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Comment by nothercastle | Hacker News Reader

Is Braid really a game that needed an anniversary edition?

Slay the Spire for example is cheap and bonkers fun for hundreds of hours, likewise many great small games I've enjoyed (FTL, Carrion, ...). I think as games go, Braid got enough money relative to its "actual fun-level" or something (obviously subjective).

And if they came out with an anniversary edition I’m not sure anyone would buy it either.

I suppose if it was easy and fast to swap out the old textures for the new ones?

Odd that Blow would assume giant sales for the game. It barely registered in my radar, plus it was a big hit on release. I wasn't really looking to buy it again. It's a puzzle game, I remember playing it for months back in the day, but I now know the solutions.

It wasn’t a simple texture swap. They added 40 new levels.

Ah I didn't know. I'm sorry for Blow. I really loved Braid when it came out.

> Odd that Blow would assume giant sales for the game.

Did they?

They?

Blow

Yea him.

"Did he?" is the proper way to say it given that he's a man.

Oh I thought it was a company lol, headline is cut off on mobile. https://imgur.com/a/PhFDyAC

Btw it's really amazing there's a volunteer anti-they pronoun police in the comments now. Thank you. Really good example of how you getting annoyed at something turns you into the something. It's pretty natural in English to use "they" in those contexts, policing it doesn't mean you're fixing some programming I got.

Quote: "It's not like we sold a million copies day one or whatever, which is what you expect."

That is very misleading. He is specifically referring to NOT expecting to sell a million copies.

Right, thank you, they didn't expect to sell a million copies day 1 or whatever.

From the quotes in the article, it sure sounds like he was expecting this re-release to save his company.

> None, because we can't afford to pay anyone because the sales are bad.

That doesn't say they expected sales to be good.

It says they don't have money to pay someone to work on the orthogonal programming language thingy.

It's saying they don't have the money to pay anyone. Not that they have money to pay for game development but not other things. The bad sales of this game are stated to be the reason they can't afford to pay anyone.

If they didn't expect sales to be good, they sure wouldn't have expected to be able to pay salaries for a dozen SF-based devs with the proceeds. And if they didn't expect that, they couldn't blame the bad sales for not being able to pay staff.

As a naive reader (and now re-reader), I don't understand what this is other than more layers of hypothetical in service of inventing thoughts other people had. Maybe you have more lore than the article, ex. dozen SF-based devs? Happy to hear more.

Sure! The original game was stellar and it holds up. There’s two whole generations of new gamers who have probably not played the original.

The original was authored at, I think, 720p. Totally reasonable to remaster at 4K and release for new audiences to enjoy.

Sadly it failed to reach that new audience. The games industry is beyond brutal and in dire straits right now.

I forget the exact issue but there was something about the PC version not having the feature of being able to remap controls on a gamepad, and one or two of the mapped buttons being very much not to my taste on my xbox360 controller, that made me give it up after a little while. If the anniversary edition adds control remapping I might revisit it.

Nah. Braid is overrated. Now that the Kotaku era is finally coming to a close the 2010s indie game scene vibe should be buried with it.

It is entirely different market nowadays. You really have to stand on your own feet and catch the attention of enough people... It is simply not enough to be lucky to be on store...

It doesn’t help that his game is bland and his personality is trash. The market is different in that consumers don’t have to put up with Blow.

Is braid really a game that needed...

> Braid: Anniversary Edition launched in May and adds 40 new levels, as well as over 15 hours of commentary.

... 15 hours of commentary?

To be fair I've only just heard of Braid but commentary is not something I look for in a puzzle game. Sounds awful, really

Blow has a reasonably large audience as a game dev thinkfluencer. I think he might have overestimated what % of a Twitch or YouTube audience is willing to go actually pay money for commentary from the same person.

Braid is a very good game and commentary from good game designers is extremely good.

I mean JB does seem to be someone who enjoys hearing himself speak but he is also an exceptional game designer so… yeah it’s good. It’s not just a texture swap.

On top of that the "40 new levels" seem to be "40 released development iterations of levels" instead of new content.

Ouch

40 new levels? That's pretty huge. I'd never even heard about this edition, and I'm someone who immensely enjoyed the original. A name like "Anniversary Edition" makes it sound like they made minor tweaks such as improved graphics or something. Shouldn't they have just named it Braid 2?

I mentioned this in a sibling conversation but I thought I'd mention it here too since I nearly bought the game until I read reviews: these don't seem to really be 40 "new" levels rather mostly "unreleased development versions" of existing levels or parts of the development commentary.

Apparently only 13 of them are actually new levels. 12 are alternative versions of existing levels and the rest are "commentary index levels".

It's like a DVD commentary track, it's for super fans.

Whatever you think of the merits of the game itself, historically, it's an important game and one of a few that came out around the same time that allowed games to be treated seriously as an art form by critics in the sense that the gameplay design itself was seen as an artistic expression rather than just the music or other art assets.

There's a lot to criticize about the game, but it's definitely a game that's worthy of a commentary track.

I guess I just don't get it. I loved Monty Python my whole life. Loved Terry Gilliam's performances. But when a friend got a Monty Python DVD with "features" the only "feature" of note was Terry Gilliam droning on and on, and on... and... on... yikes. It was just about the least funny thing I've ever seen. So disappointing.

A commentary is just behind the scenes if you want to know how it was made. If you don't care, it's boring.

It’s the kind of game you release a free HD update patch for and raise some excitement via gaming news sites, bumping sales of the original version.

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