This prompted me to look into their history, and yeah, looks like they were basically a super-group formed out of employees from names like Apple and Atari and were big right out of the gate.
I was mainly just thinking how EA Sports games have been a thing for as long as I can remember. Even when video games was a small industry, they were still a big fish.
Say what you will about the monetization strategy - there are a lot of valid criticisms to make - but the changes made to the core gameplay with OW2 and moving to 5v5 made the game infinitely better to play.
5v5 with reduced CC and shields >>>> late stage OW1
Hard disagree. Late stage OW (post 2020) was pretty balanced after they nerfed double shield. Now the game is too chaotic and more dependent on DPS than it ever has been. Also they seemed to have doubled down on burst damage and one-shot heroes, I want to shoot whoever thought Soujourn was a fun addition.
There were decent metas for sure after double shield got nerfed, but the game just feels better with 1 tank imo. Teamfight wins are more consequential and fights don’t drag on as long. There’s more space opened up for solo carrying.
A criticism I have is that tank counter picking has become more powerful than I would like.
I can’t imagine going back to 6v6 anymore. The trade offs are super worth it imo.
PS yeah Sojourn was busted for way too long. She’s in a pretty good spot now though. They also dialed back Widow’s effective range and obviously got rid of doom 1shots.
I played OW1 as my main game from launch to 2-3 years ago. I came back for OW2 then quit again after a month or two…but…
Late stage OW fuckin sucked, man. If you were a tank player who didn’t play hog you were basically solo tanking the whole game while your co-tank (hog) went flanking. Things may have been different in top ranks but the It was absolutely the least fun era of OW1 for me.
OW2 at launch was an unbalanced mess for sure but things felt great after the sojourn nerf. Every character is viable for like the first time ever.
Stop with the bad takes. If they actually worked on anything during the OW1 content drought that didn’t just make em a quick buck, we might have gotten a better experience. Someone higher up saw the dwindling player base and went with the cheapest and laziest way to squeeze a couple extra bucks from what’s left.
There was so much that could have been done to bring people back, but each time they’ve either done the literal least, lied, or axed it.
They went 5v5 cause it was the choice that had the least work required to get people to tank, but now if your tank is bad you’re pretty much going to lose. They could have kept 6v6 and reworked all the tanks kits.
Blizzard has made every choice so far that says Overwatch is going to be sunset. It’s sad to see something as great as OW1 turn into what it is now. Especially when there’s a lot that can be done to fix it the right way.
Makes me wonder how the current dev team feels about everything that’s happened and how they really feel about the decisions being made currently. Cause Invasion is pretty mediocre so far.
Removing a tank completely ruined the balance of the game. There's no reduced CC, infact they added more. Shields was the only main problem, but they could have tried splitting tanks into main/off tank roles to stop double shields, but the whole freedom is what was great about the game, the game started going downhill when they added Sombra, then fell off a cliff with Orisa. They were adding new heroes for the sake of it and not because the game needed it and that is what fucked it.
The design philosophy now is to try and make every character feel strong to play no matter how horrible they are to play against, so people will buy skins for them (or buy the new heroes).
The flash was just replaced with a new long range nade that slows enemies and disables abilities, which is worse CC to play against than a stun if you got within 3m of him. Doomfist, wrecking ball still have entire CC kits, they added more CC to orisa, who now can push players, knockback players and pull players in and slow them. Junker queen pulls players, ramattra slows players, soujourn slows players, There is objectively more CC in the game, for every bit they removed, they added more. CC isn't objectively a bad thing, the most annoying thing in the past was Mei, because she slowed you and froze you, now she just slows you. Being knocked about, slowed or abilities disabled is the most annoying form of CC to play against and that is what nearly every new champ has and what older champs have been reworked to.
Playing tank the last 2 years of OW1 was fucking miserable. I exclusively played tank since season 3 but it made me quit. I’ve put OW2 down, too, but yeah…gameplay wise it got fun again (once they nerfed sojourn).
