Diabotical did do teams and objectives. I think what really needs to happen to bring the genre back to life though is for there to be a really good campaign tied to a really good multiplayer experience that brings in some new weapon design instead of the Quake meta weapons with minor tweaks.
UT4 was looking promising in terms of multiplayer before Epic killed the project.
You might like roboquest it’s a very recent game that’s not PvP but has a lot of AFPS characteristics.
IDK, kinda feels like we need idSoftware to do a new Quake with new story and new weapons even if they don’t call it Quake (or to release a DOOM multiplayer experience that is actually fun).
Checkout Distance on Steam. It’s definitely up there in terms of unique racing games.
Split/Second was also a really interesting take on racing, I wish they had released DLCs or something to add more maps, the way that game worked with the crazy visuals to open up new shortcuts and modify the track midrace was an awesome idea
Yeah… Diabotical looked like a promising update to AFPS (which is what I’d say you’re describing), but it didn’t change enough of the formula (I blame the weapon design choices) and it launched on EGS instead of steam.
Maybe, it might also be easier to reuse portions of the engine in Unreal Engine while using parts of Unreal (like its rendering engine) than you think though. Assets largely I’d expect to be portable or at least comvertable with a custom asset loader.
I’m talking a little out of my ass though, and neither of us is familiar with the code. Point being though, it’s a little different moving engines than rewriting a complicated web server (a project I have been a part of and would not recommend).
Maybe, but we’re also seeing it in reviews in such high quantities, it feels like it has to be more than just kids. And like, sure I’d love if the games were cheaper, but they certainly haven’t gotten cheaper or less risky to make.
It’s frustrating either way… I don’t care if the game is $100. I want to know A) does it have pay to win mechanics or gambling (things I actually consider to be predatory – another word that is significantly over used right now), B) is it fun?, and C) how much replay value is it (i.e. should my expectations be set for a really great 80 hours or potentially hundreds – I’m okay with the former sometimes, but it’s nice to know what I’m getting into).
Lately with steam reviews it’s like “tHiS gAMe coSt toO muCh. Y u So gReDy!?!” Which tells me none of those things and just gives me old man yelling at a cloud energy about how things (particularly live service stuff) does cost money to develop and run beyond a 1 time purchase of $25.
It sounds like the game’s next expansion has been delayed, and the game is being maintained by a skeleton crew while the rest of the studio focuses on Marathon.
FWIW, they have ~650 people even after the layoffs for destiny 2 alone. Hardly a skeleton crew. The content drops have been the same as they’ve been for years, seasonal content drops in-between expansions. There is definitely a lul period where there’s not new stuff getting released to give people a chance to catch up.
Competition. With few exceptions, good games always slowly bleed users as shiny new alternatives attract players.
There is some of this. I think there also just seems to be a general recoil of players at what games are costing these days. I’m personally fine with it, but I see what feels like infinite complaining about how greedy … basically every company that isn’t indie is being.
Realistically, I’d say it’s A) bad PR and B) a failure to make new gameplay loops that shake things up significantly C) a failure to fully utilize old content (there’s not a lot of reason to play old strikes, not a lot to encourage players to help others out in old story missions, etc – replay value is artificially neutered by making too many things curated which limits choice)
There’s a couple here and there, it’s not like new players have completely stopped joining, but there’s not that many.
That’s typical when you hit market saturation/have an established game. Look at wow or RuneScape. The revenue comes from the people already playing your game.
The new light onboarding really was abysmal when I went through it earlier this year
You should’ve seen it before beyond light launched.
“Go shoot that, now that, now that. I’m so glad you’re back guardian. Welcome to the tower.”
My friends and I started without anyone to pull us through that mess, and we figured out what to do with Google and just clicking on things. We’ve since grown to a group of like 10ish, but yeah … Like newer people don’t really get what it was like before. It’s not great, but it’s gotten better.
Despite what others are saying, the game is fine (at least compared to its previous state/status)… They’ve made a lot of changes to improve the onboarding experience and remove pain points. They’ve made things less grindy and more engaging every expansion.
The last DLC just had kind of a meh story to it, “the discovery of strand.” The environment they used also wasn’t all that pretty or interesting. It wasn’t snow, it wasn’t a swamp, it was a minimalistic city-scape with some canyons.
That, plus increased pricing and over dramatization of the loss of the red war and foresaken content (which wasn’t even that good compared to the new stuff mind you – it was extremely short and grindy) has almost definitely caused the profit loss.
Not to mention, playlist activities still feel bland… Implement map voting and modifier voting, and make a higher difficulty playlist for PvE content. I swear once you’re caught up, it’s either stomp over everything in the same 5 maps over and over, or face the exact same somewhat challenging (or extremely challenging) encounter over and over for an entire week. They have all this content they could open up to high end rewards and mutators, but they don’t.
There are new players… We just brought another on last month… It’s really not that bad. The new light stuff has actually been worked into a pretty nice onboarding experience.
I largely agree with what you’re saying but I’m going to add… If you get to the point of release and you’re off 300% and not 15% … you screwed up.
There definitely aren’t easy answers to these kinds of problems but there are steps that should be taken along the way to prevent them. Getting to the end and then addressing any and all performance issues is a recipe for disaster.
You don’t want to be making major architectural changes at this point in the process. You want to be dealing with hiccups. Throwing hardware at the problem and “optimization” only go so far.