A small group of smart people on the internet may do a lot of noise, but it just echoes in the void then it's business as usual.

  (it's after all the studio
  that made Baldur's Gate)

I mean if it's anything like software development, the answer will for the most part be "well there's actually nothing here". A lot of sequels feel bolted on in that regard, where they just took elements from the original game, world and story and build on top of that.

If you read enough of of them you can see BioWare has had three phases in their life:

1. Shattered Steel to Mass Effect 2, where they were largely independent and taking on feast-or-famine work (more of the former given the quality of their work at the time)

2. Mass Effect 3 to The Old Republic, which ringed-in the EA era and cracks in the quality of their work start to show. The end of this era is also when the co-founders and some key contributors to their past games left.

3. Dragon Age 3 to Anthem, which ringed-in stronger ties with EA—specifically having to work with Frostbite—and where we see that a lot of the problems we saw in the last era were probably chronic rather than acute. Lots of key contributor churn.

At the end of the day your decisions still matter to you. The debate around the ME3 ending has left me with a lot more respect for the ME3 ending over time than after I played through it the first time.

Which of those 3 buttons a player chose often says so much about their combined playthrough of all three games. Linearly in terms of that playthrough so many gamers felt they only had "one choice" at the end, and that is an amazing psychological trick because the statistics BioWare revealed show that among players that did complete the final choice it was an almost even split (and a surprising number of players took the interesting fourth choice of just quitting there and not making a choice).

I think the ME3 ending even before the Extended Cut (and more importantly the final Citadel "cleanup" DLC) was better than a lot of gamers gave it credit for, but the problem with it was that it was a very hard situation to see the forest from your particular gameplay tree.

(Now, Anthem from a story perspective I have a lot less respect for. It's a weird KOTOR B-Plot [almost entirely recycled] with the Star Wars filed off.)

Your decisions do technically affect the ending, but it's subtle and not very satisfying. The outcome of every major decision in the trilogy is assigned a numeric value and added to a "war assets" sum as you progress through the game. Different decisions result in slightly different amounts of war assets, and actions in the third game were heavily weighted over previous games. The size of that number changes each ending very slightly.

https://www.ign.com/wikis/mass-effect-3/End_Game_Chart_-_Wit...

PS: I had no idea it was such a controversial statement to suggest that things matter even if the universe is ultimately doomed.

Personally... I don't care in the slightest, because as someone who's been playing these games for a while and also as a programmer, I observe that what these companies are promising is basically impossible, so I never bought into this promise to be offended it didn't play out. It is not possible to have a true branching story where you can make dozens and dozens of meaningful choices and the story has fully rendered cutscenes with voice acting and unique locations and etc. etc. But it might be nice if the companies would stop promising this. Every year, as the standards go up, it is actually getting harder and harder to bring this level of responsiveness to a game.

(Sometimes I think that as impressive as the holodeck may have been on ST:TNG in terms of providing an immersive sensory experience, it's even more impressive in that it seems to have enough intelligence built in that it can actually do true reactive storylines and such. We'll probably have reasonable approximations of the former a long time before the latter!)

Stupid mistake and definitely avoidable. I'm convinced Bioware sealed their fate with that (making mediocre games after did not help them though).

      *   *   *   *   *   *
     / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
    *   *   *   *   *   *   *-->*
     \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /
      *   *   *   *   *   *

You can't build this (story goes down):

              *
             / \
            *   *
           /|  /|\
          / | * | \
         *  *   *  *--
        /|  |\  |\  \ \
       / |  | * * *  * *
      *  *  *

The problem is, no matter how you disguise it, gamers sense in the first case that they're on some sort of rails. Then companies promise the second, whether they mean to or not. But they can't deliver across one game. I remember thinking when I heard the announcement about the Mass Effect trilogy laughing at the idea that they could do it across three. You just can't let the combinatorics explode that much and make decisions that change the story. (Note things like "whether or not a Krogan squad is there" are consequences, yes, but you'll note they do not impact the future flow of the story, so they don't contribute to a combinatorial explosion. It's a linear contribution; you have to model the event and voice act it, etc., but it's still just two story nodes not significantly interacting with anything else.)

