BF1 followed Hardline which was almost universally mocked, 4 which is largely considered to be where things started going downhill, and 3 which was shit on for not being Bad Company 3 (… I can’t entirely disagree with that). It could just as easily have been a massive flop as a success (also, I personally never noticed the universal acclaim, but I do know it was generally tolerated).
Also, I can’t be arsed to check, but wasn’t the god awful free to play game out around that time as well? like the cartoony ww2 themed one?
If a game is not allowed to even be released in the same quarter as a CoD then… yeah.
I REALLY hate the ongoing narrative that Titanfall 2 was sent to die or whatever.
Titanfall 2 was made by Respawn. Respawn/Infinity Ward/Whatever They Were When They Did Medal Of Honor have been more or less defining mainstream first person shooters for decades at that point.
And there is this idea that Battlefield 1 (and this was well after we had all decided we hated Battlefield) and CoD Infinite Warfare killed it.
The reality is that it always had an uphill battle because Titanfall 1 was MP only and turned a lot of people off. And FPSes had largely become a “multiplayer genre” with the big surprise of 2016 being DOOM which… still mostly needed people to realize it was good after the “weird” trailers.
The funny thing is that if Titanfall 2 had been Titanfall 1… either as pure MP or with TF1 having one of the all time great SP campaigns, it probably would have become the new Call of Duty in the same way that CoD became the new Medal of Honor. But instead it was a poisoned well released at a time when Gamers just weren’t interested in SP shooters.
Similarly, if it had come out a few years later (after people remembered you could tell a story in a shooter), it probalby would have done gangbusters.
But, like with most things, we instead blame EA. Because clearly EA were willing to piss away however much money Titanfall 2 cost to… get a really shitty VR game and make Vince Zampella work on Battlefield?
Again, what does that have to do with anything here?
Naughty Dog have not launched anything since the TLOU remake a year or two back. And WFH is not mentioned at all. So I have no idea where you are pulling your random ass talking points out of.
Because this is a pretty bog standard “We have had a troubled development cycle and our publisher/parent company is cutting their losses”
Because game dev, at the best of times, is a giant multi-year gamble. You have to hope that people like the game you are in year 3 on because you don’t have money to go much past 4. And you also have to hope that another more popular studio doesn’t release something similar that cannibalizes your sales.
One way to make that safer? Get a publisher with deep pockets. Someone who can say “Hey, Elden Ring just came out and even has the same ‘there is a whole other world underground’ gimmick that you do. Can we delay your game for another six months but keep paying you the entire time?”
And those kinds of publishers tend to prefer the big studios where pivoting to a new engine or making a prototype for a radical genre shift is viable.
And this also applies to the insanely successful small studios. Dead Cells is a great example. Motion Twin is mostly a worker cooperative. This greatly limited its scalability (profit sharing for indie games doesn’t scale all that well) and resulted in a spin off of Evil Empire to manage Dead Cells.
Unionization will go a long way toward avoiding the worker abuse inherent in game dev. But startups are dangerous no matter what industry you are in.
… what? Does lemmy have karma bots that just fire off pre-written feel good comments? … Does lemmy have karma?
What does that have to do with any of this. Where is the “long held product”? Hell, the sister article is even “Yeah… that MP mode is never coming out”
I disagree regarding the map design being “unbelievably good” (a lot of it was “okay” to “good” with very few standouts) but yeah.
It reminds me a lot of when Bloodstained and Timespinner came out. Both are unapologetic love letters to Symphony of the Night. Except…
Bloodstained felt just as clunky and awkward as SOTN (I should know since I replayed SOTN in anticipation) with a lot of the same “good for the 90s…” design choices and mechanics.
Whereas Timespinner straight up stole the menu. But also modernized the gameplay and filed off a lot of rough edges.
End result is that Bloodstained played like SOTN and was carried by nostalgia and influencers. Whereas Timespinner played like what we remembered SOTN playing like… but didn’t have Iga.
Same here. Games like Dusk, Project Warlock, and so forth all play like what we remember DOOM and Quake playing like. Prodeus… played like DOOM without the nostalgia factor.
Titanfall 2 is one of the greatest games of all time (I would say it is easily a top 50, maybe even a top 20). The singleplayer campaign is just ridiculously well designed and even has a surprising amount of pathos in the narrative.
But if you are likely to be regularly interrupted? Horizon Zero Dawn. most of the story quests are 10-15 minutes each and you can just do the checklist open world the rest of the time.
If this were a DCS and someone were insisting that the jet they flew for a few years actually has a secret vectored thrust system, I could sort of understand.
But this is “Here are twelve top secret documents. This tank should have 0.1 more points of armor on the left side”
DOOM and DOOM Eternal both did pretty well. And, truth be told, the pacing is not too dissimilar from a Call of Duty where it is a constant intensity with a few spikes for set pieces. Max Payne has a few “walk and talks” but mostly it is just about clearing rooms.
Obligatory: Roguelike (well, Roguelite but that starts getting into the berlin bullshit). Rogue is a class in tabletop RPGs and a historic game. Rouge is a bunny rabbit in sonic and a kind of makeup.
That aside, here are a few off the top of my head:
Distance: Mostly a “beat the clock” style racing game in the vein of trackmania, although the synchronous MP with collision is a great time at a party. But it also has a weirdly good singleplayer campaign with both a narrative and some solid mechanics and set pieces. Also a ridiculous steam workshop presence
Tales of Maj’Eyal probably doesn’t belong here as I think it has been ridiculously successful for a game made by a small team and consistently comes up in discussions by anyone who is aware of what “the berlin interpretation” is. But it feels like it is almost completely ignored in the overall cultural zeitgeist when roguelikes/lites comes up. Which is a shame since TOME is very much a roguelike (technically lite, but… meh) with some solid design concepts. The vast majority of runs feel like they were “worth it” and even the early leveling has enough variety and wrenches that it feels less like you lost an hour of your life when you wipe and more like you get to do the Sand Worm again. Some of the unlocks are complete bullshit (although, I want to say the special magic trees were just made “free” because everyone hated it?), but it is generally the kind of game where you can work toward something with every run.
