Hello, new week of PC games! Hey, I thought you'd be taller. Ah, I see what's happened: the Maw has eaten Friday again, and swallowed next Monday for good measure. As ever, the normies are calling this a "bank holiday weekend". There are various festivities planned - apparently, some bunny has been running around laying chocolate eggs.
Epic Games' mass layoffs led a programmer with terminal brain cancer to lose his life insurance, leaving him and his family struggling to find new coverage. Following news of the situation breaking, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said the company have reached out to the programmer - Mike Prinke - and that they "will solve the insurance".
Pearl Abyss' bashing of their massive open-world into a more palatable shape continues, with Crimson Desert's latest patch packing a bunch more tweaks to controls and adding some new animals to ride around on. It also looks to have begun swapping out those AI paintings the studio previously claimed were accidentally left in it on release, though the patch's wording around this change is fairly vague.
Sundays are for deciding to re-watch The Sopranos. Specifically that episode in which Tony gets a bad tummy and then talks to a fish. You wonder what you might fever dream of, if you too were to go and eat at an Indian restaurant, then have enough room for a snack at Artie Bucco's fine Italian eatery? Would you too dream of surreal wandering down a boardwalk? Would you instead dream something different? Would you dream of a platypus sitting in a high-rise apartment, looking up from the newspaper as he reminds a house guest not to trip over a potted cactus when they exit his bathroom?
Would that be the-Oh. Oh no. It's happening again. The person who's emerged from the bathroom, tripping over the plant on the way, is bald and reeks of alternative comedy. Ready the words and prepare to fire.
Video games, or more so the people who play them, I suppose, have this annoying thing where they assign a genre name as an insult. I don't want to reignite the discourse around JRPG as a term, but it certainly was used in quite a derisive and othering manner in its earlier years. The term walking sim was used more as a point of ironic degradation, even though it was perfectly apt in many ways. Then there's Eurojank, a sort of real but not technically real genre that describes ambitious but imperfect games made by European developers. And Andrii Verpakhovskyi, designer on the original Stalker games, doesn't think such jank should be geologically categorised.
The mystery of what you should price your game is one that I am sure will continue to remain mostly unsolved. There's just no right answer, and to make matters worse, there's currencies other than your own to consider. On Steam there have been plenty of occasions where regional pricing differences haven't gone down well, primarily due to games costing too much based on local wages. However, a new Steam update should now make it easier for devs to set better regional prices.
The problem with playtesting is that it is impossible to predict every last thing any given person may do once a game is out in the wild. It's an imperfect science where you do the best you can in the moment. I imagine a live service game like Arc Raiders to be extra difficult, given how many playstyles need to be accounted for. And based on a recent interview, it sounds like some of the team at Embark took an approach that involved a randomiser determining their own playstyle from day to day to make sure they weren't just playing one way.