Whole lot of rose-tinted glasses about balance in OW1. Who the fuck was having fun in the Hog meta besides Hog players? And HOW LONG did that last? Part of that is because they diverted devs to OW2 but every balance change they made to make tanking more fun was a failure outside of giving Rein his passive.
OW2 is slightly worse than year one OW1 but so much better than the bullshit in late OW1. Am I gonna play it again? Hell no. But do I think people are giving honest reviews about the actual gameplay? Also no.
I’m morally opposed to their mtx model but it didn’t affect me as I never cared about skins. The thing that really made me quit was that f2p brought in a ton of young people and it became obvious that I was no longer the target demographic.
Playing tank was shit because they had shit tanks for a two tank meta. They didn’t need to remove the second tank, they could have rebalanced the tanks instead
That’s fine for comp, but it means learning a new hero involves completely screwing your team in QP for days.
If it were up to me? They went in the wrong direction to solve a real problem. There are twice as many DPS heroes, so do 2-2-4 (2 tank, 2 support, 4 dps) comps. Nerf ult generation across-the-board by about 25% so that you’re still getting the same number of ults happening per-game, spread across more players. And give more DPS heroes off-support powers like Soldier and Sombra. And do more to punish barrier-heavy play, like Symmetra does, or just nerf the barriers.
Offer a 1-1-2 (1 tank, 1 support, 2 DPS) mode for comp for people who want a really hardcore experience.
If someone makes a new kotor game but uses the same extremely janky DND 3.x rules I am going to search my house for the monkey’s paw. That would make me so mad.
Please don't use the money's paw. It will almost definitely change the game system to FATAL, and I do not, under any circumstances, want to roll for Zaalbar's anal circumference.
Wizards of the Coast owner Hasbro, which says Larian’s “mega hit” RPG, having driven around $90 million in revenue in the last year, is a good sign for more video games to come from the D&D license.
I don’t know them, but this seems like they have understood that D&D is beneficial to their purse.
Hasbro wants more games but that doesn’t say Larian wants or has been contracted for more. It’d be dumb for Larian to at least not make an expansion. Though I do understand expanding the level cap is super difficult and a LOT of spells will need to be limited in scope.
In short, at 7th to 9th level spells shit get stupid really fast.
In any case, the sweet spot of the 5th edition ruleset(which Larian vastly improved upon) is levels 5 to 10. Under that and you're too squishy, over that and you start getting into the plane shifting and just outright death spells.
Larian said they were releasing a complete game. I honestly hope they don't release an expansion. The ending was great, and I don't know where you go after. An expansion past the ending would almost cheapen the whole game for me. After a huge build up to the fight of the netherbrain. It wouldn't feel right to continue after that.
And only getting to 12th level felt fine. I don't think it needed to go higher. Mine abs my partner's characters were beasts even at level 12. So it doesn't feel like it's necessary.
I'm not surprised about this. The game was developed entirely around what it would have rather than around what the player would do and you can tell.
I can imagine the initial pitch meetings, with everyone going "whoaaa it will have hundreds of solar systems and biomes whoaaah" and no one going "ok, but what does the player do in them". A few other guys enthusiastically saying "There will be spaceship building and you will get a crew and explore with it" and not a soul in the room thinking of "ok, but how will we make space travel work within our current systems and technology? Can we make it substantial?". And this way of thinking probably permeated every second of development for the first few years.
The game is chockful of vestigial systems that they had obviously intended to be more significant and in depth, but ultimately decided not to develop further, yet still maintained in the game in a manner that only harms the game. The fuel "system", the contraband "system"... So many examples of stuff that doesn't add anything to the game, yet was still maintained because man-hours and money went into it I guess, and because the "and it will have that and that" mentality tool a priority over player experience, player agency, and actual game design.
If I can circlejerk for a bit, this is one of the reasons why Baldurs Gate 3's release and success is so timely. How many areas, how many biomes, how many systems, how many quests and how many square kilometers does that game have versus Starfield? 30 times less? 50 times less? Yet it had an overwhelmingly positive reception where Starfield didn't because its elements put player experience first. Yes it has less quests, but most are super modular and super reactive and not afraid to let you solve them in janky or silly ways that go out of the suggested solutions; yes it has fewer areas smaller in size, but you are constantly coming across stuff to do. Etc etc etc.
