First scoop of 2023 is a sad one: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has canceled at least five video games and eliminated just under 15 positions (so far) as it curtails its gaming ambitions
these are all unannounced projects, BG3 unaffected despite being in the thumbnail
I wonder if WotC will ever go the games workshop route and try and open up licensing to pretty much everyone who wants to make a game
i doubt it, they appear to be very bad at decisions when it comes to most anything D&D
as a relative outsider to tabletop RPGs, it seems like D&D got popular in spite of anything WotC did, not because of them
the big thing to note here is that when D&D first got popular it was owned by its original creators, TSR (not to be confused with the new, hyper-racist company one of the founders' sons made recently after the trademark lapsed)
that company was also mismanaged to the point of ruin, at which point it got bought by WotC, but the big D&D boom happened before the mismanagement.
I don't know why the recent Fifth Edition revival in interest happened, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly just down to big youtube/podcast-based third-party productions (Critical Role etc.) and not due to something Hasbro/WotC themselves did?
DnD was always destined to be successful in the same way that Warhammer will always be the biggest tabletop wargame. It's the biggest and most well known, on account of coming out the earliest (or close to it) and because the hardest part of these games is finding a group to play with people are always going to be drawn towards the biggest one, which becomes bigger and easier to find players for, and so on. Like you could spend months trying to convince your friends to try Blades in the Dark with you and have to buy the book yourself and learn all the rules (because they're not going to learn it) OR you can just go on roll20 and find a DnD game in about 10 mins.
You could argue that the youtuber boom really helped (and it certainly did!) but they all picked DnD to play because it was already the biggest around. This goes back the whole way through its history. Why make your own game when you could produce a book under the 3.5 OGL and have it be part of the biggest game? Why run a convention game of something obscure when you can run games of the one game everyone knows? It's hard to understate just how self-reinforcing success in the tabletop space is.
My brain is itching at me to take a crack at Game Maker again and see if i cant figure out how to pull off this Vampire Survivors/Into the Breach mashup i've got buzzing around in my head.
Which unlike the numerous other game ideas i've had over the years (my brain comes up wtih Too Many Fucking Ideas), this one actually seems... doable, just because the scale is inherently pretty tight. Also my understanding of these things is that as making stuff goes, turn-based on a grid is pretty simple.
(The core idea would be to call it something like 66 Turns. 9x9 or similar odd number for the grid. Player starts in the dead center, and moves 1 tile a turn in any one direction. Once the player finshiers moving, their weapons automatically go off, effecting whatever squares. Enemies spawn in waves and come from the four cardinal directions, moving after the player does. No time limit, just a turn limit - Survive for that long, and rack up as much score as you can in the process. Add in stuff like Into-the-breach shoving/pulling, and the myraid of fun weapon options this affords you, and i think the core is real solid).
But also looking at things, Game maker is now free to access... unless you actually wanna do anything useful with publishing your stuff, at which point it's a subscription model (Gross)
First scoop of 2023 is a sad one: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has canceled at least five video games and eliminated just under 15 positions (so far) as it curtails its gaming ambitions
these are all unannounced projects, BG3 unaffected despite being in the thumbnail
I wonder if WotC will ever go the games workshop route and try and open up licensing to pretty much everyone who wants to make a game
i doubt it, they appear to be very bad at decisions when it comes to most anything D&D
as a relative outsider to tabletop RPGs, it seems like D&D got popular in spite of anything WotC did, not because of them
the big thing to note here is that when D&D first got popular it was owned by its original creators, TSR (not to be confused with the new, hyper-racist company one of the founders' sons made recently after the trademark lapsed)
that company was also mismanaged to the point of ruin, at which point it got bought by WotC, but the big D&D boom happened before the mismanagement.
I don't know why the recent Fifth Edition revival in interest happened, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly just down to big youtube/podcast-based third-party productions (Critical Role etc.) and not due to something Hasbro/WotC themselves did?
