Yeah dude. I remember you saying that you really dug JA2. The third brings up a similar feeling for me.

And not for nothing but no one in the history of forever ever wished on their death bed that they worked more. Take a break every now and then.

Prez wrote on Feb 7, 2025, 12:20:

Beamer wrote on Feb 7, 2025, 07:13:
It's fun when the guy endlessly negative about games he hasn't played is angry at people positive about games they partially have.

I can never tell if RogueSix is a gimmick poster or just has zero awareness

I think he fancies himself as enigmatic. Who knows. Who cares.

Hey Beamer. Did you ever get that key I mailed to you?

Oh! I haven't checked that email! Work has been absolutely unreal.
Let me do it, and thank you so much, Prez!

Beamer wrote on Feb 7, 2025, 07:13:
It's fun when the guy endlessly negative about games he hasn't played is angry at people positive about games they partially have.

I can never tell if RogueSix is a gimmick poster or just has zero awareness

I think he fancies himself as enigmatic. Who knows. Who cares.

Hey Beamer. Did you ever get that key I mailed to you?

Sepharo wrote on Feb 6, 2025, 00:02:
Maybe it's just me... but I didn't hear a word about Veilguard until it dropped.

Don't feel bad, when I saw it in the headline I thought, "what's that?". As you went on to say I'm sure it was mentioned here at Blue's but managed to miss it and was completely unaware of it.

It's fun when the guy endlessly negative about games he hasn't played is angry at people positive about games they partially have.

I can never tell if RogueSix is a gimmick poster or just has zero awareness

The nerve of people; not wanting to criticize a game before there was a game to criticize.

RogueSix wrote on Feb 6, 2025, 03:11:

Sepharo wrote on Feb 6, 2025, 00:02:
Maybe it's just me... but I didn't hear a word about Veilguard until it dropped.
I'm sure it was here on Blue's but I didn't notice it... and I certainly didn't see any advertisements or press outside of here.
On the other hand, with BG3 I saw a ton of commercials and early pre-release hype.
So maybe part of the issue was marketing?

There was a ton of marketing including some failed stunts like that one goofy cartoon trailer that was probably meant to create Veilguard's "bear sex" momentum but backfired due to poor execution instead.

There were also many hyperbolic hype articles in the press like "Dragon Age looks better, plays better than ever in The Veilguard" (based on a special preview event that all of the mainstream gaming media attended with all expenses covered, of course, and correspondingly, most previews hyped up the game like it was the 2nd 4th Coming, e.g.

- Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a Definite GOTY Contender
- This is the BioWare comeback fans want
- I spent nearly 7 hours playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard and would like to spend 100 more
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard Hands-On: 7 Hours Was Not Enough
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s press preview gave me the reassurance I was looking for

... and so on and so on... slobbering upon slobbering of the sycophants and that's just the "old school" mainstream gaming press. The shitfluencers went overboard with similarly named clickbait thumbnails as well (OMG ITS TEH GOTY 4 SUUUUURE).
In all fairness, however, there was at least one critical preview at PCGamesN but this was the total exception. Guess they don't want to be invited to future BioWare press events. May The Almighty have mercy on their souls.

BTW, most people around here (the usual subjects who always preorder/buy the latest releases) were also pretty hyped about the release and defended it against criticism like their lives depended on it but then the typical soberness must have set in after the "omg i'm so hyped and must justify why I paid full price" phase as the game has barely received any positive comments anymore around here.

Last but not least, here is BioWares's launch letter.

I was getting BG3 commercials on youtube like crazy... didn't get any for Veilguard.

El Pit wrote on Feb 6, 2025, 00:48:

Jim wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 18:44:

El Pit wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 17:27:
The big companies are blinded by greed and will therefore go the way of the dodo. So many huge companies in the entertainment industry are nowadays led by people who know shit about the entertainment that movie and game fans want but they know a lot about profit maximization.

that is a really simplistic view of things. big companies are responsible to their shareholders. they have to produce expected income based on their share price and if they cannot their share price will drop. Shareholders will include lots of 401k plans, pension plans and such. Sucks to be them, right?

The shareholder value is exactly what is wrong with companies. There is no endless quarterly profit growth. For this growth and especially after having released a successful game, you would have to release QUICKLY an even better selling game. And if lightning strikes twice, a 3rd and even more powerful lightning has to strike the next quarter. And so on. This idea is nothing but madness and completely delusional. And this is what economies should be based on? Well, good luck with that. Once all workers have been burnt out by the management trying hard to make a 10th lightning strike which has to be better than the last 9, what are they going to do? Let AI work on games, I guess, forgetting that the workers will be out of work and won't have the money to spend on games and movies which does not bode well for the success of that new game...

