buy the game and support Krafton as a result. Which is a bit silly in context of the payout, considering the best possible way to punish Krafton is to get Subnautica 2 to $150 million in revenue, directly causing a $100 million Krafton loss.
Regardless, we’ll undoubtedly see something released between May and September. Missing the earnout window after all this time drama would be… criminal.
Level of Enthusiasm: Wiki
You ever felt so engaged in a game that you are updating the Wiki? That’s where I’m at in Mewgenics.
Granted, the Wiki was basically all blank pages since the game came out just a few weeks ago; hard to demonstrate “Wiki-updating enthusiasm” if it is already filled out for you.
But, guys, whew. I play a lot of games, and it is vanishingly rare when I play something that completely consumes the entirety of my play experience. Or should I say: allows itself to consume my play experience. Expedition 33 has a lot going for it and won all kinds of awards for reasons… but I find it difficult to play the game for more than one “session” at a time. Combat is stressful, not fun. Each new area is a hard stopping point wherein you encounter new mobs with new attack patterns you have to memorize so you can Parry them (or die). Two hours is basically my limit for the day.
Mewgenics also technically has stopping points. Maybe all your cats die in a series of unfortunate bouts of RNG. Going into brand new zones can be stressful in its own way too. “This enemy’s ranged attacks delete my equipment? And there are six of them?!” Nevertheless, I persist. And it’s fun. I don’t even bother with GW2 dailies anymore, as that’s 10-20 extra minutes of Mewgenics I could be playing. The last time I experienced this was with Abiotic Factor, and Wartales before that. No doubt I will burn myself out before too much longer, but Christ I almost have 100 hours already.
Not bad for a $30 MSRP game.
E33: How It’s Done
I am not particularly far in Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 (E33) – about 12 hours or so in – but I did want to briefly highlight one fantastic customization system that it has in comparison to, say, Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2, or frankly any game that professes to have player agency/customization at all. That system is of Pictos.
In many ways, Pictos feel like OG Final Fantasy 7 Materia: they are an item you equip that grants both stat bonuses plus a passive ability. Once you complete four combats with a given Pico equipped, the passive ability is permanently learned by everybody. Each character then has a pool of “Luma” they can use in a point-buy way to equip the passives. Some effects are cheap, like being able to gain +1 AP on a Perfect Dodge for 1 Luma; more powerful passives can cost 10, 15, or more. Oh, and of course you can freely move Pictos and Luma around at no penalty (there are respec items for base stats though)!
What gets the juices really flowing are the synergies and tradeoffs. Each character can equip three Pictos apiece, and while so equipped, the passive is granted without spending Luma. Thing is, there is usually an inverse relationship between how much Luma it would otherwise take to get the passive, and the raw bonus stats on the Picto itself. A given Picto might have +50 Speed and +15% Crit Chance, for example, but contains a passive that only saves you 3 Luma. Meanwhile, that 20 Luma passive is attached to like a +300 HP brick.
…which can be still be helpful if one of your characters is wielding a weapon that doubles as damage taken in exchange for another bonus. The downside of which you are mitigating with a passive that reduces damage taken by 50% but you cannot be healed by spells. No worries, just stack a bunch of +HP Picos and practice your sweet, sweet dance (dodge) moves.
Now, think about The Outer Worlds 2 in comparison. There is none!
Yeah, these are not the same type of games, so of course they are not set up in the same way. But there will be people who argue that you choosing Engineering and Medical on the character select screen in TOW2 is some deep gesture of customization when it is, in fact, an a priori straightjacket that railroads your entire playthrough. “I’m roleplaying though!” Roleplaying… what? Arbitrary Man?
Anyway. All I’m saying is that I am wherever I am in the game, and already have more than 40 Pictos to choose from. And unlike in TOW2, I am actually choosing builds and testing them out, because I am not expressly penalized for doing so. That’s some good, engaging game design.
Maybe Obsidian should take notes.
Half-Cocked
So the news out there is that both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 flopped. Or, technically, “failed to meet expectations.”
