Next Gen for PC kinda sucks.

[Eric]

I'm getting sick of games not working the day they come out or running awful.

Arkham Knight runs like shit.

[kali o.]

Serves you right for supporting AAA dlc ridden trash. Just saying. Too many other good games to waste my time on these season pass, special edition money grabs. Nevermind the huge backlog of games I have missed.

WB is just terrible, all around. No surprise they released a buggy mess.

[Shrinweck]

$40 season pass when games still sell their passes for $25-$30 - not the greatest sign for the Arkham series. I never liked this series to begin with, but isn't this the fourth iteration and they've all been pretty bad in comparison since the first?

In any case, yeah, stop pre-ordering AAA titles from publishers that strive to push out sequels every 1-2 years. Just going to get burned. The PC games that are 'cross-platform' releases are just basically always going to be shit - especially from these companies that used to stagger out the PC release 6+ months after the console release.

PC releases are fine.. but our cross platform releases are just garbage. Gotta hold out for the companies like CDPR that take years to release (what approached) a final product and Rockstar, who even with their recent pad press, put out an A+ port. We still get tons of interesting games and we don't have to go through fucking Sony or Microsoft to do everything.

[Eric]

Steam refunds already making their presence known.

https://community.wbgames.com/t5/Suppor ... 32#U575332

Warner Brothers suspends [new] purchases Dear Batman: Arkham Knight PC owners,

We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. We take these issues very seriously and have therefore decided to suspend future game sales of the PC version while we work to address these issues to satisfy our quality standards. We greatly value our customers and know that while there are a significant amount of players who are enjoying the game on PC, we want to do whatever we can to make the experience better for PC players overall.

Thank you to those players who have already given valuable feedback. We are continuously monitoring all threads posted in the Official Batman: Arkham Knight Community and Steam forums, as well as any issues logged with our Customer Support (support.wbgames.com). If you purchased your copy of the game and are not satisfied with your experience, then we ask for your patience while these issues are resolved. If desired, you can request a refund at help.steampowered.com (Steam refund policies can be found here: http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds) or the retail location where you purchased the game.

The Batman: Arkham fans have continually supported the franchise to its current height of success, and we want to thank you for your patience as we work to deliver an updated version of Batman: Arkham Knight on PC so you can all enjoy the final chapter of the Batman: Arkham series as it was meant to be played.for PC version of Batman Arkham Knight

[Don]

I remember there's this novel and there's a side story about how there was this family that was like the Illuminati of that world, but then their last leader was crazy and decided to take all the family's unimaginable wealth and hide it in a cave somewhere, and then the future generations of the said family spent what's left of their wealth (which is still a lot) searching the world for this unimaginable wealth that they never did and quickly faded into obscurity. I think gaming is like that too. When you've games that make a ton of money that nobody can tell you why they're successful all you get is new game trying to get lucky to find this new unimaginable wealth. Mobile amplifies this too since you literally got junk making AAA title money so everyone spends all their time hoping they'd be the next hit by being lucky instead of working on something quality. I saw an article about how this indie game that was somewhat successful because it actually had somewhat good graphics instead of the standard ghetto 'retro' graphics, but clearly there must have been some game that hit it really big with 'retro' graphics and you can see that a lot of indie game figure ghetto graphics must be the way to go. Same can be said with incomplete game with stupid DLCs, since there has to be at least one game that was successful running this model and now everyone's doing the same thing.

[Shrinweck]

AAA titles sell a lot because those are the games that get talked about by the so-called mainstream. Even Assassin's Creed Unity which was shit on by reviewers (to the degree that AAA games get shit on these days) and is basically the epitome of sequels gone wild, sold 10 million units. And those're numbers from last December. They're the games parents/grandparents buy for their kids. They're the games kids ask for. And even a well-meaning adult connoisseur of video games such as myself (sarcasm) gets fooled into a crappy big budget title once in a while.

Step one: Slap a well known franchise name onto a game of just about any quality
Step two: Profit

They don't even need a "????" step!

I think the sign of a good game franchise is that it ends. Mass Effect, for all it's controversy, is actually something I remember quite well - and a lot of that is because (at least as far as Shepard's story is concerned) it ended. Witcher 3 ended up having an expiration date of three, as well. But neither of those games ever got caught in a 1-2 year release cycle.

These games that are just going to go on and on and on and on like Battlefield, AssCreed, Call of Duty, Arkham.. It's best to just give up. Maybe they'll do something interesting with them some day, but as long as they're on the 1-2 year non-stop release cycle they're probably never going to get exceptionally good ever again.

There's a certain degree to which these people just don't need to do any better. It'll still sell like crazy. Steam refunds will hurt, maybe it'll even be as much as 20% of their PC sales (I doubt it), but they'll still make wheelbarrow-fulls of money.

[Don]

Most of these AAA game at least put a lot of quantity even if the quality leaves a lot to be desired. For example I always thought Blizzard games are way overrated but there's definitely a lot of stuff you can do in WoW or Diablo 3. Maybe they don't quite deserve getting those sales though they've a huge budget on marketing/staff so they don't necessarily even make much money. At any rate there are a lot of successful games that are literally missing half of a game. Take say MMORPG you had a pretty long streak of new games being the next WoW killer that doesn't even have anything to do at the high end, and honestly end game content isn't really that hard to do. I think there's only one guy on most of the end game staff for EQ1 and all you're really doing is making bigger numbers and put the fire in a different location. The most labor intensive part is probably testing and/or the zone assets but these days you can just get people to do the testing for you and graphics are a relatively fixed overhead. I mean, if you look at say Tacvi in EQ1, which is one of the better high end raiding content out there, it's something literally one guy could've finished in a week. There are like 4 models for the boss (snake boss, goat boss, 2 headed boss, and final boss, and only the final boss has a new model compared to stuff you've seen before). All the fights take place in a tiny room and half of the bosses have like one ability besides melee, but it was tuned very well and generally viewed as top quality content by the hardcore. Now I don't know if the hardcore matters but the point is that you can satisfy a very hard to please sub section of MMORPG in a zone that basically has 1 new graphic asset and surprsingly simple (but hardcore) encounters since some of the boss's only special ability is 'kills everyone very fast'. It'd likely have been easier if you were aiming for anything more casual because the hardcore guys are generally just the hardest guy to keep occupied. Maybe the casual guys would want something that's more than the same 3 recycled model but I seriously doubt the lack of content is because new games can't finish their models on time.

I think the players themselves have bought the whole 'making content for games is hard' and it's like the Penny Arcade strip where Gabe bought an empty boxed game because you got to wait for the patch for the actual game. And if you can get away this kind of stuff what incentive is there to make a quality game?

[Shrinweck]

Yes that's a good one and this one also works.

To be quite honest, gaming has always had its ins and outs like this (Those comics are from the late 90s) - it's just these days the sales are so much higher because consoles and gaming in general is so much more hip so-to-speak.

[Don]

Well with the Steam actually backing up a refund policy maybe you'll see like a typical 'empty box' game actually crash horribly and that might shake things up, but so far that hasn't happened. Or maybe a small developer will make a decent game that doesn't look like it ran on technology that predated the SNES and hit it relatively well. I saw a preview for Tochlight on mobile and the graphics actually look pretty good, but I'll bet it's going to do nowhere as good as things that barely slapped a functional graphics engine, and if that happens that certainly gives people no motivation to put in an effort.