This game was the most AA shit I’ve ever seen. In the PS2 days it would have got a 7.5 average from most reviewers then it would have had a not-insignificant number of people pick it up.
They are delusional for thinking a UE5 asset flip is a AAA game.
I play a lot of single player shooters. One thing they all have in common is that I know they exist, which I’m thinking could potentially be part of the problem with this one. Based on reactions in this thread it seems like a lot of people are in the same position I’m in, where the first they hear of the game is when it’s being pronounced a flop. I’m getting big The Producers vibes.
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.
I had to look up a video to realise this wasn’t the “I guess that’s something I do now” game.
Looks like a confusing mess of a game tbh. When a game’s failure is blamed on it being released close to fucking Starfield, you know it never had much going for it.
Path of Exile players pay this and more with a smile on their faces, but yeah the game is “free to play” (you can barely play the game without buying storage tabs).
For $20 you can buy enough stash tabs to happily play for years with nothing else. You do need more storage and the map tab is very helpful but most of the specialized tabs are not really needed. I have most of the specialized ones and I could easily live without them. So it’s a $20 game in my multi-1000 hours in-game opinion. The cosmetic microtransactions are a mixed bag but some are very cool. Compared to the money I spent on D4 which didn’t give me much in return, it is not in the same ballpark.
If you don’t have a vision, don’t try to turn money into more money by making a game. Everyone loses. Dumping money on assets doesn’t make your trope copy/paste any better than the other million cheap Chinese clones on an app store.
All dictated by management with zero input from anyone else. I get sad for developer’s working for EA. Having zero influence on the games they make. I believe that everyone can have a great idea or a solution to a problem no matter what department they’re in.
Lots of developers have overlapping skills from making they’re own games that aren’t being utilised.
Working under EA is probably alot like working for McDonald’s, yeah if they did it ‘this way’ they would sell more burgers but good luck getting your voice heard.
Disagree. The fact that I’m only hearing about it now that it’s flopped is a good thing because I might have given it attention before. Well, probably not because it’s EA.
I just hope that companies that aren’t EA don’t take what they say about single player games at face value. EA games probably need friend group hype to succeed at this point. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking that there are many others like me who want to avoid anything from that company and thus would only play when pressured by friends.
But if EA does fail, there likely will be a period where they try to talk about it like experts and will just say, “oh, gamers must not like x genre anymore”, when gamers really just don’t like overproduced garbage games that are clearly tuned to sell MTX rather than be fun.
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.
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