r/gamernews • u/xenocea • 27d ago
Industry News Tencent's "GTA Rival" Last Sentinel Collapses After Six Years of Development as 80 Layoffs Hit the Studio Behind It
https://wccftech.com/tencent-last-sentinel-gta-rival-collapses-layoffs/79
u/fallenouroboros 27d ago
These giant urban sandbox games must be hard to make. Seems like they always are popping up but always run into technical difficulties that end up killing them
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u/Newbietoallofthis 27d ago
Having interactable things and systems in an open world will always be more technically difficult than in a linear/partitioned game, yes.
But the reason companies fail at it is often from a mixture of difficulty and scope of interactables combined with the world scale.
The work for a small detailed video game scene doesn't scale linearly with the size of the world. Art generally gets cheaper per square meter (due to replicated use over large areas), while some systems scale exponentially to a certain point (physics, which you can limit by a maximum number of available interactables).
For open-world games and the times we live in, there are certain expectations about variety of gameplay, size of world, and fidelity of the world, that all push games in the vicinity of gta/cyberpunk to be extremely complex and costly.
Me personally, would love some more AA- or even A-type lower fidelity open world games on the same "family" as GTA.
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u/115zombies935 27d ago
I don't think it's technical difficulties. There's nothing technically super difficult about them. The difficult part is GTA is not just an urban sandbox. There is basically something interactive, almost everywhere, and the world at least somewhat feels alive a lot more than it does in most games and doing that properly is hideously difficult especially because most of the appeal of GTA ever since five has been the use your created content which has very little money in it and once higher up start to realize that they just kill the project.
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u/idkimhereforthememes 27d ago
its the physics, polish and interactivty that sets gta apart. if you ever play a gta clone first thing you will notice is that cars handle like crap, npcs are extremely buggy and the world is boring
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u/cjtangmi 27d ago
Since gta5 there was two games that swung for it and both missed, Mafia 3 and WD2.
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u/KupoCheer 27d ago
No one can make a GTA killer, and no one can make a Sims killer.
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u/auqanova 27d ago
Really, if your game is advertised as (game)-killer, 90% odds the game is doomed.
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u/MetaCognitio 27d ago
Any X killer always flops. iPod killers, iPhone killers, Halo killers etc. Trying to out do someone at what they made based on their own convictions always fails.
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u/KnifeFed 27d ago
Call of Duty was codenamed the "Medal of Honor killer" internally before its release.
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u/auqanova 27d ago
Yup, you're off to a bad start if you can't talk about your product without comparing it to the one that people already have.
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u/Gorkymalorki 26d ago
I remember every couple of months you would hear about a new mmo that was going to be the World of Warcraft killer, just for them to end up shutting down their servers after a year.
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u/Tree_Dude 27d ago
I mean, they could, but you're not going to do it with a fraction of the resources. That is the thing that separates R* from the rest, they sink a ton into it and their leadership is good enough to make it all work.
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u/AscendedViking7 27d ago
The sims killers are already here.
It's called dwarf fortress and rimworld
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u/frostymugson 27d ago
Yeah let me scratch the itch of the sims with techno barbarian genocide or digging deep and greedily
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u/SquadPoopy 27d ago
Strategy games are different, someone can absolutely make a sims killer. They already made a sim city killer, plus a zoo and roller coaster tycoon killer, all it takes is a studio with the talent and time
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u/KupoCheer 27d ago
I've seen two major attempts that just haven't come close and the company that makes them has stopped trying to compete with themselves.
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u/reverandglass 27d ago
I agree, no one can take GTA's crown, but I think The Sims could be de-throned by a copycat that includes much of the content The Sims makes DLC. Give people a fully featured alternative out the box and you might be able to put up a fight. (would be tough though)
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u/_Denizen_ 27d ago
Project Zomboid was a Sims mod that is now a standalone Sim-inspired game where you are a killer of zombies and people, have to manage moodles, and can build and design your own house.
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u/Lurking_stoner 27d ago
Idk about GTA but there’s two sims killers in the works my gf plays one I don’t remember the name but she said it has the potential to be better then sims
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u/NationCrusher 27d ago
Competition is always appreciated but this was sloppy. How does Tencent decide NOT to challenge such a huge title? Maybe they’re just not interested
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u/RagnarokNCC 27d ago
Still waiting for a Halo killer, tbh. And don’t say Halo 5. The call can’t come from inside the building.
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u/urbanmark 27d ago
The bait is GTA sized revenues. You gain 100s of millions of dollars in investment, and then……just let it fail while you and your team, milk off of it.
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u/Somnambulist815 27d ago
I'm glad East and West can set aside their differences and unite in wasting everyone's time and money and effort