Here’s the thing though, these games are highly reviewed and played but it may still in fact be more profitable to keep pumping out mid tier trash. For companies that have long forgotten the time when they had a soul and were a group of passionate gamers, that’s all that matters.
Im starting to believe the big triple A game industry is starting to collapse, not the gaming industry it self, but the big companies that make generic after generic blockbuster kind of games. They keep getting more and more desperate and predatory in order to appeal to the share holders and maximize profits because their type of games have become so expensive to produce.
Remember when games didnt have to put the same amount (or even more) of the development cost into marketing? Good games sells themselves, every gamer knows it, but the monkeys with suits who run the companies nowdays cant compute that. Instead they keep coming with more and more shitty ways to steal our money. They will try anything instead of listening to their developers ( who are the actual gamers that know what works and what dosnt).
And so here we are. Just in this year I have seen a single player game put a mechanic like the NG+ mode only availible for the deluxe edition (yakuza), an extra save game file or fast travels as microtransactions (dragon dogmas 2), extra missions and a 3 days early launch acces for single player game only allowed in the 110$ edition (star wars outlaws), and a company literally changing their former terms and conditions in order to sell a 250$ p2w pack and killing it self and the work of the last 5 years? in less than 24h (tarkov)
Im starting to believe the big triple A game industry is starting to collapse, not the gaming industry it self, but the big companies that make generic after generic blockbuster kind of games.
I’m not that hopeful, casual gamers keep buying the same low effort games like Fifa, NBA, Pokemon every year even though they got enshitified 10 years ago. The opinion of game-educated and demanding people that represent a minority of their market will not change those game companies. It’s like asking fat food chains to get into Michelin ranking, they don’t care. All we can do is allow good quality independent game makers to exist by giving our money to them instead of the fast food games companies.
Exactly. Ubisoft is the perfect example of this. Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, R6. They used to take risks and try to push gaming forward with amazing ideas and design that made my kid brain explode.
Now those IPs are dead or extremely stale. And it’s because releasing an AC with microtransactions makes them more money than making an offline single player Splinter Cell. Or releasing a skin for 20 euros for R6 siege makes them a huge profit for the time invested in creating it.
God I wish we’d get a new single player Splinter Cell. Some of my best memories I have as a kid are playing the original Splinter Cell. Even if we do, it’ll be riddled with microtransactions and will fail to capture the magic of the original games.
Especially as Michael Ironside seems to have gotten over his medical troubles. I know he’s 74 now but one last outing as Sam Fisher? Imagine?
It’s strange though, because Ubisoft on paper should be something I hate, but when I actually play one (and I’m a single player gamer), they’ve got fun gameplay, and the store, although it is there, generally keeps out the way and when I accidentally press the button in the menu that goes into it, there’s nothing I’d ever consider handing over actual money for. The game never points you at it, or makes you feel it’s needed.
I don’t even know who it’s for. Who buys cosmetics in a single player game? It genuinely feels like it’s just been put in to appease the beancounters.
That said I don’t get excited enough to buy them at full price, and normally wait until they’re on PSPlus or something. There’s nothing in most of these AAA games to truly love. They’re a sea of merely “alright”, and they’re all way too long.
There’s nothing in most of these AAA games to truly love. They’re a sea of merely “alright”, and they’re all way too long.
But why bother with alright when there’s thousands of highly regarded indie games out there for a quarter of the price?
Probably same reason people go to McDonald’s.
There’s nothing in most of these AAA games to truly love. They’re a sea of merely “alright”, and they’re all way too long.
Captures Ubisoft’s philosophy on one sentence. But it’s what makes them money, so they’ll keep doing it.
To be honest, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint was the most mid, regular, non-surprising game I’ve played in years. I know they tried later to make it better, but it was just so empty and repetitive, like The Division 2.
Wildlands surprised me multiple times, Breakpoint only made me ask myself multiple times: why is this not possible?, why do I have to do this all over again?, why do we have vehicles if most of the places can’t be reached normally?