Fallout 1 & Fallout 2 were structured as several parallel instances of the first example, which is probably the best compromise you can make to prevent exponential explosion while still giving some heft to the choices.

But ultimately, if you want your "choices to matter", you'd better stick to "classic" roleplaying. A Dungeon Master can react to your unexpected choices and set you in a standard "fetch the thing" quest but then react to you actually accidentally literally destroying the world when that wasn't written into their "plan", and then carry on with the resulting consequences if you like. Computer games are still a long, long ways away from anything like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-1WJtuzPg

Star Ocean: The Second Story is yet another example of an RPG that does this; it has 70-80 endings, many forking paths including mutually exclusive party member choices, relationships between characters, etc. The trick for making it feasible seems to be to make the ending modular so that it includes/removes different cutscenes based on what happened before. As I understand it there are quite a few old-school RPGs that do this.

Of course it is harder if you are talking about voice acting and super-detailed 3D assets. But assets aren't that hard considering you already made most of them for the rest of the game, and realistic voice synthesis is perhaps not that far away. So I don't think most people were expecting model (B), but even that could be viable if you controlled the number of forks carefully.

I don't think it is. The decisions made did matter, as much as anything matters, they just didn't effect the ending cut-scene you got. Is there an intentional philosophical message here? Maybe, maybe not. But there is opportunity to reflect on our relationship with decisions and outcomes. Is our time spent with the game less meaningful because of how it ended? Given a time machine, would we have chosen not to play if we knew the ending? If the ending is the thing that is important, why play the game at all instead of just watching cutscenes on youtube?

Affecting the ending is part of the promise given.

We want to talk about Mass Effect and whether promises were kept, not existential ennui. Whether or not we can truly know ourselves or whether or not the good life is led by trying to live as an ubermensch is not particularly relevant to whether promises about the game were broken.

It's sometimes helpful to step up a meta level, but you're trying to derail the conversation by stepping up something like five or six. It's not helpful.

Yeah, you're right, I should have known better than to expect more from Hacker News.

"But none of our choices matter, ipso facto the premise of this discussion is pointless" is something you could say in any discussion. If people enjoy the shift and engage, you talk about it. If they don't, you don't dig in your heels and accuse them of not understanding your viewpoint.

EDIT: You can enjoy the journey of a game and still be upset that you were sold a lie. You can enjoy the journey in part because you believe there will be a story-based payout. If you do this, the natural arc of the views enjoyment of the story is to be angry that the payout never came. Maybe you enjoy that feeling of being betrayed by a publisher, it's is a story experience. It's not the kind of twist that satisfies most audiences.

Honestly I couldn't care less about ME3, I didn't play it for completely different reasons. I just found the philosophical concept of "decisions matter" much more interesting to talk about. I misjudged how much Hacker News would rather have a bitch-fest.

> "But none of our choices matter, ipso facto the premise of this discussion is pointless" is something you could say in any discussion.

First of all, my point is that choice do matter even when they do not affect the ultimate outcome. And I'm not saying it to disregard how the commenter feels about the game, but to highlight that their description of why they feel that way is a bad rationalization, and that they could learn something about how they approach the world from examining it.

If I appear upset, it's because Hacker News, ever willing to consider themselves above redditors without justification, seem to have decided that I was defending ME3 during their collective bitching sessions and expressed their displeasure with downvotes.

And if you want to see it like that anyway: Yes, we die, but our actions influence the people around us. People we help might help us later etc. None of that was properly covered.

These philosophical questions are not as separate from the day to day reality as you want to believe.

So... you didn't enjoy anything at all up to that point? Really? Then why bother playing it at all? Why not let someone else play it and just watch your preferred ending cutscene on youtube? Is it really all just about the destination and the journey means nothing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

However, even then I contend that eternity is just another kind of ending. Given an infinite time, everything that can happen will, and therefore it will also repeat. That means that every decision we make will be made again infinitely, every path followed an infinite number of times, always eventually returning back around again, and ultimately the outcome will still be the same.

So you see, under cosmologies of eternity, we just exist in a stasis of infinity and our decisions will not change that. Under cosmologies where the universe ends our decisions will not change that either. Does this mean that nothing we do matters?

By using "admits" you mean they accept your point of view, even if they do not want to? Thats a bit telling about your worldview.

