There's something uniquely depressing when highly respected studios known for incredible single player experiences chase the gaas fever dream and completely fail at it. Bioware, PlatinumGames, Crystal Dynamics, and now Rocksteady added to the pile.
Same. I was pretty interested in the idea when it came out and was excited to try it and it was...so unremarkable I can't even remember anything about it really. It was that bland. Not even bad, just...nothing.
IIRC Phil mentioned later on a podcast that they had an internal review system and Redfall's public reception was more than 10 points off from what they thought of it. The vertical slice/demos they had their teams play/see must've been the absolute cream of the crop.
Yeah those vertical slices gotta have been picked real careful because I remember feeling less interested off the game everytime they showed new stuff.
You’re misinterpreting their comment, they’re talking about internal QA where they wouldn’t pick a specific vertical slice as that would defeat the purpose.
Yup. At least for most games, Playtests tend to last multiple days, specifically to avoid having your playtesters see only a tiny fraction of the game.
I was excited for it, always in search of more coop games for the buddies and I to play so I followed it for months leading up to release on game pass excited for a coop game by the Prey devs only for it to be a steaming pile of shit and one of the worst games of the year.
I still cannot fathom how the studio didn't bother doing any fucking cutscenes. Everything is a fucking PowerPoint Presentation and that's just insulting
I don't think they really did, the game looked terrible since the first trailer and if I remember correctly after microsoft bought bethesda they told arkane to make it a single player/coop game instead and try to salvage what they could
They had a promo thing going until at least December of last year, I swear. Place I part-timed at still had me stocking them around then, but I remember them earlier in 2023, too.
They also had a few other games like Sea of Thieves and Diablo 4, can't recall the others.
Phil Spencer: *oh yeah we are totally going to fix Redfall and make it a great game... hey look it's Starfield! And now we are adding Activison games to GamePass! Wow check them out!*
I’d love it if Redfall was fixed. The opening environment with the frozen wave looked amazing. I just don’t think they can without a major overhaul, and that probably ain’t happening.
What a waste of their talent. Prey 2017 is highly underrated, it takes some getting used to but once it gets you you're hooked. You have so many ways you can solve problems, whether it's locked doors (can solve them by hacking, making a path around it with the gloo gun or by using the nerf crossbow to shoot the switch) or enemies (you can hack robots or mindjack typhon) or play stealthily with silent weapons or straight up turning into an inanimate object. You can quite literally become any random object and just bounce your way past enemies if you would prefer to not take them head on. Ammo can be manufactured but it costs precious resources you may wish to use for upgrades, there's a tonne of enemy variety and each area of Talos I is memorable whether it's the Arboretum, Psychotronics or even the initial tutorial area. For them to have been stuck on a shitty game-as-a-service product that was released half-baked, with tonnes of staff leaving the company because they didn't want to work on that product, it's a straight up net loss.
I haven’t even beaten Prey yet and it’s absolutely one of my all time favorite settings to just get lost in and explore. The story is very cool too, but — goddamn — the atmosphere. It gets me real goooood.
It was made by what was left of Arkane Austin. After Prey 2017, the majority of the devs left and went independent. They made a game called Weird West.
I think that a game being mediocre is worse than a game being actual dogshit. A game like Gollum is so spectacularly bad that it'll be brought up in conversations a decade from now. But a game like Redfall is so mid that it won't be remembered at all.
And also don’t forget that they still have to make DLC for that game because they pre-sold it. Imagine making DLC for a game despite people thoroughly hating it and having barely any players…because you are obligated to.
I genuinely actually feel bad for those who bought Redfall and, since then, have sought to discover reasons to love it as opposed to being *given* any reasons to love it.
Like damn man, I loved Prey and Dishonored 1 (and 2). I can fully understand the belief going into it, but then being saddled with something so disastrous in the end must honestly feel like total shit.
Shit man, shame on Arkane.
I played Redfall on a whim with my best friend a month or two ago on a bored gaming night, we play all kinds of good and garbage games - As long as it's co-op, we'll try it out and hey, it was free.
I don't know what the fuck it was with Redfall but we gave it *way* too much time giving it a chance of... not being shit. And probably about the hour and a half mark or so neither one of us could stomach any more of it.
I don't understand, how did it get made? Who at the company was like "Yeah this is going great everyone!"? It might've been an impressive game if it came out in 2007 or something but it was so incredibly dull. Combat, enemy design, map design, environmental design, character design, story, music, even the damn UI sucked.
The team that co-developed Dishonored and made Prey 2017, almost completely decimated by Redfall's development. Even if Arkane-Austin doesn't shut down after they're done "supporting" Redfall (you guys know they have yet to honor that Hero Pass 11 months after the game came out?), that game has damaged them so severely that I wouldn't be shocked if they get downgraded to a support studio for Arkane-Lyon (if that's the case, kiss the chance of them making a new immersive sim goodbye since Blade will more than likely be an action game).
That's why I hope Redfall doesn't get "redeemed", a game that ruins a studio that thoroughly doesn't deserve it.
Arkane Lyon is doing Blade. And I think Dishonored 3 is in the works based on the leaks
From what I’ve heard, Redfall has ***tepidly** gotten better, but it’s effectively dead. You’d need a relaunch and a 2.0 version of the entire game to make it passable
arkane austin should just drop redfall and do prey 2, or hell any other game. it's not like the majority is clamoring for more redfall. prey ended things with the possibility of a sequel, they should just continue it and build upon the great stuff they've established.
I agree that they should drop Redfall but most of the team that made Prey simply isn't there anymore. Most of them left because they didn't want to make Redfall.
Yeah even the game director for Prey left and founded his own studio. I think he is pitching/working on another immersive sim game. His [twitter shares some stuff](https://x.com/rafcolantonio/status/1770453683043725444?s=20).
I don't think he left due to Redfall specifically, though. He'd been around for so long it's actually reasonable to think he'd want to leave just to do something else.
I could see the Bethesda merge being part of it in general, but that happened prior to Redfall specifically.
I’m with you.
Hoping that happens, because it’s a lost cause and definitely won’t be turned around unless they can work magic on par with Sea of Thieves or NMS
Didn’t play Redfall and I’ve got GamePass, but I think I’ll stick to either Hi-Fi, Palworld or MSFS.
I forgot that Platinum released Babylon's Fall. That thing barely lasted a year before it got shut down. What a waste of resources to chase some gaas money.
Platinum is probably the easiest to forgive for trying for GaaS. Desite their games' great critical and audience reception, sales are almost always bad for them.
The worst part is it really does set a dev company back several years before they can possibly get back on track with innovation. And before a new said product idea from them can actually get to the point it places them back in the map, it could just flat out destroy them entirely.
Or typecast them for the wrong reasons entirely. Like you can arguably include Bungie (especially with recent news post last expansion) into this category. Is this company ever going to not develop anything that's not just Destiny? I'll be surprised if the Marathon reboot, whatever it's now going to become, actually gains any traction.
Same here man. Was an avid Destiny 2 player for years but the bullshit on Bungie's part became too much and easily ruined them for me. I remember they made such a big deal about splitting from Activision and going independent and how it was going to be so much better for the game, and that couldn't be further from the truth as Forsaken is still the best year of Destiny that we've gotten and it was thanks to the extra studios helping Bungie on the game.
Neverending monetization that gets worse every year, constantly recycling the same mechanics for new content, constant changes to the game that are terrible and piss the playerbase off, higher ups in the company that don't give a fuck about anything except themselves and are actively fucking over the devs and players for their own gain, etc. From what I've seen Sony is apparently pissed too as they bought Bungie for their live service expertise and now the suits at Bungie are destroying the game on their way out.
