By open world they probably mean , 5 kilometers of mostly empty space with a few missions here or there
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Only if you buy those missions first. Otherwise you'll just find a marker with a lock that says "buy this mission first".
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Mass Effect Andromeda's Racist Game Designer No Longer Works For BioWare...
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Yep, it's even in the title (ex-Bioware dev). I also said that I don't think his beliefs are relevant to this topic, and I don't want this thread to turn into yet another controversial thread about social issues.
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Focusing on the individual rather on the idea per se, is a common logical fallacy, sadly.
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It's not like he's saying anything new or surprising, though. I mean, it's not like publishers are being coy about this sort of thing. They will loudly announce the new ways they've found to entice people to spend money, all in the name of player choice and freedom, of course.
On the one hand, it's a shame because it ruins games that could have been that much better. On the other hand, the relentless drive to making games more monetizable (which my browser thinks isn't even a word) results in games I don't even want to play based on their very design alone, so it makes them easier to skip. Sure, you could sink 100+ hours in the latest wide-open empty sandbox game that rewards your little brain with pinpricks of satisfaction when you've got collectible 342 out of 2400, but it's like eating fast food -- feels pretty good when you're doing it, but afterwards you look back and wonder why you made your life worse doing that, when the overall experience wasn't even really worth it. Throw in the requirement to keep spending money while you're doing it and it's even less attractive.
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All gaming companies are focused on earning money as their priority. Apart from that they may have only better or worse PR, and had a little less fuck-ups during their operation time. Not single publisher is focused on gamers. It's capitalistic business and it's always focused on money.
It's not like those companies (EA, Bethesda, Activision, 2K, Blizzard etc) are family businesses that can say "we treasure our gamers and try to give them the best game we can possibly make". They are on stock market, they need to fight for investors, they need to earn more and more money to keep investors happy by paying them their share of income. Only thing that interest them is to keep investors happy. Nothing else.
Investors like to hear that company they own use DRM to fight piracy - devs will use it in every single game they make. Investors like to see bars that show game will earn +50% more after incorporating microtransactions - devs will think how they can incorporate them in a way that will give them ability to milk players in less noticeable way. Etc.
Only exception from this rule is when game is funded via crowfunding. If done correctly devs can give players what they want without having to satisfy big stock market investor. But instead players contribute as direct devs investors.
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Well, all companies are focused on money, but there's still plenty of leeway in how you become and remain successful as a company. You don't have to be traded at a stock exchange, subject to the mercy of investor goals. You don't have to treat your customers as a way to tap into an endless revenue stream by base exploitation of psychological weaknesses. It's a choice game publishers make, though. (And note that I say publishers, not development studios, though of course there can be overlap.) It's up to us to make sure those choices ultimately won't pay off. Not that I have much hope that that part of the market is just going to disappear or anything.
The list of publishers I won't do business with because of their excessively scummy track record grows by the day. I'm going to be missing out on a lot of AAA games this way, although I'm not sure "missing out" is really the proper expression here when games are down to blatantly incorporating gambling for money (on top of all the other nonsense that's already part and parcel of the premium experience).
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I might get a ban for this as it is inappropriate language, but I simply cannot hold it back:
FUCK YOU EA.
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He could throw a newborn baby on the barbecue for dinner every evening and that still wouldn't invalidate any of his remarks a priori.
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Gameplay designer Manveer Heir (Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect Andromeda) appeared on Waypoint's podcast and spoke frankly about EA's multiplayer preference.
"It's definitely a thing inside of EA," he said, "they are generally pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetise them better. The words in there that were used are 'have them come back again and again'. Why do you care about that at EA? The reason you care about that is because microtransactions: buying card packs in the Mass Effect games, the multiplayer. It's the same reason we added card packs to Mass Effect 3: how do you get people to keep coming back to a thing instead of 'just' playing for 60 to 100 hours?"
"The problem is that we've scaled up our budgets to $100m+ and we haven't actually made a space for good linear single-player games that are under that. But why can't we have both? Why does it have to be one or the other? And the reason is that EA and those big publishers in general only care about the highest return on investment. They don't actually care about what the players want, they care about what the players will pay for."
"You need to understand the amount of money that's at play with microtransactions. I'm not allowed to say the number but I can tell you that when Mass Effect 3 multiplayer came out, those card packs we were selling, the amount of money we made just off those card packs was so significant that's the reason Dragon Age has multiplayer, that's the reason other EA products started getting multiplayer that hadn't really had them before, because we nailed it and brought in a ton of money. It's repeatable income versus one-time income.
"I've seen people literally spend $15,000 on Mass Effect multiplayer cards."
What we're seeing is a "cynical" chasing of the games making big money. "You've seen - what is BioWare's new franchise coming out?" he asked.
"Anthem," the host duly answered.
"Right," Heir said. "It's not a traditional-looking BioWare game, right? If that's what you're seeing from a place like BioWare, owned by EA, a place where I worked for seven years; if that's what you're seeing from Visceral now closing and going to this other Vancouver studio; what it means is that the linear single-player triple-A game at EA is dead for the time being."
(PCGamer, Eurogamer)
Note: On the podcast, Heir also spoke about issues such as racism and sexism. He is a bit of a controversial figure due to his political beliefs and so called "racism against white people", however I don't think that these beliefs are relevant to the topic of (AAA) games and their monetization and I don't think they make him any biased. What he says goes hand in hand with what we've been seeing recently such as EA shutting down Visceral Games and shifting the upcoming Star Wars game from a linear single player experience to "a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency", Star Wars Battlefront 2's loot boxes or Activision's Matchmaking Patent That Encourages Players To Buy Microtransactions
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