I'm really hoping that that contrast changes design philosophies just a tad in the future. Start with how a normal hour for your player looks like. Confirm that your technology can deliver your vision before committing to it, experience be damned. Don't reach for the stars, because contrary to what they say, it won't at least get you the moon, it will just leave you stranded in the middle of bumfucknowhere in space.
And, as we saw in Starfield, that means you get yet another annoying load cutscene.
You got the analogy backwards, it’s “Aim for the moon. If you miss, you’ll end up among the stars.” The thing is, they didn’t aim for the moon, they aimed for the stars and somehow missed.
As you rightly pointed out, the game lacks focus. It’s not a procedurally generated exploration game like No Man’s Sky, it’s partially procedurally generated, and they didn’t commit enough to make it compelling. It’s not a space shooter, but it has occasional space battles, but they didn’t commit enough to make that compelling. And so on. It’s a game with a lot of ideas, but no direction. It’s like they threw in the kitchen sink thinking that it would be fun, but all the dishes are chipped and mismatched.
You got the analogy backwards, it’s “Aim for the moon. If you miss, you’ll end up among the stars.”
waitwaitwait I swear to you on the grave of my budgies that I have always seen it the other way around
I'm worried now. What other things do I have a warped understanding of? Has my life been a lie until now?! Is Starfield actually secretly a great game?!
I don’t even think they aimed for the stars, they built a building and then “aimed for the planetarium” that they shoved in that building that wasn’t built to hold a planetarium.
There are some people that think cloud imperium games (star citizen) is aiming to sell their game engine (see: starengine video) and personally I really hope they do. Then all these so-called “AAA” publishers can be as money hungry and lazy as they want and we’ll still have an amazing platform for devs that actually give a shit to work off of.
Trusting your audience to appreciate the depth of work that isn’t just flashy graphics, plus respecting players by not filling it with micro transactions.
I’m so worried that starfield is going to be the opposite of BG3.
As a huge lover of all thing Fallout, I heard and read a lot about Starfield, then saw some videos and was and absolutely hyped. SPACE FALLOUT. Then I saw the game play and I hope I’m wrong but man it looks like they just took new vegas and slapped a space skin on it.
I’m worried about it too. So much so that I’m going to wait for reviews. I’m expecting it’ll be a buggy mess for at launch anyway, considering it’s Bethesda, the delays, and the unusually high minimum specs listed.
I just don’t trust Bethesda anymore, I’m waiting for reviews, patches, mods to fix everything, and a sale. So maybe Xmas time but probably next spring. BG3 should hold me for most of that
Big “no one understands my art” vibes coming off that dev. You made a mediocre game for an outrageous amount and released it in one of the heaviest gaming release years in recent memory. Sorry, this year a new IP with a 74% on metacritic doesn’t cut it. They say EA dropped 40mil on the advertising for it, but this is litterally the first I’ve heard about it, and frankly I’m the target audience for this game. I bet this shit was shoved down the throats of Fortnight and Valorant players via tiktok.
No one is playing it because it’s very “meh”, but it has absolutely been widely advertised and also talked about a lot (for being not so good).
I really doubt any of you who replied here saying you haven’t heard about it ever interact with gaming journalism and community. It has been just as visible as most other AAA games.
I’m not really the target audience and I’ve come across it what must be hundreds of times. It has been talked about a lot on anything gaming. Most of the big gaming journalism (good and bad) websites, youtube channels etc have made articles and videos about it.
I heard about it when Skill Up, whose YouTube channel I have notifications turned on for, posted his review of it. Before that, I'd seen absolutely nothing about it, and I heard very little about it after that, too. I was shocked to find out it was an EA game - partly because it didn't look (visually) polished enough to be an EA game, and partly because of the complete lack of marketing I'd seen for a major publisher game.
