It doesn't make sense to me that Ubisoft would be cutting content from the game. Ubisoft acquired the game in January of 2013, so assuming it took them a few months to get settled and negotiate some kind of production deal with Obsidian to finish it, that still means it went back into development for about a year. That's a lot of development time, and just slashing and burning content doesn't take very much effort. Also, the explanation for THQ just wanting a quick cash injection from the license sounds plausible.
They were the same for me, check your rig mate.The graphics were also noticeably better in that video.
I'm not saying they didn't. I mean, what else would they be doing with 12 months of development time? But since we have no idea what the original design was, we can't really make a definitive judgement one way or the other about whether Ubisoft helped or hindered the final product.It doesn't make sense to me that Ubisoft would be cutting content from the game. Ubisoft acquired the game in January of 2013, so assuming it took them a few months to get settled and negotiate some kind of production deal with Obsidian to finish it, that still means it went back into development for about a year. That's a lot of development time, and just slashing and burning content doesn't take very much effort. Also, the explanation for THQ just wanting a quick cash injection from the license sounds plausible.
Well, we actually pretty much know they changed design. Multiple Obs devs have now hinted towards it.
I'm not saying they didn't. I mean, what else would they be doing with 12 months of development time? But since we have no idea what the original design was, we can't really make a definitive judgement one way or the other about whether Ubisoft helped or hindered the final product.It doesn't make sense to me that Ubisoft would be cutting content from the game. Ubisoft acquired the game in January of 2013, so assuming it took them a few months to get settled and negotiate some kind of production deal with Obsidian to finish it, that still means it went back into development for about a year. That's a lot of development time, and just slashing and burning content doesn't take very much effort. Also, the explanation for THQ just wanting a quick cash injection from the license sounds plausible.
Well, we actually pretty much know they changed design. Multiple Obs devs have now hinted towards it.
I'm not saying they didn't. I mean, what else would they be doing with 12 months of development time? But since we have no idea what the original design was, we can't really make a definitive judgement one way or the other about whether Ubisoft helped or hindered the final product.It doesn't make sense to me that Ubisoft would be cutting content from the game. Ubisoft acquired the game in January of 2013, so assuming it took them a few months to get settled and negotiate some kind of production deal with Obsidian to finish it, that still means it went back into development for about a year. That's a lot of development time, and just slashing and burning content doesn't take very much effort. Also, the explanation for THQ just wanting a quick cash injection from the license sounds plausible.
Well, we actually pretty much know they changed design. Multiple Obs devs have now hinted towards it.
Regarding difficulty we pretty much can.
The balance would have been much straightened up if that change happened before Ubisoft. Not to mention things would probably actually match up rather than make no sense at all (Summons for example all being instant death for everyone on the field, despite different damage/damage animations as well as descriptions (Mr. Slave for should only remove one enemy, yet everyone runs away anyway)
Or that you have encounters set up with obvious thought/setups put into it (that ability/guy for status effect, debuffs and so on), yet in the end it matters shit..
And, and, and, and
It was cut out.Did I somehow miss that blowing-up-a-crack-house-with-a-bazooka scene from the trailer in the full game or did they... cut it out?
I'm sure they did, but it was probably cut from the game. The cut content will probably be released as the Woodland Critters DLC.I'm surprised Matt and Trey didn't do more with the Woodland Critters, knowing how much they love those characters.
I don't know why you're so focused on blaming Ubisoft for the combat in Stick of Truth. Combat was not the only thing the developers could have been talking about when they mention Ubisoft changing the design. And even if Ubisoft did make them change the combat, there is no guarantee that what we got was worse than the original system. Like I said, we don't know what the THQ version of the game was like, and we probably never will.
According to Metacritic, cringe, South Park: The Stick of Truth (on PS3) is one of Obsidian's best games, scoring a review average of 86 per cent (the same as KOTOR2 on Xbox).
Metacritic is relevant here because an 85-plus score was exactly what Obsidian needed Fallout: New Vegas to achieve in order to receive a bonus payment from publisher Bethesda. But it didn't; Fallout: New Vegas averaged an agonisingly close 84 per cent, and Obsidian lost out, despite the game being a big success for Bethesda. There was quite a fall out.
There's nothing like that in place for South Park: The Stick of Truth, thankfully, and Obsidian never intends taking that road again.
