One argues that she would love to try LE again, but can’t do it without at least “junky” wasd, and I don’t think I’m the only one in such situation. Well, right now probably not much people would want to try it anyway, but after next patch some people will, some of those who can’t enjoy playing with mouse movement. And by that time, more people will release that they don’t want to play with click-to-move. It can easily include some content creators.
I can definitely understand a personal argument as to why someone would like WASD before they come back to the game. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m predicting I’ll play more casters with it for my own reasons. (as long as I can rebind it to AZES/QWES)
Will keyboard movement be an expected option in ARPGs going forward? Yes, probably. Same goes for either loot filters or bulk item-quality vendoring. But just because Last Epoch has them built-in, doesn’t mean people suddenly stop playing Diablo 4.
The claim specifically that the game needs WASD to survive (and thus, a majority of the playerbase will not play an ARPG without it) is saying that for decades there was a massive untapped group of ARPG players around that were completely ignored by every developer ever. It would also mean games like Victor Vran and WH40k-Inquisitor would be far more popular than, say, PoE, because they do have keyboard movement.
Do I think there is a part of the ARPG playerbase that only plays games with WASD (or other keyboard movement) ? Definitely.
Do I think they are such a majority of the playerbase that they make or break a game? History shows otherwise.
I definitely want keyboard movement! I just don’t want to trade in a lot of polish for it, even if it’s only visual. And I definitely don’t want them to postpone any current 1.2 development to implement it first.
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That’s because back in the 80s & 90s studios were so much smaller so they required less cash to run so they required less cash from investors. Cut to now when games studios can be massive affairs with payrolls running well into the 10s of millions so they require a significant amount of cash to run while you work on the game which means you either get that from investors (who want to see a return on that investment) or from your historic sales. And since you have a fuckton of cash, that requires management of that cash & the people its being spent on so people start bleating on about “fiscal responsibility” & not pissing all the cash up a wall so you run out & then everyone gets laid off, looses their homes/etc.
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I don’t think it’s only that. Back then, since gaming wasn’t the industry it is today and also due to teams being smaller as you pointed out, usually it was a developer that was in charge of those decisions. Which meant that they would often push for continuing to improve the game until it was no longer possible (several of those studios ended up declaring bankrupcy).
These days, though, you have a CEO involved, along with a board of investors, and quite often none of them are developers. So as soon as game isn’t immediately profitable, they shut it down, even if it could be salvageable.
So the main issue, the way I see it, is that decisions used to be made by developers that wanted to keep true to their vision and wanted to give it their all to see that vision come true.
Whereas today only money matters and they even force developers to sacrifice their vision in favor of profit, like forcing lootboxes in games.
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Yup, again, that’s why I like to point out Larian as the exception proving the rule. They are one of the few AAA companies (that I’m aware of) out there that don’t have significant shareholders.
It’s not about what the studio produces, it’s how they go about their business. And the vast majority (ActiBlizz vs Blizard North would be a whole thread in itself) nowadays seems to be more concerned with making money than making games.
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First, I never told that LE needs WASD to survive. I think it is one of many things which could help LE to survive and which devs don’t care to use.
Second, for decade majority of ARPG community had no idea how it feels to play ARPG with WASD, now some of them are trying and releasing that it is actually much better, they can’t play with mouse movement anymore, so things are changing.
Yes, they were.
And Minecraft is one of the best-selling games of the gaming history still, relevant today, made by a single person at the beginning.
Stardew Valley, Hades, Terraria, Starbound, Caves of Qud, Balatro… and many more.
Creativity and interesting mechanic are what make a game successfull, ‘16 times the detail’ is nice and all but often just doesn’t pay back the costs.
Hence why companies go the ‘safe route’ after reaching a specific size.
I still find that fairly baffling, AAA studios pushing basically all their funds into singular projects and then nearly going bancrupt after a flop, needing every single one to succeed. I always wondered why instead of a single 200 million dollar project they can’t just pile ideas together and then create ‘small’… 5 million dollar projects instead. If 20 of them fail 20 others will still provide revenue in the positives, Also they don’t need to get literally ‘everyone’ on board with their product but can create creative niche products to boot.
It’s in my eyes just really awful project managing overall in the gaming industry nowadays.
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We would have so many interesting games for any taste… It’s sad that companies don’t do it like this. Even one black swan can cover cost of a lot of failed projects. But without risky innovative game design, black swans just can’t be born. I think that overall, making one huge and conservative project is actually more risky, than many innovative projects where each individual project is very risky.
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I am with Llama on that one.
Yes, there is probably some truth as well in the “big bad evil CEOs” theory, but I believe the first and foremost issue is the humongous size of modern studios.
