Been hearing about this game for years now, even played an early test build of it a year or two ago. Glad to see it’s shaping up, and glad to hear he has a small little team working on it now and is not just a solo developer. What he was doing on his own was impressive, but it still felt like a massively overambitious project for a solo dev, and when I played the previous test build I was left with the feeling that it was a lot of cool gun-related things in a neat setting in search for an actual game.
I’m glad to see the trailer include both some new stuff like seemingly emphasising the survival elements more with hunting and fishing and also developing the setting further and leaning into the post apocalypse thing. Not the most original concept, but at least it’s looking more like there is an idea of what the game wants to actually be now, gameplay wise.
The trailer left me confused. The artillery barrage, army helicopter shooting at you, etc… what type of game is this exactly? Are you a survivor in a zone, or soldier in a war?
That was a fun watch. I played through the most recent edition of the game with developer commentary, and that was really neat to listen to the developers talk about certain details about the level or what certain areas reminded them of, or a developer who had passed away and what they had done. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything about the Duke Nukem voice actor, so that was new for me.
Duke Nukem was fun for the time. Like, I was playing Doom II back then.
Doom II was actually a lot better. Other than the stripper scenes, Nukem wasn’t all that unique. Sorta Doom clone with bewbs.
But Nukem made enough of a splash for people to remember it and wonder about a sequel.
And wonder they did. For many years.
These are the original “When it’s done” guys.
They mocked up game footage to get funding and gawd knows why else.
And then they released a shit game. Nobody liked Nukem Forever.
And I play crap like that. I’ve got all the Serious Sam and completed the first three games.
Never bothered with Nukem Forever.
What I loved about Duke Nukem, especially in contrast to Doom, was the interactivity and that all the places actually looked like places. Doom’s levels just looked like video game levels. In Duke Nukem 3D you were in real cities with real shops. And the cinema worked, the billiard table worked, he’d comment when you tried to use the arcade machines, the toilets worked, electrical outlets gave you a shock, etc.
Seems like they technically went a bit farther than mocking game footage (but barely). A 2001 demo of sort, that’s probably close to what they showed at E3 that year, was leaked in 2022.
It’s “playable”, in the sense there are quite a few maps you can explore and player physics and weapons are functional. But there is basically nothing to do, in particular no enemies at all.
Anyway, DNF has been a fun ride all these years, and the best part is you didn’t even have to play it. The pathetic attempt from gearbox to salvage it just gave a final punchline to the whole joke.
In my case it was the opposite. Doom was ok-ish and Duke Nukem blew my mind, the fact that you could move the camera around with the mouse, it was like wow, this is the future. Haven’t played them since so not sure which one will hold better now.
Would be cool if there was 3 different teams instead 2. That could work with that team size. Plus the map needs to be smaller from what I have seen and read (I didn’t play myself).
The core gameplay looks interesting, with the Apex Legends like controls (at least it looks like) and all the abilities. Generally the game looks a bit too much inspired by Apex (size of team mates and map size and the looting). I actually don’t mind if they have their own formula and brings something new or different to the table, which it seems to do.
I keep seeing people saying that another team could work. But I think that would actually have a massive detrimental effect on the game. That adds another base, less chance of a comeback, and then you end up where you started in a 3v3 in an even more empty map with even longer matches.
This needs larger teams. Like 8v8 or 10v10 so you actually end up with skirmishes during the downtime. Your still going to have long matches, but at least something is more likely to happen. Or they need to rework the formula of the matches a fair bit.
I don’t get what makes this game so special that Geoff Keighley hyped it so much. That this thing was the big surprise that ended the game awards show was completely underwhelming. Out of the show, Highguard was the most generic game presentation. There was absolutely nothing about this game that seemed new or even interesting. Just the next hero shooter with comic look.
Tbf, I don’t think Apex Legends was completely new either. It refined and combined a lot of good ideas in other games into a battle royale. I think they’re trying to do that with this type of hero shooter vibe, having taken some ideas from Rainbow 6 Siege and a few other games. Doesn’t seem to have worked as well this time.
Well its not Concord 2.0. Already has WAY more players than Concord ever did, almost 100k peak players on Steam alone, currently 67k in-game as of the time I am posting this.
I can’t say that 3v3 is the right fit for the game, the maps are rather large for it. But I think with a bit more work in a few updates, it has far more staying power than Concord ever had.
Even still, its got more legs to stand on than Concord had, which was zero.
I think its serviceable unlike Concord, which required too many changes.
I guess we just have to wait and see if the server is shut down in two weeks. In reality, I don’t think we will ever see as monumental a train wreck as Concord was. Probably ever.
I’m 100% of the opinion that the main reason Concord failed is because it didn’t get any advertising. The first time I heard about Concord was the news that it completely flopped at launch and I wasn’t the only one. When that’s the first thing people hear about the game they’re not even going to bother to get interested in what the game is about. To this day I don’t even know if Concord had any redeeming qualities because I haven’t even seen any gameplay outside of 5 second no-context clips. Even bad games receive better numbers than Concord.
Highguard is going to have more staying power than Concord solely on the fact that it actually had an advertising budget.
Concord didn’t have any advertising because the data was showing them beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would have been throwing good money after bad.
But after they revealed it? Yes. From their reveal to their beta test, it seemed clear the game was not going to find an audience; definitely not enough to recoup $200M-$400M.
You can dig through This Week in Video Games episodes on SkillUp’s YouTube channel from back just before the game released. That’s where I got it from. Live service games are looking for the hockey stick shaped graph in order to take off, and it was quite clear that even when the game was free, it didn’t have the juice to make that happen. And even the lower bound of $200M is a tough bar to clear, but Concord was funded at a time when borrowing money was cheap and every asshole with a war chest thought they’d make a fortune by following the same formula; the problem with that is that everyone else thought they could do that too. And that’s not even to say Concord was the worst game ever made or anything. It was just a game that cost way more to make than it was ever, ever going to make back.
What advertising though? They didn’t have to pay for The Game Awards spot, Jeff just gave it to them for free. I haven’t seen any commercials or ads outside of that either. I think Concord had more advertising than Highguard, with Concord getting multiple devlogs and previews across a few Sony hosted events, IIRC.
My bad, I meant marketing strategy not advertising budget. Concord definitely had a bigger budget considering they got a Secret level episode deal before the game was even launched. But the budget and bits of marketing don’t matter when it doesn’t gain any traction and whatever their strategy was it gained no traction what so ever.
As for highguard, they did pay for the TGA spot. They didn’t pay extra to be the premier trailer, that Jeff gave them for free. And they did had a weird strategy of going completely radio silent after TGA. But despite that people at launch knew this game existed and has already beaten Concord numbers (at least on Steam) by hundredfold and I don’t think that’s solely because this game is F2P.
Looks cool but only going to play it when, it is 🏴☠️. I refuse to pay so much and then to be forced to get th DLCs for even more money. If it won’t be 🏴☠️ then I simply will not play the game.
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