Raven10

@hassun: It's not entirely the same due to the whole 2K Games half of the company. They get solid income from the yearly NBA titles alongside Firaxis joints and series like Bioshock, Mafia, and Borderlands. A single misfire would put the company in pretty dire financial straights, but it wouldn't be the end of them assuming all the 2K titles released that year didn't bomb also. Free Radical was a one game per time company. Hence their entire future was dependent on a single release. One of the reasons Insomniac has survived as an independent AAA developer is because they were smart enough to become a two or three game studio. It gives them a bit of cushion should one project either fall through or turn out poorly.

@hassun: Based on first hand accounts of former developers there, stressful doesn't even begin to cover it. They all put in 60+ hour weeks, including nights and weekends. There were reports during Red Dead Redemption of people essentially living at the studios and working around the clock to get the game shipped. It's supposed to be among the most intense and incredibly difficult work in the industry. I can say that I've known a couple people who have worked with Rockstar for some first parties and none of them had anything nice to say about the working conditions and held nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for every developer at the company. I know for a fact that many people leave Rockstar simply due to being unable to keep up with the breakneck pace once they started a family or hit middle age. I'm always impressed how long the Houser brothers have managed to stick with the studio, but then again even compared to Leslie they are paid an absolute fortune for their work.

Suffice to say he won't have any financial trouble, though. I've heard that their compensation packages are staggering, measured in at least 8 figures a year plus bonuses. He's likely worth tens of millions of dollars at this point, and at the point in his life where he wants to relax and spend that money instead of seeing his family once or twice a month.

@amirite: If you want to get indignant about massive multinational corporations then there are plenty of great options. Comcast comes to mind with both a vertical and horizontal monopoly on film and TV distribution and creation in certain locations if you want to stick to entertainment companies. Nestle and their behavior regarding the drought in California. Any major bank in any major country in the world. Any of the descendants of Standard Oil. PMC's. Pharmaceutical companies that sell pills that cost pennies to make for tens of thousands of dollars. Really the list could go on and on, but if I had to choose a list of companies to protest, the only game company on the list would be Konami.

I'm not going to say that I love massive conglomerates or that they are a great thing. But I can tell you that considering the state of MLG's capital going into this deal, they were never going to amount to more than they were and they were likely going to get swept under by better funded and better managed organizations. Meanwhile, Activision has neither the history, nor the experience to build an MLG style service. This merger makes sense then for both companies. MLG gets the funds of a multi-billion dollar corporation that has remained profitable for every year of this century when all other game related companies were taking heavy losses. Activision doesn't have to worry about the growing pains that come with starting an eSports league.

In the end the world runs on money and running any sort of sporting event, network, or league, requires a lot of the stuff. Hundreds of millions if not billions of the stuff. And no small, independent company has those types of funds to spare. Plus Activision has a proven track record on the production side of things. Their games are always released on time and on budget and they are always incredibly well polished despite very strict timetables. Regardless of the quality of the games themselves, there is no better run company in the gaming industry. Their production pipeline is as close to flawless as it gets in an industry where year long delays are the norm and you are supposed to allot double the proposed budget to any game if you actually expect it to see store shelves.

I'd love to live in a world where all you need is a dream and some crowdfunding to make anything you desire a reality, but that isn't the world we live in and certain things require the backing of a corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars to potentially lose. Without either developing their own, in house eSport, or signing an exclusive contract with an already major eSport, MLG wasn't going to survive. And the company didn't have the money or the connections to do either of those things. Activision already makes several major eSports titles, and they have the connections and loose change to secure exclusive deals with third parties as well. If MLG was going to make it big it would have happened. The fact that no angel investor came in to fund what I am discussing proves how difficult a market they are in, and how much you need a company that has both a distribution system and content for that system if you want to make a sporting network.

@bicycle_repairman: It's not very different from Fox owning Newspapers, TV networks, film production and distribution businesses, and numerous other entertainment and journalistic properties. At any one point, newspapers and websites owned by Fox review the content created by the TV and film divisions. Or, you might argue it is not that different from the beast that is Time Warner, owner of dozens of print and internet newspapers and magazines, alongside multiple TV channels, film distributors and producers, music producers, game publishers, and literally hundreds of other divisions, many of which critique and report on the actions taken by various other parts of the company. Really between Fox, Time Warner, and Comcast which owns NBC Universal, all of your news comes from the same people who manufacture the content the news is covering. And in the case of Comcast they also own the means of delivering that content to your home. Conflicts of interest are everywhere in the world of news. ABC, NBC, Fox, and CNN are all owned by mega-corps, and most newspapers and magazines are owned by the same handful of corps.

I'm pretty sure if you count handheld games and ports as well as HD remasters they tend to release something like 3 or 4 Tales games a year in Japan. I recall that one year where they put out two completely separate PS2 entries in a single year. This series is like the Guitar Hero of RPG's.

