The fact they essentially outsourced their alpha and beta testing and consumer feedback via Early Access is completely orthogonal to whether they overworked their development staff.

“These are bad examples because these companies are good at managing their projects”. Of course they are, that’s literally what I’m saying. Managing their projects well doesn’t mean they’re bad examples at all. Crunch is a reflection of bad planning and bad project management. Usually it’s taking on too much work to…

Having worked in actual large scale software development, no, I don’t think it would necessarily be simple to figure out. Many bugs are obvious and simple errors in retrospect but take many days to get to the point you notice it.

Yes you can? Crunch is a management failure and not a sustainable way to run a business long term. There are absolutely studios out there which manage to put out polished releases with minimal to zero crunch hours involved. We just tend to only hear about the negative crunch experiences rather than the positive ones.

It’s their first game, they’re a new studio with a lot of ex-Visceral / Sledgehammer people. But the game was funded by Krafton / PUBG - it was originally pitched as being in the same universe as PUBG even, though it has since dropped that and is its own thing. But in the end the decision of when to go to launch…

The thing is, sometimes the root cause and fix for something like this can be very basic, someone modified a constant in the code somewhere by accident or made a typo or whatever. But figuring out that that specific thing was the cause of all your problems can take hundreds of man-hours of work to find. So just…

Sony’s the one out there overhyping the value so if Sony is so desperate for it and having it will shut them up, why not let that happen?

For your consideration, might I also suggest the extremely cool looking, heavily Chrono Trigger inspired Sea of Stars:

There are 72 in the world every 48h, plus 5 you can buy from a vendor, for 77 total. Then there are a further 12 you can get as a once-off from Confused Aranara. That leaves you 2 short, but by the time you’ve waited for the second vendor respawn you will be getting close to respawn for the gatherables as well.

Microsoft’s approach to their acquired companies recently has been very much hands-off, let them continue doing what they have been doing successfully and not try and change or stifle the culture they had, because in the past they’ve done that and sunk perfectly viable businesses. So I’m not convinced that a Microsoft…

You can literally collect all the Kalpalata Lotuses you need to take her to 90 in two passes through Sumeru (which need to be 2-3 days apart for respawn, or has to be in co-op). You can also buy them from a vendor, Aramani in Vanarana, 5 every 72 hours. Also if you have Tighnari, gathering is much easier because he…

One of my favorite reviews of SO4 back in the day had the line “if you think Edge Maverick is a good name for a protagonist, SO4 is probably at your intelligence level”

Aware of this and mentioned it in my comment (“You can get blocked out of the archon quests in earlier stages due to the same issue too”) but we’re not talking about the Inazuma main quest here so didn’t mention it specifically.

The answer to all these questions is that the whole “Awards” thing is a marketing exercise and these are the games that the publishers paid to be nominated

The last time I went there was 2018, and it was an “off peak” day in late September. The crowds were horrendous. Not my first time visiting the park - not an LA resident (not even a US resident until the last 7 years) but I don’t remember it ever being as packed as it was that visit. I would still say it was worth…

Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia (which shared many of the same development team - Wolf Team split after ToP one half stayed at Namco and the other half left and formed Tri-Ace) were *easily* the most technically complex games on the SNES, they took ages to be properly supported and have translation patches. Early to…

Til the End of Time (Star Ocean 3) is definitely the one that gets held up as the high water mark generally. Fans seem split over SO3 or SO2 as being the best one.

It’s not that, actually, it’s just that if you unlock the story quest the characters become occupied and their underlying system only allows an NPC to be in one place and set up for one particular quest at a time. These story quests are not prerequisites for the 3.2 archon quests, they’re just blocking it because they…

It’s not like their writing is particularly good to begin with. It’s about twice as verbose as it needs to be, and it’s usually a character says some stuff then Paimon will restate the exact same thing like a moron, and then you’ll get two dialogue options that are just the one line split over two responses for some…

The Witness’ big issue is that most of its “puzzles” are actually just hearing or vision tests. It’s an interesting game but if eg you have hearing problems it is flat out impossible.