UFO: Aftermath/Aftershock (fuck Afterlight). Back in the dark ages between Silent Storm (WOOO) and the 2012 nu-XCOM, there were a lot of eurojank games in the genre. And while I don’t think UFO Aftermath was “good”, I do think it was competent. But mostly? It is probably the best Stargate SG1 game ever made. Because the devs were trying to cash in on that Jagged Alliance craze and made the human weapons stage a lot longer. So you might find yourself in an endgame with a few G36s backing up your plasma rifles as you fend off the obligatory base invasion. Aftershock, and especially Afterlight, lost a lot of this charm (because they are years later timeline wise) but were still fun
Silent Storm. Sorry, Silent Mother Fucking Storm, if we want to be specific. Alternate history WW2 where you play as a special organization for the Allies or Axis that are investigating a third party who have the potential to turn the war itself and blah blah blah. Mostly it is probably one of the best balanced JA2 style AP-based strategy games out there (just… get a save editor because the leveling/training is broken) with an emphasis on line of sight, trajectories, and full destruction of terrain. The kind of game where you might spend six “turns” getting your scout into position so that you can have your sniper plug a person from behind a wall, your machine gunner unload on people sleeping in a barracks, and your grenadier to… make the guard tower not exist anymore. All without ever directly targeting an enemy because you are fully operating based on magic radio commands or whatever. Again, this probably doesn’t belong here since anyone who liked JA2 back in the day was talking about this but it more or less fell off the face of the earth in favor of nu-XCOM. And I feel like the genre would be pretty revolutionized if people remembered this existed.
It is less about taking your HMD on the go and more about not needing a computer. For a lot of people, having a “gaming rig” is very intimidating. And, as the quest (and steam deck…) have shown, you don’t really need too powerful of a computer to run “basic” vr, but you do need the right ports and so forth.
But also? A lot of people have a complete potato of a laptop that can’t even do that.
For me? Standalone does indeed matter less than wireless. But wireless is expensive radios and power issues. Whereas standalone that I can plug in if I want to play Alyx or something with better visuals? That is my jam
Also: Standalone lets you go to a different room. Whereas you don’t want to get too far away from the radio dongle with a wireless setup. Which gets back to porn apps and maybe wanting a wank in your bedroom instead of the office. Or… having more room to move around when you play Gorn, sure.
The problem is that he really IS wooden and obnoxious for basically the entire first two acts or so. It isn’t until you have that conversation outside the motel (?) that he is allowed any range.
And… that is also around the time the game falls off massively in terms of quality. It isn’t quite Obsidian levels of “We ran out of money” but it definitely shows what they spent time on and what they just had to get working to release.
Which sucks because that is actually when they delve into the character of Johnny (particularly WHY he hates Arasaka so much) and you start having actual conversations with him… unless it is a side mission where they all default to antagonistic first hour mode.
Speculation is strongly leaning toward it not being a standalone device and instead being in the WMR/PSVR space. Possibly coupled with a return of “Steam Machines” for a tv/console experience.
I would still prefer a standalone/hybrid. But with wireless a lot of the need for that goes away. Same with if the Steam Deck is powerful enough for stuff like h3vr and other “standalone” levels of games (and, back of the envelope, it is very much capable of that).
And I think the bigger advantage will likely be to focus on OS agnostic support for the HMD itself since that is kind of a cluster. Probably will still mean everything runs on steamvr (which makes porn apps a bit risky), but will couple well with unity’s cock up and people generally getting pissy if you remind them that “meta” is “facebook”.
There have been a lot of borderline stunt castings over the years. Patrick Stewart was in like 30 seconds of TES4 and Sean Bean was in about 10 minutes of it. Hell, Bruce Campbell was in all of Tachyon: The Fringe (which is like the fifth best space dogfighting game ever).
But they were largely wasted. Kristen Bell… she is spectacular within a narrow range and “generic girl in the chair” is not it. And then there was the (alleged?) contract dispute that led to her being a baddy that gets killed off real fast. And that was largely the case. It was “get a b/c-tier actor/actress and find out that voice acting is very different than camera acting”
In more recent years we started to see a big emphasis on VAs doing the motion cap as well and Christopher “Teal’c” Judge made Kratos “I moved to a non-extradition treaty pantheon” of Sparta into a woobie. And people very much underrate how good of a job Camilla Luddington and a few other performers have done over the years.
But… we still have shit like Rosario Dawson in Dying Light 2 where “okay… she was there?”.
For its many many many many many flaws and problematic aspects, I think CDPR did an amazing job with their “stunt casting” for Cyberpunk. Because Keanu knocked it out of the park (when he wasn’t just talking about his magnificent cock) and everything I have seen of Idris Elba’s performance is similarly good.
And it kind of does mark a paradigm shift. Because it is no longer getting David Hyde Pierce to do a cameo as a camp gay counselor or a snooty over the top version of Niles. It is more like getting Ted Danson because you need a character who can simultaneously be a sleazy asshole and also the kind of person you just want to open up to and tell all your problems. It isn’t the kind of performance that you get for a single episode of sweeps week or to make people tune in even after your lead actor fucked off. It is the kind of performance you build a show/movie around.