Nope your right…I think Justin has been thrown into a time warp to about 6 months ago.
Actually, you can buy them as standalone, before you had to buy one of the packs. That wasn’t explained to well was it.

We will never know, but it is becoming abundantly clear that there are just too many games being made as well as too many live service games, and there just isn’t enough money in the market to support that output.

Any interactions have to be vetted by the CMA appointed liaison for that case and are strictly controlled.

Similarly companies which are part of the investigation are not allowed to make any sweeping changes during it, so its entirely possible ABK planned these prior to the merger, or before the CMA got involved. It is also natural post Merger that you have way too much overlap.

It is the scale of them, the timing of them and the depth of them that is staggering. Sure MS owns other Studios that compete in the same sphere as Blizz, and likely has in house / 3rd party solutions for a lot of the support stuff.

The timing of them actually lends credibility too, because its likely that a lot of this was planned pre-CMA investigation and only now able to be executed.

None of which makes it any easier for the people involved, or any easier to stomach for those of us outside of it either. One of the richest, most profitable companies in the world, which crows about its income streams, touts the high number of Gamepass subscribers etc… and they still get the corporate scythe out.

Late stage capitalism at its finest I guess, and stark reminder for anyone who thought Big Pappa Phil was different to other studio execs, sure he might not be as offensive as some of them, but he is still an exec, answerable to shareholders who dream of the impossibility of Eternal growth and refuse to accept that there is such a thing as “rich enough”

May I answer that, since I’m excited by the fact that I know this one?

Gear that’s been added to your collection can be recreated at any transmute station. (If you don’t have access to the transmute station in Clockwork City because you don’t have that DLC, you can use the station that a friend might have at their house, or get your own by doing master crafting writs.)

This is a nice little quality of life improvement, for two reasons. The gear that the transmute station cranks out will be at your character’s level, regardless of what level the gear was for when you collected it. This means no more having to go back and grind old leveling zones if there was an overland set that you’d like to have once you hit level cap.

You can also set the traits on the gear that the transmute station makes for you, based on the traits you’ve learned from your crafting research. This cuts out a lot of grinding the same gear over and over again, hoping for gear with the traits you want to drop.

The currency that fuels the transmute station is the transmute crystals that you’re awarded for completing Group Finder dungeons and PvP matches.

I hope that helps!

Was it Crop Circle Games or Daybreak which couldn’t pay severance, that was left somewhat unclear?

PlayStations are also PC hardware since the PS4, and they’re still a separate platform. The burden of supporting a new platform isn’t just the hardware, it’s the platform APIs and certification requirements, and having to set up a parallel QA process. They won’t be able to get away with testing just on PC and assuming it’ll work on Xbox as a result.

Except that they’re not really adding a new platform – unlike bringing FFXI to the 360, the Series X is a PC under the hood, built on good ol’ X86-64 architecture. I’d imagine that creating the Xbox client is a bit more involved than changing the compiler settings, but not that much, especially considering what the “X” in Xbox stands for.

The only way I could see it potentially working is if Microsoft and Square-Enix cut a bundling deal with Game Pass, similar to how they did with EA and Ubisoft for their subscription services, but apparently thinking this means you have the Microsoft brainworms. It would, at the least, be “surprising” for Square-Enix to cede the customer relationship, even though, judging by how difficult it is to buy the game on PC, Square-Enix aren’t all that invested in making sure the customer relationship is a smooth one.

Not yet, but the part about it being enforced in March seems like as close to a timeline as any.

If they could afford to pay it, and chose not to, I hope they get no one applying when they inevitably have to rehire people in a 18 months time.

I think you’re operating under the assumption that severance is somehow a requirement in the US. It is not. I’ve been laid off with no severance in California, so it is absolutely not a requirement in Texas where Dimensional Ink is located.

The inventory system is ghastly & could definitely do with a update. Same with the dated UI, but both of these issues are small potatoes compared to say for example the horrible mess that is alt’s / server populations / the need for free server transfers vs trying to force people to pay OBSCENE amounts of money to transfer from 1 server to another in order to even find people to play with.

Like there are a lot of issues that mostly revolve around how restrictive it is to make alts, crafting, inventory, ui, older “free” content being SO MUCH worse than newer content item wise that unless you buy the newer areas, you can’t even come close to being able to compete .

like the list for quality of life improvements is ridiculously long & i’ve only been back playing a short time. I’m sure there are lots of folks who have played more than I have since launch & actually stuck around, could lay out all the pain points more clearly.

Since returning these are the major things I’ve noticed.

& that’s all before you even mention the mess that is the cash shop is! because the cash shop is directly tied to your account & if the cash shop goes down, so do all your paid for bonuses. If the cash shop goes down, you literally cannot play without losing out on any bonus you have paid for, which is beyond absurd.

Like I WANT so badly to enjoy this game, but the people running it make it impossible.

