I am devastated. The impact this guy’s work had on my one life was immense.

My own username is a phonetic adaptation I came up with when I was a kid and adapted into my first email and did so because I loved Dragon Ball Z.

One of the first RPGs I ever experienced as a kid was Chrono Trigger - which he was the lead artist for, and I remember seeing his work for the first time reading Nintendo Power reading about Dragon Quest and how it stood out from all other illustrations I’d seen.

In school I would endlessly doodle character illustrations both from his work, and of my own creation but obviously based off his unique illustrative style.

As an adult, I’ve done everything from trying to make my own fan version of the “Rock the Dragon” early dub opening reminiscent of my own memory of watching it both on Saturday mornings and Toonami… to recently somewhat randomly animating a funny audio recording of my own wife’s sometimes inaccurate (sometimes not!) descriptions of Dragon Ball.

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Microsoft has already remade/made several RTS’s since Starcraft 2. Age of Empires.

Microsoft proper didn’t make the the remake. They farmed the AoE remake out to Relic and World’s Edge.

To be fair, Relic is composed of some of the people who made the Company of Heroes RTS games, so they know their RTS shit… but the original Age of Empires games were made by the legendary Ensemble Studios (a dev that made Microsoft more than a billion dollars while it was open… that Don Mattrick then infamously shut down right after they shipped Halo Wars… I guess because - even though it shit gold - maybe the golden goose looked expensive on the balance sheet??).

…And anyway, NONE of the RTS’s being made these days are anywhere near the scale that StarCraft 2’s launch was and therefore worth Microsoft pursuing outside of small “remasters” or up-rezzed ports for modern hardware.

Blizzard has to make its money daddy Microsoft some Fortnite tier piles of money to justify this massive a purchase… not a Blackthorne HD re-release money.

All of what you said is true, but usually consolidation results in a net negative overall. It’s why we (at least used to) have anti-trust laws. Companies - regardless of industry - tend to be monopolistic when they can get away with it.

However, I will say that your point about “reviving dormant IPs” is just another way of framing (albeit much more charitably) what I described previously. Capitalizing on well-known or well-regarded IPs with built-in large fan bases who will likely buy based on name recognition rather than what its Metascore is or how well it runs according to technical tests run by Digital Foundry.

Also, I agree with you that as long as Sony and Nintendo exist in the console space, the industry can probably endure. That sort of consolidation would probably result in some really bad shit. Price gouging, no more owning games - just licensing with shaky terms that they can change at any time, required subscriptions, upgrades, more egregious micro-transactions… ugh… as long as there are major competitors, they will do things like this every time one of the other one makes a greed-driven decision that pisses off the consumers.

I just wish we had the number of big game companies we had in the 90s and 2000s. There used to be dozens of pretty big name independently owned game dev studios in the city where I am, and now - among those still even open - I can’t think of a single one still independently owned. The only 2 big ones I know of now in the area are subsidiaries of 2 major giant companies.

I expect more stabs at RTS, with Microsoft going to get more people to game on a computer. They did buy the company that made WarCraft and StarCraft.

As much as I’d love to see that, they won’t do an RTS. Even Blizzard has not touched RTS games since their popularity waned against the League of Legends type games. The closest we got was the StarCraft “HD remaster” from more than half a decade ago.

The era of RTS pretty much ended a decade ago with StarCraft 2.

The big video game companies pretty much only chase trends. They’ve always done that.

Whether it was platformer games on the NES after the success of Super Mario Brothers, fighting games in the arcades after the success of Street Fighter 2, or Grand Theft Auto 3D clones after the success of GTA3, or loot shooters or DOTA clones or whatever - the game industry at a large scale is mostly risk averse.

Only privately run companies like to pursue certain genres that aren’t necessarily the most popular or profitable.

If you want to see new RTS, you’re going to have to look for relatively small indie companies - probably ones with some of the grizzled old industry vets who worked on the actual games. Those guys are the only ones who will make those sorts of games now.

One thing missed is the fresh set of eyes on old IP.

Right - like the Andor example.

I feel like Andor was a result of someone talented taking advantage of the Disney Star Wars money hose that got lucky that the corporate Eye of Sauron (aka a bunch of producers and company execs) weren’t watching them too closely.

On the opposite side, look at what Microsoft did to Halo (under Don Mattrick’s leadership, btw). They decided they didn’t want to pay Bungie a nice fat thank you in their potential contract renewal, instead decided to keep the Halo IP, spin up a studio with only a handful of key people and then people who had no idea what Halo was for their LITERAL FLAGSHIP IP.

In general, I am skeptical of how companies will handle IP after big buyouts / corporate consolidation. That way when an Andor comes along, I’m pleasantly surprised instead of finally satisfied as a result of high expectations.

Thanks. :)

Usually consolidation is done by expensive buy outs (which this one was). And if the company is public, the CEO’s next goal (since it now has valuable IP and has eliminated a competitor), is to make that money back and do so fast (see Disney with Marvel, Star Wars, etc.). This means exploiting its newest IP, farting out something that a known audience / fanbase will show up for (again - unfortunately - see Disney).

