Something like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is about the very best of what you can expect of a game with no continued monetization or post-launch content. About six to eight hours or so of gameplay, with a harshly limited scope in terms of game systems and major features. Hellblade mostly just does some puzzle gaming, a pretty basic combat system, a lot of level/environment design, and many canned cinematics.
Don’t get me wrong – Hellblade is a really good game. The folks at Ninja Theory did a great job. However, when it comes to thinking about scope, you need to look at the game’s feature set critically. There’s a core combat system, minimal UI, a linear story, limited animation sets, limited enemies, no equipment, no optional side content, etc. The smaller overall scope allowed the team to laser focus on maximizing the things they committed to doing, like creating environments and cinematics. They also placed a heavy emphasis on vfx and dark environments, allowing them to hide less detailed/polished areas with the vfx.
Notable exceptions to these sort of scope limitations are games that are subsidized for other reasons, like [first party or exclusive games], or games that are funded by external sources with different goals (e.g. the Department of Defense funded the development of America’s Army as a recruitment tool rather than trying to earn a profit). Because the conditions for success those games are different, the priorities on things like monetization are also different.
If we limit ourselves to a business model that pushes single point sales without any sort of continued support and disregard the special cases with different goals, this is about the best of what you can expect. You can get some potentially really good games, but they will be very limited in scope. Also, keep in mind that this was basically Telltale’s development philosophy as well – extremely limited scope and heavy emphasis on reusable technology and assets.
The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.
That is how i felt too after reading the comics. Comics hellboy never stuck me as an immature man child, which was what movie hellboy stuck me as.
Yeah, the movie Hellboy was kinda bratty and juvenile, where as the comic version is tired and kind of jaded. Which makes the comics great, because as they progress, Red becomes a lot less jaded.
Infectious Desire 