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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9733008" data-attributes="member: 18">I think I have to agree with [USER=58197]@Dausuul[/USER] here, though also with you re: Exodus.Beyond wasn't a WotC product at all, the only credit they can take is that they gave that licence to a company which made good use of it, and had the sense of eventually (after they'd been sold twice already!) buy them. It's notable that a lot of people, including me, expected Beyond to improve after WotC bought it, because the two previous successive owners had cut staff and reduced resources. WotC did bring some more people on board, I understand, but it seems like that just stopped it getting worse, and improved their ability to add new works (which is technically an improvement!), but didn't give them the resources to either go back and fix stuff they'd promised to fix years ago, nor to make bigger improvements they said they'd wanted to make.Sigil is the biggest red flag here, and genuinely confuses me a lot. According to Cynthia Williams, they had 250 people working on it at one point, and even if she overstated (who knows), they certainly had 33+ people on it full time for a long time. That's an investment of tens of millions of dollars, and which was announced with a lot of hype. And what did they get? Essentially nothing. We have a product you can download and use, but which isn't being maintained or added to, and which isn't fit for the purpose it was designed for. It's what you'd expect in an internal alpha test of the concept, not a finished product. I mean, I can't lie, I always assumed Sigil would fail to meet expectations, but I did expect WotC to finish it and launch it properly as the product they described, just that it wouldn't do the volume of MTX they were anticipating, at least initially. I guess internal corporate manuevering got it after Williams left.Re: Exodus, I like a lot of what I'm seeing, but we're still seeming to be pretty far from release, and what we're looking at could be anything from a really incredible 10/10 Mass Effect beater, to a deeply mediocre and forgettable 6/10 kind of game (I doubt it'd be worse than that), which fails to live up to any of its promises. Definitely hoping it's the former, obviously, love that style of game. They've been working on it for six years now (some of that pre-production, of course), which is not an insane time for an AAA cinematic RPG at all, but I do worry a little that WotC may force them to put it out the door before it's actually done (or worse, just cancel it). I hope sanity prevails and WotC's corporate leadership realizes the value of having a good reputation and the very significant extra sales from you get from a game with like 85% or 90% reviews over 80% or less reviews is worth the tens of millions it might cost to keep it in production another year or two. This is their first AAA - whether it's a good game or not will have a strong influence on how future games are regarded. Also if it is good, the smart play is probably to go straight into Exodus II rather than a different direction - it's a game intended to have sequels, if I understand correctly.WotC own several studios now, and can potentially build a good rep as a publisher, but it's really going to depend on them making good choices, something they've really struggled with previously re: digital.</blockquote>

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