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Jukebox Hero
Dec 27, 2007
stars in his eyes
Almost like big name developers in movies and games are all awful fucks who want money money money and don't care if their mingling strangles their own property

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GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.
Splatter is pretty drat good it turns out. Surprisingly good looking game for a top down shooter! Thanks for the recommendation.

The writing is hilarious godawful though.

Edit: Also gently caress frogs

GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Oct 18, 2017

Blockhouse
Sep 7, 2014

You Win!

Jukebox Hero posted:

Almost like big name developers in movies and games are all awful fucks who want money money money and don't care if their mingling strangles their own property

You're thinking publishers, not developers.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

AAA studios know how to make AAA games. That unfortunately does not translate well to horror very often, and you get stuff like Dead Space 3 becoming a cover shooter with tons of regular guns and microtransactions.

A. Beaverhausen
Nov 11, 2008

by R. Guyovich

chitoryu12 posted:

AAA studios know how to make AAA games. That unfortunately does not translate well to horror very often, and you get stuff like Dead Space 3 becoming a cover shooter with tons of regular guns and microtransactions.

I'm going to say this was the publishers fault. Visceral was really into the horror of Dead Space, which survived into DS2 even with co op. It was 3 in which suits demanded microtransactions and 'more cod' from the franchise.

FirstAidKite
Nov 8, 2009

goferchan posted:

Oh man I strongly urge y'all to check out Eat Me. It's a very well-written, very creepy little text adventure where (almost) your only verb is "eat". You can play it in browser and it's not very long; the puzzles are clever but not super tough. There aren't any vivid descriptions of blood & gore or anything like that -- instead, everything's presented as this surreal sort of fairy tale & I found it really unnerving. Worth a look for sure.

Just finished playing through this. It was interesting, though some of the descriptions were uhhhhhh


Yeah there's no blood and gore technically :v:

What ending did you get? I got what I assume is the secret ending the first time.

Improbable Lobster
Jan 6, 2012

What is the Matrix 🌐? We just don't know 😎.


Buglord

Crabtree posted:

What exactly possesses some of these developers to expect a big giant multi media franchise out of horror games? Like, not even RE or Silent Hill were that critical of a success, and in the case of their films, not exactly successful for legitimate reasons. Horror has always exploded from being a low budget project that gets big returns. You never win going to the opposite way with these things.

If a game isn't making Call Of Duty numbers then it's not worth making. And any game that is even a mild success must eventually be retooled to meet focus testing marketing targets.

A. Beaverhausen
Nov 11, 2008

by R. Guyovich

Improbable Lobster posted:

If a game isn't making Call Of Duty numbers then it's not worth making. And any game that is even a mild success must eventually be retooled to meet focus testing marketing targets.

It's this. It's been the downfall of so many great properties, and the suits dontunderstand it's them loving up. Never have, never will.

Improbable Lobster
Jan 6, 2012

What is the Matrix 🌐? We just don't know 😎.


Buglord

A. Beaverhausen posted:

It's this. It's been the downfall of so many great properties, and the suits dontunderstand it's them loving up. Never have, never will.

So many publishers have just become completely unsatisfied with mid budget moderate successes and it's going to implode the AAA industry one day.

goferchan
Feb 8, 2004

It's 2006. I am taking 276 yeti furs from the goodies hoard.

FirstAidKite posted:

Just finished playing through this. It was interesting, though some of the descriptions were uhhhhhh


Yeah there's no blood and gore technically :v:

What ending did you get? I got what I assume is the secret ending the first time.