Finding out it was an expensive flop and not just a smaller AA game they decided to put out on the side is a surprise, too.
Oh cry me a river. These hacks don’t deserve the pity they’re clearly trying to win because they have already proven they don’t know how to make a technologically sound game. Every single one of their games has suffered from save-breaking glitches, and yeah I might be one of the unlucky ones to have experienced at least one in all of their games but I can count the amount of developers that have given me a similar experience on one fist (yes, I mean “fist”, not hand).
I have an up-to-date system, more than meet the requirements for this flaming turd of a game and even among the insane amount of loading screens, there are still frequent hang-ups from the game needing to load while walking through a plaza while the game is running on my SSD. That’s simply not good enough. The last time I experienced such behaviour in a game was when I was playing on a potato over a decade ago or playing online with abysmal internet.
Critics don’t have to be developers to be able to spot in what ways a game is bad and neither does the general public. This is very different from “I don’t like this so it’s bad.”. This is a case of “It runs like ass, the writing is boring and the traversal of their mostly-empty crafted universe is little more than a lag-hung menu with a stupid amount of layers to access what you’re actually looking for and a whole ton of loading screens and thus it is bad.”. They haven’t crafted some grand open universe like they advertised, they made a bunch of levels, added a slow fast travel system and a standard fast travel system and called it quits. They’re now finally being called out as the bunch of half-asses they really are and they have more than earned it.
“We were riding the limits of what was possible” is a common excuse given. Then maybe don’t bite off more than you can chew. “Overcome technology itself”. A bad craftsman blames his tools. Maybe stop using an engine that isn’t fit for purpose. The “Creation” engine - or as we might as well call it, Gamebryo - has long been cited as the cause of many problems and barely workable. Take time to retrain your developers to a user-friendly engine and you’ll quickly make up the lost time in efficiency but they insist on holding on to that dinosaur of an engine.
As a member of the general public, I can’t say I know how to make a game, let alone a good one but given the constant stutters, mostly empty world, boring writing, frequent instances of forcing grind to pad play time and ever-increasing tedium in their gameplay loop, I have to assume that Bugthesda doesn’t either. The fact they saw to set team members on reviews instead of fixing all the problems with their games, I have to say their priorities aren’t in the right place and the ones who are “disconnected” are Bethesda who seem to be under the delusion that they’ll get nothing but praise just for releasing a game, no matter the state it’s in.
Without delving into the question over how good the game is, this sounds like a company that simply has the wrong processes in place. A case of "working hard" instead of "working smart." As a result, they waste a lot of time and resources on things that ultimately don't matter. I'm sure the person in question worked really really hard on the game, but it's mostly pointless and ineffectively effort.
…this sounds like a company that simply has the wrong processes in place
LOL! OMG, I totally thought you were talking about their process for dealing with negative press/reviews. What’s funny is that your comment basically applies to both your point and mine and that kinda reinforces the point for both versions…
While this is true, it is a terrible way of debating with the public.
And while users may not be able to understand game design decision and background, they can well be aware that those decisions brought to a really bad game.
Not only that, but their blindness is the result of developers choices on what they share. If you don’t want people making incorrect assumptions, give them more info. Don’t tell them to just forego having any opinion on the matter.
If it looks like a decision was made cynically, prove otherwise, don’t just say ‘No, you’re wrong, you just don’t know!’
But gamers don’t actually need to understand game design or why a certain choice was made.
I said this in another thread: if it’s a shit design, it’s a shit design. Knowing why the shit design was made does not suddenly make it not shit. In fact, I do not care to know why you made that decision in the first place - if it’s bad, then just own up to it and either try to fix the issue or actually resolve to do better next time.
I don't love how this is phrased, but it's not wrong.
The harsh reality of creative industries is that people are gonna be uninformed, dickish smartasses on social media (and... you know, traditional media, too), but they don't owe the creators anything, so if they don't like a thing they don't need to be right about why they like it.
