Personally I’ve only ever played POE solo and I think the game holds very well against many premium ARPG titles. When the game reaches its EOL as live service it would be very wastefull for GGG to just drop the game instead of turning it in to a paid standalone title that people can buy and play for as long as they want.
Solo Self-Found (SSF) is a thing in Path of exile and usually creating a standalone version like this requires some modifications to the game anyways for it to even run. For example developers behind Warhammer 40000: Inquisitor patched their game so that it can be played offline and even allows players to access old seasonal content (allows picking season when creating new character).
Probably most hours I’ve spend where with Conquer Online back in the days before mysteryboxes where introduced. After that probably puzzle and dragons.
Luckily after those games I learned to question my time spent in these games. (Basically just one day after grinding tower of gods for umpteenth time to spend my 1k stamina/energy, I asked myself wtf am I doing with my life, was I having fun?)
After that my most played games have been Grim dawn, Sacred2, Monster hunter world, No Man sky, Incredible adventures of van helsing then various 2d fighters like Blazblue, undernight inbirth and Granblue fantasy versus that I play on locals.
The title is a bit missleading considering that the actual article mentions a lot other problems that plagued the development.
Project 8 faced both progress and challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult, but some quality improvements were achieved. However, critical issues persisted, causing delays and budget increases. The latest review revealed unresolved problems needing more time and money, along with revised sales forecasts, raising doubts about the project’s profitability.
– TLDR by Microsoft copilot
While there’s still demand for “narrative-driven story-rich games” one should keep realistic expectations. For this genre I feel smaller scope and indie developers work much better.
Some of these could use “Nightdive” treatment like TimeSplitters trilogy.
Simple a PC version of the game with support for latest hardware and operating systems and support for LAN or self hostable multiplayer would give these games new life among people not interested in modern multiplayer games.
Many games already do this and I would like to give honorary mention to NeocoreGames who have done this to their Van Helsing and most recently with Warhammer Inquisitor. Latter one just recently got offline support with all past seasons playable.
I dont think its unreasonable to require even live services or mmos to have robust end-of-life plan that quarantees customers that the game will remain playable in some form or another.
They’ve probably spend a lot of budget to make the combat in this game this fluid. However as a side effect the game has become even more of an action game with leveling and loot shoveled in than before. I just hope Bioware can pull off at least some level of build diversity with different classes, skills, items and abilities so that there will be at least some depth with character progression.
Gameplay looks fine but also very similar to most triple-A action games on the market. Combat is fluid and cinematic meaning you can probably pull off all sorts of combos by mashing light and heavy attack buttons then do bunch of acrobatic moves to dodge any enemy attacks. You can probably also counter attacks execute all sorts of cool cinematic takedowns with single button or QTE.
But this often means that the combat lacks any sort of meaningful weight, emergent gameplay is non-existent and actual player choice is very limited and thightly controlled by what the game and level designers allow.
The trailer makes my eyes hurt so it’s a definate skip for me.
I mean the whole thing seemed to be animated exclusively with 3s or 4s which to me looks like the characters are micro-warping around instead of moving. When watching In to the Spiderverse and LOVE, DEATH & ROBOTS (SUITS) I literally had to take breaks and watch elsewhere so rest my eyes and this looks a lot worse.
Was about to comment about the developers probably had to meet some diversity quota but the “hero shooter cast” sounds even more descriptive. Personally don’t really mind much if the gameplay is good and the game is free of the usual triple-a monetization shenigans.
But in a post Baldurs gate 3 world Bioware will need to work extra hard to meet the increased expectations.
Looks like more doom which is all right in my book. Now If they can keep out the always online and live service bullshit out of this one and focus on single player it might turn out to be yet another good doom game. Not sure about the dragon and mecha though, I would rather not have any vehicles, mounts and anything like that in Doom games.
The cutscenes hurt my eyes with the frame rate but the gameplay looks alright.
Honestly not fan of the the way some 3d animations animate with 2s/3s to create fake stop motion videos. It’s even worse when they try to make it look like a cartoon/anime and completely forget to add any smear frames that make the these animations look a lot smoother than they actually are. For me these look like characters constantly warping around instead of moving which hurst my eyes, luckily it seems to only affect the characters and not the movement camera.
The gameplay looks alright but very unoriginal, there’s seems to be this basic combat with dodging, light and heavy strikes and then these fly using streams of wind/magic/energy and energy hook-shot to get you exactly where developers want you to go. Maybe the theme, story and visuals will be enough to make this shine above the competition.
If its a single player focused with no (or very minimal) live service bullshit then great.
If not then well there’s bunch of indie or classic boomer shooters I’ve not yet tried that are just that.
Honestly all these tech layoffs could really come bite back publishers and the big tech in the near future.
Theres a lot new talent for competitors to snatch and fraction of these developers might even form up new studios to make the next big thing.