Is there a secret ending? I ate all 6 courses, went down the elevator, and drank from the cup

FirstAidKite
Nov 8, 2009

goferchan posted:

Is there a secret ending? I ate all 6 courses, went down the elevator, and drank from the cup

I did that except instead of drinking from the cup I just typed "eat you" because I figured out early on that the narrator was an actual person and I figured the goblet was bad news so on a hunch I tried eating the narrator again and this time they were in the room with me and they kept getting really pissy about me trying to eat them until I got a good ending with them going "okay gently caress this, just give me the hole back, I'll let some other kid have it, gently caress you" though not in those exact words :v:

goferchan
Feb 8, 2004

It's 2006. I am taking 276 yeti furs from the goodies hoard.
Ahhh ok cool thank you. That makes a lot of sense.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

A. Beaverhausen posted:

I'm going to say this was the publishers fault. Visceral was really into the horror of Dead Space, which survived into DS2 even with co op. It was 3 in which suits demanded microtransactions and 'more cod' from the franchise.

Well, when I say "studio" I'm using it in a specific sense: big publishers that also own the developers, like EA. Visceral was originally an EA branch, and even after its renaming it continued to be controlled by EA. Rather than an independent developer shopping around for a publisher, they were instead one and the same.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



I might be stepping on some toes with this one (especially in the Steam community, they seem to love it), but goddamn this was an obnoxious game.

:ghost: SPOOKY G4MES: The Ghost Dimension :ghost:

1. Stories Untold
2. Rusty Lake Hotel
3. Rusty Lake: Roots
4. Left in the Dark: No One on Board
5. Daily Chthonicle: Editor's Edition
6. Eleusis
7. Dead Effect
8. Dead Effect 2
9. State of Decay
10. Dead End Road
11. Goetia
12. EMPORIUM
13. F.E.A.R.
14. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin
15. F.E.A.R. 3
16. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
17. Bloody Streets

18. Layers of Fear



My five-year-old daughter likes to scare me occasionally, sneaking into my room while I’m busy brushing my teeth and screaming as loud as her distressingly-powerful lungs will let her. It’s jarring and unpleasant but I laugh it off because she’s just trying to be funny, and more importantly she doesn’t do it that often. If she screamed in my face every morning and afternoon and evening it would quickly reach tiresome and cruise straight on to aggravating. My five-year-old daughter understands this, but for some reason the people behind Layers of Fear do not, despite crafting an otherwise beautiful and fascinating game to house their cheap jumpscares.

The game opens with very little explanation, you alone in a palatial Victorian mansion stuffed full of art supplies. It soon becomes clear that you are a painter, a husband, and a father, and these aspects of your life do not coexist peacefully. You are compelled to complete your greatest work, but there are demons pulling at you every step of the way and the further you get in the closer to home they hit. As you battle through the twisted mansion to achieve your goal, the true nature of your painter avatar is made shockingly clear.

In gameplay terms, this is a walking simulator. You wander the halls of your mansion, free to open drawers and cabinets in search of collectibles or rare discoveries like keys, ever onward towards your goal. Every chapter starts in your studio and takes you through a seemingly random assortment of nightmarish halls and chambers. There are points where your path will branch in subtle ways but it always ends in the same place, a dramatic setpiece that reveals key events in your character’s past and supplies him with one of the necessary pieces of his masterpiece.

I don’t use the term “walking simulator” derisively, in fact I rather enjoy these guided tours of nightmare mindscapes. Layers of Fear is near the top of the pile in aesthetic, at least, with an impressive amount of detail on every wall fixture, desk drawer, and pile of rubble. The many halls of the manor are distinct enough to be memorable, and setpieces often use huge numbers of small objects like checkers or books to give locations a tactile, lived-in feel. It’s a wonderfully dreary place topped off with some incredible effects like melting furniture and paint flows that make you feel right at home in a twisted projection of reality.

There’s plenty to marvel at as you explore the vast mansion, but you’ll be scouting around under a permanent air of dread. This is a horror game after all, and all those magical details are designed to make you feel as fraught and threatened as possible. Flickering lights, broken doors, scrabbling in the walls, melting paintings, and darker things still will accost you as you slip further into the madhouse. The atmosphere reaches a number of feverishly oppressive peaks, always capped off with a shock like hurtling books or slamming doors or screaming ghosts.

