General Gaming Chat

[MetalCaveman]

https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/4adJLuhgYrPboHAPRfK7Oz/splinter-cell-remake-begins-development-at-ubisoft-toronto

 

Splinter Cell remake on the works, given that they had to delist the video announcing NFTs for Ghost Recon, I don't have any hopes for this.

 

 

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/15/22834567/stalker-2-nfts-metahuman-dmarket

 

STALKER 2 is getting NFTs as well, quickly went from one of my most anticipated games of next year to something I won't touch even with gamepass.

[Mister Jack]

I refuse to play anything that's shoving in NFTs. I don't even know why they're doing it when Valve has already said NFT games will not be welcome on Steam. Do they really expect uPlay to pick up the slack on this?

[toxicitizen]

10 minutes ago, Mister Jack said:

I refuse to play anything that's shoving in NFTs. I don't even know why they're doing it when Valve has already said NFT games will not be welcome on Steam. Do they really expect uPlay to pick up the slack on this?

 

Probably? They already fucked off from Steam when EGS offered them money bags. None of their latest releases are available on Steam. We now know that the overwhelming majority of EGS exclusives failed to recoup the investment for Epic (so the devs end up making no additional income and often stop promoting the EGS version altogether once the Steam release happens lol) but in Ubisoft's case they still had uPlay to fall back on. So I think it's very likely that of all the companies that got in bed with Epic, Ubisoft are the ones that made out like bandits.

 

I expect them to come crawling back to Steam eventually (EA finally did) but they can stay on the EGS for all I care. AC Valhalla is pretty much the only game I'd probably end up buying if they returned to Steam. And honestly, I've wanted a new Splinter Cell for years now but with everything surrounding Ubisoft over the past couple years I honestly couldn't give less of a shit right now. I don't trust the current Ubisoft to make a decent stealth game.

[Mal]

So I'm watching this which made me think of this video:

 

They are both mentioning basically the same thing but in different games. If you are coming from games with particular look AND feel then you better get both right if you are claiming direct lineage from the older games.

[Mister Jack]

I don't know why anyone who remembers Evolve would have any faith in Back 4 Blood.

[TheMightyEthan]

I just watched that Halo video and I want to say as someone who has played approximately infinity hours of every Halo game, I agree the vehicle explosions are lacking oomph, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the grenades or the impacts from the tank cannons or anything like that.

[TheMightyEthan]

So Microsoft is buying Activision for $70billion.

 

This sucks big floppy donkey dicks.

[Mister Jack]

To add insult to injury they're not even going to fire Bobby Kotick. What the fuck, MS. 

[Thursday Next]

Ahhh, existential dread, how I have missed you!

[TheMightyEthan]

[toxicitizen]

1 hour ago, Mister Jack said:

To add insult to injury they're not even going to fire Bobby Kotick. What the fuck, MS. 

 

I mean, the deal isn't even finalized. They probably can't do anything right now and announcing that they intend to fire him in the future would be pretty stupid lol.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, doesn't look like he's staying

 

 

[TheFlyingGerbil]

The story was a headline on the main BBC evening news over here in the UK - you don't see that often.

[Thursday Next]

Even my dad texted me about it. lol.

[TheMightyEthan]

The fact that, at least in terms of revenue, Xbox + ABK is still slightly smaller than Playstation makes me feel less concerned about this specific merger, but I am still quite concerned about the trend it represents.

[Mister Jack]

This sure would be a great time to do a full unveiling of the PSVR 2, Sony.

 

Or to announce the PS Now successor we all know you're working on.

Edited January 19, 2022 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

 

The plot thickens...

 

Probably just means Warzone though, which would go along with the whole "not yoinking existing games" policy they've established with Bethesda and reiterated with this deal.

[toxicitizen]

Did anyone really expect them to pull existing games? It never occurred to me that they might because it seems like such a counter-productive thing to do. Physical copies are already in the wild and even pulling digital copies would just piss people off. Feels like the cat's already out of the bag there.

 

Unreleased games are absolutely going to be exclusive, though. Except maybe Call of Duty, I guess. Although yeah, this could simply mean Warzone here.

[Mister Jack]

Only Sony and Microsoft know how long Sony's deal with Activision lasts regarding early or exclusive content. Five years? Ten years? However long it is, Microsoft seems to have every intention of honoring it. After that, who knows.

[TheMightyEthan]

14 hours ago, toxicitizen said:

Did anyone really expect them to pull existing games? It never occurred to me that they might because it seems like such a counter-productive thing to do. Physical copies are already in the wild and even pulling digital copies would just piss people off. Feels like the cat's already out of the bag there.

 

Unreleased games are absolutely going to be exclusive, though. Except maybe Call of Duty, I guess. Although yeah, this could simply mean Warzone here.

 

I don't think anyone expected them to pull existing one-time-sale games, but ongoing games are less clear because there's more grey area. I don't think they will (especially after that tweet, but I didn't anyway), but they could leave them running but stop updating them with new content, or something like that, short of outright yanking them.

[Mister Jack]

They could also do what Sony used to do where the Playstation will still get the games and the updates but Microsoft platforms get everything new first for a few months to a year. Seeing that MS owns Activision now it's not like they'll have to make any more deals to get timed exclusivity on their content or DLC. 

 

Of course, I still kind of expect them to yank CoD off of Playstation eventually. 70 billion is a lot of money to spend and then not change things dramatically. 

[danielpholt]

I think Jeff Grubb was talking about how Microsoft may see some value in the idea of releasing everything everywhere, but making them timed-exclusives to Gamepass/XBOX before ultimately releasing them on Playstation for whatever the going rate is. That way you still get that sweet post release ££££ but you're still making a pretty great advertisement for gamepass.

 

Free is very hard to argue with.

[Mister Jack]

That's a good point. I could definitely see them going that route where Playstation still gets last year's CoD but the new yearly release is only on MS platforms.

[TheMightyEthan]

Just remember, that's the exact same argument everyone made with Bethesda, but the official policy there is (for future releases) "exclusive to platforms where Gamepass exists". I expect ABK will be the same.

 

So I expect everything that's already on PlayStation to stay there (like Fallout 4), I expect Warzone to stay and continue getting updated (like Minecraft), but I don't think anything that isn't already there when the deal closes will ever come there (like Starfield or TES6), unless there's a specific preexisting contract (like Deathloop and Ghostwire).

[Mister Jack]

Uh oh, a remote code exploit was found in Elden Ring for the PC, as well as every Dark Souls game for the PC. This is going to mean one of three things:

 

1) The game is delayed to fix the problem

2) A race against the clock at From to fix the issue before the release

3) Elden Ring launches with no online functionality (probably unlikely)

 

I obviously don't know just how complicated it will be to address this, but currently all the Dark Souls servers are down with no word on when they'll be going back up so this definitely isn't something you can just hotfix but it's gotta be done.