Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”. Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:
Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn’t lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.
Can’t really say I’m surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.
If you don’t have a vision, don’t try to turn money into more money by making a game. Everyone loses. Dumping money on assets doesn’t make your trope copy/paste any better than the other million cheap Chinese clones on an app store.
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”.
This is exactly what AAA gaming is. Some guys in suits dictate projects to make money. There’s no passion behind them. They can’t do anything unique or interesting because it may not make money. They just make safe games, and they’re generic and boring as hell.
The issue is not the genre “single player (shooter)” itself, but that these big companies just churn out the same generic bullshit and then act surprised when no-one plays it.
AAA studios just don’t have the balls anymore to take a risk and develop something unique. And this is their downfall.
Titanfall 2, Metro Exodus, Ghostwire Tokyo, Doom (to name a few) are all excellent first person shooters. All of them have something unique about them that makes them worthwhile.
Titanfall 2 had one of the most acclaimed single-player campaigns, with it being only a few hours long and mostly a showcase to get people on multiplayer, and it was still enough.
Quite seriously I am actually looking to attempt to solo indie dev a sort of fps/tactics/management hybrid FPS that would at least start out as single player, and titanfall 2’s gameplay is something I am drawing inspiration from.
My basic idea is: What if you had the squad management and mission planning depth of basically Xenonauts, but you actually played out the missions in first person, with combat systems and load outs and player (and enemy) capabilities that resembled titanfall2’s mix of athletecism and gunplay?
Im in very early stages, but yeah basically titanfall2/xenonauts hybrid with (this is likely the hard part) procedurally generated, 3d levels, strung together with a kind of narrative generation engine, something sort of like rimworld’s system that simulates world conditions and then generates certain events based off of them, but also responds to certain specific things you do or do not do in mission, or what missions you choose to embark on over others.
Probably Im gonna focus on core gameplay systems and not really worry about graphics or assets at all until I can get any of this to an actual working concept level.
Probably similar in many ways, but ideally I would like to make it as or more in depth with other features from something like xenonauts.
Youve got resources such as vehicles of differing kinds you may choose to deploy or not, but you have to store them somewhere and also be able to repair them. All this comes from pools of funding from at first probably just completing a mission according to guidelines, but some things take maybe an R&D program or just outright raiding a rival faction or something.
Maybe you want to go a more special forces type route and have a few exceptionally well trained / equipped soldiers and leverage things like helicopters to do infil and exfil and leverage the element of surprise.
Maybe you want to act more like a conventional military and go with larger numbers with decent equipment and a wider array of possible vehicles and support systems.
Maybe you want to focus as much as possible on gathering intel before missions, maybe you want a more intelligent active battlefield info you can access in mission via various sensors.
So… what I am aiming for is something that eventually allows for a more broad array of mission profiles and sort of map archetypes, which, depending on many factors, will have surprises that may occur, like an enemy force having the ability to call for reinforcements that maybe you did not know about, and might force you to withdraw.
Or maybe some missions will take place with a relatively high number of civillian AI running around and your org you work for/run will suffer massively if you just go scorched earth.
I dunno, these are all ambitions at this point, and Im going to focus on at the very least getting a functional combat prototype done first, and then testing out how well that and what I can make combat AI actually do actually works.
Its possible I’ll find some kind of thing that really works well, or really doesn’t work, and change scope significantly.
So far all I have really figured out is that a near future setting would seem to work best with the scope of either my minimal working concept, or a more extended version of it.
Oh hey Im surprised that all even posted, my connection crapped out right as I hit send.
But uh haha yeah.
My one saving grace is I have a lot of time on my hands.
But I expect it to take probably at least 6 months before I even have what Id consider a working combat prototype with a variety of different weapons and Ai routines, and maybe a barebones model of a procedural map generator.
Im guessing that me soloing a whole project like this could take 3 years, but if I can get a prototype working, I might have enough money to pay for some 3D assets to speed up dev time a bit.
Almost certainly not enough money to hire anyone lol, and I really really do not want to do kickstarter or early access and deal with the community and possible total failure.
Single player shooter’s aren’t bad or even unpopular right now. But I think people are beginning to realize that anything that has EA’s name attached to it is trash and just avoid it on principal.
Jup, even new iterations of their older IP seem to be devolving instead of taking that which was fun and expanding on it.
Maybe they should use all these behaviour experts to investigate why people keep playing games instead of figuring out how to maximally predate on your customer base.
Ubi does the same. I found the last farcy so Uninteresting that I stopped playing somewhere mid game. And the first signals from their pirate game are also not encouraging, while I know many people that looked forward to it.