And honestly, that’s where the game loses me. It doesn’t just lose me, it actively drives me away in a huff because as much as I love the atmosphere, I DESPISE the jumpscares. I’m a jumpy person and I don’t care much for big shocks like screamers, but I’ll tolerate ones in games like SOMA and Oxenfree because they’re infrequent and earned. Layers of Fear, in stark contrast, ends almost every single one of their building spooks with a loud noise and jarring visual. There’s hardly any break between them, as scares usually come only three or four rooms apart. What’s worse is that they’re often telegraphed, too… anytime a door locks behind you or the next one doesn’t open immediately, you’re in Scarytown for the duration.

Combined with the ultimately linear nature of the game, this sucks a ton of the fun out of an otherwise promising horror game and turns it into a cheap carnival ride. Walk 10 steps, watch a screamer. Walk another 20, get books thrown at you. Turn the corner, a window bangs. It becomes utterly perfunctory, yet keeps trying harder and harder to shock you by getting louder and more audacious. By the end Layers of Fear feels like a game that was designed to be moody and atmospheric, and then was harangued endlessly for not being scary enough until it was completely over-tuned. The cheap jumpscares are so much more annoying because they’re not even necessary, yet they persist and fight ever harder to shock you.

That should tell you everything you need to know to decide on this one yourself, but if you’re in the mood for spoilers I’m going to talk about the story a bit. I don’t normally dabble in spoilers but by the end I was so fed up with the main character that I simply couldn’t manage my ire anymore. Your dude is a tortured artist who is obsessed with his work, obsessed with professional validation, and obsessed enough to neglect his family to literal death. Ostensibly this is a story about redemption but you’ll soon find he’s so irredeemable that you’ll almost wish his demons would just kill him. I actually did that in the later chapters where his dead wife is wandering around, I would run him right into her cold, fatal embrace because after everything I had seen and heard from him he deserved nothing more. Seriously, to complete his masterwork he’s searching for pieces of his family, tanned skin and blood vials and an actual eyeball, to paint with. The man turned his wife and daughter into art supplies and we’re supposed to believe his soul can be saved? Really?

Ultimately, Layers of Fear is a horror game with an incredibly promising base and a painfully inept structure built upon it. The technology and artistry on display is undeniable, the game looks amazing and has a talent for surprising and impressing. But instead of using that talent to build a compelling story and atmosphere, the game settles for cheap, mindless scares and a story that simply doesn’t work. I won’t deny that I enjoyed admiring the squalor of the mansion and rifling through dressers for clues, but the knowledge that another dumb room with a dumb screaming scare was coming up always filled me with the wrong kind of dread. When I finished the game I felt such relief, not at the conclusion of a compelling story or at the accomplishment of a goal, but at the fact that I would never have to play this wretched thing again.

Morpheus
Apr 18, 2008

My favourite little monsters
Yo Too Shy Guy I love reading these reviews of yours - any intent on playing Home Sweet Home? Looks like a halfway decent horror game from what I've seen, with some variation in the horrific antagonist from chapter to chapter (and, as a result, the gameplay).

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



Morpheus posted:

Yo Too Shy Guy I love reading these reviews of yours - any intent on playing Home Sweet Home? Looks like a halfway decent horror game from what I've seen, with some variation in the horrific antagonist from chapter to chapter (and, as a result, the gameplay).

I thought about it. I broke down and watched John Wolfe play it and I think it might kill me if I tried it myself. Being chased in games gets me real good and between the atmosphere and the antagonist design I'm not sure I could handle it. I'm working through IMSCARED right now and the dumb pixel ghosts are scaring the poo poo out of me.

There is one big problem with Home Sweet Home that they don't tell you about until the very end though, and it makes me want to put it off for now. It's episode 1 of a planned series, so it ends without resolving any of the story threads.