Last year the developer released three games—a rare and impressive achievement for a studio of its size—but two of them failed to meet sales forecasts set by Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft Corp. “They’re not disasters,” Urquhart says. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”
While Grounded 2 was a big hit, the disappointing results from the other two have led Obsidian to “think a lot about how much we put into the games, how much we spend on them, how long they take,” Urquhart says. Both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were in development for more than six years, inflating their production costs and the company’s financial expectations. One of Urquhart’s missions is to cut down development timelines to three or four years per title. (source)
The piling on in the Reddit comments is understandable, and I agree with most of it. Neither Avowed nor The Outer Worlds 2 feel like games that have had 6+ years in development. The equipment upgrade system in Avowed is both punishing and boring, and two of the classes have nothing interesting going on in the Skills department. For TOW2, Skills/Perks were half-assed at best and irrelevant at worst. What in the world were the designers spending all their time on?
During the negotiations with Microsoft, Obsidian’s executives assembled a slideshow presentation for the concept that would become Avowed, pitched as an ambitious cross between megahits The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Destiny that would allow players to battle monsters together in a massive fantasy world. It was an impressive if unlikely proposition. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” says Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director. Two years later, Obsidian stripped out the multiplayer feature, and a year after that it assigned a new director to the project. By the time Avowed came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years.
Ah, well, there you go.
I’m not going to pretend to be an industry insider, or able to speak authoritatively on game design (or any topic, for that matter). But, respectively devs, what the fuck? We have heard for ages that development cycles are getting more expensive, and that is why game prices have to be $70, $80, and higher with macrotransactions. People just swallow the narrative that all the increases in technology and graphical fidelity make the process of making games cost more money. But peel back the layers and all of a sudden it certainly seems like the people in charge are just going off half-cocked.
Game design is an iterative process, yes. Inventing new forms of fun is hard. I can also understand that sometimes the fun only manifests itself once all the various interlocking systems are already in place. Again, though… what the fuck? “Skyrim meets Destiny in massive fantasy world” is not a game, it is barely a concept of a setting. Do these designers believe that the fun will simply manifest itself out of the aether? “If we build it, they will have fun”? Or do they assume that figuring out the fun is the easy part and can be added in later?
During recent breakfast meetings, Urquhart and his deputies discussed some things they could’ve done better with last year’s releases. Perhaps Avowed players needed the option to, say, commit crimes and get arrested to make the world feel more alive. Maybe The Outer Worlds 2 needed stronger virtual companions. It’s hard to imagine a game would sell more copies if it had pickpocketing, but Obsidian’s leaders say seemingly minor ingredients can make a big difference. “Our job, all of us here, is to go make games that people want to play and buy, and if we continue to do that, then we have a solid business,” Urquhart says.
“Minor ingredients,” oh my fucking god. They have no goddamn clue, do they?
Here you go, Obsidian, on the house. I’m not certain how pickpocketing would have worked in Avowed considering none of the NPCs move, but sure, it would be nice flavor. But I recommend starting with the fact that every part of the player progression experience is awful. You are punished for upgrading equipment since resources are finite and enemies don’t respawn, and are also punished for not upgrading equipment as enemies automatically deal 35% more damage if they exceed your tier. When you do upgrade though, you get a whole +4 to whatever stat, with nothing else interesting going on.
These sort of things are not “minor ingredients.” It’s the whole fucking game! You know, the thing that players do after purchasing your product? P-L-A-Y. Kudos to the people who designed the movement and vaulting inside the game world, but whoever came up with the fiddly bits needs some goddamn coaching. Would it have killed anyone to increase all the values by a few points when upgrading gear? Or playtested the Warrior/Ranger talents against all of the stuff the Wizard could do by default?
As for The Outer Worlds 2, same thing. Skills and Perks were deadass boring. How many of them meaningfully impacted combat at all? In what world should a player feel comfortable breezing through the entire last Act of game with 17 unallocated Skill Points and 5 Perk Points? Nothing I picked felt like it did anything other than add another percentage gain on otherwise extremely low base damage weapon. Hard to get excited about going from 490% increased damage to 520%.
