Star Citizen is in this picture. They added hunger and dehydration to a space exploration, cargo, and fighting game.
Oh boy. Time for an 800 comment long flamewar about Star Citizen. I’m ready.
I’m proud to be the one to start the fire this time. To be clear I do really want a good game out of all this.
Personally, I think Star Citizen is shallow and pedantic.
It is, it’s also in alpha still. If they were claiming beta in this state I’d be more worried rather than just mad they keep adding stupid shit instead of going full optimization. They have a game, they just need to get it out the door and worry about content in future releases. It’s like the painter who can’t call a painting finished.
I really feel there would be a market for something like star citizen without all the realism stuff that gets in the way of the gameplay. I’m a backer, and when I can get to playing the game it’s fun, but finding my way to the launch pad after every two years break when I’m trying to checkup on progress sucks.
Literally any other space game.
“Of course it was cost-intensive to program an engine that will render every single eyelash at a resolution that will require the player to buy an additional graphics card for each eyelash concurrently on-screen, but now we only need twelve and a half billion people to buy, no, what am I saying, to pre-order and pre-pay the Ultra-Super-Deluxe-Collector’s Edition and we’ll start to turn a profit.”
- current AAA gaming
And development teams are too big. No game should realistically be having 500+ people working on it. That’s too many people, too big a ship to steer fast enough for the changes that happen in game development. Even the biggest games have done very well with teams of 250 or less, including all staff that work on the game, how about development studios pay attention to that?
People expect all games to be multiplayer with online live ops and events and a steady flow of new content.
That’s why you need to have a 500 person team. Someone needs to be designing and coding the valentine’s event for 2025 right now
I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.
Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.
It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.
Who is these people that want this? And even if they do. Creating a good game does not need 500 people. And if you want to provide content after setup several small parallel teams to make cosmetics and stuff.
But the whole live service is something the companies want. So they can keep monetizing it and turn if off once a new iteration is done.
Check out the leaks from the Sony/Microsoft trial
There are literally tens of millions of people who ONLY use their PS5 for CoD - a live service multiplayer game.
A whole generation of people have literally never played a single player game and don’t know how to.
It’s like they exist in an alternate reality. But then I’m fine with that too. If there is a market for that… just a shame that the hunt for this audience eats up everything else.
Games got bigger to their own detriment. Halo and Gears of War are open world games now, and they’re worse off for it. Assassin’s Creed games used to be under 20 hours, and now they’re over 45. Not every game is worse for being longer, as two of my favorite games in the past couple of years are over 100 hours long, clocking in at three times the length of their predecessors, but it’s much easier to keep a game fun for 8-15 hours than it is for some multiple of that, and it makes the game more expensive to make, raising the threshold for success.
Unpopular opinion: open world ruined Zelda. I thought I’d love the concept. But actually give it to me? Ughhh… Spend forever doing side quests because you don’t know if the equipment will only be good now or if youll need it down the road… No real guidance so you can end up just meandering around…
I liked the more structured narrative. Don’t get me wrong - it’s cool to play Link and just do whatever you want. But for a story game, a more defined linear path is more engaging imo.
Wasn’t Zelda always open world? LttP was about as open world as they come back in the day?
Open world while still needing to go through the temples in a certain order. Various gadgets were required to progress, but crafty players often got around this. Pokemon would also be called “open world”, but could you just walk up to the Elite 4 from the beginning? Nope, had to get them badges first.
There’s “open to exploration” open world and “here’s a giant map, go wild”(a la Fallout/Skyrim). I prefered a Zelda with more guidance. Even Wind Waker, arguably the most open world, still had a progression the game tried to keep you on.
Yeah so today there’s more of a spectrum. Back in the 80s and 90s there were far fewer choices.
I get what you mean though, just wanted to point out it’s more complicated to judge older games by new standards. Eg. if Zelda were a new franchise it might just be a fully open world from the get go.
How is saying it’s not the same game mechanics “judging it by different standards”? That right there is the problem: this idea that everything modern is better. Not everything needs all the same features tacked on.
Space marine 2 seems like a good example of this.
Single player campaign: mediocre
CoOp missions: mediocre
Competitive multiplayer: poor
Seems like dropping one of those might have allowed the remaining two to earn a “pretty good”
It seems to be resonating pretty damn well for them. In fact, the competitive multiplayer has been praised for its simplicity and feeling a lot like the kind of multiplayer that we used to get so much of back in the 360 era.
back in the 360 era.
An era famous for its’ tacked-on multiplayer modes.
It was also famous for having multiplayer modes that were just fun and didn’t ask you to commit your life to them. Some of those multiplayer modes were really cool.
Who praised them? But I don’t know what measure we’d use to determine the general reception of this particular feature. Particularly given that almost all video game journalism is mere marketing. So that’s probably not a fruitful point to argue over.
Instead I’ll offer the things that I think earn the competitive multiplayer a poor rating.
- No skill or even experience based match making. Too many games are blowouts because all of the level 1 players were put on one team.
- Teams are static once a match lobby has formed. If the teams are poorly balanced they will continue to be forever. Players can’t even switch voluntarily. The only remedy is to bail on the lobby and hop into a different random one.
- Classes and weapons are poorly balanced. The Bulwark is a key example of a too strong and not fun design. The Assault class, and melee in general is in a pretty poor state (unless you have an infinite defense shield that lets you walk up to people). Many of the weapon options for the classes are almost unusably weak, so class loadouts tend to be very samey. Grenades are spammy and the shock grenade blind duration is not fun.
- Players are randomly assigned Imperial or Chaos marines. But there is basically no character customization for the Chaos marines, while the Imperial marines have 5 or 6 different sets. Either the enemy team should always appear to be Chaos with their NPC style, or they should have included equivalent Chaos customization.
- Players have minimal control over which game modes they play. It’s either 100% random or selecting a single mode. A configurable selection is a common multiplayer feature.
- Map design is bland. This is perhaps a more personal preference, but I find the symmetrical, arcade arenas with no narrative character boring.
I watch and listen to a lot of Giant Bomb and SkillUp, and both had praise for the multiplayer modes, warts and all. I can’t agree with all games media just being marketing, otherwise you’d never see bad reviews for the likes of those publishers spending all that money on marketing. It may not have worked for you, but doing all of those modes has done very well for the game.
Reminds me of many “The reason why Call of Duty sucks” arguments I heard as a kid.
Like, my own tastes agree with you. But you don’t bring that argument into game industry discussion because fact is, the game is doing very well financially and obviously many players disagree with you. So you have to take that data, and work back to decide what the logical conclusion is.
If the argument is that SM2 is successful because it limited it’s scope to execute a smaller number of features well, I don’t think that holds up. It took on three different types of games and (imho) executed merely okay. What more could they have added? Open world? MMO?
I think the more plausible explanation for the sales is that it’s Warhammer, it’s pretty, and SM1 was good.
