I am sure that many people use games to make statements, but not all devs think like that. Many of them just think “it would be cool to play/develop a game like this” without thinking about any kind of statement they will be making.
And thats great if you’re making Hello Kitty Island Adventure. These guys based their game off the movie Starship Troopers, not even the book that kinda idealized the military. But the one that made a statement about fascism. Seems to me the publisher had a slight disconnect with the actual developers there.
The Games Workshop of 2025 is not the GW of… fucking corpse god, 2004. Modern day GW very much cares about their brand and the “synergy” with tabletop and the like.
So I assume this was greenlit when they were pushing Mechanicus and all the “Armies of the Imperium” very hard as a way to break up the Guard and specialize more with heroes and so forth.
That said: Assume there will be at least one “secret” faction closer to launch. Probably Chaos because… duh.
The Games Workshop of 2025 is not the GW of… fucking corpse god, 2004. Modern day GW very much cares about their brand and the “synergy” with tabletop and the like.
GW has always been about chasing trends and synergy with new products. Xenos being ignored in favour of human armies has been a meme for as long as the game existed. And I remember DoW1 including flying units in the last expansion just because GW was pushing them in the tabletop.
Has it become even worse? Tbh I hate GW and I don’t keep up with their news.
GW has always been about chasing trends and synergy with new products.
In the video gaming space? No.
They’ve gone through a few different waves. Pre-Relic (so 90s) we have a lot less information on since most of those studios were dead long before game journos even realized they could talk to people but it was very much characterized by “whatever looks like a strategy game”. Relic (and the folk who did the underrated Fantasy RTS) kind of had carte blanche in the early 2000s. Yes, there were some clear mandates to incorporate certain armies (largely indicated by Relic outsourcing Soulstorm) but it was a lot closer to what we see with Total Warhammer these days where it was kinda just “make a video game version of 40k”.
Then… Dawn of War 3 happened and everything came crashing down. Probably also the MMO nobody but me played and said fantasy RTS that even the fans can’t remember the name of. But holy crap did everyone hate Dawn of War 3 to the point I am shocked they didn’t remove the number entirely and just call this “Dawn of War: Yo Dog, Primarchs is Back. All them Blood Ravens suddenly feel a strong urge to hang with Magnus But We’re Gonna Ignore That”
Which led to an era of slop where anyone who bought a PR person a six pack of cider could get the license. But from what various studios have alluded to in the 2020s, that is mostly gone (outside of mobile slop which has largely slowed down) and it is very much a case where if a game is being made it is because a specific product is being pushed. With Total Warhammer largely being the last holdout since even GW realizes nobody cares about Age of Sigmar (it amuses me that probably one of the biggest supporters of AoS online is Louise Sugden who can’t go a single video without all but daring GW to come at her and get her to explain why she left).
So if the fricking Mechanicus is an army: There is a reason. And it very well might be the reason for the game itself.
I bought this game on a whim after reading that the devs had said they’d rather people pirate it than have it spoiled for them. I don’t usually buy games full price, so this was a rare thing for me, but I have no regrets; it was one of my favourite games of that year.
I just love how ripe for thematic analysis it is. For example, I’m a woman who has read a bunch of feminist and queer theory, and some of my interpretations of the themes were drastically different to a friend’s. I found it really cool that I didn’t necessarily disagree with their takes, nor they mine, but we both resonated with the game is strong but different ways
Yeah, it sits at this very satisfying cusp where it is clearly saying something, once you get over the "look at this upsetting thing I'm showing you" level, but I can also totally believe people coming to totally different conclusions about what it is saying. It's wild.
Thus is a super cool project, but just a warning: most burned discs have a lifespan and begin to deteriorate over time as a result of having the ability to be chemically modified by light. If you’re looking to make long-term backups, you need to get special, more expensive, blanks intended for archival that last longer.
Square: “Alright, we are developing a new game that looks pretty neat. Who is available to come up with the worst names possible for the title, characters, and locations?”
I never finished the 1st one because I found the complete lack of connection between the stories frustrating. I get that they wanted you to be able to play with any combination of the 8 characters, but the story suffered heavily.
It was just 8 separate games played at once with the same mechanics, and the lack of any real overarching story meant the narative scope of everything felt small.
That’s a fair point. The narrative was very much a choose your own adventure with mostly interchangeable parts.
I enjoyed it for those reasons, though, because it gave me the feeling of old FF games when players got to decide completely on party makeup. I thought it was nice that I could get my chosen team to level 60 and then just blaze through the characters I hated and focus on what I wanted to do.
I really like the first one, but OT2 felt very padded. At 30 hours I think I was less than halfway through the game. I got frustrated and put it down, never got back to it.
When you say padded, do you mean like most anime where they just add unnecessary conflict to fill out the story, or was it more like extra steps to get to the main story?
The one thing I didn’t enjoy so much from 1 was the way each story followed the exact same arch.
The main story points are further apart level-wise, leading to more grinding. There’s also more fluff side story content involving multiple characters instead of just one. Which isn’t bad in itself, but none of it is actually optional because of the leveling curve. And the two multi-character “side plots” I did… anime is an apt comparison, they kinda felt like hot springs episodes. No bearing on the overarching plot.
The way it was done, the story beats for individual character plot arcs are very far apart. 30 hours in, I only had a few characters through the second parts of their stories.
I was pretty engaged with a few of the individual stories (the thief, the healer, the merchant, the scholar) so this was really frustrating.
Second I played most of the characters to their third quest maybe about halfway though the game and the day/night addition was fun but the narrative style and level gating in the second could use more work imo.
I liked 1 enough until the first 2 chapters of all the characters were complete, but then it immediately felt like it hit a grind wall. With 8 stories it’s long enough already–why would they pad it out any further?
Even in the pretty generic realm of military fps trailers, this one lacked the tiniest ambition of standing out. It almost dips into the realm of satire in it’s choice of themes and presentation which are all so obviously just lame rehashes of things we’ve all seen dozens of times before.
Also worth mentioning that I learned from this video that Shift Up removed the Playstation region lock that caused the Helldivers 2 controversy universally, so they get kudos from me.
The other day I shared this video (Failure of Battlebit Remastered), which itself was uploaded by its creator only a week ago.
It’s great to see the devs coming back to it. Tbh I don’t think it’s my sort of game personally, but I typically prefer to see projects revisited and restored well instead of abandoned.
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