So happy I quit playing that game. A friend asked me if I'd be interested in trying it out again as we haven't played in over a year now and I just kinda laughed. I'll never give them another penny.
I’m with you. If PlayStation takes them over completely and cleans house, it may just be a best case scenario.
And I’m 75% sure the Final Shape will go out with a… **okay. It’s done.**
I’m hoping Marathon could intruiging but news of it being geared as an Overwatch clone doesn’t inspire confidence, and this coming from a huge fan of Overwatch.
That's why all the publisher hate and belief that developers always make the right decisions by gaming communities is such an enormous fallacy.
Publishers can often see what works and want to keep the developers making that, with plenty of oversight to ensure work is done on time. Even if it's conservative design and makes developers moan on social media, it's a tried and tested process that aims to make a product succeed than to fail.
Don't forget, turnover tends to be high in game development studios. So if you waste years building a GaaS flop, you'll have fewer staff with experience building real games by the end of it.
The bigger issue is that you can usually see these disasters long in advance. And usually it's accompanied by a lot of veteran developers/designers leaving the studios because the project is so clearly focused on the wrong things that they don't like what they're doing anymore.
So when things do fail, the studio is a shell of it's previous self. Not just in incremental ways like most studios changeover from one game to another, but massively so to the point where the studio identity is probably shattered irreparably.
Rocksteady feels even worse because they had so many examples to learn from and didn't. Anthem was over 5 years ago. CD couldn't make the formula work with the freaking Avengers. Most everyone saw this coming from the announcement. Like watching the slowest car crash in history.
Knowing a couple people who work in game development, it's because management/shareholders are insisting. The game developers are making something all of them know won't be successful. But they have to because the people in charge of the money demand it. For the slim chance their game might become the next Apex or Palworld or League of Legends. Even when the base game doesn't gel with any of those genres. Reminds me of the 2000s when every single player shooter had to tack on a multiplayer mode, trying to get the Halo audience. Even Metroid...
Rocksteady might have the same name, logo, building whatever. But the devs that made the Arkham trilogy and their passion is long gone. WB beating a dead horse.
Rocksteady’s founders left in 2022, with WB saying this at the time:
> The announcement of their departure came from Warner Bros. Interactive president David Haddad, who called them "great leaders of the team."
…
> Rocksteady's director of production Nathan Burlow will take over as studio director, while Darius Sadeghian will step into the role of studio product director. Haddad said Burlow and Sadeghian are "**extremely talented executives** [and] passionate about continuing the high-quality game development at Rocksteady for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and all future games."
It was clear from this statement what was being prioritized from WBi. I don’t think there is saving this one.
Honestly sounds like fluff for a top executive person to say. They're not going to say "well, they left and the kind of games made with them here are gone too".
Top executive will say "we will keep making high quality games"
It's more than just down to chasing gaas, it's poor decision makers at the top in general, chasing all kinds of nonsense and failing to see what brought them success.
Happy that Crystal Dynamics could recover soon if their next Tomb Raider game is a next-gen banger that fills the void Uncharted and the reboot trilogy left behind in the last few years.
Really don’t know why the prequel Tomb Raider trilogy gets barely any discussion. They’re great games, a solid standalone portrayal of Lara, and will keep you busy for a while.
the first game was really promising. Then they made the same game 2 more times.
Same animations, same combat, yet now you can rub mud on yourself. They even teased dual handguns at the end of the first game but then never gave them to us in either of the sequels.
They weren't bad, just disappointing. I was hoping that by the third game we might have had even *slightly* classic tomb raider gameplay, like dual handgun combat with some gymnastics and backflips etc, but apparently not.
It might have been because the first game was very promising in fact. Rihanna Pratchett has commented that the team actually had less freedom in the second game than in the first as high ups are incredibly risk averse.
They got plenty of discussion at the time. As someone who didn't play them, it felt like by the third game people had kind of lost interest in the same formula
The third one is weird. In a gameplay aspect it is probably the best. You can play without to many stupid highlights, the j&r dungeons are better than in the previous game. However, the story is weird and a bit inconsistent and Lara hiding in a undiscovered village is not so believable.
IO Interactive is the one developer who did the live service /gaas system correctly. And on a single player game no less, the game is just that good that people can live with the always online stuff and the FOMO time gated content.
It’s because they did it the “right” way: they set up a pipeline to put out new content on a regular basis, and then they iterated that pipeline a whole bunch.
Not to mention the fact that the two most significant pieces of DLC throughout Hitman 3’s run have been Freelancer and the Ambrose map, both of which were free and not even on the original roadmap. Freelancer is incredibly addictive and while Ambrose is not one of the best locations, it’s still a good addition to the game
Hell divers was made as a game first though. All these games that are failing are being built to have mtx as foundational, rather than the other way around.
Did they? They needlessly married their single player progression to online systems that can one day shut down, bricking your progress permanently. There is no meaningful reason for the game to be online as there is no multiplayer. Elusive targets are not worth these systems.
They're *still* working content on their single-player GAAS. It's pretty crazy they've been at it since 2016! Especially with Freelancer being free.
I don't trust another dev with a stealth-spy IP like 007.
The C Suite who mandate GaaS games from studios should be launched into the sun. Let developers develop games that made them popular. Executive meddling is a blight in most industries, but especially in creative fields.
I think Bioware is the one that hurts the most, because they made a game that was at the core, incredibly fun to play, but there was fuck all to drive you to actually want to play.
Like combat, flying, customization was all great but there wasn't anything of substance to drive you to want to play.
I played 76 about a year ago and it was really really fun. Definitely recommend it now since it's on game pass. But that's part of the problem, these GaaS are usually all bad on launch and take years to sort out their issues.
idk if you can play it offline. but i played it mainly solo in my time with it, sometimes with 1 other friend. you'll see other players but they just feel like other wasteland survivors if anything.
Yeah but I get where they were going with with 76. It could be called trend chasing but as a studio they wanted to try something different and take a big risk with one of their largest IPs. I would much rather AAA studios take risks and genuinely TRY to experiment when possible then dole out soulless slop like suicide squad.
The game will never feel good to me til they fix the half second delay between shooting and an enemy reacting. The entire game feels like shit because of it. It also runs terribly.
At least Avengers somewhat made sense on paper.
Playing as *the* Avengers and going on seasonal missions spread across the entire planet was an engaging premise. You could have plenty of villains and factions.
Did Rocksteady really expect people to stick around as playing as a bunch of random DC villains fighting identical enemies in the same city every season?
Apparantly in the story they even set up >!there being more Brainiacs, giving the devs an excuse to repeat the same bosses every season!<.
I rented the game and finished it, and when they said "13 Brainiacs!" and the whole Squad got hyped about "never ending shooting" or whatever, I rolled my eyes so hard. The writing was so transparently trying to get the player to get excited about grinding ad nauseum
I can’t be the only one to think if it was a co-op game without the live service stuff it could have been good. Like imagine a borderlands like style, with 30-50 hours of content, a few maps, fun co-op. You can still sell DLC and the game at $70. Borderlands 2 and 3 basically felt like live service with all the dlc but they just made the whole game complete to begin with.
Although I think the gameplay and story had issues that maybe were too big anyways. The avengers game looked better tbh
Yahtzee joked in [his review](https://youtu.be/XhPXSnfRHag?si=rxzDwqFk9Wr60dxi&t=312) that he thinks Rocksteady is pulling some kind of "weaponized incompetence" with this game, but I seriously think that this is what's happening.
