Yep, just like TF2, that they copied, game is not fun if everyone starts taking it too seriously. I feel like Valve understood that and that’s why they never really pushed the competitive scene.
You have to do some work for the tower’s master and/or you need to gather informations for the knight. That could be stuff like cleaning their orbs so they can ponder them later, preparing/finding magical critters to be used in their potions, putting away his stupid sentient magical artifacts that keep trying to escape or do some shenanigans… Whatever. And try to gather information/find escape routes etc. But imo if there is some knight gameplay, it should be a minor part of the experience, otherwise you will indeed feel like you’re just playing the knight.
Edit: I think you could still have a fair share of knight gameplay if you make the princess gameplay some sort of walking sim where you wander around the tower, possibly under time constraints, and when it’s over, your have a knight section. You can figure out tons of way to make these gameplay segments interact too. For example there could be roadblocks to the knights progression that require the princess to do/find something. That could be mixed with Libra’s idea of having the princess cast spells and do other stuff during the knight’s segments, by having the player find the spells/artifacts required during the princess segments
All you need to notice is that the painfully politically neutral people making content about games (e.g mandalore) literally never mention this. Because that is a stale, pointless debate that never adds anything to a game’s analysis.
The Outer Wilds was a first game from an indie studio. On this basis alone it was practically guaranteed to not get the success it deserved. And it does deserve a ton of it.
Conversely, call of duty is literally one of the most notorious franchises in the entire industry, and pretty much sells on its name alone.
If the game is good, doesnt need an active playerbase to survive (ie isn’t entirely based on multiplayer), and the company is already reputable, it has no reasons to not sell decently in the long run. Also if an (already established) company’s future is jeopardized by a single game not doing well, I’m sorry but it’s not well managed. Ask me how I know.
if you thinking that a game even releasing in the same month as GTA6 won’t have a permanent impact on that games sales, you’re smoking the reefer.
Maybe they should stop trying to peddle bland-ass live service games that live and die by their players numbers then. A good solo game might take a hit to its initial sales but should recover in the long run.
Well I’m one of the people who put hundreds of hours in the game and will probably keep playing it on and off for a long time. One of my friends is an absolute L4D2 junkie and he loves it too (even more than me actually) but it doesn’t work on everyone. Personally I really like how when everyone knows what they’re doing it really feels like you’re a real team even though you might have never met any of the other players before. A good chunk of the levels are quite corrydor-ey but the environments are very detailed and truly feel massive at times when you look up and see these sprawling messes of pipes, cables etc (and I think the fact that the layouts you navigate aren’t as complex as in L4D2 doesn’t hurt the game that much since it is a lot more combat-focused). Plus the Jesper Kyd soundtrack slaps.
Well it’s not titan-level but the ogryn towers over all the other characters (with a much higher camera when you’re playing) and while the hit reactions on alive enemies are not huge (though he can usually stop most of them dead in their tracks with a single hit when he’s not one shotting them), all of his melee weapons send ragdolls flying in the direction of the strike and his guns usually turns enemies to paste or at least dismember on death. Also when you need to carry a power cell or whatever, all the other characters can only walk but the ogryn can run at full speed.
IIRC even when not geared and not leveled he just plows through the hordes (he has a lot more health and toughness than other characters too which makes him the king of crowd control) ultimately though, the toughness mechanics force you to have at least one squad member close by during fights or you’ll end up dying by a thousand cuts
Edit : I think the main issue with the power fantasy in Darktide is that the game is 100% skill based. With enough game knowledge and decent mechanical skills you can avoid pretty much every damages or special enemies’ attacks. But that does mean that when you don’t have that knowledge you’ll get your ass handed to you even by a small horde of poxwalkers, regardless of the character (though the ogryn will die slower because of his bigger health pool and better toughness regeneration mechanics against hordes of chaff)
Yeah you either play for hundreds of hours or you don’t. Shallow, though ? It’s got tons of great mechanics that make the moment-to-moment gameplay enjoying
I respect the hustle, but as a professional gameplay programmer : the fuck did you expect ? Piling systems upon systems does indeed increase the game logic’s complexity exponentially. Probably a big reason why there are so few (good) immersive sims even though it’s quite the popular genre.