Avalanche founder/CEO leaving

[hanselthecaretaker]

Said he?s ?not so fond of the constant gold digging mentality of the industry? [https://www.gamespot.com/articles/just-cause-dev-founder-and-ceo-leaving/1100-6465249/]

Hopefully this will send a much needed message to more big publishers that things need to change, and quickly.

 

[Squilookle]

Aww man- I really liked Avalanche. They were the game studio with the closest game design philosophy to mine. I thought JC4 got a bit unfairly savaged, when its only crime was doing more of what already worked. Far Cry 4 did the same thing and was critically acclaimed for it. Hope the spirit lives on in future Avalanche titles. And that their steampunk game resurfaces.

 

[Trunkage]

Aww man- I really liked Avalanche. They were the game studio with the closest game design philosophy to mine. I thought JC4 got a bit unfairly savaged, when its only crime was doing more of what already worked. Far Cry 4 did the same thing and was critically acclaimed for it. Hope the spirit lives on in future Avalanche titles. And that their steampunk game resurfaces.

I remember Far Cry 4 being panned for being FC3.5.

Gyrocopter were nice and I don't think I could ever go back

 

[Squilookle]

Aww man- I really liked Avalanche. They were the game studio with the closest game design philosophy to mine. I thought JC4 got a bit unfairly savaged, when its only crime was doing more of what already worked. Far Cry 4 did the same thing and was critically acclaimed for it. Hope the spirit lives on in future Avalanche titles. And that their steampunk game resurfaces.

I remember Far Cry 4 being panned for being FC3.5.

Gyrocopter were nice and I don't think I could ever go back

Strictly off the top of my head, I remember that the critics noted the similarities, but the general consensus seemed to be 'when the previous game was this good, more of the same isn't such a bad thing.' Far as I remember it wasn't until Primal where critical reception started to get ugly- what with the whole 'completely recycled map' thing. Looks like New Dawn has managed to find a loophole around that one, too

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Strictly off the top of my head, I remember that the critics noted the similarities, but the general consensus seemed to be 'when the previous game was this good, more of the same isn't such a bad thing.' Far as I remember it wasn't until Primal where critical reception started to get ugly- what with the whole 'completely recycled map' thing. Looks like New Dawn has managed to find a loophole around that one, too

Other common criticism was that Pagan Min was not as cool a villain as Vaas and that Kyrat was not quite as vibrant as the Rook Islands. So FC4 was more given a pass then it was praised for being a great game. New Dawn also managed to avoid the map recycling criticism by being upfront about re-using the map from FC5, whereas Primal was passed off as an entirely new and original game.

Personally, I also got the distinct impression that JC4 was mostly slammed for being a mess of under-developed, if cool, mechanics that were poorly explained and implemented, leaving the entire game being a frustrating ordeal of seeing a potentially good game had it been given another year or so of development to really smooth out and polish the new features.

 

[Kyrian007]

Personally, I also got the distinct impression that JC4 was mostly slammed for being a mess of under-developed, if cool, mechanics that were poorly explained and implemented, leaving the entire game being a frustrating ordeal of seeing a potentially good game had it been given another year or so of development to really smooth out and polish the new features.

I'm not so sure the underdeveloped mess of new mechanics were "cool" though. Pretty much everything "new" didn't work as well as it had in the past. The new gun secondary features were functionally a less effective replacement for the missing "grenade button." The new feature of being able to select custom loadouts for the grappler was great, you were never more than a button press away from selecting the only useful loadout... the one from Just Cause 3.

And JC 4 didn't need a year or so of "polish." It flat out needed a year or so of active development and bugfixing. It took Avalanche more than a month to simply patch it into a working state on PC. A month in which they didn't even communicate what they were working on.

JC 4 wasn't terrible, it was still more Just Cause. It was just unfortunate that the changes they made weren't good, the new map wasn't as big as JC 2, but just as empty. And they picked an island with 4 completely different biomes on it for some reason, and geared up the big finish to be... in the most boring one.

I don't have a problem with this guy leaving if he really has a problem with the industry's increasingly predatory practices. I hope it makes a statement. But, how his development team rolled out JC 4... broken with little to no communication with PAYING CUSTOMERS. Well, he should have handled that release way better and should be ashamed of how bad it made Avalanche look.