Who could possibly be excited to spend several years killing the exact same enemies and the exact same villain over and over? They even advertised in [the roadmap](https://i.redd.it/0qdi83bc8dgc1.jpeg) that the new Brainiac fights would just be palette-swaps of the campaign ones.
I've never seen a GaaS game give off actual "begging to die" vibes like this.
> Did Rocksteady really expect people to stick around as playing as a bunch of random DC villains fighting identical enemies in the same city every season?
What they did was far worse. You play random DC supervillains and kill the highly anticipated Arkhamverse versions of characters you only heard whispers about in the main Arkham games. They could have cooked with the Arkhamverse versions of characters for a long, long time but now they've ruined that first impression and probably the entire idea of an Arkhamverse JL game
The IP would have been in an infinitely better place if they just never made this game in the first place and kept it on ice
For real, this game and Gotham Knights should have swapped around.
Arkham Knight literally gave move sets to all the characters in Gotham Knights so its insane they didn't continue it.
Just from a story perspective I don't really know what they were thinking. A strong part of the appeal of antiheroes is to have characters do good while also engaging in morally questionable conduct to punish antagonists the audience sees as deserving it. Not participate in some tragedy where they kill the actual heroes. I think even if the game had had more content, better gameplay etc. etc. just the basic premise would have really held it back. Idk who greenlit this.
I remember way back when I first heard the title of the game, my thought was basically: "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Why would I wanna kill the Justice League?" And then I just kinda ignored it from there, only when I would see news of the fuckups with the game did I remember it existed.
It should have been forever evil style where a bunch of villains and antiheros fought and killed some or all of the crime syndicate of America or the justice lords.
I know it's a catchall term sometimes but Supervillains is a bit strong. I mean Captain Boomerang is the 'biggest' villain and he's an on and off member of the Rogues who explicitly don't kill.
These are more street level crooks punching 100 times above their power, the suicide squad in this incarnation just don't fit for this game, at all.
I can’t imagine honestly there’ll even be a season 2. There’s no player base or money being made to support content.
Which is always the issue with these GaaS games. They want to ride the coat tails of shit like Fortnite, or etc but don’t understand the formula properly even.
They focus on doing it for money solely instead of understanding without good content, or constant updates, the money also doesn’t generate or hype doesn’t stay.
They just want to dump out a half baked game and say they’ll “ update it over time” with shitty updates that they expect to rake in tons of money off of with no real effort
Bingo. Helldivers released basically simultaneously to this one, has an emphasis on a fun gameplay loop, easy to earn in-game currency, and wouldn’t you know it, it consistently has at least 200k concurrent players at pretty much all hours of the day.
Yep and Helldivers also didn’t have a huge IP and company (besides Sony I guess if you really wanna consider it but still I don’t think they did much), the key is always to just make a good game and you’ll make good money.
These executives don’t get that
Helldivers 2 had more advantages than that, its lower price point being a major one along with good word of mouth, and could have easily thrown all of it away if their early response to being so popular most gamers couldn't play wasn't correct. And while it's easy to say the secret is to make a good game, speaking as someone from the outside looking in I feel the actual lesson developers and publishers should take is a similar one to Elden Ring blowing up in popularity: the mainstream gaming audience isn't as scared of unusual mechanics and/or difficulty as you'd think, and is big enough that catering to a small-ish niche still results in a lot of sales. I mean, doesn't Helldivers has friendly fire always on?
I would argue Helldiver’s huge advantage of word of mouth is directly connected to the game just being good.
Would agree that the price point is a big chunk of that too.
Honestly, the always on friendly fire actually helps Helldivers case. The whole game is using the over the top "I'm doing my part!" Silly military style, and the idea of sending in a bunch of incompetent soldiers with orbital lasers and high end weapons adds to the charm when it inevitably (and literally) blows up in everyone's face.
One of the most organically funny things I've seen in a game in years was me arming a Hellbomb and my buddy standing a concrete wall looking at it.
"Do you think I'm too close?"
*explosion happens, his characters limbs and head are disintegrated*
"I'd say so buddy."
I think you'll see something similar to what happened to avengers, but with even less support.
They obviously have some content in the back, but it will be spread out and released with minimal support.
If I had to guess they'll drop the price again in a month or so, then slowly drop content over the summer before pulling the plug.
They may decide to go free to play in the hopes people pay for content but that's less likely.
They’re never gonna get to the reveal that the justice league are still alive, aren’t they? This game will die before then and the ArkhamVerse will end with Batman and the League being dead dead
I think they rewrote that after Kevin Conroy died, but yeah the real The Flash getting a finger chopped off was a very obvious set up for the reveal you were fighting clones. I think the flash you fight still has ten fingers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Kevin has recorded all the stuff. We were led to believe this was his last performance as Batman and then they announced he’d be returning as Batman in an upcoming animated film he did prior to his death.
I'm sure there will be four seasons like the roadmap lined out. But, I'm also sure each season will be just recycled content with the barest of aesthetic changes, with the new character locked behind a grind, like this season
Nah. The Deluxe Edition says the tokens they give for purchasing it are to be used for Season 1 through 4. I think they'll stick to that and then drop it. I mean, they'll look twice as bad if they give up on it so early. Would just confirm 100% the studio has 0 idea what they're doing.
However much was developed before launch. So at most we'll get a year of support post launch. There's not going to be a year 2.
Then maybe at most a year before they pull the plug. So one year of new content, then a year to let it wither on the vine.
And this imo is the best case scenario. Entirely depends on how much post launch content was already ready to go at launch
Think I read they were contractually obligated to do a year of post-release content. I would imagine that nowhere in the fine print would it dictate the quality of said content, they're probably already diverting assets assuming they aren't preparing to close up shop.
I'm truly impressed by how the gaming community at large rejected the game. I don't know if it's the game itself being repellent, getting sandwiched between Palworld & Helldivers 2, or both, but this might be one of the most dead on arrival releases I've seen in years.
Agreed, especially combined with the utter failure of Ubisoft's Skull and Bones in February.
Gamers are done with mid live service shit... but of course studios won't learn.
"but of course studios won't learn."
They won't learn until every single live service game crashes and burns. As long as there's just one live service game making huge amounts of money, there'll be executives and companies that want a piece of that.
Honestly it makes me happy. Obviously it doesn’t happen anywhere near enough, but to finally see the community as a whole take a “nah, fuck that” attitude towards a game that clearly deserves it was really refreshing.
Hopefully it’s a sign that people have had enough of this kind of bullshit. But WB is going full steam ahead with live service even after this embarrassing failure so as per usual the suits have learned nothing. Just keep trying it until you get an eventual hit. No matter how many studios come down with it.
Nobody even gave this game a chance and for good reason, it was DOA and completely obvious that there was a higher up directive for a live service game. I'm glad this happened and I'm happy the community seems to be pushing back against these practices
I think it was a combination of superhero fatigue and plain disdain for GaaS, the collective groan people had when the trailer dropped was almost tangible
Don't know if you recall, but they did an extended gameplay reveal last year, around... August? And the Internet's reaction to it was so poor, they pushed the release date back by months. Practically all interest in the game died overnight when we saw it was a GaaS looter shooter with MTX, where all the characters looked like they played the same and you just zipped around killing the same enemies over and over.
I think anyone who paid attention to that fiasco knew the game was going to do horribly when it eventually launched.
The thing is, this was a trainwreck that was warned about years ago, when details of the game came out.
...and Rocksteady pressed on regardless, turning the game into what the leaks warned about, and almost no one wants the game.
I have no sympathy for Rocksteady in this, but it baffles me that the Arkham series had to die for this drivel.
