I couldn’t know that until I got home, and this article summarized everything just fine as well as embedding the source video in it.

The comments here are something else. This event is completely independent of the sales of the game (a game that probably did just fine). She’s a director who left a company after 18 years at the end of a project, which directors often do, because that’s the best way to accept a lucrative offer without burning bridges. 18 years is a long time to stay at the same company.

EDIT: Oh, apparently this departure is a part of some manufactured internet culture war drama. Allow this from Jeff Grubb to clear the air:

Corrine Busch, director of Dragon Age, really is leaving BioWare. But I don’t think EA is closing BioWare Edmonton. Was told there is nothing solid about that part of the rumor.

In her letter, she said she is moving to a new team to work on a new RPG.

Just to give you all the timeline: Two people reached out to me directly with details about the story before I ever saw Grummz or whoever’s tweets (I have all those blocked). Regardless, their posts contained lies to fuel a pathetic culture war, so I never would’ve felt good about crediting them.

When a game cost that much to make and didn’t launch with big numbers, there was no prayer of it ever making money.

It was early morning at jury selection, and I did not bring headphones with me.

Well, yeah. If it’s clearly never going to recover, why keep spending money on it? They already took it as a total loss by refunding everyone, so that was probably cheaper than holding out for a recovery that wasn’t going to happen.

Keeping it running has ongoing costs involved. It would just be setting money on fire.

Concord likely wasn’t shit but also was just thoroughly not something that anyone was asking for.

Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it’s undoing large swaths of the industry.

It had worth to me, as someone who was stuck in a place where it was unacceptable to watch a video but was acceptable instead to read a summary quietly.

I’m not talking about a metaphorical 50m, I’m talking in the game world 50m. It’s not an analogy for game design, I mean in a very literal sense that the worlds are a bit too small for my tastes.

But the size of the world is a part of the game design. What’s too big for The Outer Worlds might be just fine for Mad Max simply because one of those games lets you drive a car. The distance that those supplies can be away from where you start is dictated by what mechanics you have at your disposal to get there. It’s metaphorical because we’re talking about any time a game makes a decision like this with relation to how they scale their game world, not just that one time that you measured it out to be 50m.

I do think it’s worth examining why this is harder for you to suspend disbelief than other things in video games. You suspend disbelief every time your character loses or gains hit points rather than suffering actual injuries that need time to heal. You suspend disbelief any time you play a game in a real world city that isn’t represented in 1:1 scale (that’s basically all of them) like The Division or Spider-Man. So to the same end, I’ll take those supplies that are 50m away and it’s somehow too far for the quest giver to go get them, because it’s best for the design of the game, just like the scale of the world that they built.

I would not put it past Nintendo to charge you $70 for Tears of the Kingdom again so that you can run it at reasonable resolutions and frame rates this time.

All the immersion Bethesda could muster couldn’t make Starfield a better game than The Outer Worlds. The criticism was frequently that they made 1000 planets but that it would have been better if they’d focused on making 5 good ones, which is basically what Outer Worlds did. Putting the metaphorical supplies 50m away is what they found led to the best pacing, so suspend your disbelief a bit, and have a better time than if they’d put them further away. This isn’t prescriptive, btw. If it’s not your preference, it’s not your preference, but I think most people would prefer the compromise to immersion when it makes the game more fun.

The old games were beaten by a Twitch chat sending little more than random inputs to the game. Maybe the newer ones are worse, but let’s be real.

There’s a disclaimer that says not every Switch 1 game will work, but I think it will play on the new Switch with the same lousy performance it has now unless you buy the Switch 2 version.

Are you prepared to have to buy the game again to do that? I don’t know it for sure, but it’s how I expect Nintendo to operate.

The advantage of putting those supplies 50m away though is that it makes a better video game. Playing The Outer Worlds right after Starfield made me a-okay with every way they shrunk the Bethesda experience.

I didn’t play Tears of the Kingdom, but if you found large swaths of the map to be empty in Breath of the Wild, it means there’s something hidden there that you didn’t find.

Has a game ever asked you if you wanted to drop down to easy mode when you died too many times? How many times have you said yes? Because given that prompt, basically no one takes up the offer, and they’re more likely to just stop playing because the game is too hard.

As it stands now, it’s difficult for the consumer to make the informed choice that you can make with any of those. And the comparison is that you’d prefer cigarettes that didn’t cause cancer, because they absolutely have the ability to make cigarettes that don’t cause cancer in this metaphor, but they choose not to because they believe they stand to make more money the way things are.

That too would have costs associated with it. Nothing is free when you do it at work, but it’s reasonable to impose those kinds of costs to ensure the products they make meet a base standard.