Most people are aware of the concept of precedence. Primarily used in legal settings, this allows you to compare two items that are similar and respond in a similar fashion. When the issue is brand new, then there’s a big argument around it, getting to a nation’s highest court. The ruling then sets precedence, allowing for future similar discussions to be solved much quicker. (The whole Trump voting thing lost because of precedence, and on rulings that a first day law student would know better than to try.)

The psychological impact of precedence is the real matter at hand. Individuals like surprises, people do not. Society is based on a set of rules and has trouble adapting when those rules are challenged or changed. Subverting expectation works in things like art, but rarely in other mediums. Uber decimated the taxi industry (and still doesn’t pay people enough, nor does the company actually make money). The pandemic has shown that society can manage work remotely – at least a LOT more than previously thought. That will cut the travel/hospitality industry to the knees, or any business dependent on “rush hour”. Change is by nature disruptive, but it also tends to set new expectation. And from that point on, precedence is set.

Precedence in gaming is a thing too. WoW is the bar by which nearly every MMO has been judged for 15 years! If your quests don’t have a ! around them, are they quests? If it doesn’t play like FIFA, is it really football/soccer? People don’t say “it’s a tactical game”, they say it plays like XCOM. There are so many games we’re forced to compare, and those comparisons have judgment.

All of that to Cyberpunk. Not the first company that’s an industry darling to make a mistake. It’s not the first game to have crazy hype. It is not the first game to promise so much more than it delivered. It is not the first game to subject its developers to insane crunch. It’s not the first game to launch to meet stockholder demands. And it’s not the first game to offer generous refunds.

You don’t have to look too far back here. Anthem was in this bucket. The good news for players was the EA pass structure, meaning most people were out like $20 instead of full retail. Diablo 3 offered refunds for everyone for a month after launch. Star Citizen still has not launched, and I’m astounded that it’s not the largest case of gaming fraud in history. Day 1 kitchen sink patches are expected now. There are plenty of discreet examples across time that show that this has happened before. Plenty of reasons that explain why pre-orders are bad for everyone.

What Cyberpunk has done instead is bring this all to 11.

• CD Projekt was riding ultra high after a great track record – including the highly regarded Witcher 3.
• It’s been hyped like mad for 8 years, and been taking pre-orders for nearly 3
• It clearly launched in a overly buggy state, and is for practical purposes, not playable on last-gen consoles. This makes everyone look bad, including Sony/MS.
• It promised, multiple times, to not have crunch. Then management demanded it for the last 6 months. They will, certainly, have a loss of talent because of this choice.
• It’s launch was primarily a financial matter, so that they could claim the pre-order negative balance. It sold 8 million of them! WoW Shadowlands was the “highest ever” with 3.7m, a week before. Side note – it also has cost the company ~20% of total value due to stock depreciation (~$1.8b dollars), way more than the pre-orders generated.
• The refunds are unheard of. You can’t even buy the game digitally right now for anything but PC. If you do have a copy, every single vendor is offering some form of refund. See prior line item to get an idea of the financial impacts of this.

Many games have launched in a state similar to this. Few have checked as many boxes as Cyberpunk, and checked them so forcefully. Some have come back from the dead (No Man’s Land), most have just cut their losses and moved on. This absolutely spectacular failure and set of consequences could have and should have been mitigated. Consumers are anti-ethical by nature, they could give 2 shits about crunch as long as the product has value (RDR2 in gaming, and the existence of WalMart in general). This was a cluster of mistakes that anyone with half a brain should have seen coming, and yet, here we are.

No, what Cyberpunk has actually done is a much larger problem. They’ve set a precedence for consequences of failure so absolute that the next person to fail even remotely close has to measure up to this response. How refunds are managed, and the decision to support or tank a game here on out for video game is the real target. This may not seem like a big deal to consumers, refunds are part of life right? Yeah, on the other side of the machine is a financial team that measures risk and liability. 80% of the people impacted by that decision have zero power to impact it. EA and Acti/Blizzard execs are sweating bullets thinking “this could be us!”