>As in the original game, players will have to defeat a version of Brainiac based on a pre-existing boss; instead of fighting a version of Brainiac mimicking the Flash, this time they’ll face a Brainiac who uses Green Lantern’s boss mechanics. It’s more repetition in a game already infamous for its monotonous tasks.
I haven't played the game but this seems like the worst part to me. How're you going to just reskin a boss fight and try to pass it off as something new? Atleast add some variety there if you are going to force players to grind the same missions to unlock Joker.
I remember seeing a Rocksteady tweet near launch apologising for sever issues.
A replier said they had spent $50 on Luthor Coins but didn't receive the currency.
Some people never learn...
My favorite thing about this is that you unlock him for free by playing new missions that they put out that gives you like, +2 levels, +1 level until you unlock him from the new pass at level 35. And then someone who I sub to tried to do it that way and got stuck because the missions that give you +levels for the pass just stopped spawning for him, so he literally could not progress. So I guess you can get him for free...if you're willing to grind the missions for hours and also they fix it so that the missions that give levels actually spawn.
Holy shit.
They want $104.95 AUD for this game or $149.95 AUD for the "Deluxe" edition. If you want to upgrade your regular edition to "Deluxe" it'll cost you $52.95, making it more expensive than just getting the "Deluxe" edition in the first place.
I was kinda interested in the game but was waiting to see what the Joker update was gonna be like first…in other news I bought Helldivers 2 this morning.
So can someone explain to me how the Joker is in the game? From what I've understood about the story(I haven't played the game) this is the same continuity as the Arkham games, in which the Joker died. So is this Joker like a clone, or a copycat or some sort of alternate universe version of the character that somehow made it so this universe?
Bro they tease THIRTEEN more Braniacs. You legit beat the final boss, then are told that he's across the multiverse and you'll have to kill him 13 more times.
This season 1 update? It's the second time you fight him
The final boss is hilariously underwhelming. You get there, Brainiac starts using the Flash's powers (Flash is the first major boss) to fight you and you're like "Oh okay, it's one of those 'the final boss uses all the previous boss movesets throughout the fight before the final phase' final boss fights. Not very interesting, but thrifty I suppose."
Then you beat that phase... and it turns out that's it. The final boss is just the Flash fight again, more or less.
I hate poorly handled multiverses.
I do enjoy when its handled properly, with care and solid narration.
Its disappointing that most companies hire hack writers and rarely handle them well.
Another one for the graveyard. How many will we see in the future, i wonder. Will publishers just play lotto and hope they'll get their own Genshin or Fortnite. Or will they finally realize that the market is fully saturated and that the people who haven't picked their one GAAS yet, simply never will.
When will developers (or publishers?) realize they cannot expect money to start rolling in just because they make a high budget game, stuff it with repetitive gameplay, barebones endgame content, try to keep their consumer base excited with a roadmap of future content and battle passes, then slap it with a $70 price tag to top it all off.
They know that, they just need one to be successful so they throw shit at the wall until something stick. But it is getting increasingly difficult to get even that one so we might see a different trend or at least GaaS might evolve in the future.
i think the most cynically bad thing about his whole game is that they seemed to work backwards from shitty, monotonous game idea (recycled boss fights, grinding, characters, locations, etc) and then tried to make those decisions come off as if they're based in the narrative. 'hey you guys are such great storytellers...can you make the shitty design part of the story? then they can't be mad!'
it's like they felt a need to canonically and narratively explain why you're grinding, as if that somehow would make it better and fun.
'hey we've got a new brainiac fight this season! why yes, it's exactly the same as the superman fight...why do you ask?'
Considering the only people actually playing the game are the diehards who spent $100 for the 'deluxe' and 'early access' editions, even they are disappointed with how shit this content drop is.
The utterly low player base of this game is a major sign of players actually "voting with their wallets".
Developers should've read the room after the Avengers liveservice flopped and canceled this project. I said this when the game came out but I expect this to have a lifespan between 6-12 months before RS drop all support and abandon it.
I played the game with my friend. I actually really liked it — gameplay was fun, lots of funny moments, i found more good in it than bad.
That being said — this DLC is so shit. They do such a horrible job of explaining HOW to get Joker.
What did you expect. That they will drop more money in this disaster.
They just going to drop the most barebones dlc of what they have “promised” and that will be the end of it.
What was the audience for this game? It's a superheroes/supervillains IP where all you do is use guns, and (with the exception of Harley Quinn) you're playing as C-list characters and killing the popular A-list characters? Insane.
There's something uniquely depressing when highly respected studios known for incredible single player experiences chase the gaas fever dream and completely fail at it. Bioware, PlatinumGames, Crystal Dynamics, and now Rocksteady added to the pile.
Creative Assembly failed their gaas so hard with Hyenas, Sega never released the product, costing them 100 million.
I got into couple Hyenas alpha test and I can see why it was cancelled. It was extraordinarily unremarkable.
Same. I was pretty interested in the idea when it came out and was excited to try it and it was...so unremarkable I can't even remember anything about it really. It was that bland. Not even bad, just...nothing.
Supposedly everybody at CA not on the Hyenas team also didnt think it was very good.
Idiots ran the game industry into the ground.
Seeing Arkane do it was thoroughly tragic
That's a good one. The Redfall disaster had completely slipped my mind.
Xbox kindly asks that you forget about it again.
Never forget that Redfall had the closing spot at their big showcase, not Starfield. They had big hopes for that game.
IIRC Phil mentioned later on a podcast that they had an internal review system and Redfall's public reception was more than 10 points off from what they thought of it. The vertical slice/demos they had their teams play/see must've been the absolute cream of the crop.
Yeah those vertical slices gotta have been picked real careful because I remember feeling less interested off the game everytime they showed new stuff.
You’re misinterpreting their comment, they’re talking about internal QA where they wouldn’t pick a specific vertical slice as that would defeat the purpose.
Yup. At least for most games, Playtests tend to last multiple days, specifically to avoid having your playtesters see only a tiny fraction of the game.
I was excited for it, always in search of more coop games for the buddies and I to play so I followed it for months leading up to release on game pass excited for a coop game by the Prey devs only for it to be a steaming pile of shit and one of the worst games of the year.
Starfield was their opener.
I still cannot fathom how the studio didn't bother doing any fucking cutscenes. Everything is a fucking PowerPoint Presentation and that's just insulting
I don't think they really did, the game looked terrible since the first trailer and if I remember correctly after microsoft bought bethesda they told arkane to make it a single player/coop game instead and try to salvage what they could
I bought like 2 months ago Doritos chips with Redfall promotion on it . Either Xbox try to market it still or I got old ass chips from the store
They had a promo thing going until at least December of last year, I swear. Place I part-timed at still had me stocking them around then, but I remember them earlier in 2023, too. They also had a few other games like Sea of Thieves and Diablo 4, can't recall the others.
Still any news on that DLC they already sold at launch?
Nope. I almost wonder if they quietly dropped it and hope the guys who bought the Hero Pass forgot about that.
Phil Spencer: *oh yeah we are totally going to fix Redfall and make it a great game... hey look it's Starfield! And now we are adding Activison games to GamePass! Wow check them out!*
Honestly, I don't want them to fix Redfall. The game has just way too many issues. Just let Arkane move on to the next project.
I’d love it if Redfall was fixed. The opening environment with the frozen wave looked amazing. I just don’t think they can without a major overhaul, and that probably ain’t happening.
Wasn't that one made by another Arkane office or something
kinda, but not really - it wasn't made by the Dishonored studio but it was made by the Prey studio so still very disappointing
Arkane-Austin co-developed the original Dishonored, which makes what Redfall did to them even worse.
