League of Legends, Dungeon Fighter Online, EVE Online, Crossfire, Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft, etc. Live service games can have surprisingly long lifespans.

BG3 sold multiple millions of copies over the last month. The vast majority of people who were going to buy it at full price on PC have already bought it at this point. Unseating the #1 on steam is not really a significant achievement for any game with a marketing budget, whatever game is actively the next big release…

Is this really newsworth? BG3 is a single-player game that’s been out for almost a month. Of course a biggest AAA game of the year is going to push it out as its release draws near.

know that it is stocked with plenty of sidequest content

AI is woefully bad at it so far. Nothing beats tight, consistent writing from a dedicated team. Even if speech patterns get more sophisticated, it’s still likely for weird things to sneak in or stray off the plot/thematic focus. It’s a matter of including everything vs expecting an advanced script to be able to keep…

Hopefully the money they saved on having silent protagonists enabled them to hire a few extra voice actors to do the NPCs so you don’t have 600 different characters all sharing the same 5 voices.

The protag character in FO4 never bugged me, but it definitely seems like it wasn’t worth all of the effort to implement it into a game of that size. The payoff isn’t proportionate to the encumbrance placed on the dev team and voice actors to get it all done. It definitely can work in smaller, tighter-focus games,…

Arguably, Bethesda consistently over promises and under-delivers more than any other dev/publisher. It brings this criticism upon itself by making wild and bizarre claims such as “130 hours just to start the game” or “you can explore an entire barren planet if you want to.”

Seems to me Bethesda actually gets away with some stuff other Devs get called out on more. “Oh, it’s just Bethesda jank, modders will fix it, it’s expected.”

It’s a problem with the game design, because there’s no real narrative or gameplay drive to finish the main quests:

Having never finished the main quest in Skyrim or any Fallout game, this makes me wonder if that’s my problem with these games. Sidequests are far too distracting for me.

Yes, he's trying to make it sound like it has impressive longevity when really what he's saying is that a huge chunk of their game is going to be a waste of time

If a game doesn’t really get going until around 50 hours once the main quest is done, then shouldn’t the main quest be better?

Did he steal them?  It doesn’t matter, they’re stolen and he has them. This dude is dumb as hell.

Couldn’t agree more, its one of the worst states D2 has been in, in many many ways.

I think that this makes a better case on why a game needs to be delayed more often (by the AAA studios). These mega publishers EA, Activision, Ubisoft, have the cash to delay a game in order to push out a finished, less buggy game, but they don’t. IT FREAKING Kills them in sales and player retention (MTX sales).

Its about quality. No one expects every game to be as complex or large or detailed as this. But what everyone should expect is for developers to give a damn and make sure whatever they are making is something they can be proud of.

I get this argument, I really do, but it gives short-shrift to the simple fact that $70 is no small amount to the average person, who maybe doesn’t want to feel the phantom hand of a publisher reaching into their pocket for more money every ten minutes.

Counterpoint. I don’t care what kind of problems the developers are having. Not my problem. Don’t market your game deceptively.  I just want to buy a working game that’s design isn’t based on pushing additional purchases for a product I already own.