The optimist in me says this will mean games will have to launch with higher QA standards than what we’ve seen. That quality will not only be rewarded, but expected. The pessimist in me says that this will put an elite bar on games where anything that doesn’t score say an 80 on metacritic is a target for a massive refund drive from gamers, and that there really isn’t any way for suppliers to push back.

And to close here, I feel ultra bad for the CD Projekt development team. They knew this was going to happen (well, maybe not the refunds) and management did nothing. They did nothing multiple times! The company has lost billions of dollars from this. That usually comes with consequences, and these folks do not need that additional stress over the holidays. All because someone wanted to print a number on a quarterly review. Rather than a few execs taking a smaller bonus, they’ve now put the entire company under the lens.

A long while ago, I worked as a code monkey for a small company. Google searches indicate they are still operating, that’s oddly comforting. I’ve worked quite a few IT jobs in the past 20 odd years, and while the technology may have changed, the processes really haven’t all that much. SDLC is still the same idea, except now we call crunch things like “SCRUM” or “AGILE”. Back then, we just called it “get it done”. Everything was pretty fresh in the early ‘00s, and the pasty basement dwellers only needed a case of Coke to meet a deliverable.

Today’s world is different, it’s bigger for one. Coding is not a 1 person shop anymore, it’s dozens of people, if not hundreds. It’s commenting code, it‘s libraries, it’s devshops, it’s grey hacks, pen-tests, throttling, package controls and a dozen other things. Oh, and QA, the one thing we always never had time to do.

There’s a fair chunk of news about how companies treat their staff, and whether crunch comes with the game or not. Crunch exists for only one reason, bad management. Either they didn’t scope out the work properly, made assumptions with mitigations that weren’t accurate, or failed to manage the schedule and their bosses. I’ve been both impacted, and was the cause of crunch. It’s not that crunch “suddenly shows up”, it’s that priorities are not managed. You don’t realize with a month to go that you need yet another month, you defer making the decision until things are that red.

This topic is top of mind when comparing things like Cyberpunk 2077 and Hades, two games that were up for best game direction and somehow Cyberpunk 2077 won. I don’t begrudge CD Projekt delaying the game over so many years to deliver something, I think that’s the right approach. And that the developers share in overall profits is great. Added incentives against meta critic scores annoys me to no end (which are apparently ignored here, just given out). It’s the last 6 months of dev work, after 8 years of effort. It’s the last minute delays that no one is aware of until media lines are out. This isn’t some line worker, or supervisor. I doubt it’s even at the director level. This is top brass stuff finally making the right call, understanding that the years of effort making it are about to be undone with a buggy mess that will just mean more crunch to patch.

And let’s not forget what Rockstar went through to get RDR2 out the door. 80 hour work weeks are insane.

Then you look at Hades, where early access (beta) showed where they were going with no big expectations past that. Things came out when they were clean, and iteration was key. Staff has mandatory 20 days off a year, and then there’s a mental health check to manage workload. In short, the people matter more than the work, which obviously creates a better work environment, and therefore a better product.

Time Management

Who hasn’t tried to do something while completely exhausted? How often does that thing go the way you want it to? I’ve made TONS of mistakes while exhausted that took me longer to fix than if I had just come back to it later. Doing it once and a while, to get over some unexpected emergency (like helping someone manage their personal stuff), that is part of the job of being manager. Doing it consistently, over multiple weeks and months… you never get a chance to recover and will continue to make mistakes along the way.

Now, compound that over dozens of people, all working at much less than 100%, for long periods of time. Their heart is there (assuming they are compensated), but their brains aren’t.

Motivators

There are 2 big things that motivate people – money and pride. For most people, the money thing isn’t really motivating, because you’ll get paid on this game or the next. If you get a stock bonus, then you’ll get it eventually. Few people ever get a bonus for meeting a milestone, except executives. Few people ever get a bonus due to share performance, executives excepted as well. Now the reality is that cash flow is required to pay people to work on a game. No money in = no game development work done.