MockingQuantum
Jan 20, 2012



I've got a question that I'm guessing may be a little divisive, but I'm curious to hear the answers: I kind of hate the concept of hide & sneak style horror games, with a fiery passion, but it seems like it's sort of the de-facto way of operating for the majority of new horror games. So what games actually do this well? Or are good in spite of the "run and hide until it goes away" gameplay, if that's the case?

I've been sitting on Alien: Isolation for ages, and quit Amnesia pretty early on back when it came out once I found out you couldn't actually do anything to your pursuers. It seems like I should at least play those two since I have them and they're generally regarded as good games, but what else is definitely worth playing?

Or maybe a better question is, what should I definitely avoid?

Johnny Joestar
Oct 21, 2010

Don't shoot him?

...
...



Too Shy Guy posted:

I thought about it. I broke down and watched John Wolfe play it and I think it might kill me if I tried it myself. Being chased in games gets me real good and between the atmosphere and the antagonist design I'm not sure I could handle it. I'm working through IMSCARED right now and the dumb pixel ghosts are scaring the poo poo out of me.

There is one big problem with Home Sweet Home that they don't tell you about until the very end though, and it makes me want to put it off for now. It's episode 1 of a planned series, so it ends without resolving any of the story threads.

yeah, i was going to post about that last bit before i saw that you had mentioned it. i dunno how i feel about that decision, but if the second half/chapter/whatever is able to tie things up and have a bunch of cool poo poo involved then i guess it'll work out.

if not then welp, there goes another waste of a good setting

also IMSCARED actually does a really good job of setting a certain atmosphere so being wigged out by it is pretty reasonable, i'd say

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



MockingQuantum posted:

I've got a question that I'm guessing may be a little divisive, but I'm curious to hear the answers: I kind of hate the concept of hide & sneak style horror games, with a fiery passion, but it seems like it's sort of the de-facto way of operating for the majority of new horror games. So what games actually do this well? Or are good in spite of the "run and hide until it goes away" gameplay, if that's the case?

I've been sitting on Alien: Isolation for ages, and quit Amnesia pretty early on back when it came out once I found out you couldn't actually do anything to your pursuers. It seems like I should at least play those two since I have them and they're generally regarded as good games, but what else is definitely worth playing?

Or maybe a better question is, what should I definitely avoid?

I don't hate this kind of gameplay but it stresses me out super bad, so games like Alien: Isolation and Amnesia are right on the line of too much for me to deal with. That being said, SOMA is definitely the pinnacle of this particular genre for me. It relies way more on atmosphere and story to horrify, and the monsters are spaced way out and all behave differently enough to be interesting. In retrospect I also think the first Outlast did it well, it's brutal and gross and never lets up on the stress but actually has very little hide and sneaking in it.

You're going to want to avoid most cheap first-person horror though, because they almost all do this now.

Johnny Joestar posted:

yeah, i was going to post about that last bit before i saw that you had mentioned it. i dunno how i feel about that decision, but if the second half/chapter/whatever is able to tie things up and have a bunch of cool poo poo involved then i guess it'll work out.

if not then welp, there goes another waste of a good setting

I think what happens is that little indie studios put together a decent demo, get kickstarted or funded and then up on Steam, and then realize they don't have the time or the money to build an entire game. So they launch what they've got as Episode 1 to make the money they need to keep going and pray no one gets too miffed about it. I'm going to cover a few games that did that before the month ends, which should illustrate how mixed the results can be for everyone.

Bert of the Forest
Apr 27, 2013

Shucks folks, I'm speechless. Hawf Hawf Hawf!

MockingQuantum posted:

I've got a question that I'm guessing may be a little divisive, but I'm curious to hear the answers: I kind of hate the concept of hide & sneak style horror games, with a fiery passion, but it seems like it's sort of the de-facto way of operating for the majority of new horror games. So what games actually do this well? Or are good in spite of the "run and hide until it goes away" gameplay, if that's the case?