Also, The Division 2 was incredibly boring. I really want to like it, but I have to repeat the same things over and over, and you don’t even get good rewards, farming is boring and doesn’t compensate the time spent, at least not like in The Division 1 and its incursions, you were at least guaranteed something.
I haven’t bought any game from Ubisoft after TD2 and Breakpoint. I can already spend time in those games if I want the ubisoft experience. I
Character creation in single player games is often a big thing and considered in a lot of reviews. I played a lot of midnight suns, and while I would never actually buy any cosmetic stuff, I definitely liked unlocking the skins and had ones I particularly liked. I even changed up once in a while. I would think even in multiplayer games, people aren’t generally buying the skins for other people, but because they like to look that way.
It comes as no surprise that single player cosmetics is a source of revenue.
At some point it’s really up to the consumers to stop buying shit games
This is it. The reviews only matter to the extent they affect sales. Many shit-scored titles make billions for the suits (eg. FIFA, COD), and do so year after year without significant risks involved
This is modern and late stage capitalism in general
Principal Skinner = no. The children yearn for the microtransactions
microtransactions isn’t relayed to this at all though… I hate them as much as anyone else but this is about giving the devs the time they need.
Your reply is basically “I know buzzwords but don’t know what they really mean so I’ll just reply with whatever comes to mind about games nowadays being bad”.
Naw, the companies will miss the point and demand studios go as cheap and dirty as they want for Helldivers 3 and Baldur’s Gate 4
I suspect that may be part of the reason Larian isn’t making a Baldur’s Gate 4. At the very least, they probably realize that lightning is very unlikely to strike twice, so why tempt fate? Get out of the series while everyone still loves you. They probably also recognize that they would face a Knights of the Old Republic 2 situation where the IP owner will want more profit faster, and so they will set deadlines which don’t fit with Larian’s design model. At best, BG4 would be a rushed mess, with Larian struggling for years afterwards trying to deliver the game they wanted to deliver and burning down all of the goodwill they have built up with gamers. It’s just not worth it. If they walk away and stand up their own IP, they get complete control and can take the time to deliver what they want to deliver. Sure, they don’t have the built in fanbase that a D&D title would have; but, I suspect they are going to have a lot of that fanbase follow them anyway.
Sadly, Hasbro absolutely will be willing to burn down any and all goodwill BG3 has built up. I expect we’ll see some smaller developer handed BG4, put under unrealisting timelines and the result will be a disaster. It will not be the fault of the development team. I suspect any dev team is going to be salivating at the prospect of making a D&D title. It’s a dream project and they will bend over backwards to get it. They just won’t realize, or hope they can avoid, Hasbro breaking their back in the quest for short term profit.
Your comment just says that you don’t know anything about Larian, so don’t slander them for no reason at all
larian isn’t making bg4, and hasbro are
absolutely
going to fuck it up trying to milk it
Larian is not making Baldur’s Gate 4. Stand down soldier.
But they probably think that
How bad is your reading comprehension? Reread just the first sentence.
Hasn’t Larian already said they aren’t doing Baldur’s Gate 4?
- Corporations aren’t your friends, stop stanning
- Larian doesn’t own Baldur’s Gate and wouldn’t be the ones making decisions for BG4, that would be Wizards Of The Coast
also no rebalancing the games progression so you can shoehorn mtx into it helps a lot too
Eh, there’s a lot that could be said about Helldivers, at least as a PC port.
Great game, nice content delivery, very cool. No DLSS, no modern FSR (it straight up uses an horrendous implementation of FSR 1.0), very bad usage of multiple threads, quite a few bugs - the armour ratings literally did not work, as in, a crucial feature of the game that changes the entire balancing of gear and enemies did not apply, meaning you could have a party of a heavy gear tank and light gear medic and both would take the same damage from the same enemies.