Everyone in the single player fps demo is replaying the old good games, or seeking out like custom doom wads or the occasional actually good indie fps single player game, having at this point long given up on large studios being able to make a compelling single player fps.
Sure, a lot of us enjoy lots of other kinds of games too, but good lord is there an unscratchable itch for a new, compelling FPS campaign thats actually interesting and challenging.
It’s boomer shooters or nothing in that space right now. We’re starving out here. On my radar in the coming year or two are Mouse, Core Decay, and Agent 64, but no one knows what kind of quality we’ll get out of those. Also, is it a crime to just throw in some competitive multiplayer that’s meant to be played a handful of times with friends instead of being the next e-sport?
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.
Same. This seems to be getting more common with various media and products. Too many choices which is a good thing for consumers but not good for publishers.
I’m not the person you replied to but I’ve been a first person shooter fan since Wolfenstein 3D and original doom. I had NEVER heard of it til today. First person and tower defense games are basically all I play.
I mean im on my ps5 every day, browse a ton of game related content on lemmy and such, and share a lot of game news with my friend group, and Ive literally never heard of or seen marketing for this game.
They claim to have spent 40 million usd marketing it, I saw some people on twitch playing it when it first came out but it looked meh and was priced way too high so I didn’t watch much
“At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio’s debut project,” the former employee said. "The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution…
They must have done extremely bad marketing even though they spent so much on marketing because I’ve never heard of this game
This game was the most AA shit I’ve ever seen. In the PS2 days it would have got a 7.5 average from most reviewers then it would have had a not-insignificant number of people pick it up.
They are delusional for thinking a UE5 asset flip is a AAA game.
It was actually quite fun! I rented it off Gamefly and enjoyed it for about 30-40 hours. It’s basically an action-adventure shooter like Metroid. It’s a decent game, not groundbreaking, but definitely doesn’t deserve the hate people give it.
We should expect more of that with the upcoming UE5 titles. The devs that have devoted to releasing those seem to have very hard time optimising - they’ll likely expect us all to just own 4090s and still run their game with DLSS ultra performance or other fake frames.
STALKER 2 will have the janky soul we expect from the series, but this mostly, mostly due to engine choice and apparent attempts to visually impress the player. Or the investors.
Nah, I’ve seen hate. But mostly from people who hate Wesdon-Like quip writting and, well, women-haters who can’t handle the characters being ugly (and they are ugly, admittedly), so I just dismissed the hate.
Unlike many people in this thread, I actually have heard of the game. The makers of a podcast I follow loved it, and had the head of the studio on their show for a pretty frank interview, too. When I learned that there was a free demo, I decided I would give the game a try some time.
And in light of the overwhelming negativity in this thread, I did so last night. And what can I say? I spent an hour and change going through the prologue, the training and the first battle sequence, and I really enjoyed it. Movement and shooting slinging magic are great fun, with a diversity of spells available pretty much from the get-go. Just shoot, or throw a massive armor-breaking spell at a wave of enemies, or use a lash to pull a remote enemy close and whack them. I wouldn’t have know what to expect from the ‘CoD with magic’ premise but it’s really enjoyable so far.
The voice acting is very good, and while the facial animations are a bit uncanny valley, I am enjoying the snarky dialogues and matching facial expressions. Gina Torres has presence, and the rest of the cast so far blends in fine.
I will definitely spend some more time with the demo, and if it doesn’t annoy me too much, I might just buy this. And that seems to be the feedback the devs got from many people - once players actually get their hands on it, they actually enjoy it. According ton the studio head, sales have picked up towards Christmas, and they’ve been getting a lot of conversions from the free demo.
I think the problem is just that, the game is… okay, not bad or good, just okay, unremarkable and forgettable.
If you want good sales you need to do something innovative and interesting, or something cliché but really well done.
Taking a look at Doom 2016 (also a single player shooter) we can see the core gameplay: Shoot demons, Pick up ammo, Shoot more demons. But it’s crafted so masterfully that you spend dozens or hundreds of hours doing just that.
Now with this game that I actually forgot the name mid comment, It’s… well you get the ideia.
Yeah, AAA for quite a while now has really only had any impact on graphics, and maybe on how playtested it was. That is one hell of a load bearing maybe. No correlation to quality on any other metrics.
I’ll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I’d say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I’m honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.
Yeah I will say, it’s painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it’s not a bad game per se. It’s just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.
The worst offense to me though is how there’s no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That’s the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.
The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally “AAA” now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that’s “AA”.
Much like “alpha” and “beta”, the meanings are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.