@brendanwins: Alex was incorrect in stating that there were no other camera angles. There are three different views and I believe Alex was playing with the most close up whereas I prefer the medium range and there is also a camera even further back. The game never mentions this and I don't even think it is listed in the controls, but I was curious and hit the select (or whatever it is called on a Wii U) button just to check and sure enough it cycled through a bunch of different camera angles.

@alex Worth mentioning that for your future enjoyment of this game that the weight stat is actually just a handling stat turned into a number. In earlier builds it actually was a bar that said handling but for whatever reason they changed it and now the higher the weight of the car the worse the handling. Race with the Fulcrum Capital that you were and then do the same race with the ship Vinny was using and you'll immediately see how massive of a difference the stats make. Also, I learned from hours of practice that the way to handle the first track of the third cup is to just use the triggers to steer during those big jumps. Using the Fulcrum especially it is all but impossible to make those jumps using just the analogue stick but using the triggers you can make them all with ease.

@dgsean: @planetfunksquad: Prefacing this by saying I never actually beat FF7, but just from playing the first 30 or so hours I could see a couple easy breaking points. You have the point at the 20 or so hour mark where you leave the city for the first time, or the point I think about 10 hours later where you leave the first continent. Either of those could be a solid breaking point. Mind you I never played much beyond that point so I couldn't say what other good breaking points there would be, but all Final Fantasy games tend to restrict your movement and slowly unlock more of the world as you get a boat and then an airship or some similar setup. So the smart way to break the game up would be the various points where you get a new mode of transportation that let you access previously inaccessible areas. Again, dunno from a story standpoint where that would put things past that 30 hour mark, but from a gameplay perspective that is the only way that would make sense in my mind.

This definitely feels like the first entry in a franchise. Build a solid foundation and then expand the content in the sequel. I know it's really the third entry in this case, but I would bet that in two years for Episode 8 we get Battlefront 4 and it has all the things people were wanting in this version.

While the lack of content sucks, I think it's better for them to nail the core gameplay the first time around and then layer on new mechanics and modes for the sequel. I'm definitely looking forward to that game.

Also, impressive anti-aliasing in place for this being a 720p game on Xbox One. I remember watching the quick look for Hardline and thinking how awful the aliasing was in that version of that game. Impressive step up in image quality from that standpoint.

@davidh219: They are a successful company, but the vast majority of their income comes from the Bethesda Game Studios output. Dishonored made them a small sum of money, and a couple other titles also had very minor success. But around 90% of their sales on a given console come from games made by BGS. Having to double the development time would put a massive strain on their finances. I'm not saying that it wouldn't make for a better game or anything, just remember that this isn't EA or Ubisoft. Bethesda puts out at most a half dozen games a year. Some years it puts out only two or three titles. I think they are going to have a tough time justifying another game on this engine, or at least this engine without major alterations to its animation and streaming system, but I wouldn't be surprised if they tried. I think the key to a better looking game is going to come from a procedural animation system. But those types of systems only work if they are done exceptionally well. The other big thing would be to rebuild the streaming system to alleviate a lot of the stuttering that occurs in these games. Other than that I don't think the engine is holding them back. They are using PBR and volumetric lighting alongside things like ambient occlusion and it seems like some form of global illumination system. Some tessellation might improve geometric depth but that would be incredibly demanding for current gen consoles. I think really they just need to hire more artists and animators. The game is large but nowhere near the point of filling a blu-ray. They could use more one-off textures, objects, and animations and really up the visual quality without changing the underlying tech.

@davidh219:I don't disagree with what you are saying but I'll take the time to add the "why" to this. When Bethesda moved to a fully 3D engine with Morrowind and started using Gamebryo, that engine was still being iterated on. That Oblivion was such a big leap from Morrowind had less to do with Bethesda and more to do with using a brand new version of the engine. But between the release of Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim, the company behind Gamebryo went under. So Bethesda has been forced to make all engine improvements themselves since then, which is why they changed the name. But there is a difference between having a whole company dedicated to making engine improvements, and having a half dozen people working on the same thing in a company that mainly uses IdTech.

The problem is that there are no 3rd party engines out there that can do these types of open worlds especially well. Unreal 4, CryEngine, Unity, and the couple other 3rd Party engines are all much more focused on level based games. And creating an engine from scratch is hard, expensive, and risky. For one there are only a couple dozen people in the world qualified to lead a team to build an engine from scratch and most of them seem quite happy in their current jobs. If they hire less qualified people there is nothing to say that the engine they build would work any better than the current engine. So they would likely have to pay a fortune to hire some other company's expert, and then it would take a couple years to build the engine, meaning the next game wouldn't come out for a couple years after that. You're talking doubling the cost of the game while increasing the risk that it will not work outright, when simply using the same engine over and over has been enough for 15 years now. Why would any executive in their right mind agree to that?