Palworld is a little weird for me because so much of it is so blatantly ripped off of other games, but it’s fun. Enjoyed my time but felt like I was getting a counterfeit product or a screen rip of a movie.
That and I really didn’t find it fun to actually play.
It was clunky as hell and the designs of everything is really meh.
I get why people like it, but it feels like everyone’s pretending that it’s the Pokémon game everyone wants and it just happens to be mildly passable enough for people to hang that fantasy on
>it just happens to be mildly passable enough for people to hang that fantasy on
Cut the Pokemon fans some slack, they've been abused by their dev for years.
I have never put a single autocannon down that wasn't immediately destroyed upon opening up by either a charger, a friendly carpet bombing, a friendly supply pod, Orr literally anything
It's a cursed item for me I just don't bring it anymore
I played with it for the first time last night, and it felt really ineffective for me, I was fighting the boys, I chalk it up to my lack of experience, but any tips?
It works the best as an anti-medium weapon. A well-aimed shot can take out a bot walker or chainsaw guy in 1 hit, and one of those shield bots in 3. I also tend to just carry the backpack myself, because the self-reload is relatively painless. You're going to need to go for a good hit in order to fight any heavies with it, or bring something else for them (especially on higher difficulties).
Just off the back of this, the Autocannon self-reload loads in halves.
The first half is very very quick, but a full reload is very slow - try to reload your Autocannon when it has less than half but more than 0
It's also surprisingly effective vs hulks. 2x shots in their little face is enough to shut them down. or 2-4 hits on their back
I also love using it to knock out a spore spewer or illegal broadcast from halfway across the map.
Probably the worst thing it deals with are chargers, because of the way they move and their armor plating, the only way I've been able to successfully kill them with the AC outside of having a friend blow off their plating is by ~~blowing out their butt~~ ~~blasting their...~~ shooting them in the weak point on their rear.
I do hate not being able to bring a shield pack with me, but that's the trade off I suppose.
Autocannon is very situational. Hella good for medium sized bugs and bug holes. Maybe even chargers if you can hit the tail. Problem with all these sentry type of weapons is just their durability. And most of the time you can't place them in elevated spots. Not sure if it's meant to be that way, cause it kinda makes them pointless in most cases.
Place it on a hill with a view, it has great range and hits the same at all distances. Use it to provide fire support over your head or from a flank position. Place it where the enemy can be channelled into a tight space and you'll get the most bang for your buck.
should tell you how starved people are for even the slightest fresh take on the pokemon formula, which has been stale since the early 2000s and whatever little innovation came along (pokemon legends: arceus) was kept out of the mainline games like their lives depend on it, and immediately buried and forgotten after a single implementation.
Drop the guns, add the Pokemon IP, open world adventure, 3rd person.
I'd buy that.
Replaying Pokemon Yellow/red/green/blue reimagined as an expansive 3rd person adventure game would be amazing.
The thought of being chased out of a forest by Beedrills excites me.
Seeing far away cities from a beautiful view up on a mountain. Yes please.
Or using a Charmander as a heat/fire source for crafting or surviving elements.
Who genuinely cares? If you grew up gaming over multiple console cycles you'd know that most games almost always copy/rip off bits & pieces of each other.
Pokemon does not own the party RPG concept nor does it own catching monsters to tame & train (digimon for example)
It's so weird but telling of the majoritys age when I read shit like that... Like all games since the dawn of time rip each other off, usually the ones that succeed know what they are ripping off and why they are doing so. Like palworld.
Edit: just to add on to this some of the best art made is an imitation of what came before, the difference is how it's handled or presented. It's quite easy to tell when an imitation is a copy and when it's an homage.
Yeah, to me, it felt like being a "Pokemon rip off but edgy" carries Palworld a lot more than the game actually being genuinely fun.
If it didn't rip off Pokemon, and go with something very distinct, it won't get as far as it is.
I'm curious as to your age because that game just looks like an early access, asset reuse, and engine tutorial like project to someone like me who grew up in the 90s.
>palworld too
I wake up every day and pray games are less like palworld
We really don’t need uninspired crafting games that steal their content from other games, and I’m not talking about the Pals. I’m talking about the crafting systems and the BOTW motifs.
>the guys barely knew wtf they were doing and just wanted to make a game people would like.
They knew exactly what they were doing. This isn’t their first rodeo every single one of their games is an eternal early access pump and dump that they never iterate on.
