Depends, really. Producers do decide who will work on a movie in the first place. Producers’s biggest influence is during pre- and post-production. It’s true that producers stay out of the way during the actual production phase, but producers often take back control during the final cut (unless directors get the explicit right to do it that themselves) and other steps in post-production.

Avi Arad’s track record is a very mixed bag IMO. His films include the “Spider-Verse” films on one hand, on the other there is stuff like “Morbius” and the live-action “Ghost in the Shell”.

There is no doubt that Arad knows how to get the budget and bring the people together, but it certainly isn’t always working out as intended.

Despite all that’s happened, at least one source told the outlet they don’t think Unity’s moves were made out of complete malice. “They need to do something to make more money. Sadly, it wasn’t delivered well, but the need to make more money is still there.”

And that’s why every dev (who can) should run as far away from Unity as possible, because Unity will try to screw them some other way.

My sympathies. Keyboard producers are really dropping the ball for you guys.

A beak or feet work too, but I get your point. Invertebrates obviously have a hard time with typing.

Thank you. I try to make an effort, but it is really hard to type. Humans should make smaller keyboards.

Ars Technica has done an interview with Unity’s Marc Whitten and Whitten’s responses are very, very telling:

“It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way,” he said. […]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity “didn’t communicate effectively… There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job.” […]
“That’s on us,” he continued. “We didn’t do a good enough job… of delivering the information that would help people.”

It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not “confused”, they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity’s initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.

Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.

And going by Whitten’s statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.

Considering that DA veteran David Gaider left ages ago, I do not have much hope left for the next DA game. BioWare may have hung on a little bit longer than other EA studios, but it looks like the notorious mismanagement by EA will get it too.

Well, there is the MetaCritic user score too. It currently sits at 1.4, so it should surprise nobody.

Tolkienesque fantasy has become the carbon copy of a carbon copy of a carbon copy ages ago…
And it becomes even more apparent when people consider that Tolkienesque fantasy tropes aren’t even about “medieval Europe”, they are about a particular English pseudo-medieval world. Fantasy doesn’t do much exploring even beyond the English-speaking world.

Southern Europe (Italy, France, Spain,…) aren’t even featured much. The landscape may allude to it, but then the same Northern European castles sit on the top of hills, occupied by the same kind of lords that you’d find in other parts of the game map.
And other parts of the medieval world do not fare much better: Everything around the Mediterranean is reduced to stereotypes or entirely replaced by some fantasy race. Every place outside of Europe/the Mediterranean fares even worse.
It has no depth, no knowledge of particular local traditions, it is not rooted in any stories, only recalls the same tired tropes that Tolkien established.

Even inside Europe and around the Mediterranean, the medieval world was very diverse. Every region had its own traditions, stories, clothing, customs and its own mythologies with their own particular kinds of monsters and creatures.
But you’d not know through most fantasy stories which - no matter the landscape they take place in - it always boils down to a band of adventurers walking into an inn, drinking a beer and paying it with gold coins, before they go off to kill some orcs in the name of some duke. Very little thought is spend on considering if it even makes sense that a place that is akin to - let’s say - Southern France had any of these things.

When Tolkien wrote LOTR, he based most of it on ancient Germanic stories like “Beowulf”, that there are uncountable other folktales and stories from all over the ancient world which could be chosen as the basis of a fantasy setting instead.

Have fun! It’s a weird little game, but I am always happy when it finds some new players.

The most successful example for a blockchain game is “Axie Infinity” which is something of a Pokémon-like. It used blockchain technology to track the unique “Axies” (= Pokémons) which could be traded and sold. So the blockchain was used to do just that.
The big promise of games like “Axie Infinity” was “play-to-earn”, games which allowed players to earn money through playing the game, such as trading in “Axie Infinity”.

Could this only be done with blockchain? No. All of that could technically also be achieved by other means.
So ultimately all of the talk about the blockchain was mostly PR and a way to distinguish the game. Nobody would have cared about it, if it had not had this feature. Which is very representative of all blockchain games.

The talk of how blockchain technology would allow players to transfer items from one game to another; or create unique characters which could be transfered between games; etc. have always been pipe dreams, They would have required a level of cooperation between publishers and developers of games that was simply impossible to achieve.

As a footnote: The use of blockchain in “Axie Infinity” ultimately resulted in an in-game economy that was largely a pyramid scheme. The game is still there, but the economy imploded and most players only ever made cents, if they earned anything through the game at all.

My answer to that question is always “King of Dragon Pass”, a narrative/management game that is unlike anything else out there. It got a spiritual successor with “Six Ages”.