And have you ever considered, that cosmology can only make relative observations and speculations?

In other words, if our whole universe is just a small part of a bigger universe, how could we tell for sure, if all we can observe is within those borders?

Also, how likely is it, that out of eternal nothing someday came a whole universe which wents back to nothing forever?

Sounds more like religion than science.

"admits" can also be used to mean "accepts as valid"

Not really the same thing at all.

Humanity will one day no longer exist and it will be as if we never existed at all. The universe is that massive and indifferent to our existence, and it too will come to an end.

Some other game maker would crush EA in the market if they were allowed to use NFL logo's and names.

Though in hindsight who knows what a 2K NFL game would look like today. With the way they butchered their NBA games I don't have much faith that an NFL game would be any better.

Who knows if the latest PES (which looks absurdly good) will push EA to make fifa worth a damn again, but at least we’ve got choices in futbol games now.

Edit: No seriously, look at this trailer for PES2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_89i5H1zAeU it's amazing

I haven't figured out how they are still releasing a new game every year - they really should be releasing every season, or really, every team, as a DLC. The content is where it is at, not the engine.

This is easy. People pay full price every year for the new version which contains a bare minimum of changes compared to the previous (not including the roster changes). Why would they cut that gravy train off? Presumably a yearly DLC would not be priced as a full game.

* Fundamentally, what EA owns is the engine. They pay license fees to the. If someone else knows how to build a clearly better <insert sport> game. If the right to use NFL branding and likenesses is worth $10/yr to the user, and EA only ever sells roster updates, you should expect the cost to EA for an exclusive license to creep closer and closer to $10/yr/user.

* The full game release justifies a $60 price point (vs the ~$10 you might hope to get for a roster update.

* My understanding is that much of the DLC/add-on revenue now comes in the form of "power-ups" for the create-a-player modes. Progress on that track can be reset in a new edition to force pay-to-upgrade users to pay again. With a perpetual edition, this dynamic either creates power creep (which alienates the bulk of your users who refuse to pay extra and can no longer compete) or forces you to dilute the power-ups to the point they're no longer desirable to high-value customers.

* From a staffing perspective, light, continuous updates are easier to staff for than spinning up a full scale rebuild once every platform generation, with less risk of blowing the new edition and losing your incumbency. If Madden 2020 releases a wildly unpopular change, you can fix it in Madden 2021.

Maybe. But outrage that results in meaningful action lasts a few months at most. The first person shooter industry is fascinating to me. Somehow Call of Duty is still extremely popular and commercially successful series year after year despite continued management by the exact same studios that repeat the exact same algorithm:

1. Release re-skinned game each year with huge promises of new and original content to come

2. Underdeliver on said promises and lock remaining ones behind micro-transactions, loot boxes, and DLC

3. Abandon game 6-12 months in to begin preparation for the next iteration of the game after raking in millions on suckers

4. Repeat

You'll see thousands of people swearing they'll never pay another $60 + add-ons for a CoD game ever again and yet somehow the cycle continues year after year.

There are numerous other video game series (not just in the FPS genre) that follow the same pattern. Some eventually get run into the ground, but only after a very slow and profitable death. People have short attention spans. You might remember touching a flame, but the feeling of pain quickly fades.

But this doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s likely that people who dig up that “promise” had an axe to grind anyway, so it’s about scoring points based on spin and lies.

Even no man’s sky was like 90% toxic exaggerated bullshit, 10% truth.

If they had stuck with their seemly original plan, that was make a modern copy of the game Noctis, with no base building and a stronger focus on exploration of precedural worlds... things would have went better.

As soon they tried to mix it with minecraft they introduced incompatible elements on the game and ruined it, they made stuff they already had not work, and promised stuff that in the new game they were making made no sense.

I didn't played the current heavily patched version, but read about it, seemly the game shifted genre completely and is nothing like the original intention.

Meanwhile I wait for someone to make a cool noctis clone... or maybe have the original author finish Noctis 5.

You're talking about vertical slices created years in advance of any realistic release date, for the sake of demonstrating to players a game that largely doesn't exist yet. Of course they're doctored. If they could show off natural gameplay, they'd have a near-releasable game and there'd be no need for the vertical slice.

