A good part of the problem was simply that Squenix’s attempts to market the game were utterly inept. Personally everything they showed made it look awful, the only thing that saved my interest was the 1 hour or so deep dive they did late last year on the systems and so on, which when freed from the Marketing Bullshit…

In addition to the fact that there’s been rumors for a while about a second Sony studio picking up Uncharted, don’t forget that there’s precedent for Sony farming out the franchise to another studio - Golden Abyss on the Vita was developed by Bend instead of Naughty Dog. Wasn’t a bad game either, just let down hard by…

I have definitely seen an argument that there is a subset of the evangelical right that believes that we’re in the “end times” and that because “God’s Plan” is to destroy the world in fire, trying to prevent climate change is prolonging the process or interfering with The Plan and instead we should just continue as…

“should the player continue these actions, the world will reflect back knowledge of them.”

I’d never actually stopped to think about it, but I guess that Muramasa really is a Metroidvania. Definitely needs a port if not a deeper remake like Odin Sphere Leifthrasir.

Isn’t this literally the kind of management that people unionize to prevent in the first place?

Fact is, Xbox isn’t really Microsoft’s next-gen platform any more. The next-gen Microsoft platform is Game Pass, and it increasingly doesn’t matter where or what you access Game Pass stuff from. Xbox is nice because it’s low-cost turn-key hardware to allow people to access Game Pass games and run them locally (or…

or·thog·o·nal
/ôrˈTHäɡən(ə)l
adjective

None of these factors mean that crunch is required or inevitable. This sort of development is not sustainable long term and it leads to burnout, inability to recruit and retain good staff and can lead to whole studio implosions (eg look at the hollowed out shell that Bioware has become - magic crunch was literally…

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…