Was the big D&D boom you speak of bigger than the whole podcast/stream/live show version of D&D/other tabletop games that started about 10-13 years ago (which is during WotC's ownership of the brand?)
I feel like the boom of the late 00s-2010s might be a bit bigger.
First scoop of 2023 is a sad one: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has canceled at least five video games and eliminated just under 15 positions (so far) as it curtails its gaming ambitions
these are all unannounced projects, BG3 unaffected despite being in the thumbnail
I wonder if WotC will ever go the games workshop route and try and open up licensing to pretty much everyone who wants to make a game
i doubt it, they appear to be very bad at decisions when it comes to most anything D&D
as a relative outsider to tabletop RPGs, it seems like D&D got popular in spite of anything WotC did, not because of them
the big thing to note here is that when D&D first got popular it was owned by its original creators, TSR (not to be confused with the new, hyper-racist company one of the founders' sons made recently after the trademark lapsed)
that company was also mismanaged to the point of ruin, at which point it got bought by WotC, but the big D&D boom happened before the mismanagement.
I don't know why the recent Fifth Edition revival in interest happened, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly just down to big youtube/podcast-based third-party productions (Critical Role etc.) and not due to something Hasbro/WotC themselves did?
Was the big D&D boom you speak of bigger than the whole podcast/stream/live show version of D&D/other tabletop games that started about 10-13 years ago (which is during WotC's ownership of the brand?)
I feel like the boom of the late 00s-2010s might be a bit bigger.
The original big boom in of Basic Edition and AD&D 1E back in the 80s saw... these charts I'm looking at makes it seem like 3.5M sales of Basic and 2.9M sales of AD&D's Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide.
Also, the new big boom started something like eight years ago with Fifth Edition. By 2016 (two years) it had sold more Player's Handbooks than the lifetime sales of 3E, 3.5E, or 4E (those got 5-6 years each). I don't know if the newer boom was bigger than the original one, though, since WotC doesn't share sales numbers. I think it's definitely possible - the hobby as a whole is less niche these days, even if D&D doesn't currently have a TV series.
EDIT: It seems like WotC's Ryan Dancey claimed that the total lifetime sales of the 3E PHB was 1M units while the 1E PHB was 1.5M units, which I guess means the chart I was looking at was combined PHB+DMG sales and Basic outsold Advanced 2:1. Wow. Also, TSR's Tim Kask apparently did some math and figured that Basic probably sold three million copies in three years across twelve-ish languages? It was a real big success back in the day, probably because it was $9.95 and available in big box retailers.
First scoop of 2023 is a sad one: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has canceled at least five video games and eliminated just under 15 positions (so far) as it curtails its gaming ambitions
these are all unannounced projects, BG3 unaffected despite being in the thumbnail
I wonder if WotC will ever go the games workshop route and try and open up licensing to pretty much everyone who wants to make a game
First scoop of 2023 is a sad one: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has canceled at least five video games and eliminated just under 15 positions (so far) as it curtails its gaming ambitions
these are all unannounced projects, BG3 unaffected despite being in the thumbnail
I wonder if WotC will ever go the games workshop route and try and open up licensing to pretty much everyone who wants to make a game
i doubt it, they appear to be very bad at decisions when it comes to most anything D&D
as a relative outsider to tabletop RPGs, it seems like D&D got popular in spite of anything WotC did, not because of them
the big thing to note here is that when D&D first got popular it was owned by its original creators, TSR (not to be confused with the new, hyper-racist company one of the founders' sons made recently after the trademark lapsed)
that company was also mismanaged to the point of ruin, at which point it got bought by WotC, but the big D&D boom happened before the mismanagement.
I don't know why the recent Fifth Edition revival in interest happened, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly just down to big youtube/podcast-based third-party productions (Critical Role etc.) and not due to something Hasbro/WotC themselves did?