"We have a general policy whenever we're talking to different publishers now: we don't do anything that has to do with Metacritic. It's an unfair way of... in a lot of ways it can only be used as a way to take advantage of a developer.
"Ultimately if a game is financially successful, if a developer has back-end royalties on that, then they should make those back-end royalties if they made money for the publisher."
Good to know they learned from that. Although it does worry me that Bethesda might not want to let them do another Fallout game, despite how well that worked out.
German news sites are reporting that
a) the German version is unlikely to be released before April
Through their official German forums, Ubisoft has announced the new release date for the German/Austrian version of South Park: The Stick of Truth: March 27th.
I'm not saying they didn't. I mean, what else would they be doing with 12 months of development time? But since we have no idea what the original design was, we can't really make a definitive judgement one way or the other about whether Ubisoft helped or hindered the final product.It doesn't make sense to me that Ubisoft would be cutting content from the game. Ubisoft acquired the game in January of 2013, so assuming it took them a few months to get settled and negotiate some kind of production deal with Obsidian to finish it, that still means it went back into development for about a year. That's a lot of development time, and just slashing and burning content doesn't take very much effort. Also, the explanation for THQ just wanting a quick cash injection from the license sounds plausible.
Well, we actually pretty much know they changed design. Multiple Obs devs have now hinted towards it.
Regarding difficulty we pretty much can.
The balance would have been much straightened up if that change happened before Ubisoft. Not to mention things would probably actually match up rather than make no sense at all (Summons for example all being instant death for everyone on the field, despite different damage/damage animations as well as descriptions (Mr. Slave for should only remove one enemy, yet everyone runs away anyway)
Or that you have encounters set up with obvious thought/setups put into it (that ability/guy for status effect, debuffs and so on), yet in the end it matters shit..
And, and, and, and
From the Jordan Thomas interview (mr Shalebridge Cradle) it isn't obvious that all of the design changes post-Ubisoft were bad. He didn't mention combat though.
Of course increased difficulty is going to be "stats go up" but the enemy stats as they are are tuned too low so there you go.Putting together the wishlist for the next patch so if anyone has any egregious bugs they saw let me know so I can try and include them, or any little annoyances. I've already got PC K&M stuff (tutorial/minigames), QTE difficulty and overall difficulty on my wishlist.
Duraframe300 earlier this week Ubisoft producer said
Of course increased difficulty is going to be "stats go up" but the enemy stats as they are are tuned too low so there you go.Putting together the wishlist for the next patch so if anyone has any egregious bugs they saw let me know so I can try and include them, or any little annoyances. I've already got PC K&M stuff (tutorial/minigames), QTE difficulty and overall difficulty on my wishlist.
We care because you (gamers in general) care. 85 versus 80 makes a HUGE difference when it comes to sales numbers, so a bonus based on hitting 85 versus 80 makes sense, business-wise.
At one point Uplay was being integrated but we ultimately decided against it.
And preemptively, I wanted to point out that internally, Uplay means about a billion things, from the Uplay store where we sell games, to Uplay Rewards which gives you unique stuff for playing other Uplay-enabled games, to Uplay UbiServices, the back-end tracking stuff that tells us how many people play which class, what side quests get completed the most, etc. And also, Uplay on PC and Uplay on console are completely different development teams, so one may be garbage that everyone hates and the other is unobtrusive and no one seems to mind it. Just keep that in mind when hating Uplay as a whole. There's elements that aren't bad.
Also just to reiterate, there's no Uplay elements in South Park at all except the ability for us to sell the game in the Uplay store.
Sorry, I didn't mean to come across that way. It wasn't that it was garbage, sorry. It was incomplete and THQ was pushing to get it out the door incomplete. It was garbage in the sense that it wasn't balanced and many areas were devoid of content. I definitely don't want to imply that Ubisoft did all the work here, the guys at Obsidian worked tirelessly. THQ execs were pushing to get the incomplete product out ASAP in order to save themselves. That's why it was garbage at that point.
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Yeah I definitely want to reiterate that the Obsidian guys are great and I really appreciate the hard work they put into this. I'll bet many if not most were working plenty of overtime for probably at least 3 months, if not more, so I should not steal ANY of their thunder. It was 99.999% them, 0.001% me.