I’m so old when I started in games “alpha” meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.
Now it’s basically “alpha” means a demo, and “beta” means they’re buying time for GM release.
Regarding the alpha/beta point, increase in internet availability and rolling updates probably made all the work in that shift. In the old days if you published a raw product it would take a hell of an effort to amend it. Now it’s just a matter of a user not plugging the internet off for some time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This started happening when studios got bigger and marketing controlled release dates. By the 2010s or so, the actual devs had zero say. So some idiot owner would promise a game in 18 months, half the ideas would be removed due to time, and a rushed product went out.
“Games as a service” was just corporate speak for how to streamline putting out a game with less components and then adding them over time.
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If you don’t have a vision, don’t try to turn money into more money by making a game. Everyone loses. Dumping money on assets doesn’t make your trope copy/paste any better than the other million cheap Chinese clones on an app store.
This is exactly what AAA gaming is. Some guys in suits dictate projects to make money. There’s no passion behind them. They can’t do anything unique or interesting because it may not make money. They just make safe games, and they’re generic and boring as hell.
I’m very into shooters and this was a hard pass because it looked like a generic and boring Call of Duty re-skin and I’m not into that game.
Maybe the problem is not the current AAA or shooters landscape. Maybe it is more about the quality and the fun your games are.
“potential customer hears about product for the first time after it’s announced a flop”
I mean, a single player FPS… Oh it’s an EA game we are talking about! NEVERMIND.
The issue is not the genre “single player (shooter)” itself, but that these big companies just churn out the same generic bullshit and then act surprised when no-one plays it.
AAA studios just don’t have the balls anymore to take a risk and develop something unique. And this is their downfall.
Titanfall 2, Metro Exodus, Ghostwire Tokyo, Doom (to name a few) are all excellent first person shooters. All of them have something unique about them that makes them worthwhile.
Goes to show that making a good game is still more art than science.
Hell, make a broken or buggy game, if it has the special something it’ll still likely become a classic.
Eg. Fallout New Vegas or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
Titanfall 2 also bombed, even a good game can flop if your marketing sucks or if you release it next to other massive hits.
Titanfall 2 had one of the most acclaimed single-player campaigns, with it being only a few hours long and mostly a showcase to get people on multiplayer, and it was still enough.
Quite seriously I am actually looking to attempt to solo indie dev a sort of fps/tactics/management hybrid FPS that would at least start out as single player, and titanfall 2’s gameplay is something I am drawing inspiration from.
My basic idea is: What if you had the squad management and mission planning depth of basically Xenonauts, but you actually played out the missions in first person, with combat systems and load outs and player (and enemy) capabilities that resembled titanfall2’s mix of athletecism and gunplay?
Im in very early stages, but yeah basically titanfall2/xenonauts hybrid with (this is likely the hard part) procedurally generated, 3d levels, strung together with a kind of narrative generation engine, something sort of like rimworld’s system that simulates world conditions and then generates certain events based off of them, but also responds to certain specific things you do or do not do in mission, or what missions you choose to embark on over others.
Probably Im gonna focus on core gameplay systems and not really worry about graphics or assets at all until I can get any of this to an actual working concept level.
So like Rainbow Six 1-3’s mission planning mode?
Probably similar in many ways, but ideally I would like to make it as or more in depth with other features from something like xenonauts.
Youve got resources such as vehicles of differing kinds you may choose to deploy or not, but you have to store them somewhere and also be able to repair them. All this comes from pools of funding from at first probably just completing a mission according to guidelines, but some things take maybe an R&D program or just outright raiding a rival faction or something.
Maybe you want to go a more special forces type route and have a few exceptionally well trained / equipped soldiers and leverage things like helicopters to do infil and exfil and leverage the element of surprise.
Maybe you want to act more like a conventional military and go with larger numbers with decent equipment and a wider array of possible vehicles and support systems.
Maybe you want to focus as much as possible on gathering intel before missions, maybe you want a more intelligent active battlefield info you can access in mission via various sensors.
So… what I am aiming for is something that eventually allows for a more broad array of mission profiles and sort of map archetypes, which, depending on many factors, will have surprises that may occur, like an enemy force having the ability to call for reinforcements that maybe you did not know about, and might force you to withdraw.
Or maybe some missions will take place with a relatively high number of civillian AI running around and your org you work for/run will suffer massively if you just go scorched earth.
I dunno, these are all ambitions at this point, and Im going to focus on at the very least getting a functional combat prototype done first, and then testing out how well that and what I can make combat AI actually do actually works.