Was the big D&D boom you speak of bigger than the whole podcast/stream/live show version of D&D/other tabletop games that started about 10-13 years ago (which is during WotC's ownership of the brand?)
I feel like the boom of the late 00s-2010s might be a bit bigger.
The original big boom in of Basic Edition and AD&D 1E back in the 80s saw... these charts I'm looking at makes it seem like 3.5M sales of Basic and 2.9M sales of AD&D's Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide.
Also, the new big boom started something like eight years ago with Fifth Edition. By 2016 (two years) it had sold more Player's Handbooks than the lifetime sales of 3E, 3.5E, or 4E (those got 5-6 years each). I don't know if the newer boom was bigger than the original one, though, since WotC doesn't share sales numbers. I think it's definitely possible - the hobby as a whole is less niche these days, even if D&D doesn't currently have a TV series.
EDIT: It seems like WotC's Ryan Dancey claimed that the total lifetime sales of the 3E PHB was 1M units while the 1E PHB was 1.5M units, which I guess means the chart I was looking at was combined PHB+DMG sales and Basic outsold Advanced 2:1. Wow. Also, TSR's Tim Kask apparently did some math and figured that Basic probably sold three million copies in three years across twelve-ish languages? It was a real big success back in the day, probably because it was $9.95 and available in big box retailers.
D&D 5e is a much more simplified, easy to pick up game than any of the editions that came before it. That isn’t necessarily a sign of quality (I think it’s pretty good for D&D) but it did make the barrier of entry much lower.
Then you had TAZ and Critical Role and others using it cause it was easier to stream than most similar tabletops, as well as having the name recognition so it exploded in popularity.
My understanding is that in general, D&D is doing pretty well. That doesn’t mean it’s doing infinite growth money bags well that Hasbro wants it to do, but it’s in a much healthier space than it was a decade ago.
+2
BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
Here's the complete list of winners:
Game Of The Year: Elden Ring
VR Game Of The Year: Hitman 3
Labor Of Love: Cyberpunk 2077
Better With Friends: Raft
Outstanding Visual Style: Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Most Innovative Gameplay: Stray
Best Game You Suck At: Elden Ring
Best Soundtrack: Final Fantasy VII Remake Entergrade
Outstanding Story-Rich Game: God Of War
Sit Back And Relax: Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Best Game On The Go: Death Stranding Director's Cut
Cyberpunk 2077 winning "labor of love" is the height of bullshit.
They loved it so much they crunched for several years, then released the game a year too early and became an industry punchline. Because love! It's pretty silly not to give that award to say... Vampire Survivors (what else would you call one guy doing like 30 free updates to a $5 game all in a row) or Dwarf Fortress or something.
Same with Stray, which has zero innovative gameplay ideas. Unless you think not letting the player have a dedicated jump button is innovation (it's literally not, Zelda thought of that on the N64).
I actually just finished up Cyberpunk last night. I think it's still a really flawed game in various ways, but it has some moments that really land, almost entirely in side quests. Also it has, shockingly, one of the best romances I've seen in a AAA game?
It's a shame its main story isn't particularly interesting and that it saddles you with an absolutely dogshit character like Johnny Silverhand. Just a miserable presence to have around. He gets his own moments, usually in the aforementioned side quests where he comments on some of the dumber or wackier stuff you get paid to do. And there is an optional quest chain in the late game to help him wrap up some lingering regrets from the Samurai days that clearly are intended to give him more depth, but I don't think much of it lands. He just sucks, as a guy
Anyway, I came away from it feeling more positively than I expected and I may check out the DLC, but I may not. What a mess of a game
CD Projekt Red has decided to end development of new content for the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077, confirming in an update note that future expansions, including the recently announced Phantom Liberty, will only be released on PC, PS5, Stadia and Xbox Series X|S.
I actually just finished up Cyberpunk last night. I think it's still a really flawed game in various ways, but it has some moments that really land, almost entirely in side quests. Also it has, shockingly, one of the best romances I've seen in a AAA game?