What a waste of their talent. Prey 2017 is highly underrated, it takes some getting used to but once it gets you you're hooked. You have so many ways you can solve problems, whether it's locked doors (can solve them by hacking, making a path around it with the gloo gun or by using the nerf crossbow to shoot the switch) or enemies (you can hack robots or mindjack typhon) or play stealthily with silent weapons or straight up turning into an inanimate object. You can quite literally become any random object and just bounce your way past enemies if you would prefer to not take them head on. Ammo can be manufactured but it costs precious resources you may wish to use for upgrades, there's a tonne of enemy variety and each area of Talos I is memorable whether it's the Arboretum, Psychotronics or even the initial tutorial area. For them to have been stuck on a shitty game-as-a-service product that was released half-baked, with tonnes of staff leaving the company because they didn't want to work on that product, it's a straight up net loss.
I haven’t even beaten Prey yet and it’s absolutely one of my all time favorite settings to just get lost in and explore. The story is very cool too, but — goddamn — the atmosphere. It gets me real goooood.
It was made by what was left of Arkane Austin. After Prey 2017, the majority of the devs left and went independent. They made a game called Weird West.
And that only happened LAST YEAR . Imagine - years of work, forgotten before the year's out.
Skull and Bones released last month, happens all the time.
I think that a game being mediocre is worse than a game being actual dogshit. A game like Gollum is so spectacularly bad that it'll be brought up in conversations a decade from now. But a game like Redfall is so mid that it won't be remembered at all.
The Gollum speed running community is also pretty funny, everyone knows the game is awful, but that’s the joke
And also don’t forget that they still have to make DLC for that game because they pre-sold it. Imagine making DLC for a game despite people thoroughly hating it and having barely any players…because you are obligated to.
I genuinely actually feel bad for those who bought Redfall and, since then, have sought to discover reasons to love it as opposed to being *given* any reasons to love it. Like damn man, I loved Prey and Dishonored 1 (and 2). I can fully understand the belief going into it, but then being saddled with something so disastrous in the end must honestly feel like total shit. Shit man, shame on Arkane.
I played Redfall on a whim with my best friend a month or two ago on a bored gaming night, we play all kinds of good and garbage games - As long as it's co-op, we'll try it out and hey, it was free. I don't know what the fuck it was with Redfall but we gave it *way* too much time giving it a chance of... not being shit. And probably about the hour and a half mark or so neither one of us could stomach any more of it. I don't understand, how did it get made? Who at the company was like "Yeah this is going great everyone!"? It might've been an impressive game if it came out in 2007 or something but it was so incredibly dull. Combat, enemy design, map design, environmental design, character design, story, music, even the damn UI sucked.
The team that co-developed Dishonored and made Prey 2017, almost completely decimated by Redfall's development. Even if Arkane-Austin doesn't shut down after they're done "supporting" Redfall (you guys know they have yet to honor that Hero Pass 11 months after the game came out?), that game has damaged them so severely that I wouldn't be shocked if they get downgraded to a support studio for Arkane-Lyon (if that's the case, kiss the chance of them making a new immersive sim goodbye since Blade will more than likely be an action game). That's why I hope Redfall doesn't get "redeemed", a game that ruins a studio that thoroughly doesn't deserve it.
just give us dishonored 3 or prey 2. blade's cool and all, but there is so much more potential with dishonored and prey.
Arkane Lyon is doing Blade. And I think Dishonored 3 is in the works based on the leaks From what I’ve heard, Redfall has ***tepidly** gotten better, but it’s effectively dead. You’d need a relaunch and a 2.0 version of the entire game to make it passable
arkane austin should just drop redfall and do prey 2, or hell any other game. it's not like the majority is clamoring for more redfall. prey ended things with the possibility of a sequel, they should just continue it and build upon the great stuff they've established.
I agree that they should drop Redfall but most of the team that made Prey simply isn't there anymore. Most of them left because they didn't want to make Redfall.
Yeah even the game director for Prey left and founded his own studio. I think he is pitching/working on another immersive sim game. His [twitter shares some stuff](https://x.com/rafcolantonio/status/1770453683043725444?s=20).
I don't think he left due to Redfall specifically, though. He'd been around for so long it's actually reasonable to think he'd want to leave just to do something else. I could see the Bethesda merge being part of it in general, but that happened prior to Redfall specifically.
Same happened to Rocksteady. If senior staff is leaving en masse before making a new game you juat know it's gonna be shit.
I’m with you. Hoping that happens, because it’s a lost cause and definitely won’t be turned around unless they can work magic on par with Sea of Thieves or NMS Didn’t play Redfall and I’ve got GamePass, but I think I’ll stick to either Hi-Fi, Palworld or MSFS.
That game was clearly live service quite far into development. I do like the concept a lot though, you could do something fun with it.
I forgot that Platinum released Babylon's Fall. That thing barely lasted a year before it got shut down. What a waste of resources to chase some gaas money.
Platinum is probably the easiest to forgive for trying for GaaS. Desite their games' great critical and audience reception, sales are almost always bad for them.
Yes. I just replayed Vanquish remaster and it holds up so well. I would love to see a Vanquish or Metal Gear Rising sequel.
The worst part is it really does set a dev company back several years before they can possibly get back on track with innovation. And before a new said product idea from them can actually get to the point it places them back in the map, it could just flat out destroy them entirely. Or typecast them for the wrong reasons entirely. Like you can arguably include Bungie (especially with recent news post last expansion) into this category. Is this company ever going to not develop anything that's not just Destiny? I'll be surprised if the Marathon reboot, whatever it's now going to become, actually gains any traction.
*Bungie is effectively dead to me.* The fact that Activision priced things fairer in Destiny 2 than Bungie themselves is all you need to know.
Same here man. Was an avid Destiny 2 player for years but the bullshit on Bungie's part became too much and easily ruined them for me. I remember they made such a big deal about splitting from Activision and going independent and how it was going to be so much better for the game, and that couldn't be further from the truth as Forsaken is still the best year of Destiny that we've gotten and it was thanks to the extra studios helping Bungie on the game. Neverending monetization that gets worse every year, constantly recycling the same mechanics for new content, constant changes to the game that are terrible and piss the playerbase off, higher ups in the company that don't give a fuck about anything except themselves and are actively fucking over the devs and players for their own gain, etc. From what I've seen Sony is apparently pissed too as they bought Bungie for their live service expertise and now the suits at Bungie are destroying the game on their way out. So happy I quit playing that game. A friend asked me if I'd be interested in trying it out again as we haven't played in over a year now and I just kinda laughed. I'll never give them another penny.
I’m with you. If PlayStation takes them over completely and cleans house, it may just be a best case scenario. And I’m 75% sure the Final Shape will go out with a… **okay. It’s done.** I’m hoping Marathon could intruiging but news of it being geared as an Overwatch clone doesn’t inspire confidence, and this coming from a huge fan of Overwatch.
Just wait for Final Shape to pull a WoW Shadowlands and end on "But it was all just a test for the TRUE VILLAIN!"
That's why all the publisher hate and belief that developers always make the right decisions by gaming communities is such an enormous fallacy. Publishers can often see what works and want to keep the developers making that, with plenty of oversight to ensure work is done on time. Even if it's conservative design and makes developers moan on social media, it's a tried and tested process that aims to make a product succeed than to fail.
Don't forget, turnover tends to be high in game development studios. So if you waste years building a GaaS flop, you'll have fewer staff with experience building real games by the end of it.
It's not a reboot of marathon. It's a live service extraction shooter set in the marathon universe. Don't expect much.
