And I’m saying this as a former battlefield fan, they’ve thoroughly run the series into the ground. It’s genuinely impressive, it’s not even lucrative anymore I don’t think.
another former fan here, could you pls expand a bit on what you’re feeling with these points and what it means? i don’t know enough about each of them to realise what you meant?
the previous games i’m 100% with you, 2042 was beyond embarrassing. the publisher, nothing need be said lol. the dev cycle i’m going to assume is suspciously fast?
Well the price is $80+. GAMES with higher prices tend to do poorly a lot of the time. Additionally, this is a multiplayer game, so less people buying for the high price also means lobbies might be more on the empty side, which takes away the fun. And then there is also an argument that high prices cover a lower expectation of sales. Although this one might be my naivity about causality.
They talk about the game in abstract terms, and in a way where the hype seems to be more important than the content of the game. Which to me is always a bad sign. If the game is good, why not talk about specifically what the must fun parts were for you?
And even the leak itself suggests at least one person knows the price is a bad look for the content. So that person who has insight, knows it sounds bad. I will boldly infer, that that’s because it’s not worth $80. Which makes it also very probable that it’s far less than even a “moderate” $60, I can’t believe I’m saying this because that’s still an unbelievably high sum of money for a game.
And with all these points remember, battlefield does not have the best track record, so only some of these details indicating a fishy smell will sound the alarm and make me reconsider buying. I don’t have enough trust to extend towards games published under EA, for obviously reason.
Oh yeah, probably my favourite squad mod. A little hard to believe that people will do that kind of quality work for free and consistently update it when any patch can and will invariably fuck mods up.
They’re really trying to keep the server load low on launch are they. There’s gonna be a nice 6 players on a 64v64 map in a game mode that’s riddled with bugs.
For some reason I have a bigger urge to jump in the Atlantic than to buy this game.
I’m very curious to see if they’ve learned their lesson from 2042, or just trust that it’ll sell with reputation alone. The development cycle doesn’t give me too much hope unfortunately
If you assume 25% of player will buy at 80, 50% will buy at $50, and 25% will buy at $20. Per 100 buyers they stand to make $5,000. However if they start at $50 with 75% of buys buying at that price, they will make $4,250. This is about maximizing profit by selling to fans with deep pockets first then discounting latter to captured the rest of the player base.
That tactic would work if it was a multiplayer game or a major franchise but with a single player cookie cutter game there’s no urgency for me to get started and no FOMO. It just isn’t that interesting of an IP
People still will, because lots of people spoil, some like watching streaming etc. When new stuff comes out and I’m not ready to start it, it often also involves stop visiting certain communities, discords, etc.
right, so that would put you into the 50% or the lower 25%, but there are people that will buy higher price, and as long as there is 1% willing to buy before the first sale it is worth it for them.
But what they don’t take into account is that 75% all at once creates an excitement buzz around the game that ends up causing even more sales then would ever happen otherwise. Look at games like Pokémon go or PalWorld that generated so much buzz. I tried both of them because of the hype and I normally wouldn’t have bothered otherwise.
With a game like there has probably been existence market research to account for how much buzz the game will get. They may even be counting on the buzz to sell more copies at full price.
I really enjoyed the first game, not AAA new game price enjoyment though. I mean, I got as much fun out of it while playing as I have anything else, it just wasn’t as rich and deep as a fallout game. I give it a pass since it’s establishing a new universe but as much as I liked it, it’s most certainly a blue light special fallout clone.
So, asking inflated AAA prices seems, somewhat short sighted. I’d absolutely pay what I did for the first game, 80 bucks is a hard no for me though. I might buy it when it’s cheaper, but by then I’ll likely have seen enough clips, read enough reviews and gotten busy enough to just forget about it.
Setting aside prices, I’ve seen an unexpected amount of sourness directed at the first game. While the first game wasn’t a greatest of all time RPG and had flaws, I found it overall enjoyable enough and it was clearly a project with some passion that I didn’t regret sinking time into it.
I expect similar of the sequel, with hopefully improvements based on feedback from the first game. I plan to have fun with the game, and it is a bit tiring to see things like the pricing prompting people to badmouth the game itself when they are separate things.
Am I going to pay $80? No. No I’m not. This is a single player RPG though. There’s no FOMO of getting left behind on the multiplayer unlocks or the lore of a new season. It’s a singleplayer game. Put it on the wishlist and buy it on a sale. Simple as.
The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).
I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.
Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.
I don’t think it was the lack of open world that put me off from it, as I’ve always preferred hub based games ever since Dragon Age Origins. I think it was just the writing honestly. I don’t like the whole “le soooo epic zany & ttlly rndm” writing that it shares with Borderlands. I don’t find it funny, endearing nor entertaining. It’s just annoying to me and it was everywhere at the time because millennial culture was at its height.
I wouldn’t categorize it that way at all. It extrapolated nationality to one’s employer and religion to the law. It was unsubtle in its views of classism and such, in a way that I appreciated, but it wasn’t just doing zany things “just because”, unless you’ve got a good example that’s slipping my mind.
I can’t say I follow you. I would call it satire rather than “totally random”, but if you didn’t care for the writing, you didn’t care for the writing.
found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG.
Yes, exactly. It followed that formula, not Fallout. That probably should have been made more clear so people wouldn’t be making a comparison that didn’t fit at all.
I made it maybe 20 min before I un-installed. I don’t vibe with Fallout in general (but I’ll suffer through them) and with the writing style, just wasn’t my thing. Maybe the 2nd one is a bit more polished and I can get into it cause I heard good things.