Pride though, that’s a big one. No one should be ok with delivering a stinker. They may feel powerless in that space (again, a failure of management) but they are not actively trying to make a bad experience. There’s not a chance any dev working on Anthem was looking at that product and going “yeah, that’s good”. But someone in that path decided it had to ship, no matter the state of affairs.

Money Matters

Tangent here for a sec. Codemasters is entertaining an offer from EA for 1.2 BILLION dollars. Take Two had offered just under 1 BILLION. Primarily for the Dirt and F1 franchises. That’s insane. Taking a step back, the EA bid is seen as defensive, since they already have a bunch of racing franchises – defensive meaning they will cut like crazy. Take Two would benefit from extra work, but no mistakes either, some serious cuts would follow. Any Codemaster employee that is not an executive (who is certainly going to gain from the stock purchase) is likely updating their resume right now. This is the business of entertainment.

Come Backs

There are only so many FF14, For Honor, and No Man’s Sky possible. Very, very rarely will you see something launch as a right mess and come back to some measure of success. Instead you’ll get lists like this one (I am still ticked that Infinite Crisis didn’t work). None of them died out of the gate, each one had a team working feverishly to do what should have happened before launch. Each one eventually came to the conclusion that the battle couldn’t be won – curious as to how many devs actually came to this conclusion before their bosses.

Solutions

Is there a single answer to all this? You’ll see “union” listed as top of pile, and certainly there’s some serious value here. Even just recognizing the “class of worker” would have huge impacts. Should games simply cost more? How does something like Hades or Into the Breach become profitable yet ME: Andromeda is a hot mess? Maybe the hype cycles need to be cut. Maybe the idea of meta critic bonuses have to be eliminated. Maybe the consumer needs to be educated and make smarter purchases? (If FIFA/NFL are any indication, I have a better chance of getting pregnant)

The real challenge here is that coders are often disposable. Entry level positions are everywhere, and an environmental artist graduates every 20 minutes. Someone coming into the market thinks it’s part of the deal to bleed themselves dry to get something out the door because they are competing against someone who will. It’s a right nightmare.

Talking about it is a major first step. Having a pile of good examples to share is another. Replacing the “old guard” is even more important, where people with different ideas come to lead. Understanding that our darling dev shops from yesterday are large conglomerates beholden to shareholders today is another. Buying stock of these companies and being part of the stakeholder process is another… they were a couple votes shy of cutting Bobby Kotick’s salary bonuses last time. Making personal purchase choices is always an option, but that lives in a grey zone that each person manages to their own delight.

All looters have one purpose, make imaginary numbers go up through random drops, allowing for access to content that provides larger numbers. In some games, this is an inverted pyramid, where more content gets exposed as you get larger numbers, in others it’s a more narrowed view of options. In the MMO space, it’s often just raids. In the action genre, it’s rogue like dungeons. In shooters, it tends to be a mix of group focused content – probably due to the fact that consoles run the show.

Drops

Avengers manages drops in three methods. Completing a mission draws from a pool of items. Opening chests (which themselves have quality markers) drop gear. Finally, enemies drop items with higher odds on tougher opponents, like completing a waypoint. Let’s run through a good example.

Day of the Remains is an Inhuman mission that you eventually access in the main campaign. You can replay it, with a recommended power level of 25. You can certainly run it earlier, but you’re gonna die a lot! The mission has an chance for a chest at the start, a bunker with up to 4 chests to the left of the first waypoint, another bunker with up to 3 chests at the 2nd waypoint, 2 chests in locked rooms at the 3rd waypoint, and another chest near the main road (where you can rescue an Inhuman). My best runs have 12 chests and you never need to fire a shot. If you do end up fighting, then then 2nd, 3rd and 4th waypoints will all drop a few items (5 or so) and you get something for killing the 2 adaptoids at the end. If you need experience, then run the waypoints (<10mins). If you only need power levels (gear), then skip it all and focus on chests (~3 mins). I’ve run all the mission types, this is really the most efficient way. From start to end it takes less than 3 hours to reach 50/130.

Missions

These all focus on the concept of way points. If you skip one, then the next one won’t spawn. In the more open-world spaces, you’ll find some optional things to do – either a chest to get, an inhuman to free, or a tough enemy that guarantees a drop. In the tighter quarters, you only ever find locked chests.