It could be that I’m the one off-base. Maybe the entire problem with the games were one of marketing, or the story not being engaging enough, or the graphics being something-something. In one of the Reddit threads, someone commented how slowly people talked in Avowed being an issue. OK, sure. That said, it possibly couldn’t hurt to make character progression fun or exciting in any way whatsoever.
The hilarious and tragic thing are the lessons (un)learned.
Grounded 2 came together the quickest. Despite the popularity of the original, which the studio released during the pandemic gaming boom of 2020, Obsidian hadn’t planned on greenlighting a sequel until it got a pitch in early 2023 from Eidos Interactive, a studio in Montreal that was looking for outsourcing work. […]
Grounded 2 offers some lessons for a better way forward. Obsidian assigned a few senior staff to orchestrate the production in Montreal from 3,000 miles away, rather than develop the whole thing in-house. Chris Parker, an Obsidian co-founder who supervised development, says the distance was empowering because he could make hard calls more swiftly. One of the game’s vehicles—rideable insects called “buggies”—had originally been designed to be shared by multiple players until Parker and his crew realized the functionality wasn’t coming together, leading them to pivot. “I was like, ‘If this was one of our internal teams, we would work on this for another two or three months,’” Parker recalls. “We made this call because we could tell them what to do. It feels like we still run around with our kid gloves on internally.”
First of all… they hadn’t planned on greenlighting a Grounded sequel? I mean, yeah, not every game needs a sequel, people crave new experiences, sometimes devs want to move on, yadda yadda. Still, it feels bonkers to me that when a game company does strike gold on a fun game concept/design, it often just goes nowhere afterwards. Everyone sings Obsidian’s praises for Fallout: New Vegas, which cost $8 million and only two years to produce. How did that happen? It was basically a Fallout 3 mod. Which is probably why it was so fun in the first place, because it was built on an established foundation of fun.
We’ll have to see with Obsidian whether they take the lessons to heart. But I was also thinking about this other recent tidbit from Blizzard in a different article:
“[Warcraft is] a fantastic IP. In my humble opinion, it’s been underutilized and I just want to bring it to as many people as possible. And that means evolving what Warcraft means, what it is, and where it’s going. We want it to be approachable. Chris Metzen [executive creative director], is sometimes like, ‘I wish we hadn’t called it Warcraft. It sounds intimidating.’ But I’m like, nobody really thinks that about Warhammer. It’s an understood name.
“This idea of ‘third space’ in our online worlds, we can’t even define what that means exactly, but we’re working on figuring that out. We want people to come in, hang out and have birthdays, weddings, raids, grand adventures, play with their friends, meet new friends… all the things that World of Warcraft has been good at for over 20 years. (source)
The easy jokes are, you know, how Blizzard has a TCG, MOBA (abandoned), and Clash Royal-esque mobile app (dead) all within the same narrative universe. But remember, Blizzard had also been working on a fantasy survival game for many years before that got killed in development as well. Wonder what had happened there…
It was conceived to be similar to a more polished version of popular survival games such as Minecraft and Rust, containing “vast” maps supporting up to 100 players. Due to the ambitious map size, the game’s engine was switched from Unreal Engine, in which it was prototyped, to Synapse, an internally-developed engine created specifically for Odyssey and envisioned as something that would be shared by multiple projects. However, the switch led to significant problems – due to delays, Blizzard’s artists were forced to continue prototyping in Unreal, knowing their work would later be discarded. […]
At the time of the Microsoft acquisition, team members remained hopeful they would be allowed to switch back to Unreal Engine due to Microsoft’s stance on allowing game leads rather than executives choose the technology used. While the game was positively received by testers, however, there was estimated to be several years of development time remaining on the project, with even a 2026 release seeming overly optimistic. The news of the game’s cancellation was announced by Microsoft in a company-wide email in late January 2024.[2] Some of the former team members from Odyssey were moved to other projects in development,[2] though a significant portion were laid off.