Again, the game itself is very fun. But I’m absolutely not going to praise this port and claim it’s a shining example of developer quality.
Releasing a perfect game that doesn’t have any bugs isn’t what the article is about.
It’s talking about teams that have honed their craft over many years of developing titles they cared about working on and investing in continuous improvements, of which both Arrowhead and Larian have done.
That’s true for virtually every game. Diablo IV: hated by many, considered a major downgrade, Blizzard bad, gets boring, doesn’t handle live content updates right… yet go watch the videos with the team that designed the dungeons and the assets, they’re extremely passionate, they are proud of their work, they explain how they spent a looooong time just working on little details they thought people would appreciate.
It’s super unfair to raise Helldivers and Baldur’s Gate to this elevated “worthy passionate developer” status and disregard others while, at the same time, being selectively blind about the issues both of these games had and still have. In fact, Baldur’s Gate straight up required months of Microsoft intervention to finally (partially!) fix CPU affinity issues.
Most devs are passionate about their work, but the point is that the company around them needs to give them enough time and flexibility to make something great. Diablo 4 didn’t have that, but BG3 did (I can’t speak to helldivers because I haven’t played it enough yet).
It’s almost as if it’s not so simple to just make statements about how to make good games
you can be incredibly passionate while still having mbas breathing down your neck
if you don’t think there was a ratio of developers to neck-breathers of at best 2:1 at blizzard you have more faith in their internal management than me
It’s using an ancient discontinued engine. Hopefully we see improvements with time
yeah but ultimately it doesn’t matter because the end product is good on the whole
i feel those kinds of details are exactly what meddlers would want to meddle in, when the entire argument of the article is that the game manages to be good on the whole not despite its lack of meddlers but because of it
You need to touch grass I think.
Great argument!
Somewhere along the way I lost the verve to argue about this kind of thing. It’s not that I can’t, I just don’t care anymore
Edit: The guy below me has a valid point. Ignore this comment.
Then why are you here, trying to start arguments?
if you respond to “touch grass” with anything along the lines of an imperious “hah what fallacious and illogical reasoning” while pushing up your glasses on the bridge of your nose like an anime villain, then yes i think it might be meadow time for you
I have no idea how to respond to this lol, I couldn’t understand a single phrase on this comment. What’s anything got to do with anime here?
There’s a much better game in that regard:
Factorio
Been on my wishlist for quite some time. Don’t really know much about it. Is it really that good?
Factorio is the best manufacturing/logistics sim by a huge margin. Some of that is technical things, but the biggest contributor is game balance and the complexity curve. They spent years iterating to find a sweet spot.
Satisfactory is pretty amazing. I won’t claim it’s better but that margin is not as big as you’re making it sound.
It is the best, and the benchmark, for the survivalcraft factory RTS genre. They optimised the game to an absolutely ridiculous degree, that it will even run smooth on a Nintendo Switch.
Probably the best game i am playing, 6000h+ into it now. If you like that type of game, you will love factorio.
Has a free demo on steam, so you can try before you buy.A demo? Great. I have a feeling I’m going to regret this based on the comments here.
I expected Helldivers 2 to be good, but not “unforeseeable appeal that knocks out back-end servers and leaves players in a weeks-long login purgatory” good
It continues to boggle my mind that people will take this objectively bad thing built in to the game’s design and turn it into good press. Being unable to play the game you paid for is a bad thing. They could have let you host the game yourself. Yes, even the dungeon master part that Joel does. That they don’t let you not only leads to login problems with unexpectedly populous launches but also an expiration date that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t even have when it comes to online multiplayer.
Agreed. This is one of the frustrating casualties of live service microtransaction games. Can’t let people run servers or mod it because otherwise how can you sell them stuff?
Having launch issues seems to be the norm nowadays.I do lot think anyone expects complex software to be bug free.
