End of an era for another game studio, as Freejam - developers of Robocraft and the in-development Robocraft 2 - are closing and so both games will also be shut down.
Robocraft was near and dear to me. It’s also the reason I don’t bother with live service games anymore. In 2017-2018-ish, Robocraft was one of my favorite games, ever. Then they were able to take that game away from me and replace it with something I liked far less. This is inevitable for any live service game; if not replacing the game you liked with something else, then its removal altogether so that no one can play it anymore in any form. It sucks.
It’s with a heavy heart that we have to tell you all that we’re ceasing production on Robocraft 2 and closing Freejam as a studio. With the current market conditions and the server costs required to keep a game like RC2 running, we’re simply unable to launch or sustain development.
You know, if you let your customers run the servers themselves, we’d be able to keep playing the game and you wouldn’t have to bear the burden of those costs!
If you’re ok with emulation (or have the hardware & means to acquire the game), the infamous Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is similar to Robocraft - only singleplayer-focused, with the technical limitations of the Xbox 360, and a bastardized version of the BK artistic direction.
I’m not sure the game aged well, but other than that I got nothing
Robocaft was my most played game on steam for many many years. It’s sad to see it shutting down, but it hasn’t been the game I fell in love with for so long it doesn’t feel like i’m missing much. The armor changes and the physics changes and then the regen and the pivot to loot boxes took so much from a great game
The loot boxes came along with the beginning of the changes that really spoke to me. Not the loot boxes themselves, but the pivot away from grinding for objectively better parts and toward a flatter structure where everything had its use case. Of course, it sucks that neither of us can play either of those versions anymore.
I started to fall off the game around when they reworked the chassis blocks to all be one tier. There was so much depth in balancing durability with trying to stay in the right tier. And having to actually protect your pilot seat.
Losing the specialization with the weapons and letting you out all of them in the same vehicle further removed any kind of tradeoffs and then the loot boxes completely ruined the progression system.
I wish they’d release server code, it would be sick to be able to run small community games
The presence of tiers at all was what bothered me. The version I liked most did have light and heavy blocks with tradeoffs so you could have that depth without wreaking havoc on matchmaking by splitting your player base into 10 different pools.
Ahh you may have played earlier than I did. Most of my playtime was around rise of the walkers. I think I started playing a couple months before the nano machine heal gun things.
I liked being able to pull higher tier stuff into lower tier games, and even grinding up the ladder before I was T10 it was pretty rare for it to feel super unfair.
I started playing at the end of 2015. I saw the game go through a bunch of different forms. The people pulling higher tier weapons into lower tier bots were mostly doing all-in strategies around that weapon, because they didn’t have enough budget left for much else, IIRC. But it was going to be mathematically impossible to support to 10 tiers of 10v10 matches as the game went on anyway, and it became a really fun competitive game with no tiers in early 2017. Then they went for some kind of half-assed return to tiers at the end of 2018 that made no one happy.
Yeah, I can totally see how matchmaking for 10 tiers would implode. It really requires a ton of new players or each tier to be unique enough to go back to
Then they were able to take that game away from me and replace it with something I liked far less. This is inevitable for any live service game; if not replacing the game you liked with something else, then its removal altogether so that no one can play it anymore in any form. It sucks.
This is a good, concise way to describe one of the subtler problems with these types of game. At least with some of them, if they’re sold without DRM, you can keep the version you like, but more often than not, those are few and far between.
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That is a shame - I’ve had a lot of fun with it over the years. I can’t find anything quite like it- does anyone have any ideas?
If you’re ok with emulation (or have the hardware & means to acquire the game), the infamous Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is similar to Robocraft - only singleplayer-focused, with the technical limitations of the Xbox 360, and a bastardized version of the BK artistic direction.
I’m not sure the game aged well, but other than that I got nothing
Robocaft was my most played game on steam for many many years. It’s sad to see it shutting down, but it hasn’t been the game I fell in love with for so long it doesn’t feel like i’m missing much. The armor changes and the physics changes and then the regen and the pivot to loot boxes took so much from a great game
The loot boxes came along with the beginning of the changes that really spoke to me. Not the loot boxes themselves, but the pivot away from grinding for objectively better parts and toward a flatter structure where everything had its use case. Of course, it sucks that neither of us can play either of those versions anymore.
I started to fall off the game around when they reworked the chassis blocks to all be one tier. There was so much depth in balancing durability with trying to stay in the right tier. And having to actually protect your pilot seat.
Losing the specialization with the weapons and letting you out all of them in the same vehicle further removed any kind of tradeoffs and then the loot boxes completely ruined the progression system.
I wish they’d release server code, it would be sick to be able to run small community games
The presence of tiers at all was what bothered me. The version I liked most did have light and heavy blocks with tradeoffs so you could have that depth without wreaking havoc on matchmaking by splitting your player base into 10 different pools.
Ahh you may have played earlier than I did. Most of my playtime was around rise of the walkers. I think I started playing a couple months before the nano machine heal gun things.
I liked being able to pull higher tier stuff into lower tier games, and even grinding up the ladder before I was T10 it was pretty rare for it to feel super unfair.
I started playing at the end of 2015. I saw the game go through a bunch of different forms. The people pulling higher tier weapons into lower tier bots were mostly doing all-in strategies around that weapon, because they didn’t have enough budget left for much else, IIRC. But it was going to be mathematically impossible to support to 10 tiers of 10v10 matches as the game went on anyway, and it became a really fun competitive game with no tiers in early 2017. Then they went for some kind of half-assed return to tiers at the end of 2018 that made no one happy.
Yeah, I can totally see how matchmaking for 10 tiers would implode. It really requires a ton of new players or each tier to be unique enough to go back to
Man, Robocraft and Loadout were both great games I enjoyed back in the day, and they both crash and burned a few years later. A real shame.
Such is live service.
I remember the days of triforce armor and giant gun on tiny chassis kinds of bots.
This is a good, concise way to describe one of the subtler problems with these types of game. At least with some of them, if they’re sold without DRM, you can keep the version you like, but more often than not, those are few and far between.