Of fucking course. I especially liked the “allowing game leads rather than executives choose the technology used.” Seems like a good idea, maybe someone should try it occasionally.
You know, all this does is really highlight that nobody knows what they hell they are doing and it’s a miracle any fun games get built at all.
In An Age 
GameNative
May 11
Posted by Azuriel
It took me several hours to set up my Retroid Pocket 6 (RP6) with all the emulators and copies of 30+ year-old games. Then I downloaded an app called GameNative, and within minutes had access to over 2000ish of my games across Steam, Epic, Amazon (?!), and GOG. And it is seriously changing the way I look at games and how I play them.
Probably.
In the likely event you haven’t been watching RetroGameCorps or TechDweeb videos for the last year, the handheld gaming scene is having a Renaissance moment. The nostalgia mining element has always been there – “Here is a $80 GBA-looking thing that plays PlayStation 1 games!” – but there are only so many of those veins to go around. Then the Steam Deck came and kind of blew open the more premium tier of handheld devices. In the last year or so, though, there have been some serious developments on the software side of things that allow for Steam to more easily communicate on Android devices without a lot of workarounds. This includes automatically applying drivers and settings and tweaks to get games to function correctly.
I don’t know all the technical stuff, but as Todd Howard would say: it just works.
…for most games. The RP6 I own has a chipset which is the equivalent to a 1050ti graphics card, for example, and only 8 GB of RAM. I’m not going to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate 3 on this thing. However, most of the games I have (by volume) aren’t AAA titles. Hell, I spent like 200+ hours in March playing Mewgenics and Slay the Spire 2. And guess what? Both games fully work on the RP6 and include cloud saves. Granted, Mewgenics isn’t as controller-friendly as I’d like, but still!
As mentioned earlier, all this is changing the way I look at games in general. For one thing, it has me reexamining my entire decade+ Steam/Epic/Amazon/GOG libraries to see if there are games that I may have otherwise ignored/missed that could be more fun by virtue of playing on a handheld.
For example, I just played through the entirety of Celeste on the RP6. Was it a better experience than just playing on my PC with a controller? Probably not. In fact, I ended up purchasing a separate grip for the RP6 because I was getting hand cramps after playing more than an hour straight with the RP6. Although that might be more due to Celeste’s control scheme and precision platforming. The fact remains that I did stick with it and beat Celeste in little 15-20 minute increments in-between meetings, while waiting for other games to load, and eventually just in straight-up long sessions. Celeste is certainly more amenable for this sort of gameplay experience than other games might be, but it’s a proof of concept for me. Plus, as an Android device, the software manages to perfectly (thus far) suspend the game at a moment’s notice if something were to come up.
After reviewing my existing catalog, I have begun to pay more attention to all those ancillary (bundle) sales that I may have hitherto ignored. Just this past week, I picked up Journey and Donut County for just over $3 apiece. I haven’t played Journey in just about 13 years and I would probably enjoy it more on a larger screen… but the fact that I could play it (natively!) on a handheld? Yes, please. As for Donut County, that looks precisely like the sort of goofy fun I wish to be able to conjure up to fill in the gaps between moments.
Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, of course. I was initially excited to finally have an excuse to play Rain World, but everything looks tiny on the RP6 and there aren’t any in-game graphical options to correct it. Slay the Spire 2 has controller support already, but not touchscreen support that I can tell. As mentioned, Mewgenics is playable, but there’s no way I’m going to move the mouse cursor around with a thumbstick the entire game when I just want to move a few squares. I anticipate many such idiosyncrasies as I load into various games.
Overall though, I’m finding GameNative to be a game-changer for me. In many ways, this functionality was what I was waiting for the Steam Machine for. The Retroid Pocket 6 has video out capability, so it technically fulfills that portion too, if I were so inclined. All that is left, really, is to check its MineCraft capability. And wouldn’t you know, MineCraft is on Android and this is an Android device.
So, my guess is: “pretty good.” Better than on Switch? We shall see.
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Tags: Android, GameNative, Retroid Pocket 6, Steam Deck, Steam Machine