I've been sitting on Alien: Isolation for ages, and quit Amnesia pretty early on back when it came out once I found out you couldn't actually do anything to your pursuers. It seems like I should at least play those two since I have them and they're generally regarded as good games, but what else is definitely worth playing?

Or maybe a better question is, what should I definitely avoid?

I will say that despite the jank, Depths of Fear: Knossos is one of my favorites of this particular sub-genre. It has a unique setting (Minotaur/Greek Mythology monsters in a dark labyrinth), a totally killer 70's synth soundtrack, utilizes some very light roguelike elements to mixed degrees of success (spells are totally useless, but the meta-progression system of buying new starting weapons is pretty satisfying), and there are plenty of killable fodder enemies in between all the sneaky-sneaky to help break things up. Additionally, your character can run like a god drat Olympian so even when you do get caught, recovery is always an option. whereas in games like Outlast I remember it being a huge pain in the rear end to shake them off you once you are spotted. This does break into the tension a little, but the sound design and general atmosphere tend to make up for it in my opinion.

Marshal Radisic
Oct 9, 2012


Too Shy, I was wondering if you had any plans to do a write up for Observer? I played it for the first time about a week ago, and while it's made by the same team that made Layers of Fear, it definitely feels like an improvement on that game. For starters, the narrative is tighter: you're a detective in dystopian cyberpunk Krakow who's stuck in a locked-down tenement block looking for his estranged son, which gives you both a clear objective for the entirety of the game and an excuse to poke around the building. Secondly, it integrates the scares into the story better than Layers of Fear did. The whole conceit of the game is that your detective character is an "observer," someone who can plug themselves into other people and run through their memories. Naturally, because this is dubious cyberpunk technology being used on people who are usually dying, the memories are these weird, glitchy places full of the reality-shifting mechanics the developers love so much. It starts out pretty straightforward, but naturally it gets more unsettling once your character's memories start bleeding into the sessions and his sense of reality begins to break down. The later half of the game has some "sneak around the unkillable monster" sections, but they're probably easier to deal with than some of the other game you've tried. In the most of them the monster just patrols around in one big rectangle, it's easy to see where it's looking, and your only goal is usually to do one thing and then get out of the room. For what it's worth, I found Layers of Fear wore out its welcome well before the end, but enjoyed all the time I spent with Observer.

Bogart
Apr 12, 2010

by VideoGames
Play Prey on the hardest setting if you never want to trust a coffee cup again. Everything before you get the Psyscope is so tense because you can't trust anything around you at all. Of course, once you get powered up, the dread kinda dissipates, but ain't that always the way.

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

MockingQuantum posted:

I've been sitting on Alien: Isolation for ages, and quit Amnesia pretty early on back when it came out once I found out you couldn't actually do anything to your pursuers. It seems like I should at least play those two since I have them and they're generally regarded as good games, but what else is definitely worth playing?

So some advice on if you do play it....

Alien Isolation has lots of things you can do to your pursuers, and lots of pursuers you can and should be directly mauling in satisfying ways. Most of your actual enemies are humans and androids which are very killable if you want to, and the alien is a common foe but even he can be distracted or driven away in a variety of ways (and in fact many of the most tense moments involve trying to fake the alien out by making it think you're gonna drive it off but not actually driving it off because you're low on ammo and poo poo - yes, you can bluff the alien and pretend you are better armed than you actually are!)

Also "run and hide until it goes away" is not a workable strategy in the game and if you try to do much of that you are gonna die over and over again in particularly frustrating ways. Key to success is to plan your routes, keep moving, use distractions, and avoid lingering in one place too long. (Which isn't to say it doesn't sometimes devolve to this, but it's very much a worse case scenario because you're pursuers generally are disinclined to go away on their own except for when you're waiting for the alien to head back into a vent, which doesn't even work reliably in many areas)

---

Also, if you play SOMA, which you should, I recommend also downloading the mod that gets rid of the hide and seek bits. The game loses nothing as a result, imo, and is much better as a pure horror-themed walking sim.