The waypoints themselves focus on specific activities. A capture/hold event, destroy specific things, kill all enemies, kill elite enemies, or kill a specific target. In the open world, you have things between you and the objective that you can ignore. In the tighter spaces, the waypoint is often behind a console you need to interact with, behind a mess of enemies. Hives are “the” end game activity and you want to skip as much “trash” as possible to get to the next objective. Super advantage to flyers here, to a crazy degree. Major disadvantage to Hulk as he’s so big and gets stuck on stuff.

There are some missions that mix and match this stuff. The boss missions have you outside, then inside for a bit, then back outside for a large fight. Vaults have you outside trying to find the front door, then the rest is a mix of capture/hold mechanics against waves of enemies. They can vary in duration from something as low as 3 minutes to closer to an hour. It’s really great to have that level of variety.

But, not all things are created equal. Drops (as above) need triggers. If there aren’t chests, then you need a lot of waypoints. If a mission only has 1 waypoint and no chests… well you’re not going to get much out of it. Enter Hives.

Hives

I mentioned how action looters tend to have rogue like dungeons, and Avengers takes this as a foundation. Regular Hives have 8 floors to clear, and 1 waypoint to start the activity. You can die, but you restart a floor. Chests can spawn in the “trash” space between waypoints. For now, all Hives take place in the same building-basement tileset, which only have a dozen or so layouts. There’s less random here than say, Diablo 3.

Each waypoint will drop something, though there isn’t one that has better stuff than another. You can get a great drop from the first one and junk all the rest. They don’t take very long, maybe 10 minutes to clear.

Mega Hives are different. These are 48 floors (6 groups of 8 floors) where the entire squad needs to have power level 130. All 4 characters. In theory, this is a great incentive for multiplayer. The weird mechanic here, and only here, is that if you die you swap lead characters. All 4 characters die and you restart from floor 1. Each floor takes ~2 minutes to clear. In the best of cases, you’re here for 45 minutes. You don’t lose any of the gear, but you lose all the progress. And that final completion has guaranteed chance to drop an exotic (the best quality level item). The concept here is really solid, it’s that in practice Mega Hives are just too damn long and for most people you’re better off not playing with other people… AI companion deaths don’t count.

Load Times

This is an annoyance, as any waypoint trigger from a console generates an elevator cutscene. It doesn’t last long, maybe 5 seconds, but it really breaks the flow. You’ll get 2 of these for almost every Hive floor. It’s dumb, full stop. I am not against some loading, in particular for boss arena fights, but when you’re spending 20seconds in a corridor between loading screens, it makes you question why any of it exists. This is aside from the speech intros to every mission, which are not skipable. This effectively “raises the floor” of load times, so that you don’t end up zoning in and half the team has cleared most of the content, or has already moved to the next loading screen. Bigger areas would help a lot here, though I have to assume this is a resource issue in zone design.

Moving Forward

The core here is really quite good. The concept of Vaults and larger Hives seems ripe for interesting runs. They would need some additional tile sets so that it isn’t the same walls all the time, which is certainly some work but the assets are already mostly there. The space and underwater tile sets are underused to a crazy degree, and would be awesome here.

Having a way to modify gear stats, similar to Division, would be a huge relief from the stat waterfall currently in-game.

More content is certainly going to be nice to see. There are only 4 repeatable bosses (Abomination, Taskmaster, a giant spider tank, and a flying airship). MODOK, Super Adaptoid, and Monica are all campaign-only bosses. I wouldn’t say boss fights are a highlight, but it would be cool to have more variety. The whole “we can clone anything” gives a ton of room for this to work. Other mission types would be great too, Tachyon Rift is a nice change of pace.

