Yeah, I fully agree that they've stuck to a template far too closely for far too long. That's part of why I'm frustrated that this one went as poorly as it did, since it very much isn't that.

I think the hostility to any non-Steam platform is unwarranted, although annoyance is annoyance. That said, the Ubi launcher on Steam right now is just a pop-up, I don't think it makes you log in each time if you have everything linked.

That's fair. I do see how it being nominally a new IP instead of a numbered sequel the ways it overlaps with Persona feel like a bit of treading water.

For me there is way more than enough to separate it, though. The bonkers story alone and the super political spin on it are crazy, plus the gameplay ends up being different enough.

But yeah, it's pretty much one of those. Still better than going full action RPG like Square has done with its franchises, though.

This doesn't have anticheat, it has DRM software, though.

But hey, if there is no overlap, then how come this did so much worse than other similarly well liked metroidvanias, right? That's been my point here. People keep pointing out that it's not comparable to other Ubi titles. I disagree, because PoP is PoP, but let's roll with that. It also underperformed compared to other games in the same genre with similar review scores.

So what happened there? Either the Ubi woes are behind this, and then it doesn't make sense because this did worse than other more Ubisofty Ubisoft games, or they are not because different demos, and that doesn't make sense because this did much worse than similar games not from Ubisoft.

I think as far as this tells us anything is that the stink of negativity is not very fact-based when it comes to the core gaming community. That and Ubisoft may not have more money to make by going to middle sized, pure and simple high quality experiences like Rayman or this. Which sucks. Those are the best games they've made in recent years, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I don't know how long this has been a thing or how prominent it is. I haven't seen it in the more mainstream news channels, this thread was my first notice. I expect if people start to freak out in larger, more mainstream circles they may want to address it. Right now it's only reached a few people, I think.

Well, they're back on Steam, this game included, so there's that shift. Does that count or nah?

No, you're not following me.

The point here isn't whether this game did poorly. It did. Cool.

The point here is that it did WORSE than other Ubisoft games.

Specifically, worse than Ubisoft games that include all the shitty behavior. More of the shitty behavior, in fact.

So the performance of the game is not correlated to the shitty behavior. Well, maybe more shitty behavior gets you better sales, that would fit, but I'm not going to jump to that.

You'd think if Ubisoft's shitty behavior is scaring people off this game would have done better than Mirage and Mirage better than Outcasts, but that's the opposite of what happened.

I get that you want that to be true, but there is really no indication that this is the case. There are a lot of elements in Ubisoft's recent issues, but there is no good suggestion that any of that train of thought lines up with what we're seeing here.

More to the point, even if it was, all that suggests for Ubi as a course of action is to keep doing what they're doing. I mean, maybe launch on Steam day one, but... yeah, if you monetize the big games better and the fans of the small games won't cut you a break for making them... just don't make them.

My point stands either way.

Ah, yeah, but the fun bit is that there are a ton of builds that let you get there. HP-based skills are powerful in this, and you can heal for cheap, so you can get there that way, and once you get a bit overlevelled and can kill mobs out of turn-based combat you're just cruising.

I may see what happens on harder difficulties, but I genuinely don't care too much, because just the mechanics of figuring out the sequence for each dungeon and enemy type is so fun to do with the brilliant UI that I just... enjoy doing it, kinda like you enjoy clicking things on Diablo or something. Truly smooth design.

I just wish they had figured out antialiasing better, because woof. I ended up injecting better AA through ReShade and never looked back.

Okay, but there was none of that here (except perhaps the launcher), and there was no suggestion in the results that anybody wants to encourage that. So that's definitely not the lesson being learned here.

Also, and I will keep repeating this forever, companies don't make games, people make games.

Also, also, good luck with that. Don't look now, but that's not how major companies going out of business and fire-selling their IPs tends to go.

Look, I'm not sure why it's Ubisoft's turn in the hot seat after EA and Activision, but none of that is a productive outlook or leads to a better outcome, as this one really good, really wholesome game bombing hard goes to show.

I mean, it's not like accidentally running Recall once is going to automatically compromise all your data to Microsoft in perpetuity. I don't even know what the final implementation is supposed to be, I'll make up my mind when I can review it, not before. Ditto for Apple's version on the new iPhones and all the other stuff being promoted right now.

But in this case I'm just puzzled. At this point it sure looks like they installed some package or service that is probably the ground layer for the actual feature at some point, but that doesn't mean it's doing anything at the moment. Maybe logging the same metadata as the Win8 feature, but it's not clear (there is a "activity history" setting in the privacy settings now, perhaps it's part of that?).

If anything the panic shows how tainted the Recall name has become, but that's not new for Microsoft. That original logging feature was also widely hated, as was a lot of their search or their current, mandatory "widget" news feed that nobody has ever found useful. The question is how widely tainted it is, and whether normies will want to burn it with fire as much as the Linux-facing techies.

