but they do have all the money in the world, no external pressure, no publisher to shit on them, it’s just their developers and artists and a vision.
I think that’s part of the issue. Supposedly they do have multiple games in development and a large percentage of their employees are working on them. But they are content to let the creative and technical processes play out, without announcing too-ambitious release dates which inevitably get pushed back and still have a buggy game released. And sometimes they even cut their losses if a long term project just isn’t working out.
And isn't everything derivative? What's the issue with that? If feel like you're really trying to gather negativity towards this game simply because it doesn't pander to your tastes
Well, I guess your are right that everything is derivative. I also think some things are more alike than others and also some markets are more saturated than others. When Half-Life came out it was in a saturated market of FPSs but it also revolutionized the market. When Portal came out no one could compare it to anything other that a student project. Half-Life Alyx is still considered the no 1 most polished and complete game in the VR space. We’ll see the impact that Deadlock will have I guess.
Even if it is, it’s a derivation I’ve been sorely missing. Ever since Battleborn got shut down, there’s been a Battleborn shaped hole in my heart. Deadlock fits in that hole really well.
It’s possible that the whole impetus for creating Deadlock came from something like that. Someone at valve, like me, enjoyed the hell out this particular mix of mechanics.
There’s nothing like it. Dota doesn’t do the trick, neither does Overwatch. Of all things, the closest thing might be Titanfall 2’s titan combat.
Did you ever try Paladins? I somehow ended up playing Battleborn when it came out and really liked it, even though it got panned. Always thought Paladins was a close second.
Also calling Overwatch a “MOBA shooter” is like calling Mario Kart a “Rogue like racer” because you start each race fresh with everything reset. It’s just an FPS, nothing MOBA about it.
I personally think MOBA should be used to broadly describe a style of game rather than what’s done while playing it. I know that when Riot coined the term, they were referring to games like DotA, LoL, etc.; to me the whole approach to a match’s flow is echoed similarly enough throughout multiple games, that applying the term MOBA to other games is a logical extension.
To me a game is a MOBA if:
The way to interact with it is primarily designed around playing with other players online (the M and O of MOBA.)
The goals of the players are against the goals of other players — ie. it’s competitive rather than cooperative (the B of MOBA.)
Any player at the beginning of a match has access to all the same options as any other player. This one is a little more vague, but as the A in MOBA stands for arena, I imagine it like a group of gladiators standing before a communal weapon rack that they’ll all pick from; no one has any options that the others don’t have access to.
Following these criteria, something like Overwatch is a MOBA, as is DotA, and ironically LoL isn’t as you have to unlock options meaning you don’t satisfy the arena condition. To differentiate games like DotA, Smite, Awesomenauts, Deadlock, etc., I prefer the term lane-pusher as that’s a lot more specific and understandable.
Does it really matter what it’s called? Not really. I mostly just do it so I can feel superior to Riot for coming up with a vague term that is applied, how I deem, incorrectly, while also excluding their own game from the term that they made to describe it.
I’ve been looking for a game that fills the void left exactly by Super Monday Night Combat, so for me… This might be it (altough i’ll miss the style).
Haven’t played it yet because I don’t have an invite, but I’m carefully hyped by it.
Because it's not identical. SMITE plays like the top down mobas but in a third person perspective. Deadlock plays like a third person shooter with moba elements.
the kids who are the age we were in the half life glory days–they don’t want single player. they want league of apex legends fortnitewatchstrike
single player games won’t go away completely, but they’re definitely taking a backseat to whatever the rage is with the kids. currently mobas. just google “most played video games” if you’re not depressed enough already
“Single player games have taken a backseat”. Okay. We’re just going to state that as a truth? And also just stating kids as being the main video games audience still?
I mean if single player games have taken such a backseat, why are big companies pouring so much money into games such as Horizon, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Anno or Dark Souls? Why are indie games, thousands and tens of thousands of them, so overwhelmingly single player? Why is Zelda still not a MOBA? Just does not really hold water as an argument IMO. If anything it seems the opposite is happening and after the height of MOBAs in ˜2015, the market is slowly creeping back.
I think we can state as a truth that they have less potential profit.
Wrong, they just take less effort and have a more constant revenue stream.
Potential for profit means nothing, when so many attempts at milkable forever games end up like Suicide Squad or Concord.
Also you can come into them half baked and pull the plug if the game doesn’t sell (because it’s half baked) like they’re doing with SS and they did with the Avengers game.
They spend more money.
They don’t, you can’t spend money you don’t have, whales are working adults.
Kids spend money for less. Better ROI, not higher payoff.
You make the 18302nd skin and troves of kids will badger their parents for fortnite bucks so they can buy it but not everyone will. The upside is that making a skin costs you single digits percent points of the profits, so even if one or two are a dud, you’re fine, the good ones will make up for it.