This is not unique to the games industry though, just capitalism in general. Just like many other hot growth industries before it, this one will have (and is in) a slow decline where the worst companies get shuffled out of the business. Search engines, car makers, restaurants, movies, etc., all have gone through this and there are plenty of brands who were huge in their day which have died. Some are just zombies that don't know they are dead, like Yahoo, that EA might end up becoming.

The good news is that in most of these cases, better products and services have emerged as a way to distinguish a company's brand. It tends to be cyclic in nature, often when the next new hot tech affecting said industry comes along that makes a noticeable difference. Then they all rush to that new hotness only to have another slow decline due to saturation.

Oh no, we only sold 1.5 MILLION copies. What a tremendous waste of our time and effort. /s

I hate this hollywood style accounting where they use completely made up targets to stay disappointed so they can always fire people or keep them afraid of being fires. Yet the CEO never gets fired, despite constantly having to "justify" the stock price to shareholders. You'd think that like with a football team, the trainer gets removed as an aside if the team does badly, since it happened under their management.

So any issue happens -> C-suites get removed because clearly they did not steer the company well or hire the right managers under themselves.

Sepharo wrote on Feb 6, 2025, 00:02:
Maybe it's just me... but I didn't hear a word about Veilguard until it dropped.
I'm sure it was here on Blue's but I didn't notice it... and I certainly didn't see any advertisements or press outside of here.
On the other hand, with BG3 I saw a ton of commercials and early pre-release hype.
So maybe part of the issue was marketing?

There was a ton of marketing including some failed stunts like that one goofy cartoon trailer that was probably meant to create Veilguard's "bear sex" momentum but backfired due to poor execution instead.

There were also many hyperbolic hype articles in the press like "Dragon Age looks better, plays better than ever in The Veilguard" (based on a special preview event that all of the mainstream gaming media attended with all expenses covered, of course, and correspondingly, most previews hyped up the game like it was the 2nd 4th Coming, e.g.

- Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a Definite GOTY Contender
- This is the BioWare comeback fans want
- I spent nearly 7 hours playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard and would like to spend 100 more
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard Hands-On: 7 Hours Was Not Enough
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s press preview gave me the reassurance I was looking for

... and so on and so on... slobbering upon slobbering of the sycophants and that's just the "old school" mainstream gaming press. The shitfluencers went overboard with similarly named clickbait thumbnails as well (OMG ITS TEH GOTY 4 SUUUUURE).
In all fairness, however, there was at least one critical preview at PCGamesN but this was the total exception. Guess they don't want to be invited to future BioWare press events. May The Almighty have mercy on their souls.

BTW, most people around here (the usual subjects who always preorder/buy the latest releases) were also pretty hyped about the release and defended it against criticism like their lives depended on it but then the typical soberness must have set in after the "omg i'm so hyped and must justify why I paid full price" phase as the game has barely received any positive comments anymore around here.

Last but not least, here is BioWares's launch letter.

...And now people have the nerve to criticize EA?!?...

Um...are you new here? People have been criticizing EA for being utter shit since the early 90's at least. Don't worry - we'll give you time to catch up.

and how do you expect Bioware to function as the company it once was when it's been completely gutted? There is barely any senior devs in the company anymore, the Bioware of old doesn't exist anymore. This new Bioware did their best with the skills they had.

Sepharo wrote on Feb 6, 2025, 00:02:
Maybe it's just me... but I didn't hear a word about Veilguard until it dropped.
I'm sure it was here on Blue's but I didn't notice it... and I certainly didn't see any advertisements or press outside of here.
On the other hand, with BG3 I saw a ton of commercials and early pre-release hype.
So maybe part of the issue was marketing?

I think you are right. I think EA tried to lean on the Dragon Age name too much. The last game released 10 years ago and was a huge sales success, so if they were looking to save some money overall...maybe that was the logic. They blew a boatload of cash on marketing Immortals of Aveum, which released in the same month as BG3, and got no return on it. Maybe they were hoping to make some gains this time around.