But hey, I also don't resent any creator for venting reasonably on social media about this stuff every now and then. I think it's a dumb, potentially career-ending thing to do, but I get it.
I don’t see why we should accept a long winded excuse for failing to stick the landing.
Olympians know when they fucked up an attempt, and move on. What’s stopping these whinging game studios and developers?
No one owes them money. Their game doesn’t deserve to be profitable. They were attempting to make a good, profitable game. Failed, and now want everyone to pat them on the back and give them a gold medal anyway because they tried soooo hard!
It’s the entitlement that gets me, as if they deserve pity or artificial success just because
Did people pay for the game before or after the developer removed any references to it being an MMO?
If they made something that is not an MMO it’s only natural that they won’t want it to be presented as if it was one, even if they originally intended to create the game as an MMO.
I don’t think the game deserves to be cruficied just for failing to reach the goals the devs had in mind, as long as it is not being sold as if it had. Folks can buy the game, realize it’s not what they hoped for, refund and move on. Or better yet, hopefully they can realize it’s not the game they were expecting based on the store page and not even buy it in the first place.
Now if the dev is misleading people about what the game is, or if people paid for one thing long ago and received another in the end, then nevermind me and carry on.
The email I got from Steam notifying it was available says:
The Day Before offers players a uniquely reimagined journey into a post-apocalyptic open-world MMO survival set in the present day on the US East Coast following a deadly pandemic.
Best I can tell, they didn’t take preorders or Kickstarter funds. Just did a release. Seems like their old plans didn’t pan out and their old marketing doesn’t align with what they did release after they scaled back due to almost cancelling the whole thing at some point. From watching Sacriel play a bit yesterday, it’s definitely not an amazing game, has typical issues with the genre (e.g. not enough AI, extract camping) in addition to other typical poor game issues (e.g. poor ui, tooltips, latency).
Seems like a lot of the backlash is due to failing to meet its own hype, plus people continuing to buy games without consulting release version reviews and feeling burned, and added to the general cultural frustration of things being released before they’re actually ready.
If marketing promises something, you should live up to that, even if plans change. If you haven’t gotten to the stage where you know what kind of game it is, you shouldn’t be marketing it that way yet.
Sure, things can change but if it’s something that might change, don’t market it.
It’s fine to be aspirational and fail, but transparency and communication are key when that happens, but it’s also on the consumer to not trust years old marketing, games change all the time, some fundamentally.
Old marketing for an old product, sure. Products change over time. However forward marketing for a product yet to be released should be accurate at release.
Also, once the trailer narrator starts, she also says “post apocalyptic mmo open world survival”
I mean, maybe technically it is those things? Only the world is super small and you can only access it during a match, which happens with, dunno, at least 50 other players, which is “massive”? It’s more players than what most WoW raids or pvp matches have.
The game is NOTHING like what has been advertised over the years. Even vaulting isn’t a thing, and trailers have shown players vaulting over fences etc. why the fuck would you remove vaulting from a game?
I feel like this is emblematic of why many AAA titles are so dull.
I mean, you gotta give Bethesda some props here for developing their own engine. Indies don’t do that.
But still, 8 years ago, they had this idea of a Bethesda game in space. Maybe they should have seen it coming that this concept won’t work out terribly well, but ultimately someone decided to go ahead with it and then they spent 7 years building a space physics simulation, procedural planet generation and so on.
There was no way, they could have not released this game after realizing the concept doesn’t work out terribly well. Or taken a step back and shifted the focus of the game towards space flight. Or taken a step back and deviate from the Bethesda-typical formula for this space theme.
These are options you have, when you’ve spent a few months prototyping, not after multiple years. They had to roll with the concept and basically try to bruteforce the fun into it.
Anyone who wants to make a space exploration game needs to play The Outer Wilds. It has one star system all the planets are about 10 miles across and the game resets every 20 minutes and there is no combat, and yet it’s still an infinitely better game than StarField. Why?
