I get what you’re saying but FPS specifically are mostly played competitively, so a single player game in THAT specific genre in 2023 sounds like a very bad idea.
Every other genre than FPS needs more games where you’re allowed to only play single player and use tons of mods if you want to without risking being locked out of playing, though.
Fallout New Vegas, Baldurs Gate 3, Skyrim, The Outer Worlds and the older Bioware games are where it’s at for my favorite genre, to name a few examples.
I’m not sure that’s really true what you’re saying about single player FPS games being mostly competitive or that it’s a bad idea. See: Doom, Metro, Ghostwire, Dying Light, System Shock, people seem stoked for Space Marine, etc.
Props to you for using strikethrough instead of deleting in your edit so the context still makes sense. I think you bring up an interesting point about competitive fps games. I imagine companies structure their development similar to games-as-a-service because they are essentially two flavors of the same thing, right? I had never really considered whether the growth of the competitive scene was part of the drive towards GaaS and away from tight single player experiences.
I think underlying all of this is that publishers want a guaranteed profit margin. That doesn’t exist in art, of course, but they still want it. And if that means choosing what they think is a safe bet, they’ll choose it. I think Bungie made GaaS look way easier than it actually is, and maybe the competitive scene contributed to that too. “Look at all the money these hero shooters are making, let’s get a piece of that pie.” Formulas just never quite work out that simply in real life.
Yep, nobody enjoyed playing through Half Life 1/2, or FEAR or Deus Ex, or the early Medal of Honor or Call of Duty campaigns, or the Doom series or Battlefield Bad Company or the Wolfenstein Series.
Just because most modern popular FPSs are basically cartoony tf2/overwatch clones/derivatives and there are a lot of highly competitive multiplayer FPSs filled with screaming, racist misosynist babies and manbabies alike doesnt mean theres no market for a single player FPS.
It means that making a single player FPS game these days is apparently too hard for modern game devs to figure out how to do.
Also EA has to understand more and more people have experienced their garbage launches and will skip their gold plated launch prices because of the risk you end up buying a lemon that is subsequently abandoned.
Making sure the gameplay loop is interesting and the game performs properly is important. Focussing on all the latest engine features that requires people to have top tier hardware is only good for marketing. Marketing then eats up a tremendous amount of budget without adding anything to the offer they make.
The last EA game I bought was Jedi: Fallen Order for $4, and I still felt ripped off, because EA adds a mandatory online connection check to every game they release now, including Immortals.
Whenever I saw that game it looked like a generic, soulless, made-by-committee shooter… All footage had strong tech demo vibes. The only thing I can remember about it is „the guns looked kinda weird.“
Most notable thing about this game was it was one of the first to launch with FSR3 frame generation. Other than that I think I’d have completely forgotten about it.
I’ll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I’d say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I’m honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.
Yeah I will say, it’s painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it’s not a bad game per se. It’s just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.
The worst offense to me though is how there’s no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That’s the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.
The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally “AAA” now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that’s “AA”.
Much like “alpha” and “beta”, the meanings are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.
I’m so old when I started in games “alpha” meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.
Now it’s basically “alpha” means a demo, and “beta” means they’re buying time for GM release.
Regarding the alpha/beta point, increase in internet availability and rolling updates probably made all the work in that shift. In the old days if you published a raw product it would take a hell of an effort to amend it. Now it’s just a matter of a user not plugging the internet off for some time ¯_(ツ)_/¯
This started happening when studios got bigger and marketing controlled release dates. By the 2010s or so, the actual devs had zero say. So some idiot owner would promise a game in 18 months, half the ideas would be removed due to time, and a rushed product went out.
“Games as a service” was just corporate speak for how to streamline putting out a game with less components and then adding them over time.
Same. This seems to be getting more common with various media and products. Too many choices which is a good thing for consumers but not good for publishers.
I’m not the person you replied to but I’ve been a first person shooter fan since Wolfenstein 3D and original doom. I had NEVER heard of it til today. First person and tower defense games are basically all I play.
They claim to have spent 40 million usd marketing it, I saw some people on twitch playing it when it first came out but it looked meh and was priced way too high so I didn’t watch much
“At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio’s debut project,” the former employee said. "The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution…
They must have done extremely bad marketing even though they spent so much on marketing because I’ve never heard of this game
I mean im on my ps5 every day, browse a ton of game related content on lemmy and such, and share a lot of game news with my friend group, and Ive literally never heard of or seen marketing for this game.
Yeah, AAA for quite a while now has really only had any impact on graphics, and maybe on how playtested it was. That is one hell of a load bearing maybe. No correlation to quality on any other metrics.
Yeah exactly, my first thought was “Doom is still in the public discourse.”
Not to mention, oh what’s that game that broke earnings numbers on steam, oh yeah, Cyberpunk 2077? Rough launch aside, the game literally printed money, and is a great RPG and a great FPS.
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