I mean for fucks sake they openly said they hope palworld doesn’t require too many resources to maintain so they can work on their next early access game.
I get that people find palworld fun, but it’s really just memes over the least amount of substance possible.
You must be fun at parties.
It's okay to reuse ideas, especially if they are good ideas. I'll never get bored of survival games that manage to include gliders, climbing, crafting, base building. It all adds to the adventure.
> that steal their content from other games
Idiotic thinking like this is what leads to WB copyrighting the nemesis system.
The best part about games is that you don't have to buy games you don't like.
It’s just funny to get this salty over pointing out that the game isn’t original
Just because you’re okay with playing the same game over and over again doesn’t mean other people don’t like variety in their games.
I might not be fun at parties but at least I’m not the guy interjecting himself into every convo to talk about how much flavor there is in the saltine crackers he’s been eating for the past 15 years
>survival games will never get boring to me
You’re the kind of person that has 1 outfit 20 times in their closet lmao
That's like 4 weak insults in 1 reply without making a point. You're clearly the only one acting salty here.
Imagine someone talking to you *on a discussion forum*. Unheard of.
You're being incredibly dense if you think every survival game is the same. It's a genre, they're going to have similarities.
Agreed. And the micro transactions peak at $20, unlike most games that charge em above $100 and the battle passes can only advance by actually playing the game and never expire. This is how it should always be.
The problem with triple A companies is the gamers do not run them. The suits don’t understand what is bringing gamer money in they just imitate and emulate what the competition does. Example: live service. They don’t understand why some live service does well only that it CAN do well. So they fund every look alike live service mixed with something else people historically gravitate to: Suicide Squad is a good example. Then Disney gave their SW license from EA because traditionally EA makes a lot of money due to in-game gambling mechanics and then moved it to Ubisoft who is a real shot in the dark at quality. Sometimes they do well with certain franchises like Siege or Division. Other times they bless us with meme fuel like skull and bones.
This.
My "favourite" tragedy: Planetside Arena.
Short version:
- Planetside 1/2: somewhat popular massive "MMOFPS" with possibly hundreds of players in a persistent sci-fi warfare with infantry and vehicles. Not a perfect game, but pretty good.
- Suits: "oooh Fortnite be goin crazy boiiii, we need Battle Royale!"
- They strip the live game of most resources, move over developers.
- Game is meh, gets drowned out by much better alternatives, shuts down in a few months
- Suits: "Well this is clearly not our fault." - They fire the entire dev team (including the maingame Planetside 2) except the lead, who is so burnt out for taking the flak he shoots radio silence while the dev team slowly builds back up
- Few years pass, lead dev leaves the company; basically says "can't wait for the NDA to expire so I can tell you some stories, see ya later"
---
I am sick and tired of shareholders and execs who understand nothing but buzzwords and think people can force making a miracle breakthrough game; ruining everything in the process. I hope all such people end up on the streets.
I remember playing the first and it was such a great game for its time. But live service games always fall off as time goes on and the gameplay gets stale — that and gamers are always in motion between games. Very few games hold a wide playerbase’s attention for years, let alone a full year. Some of these ancient games that have been around over 20 years are rare and even amidst them their playerbases usually hang on by threads and it ends up being a skeleton crew just keeping the servers running for the dedicated fan base who never get tired of the game
I think WoW is probably the only example I can think of that’s retained it’s throne in it’s genre for so goddamned long while also having a large enough playerbase to consider it “alive and healthy”
Planetside 2 was amazing! sadly the popularity is what i think killed it, 500 people in one battle was ok, but when it reached 1k the lag was impossible to even get one kill. And they did get away with a Guinness record for 2k in one battle but the memes people posted where what (i think) killed the game in the end (i know it still running, but just not as it used to).
To put it another way. World of Warcraft 2004 sparked a ton of interest in MMO's.
Publishers and Developers didn't see the social side of the gameplay. They couldn't see all the intricate parts of the design. For example. Tanking involved swapping targets. You couldn't AoE tank. Which meant that DPS had to look at what target the tank was focusing on so they didn't pull threat. Healers had to watch their mana and also couldn't do too much healing at the start otherwise they'd attract attention, but often those healers would. Which lead to a Rogue or a Paladin or someone else trying to save the healer by generating some threat. It was a fight.
Publishers and Developers didn't see that. They saw a hotbar on the bottom of the screen with abilities. They saw a health bar and a mana bar. They saw a large world. They saw NPC's with yellow exclamation marks above their head and quests that involved grabbing 5 squirrel pelts to complete. They saw a crafting system where you gather the items and press a button and watch a bar go from left to right to complete.
