Destiny 2 has the bones of a decent game in there somewhere, it’s just that the devs keep fucking it up.
If it were me, I’d fix it like this:
Split it into 2 games. Story based PvE with paid content, F2P PvP with all the cosmetics, paid currency bullshit.
Allow characters to transfer back and forth at will, but each can be played without the other. Balance weapons independently in both games, so changing a gun for PvE doesn’t fuck up PvP and vice versa.
Restore all the story content removed from PvE. Allow each story mission to be picked from the map like D1 STILL does, and have level markers on them so people can experience the story in logical order.
That first part reads as “get rid of everything I don’t like.” I fundamentally disagree and so do the devs. Their core design philosophy was that it was 1 cohesive world. It should stay that way.
They did start balancing weapons between game modes through design. Making perks take kills streaks or rapid kills, or by picking up drops from killing monsters, etc. Things that activate perks that can easily be completed in pve, but not so easily in pvp.
Their biggest problem, frankly, was that they didn’t do d3 or sunsetting anymore. The game got too bloated and unmanageable. You didn’t need new loot to do new activities and they just got stale. I agree they shouldn’t have removed all that content, and the story should be replayable, like in D1… which, had they released a D3, that content probably would have existed in D2 still.
You have no idea. As someone who tried to get into d2 not knowing anything about it, I was completely lost. The menu interface is Byzantine. The concept of the game is lost. You have to ask people how to play the thing and what the goals and objectives are because the game is so lousy at helping new players understand it. I gave it a hard pass.
Incidentally, it sounds like you’re describing Elden Ring and DS3.
The age of DRM means that they can now “unlaunch” the game and force you into a reimbursement while giving up the game. Why? What if someone liked it and wanted to keep playing? is this an online only game? This is just sad.
edit: this is a good time to remind people, if you live in the EU, please support the “Stop Killing Games” initiative, it has just past a third of the required signatures, and has 10 months to go still:
Bank transfers are slow. It is generally taken out of the account the next business day, sits in escrow for a few days, then appears in the destination account where it takes another day to clear. About a week total.
Though, if it gets held for suspected fraud or needs to cross international boundaries, it can sit in that escrow account for much longer.
Sounds like I should start holding my payments in escrow, just in case the publisher decides to shut down their game less than 2 weeks after taking my money. Got it!
In the EU we use SEPA and transfers are instantaneous. Used it when buying something of our local ebay when at the person’s house. Also most banks even have Venmo style payment systems… scan qr of your bank, click on my banks icon, authorize, done.
Companies sit on cash simply for cashflow reasons. Keeping the money in your account for an additional x days means it can be used for other stuff.
Your card is charged instantly, but it can take a week or two before it’s cleared the fed’s anti-fraud measures and they’re assured you’re not reversing it through your bank. Then they send the refund and it can take another week or two before your bank clears it and makes sure that they’re not reversing their payment. Add in some wiggle room to cover yourself in case something gets flagged as potentially fraudulent and someone has to manually review it, and it can take a while.
In practice, refunds should arrive this week, but they want to be careful not to promise that in every case. What they’re mainly worried about is people buying the game, immediately refunding it, and simultaneously doing a chargeback while in some faraway country.
Wow, I expected they’ll go straight to free-to-play but I guess the game has such a bad reputation that they decided to take it down completely. Refunds being issued is awfully nice though.
Some quick math, steam takes a 30% cut (10k * 40 * .7 = 280k), and since this is a sony published game sony got to keep 100% on their platform (15k * 40 = 600k). Sony made less than 1 mill in revenue on this game which allegedly cost 100M to develop.
Yeah, ain’t no monetizing scheme is gonna save this one.
This is the key marketing fail. They released an OW clone, and then failed to highlight the differences. I might have thrown $40 at it, if I’d known that there wasn’t going to be a battlepass or something equally asinine to come with that price tag.
I played through their free weekend beta some time in July and didn’t hate it, but it was clunky and the designs were uglier than OW. That said, I had expected them to clean it up before release; anything except let it stand with its overarching veneer of greyige+olive green over every character.
I think they just released it to say it was released and be able to do the write-offs. Otherwise, any game that had been in development this long would have seen a huge marketing campaign that highlighted why players should abandon OW, et al for Concord instead.
Free-to-play is often a lazy comment from social media that represents an incomplete business plan. Developers have to get paid, and you need a plan for how players will be pushed into that.