But the response and speed of fixing issues from arrow head are very good, and an example for others to follow.Dedicated servers are awesome tho. And all great games have that. Makes the game live forever if the community cares enough. Cnc renegade and enemy territory still have players.
Considering Helldivers 1 just finished it’s 135th War cycle, I’m not particularly afraid about an expitation date from the DM/online play side. Heck, I’d imagine when Arrowhead finally pulla the plug on HD1, they’ll likely update it so it works offline.
And the gameplay portion kinda already does.
I’m not particularly afraid about an expitation date from the DM/online play side
It’s actually inevitable.
Heck, I’d imagine when Arrowhead finally pulla the plug on HD1, they’ll likely update it so it works offline.
I’m pretty sure I can count on my fingers the number of games that have actually patched their online-only functionality to work offline. Off the top of my head, it’s just Knockout City, and I think maybe a Gran Turismo game somewhere along the line.
It is a possibility for sure, but HD1 is still going after 8 years, and because AH doesn’t host the gameplay servers, I reckon the server costs aren’t excessive.
L4D2 is 15 years also, and still going, and still played. I hope and trust HD2 will be up long time.
Left 4 Dead 2 has LAN, and it’s entirely peer to peer when online. “A long time” is still worse than forever. It would be a damn shame if your favorite movie made before you were born didn’t survive long enough for you to enjoy it. And the more expensive it is to build and operate a given live service game, the shorter its lifespan is. Games like Warhaven and Hyperscape didn’t even last a few years.
It’s Match Making isn’t peer to peer, and requires a connection, though. I’d reckon the playerbase to wither quickly without Valve servers and/or Steam friend list, even though technically possible, and a 3rd party could devise a system of finding players.
Valve offers ubiquitous matchmaking services as a part of Steam. They operate as long as Steam does. They’re funded by all the revenue that comes in every time anyone makes a purchase on Steam; these same services apply to third parties who choose to use them, too. Helldivers 2’s servers are run by some function of Arrowhead and Sony, and they shut down when Helldivers 2, in particular, stops making money, rendering the game inoperable.
Liberty will see you through
Okay yes, but helldivers is still filled to the brim with bugs. Not quite an equal comparison
Edit: wild that fanboys will down vote you for simply stating a fact
The bugs are quite literally a feature.
There’d be half a game if they took out the Terminids.
Yeah, it’s bonkers it’s been out for months and months and the Spear is still completely broken.
I just left a game where someone was using the Spear to great effect, although they were finding it a bit of a pain to lock. That’s pretty different to completely broken.
I’m shocked. Every time I use it, I can’t get a lock on anything. When I manage to, it works great, but it’s not worth it for me over the quasar.
Spear isn’t in a good place, but it works after you learn its kinks. I wish they made the locking work better and added a range indicator when you are aiming it too close, so you know why it’s not locking in that case.
Yeah, in one game I was having issues locking at a big distance. Maybe the hitboxes of the hills the hulk was running across were being funky, so it was thinking it was out of sight. Idk.
Not a word of a lie. Filled to the brim with bugs and automatons.
I find the game in general pretty mid. I’d rather play DRG 100% of the time.
That was true when it launched, but past month I’ve had 0 crashing in about 100 hours of gametime. It was unfortunate, but it’s not filled to brim with bugs, unless you’re referring to the Terminids 😄
We killed 2 billion of them a week ago, but they just keep coming.
Your comment’s score has convinced me that the above post is just paid shillery to promote helldivers.
Removed by mod
Most games lose something like 80%-90% of their players in the first couple months. Helldivers 2 is still at about 35% of peak. That’s pretty huge. Is it, literally, losing steam? Yes, in a technical sense, you’re right. But all games lose steam. Helldivers 2 is losing it way slower than comparable games, which is much more important imo.
I play this game exclusively on Linux without issues so the anticheat doesn’t seem that intrusive. Could be my perception of it though.
Yeah, a true rootkit kernel-level anticheat wouldn’t work on Linux at all (see: Valorant and its anticheat - Vanguard).