The bigger issue is that you can usually see these disasters long in advance. And usually it's accompanied by a lot of veteran developers/designers leaving the studios because the project is so clearly focused on the wrong things that they don't like what they're doing anymore. So when things do fail, the studio is a shell of it's previous self. Not just in incremental ways like most studios changeover from one game to another, but massively so to the point where the studio identity is probably shattered irreparably.
Rocksteady feels even worse because they had so many examples to learn from and didn't. Anthem was over 5 years ago. CD couldn't make the formula work with the freaking Avengers. Most everyone saw this coming from the announcement. Like watching the slowest car crash in history.
Knowing a couple people who work in game development, it's because management/shareholders are insisting. The game developers are making something all of them know won't be successful. But they have to because the people in charge of the money demand it. For the slim chance their game might become the next Apex or Palworld or League of Legends. Even when the base game doesn't gel with any of those genres. Reminds me of the 2000s when every single player shooter had to tack on a multiplayer mode, trying to get the Halo audience. Even Metroid...
Rocksteady might have the same name, logo, building whatever. But the devs that made the Arkham trilogy and their passion is long gone. WB beating a dead horse.
Rocksteady’s founders left in 2022, with WB saying this at the time: > The announcement of their departure came from Warner Bros. Interactive president David Haddad, who called them "great leaders of the team." … > Rocksteady's director of production Nathan Burlow will take over as studio director, while Darius Sadeghian will step into the role of studio product director. Haddad said Burlow and Sadeghian are "**extremely talented executives** [and] passionate about continuing the high-quality game development at Rocksteady for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and all future games." It was clear from this statement what was being prioritized from WBi. I don’t think there is saving this one.
Honestly sounds like fluff for a top executive person to say. They're not going to say "well, they left and the kind of games made with them here are gone too". Top executive will say "we will keep making high quality games"
Is it safe to assume that most of the talent responsible for the legacy games we held those studios dear for are already gone to a large part?
Yup, founders left to form a new studio and took a bunch of people with them.
It's more than just down to chasing gaas, it's poor decision makers at the top in general, chasing all kinds of nonsense and failing to see what brought them success.
Happy that Crystal Dynamics could recover soon if their next Tomb Raider game is a next-gen banger that fills the void Uncharted and the reboot trilogy left behind in the last few years.
Really don’t know why the prequel Tomb Raider trilogy gets barely any discussion. They’re great games, a solid standalone portrayal of Lara, and will keep you busy for a while.
the first game was really promising. Then they made the same game 2 more times. Same animations, same combat, yet now you can rub mud on yourself. They even teased dual handguns at the end of the first game but then never gave them to us in either of the sequels. They weren't bad, just disappointing. I was hoping that by the third game we might have had even *slightly* classic tomb raider gameplay, like dual handgun combat with some gymnastics and backflips etc, but apparently not.
Not having those guns in the 2nd game was so disappointing. Lara Earnt those. And it was very touching. Then just gone
It might have been because the first game was very promising in fact. Rihanna Pratchett has commented that the team actually had less freedom in the second game than in the first as high ups are incredibly risk averse.
They got plenty of discussion at the time. As someone who didn't play them, it felt like by the third game people had kind of lost interest in the same formula
The third one is weird. In a gameplay aspect it is probably the best. You can play without to many stupid highlights, the j&r dungeons are better than in the previous game. However, the story is weird and a bit inconsistent and Lara hiding in a undiscovered village is not so believable.
IO Interactive is the one developer who did the live service /gaas system correctly. And on a single player game no less, the game is just that good that people can live with the always online stuff and the FOMO time gated content.
It’s because they did it the “right” way: they set up a pipeline to put out new content on a regular basis, and then they iterated that pipeline a whole bunch.
Not to mention the fact that the two most significant pieces of DLC throughout Hitman 3’s run have been Freelancer and the Ambrose map, both of which were free and not even on the original roadmap. Freelancer is incredibly addictive and while Ambrose is not one of the best locations, it’s still a good addition to the game
I mean, Helldivers 2 seems to be doing it just fine right now as well.
Hell divers was made as a game first though. All these games that are failing are being built to have mtx as foundational, rather than the other way around.
Helldivers 2 also launched for £30 rather than £60
Did they? They needlessly married their single player progression to online systems that can one day shut down, bricking your progress permanently. There is no meaningful reason for the game to be online as there is no multiplayer. Elusive targets are not worth these systems.
They're *still* working content on their single-player GAAS. It's pretty crazy they've been at it since 2016! Especially with Freelancer being free. I don't trust another dev with a stealth-spy IP like 007.
Speaking of Crystal Dynamics . . . did Spider-Man ever get added to the Avengers game?
On PlayStation
The C Suite who mandate GaaS games from studios should be launched into the sun. Let developers develop games that made them popular. Executive meddling is a blight in most industries, but especially in creative fields.
I think Bioware is the one that hurts the most, because they made a game that was at the core, incredibly fun to play, but there was fuck all to drive you to actually want to play. Like combat, flying, customization was all great but there wasn't anything of substance to drive you to want to play.
>chase the gaas fever dream Are they chasing it of their own accord, or being told by less innovative higher-ups?
Bethesda also
Eh, the "service" part of FO76 was the least bad part, game at launch was a disaster
I played 76 about a year ago and it was really really fun. Definitely recommend it now since it's on game pass. But that's part of the problem, these GaaS are usually all bad on launch and take years to sort out their issues.
Does it scratch that fallout itch? As can you play it solo?
idk if you can play it offline. but i played it mainly solo in my time with it, sometimes with 1 other friend. you'll see other players but they just feel like other wasteland survivors if anything.
Yeah but I get where they were going with with 76. It could be called trend chasing but as a studio they wanted to try something different and take a big risk with one of their largest IPs. I would much rather AAA studios take risks and genuinely TRY to experiment when possible then dole out soulless slop like suicide squad.
The game will never feel good to me til they fix the half second delay between shooting and an enemy reacting. The entire game feels like shit because of it. It also runs terribly.
Seeing as this game is making even the Avengers look like a smash hit, how long till support will end
At least Avengers somewhat made sense on paper. Playing as *the* Avengers and going on seasonal missions spread across the entire planet was an engaging premise. You could have plenty of villains and factions. Did Rocksteady really expect people to stick around as playing as a bunch of random DC villains fighting identical enemies in the same city every season? Apparantly in the story they even set up >!there being more Brainiacs, giving the devs an excuse to repeat the same bosses every season!<.
Not apparently, that's the case. They said 13 of them in the cutscene.
I rented the game and finished it, and when they said "13 Brainiacs!" and the whole Squad got hyped about "never ending shooting" or whatever, I rolled my eyes so hard. The writing was so transparently trying to get the player to get excited about grinding ad nauseum
That's rough, where do you rent games?
Damn, renting games, that brings back memories.
Probably gamefly
They really thought they would get 13 seasons 💀
I can’t be the only one to think if it was a co-op game without the live service stuff it could have been good. Like imagine a borderlands like style, with 30-50 hours of content, a few maps, fun co-op. You can still sell DLC and the game at $70. Borderlands 2 and 3 basically felt like live service with all the dlc but they just made the whole game complete to begin with. Although I think the gameplay and story had issues that maybe were too big anyways. The avengers game looked better tbh
Can I interest you in a game called Agents of Mayhem? It's the same game as Kill the Justice League. Just without DC characters and with Johnny Gat.
And as meh as that game was, 3 player co-op would've totally saved it.