It's a shame its main story isn't particularly interesting and that it saddles you with an absolutely dogshit character like Johnny Silverhand. Just a miserable presence to have around. He gets his own moments, usually in the aforementioned side quests where he comments on some of the dumber or wackier stuff you get paid to do. And there is an optional quest chain in the late game to help him wrap up some lingering regrets from the Samurai days that clearly are intended to give him more depth, but I don't think much of it lands. He just sucks, as a guy
Anyway, I came away from it feeling more positively than I expected and I may check out the DLC, but I may not. What a mess of a game
Yeah, I picked it up earlier this year when it was on sale and enjoyed myself more than I expected, to the point where I was glad to see the announcement of a sequel. There's some real good stuff in there but it has moments of "I am suffering through this in the hopes this storyline pays off". The main story has pretty bad pacing too.
I hope if you move your head too fast, your eyes pop out and then jump back in as it readjusts to your new position. It'd be like you're a living cartoon character.
Would love for the myths about eye contact to fucking evaporate, my ND ass would love that.
what kind of myths?
One of the big ones for me is the idea that if a person can't maintain eye contact it's because they're lying or hiding something. Was not a helpful thing to have in mind when I was growing up and realized I am really bad at maintaining eye contact
Does remind me of early in the pandemic when I was still getting used to doing therapy via zoom calls and I realized that I was avoiding eye contact with the image of my therapist on my computer screen
ironically when you are making eye contact on a video call you're actually looking at someone's picture on the monitor and not at the camera, so it appears that you're not making eye contact
I assume that is what the nvidia eye faking thing is actually about
Does remind me of early in the pandemic when I was still getting used to doing therapy via zoom calls and I realized that I was avoiding eye contact with the image of my therapist on my computer screen
I still don't do that in my telehealth therapy sessions!
Posts
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
the big thing to note here is that when D&D first got popular it was owned by its original creators, TSR (not to be confused with the new, hyper-racist company one of the founders' sons made recently after the trademark lapsed)
that company was also mismanaged to the point of ruin, at which point it got bought by WotC, but the big D&D boom happened before the mismanagement.
I don't know why the recent Fifth Edition revival in interest happened, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly just down to big youtube/podcast-based third-party productions (Critical Role etc.) and not due to something Hasbro/WotC themselves did?
You could argue that the youtuber boom really helped (and it certainly did!) but they all picked DnD to play because it was already the biggest around. This goes back the whole way through its history. Why make your own game when you could produce a book under the 3.5 OGL and have it be part of the biggest game? Why run a convention game of something obscure when you can run games of the one game everyone knows? It's hard to understate just how self-reinforcing success in the tabletop space is.
Which unlike the numerous other game ideas i've had over the years (my brain comes up wtih Too Many Fucking Ideas), this one actually seems... doable, just because the scale is inherently pretty tight. Also my understanding of these things is that as making stuff goes, turn-based on a grid is pretty simple.
(The core idea would be to call it something like 66 Turns. 9x9 or similar odd number for the grid. Player starts in the dead center, and moves 1 tile a turn in any one direction. Once the player finshiers moving, their weapons automatically go off, effecting whatever squares. Enemies spawn in waves and come from the four cardinal directions, moving after the player does. No time limit, just a turn limit - Survive for that long, and rack up as much score as you can in the process. Add in stuff like Into-the-breach shoving/pulling, and the myraid of fun weapon options this affords you, and i think the core is real solid).
But also looking at things, Game maker is now free to access... unless you actually wanna do anything useful with publishing your stuff, at which point it's a subscription model (Gross)
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Was the big D&D boom you speak of bigger than the whole podcast/stream/live show version of D&D/other tabletop games that started about 10-13 years ago (which is during WotC's ownership of the brand?)
I feel like the boom of the late 00s-2010s might be a bit bigger.
as expected, 4070ti reviews are... not very positive
The original big boom in of Basic Edition and AD&D 1E back in the 80s saw... these charts I'm looking at makes it seem like 3.5M sales of Basic and 2.9M sales of AD&D's Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide.
