Unlike many people in this thread, I actually have heard of the game. The makers of a podcast I follow loved it, and had the head of the studio on their show for a pretty frank interview, too. When I learned that there was a free demo, I decided I would give the game a try some time.
And in light of the overwhelming negativity in this thread, I did so last night. And what can I say? I spent an hour and change going through the prologue, the training and the first battle sequence, and I really enjoyed it. Movement and shooting slinging magic are great fun, with a diversity of spells available pretty much from the get-go. Just shoot, or throw a massive armor-breaking spell at a wave of enemies, or use a lash to pull a remote enemy close and whack them. I wouldn’t have know what to expect from the ‘CoD with magic’ premise but it’s really enjoyable so far.
The voice acting is very good, and while the facial animations are a bit uncanny valley, I am enjoying the snarky dialogues and matching facial expressions. Gina Torres has presence, and the rest of the cast so far blends in fine.
I will definitely spend some more time with the demo, and if it doesn’t annoy me too much, I might just buy this. And that seems to be the feedback the devs got from many people - once players actually get their hands on it, they actually enjoy it. According ton the studio head, sales have picked up towards Christmas, and they’ve been getting a lot of conversions from the free demo.
I think the problem is just that, the game is… okay, not bad or good, just okay, unremarkable and forgettable.
If you want good sales you need to do something innovative and interesting, or something cliché but really well done.
Taking a look at Doom 2016 (also a single player shooter) we can see the core gameplay: Shoot demons, Pick up ammo, Shoot more demons. But it’s crafted so masterfully that you spend dozens or hundreds of hours doing just that.
Now with this game that I actually forgot the name mid comment, It’s… well you get the ideia.
Why does a game cost that much to make? I’m not saying every game should be an indie, but given what indies can accomplish it’s a little ridiculous to spend $125 million.
If I had to guess, texture quality and graphical fidelity is really high, plus this was one of the first games to run in UE5. A mix of extreme amounts of manhours invested into graphics coupled with slow progress due to having to get used to everything.
And rampant corruption at EA, I bet. 40 million marketing my ass, the game barely had any marketing!
Marketing and payroll are always the two biggest, and yes they can get to those numbers easily at AAA scale. AAA games are as big of productions as big budget movies these days. Hundreds of people involved. Graphics of that level are also extremely expensive and time consuming. Everything has to be motion captured, and the fidelity just takes a long time. Every single piece of trash on the ground has to have a full PBR material stack.
With graphics it’s kind of an exponential thing. The closer you get to absolute realism the more time it takes exponentially. That’s why so many indies are embracing retro graphics these days. It lets you spend a lot more time on the gameplay and content. AAAs are expected to look this good as a baseline, and that already pigeon holes a lot of design choices with the deadlines they’re working with. A truly innovative game that looks AAA quality would take more years to make than these studios are willing to devote to them.
And finally there’s the marketing. Mainstream casual gamers, which are who these companies are usually targeting, is the most expensive group to market to by a long shot. They can really only be reached by huge marketing campaigns on TV, social media, and physical signage. Those types of campaigns can easily get into the millions. They’re also probably spending a large amount on having influencers play the game on stream. The big guys I’m sure cost hundreds of thousands, though I have no idea the actual numbers.
Wait, didn’t EA had their in-house engine Frostbite? They botched Mass Effect Andromeda because they moved from UE to frostbite (not the only reason) .
Yeah and for a while it was mandated to be used for ~everything IIRC but after years of struggling to retain programmers and designers they finally relented on that mandate.
Well you see managers need to be paid more than everyone else and theirs lots of managers. Plus headcount is in the hundreds to pump out all the features and art assets within a few years
There’s no propaganda, the studio is in Russia and the game was released shortly before the special military operation by coincidence. They wanted to release it on Defender of the Fatherland day since that’s a pretty patriotic day which fits the game pretty well but Putin also wanted to release revenge on that day so now it’s all muddled.
I’ve played it and the game feels more like a parady similar to Fallout so if you count fallout as propaganda then Atomic Heart is also propaganda
Only bad thing really about it is Denuvo (properly implemented it doesn’t make the game run like garbage, but I still like to run my game whenever I want without online verification and excessive load times). I might buy it when it’s DRM free on GOG and discounted.
You don’t even have to go that far for the joke. An official Bloodborne PC port releasing first would be a miracle. God do I pray for that port release 😭
The article lists like 3 offending things in a bunch of games totalling dozens, if not hundreds of hours of gameplay. As somebody who hasn’t actually played the games, sheesh. Give us a bit more content would ya?
I personally think Overwatch 2 is a great game compared to OW1, especially for going F2P and removing the loot box. I have played OW1 since 2017 but since it is a paid game, none of my friends play it and we all played Apex instead when it came out.
Fast forward to 2022, they actually removed loot box (fuck gambling) and made it F2P. I have been playing OW2 almost every day since launch. Haven’t touched Apex a single time since then.
I never played ow1 but I did enjoy OW2. One of the few multiplayer shooters where I didn’t suck. However I noticed I got very frustrated by it and seemed to get addicted as well. Also noticed I enjoyed other games less. Stopped playing and feeling better now.
I liked the free lootboxes with chances of getting cool stuff than the damn $20 every couple months battle passes where you actually cannot get anything interesting without paying for it.
You liked getting free cool stuff, not the loot boxes. They can still give away cool stuff for free even without loot boxes but they chose to stop doing so and it sucks.
I think the Battle Pass is fair, it’s $10 every 2 months. It helps keep the game running. Overwatch 1 was going to die if they kept going with the old business model.
conservatives use it to shut down arguements, of things that they are potentially wrong about, which includes everything they dont like. but mostly refers to traditional male and female roles(no lgbtq+)
I gotta thank Ubisoft for saving me money by consistently saying dumbass shit so I don’t buy their crappy games. The one Elon tweet was still pretty funny though I won’t lie.
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