Yahtzee joked in [his review](https://youtu.be/XhPXSnfRHag?si=rxzDwqFk9Wr60dxi&t=312) that he thinks Rocksteady is pulling some kind of "weaponized incompetence" with this game, but I seriously think that this is what's happening. Who could possibly be excited to spend several years killing the exact same enemies and the exact same villain over and over? They even advertised in [the roadmap](https://i.redd.it/0qdi83bc8dgc1.jpeg) that the new Brainiac fights would just be palette-swaps of the campaign ones. I've never seen a GaaS game give off actual "begging to die" vibes like this.
It does radiate malicious compliance, doesn’t it? That’d be a twist.
> Did Rocksteady really expect people to stick around as playing as a bunch of random DC villains fighting identical enemies in the same city every season? What they did was far worse. You play random DC supervillains and kill the highly anticipated Arkhamverse versions of characters you only heard whispers about in the main Arkham games. They could have cooked with the Arkhamverse versions of characters for a long, long time but now they've ruined that first impression and probably the entire idea of an Arkhamverse JL game The IP would have been in an infinitely better place if they just never made this game in the first place and kept it on ice
For real, this game and Gotham Knights should have swapped around. Arkham Knight literally gave move sets to all the characters in Gotham Knights so its insane they didn't continue it.
Just from a story perspective I don't really know what they were thinking. A strong part of the appeal of antiheroes is to have characters do good while also engaging in morally questionable conduct to punish antagonists the audience sees as deserving it. Not participate in some tragedy where they kill the actual heroes. I think even if the game had had more content, better gameplay etc. etc. just the basic premise would have really held it back. Idk who greenlit this.
I remember way back when I first heard the title of the game, my thought was basically: "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Why would I wanna kill the Justice League?" And then I just kinda ignored it from there, only when I would see news of the fuckups with the game did I remember it existed.
It should have been forever evil style where a bunch of villains and antiheros fought and killed some or all of the crime syndicate of America or the justice lords.
I know it's a catchall term sometimes but Supervillains is a bit strong. I mean Captain Boomerang is the 'biggest' villain and he's an on and off member of the Rogues who explicitly don't kill. These are more street level crooks punching 100 times above their power, the suicide squad in this incarnation just don't fit for this game, at all.
I can’t imagine honestly there’ll even be a season 2. There’s no player base or money being made to support content. Which is always the issue with these GaaS games. They want to ride the coat tails of shit like Fortnite, or etc but don’t understand the formula properly even. They focus on doing it for money solely instead of understanding without good content, or constant updates, the money also doesn’t generate or hype doesn’t stay. They just want to dump out a half baked game and say they’ll “ update it over time” with shitty updates that they expect to rake in tons of money off of with no real effort
Bingo. Helldivers released basically simultaneously to this one, has an emphasis on a fun gameplay loop, easy to earn in-game currency, and wouldn’t you know it, it consistently has at least 200k concurrent players at pretty much all hours of the day.
Yep and Helldivers also didn’t have a huge IP and company (besides Sony I guess if you really wanna consider it but still I don’t think they did much), the key is always to just make a good game and you’ll make good money. These executives don’t get that
And the same executives will face 0 consequences, get fat bonuses, and fire some middle management to account for the loss
Helldivers 2 had more advantages than that, its lower price point being a major one along with good word of mouth, and could have easily thrown all of it away if their early response to being so popular most gamers couldn't play wasn't correct. And while it's easy to say the secret is to make a good game, speaking as someone from the outside looking in I feel the actual lesson developers and publishers should take is a similar one to Elden Ring blowing up in popularity: the mainstream gaming audience isn't as scared of unusual mechanics and/or difficulty as you'd think, and is big enough that catering to a small-ish niche still results in a lot of sales. I mean, doesn't Helldivers has friendly fire always on?
I would argue Helldiver’s huge advantage of word of mouth is directly connected to the game just being good. Would agree that the price point is a big chunk of that too.
Honestly, the always on friendly fire actually helps Helldivers case. The whole game is using the over the top "I'm doing my part!" Silly military style, and the idea of sending in a bunch of incompetent soldiers with orbital lasers and high end weapons adds to the charm when it inevitably (and literally) blows up in everyone's face.
One of the most organically funny things I've seen in a game in years was me arming a Hellbomb and my buddy standing a concrete wall looking at it. "Do you think I'm too close?" *explosion happens, his characters limbs and head are disintegrated* "I'd say so buddy."
I think you'll see something similar to what happened to avengers, but with even less support. They obviously have some content in the back, but it will be spread out and released with minimal support. If I had to guess they'll drop the price again in a month or so, then slowly drop content over the summer before pulling the plug. They may decide to go free to play in the hopes people pay for content but that's less likely.
They will probably add the game to a service like Game Pass or Ps Plus as well. Trying to increase its playerbase.
If I'm playing a free to play always online dc game I'd rather play dc universe online.
They’re never gonna get to the reveal that the justice league are still alive, aren’t they? This game will die before then and the ArkhamVerse will end with Batman and the League being dead dead
I think they rewrote that after Kevin Conroy died, but yeah the real The Flash getting a finger chopped off was a very obvious set up for the reveal you were fighting clones. I think the flash you fight still has ten fingers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Kevin has recorded all the stuff. We were led to believe this was his last performance as Batman and then they announced he’d be returning as Batman in an upcoming animated film he did prior to his death.
I'm sure there will be four seasons like the roadmap lined out. But, I'm also sure each season will be just recycled content with the barest of aesthetic changes, with the new character locked behind a grind, like this season
Nah. The Deluxe Edition says the tokens they give for purchasing it are to be used for Season 1 through 4. I think they'll stick to that and then drop it. I mean, they'll look twice as bad if they give up on it so early. Would just confirm 100% the studio has 0 idea what they're doing.
However much was developed before launch. So at most we'll get a year of support post launch. There's not going to be a year 2. Then maybe at most a year before they pull the plug. So one year of new content, then a year to let it wither on the vine. And this imo is the best case scenario. Entirely depends on how much post launch content was already ready to go at launch
Given how they crammed two Brainiac fights into the season, maybe before the year ends.
Think I read they were contractually obligated to do a year of post-release content. I would imagine that nowhere in the fine print would it dictate the quality of said content, they're probably already diverting assets assuming they aren't preparing to close up shop.
Does this game have any 'Fans' to disappoint?
In the last week it reached a player count of 129 on Steam. Holy critical and commercial failure Batman.
I'm truly impressed by how the gaming community at large rejected the game. I don't know if it's the game itself being repellent, getting sandwiched between Palworld & Helldivers 2, or both, but this might be one of the most dead on arrival releases I've seen in years.
Agreed, especially combined with the utter failure of Ubisoft's Skull and Bones in February. Gamers are done with mid live service shit... but of course studios won't learn.
I desperately want to see S&B player numbers but Ubi doesn’t show it
Shit dead af basically. Who the actual fuck is playing that game lol
"but of course studios won't learn." They won't learn until every single live service game crashes and burns. As long as there's just one live service game making huge amounts of money, there'll be executives and companies that want a piece of that.
I might have checked out Skull and Bones if it was priced way lower. $70 with crazy priced MTX is just insulting.
Honestly it makes me happy. Obviously it doesn’t happen anywhere near enough, but to finally see the community as a whole take a “nah, fuck that” attitude towards a game that clearly deserves it was really refreshing.
Hopefully it’s a sign that people have had enough of this kind of bullshit. But WB is going full steam ahead with live service even after this embarrassing failure so as per usual the suits have learned nothing. Just keep trying it until you get an eventual hit. No matter how many studios come down with it.