Jim wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 18:44:

El Pit wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 17:27:
The big companies are blinded by greed and will therefore go the way of the dodo. So many huge companies in the entertainment industry are nowadays led by people who know shit about the entertainment that movie and game fans want but they know a lot about profit maximization.

that is a really simplistic view of things. big companies are responsible to their shareholders. they have to produce expected income based on their share price and if they cannot their share price will drop. Shareholders will include lots of 401k plans, pension plans and such. Sucks to be them, right?

The shareholder value is exactly what is wrong with companies. There is no endless quarterly profit growth. For this growth and especially after having released a successful game, you would have to release QUICKLY an even better selling game. And if lightning strikes twice, a 3rd and even more powerful lightning has to strike the next quarter. And so on. This idea is nothing but madness and completely delusional. And this is what economies should be based on? Well, good luck with that. Once all workers have been burnt out by the management trying hard to make a 10th lightning strike which has to be better than the last 9, what are they going to do? Let AI work on games, I guess, forgetting that the workers will be out of work and won't have the money to spend on games and movies which does not bode well for the success of that new game...

Maybe it's just me... but I didn't hear a word about Veilguard until it dropped.
I'm sure it was here on Blue's but I didn't notice it... and I certainly didn't see any advertisements or press outside of here.
On the other hand, with BG3 I saw a ton of commercials and early pre-release hype.
So maybe part of the issue was marketing?

You turn a deep game into a twitch fest, turn a grounded game into a cartoon, and then wonder why the fans aren't lining up.

EA is the perfect embodiment of the "Who Killed Hannibal?" meme.

El Pit wrote on Feb 5, 2025, 17:27:
The big companies are blinded by greed and will therefore go the way of the dodo. So many huge companies in the entertainment industry are nowadays led by people who know shit about the entertainment that movie and game fans want but they know a lot about profit maximization.

that is a really simplistic view of things. big companies are responsible to their shareholders. they have to produce expected income based on their share price and if they cannot their share price will drop. Shareholders will include lots of 401k plans, pension plans and such. Sucks to be them, right?

EA is a very successful company financially. Not their fault BioWare are incompetent. There were quarters when EA made 85% of their total revenue from live services. Last quarter was just under 70%. That's expected though because they naturally had more full game sales last quarter because their financial Q3/2024 (calendar Q4/2024) is always packed with new releases. Full year live service revenue stands at 75%. Or in numbers: $7.347bn total revenue, of which $5.449bn were from live service stuff.

In spite of these overwhelming odds in favor of live service shit, EA allowed BioWare to go ahead with a single player game. And BioWare "thanked" EA for that liberty by crapping out Veilguard. EA even had really low expectations. Very modest ones. EA only wanted to sell three million copies. BG3 sold 15 million. EA only wanted a fifth, 20%, of that action which seems very conservative.

Heck, we don't even need to divert to other franchises: Dragon Age Inquisition, BioWare's best selling game to date, sold at least 12 million and "massively oversold the internal EA projections" (quoting former BioWare executive Mark Darrah). EA only wanted to reach one fourth, 25%, of that demographic. A perfectly valid goal.

And now people have the nerve to criticize EA?!?

BioWare had yet another opportunity here to convince EA (just like Respawn with the Jedi games) that quality single player games are still viable. They even had some massive help from Larian and BG3 which could have taught them some valuable lessons with regard to the importance of writing, choices & consequences and player agency in general (as if that shouldn't have been super-obvious from the get-go).

But they done fucked it up. All by themselves. And the sales were poor in spite of some massive helping by the console-centric mainstream gaming media who have always been BioWare fanbois/fangals. Veilguard has an MC average score of 85 on Xbox, 82 on Playstation and it is only the PC where some reviewers did not consume quite as much of the kool-aid (76 avg score).

Personally, I don't give a shit what they do with Mass Effect 5 after the abomination that was Andromeda and after the extremely stupid ending of ME3. And I'm not talking about the three buttons. I played the game when it was complete, fully patched etc. - I'm talking about the actual conclusio of the game, i.e. the reasoning for the Reaper attacks which was to reset the galaxy every 50K years. That was some seriously dumbass shit.
If ME5 turns out decent, cool, I might buy a complete edition on sale one day. If it doesn't, it's no loss to me. Fuck it. They can turn into a live service game for all I care. Go ahead. Maybe it will make actual money instead of this Veilguard flop.

I reached a point where I refuse to use anything that needs the EA app. That's how little I trust them. I trust Ubisoft more. Shots fired!