> However when it was just "We might do this", then almost nobody blames them, a small minority might be angry or upset, but most don't care and many steps in to defend the devs in those cases.

When you start trying to make assertions about how "most players" responded, it becomes difficult to sort fact from fiction. "Most players" don't follow the games enthusiast press cycle -- whatever the perceived reaction to the press cycle for a game is, it's largely determined by the people who are the most engaged and the most vocal about the game in question, and it may be gauged differently depending on what slice of the reaction you were exposed to. That makes it pretty difficult to reach agreement as to what the temperament of the overall reaction was.

I also take a bit of issue with the expectation that designers should couch unconfirmed ideas with words like "might". It seems like an attempt to determine the validity of a wave of hysteria via a process of nitty-gritty word-lawyering that I don't think is very practical. Designers aren't always the best or most cautious of public speakers, so an idea that's in the "maybe" or "I hope" pile might not receive proper couching in suitable disclaimers when the designer speaks about it publicly. Further, players often don't remember the full context of words that are spoken about a game, and even are likely to want to read the most enticing thing possible out of the words written or spoken about a game they're intentionally following. Insisting that words that are publically spoken about a game in production are lawyerable like this just encourages studios to clamp down and stop speaking to the public about their craft, and leaves us with sterile messaging that's been carefully crafted by PR experts.

With that said, I'd counter that there's a pretty lengthy history of players misinterpreting the exploratory words of designers about possibilities for their in-production games as promises about what the final product would contain, and then later raking them over the coals for breaking those promises. On the spot I think that's going to be a tricky view to corroborate without going through a messy and time-consuming process of picking apart a bunch of case studies, though.

The problem is that the people I would want to play with stop playing the older games, so if you want to play with your friends and get a half-decent matchmaking experience then you have to get the new ones.

There's also a minor problem with the older games, people get so good that the enjoyment is sucked right out, it's nice when everyone is unfamiliar with the balancing/movement/etc in the first months, it evens the playing field a lot.

(also, older and thus cheaper/free games lead to a lot of cheaters who don't care if they get perma-banned).

Every couple of years they promise "completely new engine from the ground up" and deliver an incremental improvement on the previous years. I don't necessarily consider the result a bad thing, but the marketing is always BS.

I wonder what proportion of the cod sold are first or second purchases into the franchise before the infatuation tapers off, my hunch is that it's quite a majority

‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’

The public in aggregate have a perspective that insiders in a company don’t or cannot because of culture or they’re too close to the problem or they’re just being disingenuous. And the public always finds out, sooner or later.

The individuals do not have to be smart here, there just has to be one person who will bother.

I don't think it works like that, most social media are a game of numbers, if one smart person was enough, you wouldn't have nonsenses like flat-earth and similar becoming "popular topics".

> The smart cow problem is thought to be derived from the expression: "It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows follow.”

Sure, the internet will remember everything you ever said, but the question then isn’t whether what you said measures up to the truth, but whether what you said can be spun in a negative way for you.

Also, none of this is inevitable or even very predictable.

The internet might rage,and might call your bluff. Butbas long as it doesn't show in my wallet. Why should I care as a company?

As an aside the exact same is true in the movie industry. Ticket sales have been on a sharp decline since about 2002. [2] This is masked by similar effects as above, but there's also another one in the movie industry. They focus on "gross receipts" instead of ticket sales. Gross receipts = tickets_sold x price_per_ticket. Far fewer tickets are being sold, but their costs have gone up. So the whole dissonance about Hollywood releasing increasingly rubbish films because this is what people want is clearly untrue. To be clear this was also not just a clever rebalancing of price:demand. Their inflation adjusted revenues also peaked in 2002.

Hollywood's in decline, overhyped games are in decline. It's only our perception that's lagging behind.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/321374/global-all-time-u...

[2] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

The picture I'm talking about...

I'm addition there's curiosity, the overwhelming desire to play with friends, and some people stream/review for a living. It's not like this was a coordinated effort with organized dogma.

Funny as hell for just an out of context picture though.

Even GOOG seems to not be immune to this one. They're cited in recent headlines regarding a promotion of RCS but IRL they're abandoning it.