Since the butthurt mods didn’t like it and removed the comment, I’ll summarize it for future readers:
A wave of downvotes hits every comment critical of Helldivers 2. This whole post and discussion is paid shillery.
This whole post and discussion is paid shillery.
People aren’t being shills, you’re just being a moron. Your comment had nothing to do with the article in question and was nothing more than irrelevant ranting, which is why people were downvoting you.
Extra extra, shill denies shillery
You are wrong, and you should be ashamed of yourself for accusing people without any proof. If you really believe everyone who praises the game to be shills, then you’re also deluded.
I’ve 250 hours in, and loving the game. Sure it’s starting to lose the appeal slowly after this long in, but I sure as hell got my 40€ worth, and I know me and friends will return to have fun with it periodically, similarly to L4D2. The gameplay loop is just that good.
I’m so happy you’re absolutely fine with your security and privacy being compromised, but it doesn’t make it right.
Helldivers stole the matchmaking form Warframe/Destiny (more Warframe) and I got thousands of hours in both, but Helldivers made it so obscure that I could not figure out how to find a group. I was placed on one once. Then I had a loading screen, then a hidden loading screen (aka “ships fly next to each other sequence”), then walked up to the person I was apparently in a group with, then got kicked, had the same amount of loading, just backwards. After that, I tried several missions, all without any support by anything. The combat system is utterly useless when alone (which I only was because of matchmaking). I refunded this very undercooked game.
Why not use Horizon (doesn’t matter which one) as an example? Or Xenoblade Chronicles? God of war?
You know what, I am gonna call skill issue.
I get that the “press R to join a group” can be overlooked or that not everyone has the intuition to click on the active missions on a planet (alright, these are currently bugged and do not refresh quick enough so always full).But all one has to do is a quick google search to find out you just open the big holo planet and press R, there are also definitely worse offenders in cryptic/useless UIs.
I do have to generally agree, however this is also easily the weakest part of the game. The game doesn’t hand hold you through explaining everything with full screen explanations like some games, and there’s a lot going on with the map screen to notice the difficulty and matchmaking functions when you first jump into the game. However, it is right there. The first couple missions it steers you towards are so simple and short you definitely don’t need teammates to complete, and from my experience they basically assume you won’t have any. After you play a couple short missions alone, it makes sense you’d look at more in the interface, it’s not rocket science.
However, the high number of loading screens and animations to get into and out of a party simply to make it “look” nice is absurd. An animation of the ship jumping to a planet, then an animation of you coming out of a pod onto the ship, then if you are kicked an animation of you doing the exact same thing back to your ship, taking 30-60 seconds to run through. Animating it all for a single ship to deploy from, versus a standard matchmaking room is just a waste of time for matchmaking. It looks cool and for friends is awesome, but to just play the game, it’s a massive waste of time. This is made even more annoying with players kicking people from their teams for any number of reasons so all of those nice looking loads just waste that time and the kicked player then needs to walk all the way back through their ship to get to the map and try again. This is the most annoying part of getting kicked honestly.
I think part of this is also a good chunk of the community either not knowing how, or not utilizing the party privacy functionality. So people aren’t putting themselves into things like friends-only or closed parties when they don’t want to play with randoms. And then there’s always the toxic players kicking people simply for not playing the meta.
A party leader kicking players within a couple minutes of joining a party should negatively affect that player in some form to ensure people use the privacy system correctly and help stop some of this meta toxicity. Like an inability to call stratagems for some time in mission (and it not counting until actually playing, so they can’t just sit on the ship to wait it out). They already have the in game propaganda system setup, declare the player anti-democratic or something to make in game punishment seamless with the lore.
Of course, this can be described as a skill issue. Yet, the OP states that games get better and more polished if you let “Developers cook”, using Helldivers 2 as an example. My reply was that the game is not an example of what I’d call “polished”.