This doesn’t necessarily guarantee shitty outcomes (see Andor in the case of Star Wars being bought by Disney, see Overwatch after Activision bought Blizzard), but usually it comes with the territory of new bosses eventually trying to squeeze more value out of the IPs and team resources they purchased (see “Secret Invasion” by Marvel under Disney, and see “Overwatch 2” by Blizzard under Activision).

Depending on the company, they’ll also do MASS layoffs to “eliminate redundancies” - which in theory means firing people whose jobs encompass the exact same practice, but in reality means a bunch of people are about to have their work load doubled.

The people at the very top of the bought out company will get HUGE piles of cash, plus some requirements they stay on board usually for some amount of time… and then most of them will probably bail the moment their stock “vests” - allowing them to start up new companies and begin the cycle of “make stuff, then get bought out by big company” all over again.

Rarely a key person stays on board for some time (see Carmack with Facebook / Oculus for example), but eventually even the most passionate dev sees that their new bosses will never fully get behind them in the way they were able to do when they were not owned by said parent company.

From a broader “industry-wide” perspective, it’s probably not great either, because the mass layoffs at a gigantic well-regarded company means more workers competing across a mostly non-unionized industry for less jobs (and if you’re just starting, now you’ve got to compete with someone who has “Blizzard” on their resume).

Worse still - because the video game industry is already pretty exploitative of its workers, since it (like VFX) mostly came into being after the Reagan era completely destroyed the public perception of unions, the jobs everyone will be competing for will just have even worse conditions since soooooo many (younger folks especially) dream of working on video games (until they get their first industry job, get a few years under their belt, and been there for more than one studio closure and decide that - if they ever want to enjoy having time with their family, owning a home, and living somewhere for more than 5 years, they probably should change jobs to some relevant field in software dev that pays better, has less hours, and is overall more stable).

TL;DR - Probably bad.

I’ve never met anyone who played online on the PS2 though, it just wasn’t very popular to go online back then.

I did.

Played SOCOM, and Tony Hawk…

…For like 10 minutes.

It was almost all garbage.

The ONLY PS2 game I ever really played online along with my friends at the time was Metal Gear Solid 3 : Substance’s online mode.

But really… the PC was the best place for “online” until the late 2000s with the advent of the Xbox 360 and, a little later, the PS3.

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Short version : No.

Long version : This is a dumb thing to make our “Next Big Infrastructure Project” as its like asking if “rubber band-based propulsion” will be the best goal in making our “Next Big NASA Project.”

There are many reasons as to why, but basically the reasons “bike lanes” would be an inadequate, poorly received, half-assed, politically divisive project boils down primarily to U.S. existing city structure and a lack of planning of the cities around biking in the way that many other countries with embarrassingly far more robust public transportation systems have had for decades now. NotJustBikes explains it best.

A MUCH better (but far less likely to happen as it would require taxing billionaires a lot more to pay for it) plan would be 2 things specifically :

1. MASSIVELY increase the budget for public transportation and regulate it much more strongly. Things like requiring all public transportation providers to need to actually hire the number of people needed to do a job - like adequate numbers of janitorial and maintenance staff, make facilities safe and provide proper tools for the jobs, and not pay dog-shit wages.
2. Constantly available high speed bullet trains traveling between all major cities, lower-speed smaller trains running between all smaller city hub locations, and finally small local trolley / light people mover type trains to transport people between areas throughout towns.

And honestly, as much as I want them to, the rich assholes own both parties, so neither of those plans seem like they’ll ever happen, and even number 2 wouldn’t work without MASSIVE upheaval in city planning in the US wherein zoning prevents you from even being within a 5 mile radius of things like grocery stores.

A long time ago, I tried giving similar advice to someone on reddit I saw had a similar vibe I felt I probably had some version of back in my 17 - 22 age range period. I think telling someone who feels hopeless about their own chances in relationship success stories where you personally can relate are the best way to pull someone out of an otherwise toxic spiral they often get stuck in.

Not the typical “be yourself” parental type advice, but like “I also felt” and “well until I” type of personal experience perspective. Use your own genuine growth and self-reflection as a cornerstone of how you talk to them. If you want to help, you need to talk to them in a way that makes them feel like they’re not the only person in the world who is experiencing or who has experienced the sort of despair they have.

And - as someone else pointed out - it isn’t your responsibility. And ultimately, the person has to themselves want things to be better. If they’ve decided it’s hopeless, there’s nothing anyone but themselves will be able to do… but it is noble to try.

At one point in my life, I had decided I would stop feeling hopeless after being rejected by those who I had fallen for, and instead work on myself. As a result, I ended up getting into really great shape, going on dates, and meeting lots of really wonderful people and growing as a person - ultimately finding someone who I eventually married and had a family with. I realized far after the fact that I must have been someone miserable to be around in at least some way - due to the way I was raised (also religious Southern sheltered family), and the poor socialization skills I had lacked as a result.

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