Because it actually has things to do and explore and interact with. Everything you do has reason to it, It has intention. There’s nothing in the sidelines that was added just a pad the experience out because it’s embarrassing having 11 quadrillion planets and nothing to do on any of them, so better add some random quests.
They do not get props for trying to recycle their engine for the 100th time, because Creation sucked when they used it for Oblivion and it sucked when they upgraded it for Skyrim and it continued to suck through Fallout 4 into Fallout 76 and is very clearly not an engine designed to support a large game in space. Same bugs all the way through like five consecutive games.
Starfield was the least rocky release probably in Bethesda history in terms of bugs, but that’s only because MS took literally the entire QA team from Xbox and assigned them to Starfield and brute forced a lot of the initial bugs out of the launch. A good engine doesn’t need an entire megacorp’s fucking quality assurance department to get ironed out.
Ultimately it feels like the same engine, despite having been improved to 64 bit for SKSE, upgraded even further for FO4, and then slapped with netcode for FO76 - it’s still not good. It’s unbelievable that we can have games with life-scale cities and zero loading screens, while Bethesda still needed to cut Neon in half and instance basically everything behind a billion loading screens. Even Jemison is like, 4 separate zones and not just one whole city.
Believe me, I really don’t care to defend Bethesda. I’m not saying their engine is incredibly good.
I’m mostly saying, I feel like their games would be different and even more AAA-generic, if they built it on top of Unreal or Unity. And I’m giving them mild props for not just buying into the duopoly.
But I’m also just saying that, as a result of building their own engine, Bethesda can’t just quickly prototype something. To see what the final game looks/feels like, they have to invest years into engine development.
Blizzard, back in the day, was willing to simply can games, even highly anticipated ones, when they didn’t meet their standards, even after a couple years of work. StarCraft: Nova, Lord of the Clans…
And Square-Enix managed to take an MMORPG that was already released, tear it down to bare bones and completely rebuild it to make it good, with FFXIV: A Realm Reborn.
So it is possible to completely redo something if it doesn’t work out…
Nintendo has IP lawyers. They have to, at their scale, because they will constantly be bombarded by patent trolls, licensing companies etc. trying to extract profit out of Nintendo. So, like any other large business, they hire IP lawyers to protect themselves.
Most patent disagreements are resolved by cross-licensing. That’s where one business says, in response to a law suit, “oh, but you’re actually using 6 of our patents, so maybe we can come to an agreement”. A patent is both a shield and a sword. Even against trolls they can be useful, as they can be used to argue against troll arguments, if it gets to court, or pull in other business to the defense, if helpful.
IP lawyers know this. So they extract every patent they can out of everything a company does, as a way to build up the IP bank.
So, I highly doubt “Nintendo wants to prevent others” bla bla. It’s just IP lawyers doing their job.
I’ve sat in MANY discovery sessions with IP lawyers where they push and prod at software I, or my team, have written. “So, what you’ve effectively done is written a unique data structure to connect elements in memory?!”, “no, it’s a linked list, next question please”.
A bit of an unpopular opinion I’d love a tip option. Especially if I could tip a specific person. Like if I liked the soundtrack maybe I would tip the composer or whatever. Obviously I would require a few rules
100% of tips go to the developers or whoever I’m tipping
Dev pays don’t get cut because of expected tips.
However neither of these will be the case even if they implement something like that.
My country never let tipping culture cross over from America, and we never have to worry about that tipping stuff Americans complain about. When cheap credit card machines were still new, a bunch of businesses used American systems that asked for tips and employees and customers alike completely ignored that screen.
Also EA has to understand more and more people have experienced their garbage launches and will skip their gold plated launch prices because of the risk you end up buying a lemon that is subsequently abandoned.
Making sure the gameplay loop is interesting and the game performs properly is important. Focussing on all the latest engine features that requires people to have top tier hardware is only good for marketing. Marketing then eats up a tremendous amount of budget without adding anything to the offer they make.
The last EA game I bought was Jedi: Fallen Order for $4, and I still felt ripped off, because EA adds a mandatory online connection check to every game they release now, including Immortals.
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