Instruction Manuel
May 15, 2007

Yes, it is what it looks like!




Too Shy Guy posted:

That being said, SOMA is definitely the pinnacle of this particular genre for me.

I'll never stop cheerleading SOMA. If anyone's interested, it supports Steam Workshop and there's a mod that makes the monsters not chase you except for a few hard coded scripted sequences. It makes them into just really creepy sentries of the environment.

CuddleCryptid
Jan 11, 2013

Things could be going better

MockingQuantum posted:

I've got a question that I'm guessing may be a little divisive, but I'm curious to hear the answers: I kind of hate the concept of hide & sneak style horror games, with a fiery passion, but it seems like it's sort of the de-facto way of operating for the majority of new horror games. So what games actually do this well? Or are good in spite of the "run and hide until it goes away" gameplay, if that's the case?

I've been sitting on Alien: Isolation for ages, and quit Amnesia pretty early on back when it came out once I found out you couldn't actually do anything to your pursuers. It seems like I should at least play those two since I have them and they're generally regarded as good games, but what else is definitely worth playing?

Or maybe a better question is, what should I definitely avoid?

For all of its many, many failings I feel that Outlast did this better than most. Unlike most of the hide and seek games it was better at telling you what would and would not get you caught, and the camera mechanic helped alleviate the "don't give the player too good of a look at the monster".

Isolation was good at the hide part but if you every got caught them you were screwed, I liked how you could still run for it in Outlast and possibly get away.

Of course it wasn't a perfect mechanism but it was much better than what Amnesia and SOMA (I loved it too but the interior monster sections were poo poo) did.

Too Shy Guy
Jun 14, 2003


I have destroyed more of your kind than I can count.



Outlast also felt more focused on sneaking and running than hiding, since most of the enemies usually stayed in hub areas you needed to pass through instead of getting all up in your grill all the time. They weren't too hard either which is important, because if you have to do a sneaking section like 10 times it really ruins the tension.

Marshal Radisic posted:

Too Shy, I was wondering if you had any plans to do a write up for Observer?

A lot of people have been asking me that today. I'm definitely interested but it's not going to happen this month. I don't have the budget to get a lot of new releases, which is why my reviews usually skew more towards older and smaller games. I'm working on doing something about that, and while it's slow going I do have something cool and (slightly more) timely to share next week.

sigher
Apr 22, 2008

My guiding Moonlight...



Xenomrph posted:

Are you loving kidding me

Are you really surprised when it's EA?

Xenomrph
Dec 9, 2005

AvP Nerd/Fanboy/Shill



Wamdoodle posted:

I'll never stop cheerleading SOMA. If anyone's interested, it supports Steam Workshop and there's a mod that makes the monsters not chase you except for a few hard coded scripted sequences. It makes them into just really creepy sentries of the environment.

This sounds really cool. Do you have a link for it or whatever? I've actually never used mods in Steam Workshop or anything like that.

As an aside, do mods like that mess with Steam achievements?

s.i.r.e. posted:

Are you really surprised when it's EA?

Well not really, but it doesn't make it less lovely.
My secret hope is that if EA knows they're not going to use the Dead Space IP for anything that they'd sell it off to someone who will.

A. Beaverhausen
Nov 11, 2008

by R. Guyovich

Xenomrph posted:

This sounds really cool. Do you have a link for it or whatever? I've actually never used mods in Steam Workshop or anything like that.

As an aside, do mods like that mess with Steam achievements?


Well not really, but it doesn't make it less lovely.
My secret hope is that if EA knows they're not going to use the Dead Space IP for anything that they'd sell it off to someone who will.

They won't let American Mcgee's Alice property from there clutches, why the gently caress sell something they could use 20 years from now.

