BioWare: "Your Destiny clone flopped. What now, boss?"Originally Posted by Cam
EA: "WTF? I thought you guys were good at making games?"
BW: "We did what you told us to do."
EA: "I told you to not suck!"
BW: "You told us to copy a repetitive game with no story."
EA: "We need a successful, established property with a fanbase."
BW: "You mean Mass Effect and Dragon Age?"
EA: "Yeah! That's the ticket!"
BW: "Can we just go back to what we were doing?"
EA: "OK, FINE. HAVE IT YOUR WAY."
Probably accurate.
Keef: there are a handful of service games and looter-shooters that are kicking along okay. I can even name one of them that is genuinely popular and is doing really well (Warframe). But not a single one of them hasn't had some significant problems or controversy along the way that needed to be fixed.
The genre is full of half-baked and slightly callous money grabs, where the publisher expects to make a fortune at the expense of providing a worthwhile experience for the average player, while at the same time engineering an economy that is designed to prey upon addicts. The list of failures is growing every year. The proportion of failures to successes within this genre is troubling.
Remember Fallout 76? Ghost Recon: Wildlands 2? Marvel's Avengers? They are just three quite significant failures in the genre from the last few years, with Fallout being perhaps the most notorious one.
Yeah, but every popular genre does that (ends up with a bunch of repetitive stuff and cash grab bullshit), and only GaaS really have a chance to "fix" themselves generally because they're designed to be updated. Usually the games just fail and go away and no one cares.
There have been plenty of shit first person shooters, stealth games, rhythm/music games, open world games, etc.
Get that weak shit off my track
Actually FO76 is doing ok, all things considered.
But the other two mentioned by RWA? Manure LOL
And the story for this is that a game that came out in 2019 isn't going to continue getting new content in its third year. That's the equivalent of a game that was only popular enough for two years of DLC. That's not some rare, huge newsworthy failure. It's an average game that everyone hoped would be huge, but plenty of AAA games have been disappointments since AAA games became a thing. They'll just keep plugging away, they'll try to make another one, and when one hits it will all be worth it.
Get that weak shit off my track
I looked up the Steam charts. Warframe had 50,000 players in the last 24 hours. Fallout 76 had 5,000. Avengers had 500.
And Keith it IS a failure. All the years of development, money invested, grind and poor work practices imposed on the rank-and-file staff, mismanagement and reboots close to launch, EA forcing BioWare out of its comfort zone to begin with. There’s plenty of literature out there detailing Anthem’s problems. It would have been a good game if it was a single player adventure in the mould of Halo with more map variety, but EA wanted it to be a tent-pole live service game. If it was a success it would not have needed yet another reboot after launch and it would still be going strong today.
To reinforce my point from yesterday: the live service looter shooter genre is an intrinsically broken genre. The reason stems from the fact that the games are designed to be long-term prospects that keep a core player base for many years. This means an investment in a LOT of time from a large group of players, rather than short narrative games that people can play for a few weeks then move on. The idea is that a publisher only has to invest in a single game, saving them money, and keep it ticking over for 3-5 years or a decade.
It all falls apart because big publishers simply cannot make these things work. They aren’t the sort of games that spring organically out of a development studio; it needs to be forced out of them from above, and they are built to a price. The core of the problem is player time investment. The numbers of people needed to keep them afloat is quite large, but with a few already successful titles in the market, how many more players do you think would be available or willing to split off and play a new game?
To make them work you need a fun and engaging core gameplay loop (which Anthem failed at), worthwhile rewards (again, failure), rock-solid meta structure with limited opportunity for cheating/exploitation (failure), no bugs that impact any of the previous points (big failure), good story/art/word building/environment (pass, but also failure) and enough end-game to keep players interested (beeeeeg failure). And on top of that the games will rely on a small percentage of whales to exploit in order to guarantee cash flow. So they generally don’t reward the average player for their time investment, and are exploitative in terms of cash investment.
It. Is. A. Broken. Genre.
I’m very much bummed about Anthem being canned, I thought the core flight/combat mechanics and the world were very engaging, but it clearly needed a fresh start in terms of development. I understand why they cancelled “NEXT”, since it’d be a high risk, and the name is now tainted... but still, very bummed.
And yet Division, Destiny, GTA: Online, Warframe, Borderlands, etc.
How many failed racing games have there been? By major players, even. Does that mean it is a failed genre? A high risk genre, sure, but that's almost all of AAA gaming.
Is Anthem a failure that was pushed by the people up top and forced a lot of overworking by the developers? Sure. But so was Fallout 76, Mass Effect: Andromeda, No Man's Sky, Battlefront II, etc etc. There are SO MANY failed AAA games across all genres and companies.
Just like MMOs, though, the successful looter shooters do push out the other ones because of the time investment needed, but that just makes the risk/reward even higher. If you can be one of the games that people decide to make their major time sink, you make a ton of money. If not, you don't. That's the risk of these big things, like making blockbuster movies.
Get that weak shit off my track
I'm with RWA on this.
And I have close to 1800 hours logged on Destiny 2, which is in the top 4 percent of players.
The game gets repetitive, and turns into a slog. The saving grace for me on Destiny vs the others in the genre, is the game FEELS so God damned solid from a playability side. Like, the guns feel good between the various subclasses, the supers feel special. When I am tired of PVE I can switch to PVP. If I want a mix, I can run Gambit. No other game offers this.
It also has a SOLID story, if you read the lore.
A good example of this is the lore for a hand Cannon called "Luna's Howl".
It's amazing.
The other games don't do this.
The genre, honestly sucks.
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