The group content is going to need some big thinking hats to work out. I’m somewhat optimistic here given the extra time they took to deliver the Kate Bishop and the quality delivered. I guess a lot will depend on the AIM Secret Lab stuff and where that goes. If it works, then hopefully that gives incentive to play with other people. D3, Destiny, Division, Monster Hunter – they are all better with other people. Right now, there’s very little reason to do so here. Better superhero synergy would be one step. Better rewards with humans playing another. Tweaking the death penalties (it shortening Hives) could work. Seems like there are so many GOOD and BAD examples that it’s weird that Avengers took a middle ground path. Feels like this was a single player game with MP bolted on. Lots of good here, just needs a couple more pushes. So far, the pushes all appear to be in the right direction, which is great to see.

I’ve been giving Avengers a fair shake lately. A lot of the parts work well, some things a bit less.

The thing with looter/shooters is that the leveling process is simply an excuse to tell a story. Once you’ve seen that story, the next playthrough is essentially a waiting game until you reach the end game. Some games make that process interesting and varied. Others make it so quick it doesn’t really matter. Avengers does the former, allowing you to do nearly any activity from level 10 to level 50. Some are much better for leveling than others, but the choice is there all the same. A pure grind, you’d likely knock 1-50 in less than 2 hours. Doing it in a more random fashion, double that. I think that’s reasonable.

The gearing portion, that part is a bit off kilter. Your power level (gear score) goes to 150, though for practical purposes, things stop dropping at 130. By the time you do hit 50, your power level is likely to be ~70. I was kinda hoping for that bridge to be smaller, given that you are then faced with the prospects of a pure grind to get those drops. And meaningless ones I should add. All you care about is that the power level is higher, doesn’t matter if it’s half the hit points. When you do reach 130, then gearing has meaning.

I’ll put it plainly, there are simply too many modifiers and combinations. You roll for base stats (melee, range, HP, super powers), then you roll for perks. There are crazy amounts of perks; faster super powers, damage types, power attacks, dodge bonuses, air juggles, gravity attacks, it’s the damn kitchen sink here. Add in item rarity and I’m really finding it too much. I will say that not a single one of the perks is bad, which is a major departure from Anthem. But it could really do with some serious pruning, or the ability to modify rolls from other pieces of gear.

I will say that in the general sense, power level is more important than actual rolls. I’ve got a level 50 Kate Bishop, and she’s at 137 power and rocking a 75/25 mix of ranged damage and HP. Her special powers are fairly meaningless for damage, moreso for control. Her scattershot (multi-arrow) attack does shock damage and that’s really all that matters in that build. She can clear anything, without much of a sweat. Chain stuns will take her down, but they’d take down anyone. Any optimization here would be cool, but of no real purpose. Maybe if they have some sort of timed Harm room runs it would matter?

I’ll have another post regarding the mechanics of the game, but suffice to say that what you see in the campaign is pretty much what you see all the way through. Half the combat is in the wide open, the other half in what are effectively chained dungeons. It works but favors some characters more than others.

Which I guess is the sort of irony here. I have never played a game that so faithfully recreates the superhero fantasy. Sure, there are bullet sponges, and dodging… but the Hulk plays like you’d think the Hulk would play! Thor swings the hammer just like you’d think he would. Ironman is all sarcasm and laser beams. That gives so much more wiggle room for this game to latch on! Any other IP and I’d be irritated by the small things. It is not getting old to have Cap throw his shield against 8 enemies and back to him.

Kamala deserves some mention. On the plus side, her character is extremely well written and acted. Fangirl + scared + wants to help people. Her quips are really great to hear. Mechanically, she’s the elongated man and the best team healer. Her movement feels like a comic book character, and it just works. Her support ability (the only real healer) means that she’s in the team no matter what too.

I’ve got a Tachyon Rift down (a mission with a timer and you lose health over time) and there’s a Mega Hive I have left later, once I have 3 more people at 50 and at 130 gear levels. This will be worthy of it’s own topic.

I do have some concern on the financial model here. It’s entirely cosmetic and the bar set with the Kate Bishop stuff is exceedingly high. The character kit is well thought out, and there’s voice work for every character. And it’s all free. The only way they make money is on cosmetics, and cosmetics are primarily entire player skins. Compare that to pretty much any other game where you customize bits (dyes, parts, etc.) there are limits here.