HAHAHAHA.

Oh god the affixing system. People SWORE by it in chats, but it’s complete shit. You needed a program just to set up multiple instances of the same weapon with a lower affix so you can have the highest CHANCE of maybe adding an upgrade to your weapon. And it’s not that easy cuz there’s specific affixes that you can only get by combining a set few, and to crank up the chance you needed to use dummy affixes with it and aaaaaa

God it sucked. PSO2 is miles more fun than NGS but my god was that the absolute worst.

If only this was like, a pure open world or dungeon crawler game. Something about stopping to grab food and build ugly houses cuz-I-can’t-be-bothered is sooo annoying about the genre.

I’m inclined to agree. If they just streamline the build process (I saw a suggestion on steam to have a community tab just to share builds. Yes- that’s perfect!), scale the UI, some smaller other tweaks here and there and it’d be perfectly fine.

Okay, well, I’d like for inventory to not be as fucked but that’s an MMO staple for some reason.

instead of focusing on player retention, quality of life improvements, & overall community happiness, they instead waste their time trying to nerf tumble of all things, because people are moving too quickly in a pve game.

like are the npcs writing angry letters to whom it may concern? why was something so trivial even on the radar when there are so many GLARING issues that need far more attention atm?

the staff recently put out a 1 question survey, asking the current players if they would recommend DDO to their friends & from what I can tell from asking folks, they all said no. I haven’t found one person yet that would recommend the current game, in it’s current state to anyone.

But the staff doesn’t seem to care about the community past their wallets.

Everyone agrees it’s fun, but it needs a lot of work to bring in any new players & actually hope to keep them. The freeddo code is essentially useless atm if the staff refuse to do anything else to retain players.

…but yeah, nothing makes you and those of your colleagues more worthless among other things than have to your jobs be brought before a firing squad. /bleh

And then they are going to argue with each other over it like it is actually some kind of science, convinced that the definition they gave is the ONE TRUE ORIGINAL definition.

Rather than understanding its a nebulous term to encapsulate a game style that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

If you scroll down to the Controller Support section of https://newworld.com/en-us/news/articles/season-of-the-guardian-announcement you can see the different interface bits they’re adding and whether they work with KB/M as well, and if they only work against mobs (referred to as AI).

Thank the palaces of heaven squid, sorry I had no time to watch the vid, I own it. :) And when you own it…you own it///

Never fall in love with a brand.

Yes, it’s “Great Buddy.” That’s when the “bounce back” feature is unlocked, for when you accidentally toss a Pokeball against an attacking ‘mon and your buddy can volley it back. Not a huge deal normally, but when time is limited and you’ve got a bunch of raids to do, the benefits are real. I just did Decidueye day without it and it was a mistake.

Aim assist won’t work in PvP, according to the video.

You’re no fun.

But damnit I want to ride that little bird. That seems rad.

On the other hand, I welcome any other changes, such as crafting and tech adjustments

What does and does and does not get covered by XBox Gold (now Gamepass Core) and by PS Plus (now Essential) was laid out a long time ago. Sony very specifically put an exception that said that games requiring a separate subscription did not require PS Plus for online play. It’s been there since the PS3 when Plus became a thing. I assume it was because of their long history with Squenix and the FF MMOs, but my memory is bad, possibly there were other sub games I can’t remember. All I remember were post F2P conversions, at least in the west. MS did not put the same exception in. Their reasons are 100% their own.

EDIT: And, they can feel free to change the fine print at any time. It’s theirs to change.

I mean the first step is admitting you have a problem.

its worse if it was furloughs because that implies there aint enough money in the tank for severance

Oh, we;re aware. Thats the thing. people only willing to pay you to a legaql standard and who would pay you less if they could get away with it are certainly not charities. Theyre also not people to be celebrated. They are the number one piece of evidence that modern day capitaslism is rotten, morally bankrupt, and beholden only to the enriching of the shittiest people on the planet.

Oh, theyre very much the same company at core.

A bunch of bros covering for bros when bros do shitty things to lower level employees

Corporations are not your friend.

But, that is using the original definition of “250+ players supported in the same virtual environment”.

I actually tried to do a count of number of MMOs by year and the results were entirely depressing. Less than 100 ever released with a dramatic drop off in the last 10 years.

But, it also wasn’t that surprising. Building a game engine that can actually handle massively multiplayer numbers is extremely difficult, yet hardly any MMOs include content that makes use of that feature. Outside of PvP, there is basically nothing massively multiplayer. So, why bother going to all that effort if you’re not gonna make use of it? May as well make a regular multiplayer game, like Destiny, The Division, and others, save yourself some money.

Nah. never miss a chance to remember square enix is also a terrible company with terrible policies

…While I don’t think 100% of the blame should be laid at Microsoft’s feet here…

^^^
Yes, it should.