CuddleCryptid
Jan 11, 2013

Things could be going better

A. Beaverhausen posted:

They won't let American Mcgee's Alice property from there clutches, why the gently caress sell something they could use 20 years from now.

Sure they did.

If you pre-ordered Madness Within :negative:

Instruction Manuel
May 15, 2007

Yes, it is what it looks like!

Xenomrph posted:

This sounds really cool. Do you have a link for it or whatever? I've actually never used mods in Steam Workshop or anything like that.

As an aside, do mods like that mess with Steam achievements?


Well not really, but it doesn't make it less lovely.
My secret hope is that if EA knows they're not going to use the Dead Space IP for anything that they'd sell it off to someone who will.

Sure here. Wish they would have called it something other than "Wuss Mode" but it shouldn't matter unless you're worried about your GAMER CRED :byodood:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=560988617&searchtext=

Not sure about the achievements though.

A. Beaverhausen
Nov 11, 2008

by R. Guyovich

DreamShipWrecked posted:

Sure they did.

If you pre-ordered Madness Within :negative:

Oh I did, I meant more American is basically begging at this point but EA wont let him do anything with it.

Like many of their other properties, I suspect corporate meddling is what gave us half a game i n Madness Returns. Going through the art book and seeing the plethora of 'cut for time' descriptions is so sad.

Improbable Lobster
Jan 6, 2012

What is the Matrix 🌐? We just don't know 😎.


Buglord

A. Beaverhausen posted:

They won't let American Mcgee's Alice property from there clutches, why the gently caress sell something they could use 20 years from now.

Yeah publishers basically never sell IPs unless they've gone bankrupt and the company is being sold off. Can't risk someone else making a product that they theoretically could have made money on.

A. Beaverhausen
Nov 11, 2008

by R. Guyovich

Improbable Lobster posted:

Yeah publishers basically never sell IPs unless they've gone bankrupt and the company is being sold off. Can't risk someone else making a product that they theoretically could have made money on.

I mean gently caress me, over the years you kind of see how Oz never being released really broke the dudes heart, the one thing he was known for he cant try to recreate because EA wants service model games now and... Madness Returns came out in 2011:psyduck: Jesus I'm getting old.

A. Beaverhausen fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Oct 19, 2017

Improbable Lobster
Jan 6, 2012

What is the Matrix 🌐? We just don't know 😎.


Buglord

A. Beaverhausen posted:

I mean gently caress me, over the years you kind of see how Oz never being released really broke the dudes heart, the one thing he was known for he cant try to recreate because EA wants service model games now and... Madness Returns came out in 2011:psyduck: Jesus I'm getting old.

Recent years increasingly make publishers seem detrimental to developers

DeathChicken
Jul 9, 2012

Nonsense. I have not yet begun to defile myself.

I loved Madness Returns. Reminded me of Bayonetta except set in a really hosed up dreamland

Jukebox Hero
Dec 27, 2007
stars in his eyes
I love everything about horror takes on Alice and him not getting to do more with that series is a drat shame

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Improbable Lobster posted:

Recent years increasingly make publishers seem detrimental to developers

One good thing with recent years is that as technology is improving, making high quality games is becoming cheaper. We're at the point now where independent developers can make games on par with or superior to games from 15 years ago without needing the backing of a publisher thanks to engines like Unity. Obviously you need the skill to utilize them, but every year it becomes easier for indie studios or even individual game makers to sell unique products without having to sell their soul to EA.

Ferrous
Feb 28, 2010
We also recently had Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice which was self published and of similar quality to a publisher backed game. It was also half the price.

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Kokoro Wish
Jul 23, 2007

Post? What post? Oh wow.
I had nothing to do with THAT.

I've tried to sit through both playing and watching Layers of Fear and in the end I've personally found it to be a tedious haunted house attraction and I just lacked the will to end it.

I'll save people the effort of getting to it, here's the best part:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0fm2lRrEg0

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