The assumption is often on a vague “skins and charms” type of thing but it depends on whether the game was built for that expectation. They likely knew they wouldn’t be putting out compelling reskins of their characters.
If it wasn’t for hundreds of people likely losing their jobs it would be really funny that Sony’s greedy, cynical attempts to cash in on the live service fad keep failing
It’s probably not even the artists fault it turned out this shit. My gut feeling is that the game is victim of incompetent leadership. Indecisiveness on important matters and micro management on stupid things.
It’s also the same incompetent leadership who will get bonuses and promotions after this.
Shit in terms of having no players and being pulled back after just two weeks.
From what I understand, the game itself was alright. It had no major technical or gameplay problems. At least the team of programmers and game designers were competent.
The main issue is that the game was incredibly unappealing, and I believe this can only come from poor leadership.
I want to paint easy villains into the world as much as anyone, but I didn’t see anything especially “evil” about Concord; just poorly planned and uninteresting. It’s more of a tragic failure of incompetence than anyone being greedy or hurtful.
I don’t think the parent comment was trying to say that it’s particularly evil. They rather meant “greedy” in the sense that these companies get a bit too excited about money.
Basically, live service games are pretty expensive to make and generally result in an incomplete/worse experience at launch. But if they’re successful and gain enough of a player base, then they pay for themselves manyfold.
That’s why these companies keep on gambling, by building live service games, rather than two or three smaller games from the same budget.
Sony shuts down all of their Japanese studios and redirects their efforts into developing “cinematic” experiences to appeal to western gamers
Sony liquidates countless other studios in the pursuit of funding this game
Sony buys Bungie to aid in developing this game
Sony thinks this is going to be a huge success rivaling COD and Fortnite, so they fund an entire multimillion dollar CGI-animated episode to be aired in Amazon’s Secret Level anthology series
200 million sounds like a lot, but it’s like 2 weeks of PSPlus money.
For all this losing, they’re sure making a lot of money. Just not out of this game.
And that money ain’t gone yet, there’s for sure a pivot towards a F2P, MTX ridden version of the game to be relaunched.
The problem is that gamers say they don’t like that sort of thing, while the success of the likes of Fortnite indicates that there’s a lot of gamers out there saying nothing, but buying V-bucks like a motherfucker.
I think the people that have never heard of it far outweigh the people that have and decided to ignore it. They’re chasing “normal” people, not people like us who would likely have ignored it even if it was a free to play, micro transaction riddled mess.
And “FREE!” does appear to be a key factor in making this kind of game take off. They live or die by initial player interest and retention.
These things are expensive to make, it’s not just going in the bin. I’m just not sure where it belongs. It’s clearly Overwatch’s stunt double, and even that seems like it’s on the wane.
One of these days, it’s going to teach them to stop making games designed to destroy themselves. Preservation needs to be good for business, and the lack of it needs to be bad for business.
Really looks like this game was designed by incompetent suits and marketing teams with the primary goal of turning those millions into more money. The game looked good and didn’t seem to play (totally) awfully either. It just doesn’t stand out or make anybody want to play it, like at all. It really is a another one of those AAA unfinished style over substance tech demos that masquerade as a game that got released into really saturated market at a really bad time, where the competition is usually also free.
Also something, something big capital overtaking creative process is one of the great disasters of our time.
The game was alive for about 1.5 days for each year of development that they put into Concord.
Let’s acknowledge for a second that well over 100 developers are about to lose their livelihoods. Now let’s acknowledge that they were building a product from the start that disrespects consumer rights and preservation of the medium, and I’m still glad it failed.
Those artists and programmers had about six years to find different jobs in the industry, I have zero sympathy for the ones that stuck around and did not see the writing on the wall.
I never saw a launched game unlaunch this quick. We talked about failures that got shutdown 1 year after launch. But now the record is what, 2 weeks? Question is, will they go back to drawing board and make changes to the game for a relaunch, such as a free to play model? Nothing is stated here, so probably not.
I would consider playing this game, if it was playable on Linux (and without a PSN account requirement). But clearly Sony does not care about me.
I actually liked that game. Sure, it was unpolished and unoptimized. But there were still some fun to be had. It feels like they gave up on that game within a week or two.
“Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.
The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.
They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.
The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.
blog.playstation.com
Aktywne