Also, the new big boom started something like eight years ago with Fifth Edition. By 2016 (two years) it had sold more Player's Handbooks than the lifetime sales of 3E, 3.5E, or 4E (those got 5-6 years each). I don't know if the newer boom was bigger than the original one, though, since WotC doesn't share sales numbers. I think it's definitely possible - the hobby as a whole is less niche these days, even if D&D doesn't currently have a TV series.
EDIT: It seems like WotC's Ryan Dancey claimed that the total lifetime sales of the 3E PHB was 1M units while the 1E PHB was 1.5M units, which I guess means the chart I was looking at was combined PHB+DMG sales and Basic outsold Advanced 2:1. Wow. Also, TSR's Tim Kask apparently did some math and figured that Basic probably sold three million copies in three years across twelve-ish languages? It was a real big success back in the day, probably because it was $9.95 and available in big box retailers.
do not touch my baldur's gate 3 WoTC
get the fuck outta here
LOL
They bring shame to the TI name. My 1070TI is ace but now getting long in the tooth.
D&D 5e is a much more simplified, easy to pick up game than any of the editions that came before it. That isn’t necessarily a sign of quality (I think it’s pretty good for D&D) but it did make the barrier of entry much lower.
Then you had TAZ and Critical Role and others using it cause it was easier to stream than most similar tabletops, as well as having the name recognition so it exploded in popularity.
My understanding is that in general, D&D is doing pretty well. That doesn’t mean it’s doing infinite growth money bags well that Hasbro wants it to do, but it’s in a much healthier space than it was a decade ago.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-steam-awards-winners-have-been-revealed-and-they-are-boring
That’s what happens when you listen to fans
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
They loved it so much they crunched for several years, then released the game a year too early and became an industry punchline. Because love! It's pretty silly not to give that award to say... Vampire Survivors (what else would you call one guy doing like 30 free updates to a $5 game all in a row) or Dwarf Fortress or something.
Same with Stray, which has zero innovative gameplay ideas. Unless you think not letting the player have a dedicated jump button is innovation (it's literally not, Zelda thought of that on the N64).
It's a shame its main story isn't particularly interesting and that it saddles you with an absolutely dogshit character like Johnny Silverhand. Just a miserable presence to have around. He gets his own moments, usually in the aforementioned side quests where he comments on some of the dumber or wackier stuff you get paid to do. And there is an optional quest chain in the late game to help him wrap up some lingering regrets from the Samurai days that clearly are intended to give him more depth, but I don't think much of it lands. He just sucks, as a guy
Anyway, I came away from it feeling more positively than I expected and I may check out the DLC, but I may not. What a mess of a game
They're loved so much, they're no longer being supported.
Cyberpunk 2077 Ending Development on PS4 and Xbox One, CD Projekt Red Confirms
Also lol at the mention of Stadia
Phantom Liberty is the only one they're making
Yeah, I picked it up earlier this year when it was on sale and enjoyed myself more than I expected, to the point where I was glad to see the announcement of a sequel. There's some real good stuff in there but it has moments of "I am suffering through this in the hopes this storyline pays off". The main story has pretty bad pacing too.
I believe this article was written before CDPR went "LOL ONLY ONE EXPANSION"
man
this shit is going to keep coming until nothing is real
They prefer making house calls instead of social media tweets
Can someone please test what happens if you turn to face away but have glasses on backwards
it prevents the tigers from attacking you
Finally a biblically accurate zoom meeting.
"BE NOT AFRAID"
what kind of myths?
One of the big ones for me is the idea that if a person can't maintain eye contact it's because they're lying or hiding something. Was not a helpful thing to have in mind when I was growing up and realized I am really bad at maintaining eye contact
I assume that is what the nvidia eye faking thing is actually about
I still don't do that in my telehealth therapy sessions!