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Post by midnight tea on Jan 13, 2018 20:36:51 GMT
Also I'm not sure people in general are keen on the episode format for buying games. I hope that's not true. It's a good strategy, lowering the cost of entry for people who are more price sensitive, while building up buzz and excitement in a "try before you buy" system. It actually is more of a pain for writers and devs than for the customer, since they have to put all of their effort into making the first episode a smash hit. Which means stories that are more back-loaded won't work in the format. For people who absolutely hate having their experience stretched over months and can't stand cliffhangers, just wait until the omnibus edition comes out. That's what I do. We're living through golden era of episodic TV shows and even movie franchises, so I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that this is where things are going with games as well. Anyway - wasn't episodic Hitman a successful game for Square Enix?
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Jan 13, 2018 20:42:42 GMT
I hope that's not true. It's a good strategy, lowering the cost of entry for people who are more price sensitive, while building up buzz and excitement in a "try before you buy" system. It actually is more of a pain for writers and devs than for the customer, since they have to put all of their effort into making the first episode a smash hit. Which means stories that are more back-loaded won't work in the format. For people who absolutely hate having their experience stretched over months and can't stand cliffhangers, just wait until the omnibus edition comes out. That's what I do. I think it's more that a lot of people will buy the first episode but the number goes down a lot for each subsequent, as people get interested by the other newest shiny- I mean game I mean the majority of people don't finish their games and the reason that a lot of publishers try and put most of their DLC close to launch as it's when hype for the game is biggest and when there's the largest customer base. It's a good point, but for a complete analysis, we'd have to compare with the amount of full games that sell at discounted prices. It might be a net wash if the average revenue per unit for full games, with all discounted sales included, is about the same as the average revenue of the first episode of an episodic game. Assuming equal numbers of units sold.
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Post by rras1994 on Jan 13, 2018 20:47:49 GMT
I hope that's not true. It's a good strategy, lowering the cost of entry for people who are more price sensitive, while building up buzz and excitement in a "try before you buy" system. It actually is more of a pain for writers and devs than for the customer, since they have to put all of their effort into making the first episode a smash hit. Which means stories that are more back-loaded won't work in the format. For people who absolutely hate having their experience stretched over months and can't stand cliffhangers, just wait until the omnibus edition comes out. That's what I do. We're living through golden era of episodic TV shows and even movie franchises, so I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that this is where things are going with games as well. Anyway - wasn't episodic Hitman a successful game for Square Enix? But people don't really pay for individual episodes anymore or even individual seasons anymore - they stream them. I think that's probably were episodic content for games will end up but it will likely be done by the big Publishers that are able to produce enough content to pull it off. I don't really think Telltale would be able to pull it off quite as well.
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Post by midnight tea on Jan 13, 2018 20:59:54 GMT
We're living through golden era of episodic TV shows and even movie franchises, so I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that this is where things are going with games as well. Anyway - wasn't episodic Hitman a successful game for Square Enix? But people don't really pay for individual episodes anymore or even individual seasons anymore - they stream them. I think that's probably were episodic content for games will end up but it will likely be done by the big Publishers that are able to produce enough content to pull it off. I don't really think Telltale would be able to pull it off quite as well. They stream them - usually through platforms they're subscribed to. Subscription and episodic content seem to be trends of today. Anyway - I'm not sure how either solutions would work for developers like Telltale, but I think we're mostly talking about it in context of potentially rising price or finding other means of funding AAA games, rather than indies. Though, to be fair, many small creators now rely a lot on a pool of patrons.... that's basically like a subscription.
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Post by rras1994 on Jan 13, 2018 21:10:17 GMT
But people don't really pay for individual episodes anymore or even individual seasons anymore - they stream them. I think that's probably were episodic content for games will end up but it will likely be done by the big Publishers that are able to produce enough content to pull it off. I don't really think Telltale would be able to pull it off quite as well. They stream them - usually through platforms they're subscribed to. Subscription and episodic content seem to be trends of today. Anyway - I'm not sure how either solutions would work for developers like Telltale, but I think we're mostly talking about it in context of potentially rising price or finding other means of funding AAA games, rather than indies. Though, to be fair, many small creators now rely a lot on a pool of patrons.... that's basically like a subscription. Well, Telltale is big Indie - btw I checked again, it was 25% layed off (around 90 people - it's a big developer), not 50 % like I said earliar though still a big chunk. Though Indie devs are also struggling with the lack of price increases, probably worse as they don't have as many options for other paths of monetisation - they can use Kickstarter but that's been pretty dominated by Star Citizen as they took more of the fundraising then all the rest of the other projects combined last year. But, yeah, you're right, most of this talk in this thread is mainly about the funding of AAA games rather than Indie, which have their own problems. Oh and yeah I meant it was more going into subscription teriotory rather than buying individual episodes like the Telltale method.
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Post by arvaarad on Jan 14, 2018 0:02:03 GMT
Pat @miracl3work3rTodays new term "Speculative Code Execution" FYI it was awesome until it wasnt and now its very bad. It wasn't even all that awesome in the first place. It's symptomatic of inefficiency in translating high-level code into machine architecture. I mean, if you have the cycles to execute code that might not be needed, why can't those cycles be used for something that is for sure going to be needed? Been a long time since I looked at machine-level code, but as I recall it’s not an issue with translating high-level code, it’s an optimization that’s used even when executing pure machine instructions. Each instruction goes through multiple different steps before it resolves. To simplify things, say there are 3 steps to handle each instruction, A, B, and C. If instructions are executed purely sequentially, you have something like: 1A 1B 1C (instruction 1 is done) 2A 2B 2C (instruction 2 is done) 3A 3B 3C (instruction 3 is done) ... Which is straightforward, but very wasteful. As soon as instruction 1 moves to stage B, the part of the CPU that handles stage A is just sitting idle until 1 is completely done. Modern CPUs execute instructions on a “pipeline”, so they don’t have to wait for the previous instruction to finish before starting the next one. So it becomes more like 1A 2A, 1B 3A, 2B, 1C (1 is done) 4A, 3B, 2C (2 is done) 5A, 4B, 3C (3 is done) ... Without pipelining, it took 9 steps to execute 3 instructions, but now it takes only 5. So pipelining makes everything much faster. However. Say instruction 1 was a branch instruction (“if this, do that, otherwise do something else”). If the program hits a branch, we don’t know what instruction 2 will be until after 1 is completely done. We could solve this by emptying out the pipeline like in the first example. But now every branch is extremely slow. So instead, we guess what instruction 2 will be and keep the pipeline full. When 1 exits the pipeline, we find out if we were right. If we were, we can continue with no delay. If we were wrong, we lose the pipeline’s progress - but without speculative execution, we would have lost the pipelining every time.
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Post by lucidae on Jan 14, 2018 2:18:34 GMT
I think it might be time to take this discussion to another thread guys...
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Jan 14, 2018 19:00:22 GMT
Without pipelining, it took 9 steps to execute 3 instructions, but now it takes only 5. So pipelining makes everything much faster. I understand. My point is that better compiler technology should be able to schedule the pipeline to reduce the need for speculative execution. Like unrolling loops. Admittedly, branches are the bane of deep pipelines, and maybe there isn't a way to improve on that on the software/compiler end -- but maybe that's a symptom of a bad machine arctecture. Deep pipelines are so 1980's, maybe it's time for a change?
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Post by ladyiolanthe on Jan 14, 2018 19:34:45 GMT
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Post by spectre4hire on Jan 15, 2018 3:19:25 GMT
Does anyone else wish Dragon Age had an N7 day equivalent. So we could at least have a date to look forward to or get excited about. I just want something in terms of DA 4. I'm starving here for info. I know about Anthem being Bioware's focus, but still, I need me some DA info. That being said, I still appreciate all the tireless work put in here to keep us updated with tweets from the DA team. So thanks.