It’s a business model you can throw money at once the game’s got an audience base, which is very attractive to companies, because it’s uncomplicated and reliable.
There’s plenty of room to monetize single player games when it’s add-in content to games that you continually replay as opposed to add-on content for something that’s story driven. More systemic games like Civilization, roguelikes, simulators, etc.
When your game isn’t live service multiplayer, your incentives change to putting out more sequels rather than iterating on the same game. So your revenue per game goes down, but there’s no reason it can’t necessarily be as lucrative overall.
It’s not confusion. Your perspective is survivorship bias. For every Rocket League, there are 10 Concords. That’s why the entire industry is imploding right now. Everyone thinks their game will be Fortnite, but only so many games can be Fortnite, and a lot of that even comes down to luck, so you’ve got games like Avengers and Suicide Squad losing hundreds of millions of dollars each instead of making games for half or a quarter of their budgets that would have recouped their costs and then some.
Well then I guess your recommendation would be to keep trying to be Rocket League, even though statistically you’re going to leave a crater in the ground formed by hundreds of millions of dollars and the better part of a decade of work? Keep in mind there are single player games that make more money than Rocket League too, if we’re going to cherry pick.
I think we can state as a truth that they have less potential profit.
That’s true but it’s not because people aren’t playing single player games. The reason single player games are less profitable is because the non-subscription, non-microtransaction single player market is extremely saturated with indie games. That makes it very hard to sell AAA single player games. The standards are extremely high and the opportunities for extra monetization are not there.
I have been a single player gamer for most of my life, yet I haven’t bought a AAA single player game in decades. I have more indie single player games to play than I know what to do with, and frankly they appeal to me more than AAA titles. Expensive graphics and voice acting don’t have much draw for me these days. I am much more interested in roguelikes and retro games now. I think there are thousands of others like me out there, among all those who don’t go in for multiplayer games and haven’t purchased a console.
Single player games are less and less profitable these days. What the original commenter could have said is, these days, there isn’t much money to be made telling a story when fortnight makes so much money by doing nothing but cosmetics.
It’s not a question of demand, it’s a question of profit. Multiplayer games stand to make a lot more money than singleplayer. Nobody will spend real world dollars on cosmetic items in a singleplayer game.
I’d love to get another singleplayer game as well, but I’ve accepted that Valve is just unpredictable. I’m sure they haven’t given up on Singleplayer and we’ll get another singleplayer game… at some point. Their previous game was the fantastic Half-life Alyx after all.
Stuff has been leaking about the next Half Life game since Episode 2 came out, and not much of it had anything to do with what we ended up getting with Alyx. Don’t get your hopes up newbie.
spoilernow sentient subordinate functions, and more importantly, how Aloy treated them.
In Zero Dawn
spoilerDemitri, the one incharge of plant life, scattered metal flowers about in the first game, with bits of poetry his creator loved. He also had flowers growing around Elizabeth Sobeck’s body in the ending cutscene. Then theres CYAN and her whole saga in Frozen Wilds. Aloy really seemed to get along with her.
And yet, in the first half of Forbidden Quest
spoilerAloy has no qualms about killing the subfunctiond and restoring them to base code for the new Gaia. Minerva was damn scared, hiding in the Base the whole time, all the while sending an encrypted signal saying ‘Here I am’. Aether (weather control) didnt do anything wrong at all, just kept trying to do his duty, even as the errors kept mounting and the storms increasing.
Thats as far as I managed to get before shutting the game down. Will prob uninstall too. Even if the game has well established that Aloy is getting desperate to restore
::: spoiler spoiler GAIA ::: , this seems way out of character.
You can start the discussions on this community if you’d like. I believe it’s the most active one. If you’re looking for the amount of content Reddit has…Lemmy isn’t there yet. You starting these discussions may help more and more people to contribute and add in. Which then creates more content.
Having the game streamed by all these huge channels before it’s even officially announced is kinda crazy. Everyone wants to play Valve’s “secret game” of course, so it’s free marketing. Pretty clever.
There was a very direct terms of service “Don’t share info”. But The Verge are notoriously awful journalists. It’s like they have no clue of what basic decent journalism entails and confuse good reporting with being trolling assholes. There’s a reason they were the only idiots who broke it and got rightly burned at the stake for it. I bet the guy wasn’t even looking at the screen when he spammed the ESC key at the game. Just because it wasn’t 100 pages of legalese doesn’t mean they weren’t bound by it, clicking ESC instead of the button OK means nothing in legal terms. And just using the software means you agree to the explicit and implicit terms of service that come with the software as long as it isn’t something blatantly illegal. They were assholes and received the consequences of their actions. And that’s that.