Its possible I’ll find some kind of thing that really works well, or really doesn’t work, and change scope significantly.
So far all I have really figured out is that a near future setting would seem to work best with the scope of either my minimal working concept, or a more extended version of it.
???
Best of luck. But yes, there’s a good chance your scope is too large, so definitely start small.
Oh hey Im surprised that all even posted, my connection crapped out right as I hit send.
But uh haha yeah.
My one saving grace is I have a lot of time on my hands.
But I expect it to take probably at least 6 months before I even have what Id consider a working combat prototype with a variety of different weapons and Ai routines, and maybe a barebones model of a procedural map generator.
Im guessing that me soloing a whole project like this could take 3 years, but if I can get a prototype working, I might have enough money to pay for some 3D assets to speed up dev time a bit.
Almost certainly not enough money to hire anyone lol, and I really really do not want to do kickstarter or early access and deal with the community and possible total failure.
Im the exact opposite of a PR person.
Single player shooter’s aren’t bad or even unpopular right now. But I think people are beginning to realize that anything that has EA’s name attached to it is trash and just avoid it on principal.
Jup, even new iterations of their older IP seem to be devolving instead of taking that which was fun and expanding on it.
Maybe they should use all these behaviour experts to investigate why people keep playing games instead of figuring out how to maximally predate on your customer base.
Ubi does the same. I found the last farcy so Uninteresting that I stopped playing somewhere mid game. And the first signals from their pirate game are also not encouraging, while I know many people that looked forward to it.
Everyone in the single player fps demo is replaying the old good games, or seeking out like custom doom wads or the occasional actually good indie fps single player game, having at this point long given up on large studios being able to make a compelling single player fps.
Sure, a lot of us enjoy lots of other kinds of games too, but good lord is there an unscratchable itch for a new, compelling FPS campaign thats actually interesting and challenging.
It’s boomer shooters or nothing in that space right now. We’re starving out here. On my radar in the coming year or two are Mouse, Core Decay, and Agent 64, but no one knows what kind of quality we’ll get out of those. Also, is it a crime to just throw in some competitive multiplayer that’s meant to be played a handful of times with friends instead of being the next e-sport?
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.
Same. Those 40mil probably went into someones pocket, not surprising noone is playing the game
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 had never heard of it either until this post.
This is the first time for me as well, and it sounds likely to be the last.
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.
I play a lot of games but Ive never heard of this game before this post
Same. This seems to be getting more common with various media and products. Too many choices which is a good thing for consumers but not good for publishers.
“Nobody bought our game we didn’t market. Guess we’ll stop making an entire genre of games.”
There are many genres EA needs to stop making, but I doubt they’ll take the right lesson from this
I mean, it’s my favorite genre, so if EA can stay the fuck away from it, that’s not a bad outcome
Had you heard of it?
I’ve literally never heard of it, but not my genre.
I’m not the person you replied to but I’ve been a first person shooter fan since Wolfenstein 3D and original doom. I had NEVER heard of it til today. First person and tower defense games are basically all I play.
I think they mean single player shooter is their favorite genre, and would be happy for EA to stay away from them. Not the ‘game nobody heard of’
They did market it. A lot.
It’s just that the game’s trailers were wildly forgettable.
I mean im on my ps5 every day, browse a ton of game related content on lemmy and such, and share a lot of game news with my friend group, and Ive literally never heard of or seen marketing for this game.
They claim to have spent 40 million usd marketing it, I saw some people on twitch playing it when it first came out but it looked meh and was priced way too high so I didn’t watch much
From the article:
They must have done extremely bad marketing even though they spent so much on marketing because I’ve never heard of this game
This game was the most AA shit I’ve ever seen. In the PS2 days it would have got a 7.5 average from most reviewers then it would have had a not-insignificant number of people pick it up.
They are delusional for thinking a UE5 asset flip is a AAA game.
Wait for the “Body Cam” games to flood the market with their UE5 asset flips. Its all shit.
Apparently, $40 million doesn’t buy you much in today’s market, because I’ve literally never heard of this game until now.
I saw one YouTuber that I follow play it. It looked kinda interesting from his video, but he also has the same criticisms.
Probably spent it all on cable TV ads, where their audience ain’t at.
Or just blow and hookers.
“I’m telling you, the cocaine and hooker market is ripe for a AAA single player FPS game.”
It was actually quite fun! I rented it off Gamefly and enjoyed it for about 30-40 hours. It’s basically an action-adventure shooter like Metroid. It’s a decent game, not groundbreaking, but definitely doesn’t deserve the hate people give it.
It has Denuvo, and runs like crap even on $1500 hardware.