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Post by Nightscrawl on Jan 15, 2018 3:41:16 GMT
Does anyone else wish Dragon Age had an N7 day equivalent. So we could at least have a date to look forward to or get excited about. I just want something in terms of DA 4. I'm starving here for info. I know about Anthem being Bioware's focus, but still, I need me some DA info. That being said, I still appreciate all the tireless work put in here to keep us updated with tweets from the DA team. So thanks. We've discussed this before. I think it should be September 30 (9:30). :3
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Post by OhDaniGirl on Jan 15, 2018 4:05:35 GMT
Does anyone else wish Dragon Age had an N7 day equivalent. So we could at least have a date to look forward to or get excited about. I just want something in terms of DA 4. I'm starving here for info. I know about Anthem being Bioware's focus, but still, I need me some DA info. That being said, I still appreciate all the tireless work put in here to keep us updated with tweets from the DA team. So thanks. We've discussed this before. I think it should be September 30 (9:30). :3 I'd be down with that. It would be a lovely birthday present.
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Post by spectre4hire on Jan 15, 2018 4:21:40 GMT
We've discussed this before. I think it should be September 30 (9:30). :3 I'd be down with that. It would be a lovely birthday present. that seems only fair since N7 is on my birthday
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Post by Mresa on Jan 15, 2018 6:05:16 GMT
We've discussed this before. I think it should be September 30 (9:30). :3 I'd be down with that. It would be a lovely birthday present. My b-day as well so totally supporting this idea.
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Post by Hrungr on Jan 15, 2018 18:04:15 GMT
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Jan 15, 2018 19:08:58 GMT
The best part is that Cassandra has Mark's Mangled Mace equipped. Bears in the Hinterlands is good too.
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Twitter Guru
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More coffee...? More coffee.
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Post by Hrungr on Jan 16, 2018 1:19:39 GMT
Eric Reithel @thecraftycurlerHi, @biomarykirby! Is there a place I can find full (or, as full as been created) texts of the Canticles of Threnodies and Transfigurations? Doing some background for an RPG quest... Mary Kirby @biomarykirbyThe most complete versions as of right now are in The World of Thedas vol 2. [HASH]DAT
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Post by apollexander on Jan 16, 2018 14:19:09 GMT
Not sure if it is proper to post here. I've found on LinkedIn that Matthew Goldman, who I think was the art director of DA, has been a creative director since Oct 2017. He has a title 'Unannounced project Dec 2015 - present' (note that DAI was finished in late 2015). Now we have two creative directors (Matthew and Daniel) as well as a narrative presentation lead (John). It seems that those are the new big three for a theoretical DA game, below Mark Darrah of course.
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Post by Fredward on Jan 16, 2018 16:34:33 GMT
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midnight tea
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Post by midnight tea on Jan 16, 2018 17:35:46 GMT
If you want to have more of an idea of what kind of guy he is, it's probably best to remind ourselves of this
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Post by OhDaniGirl on Jan 17, 2018 3:36:33 GMT
If you want to have more of an idea of what kind of guy he is, it's probably best to remind ourselves of this Well, dammit...now I want to see this magical piece of pixel art.
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midnight tea
Twitter Guru
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Post by midnight tea on Jan 17, 2018 3:44:01 GMT
If you want to have more of an idea of what kind of guy he is, it's probably best to remind ourselves of this Well, dammit...now I want to see this magical piece of pixel art. I don't know if mere mortals were meant to see it... from the sound of it, this thing is so gloriously rendered it may melt our eyeballs off
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Post by OhDaniGirl on Jan 17, 2018 3:48:00 GMT
Well, dammit...now I want to see this magical piece of pixel art. I don't know if mere mortals were meant to see it... from the sound of it, this thing is so gloriously rendered it may melt our eyeballs off Apparently it is in the files somewhere. You need a hex editor to see it though? I have no idea what that means. edit- or was he saying 'can't'?
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Post by Andraste_Reborn on Jan 17, 2018 3:49:15 GMT
I will be forever be wistful about the black box they had to put over it. I mean, I know it would be illegal to sell the game in certain places otherwise, even if people could only find the penis with flycam mods. But still. All that work, and nobody outside the company ever gets to appreciate it!
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Post by vertigomez on Jan 17, 2018 4:09:32 GMT
I will be forever be wistful about the black box they had to put over it. I mean, I know it would be illegal to sell the game in certain places otherwise, even if people could only find the penis with flycam mods. But still. All that work, and nobody outside the company ever gets to appreciate it! Bull's junk lives on in our dreams.
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