Simplify the situation to lol defending the EULA all you want, but “I’m not bound by your NDA because I pressed ESC instead of clicking okay” is the kind of thing I expect a spoiled 14 year old to say while wearing a shit eating grin.
Act unprofessionally in a professional industry and you get dragged by professionals. And rightly so.
If someone ask you for a ride and you tell them not to roll down the window and they say “lol, nope” and still get on the car. They can’t be mad if you stop the car and tell them to get out when they roll down the window laughing hysterically at your face. Pressing escape means nothing in this case. The Verge’s writer was acting stupid on purpose. This is like kids who think that crossing their fingers behind their back means they aren’t bound to a promise. It is wishful thinking.
Add: oh, and BTW, there’s a reason almost all terms of service start with “By using this software you agree to…” the legal fact is using the service not clicking on the agree button. That’s just legal ammunition that companies use to prove on court that the user was aware of the legal contract. EULAs uset to be sheets of paper on a cardboard box along side CDs. No one had to click on an agree button. By buying and using the software, those were the terms you agreed to. Almost all contracts include that sort of language because the use is the fact that supports the legal contract. Law is just leaving facts and agreements on paper, facts overrule legalese, that is actually the basis used by courts to dismiss enforcement of EULAs. Like how signers aren’t legally bound to fulfill irrational or unachievable agreements, or language intentionally obtuse or ambiguous.
To ride this special car, you must agree to not open the windows.
Expectation: No? Okay, then I cannot allow you to ride this special car.
Valve: nope? Okay well get in anyway... Whaaat you opened the windows? Wtf?
Not saying the verge writer was or wasn't behaving like an entitled child. In fact, I'm inclined to think he was, but It's irrelevant. Valve made a goof. (Gasp!)
I could care less what valve does in response. They could blacklist the verge entirely and I probably wouldn't even know. I just wonder if people only care because it's valve.
So people need to be bound by EULAs that they don’t click to agree?
People…? No. And whether they clicked to agree or not should be irrelevant; EULAs should be unenforceable.
Journalists and their employers…? Neither… but then developers don’t have any obligation to provide them with review copies in the future either.
In an industry that depends on mutual goodwill, trust, and agreement, bypassing the implied NDA was completely legal… but profoundly stupid, disingenuous, and unprofessional.
The Verge decided to burn bridges it had probably taken decades to build, for the sake of one single article. It was their right and prerogative to do it, nothing illegal about it, they had no obligation to follow the EULA.
But Valve has no obligation to let them play their invite-only beta either, or to provide them with review copies in the future, and neither has any other developer.
We’ll see how it works out for the Verge in the future.
He hit esc to avoid clicking accept on the nda bit, then bragged about it in the article. There have been other articles about the game, but afaik he’s the only one that was banned for being a smartass.
From what I remember there was no NDA but no EULA either. It was a simple “please don’t share anything about this”, the journo ignored it and their account was banned. As far as I’m aware there’s no legal action going on, the Verge have just lost any goodwill they ever had with Valve.
Yeah I’m for new games and hopefully people love it but “hero shooter” and “moba” definitely aren’t categories I’m looking for in new games, the market is flooded with them. Hopefully valve can stand out
I really wanted battleborn to succeed on release even though it was just kind of flawed from a design standpoint. I kind of gave up on competitive fps games since then though.
With how chaotic the fights look like and how high the ttk looks to be, is the game still fun at lower-mid skill levels?
I’d say yes. But you do have to figure out how to apply the MOBA way of thinking. How to stack the stats of items, abilities and leveling up, into doing a shitload of damage without dying.
That applied to Battelborn, and it does in Deadlock, too.
I’ve played quite a bit of MOBA’s before, coincidentally the other big third person ones Smite and Paragon, so I’ve got a decent feel for builds and macroplay and I’m not necessarily worried about those aspects.
I grew up as a console gamer but exclusively play on PC now so I’ve found for fps games I have trouble competing because my aim isn’t as great.
It’s dota 2 if it were a very competitive 3rd person shooter. More of a MOBA than a hero shooter, and it’s very complex. Also I’ve been playing it for a month, AMA I guess
There’s already some toxic muppets getting banned from matchmaking as well as rage quiters…not a whole lot but I have come across them in the week or so that I’ve played.
There are a few people who do want to coordinate or even use VC, more than the above, but not a whole lot
Everyone calling it a shooter MOBA is right, but more basically: It’s Smite. It’s just Smite, but good. I played the Smite 2 alpha and it was very lame, no verticality, gunplay felt bad. Deadlock has an original theme, gunplay feels tight, and there is clearly a huge skill ceiling. I don’t know if it’s 100% yet, which tracks cuz it’s an alpha, but it’s already better than Smite and I have faith they’ll make it better.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze