Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

When you release a "live service" on the promise that you'll support the game for years to come and then it turns out to be unpopular, that puts you in a Morton's Fork.

You can either keep updating the game to try and fulfill your promises to the customers you do have, getting shit on for not giving up on the game and doing something else. Or you can stop updating the game, getting shit on for breaking your promises to your actual customers who bought the game.

Let's be real here. If Bethesda came out tomorrow and was like, "We've decided that because Fallout 76 didn't sell well, we will NOT be supporting it, and everyone who paid us full retail price for a copy can get f*cked," we'd all be talking about how shitty they are for doing that.

These aren't the kind of games where you can just go, "Whoops, I f*cked up, gotta do better on the sequel I guess!" Once you launch a "live service", you're committed for better or worse.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 12th 2020 at 7:45:47 AM

I'm cautiously optimistic honestly with the agreement that something is fundamentally flawed in the game and that they want to fix that.

Yeah, it'd be nice if they got it right the first time. But if they wanna pull a FFXIV or No Man's Sky on it? Be my guest.

Are they gonna do that? I dunno. But like, I can't slam the idea of wanting to fix the thing.

Not really a comparison though. Till the Wastelander Update drops, nothing in FO 76 released so far really addressed the core complaints about the game. And much of it was releasing content that had not been QA'd and made the game worse.

Edited by Ghilz on Feb 12th 2020 at 9:50:18 AM

Jim sounds kind of off in this video. Unsurprisingly.

Lol, that was Hard Truck Apocalypse in the background as Jim was reading that blog post. The game is... eh, but has some charm. It also serves as a preview to last decade's typical open world games.

Shame, the idea of a post-apocalyptic open world RPG with Big Badass Rig Vehicular Combat is way too cool.

Anyway onto Anthem, it simply has no chance.

Edited by Dhiruxide on Feb 12th 2020 at 10:10:59 AM

Maybe they'll do some market research this time by playing some Destiny 2.

Odd that he never mentioned the one success story once in the entire video. FFXIV was once in that same spot that Anthem is in right now, the way that one recovered was bringing in one hell of a project manager as a director who knew exactly what he wanted and how to get that done.

I dont think Bioware has any of that, hell I am not even sure Bioware even knows what they want the game to be even now.

Maybe Jim didn't bring up FF 14 since his audience probably doesn't care about it and only want to see him bitch about the bad stuff.

Jim's pretty weak on the Eastern side of gaming in general. I think he genuinely just forgot about it

By Jim's own admission, he was kinda off in this video, what with the move and all the other stuff he had last week. Maybe he just forgot, cause I'm pretty sure he's mentioned FFXIV before when talking about No Man's Sky.

Trying to find a good video about what happened to FFXIV since I keep hearing about it but I can't find any.

Here is a documentary on the disaster and rebuild of FFXIV, with interviews from the devs themselves. Its 3 Hours long though fyi. [1][2][3]

Pretty much everything said in the first part about 1.0 we have heard verbatim from Bioware employees in that Kotaku story about the Bioware disaster. I mean damn... and this documentary is from 2017.

Edited by Memers on Feb 13th 2020 at 1:28:32 AM

And it's probably even worse for Anthem, if thats even possible.

Playing Division 2 cause you can now buy the game for 3 dollars, they really gotta making sequels to these games.

It really work better as just a massive expansion pack.

As supposedly bad as XIV 1.0 was, wouldn't know for certain since I didnt play it. Hell I didnt even KNOW about it until after it shut down. I wish I could have seen the end times of it cause...what a way to end a game.

Not taking anything away from Yoshi P, but I do think part of why 14's reboot worked is that they didnt hide from its failure it like Anthem or 76. Instead of trying to spin it or halfway acknowledge it with pr drivel they flat out apologized and vowed to do better. Plus 14 had the advantage of their failure happening before the era of 'fix it later' began in stride.

I also think it was FF 14 1.0 being the straw that broke the camel's back. The FF 13 series were very divisive and company was still(?) reeling from the bomb that was Spirits Within. Had they not acted on fixing FF 14, Square apparently was gonna go under or at least suffer very heavily. That's probably why they came out and was just straight up honest on how terrible they made the game.

They still made FFXV and abandoned it so they didn't really learn their lesson.

You gotta look up what it was like in vanilla 1.0.

• No jump button.
• no minimap.
• a fatigue system that would make you eventually have yo earn zero xp for the rest of the day
• A main quest that requires sky high level requirements to fly in the face of above point.
• The current leve quest system was basically how you HAD to level outside of that... 1 leve quest gained every 4 hours.
• Menus were server side instead of client side.
• No mounts, couldn't even ride a Chocobo.
• No fast travel.
• Couldn't discard accepted quests
• a grand total of 2 dungeons in the game... which the bosses did not drop loot.
• horrendous crafting and gathering system that was bound to a server side UI and every action was only a chance to work.
• Forced Mouse Acceleration
• Required an I7 processor minimum to play even back then
• The lighting system was horrid and looked fake
• Some objects in the world had more polygons than any character model.
• Changing equipment is done entirely through macros and commands
• No class system
• Bars wiped themselves any time you equipped a different weapon
• Inventory was a literal list but not in any order
• When you die you had to go into the menus and find 'Return'
• You had to switch in and out of 'combat stance' to do anything. Which was a straight up full stop cast time thing.
• To join a Free Company / Guild.. it required physical contact with the invitee and inviter... it took 30+ minutes to travel between towns.
• No quest map indicators.
• Abilities did not say what they did, literally nothing.
• Gear breaks but doesn't have durability value.
• To use an elevator you had to open up the menu and find the option 'use elevator'
• Auto run switched the control system to tank controls.

Those are just off the top of my head.

Edited by Memers on Feb 13th 2020 at 5:48:01 AM

Okay I just rememebred why I don’t play XIV anymore.

I can’t find my password. It’s like somewhat a hassle logging in & the password retrieval is similarly hassling.

I just kinda stopped after a day of trying to log in & just giving up. It’s weird.

Live chat support is usually the fastest way of getting your account back.

14's worth a second look. The latest Expansion's been getting a lot of praise for it's story and setting

Epic's Tim Sweeney Says Loot Boxes Profit By Doing Harm

The same Tim Sweeney who a few days ago made the claim that "video games should distance themselves from politics"?

Yeah, no, broken clocks and whatnot, but I'm not too trusting of this guy making statements at the moment.

Not to mention Epic's own list of questionable actions regarding in game purchases that Jim highlighted.

This reminds me of that time a game executive (I think he was an executive for Activision?) made a big speech about how videogames should no longer cost $60...only to go on and explain why their games absolutely deserved the $60 price tag.

People from EA and Activision have both said that.

Mr. Sweeney's speech is just a case of Even Evil Has Standards.

Wonder if Jim's new neighbors wondered about the strange steampunk pimp going down the street.

Who the heck is J. Allen Brack?