When Judd, Mike and a few others were working after hours on their passion project, they could decide whatever they wanted to do. Just follow their dream, no pressure, choose their own path. Doesn’t work? Not a big deal, they had some sleepless nights and a lot of fun trying.
But now they have chosen to go the corporate route (as in, build a massive company), decisions become a lot less clear-cut: over 100 families depend on what they decide, families of people they know and call friends.
It is still Judd and Mike and the same few others taking the decision, but they cannot afford to be as reckless as they were.
They have to compromise between their dream and the viability of their company, for the sake of all the jobs hanging in the balance.
Ironically, it is BECAUSE they are decent human beings and think of others that they have to sometimes think about the money, not just the quality of their game.
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I don’t agree with this line of argumentation.
There’s primarily 2 types of company: The first is a pure ‘for-profit’ company. They either provide a service or a product and sell it. This is handled via the demand for it simply. Given a baseline quality (and not especially good or bad quality).
The other is a quality-based company, wanting to provide the world with something specific. Also be it a service or goods. A specific idea which is better then the competition, service which goes beyond the norm. Both viable.
No company exists for the workers though, it just creates a good environment for them - at best hopefully.
If a company solely focuses on keeping the doors open so their workers can work and feed their families then by design that company will fail on a competitive market, at best they’ll give their workers time to relocate to another company before shutting their doors. A company is not a charity and shouldn’t be treated this way. Handling it in this manner is neither doing the leaders of the company nor the workers any sort of favor, quite the contrary.
The second a company stagnates because they’re not taking any sorts of risk anymore is the second the company starts to die. Some die slowly (Like Ubisoft, doing that since years) others do it quick. The outcome is always the same though. Why? Because someone else will pick up the ‘slack’ and risk something, and suddenly your company is ‘behind’ with no chance to catch up anymore.
Also, what is wrong with trying to make as many money as possible? You are probably imagining Blizzard’s microtransactions and similar things, instead of delivering a great game. But, those aggressive things can increase only short-term profit, while decreasing it in the long-term. For the long-term profit, you should develop game more like GGG than like current Blizzards — you need to make a game which players will really enjoy so they would want to support you. These 2 goals, making a great game and making money, aligned with each other, one supports another.
A very “black-and-white” vision, as usual on the internet…
Key word: SOLELY
If a company focuses SOLELY on anything, anything at all, it will fail.
That’s why I used the word “compromise”. There are some steps between focusing solely on your workers and completely ignoring they are here.
If you decide to hire 100 people, it WILL change the way you run your company, compared to working on your own.
Same argument for:
Again, there are some steps between completely reckless behaviour and not taking any sorts of risk. Of course you take risks. Always. But you take them differently if you are in charge of a large team or if you are alone in your garage.
Not much is 100% one way or the other in this world… Black and White sounds cool on an internet forum, but has very little to do with how things work.
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Because big numbers are nice? They make the people up top (& I’m including shareholders here) feel important? Maybe larger peojects have more potential to be wildly successful & thus offer a higher return overall (after taking into account the high risk)?
If you wouldn’t trust someone with no experience to produce high quality code/art/etc, why would you trust someone with no (related) experience with tens/hundreds of millions of currency? This is why you would have a creative creative director running the creative side & someone experienced in the business side (ie, all the shit involved with running a multi-million/latge company that isn’t the actual work/creation) to run the business side.
No, every company is a “for profit” company. You’re confusing companies that want to create high/low quality stuff with companies that do/don’t want to make money. This is an error. Every company wants to make money, they just do it in different ways (high volume/low price v low volume/high price).
No, if that’s what the company is focussing on then it has already failed & is trying to protect it’s employees for as long as possible.
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You’re missing what I want to say with that.
If a company does take the respectively needed risks - not acting reckless, that’s not risk-taking, that’s just stupid - then they’ll by design stay open and hence achieve their goals.
You should at no single time ever have the need to think about your workers keeping the job or not, because if as a leader you’re not acting appropriately to the position you’ve already failed to be a proper one anyway.
Hence there is no ‘compromise’ there. Either you focus on making your company flourish (which includes a good environment so your workers are happy to work and are productive) or you don’t.
No pizza-parties, weird social setups or whatever else needed, actually often quite detrimental. Just don’t stifle your workers, let them work, pay them properly and go forward to fulfill the goals and you’re golden, something companies often forgot in modern times. It’s why so many companies fail even with decent products, doesn’t help if your workers are so pissed off that the interaction with customers becomes low quality or your most productive workers leaving for greener pastures, it’s always leading to your company going under after a while if not steered away from it.
Exactly. And even if you’re a singular person running your company… if you take reckless behaviour you earned to fail. The chance of turning that around rather then stable improvements is miniscule, and also not a stable thing since you’ll be prone to do it again… and again anyway.
Do they? As a shareholder of some companies I have to say I rather enjoy if I get dividends from stable quality work instead of ‘the one surprising hit with a 90% fail-chance’ 
I go into being a shareholder for 2 reasons after all. The first is seeing a company I deem to have a good service or product suceed… and the second is moolah as return. Some cold hard cash for giving them money to function.
But yeah, larger projects have a higher turnover rate in cash… but also a substantially higher fail-rate. Not without reason why the whole setup of Hollywood is in a crisis. In every single segment there’s a so called ‘golden spot’ for the size of your business which provides reliable high returns but doesn’t make it especially risky. Entertainment industries seem like drugged up junkies in comparison, always going for ‘more more more’ without actually having people existing which would be able to give them that ‘more’.
Obviously, but some focus on ‘modern’ profit optimization and some don’t and instead focus on providing a good product. That’s what I want to differentiate. Both can exist in their fields nowadays but have distinctly different mindsets behind it.
Given I know a lot of artists and illustrationists I can definitely say that there’s a vast difference between churning out high quantity and cheap products versus providing quality (which often leads to improvements for quantity over time as well, unlike the purely quantitative process). One keeps selling roughly the same every month while the limit of the quality one usually is the possible quantity produced… which then causes price increases until supply/demand becomes stable, often leading to a massively higher revenue stream then the one churning out piece after piece.
There is no difference with the gaming industry. People buy tons of cheaper smaller games to pick up and lay down again a week later, Steam libraries are choke-full of unplayed games. But some games are played nigh endlessly. Minecraft, PoE 1, Counter Strike, Stardew Valley… you name a genre and it usually has one of those games. All of them have been made for quality in their respective segment, for unique experiences which are on a stable foundation and otherwise simply not found.
That’s… very fair And surprisingly accurate! Gonna remember that one, thanks.
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I wonder what usually happens with the games which were made for quality in their respective segment, but then devs found out that players of their previous game are not actually the segment they aimed for, assuming that old players are claiming new game slow and boring, new players are claiming it meaningless zoom zoom, and devs are trying to make everyone happy… 
Yeah, that’s where the issue is though:
This is a prime fail-state. A nigh guarantee to fail. Because it’s mutually exclusive.
You make the product you want and see which bits ‘speak’ to the customer. If it’s feasable for you to make the compromise between your own vision and the product the customer wants then you change accordingly. If not and it’s not a substantial aspect of people perceiving it negatively then you move on with your vision.
It depends solely on the mindset there. Someone who simply wants to create their vision is more prone to fail then someone who has a vision but the end-goal is to create a thriving community with players enjoying themselves. At times your own bits of a vision just don’t align with general perception… so if you’re out for the thriving community then you adjust, and your goal still aligns with the outcome.
If you got a vision but don’t want to compromise it and shove it down your customers throats despite them clearly being unhappy about it… well ‘Don’t you have phones?’ Is all I’m saying.
I think there are customers for their original vision though, it’s just different customers from their previous game, and maybe it is smaller auditory. But they obviously don’t want to disappoint their old community, maybe in the end it will be some weird combination of one game in the campaign and completely another game with different mechanic after.
If they implement WASD I hope it comes with obvious downsides a WASD system should have to be equaly “unresponsive” as a M/K approach. If the implement stuff in LE like using WASD and be able to move and attack at the same time I for sure have a good laugh. As seen in PoE2 WASD is a far supperior input method (outside of the few skills that are borked by it). When I play an isometric hack and slash game I don’t want it to be a twinstick shooter all of the sudden. If they cave in and offer this as some kind of half backed “We work on it to smooth it out in the future!” feature I’ll lose all respect for EHG.
If there needs to be a WASD system all of the sudden for whatever reason I hope they make it balanced at least so I’m not forced to use WASD because it’s the far superior input method.
I wouldn’t worry about that at least for the next couple of years
I must be, because it feels like you have completely moved the goalposts…
So let’s go back a few steps: the discussion started about why nowadays companies seem more money-oriented than the ones in the 90s. And I was arguing that what has changed is that companies have become much, much larger, and that it inevitably changes the way they are run.
Now let’s look at some of your points in this light:
You should, and preferably BEFORE hiring them.
Running a large company is not the same as developping your own private little game. Taking this step is a decision that requires careful planning.
Because you are right when you say:
Precisely. The focus is not about creating your game anymore, like it was in the 90s. It is about running your company. When announcing the partnership with Tencent, Judd explained that he had spent most of the past year looking for investors, pretty much full time. It is a choice, the main focus becomes running a business.
Of course the game is still important, it is the main product, but you will have to do more compromises with the playerbase to keep the company afloat than a single developer, and sometimes it will mean adapting your vision a little bit.
I do believe this is the main difference between the 90s creative process and modern gaming companies.