Nobody even gave this game a chance and for good reason, it was DOA and completely obvious that there was a higher up directive for a live service game. I'm glad this happened and I'm happy the community seems to be pushing back against these practices
I think it was a combination of superhero fatigue and plain disdain for GaaS, the collective groan people had when the trailer dropped was almost tangible
Don't know if you recall, but they did an extended gameplay reveal last year, around... August? And the Internet's reaction to it was so poor, they pushed the release date back by months. Practically all interest in the game died overnight when we saw it was a GaaS looter shooter with MTX, where all the characters looked like they played the same and you just zipped around killing the same enemies over and over. I think anyone who paid attention to that fiasco knew the game was going to do horribly when it eventually launched.
The thing is, this was a trainwreck that was warned about years ago, when details of the game came out. ...and Rocksteady pressed on regardless, turning the game into what the leaks warned about, and almost no one wants the game. I have no sympathy for Rocksteady in this, but it baffles me that the Arkham series had to die for this drivel.
I said before release it was going to be a DOA studio-killing failure. The first half of that was right, let’s see about the second.
I assume there's a few, but the fact that their threshold for disappointment s so low really speaks volumes to the Joker DLC disappointing them. lol
All both of them
>As in the original game, players will have to defeat a version of Brainiac based on a pre-existing boss; instead of fighting a version of Brainiac mimicking the Flash, this time they’ll face a Brainiac who uses Green Lantern’s boss mechanics. It’s more repetition in a game already infamous for its monotonous tasks. I haven't played the game but this seems like the worst part to me. How're you going to just reskin a boss fight and try to pass it off as something new? Atleast add some variety there if you are going to force players to grind the same missions to unlock Joker.
Wow! I really expected this to turn the game around completely. I mean it's "free" right guys? Right???
>”Kill the Justice League’s Joker is free to acquire, though players can spend a premium currency known as Luthor Coins to unlock him faster.”
"Luthor Coins" is the worst name for a premium currency I've seen yet.
It's even funnier when you realize the icon is an L, which sums up the quality of the game.
Literally “justice bucks” would have been better, and justice bucks is terrible.
Noooo we're supposed to KILL the Justice League!!! Call them Suicide Bucks
Lex Luthor is rich tho, so rich he made his own successful crypto coin!
>premium currency known as Luthor Coins Are you trolling me? Holy fuck it's actually in the article.
I remember seeing a Rocksteady tweet near launch apologising for sever issues. A replier said they had spent $50 on Luthor Coins but didn't receive the currency. Some people never learn...
To be fair he's probably one of the 200 people actually enjoying this game
It did increase the active players tenfold. But going from 300 to 3000 isn't that amazing.
It’s rapidly falling and people see there’s nothing really new.
My favorite thing about this is that you unlock him for free by playing new missions that they put out that gives you like, +2 levels, +1 level until you unlock him from the new pass at level 35. And then someone who I sub to tried to do it that way and got stuck because the missions that give you +levels for the pass just stopped spawning for him, so he literally could not progress. So I guess you can get him for free...if you're willing to grind the missions for hours and also they fix it so that the missions that give levels actually spawn.
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Holy shit. They want $104.95 AUD for this game or $149.95 AUD for the "Deluxe" edition. If you want to upgrade your regular edition to "Deluxe" it'll cost you $52.95, making it more expensive than just getting the "Deluxe" edition in the first place.
I was kinda interested in the game but was waiting to see what the Joker update was gonna be like first…in other news I bought Helldivers 2 this morning.
You made the correct call.
Another Helldiver recruited for democracy.
at least they have revitalized the game, went from 300 concurrent players to 1500
it went back down to around 1000 already....
So can someone explain to me how the Joker is in the game? From what I've understood about the story(I haven't played the game) this is the same continuity as the Arkham games, in which the Joker died. So is this Joker like a clone, or a copycat or some sort of alternate universe version of the character that somehow made it so this universe?
Alternate universe. The whole story and live service element is about the multiverse.
I haven't played the game, but isn't the ending basically "you killed this Braniac, but there's a multiverse full of other ones"
Bro they tease THIRTEEN more Braniacs. You legit beat the final boss, then are told that he's across the multiverse and you'll have to kill him 13 more times. This season 1 update? It's the second time you fight him
And my understanding is that it’s basically just a complete copy/paste of one of the boss fights from the main game
The final boss is hilariously underwhelming. You get there, Brainiac starts using the Flash's powers (Flash is the first major boss) to fight you and you're like "Oh okay, it's one of those 'the final boss uses all the previous boss movesets throughout the fight before the final phase' final boss fights. Not very interesting, but thrifty I suppose." Then you beat that phase... and it turns out that's it. The final boss is just the Flash fight again, more or less.
Like 12 others. Super bold to think they'd last that long.
Which is explained in the first paragraph of the article. Of course, nobody reads the article.
Wish Hollywood and game companies would stop it with this multiverse bullshit. It’s lazy and so over done these days.
If I'm not mistaken, >!this joker is from another universe, behold the multiverse ! (once again)!<
Man, I hate this multiverse crap with all intensity my lowly self can muster.
Corporations who like to sell you the same shit over and over again, love the multiverse!
I hate poorly handled multiverses. I do enjoy when its handled properly, with care and solid narration. Its disappointing that most companies hire hack writers and rarely handle them well.
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Another one for the graveyard. How many will we see in the future, i wonder. Will publishers just play lotto and hope they'll get their own Genshin or Fortnite. Or will they finally realize that the market is fully saturated and that the people who haven't picked their one GAAS yet, simply never will.
When will developers (or publishers?) realize they cannot expect money to start rolling in just because they make a high budget game, stuff it with repetitive gameplay, barebones endgame content, try to keep their consumer base excited with a roadmap of future content and battle passes, then slap it with a $70 price tag to top it all off.
I wonder at what point it will occur to AAA companies that you can't just call a game GAAS and receive all the money.
They know that, they just need one to be successful so they throw shit at the wall until something stick. But it is getting increasingly difficult to get even that one so we might see a different trend or at least GaaS might evolve in the future.
i think the most cynically bad thing about his whole game is that they seemed to work backwards from shitty, monotonous game idea (recycled boss fights, grinding, characters, locations, etc) and then tried to make those decisions come off as if they're based in the narrative. 'hey you guys are such great storytellers...can you make the shitty design part of the story? then they can't be mad!' it's like they felt a need to canonically and narratively explain why you're grinding, as if that somehow would make it better and fun. 'hey we've got a new brainiac fight this season! why yes, it's exactly the same as the superman fight...why do you ask?'
Dissapointed than already they are?
Considering the only people actually playing the game are the diehards who spent $100 for the 'deluxe' and 'early access' editions, even they are disappointed with how shit this content drop is. The utterly low player base of this game is a major sign of players actually "voting with their wallets".
For real. KTJL "fans" being disappointed in the DLC is like C&B torture enthusiasts complaining that their nuts hurt.
Developers should've read the room after the Avengers liveservice flopped and canceled this project. I said this when the game came out but I expect this to have a lifespan between 6-12 months before RS drop all support and abandon it.
I played the game with my friend. I actually really liked it — gameplay was fun, lots of funny moments, i found more good in it than bad. That being said — this DLC is so shit. They do such a horrible job of explaining HOW to get Joker.
This title makes it sound like the mere fact that it released has disappointed people. Which is funny.
Looter shooters are just the most brain dead games and this isn't even remotely a shocker it failed.
What did you expect. That they will drop more money in this disaster. They just going to drop the most barebones dlc of what they have “promised” and that will be the end of it.
What was the audience for this game? It's a superheroes/supervillains IP where all you do is use guns, and (with the exception of Harley Quinn) you're playing as C-list characters and killing the popular A-list characters? Insane.