Besides that I just kept feeling like it was “been here, done that”. I remember at one point there is a small village and you have to choose to pull their power source or leave it and it felt so damn familiar, I didn’t bother continuing much past that. I felt like if I hadn’t played a bunch of elder scrolls and fallout games it was probably great but for me it was so much retreading old ground I couldn’t stay interested.
…yup. I didn’t get far. I vaguely remember there were a bunch of other little things but that one drove it home. It was literally a tamer version of fallout 3 opening.
I feel like Outer Worlds at least tried to have a message. But they got scared and pulled away and gave up before the end. It starts way stronger than Fallout 3 imo. At least when it comes to writing and story. It’s of course not a SERIOUS game, but it tries to say something even if it does give up. In my experience Bethesda games are allergic to having a message or point.
The first game was like RPG soul food. It didn’t do anything new, the gameplay was fine and the story wasn’t bad. Nothing innovative but nothing poorly executed. I think people should look to the game as explanation for why Nintendo doesn’t make the ‘normal Mario game’ they want. Innovation is the simplest way to dress up a game, even if you like the loop it’s healthier if the sequel is different.
I honestly don’t know why so many game journalists and bloggers are obsessed with innovations, and judge games based on that. A game doesn’t need to reinvent a genre to be good and enjoyable.
They probably meant that it felt like a game that was stripped down and shallow compared to similar AAA “full price” games and I completely agree. After playing the first one, I wouldn’t only consider buying this new game if it was at least 50% off.
To be clear, I find this rhetoric pretty silly given that price has no influence over a game’s intrinsic qualities and vice versa.
I’m not arguing for games to be priced higher either, because a lot of that money likely wouldn’t end up going to the devs, but I think the price argument doesn’t stand either way.
Pricetag sets expectations, simple as that. It is documented that no matter the product, people have more trust in a more expensive product than a cheaper one, even if they are actually identical. And thus, people also rightfully expect more of a more expensive product. Let’s talk about cars for example : if I buy an old overused small one just to get from point A to point B, I’ll be absolutely satisfied if I paid a few hundred bucks, and absolutely not if I paid a few thousands.
Same with games, if I have a small indie game entertain me somewhat for a few hours, I’ll be super okay if it cost me a few bucks, and super not ok if it cost me 60 or 80 euros. The intrinsic quality may not change, but that was never what was discussed in the first place.
I think the equivalence doesn’t apply, because a car is a functional product and you should expect price to correlate with added features.
Indie games, as well as AAA, can offer similar quality levels at wildly different prices, so price doesn’t (shouldn’t) enter the equation imo.
Quality, possible enjoyment and my tastes are what I take into account when buying a game or not, not its price point, so that might be the difference.
That’s not what I’m saying.
What I find silly is to expect price to correlate with quality in the video game space, because you have Indies as well as AAA, with wildly different prices, ultimately offering similar qualities. Price shouldn’t come into the equation when talking about a game’s quality or “value” imo.
I guess this is just a difference in how we look at it. I have for decades now used what I perceive as quality/value to decide whether I should buy a game or whether it may be worth if later if it goes on a steep sale. For example, some AAA game that get polarizing reviews or is known to be very short might be an instance where I’d be not be inclined to pay full price because to me, it wasn’t worth the price. Raising the price of a game to $80 means that I personally will want more value out of it. I just bought a game on Steam yesterday for $20 on sale, which was to me worthwhile. If it had been $80, there is no way I would have bought it.
I’ve always maintained that the first was a fine game that was tanked by the price. It was priced to drive gamepass subs, not sell the game. At $35-40, it would have been received much better, imo. Years later, now that it’s more appropriately priced, it seems to be more well-reviewed.
Unfortunately the second is going down the same path. It may take 5+ years for the game to be appreciated to its fullest (assuming no glaring issues), through no fault of the devs.
It was a fine game that was tanked by the massive inconsistency of its quality as you progressed. The game starts out absolutely fantastic, but the quality takes a very sharp and sudden fall after a few hours, and then it just sorta ends not long after. It was a very weird experience. Definitely felt like something went very wrong during development and they had to make big changes.
I got it for cheap layer (I almost never buy new games) and found it kinda shallow and boring. I wanted to like it, I love the theme and settings but ehhhhhhhhh
It was hyped up to be Space Fallout and I did not get Space Fallout out of it. Even like… Space Bad Fallout. I just got mediocre space game.
It also wasn’t up to the obsidian standards we come to expect.
But then again i understand not being able to realise it was not a well written or designed game as a large chunk of people think starfield wasn’t that bad.
I know a lot of people hyped up Outer Worlds as a spiritual successor to New Vegas and were disappointed when it didn’t reach the same heights of writing. Obsidian not being given any time to make New Vegas and then missing their contracted bonus payout by a single Metacritic point was brought up a lot before release, and gamers trumpeted this new game as what Obsidian could have made without Bethesda mismanagement. Then it came out and had the temerity to be average, leaving fans acting like they’d somehow been betrayed by Obsidian.
It wasn’t Obsidian’s or the game’s fault that people decided it had to be a 10/10 masterpiece, it just got caught up in a stupid fanbase war against Bethesda and its reputation suffered when it couldn’t meet people’s sky-high expectations.
I bought the first one for $20. For the second I’ll play on Game Pass, if it is available, or again wait for $20. Maybe even less if I forget about it, which I might.
gamesradar.com
Aktywne