At some point I’ll do some multiplayer. I’m enjoying the ability to pause a bit too much right now, and the content doesn’t even remotely require it. Maybe the eventual Aim Labs will do that – a real raid would be neat. I’ve more than gotten my $30 out of this game so far, way better value than I had expected.

That meant something different when I was younger. But here we’re talking about the Video Game Awards. The thing that Geoff Keighly has somehow managed to both create and monopolize to a degree I didn’t think possible. I’m amazed that the geek/fanboy in him still exists and that corporate culture has not crushed that into a robot mess (Hi Zuck!). That the VGA are able to recognize achievement in a genre that’s often put to the side is great. People put in a lot of time and love into creating these games.

This year went ahead with COVID around, so entirely virtual. Another cool bit is that there are no cable deals here, full stream to everyone. It recognizes that the audience is not 65. Awards interspersed with trailers for upcoming games. Imagine watching the Oscars and you had trailers for new movies? Somehow that works here. Again smart in that attention span stuff, people watch the awards themselves AND get to see new stuff. Their retention must be quite high.

Announcements

Some interesting bits here (Videos in link).

• Perfect Dark has a sequel, which is neat. I played MORE of that than I did GoldenEye, mostly due to the crazy weapons and decent bot AI. 2 player games were awesome/
• Dragon Age 4 had a trailer. As per a previous post, I am not bullish on BioWare pulling this off. I don’t get why you think setting has any bearing on this series… people have spent hundreds of hours there. They get it. Halo ads aren’t focused on trees or walls.
• Sephiroth is going to be in Smash Brothers. I wish I understood fighting game’s fascination with adding weird characters. MK11 is certainly in this boat.
• There’s a new Mass Effect, which seems to be set just after ME3. I am hopeful they learn that this story has to focus on characters rather than the world, like all good sci-fi does.
• ARK2 has a voice cast?!? I don’t get it.
• Back4Blood is from the Left4Dead team, and a modern take on it. This should be neat.
• Open Roads looks to be an exploration game, sort of in the frame of KR Zero, or Edith Finch. A lot of games try this genre, not many succeed. Fingers crossed here!
• Returnal seems an interesting mix. Groundhog Day (the Bill Murray flick) is often seen as a psychological horror movie (he’s in the loop for like 100 years), so throw some sci-fi and there ya go!
• A few games are getting big updates (or sequels, like meatboy 2) in the next few weeks!

So nothing terribly earth shattering in this space, in particular in the AAA space. We knew they were being worked on, either officially or not. None of them have timeframes.

Awards

Last of Us Part 2 won game of the year, which is less important to me than the list of candidates. Hades, Ghost of Tsushima are also on the list and NOT sequels.

The other categories are filled with sequels. Doom, Animal Crossing, FF7 remake, Half-life, Ori, Resident Evil. All amazing games, and when you have the IP down pat, then you can focus on polish. There are 3 PS exclusives (Last of Us, Ghosts of Tsushima and Miles Morales), which continues the trend of quality from that shop. If ever there was a motivation for XBOX to buy dev shops, this should be a clear indicator.

I love how a 20 year old remake (THPS 1+2) won. How messed up is the sports genre that this happened? Among Us won 2 categories, even though it launched in June 2018. And somehow Halo Infinite was on the list for most anticipated… considering it was supposed to launch a month ago, that’s odd. Could almost make a joke about Cyberpunk here…

Solid shout outs to the smaller games, like Kentucky Route Zero, Spiritfarer, Tell Me Why… These games rarely get much exposure (well… KRZ certainly is on a bunch of must play lists) and they can be a challenge to find. Steam’s content quality issues (9,400 games launched so far this year!) make is all but impossible for a person to sort through, making everyone reliant on curators. The VGA are able to highlight some diamonds in the mess of muck out there.

All told, a good event that recognizes some very hard working individuals to get stuff in front of our eyeballs, and engage us for hours, if not days. While I’d love to see less AAA on these lists and more indie games here, that’s an industry growth issue.

And if my dozens of posts on the subject were not enough, then knowing that Hades had multiple nominations and wins should scream – GO PLAY IT!