Let’s address the elephant in the room

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PVP

You will have gathered a bit of treasure during any of the above-mentioned activities, which must be transported to an outpost in order to be cashed in. The catch is, as the name of the game suggests, that other players are able to attack, kill you, and steal your treasure. Either defend against the attack, or have possibly hours of work yanked from your hands by an aggressive stranger.

First and foremost; things do pick up when other players decide to try and steal your loot, and sea battles can absolutely be fun, and visually impressive. But the fact of the matter is that player interactions online can also be a rather hit or miss affair.

Some attackers offer a fun challenge, while others may have no other aim than to wreck your ship, sling racial slurs around, and generally make the game miserable.

With that being said, as the game has been fleshed out, it seems as if Rare have made some effort to try and draw focus away from the PVP element, and gently suggest that players rather work as a team. It is, for example, now possible to team with other players, and automatically split loot upon it being delivered to an outpost. But the online world being what it is, you are always going to run into those that couldn’t give two hoots about cooperation.

The Fall

You would think the initial accomplishment meant that Telltale Games had gone on to further success, now finally having the resources to upgrade their software, and hire more talent. But this wasn’t the case. Sadly, the company decision makers, who will not be named and shamed here, were simply not prepared for true success.

Instead of upgrading aged software, and sinking money into general improvements, the decision was instead made to simply churn out more of the same. Much more. Though, this time with increasingly more expensive licenses, including Game of Thrones and Guardians of the Galaxy.

The studio’s biggest downfall, by far, was not investing in infrastructure. More developers were indeed hired, but these skilled new bodies were forced to work on painfully outdated software, meaning that production was abysmally slow. Making things worse, multiple projects were worked on simultaneously, also spreading focus severely thin. The inevitable result was that, although projects were being churned out, the quality of each began to plummet, and fans noticed.

Fans also quickly began to tire of ‘more of the same,’ with the game’s engine increasingly starting to look like a reanimated fossil, and the games themselves starting to seem formulaic. Sales, of course, plummeted.

Yet more of the same was pumped out again, and again, and again, with those previously mentioned decision makers simply hoping that another Walking Dead smash hit would be achieved. It wasn’t.

The decision did when you register right here, eventually, came to try and reinvigorate The Walking Dead, backed with a brand-new game engine. But it was far too late, and with the Walking Dead’s final chapter, the studio also closed its doors in 2018.

But what about the many mountains of millions that had been made with the original Walking Dead titles, you’re wondering? Well, that’s where the venture investment angle comes back into play. The first $8 million was not the only investment that the company had accepted. They, in fact, accepted many more investments, from many more companies over the years. This meant that money was being forked out back to investors, as quickly as it was coming in.

At around about the time the final chapter of The Walking Dead was being released, a number of investors actually pulled out, all having lost faith in the company amidst plummeting sales of stretch tent for sale in South Africa. This, sadly, resulted in the entire company going broke almost literally overnight.

Premium CPUs

When it comes to gaming, CPUs are not the most important part of the equation. Yes, a decent CPU is necessary, but only up to a very limited degree. A so called ‘midrange’ CPU is absolutely fine for the vast majority of your gaming needs, with virtually no games demanding higher than this in order to run perfectly well.

Intel’s ‘enthusiast’ CPU range, for example, is nothing short of ridiculous overkill, and amongst the most unnecessary purchases you will ever make. Not to mention they are also so overpriced as to start becoming a bit of a joke.

8 cores are not really needed for gaming, no matter what your ‘expert’ friends tell you online. 4 cores will get the job done for the most part, or 6 cores if you want to push your FPS to the highest possible levels. Anything above this once again starts to become silly posturing. Yes, Intel will be pushing their fastest CPUs in your face, and telling you how necessary they are. But they aren’t, and Intel are desperate to make sales.



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