I don’t know what kind of sales they expected when they don’t test it on lower spec PCs.
We should expect more of that with the upcoming UE5 titles. The devs that have devoted to releasing those seem to have very hard time optimising - they’ll likely expect us all to just own 4090s and still run their game with DLSS ultra performance or other fake frames.
STALKER 2 will have the janky soul we expect from the series, but this mostly, mostly due to engine choice and apparent attempts to visually impress the player. Or the investors.
I don’t think it’s getting hate. I think it’s getting indifference because no one knows what it is.
Nah, I’ve seen hate. But mostly from people who hate Wesdon-Like quip writting and, well, women-haters who can’t handle the characters being ugly (and they are ugly, admittedly), so I just dismissed the hate.
Unlike many people in this thread, I actually have heard of the game. The makers of a podcast I follow loved it, and had the head of the studio on their show for a pretty frank interview, too. When I learned that there was a free demo, I decided I would give the game a try some time.
And in light of the overwhelming negativity in this thread, I did so last night. And what can I say? I spent an hour and change going through the prologue, the training and the first battle sequence, and I really enjoyed it. Movement and
shootingslinging magic are great fun, with a diversity of spells available pretty much from the get-go. Just shoot, or throw a massive armor-breaking spell at a wave of enemies, or use a lash to pull a remote enemy close and whack them. I wouldn’t have know what to expect from the ‘CoD with magic’ premise but it’s really enjoyable so far.The voice acting is very good, and while the facial animations are a bit uncanny valley, I am enjoying the snarky dialogues and matching facial expressions. Gina Torres has presence, and the rest of the cast so far blends in fine.
I will definitely spend some more time with the demo, and if it doesn’t annoy me too much, I might just buy this. And that seems to be the feedback the devs got from many people - once players actually get their hands on it, they actually enjoy it. According ton the studio head, sales have picked up towards Christmas, and they’ve been getting a lot of conversions from the free demo.
I think the problem is just that, the game is… okay, not bad or good, just okay, unremarkable and forgettable.
If you want good sales you need to do something innovative and interesting, or something cliché but really well done.
Taking a look at Doom 2016 (also a single player shooter) we can see the core gameplay: Shoot demons, Pick up ammo, Shoot more demons. But it’s crafted so masterfully that you spend dozens or hundreds of hours doing just that.
Now with this game that I actually forgot the name mid comment, It’s… well you get the ideia.
Or a recognisable brand. Starfield got panned and still sold oodles.
Case in point. Doom has a lot riding on its name and legacy, and many people will buy it just because of that.
EA is a truly awful idea. I’m curious if their sports games are the only thing keeping them in business.
Well that, The Sims and the Star Wars license…
A GENERIC AAA (visual only) single player shooter was a bad idea.
Aveum was literally mid. It just looked good since it was the first game to use UE5.
Yeah, AAA for quite a while now has really only had any impact on graphics, and maybe on how playtested it was. That is one hell of a load bearing maybe. No correlation to quality on any other metrics.
I’ll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I’d say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I’m honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.
Yeah I will say, it’s painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it’s not a bad game per se. It’s just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.
The worst offense to me though is how there’s no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That’s the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.
Just FYI, the term triple-A doesn’t refer directly to the quality of the game. It simply means it was made by a larger, well-established company.
The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally “AAA” now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that’s “AA”.
Much like “alpha” and “beta”, the meanings are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.
I’m so old when I started in games “alpha” meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.
Now it’s basically “alpha” means a demo, and “beta” means they’re buying time for GM release.
Regarding the alpha/beta point, increase in internet availability and rolling updates probably made all the work in that shift. In the old days if you published a raw product it would take a hell of an effort to amend it. Now it’s just a matter of a user not plugging the internet off for some time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This started happening when studios got bigger and marketing controlled release dates. By the 2010s or so, the actual devs had zero say. So some idiot owner would promise a game in 18 months, half the ideas would be removed due to time, and a rushed product went out.
“Games as a service” was just corporate speak for how to streamline putting out a game with less components and then adding them over time.
Unfortunately it worked, and players bought in.
I agree 100%. The magic was not magic. It was just different looking guns. Which made the game seem more dull to me. Even if it was an okay shooter.
Is there “ammo”? I know there’s like a reload/recharge system isn’t there?
Peak player count was less than 800 players on steam… Flop is an understatement.
Those 100 workers EA laid off dont deserve to be thrown in the trash; why dont the execs take a nice paycut instead?
I think companies that make profits should not be allowed to lay off people. You‘re welcome.
Edit: without cause