Could have said that of Ori and Hollow Knight and people seem to have showed up for those. I don't think this is any worse than they are, FWIW. In any case to even notice that kind of nuance you have to play it. If that was the conversation we're having they'd be making a sequel.
The fact that it initially launched on Epic certainly didn't help its Steam numbers, but it also did much worse than Outlaws and other Ubisoft exclusives there, so the "it's the MTX/GaaS" argument doesn't hold.
That sucks. The game itself was great and its Steam numbers are Concord-bad.
I'd put a lot more weight on "Ubisoft games suck because of all the MTX and games as a service stuff" if people hadn't ghosted the legitimately great zero-MTX traditional mid-sized game.
I got into the millions with a mid-to-high end CPU and was... fine. I mean, fine at 40-ish fps, not fine at 240 fps.
To me the bigger issues were with balance and broken features that were hard to diagnose because city builders are so opaque by design. I can play a strategy game at 30 fps, been doing that for decades, but I need to have some way to figure out how the game is supposed to work.
In any case, it's less that I'm not "accepting" of games being broken, it's that I think I and everybody else are starting to wise up to the fact that you can just... wait. Why play CS2 at launch if you can give it a year while you do something else and play a better version of it that costs half as much?
See, that's the thing, I'm not even being unfair to console FPSs. I'll play on a controller. Catch me on a good day I'll say it's more fair, since your accuracy isn't dependent on how much you splurged on crazy carbon fiber, 5 gram mice with infinite dpi.
But GoldenEye on a single stick at 15fps still sucked.
Yeah, and I think that's nuance that slowly got eroded. Even at the time I remember the consensus about GoldenEye being "it's a good FPS... for a console". I'm not sure I would rather play it over Alien Trilogy or whatever the competition was in 1996, but that was the argument.
But then the "for a console in 1997" part started getting dropped off after console FPSs stopped being this weird, mismatched exceptional thing and became mainstream and now people don't remember that playing a FPS with a controller was a thing nobody did because it sucked. The N64 took a first stab at making that semi-functional that wouldn't really come together until Halo CE.
Oh, I don't question the fun with friends. I had fun with friends with plenty of crappy old games.
I'm saying the pretense that it was one of the best games ever made and a seminal FPS and that it holds up and it was a great thing one would want to replay any of the times it's been re-released makes zero sense, decoupled from the memories.
OK, so this one is really interesting and I think people maybe don't realize how that brief moment in time played out in some places.
So the Internet wasn't as widely available everywhere worldwide. It was expensive over here, and you paid by the minute. You could feel money bleeding out of your pocket if you were using it to play games, and horror stories of people who forgot to log off and got hit by huge phone bills were all over the news.
So while arcades were dying, LAN cafés exploded. All the way from Quake 1 to early CounterStrike days people would pay some cash to rent a semi-competent PC in a big room of LAN-connected computers and play each other in multiplayer games. Or, you know, if you needed to send an email or you didn´t have a computer at home and needed to write something. But mostly games. It was not that much more expensive than using the Internet at home and the experience was so much better.
I played some Doom and Command & Conquer with a couple of specific weirdo friends who had a modem, but LAN cafés were certainly the main venue for that kind of thing. There were like half a dozen in my town, and they each had communities focused on specific games. There was the Quake 3 place, which then got taken over by CS, to my disappointment. There was the weird tiny place where people did Baldur's Gate MP runs, a place that insisted on focusing on Unreal. There was a cheap one in a basement that never got over Quake 1 and people were doing railgun only 24/7. One place had people pay in advance to leave their Ultima Online characters mining while they went to class. It was groddy and magical and it'll never come back.
And I remember in the Quake 3 place they had the PC port of Turok up and running and I kept wondering who would want to play that instead, and especially who would want to play it on a console with a single stick. And then moving on with my day. I think that's a big part of why GoldenEye and the N64 didn't quite work as well in this market.
Look, I get that there is a generation in anglo territories where the N64 sold ok that discovered multiplayer games with this thing, but it's a slideshow with barely functional single stick controls. Quakeworld was a thing over here.
Neat. I wasn't able to get into Isolation, it just takes a long time to get going and I don't click super hard with what you do moment to moment, but it looks super cool and a lot of people really liked it, so I'm glad they're getting another shot at it. I'd check it out.
I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn't there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.
Right now I'd say on that continuum it's probably FP2>Against the Storm>FP1, but I need to play more FP2 to know for sure.
I mean, I will give you that Frostpunk does trade off some procedural complexity for the ability to give you narrative scenarios, but that's not a bad thing. I am waaaay past needing every game to be an evergreen forever thing these days.
That said, if anybody is just hearing about Against the Storm now, they should go play Against the Storm. Against the Storm is also good.
It is the exact opposite of that. Easily the best paced strategy game in years. This thing moves. It flows. If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
It's really, really good.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
“Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it,” said one former developer, who said he felt Ellis had poured a great deal of himself into the game, leading to a ton of stress. “Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development...he’s a good human, and full of heart.”
Sources told Kotaku that Ellis was too emotional to speak at points during a post-launch studio-wide meeting after it had become clear that the game was bombing.
You are vastly overestimating how good contracts for creative roles in the industry are, especially for a mid-sized studio of under 200 people. But even if that wasn't the case, the guy isn't quitting the company, he's apparently stepping down as creative director and staying on in some other role, according to the article.