Just because you can grind money easily or some other reason?

In any case on Normal I haven't felt it at all, mostly because I've been single-day completing most dungeons and that gets you a bit overleveled.

But it's still a lot faster and tighter than Persona on that front. And more flexible and nonlinear, too. For what looks like a long game, this thing moves. Much fewer, shorter stretches of just visual novelling with friends (although there's plenty of that, too).

Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing.

I doesn't look like it needs my help, because it's doing pretty well, but damn, it's good.

Maybe too much anxiety to play a game in which you're running for office in a fantasy land, at least until November, but... yeah, it's bonkers and it's well written and it's by far the most political game the Persona-adjacent studios have ever done in some really fun ways.

Also a triumph of UI. Not only does it look great, it's so frictionless. It's a turn-based JRPG and it plays faster and more smoothly than that abomination of an action game Square tried to pass as a Final Fantasy VII remake by orders of magnitude. Seriously, go play it if you're at all interested in that corner of gaming.

I don't know the guy, but all of that sounds reasonable to me.

BG3 can be replicated, if you have a massive dormant IP that is part of a furiously resurgent franchise and have several hundred million dollars to burn in a years-long development cycle by a studio that has already done pretty much the exact same thing without a license successfully twice.

I wouldn't model my business on aligning that set of circumstances, but I sure am glad Larian did.

To be clear, there's a bunch of other AAA stuff that is also doing quite well with pretty clean, finished games. But for midsize stuff like PoP... woof, yeah, it's so hard to break through.

And you're right, it's a miserable set of incentives that if you launch broken you kinda have a built-in marketing hit because suddenly you're doing live support and adding features. No Man's Sky was a fun one for that. Cyberpunk. But those games did great at launch, so they had the built-in base to keep growing while they fixed the game. PoP launched pretty clean, was small and nobody cared, so it's no wonder Ubi has decided it can make those super talented devs do stuff on the next massive AssCreed or whatever is left of Beyond Good and Evil 2 or The Division or whatever.

Right.

So, one, I'm pretty sure in most cases that's not why, for the same reasons we all shared memes of people "boycotting Call of Duty" while appearing online playing Call of Duty.

But even taking everyone at their word, I'm saying the group as a whole is not working by those parameters. Directly, demonstrably in apples to apples comparisons they didn't buy the Ubisoft game that doesn't do the stuff people claim to be mad about and bought other Ubisoft games in larger numbers.

The thing with obstinance is that it's hard to make reality change its mind. Remarkably stubborn, reality.

Yes. I used both and I just didn't stick around in Masto.

Honestly, Masto is fine but the firehose is too fast for a system without good filtering tools. I ened up on a multicolumn layout where one of the columns was frequently NSFW and at least a couple of others were entirely dominated by insular "why is Mastodon so cool and everything else so crap" weird sunk cost propaganda.

And to be clear, I did keep a BS account to follow a bunch of celebrities from old Twitter, but I actually hang out more here than I do in BS. It's just I do both far more than Masto.

I mean... cool?

Thanks for sharing, I suppose?

You know what, I bet it wasn't that big of a deal.

Whoever it was, thousands of years ago, probably went "ah, a talking animal, just like all the legends say, I should listen to its wisdom".

If you were the first person to hear like a hamster suddenly quote the Independence Day Bill Pullman speech today you'd be in deep trouble, though.

Right. So you didn't make a difference here, since that's also true of all the Ubi games that did better than this, then.

But this doesn't have any of the other crap people are blaming for Ubi doing poorly. So you'd expect if the outrage was making a dent whatsoever their one game that is relatively clean of that stuff would have done better, not worse, than the other stuff they are putting out.

But nope, the opposite is true.

So hey, not saying you're lying, but I think the collective at least looked at the nice, small 2D metroidvania with no MTX and went "nah", but they were much more willing to give the GaaS-y stuff a try.

Although if I WAS saying you're not being all the way honest, I may guess that you just weren't on board for this anyway and now are performatively feigning outrage for something else after the fact to pretend other people's motivations are aligned with your opinions. But I'm not. So we're good.

So wait, did I miss a step or is this NOT the recall feature they announced for Copilot Plus PCs? None of the screen snapshots, none of the AI search.

As far as I can tell it's some variation on the logging search that was in Windows in Win8, right? At least when it comes to user-facing functionality.

EDIT: As far as I can tell, people mentioning this mean the full Recall feature, but even though the package shows up on my Copilot+ PC the functionality itself is nowhere to be seen. I'm still confused about this and relatively convinced something is being missed somewhere.

Yeah, no, I understood it. I'm saying that there are similar 2d platformers on those same platforms (look, it's not my fault language recycles words for things) that did much, much better.