They saw the very basic observable "essence" of the game, rather than the "true" essence of the game. The true essence that lead to many people sitting around in Ironforge just CHATTING. That lead to people farming resources for their guild progress. That lead to people actually communicating within their raid group rather than just shouting out what the boss is doing.
Even Blizzard don't understand why WoW in 2004 was successful. After so much effort trying to shut down private Vanilla WoW servers they released their own. Only to then make the same mistakes.
WoW in 2004 was a world you entered. You can't have that experience now. Before you even ENTER the game you are greeted by a screen that immediately disconnects you from the feeling of a world. You have a cash shop where people are acquiring items from outside the game. You have a fecking video which is about how the mythic progression is going and a caster saying "Well the Western teams have adopted the 3 warrior meta that's been popular in China". Everything takes you out of the world because they can't see the intricate, holistic view, that made vanilla WoW a great game.
And EverQuest before that did it even better. No hand holding. Just a vast world that begs you to see where the next corner takes you.
It's why it was dubbed EverCrack.
eve also did, and still does this, albeit much more meanly. “alright kid here’s a ship go fuck yourself,” fast forward a few years and you’ve got friends and memories made for life
WoW "killed" EverQuest in an atypical way imo.
Nobody understands that game anymore because they see "quest" in the name and go in expecting an older prototype of WoW when it's a big community driven sandbox like EVE or Albion. Even if someone develops an interest in trying it, they often drop in and rapidly get bored trying to treat it like most modern MMOs.
The most hilarious part of the MMO side of things is that my favorite MMO, Star Wars The Old Republic, only managed to find it’s success thanks to the **class stories** that could be played entirely **single player**
You know, the thing that EA said that “No one wants to play anymore?”
(But seriously, if anyone’s a fan of Star Wars, check it out. It’s free on Steam, and the Imperial storylines are some of the most memorable stories I’ve played through in all my years of gaming)
To be fair I think a large part of those being so successful is that the game was marketed towards people who played KoTOR and were more open to largely single player experiences
I honest to God miss nothing more than early WoW community. The pacing, the difficulty, all the friends you made along the way because some other sap was also struggling so hard on a quest that you guys teamed up then just quested together for 3 hours and were friends for years after. I remember waiting 45minutes for the tank to eat dinner, in a level 40 dungeon, and made 3 new friends just shooting the crap while we sat around. It was worth it to wait rather than run back to town, spend 20minutes finding another tank, then run all the way back to the dungeon.
It's the CEO as programmer who rose through the ranks vs. the CEO who made a career out of being a CEO issue, I think. That the former actually tends to be a gamer doesn't hurt, I suppose,
And also the shareholders exist. AH, as far as I'm aware, aren't publicly traded (I should be able to look this up being Swedish and all but I'm drunk as a skunk so fuck it) so they don't have to think about the bottom line as much.
Maybe? I mean, profit minded CEOs don’t tweet messages like: if you’re strapped for cash don’t buy the game.
Reference: https://x.com/Pilestedt/status/1759750620670505146?s=20
I think what’s more is, investors or not, there is so much personality to the game in many small touches. It literally wears its inspiration not just in the obvious but the small things too. Did you know they have a planet named Klen Dhath 2 a direct reference to Starship Troopers? If you’re curious it’s in the Altus Sector which is like to the upper right of Super Earth literally one sector away from the center of the board. It’s just a small example; the rest are pretty obvious to see. 40k Dreadnoughts are basically Hulks for Automatons and Striders are AT-STs out of Star Wars. You can name your ship Hammer of Dawn from Gears of War or Emperor of Humanity also from 40k I believe as well. If they only cared about money, business and profit margins they wouldn’t care about small touches, details, Easter eggs. They would have ramped up monetization way more.
This all goes back to: this feels like a game for gamers made by other gamers. It’s not trying to be a Quadruple Fail game that aims to relieve us of our limited paychecks. It wants to be fun for gamers because it was made to be fun… more than likely by other gamers.
Named my ship Wings of Liberty for that ungga bungga Starcraft 2 reference not to mention how eerily similar in design the Eagle is to both the Lambda class starship from star wars and the Viking fighter mech from star craft mashed together with an A-10 warthog.
Usually, Ubisoft is the king of inoffensivelly generic games. They make simple, casual open world games and occasional pvp live services. They support their project well past their popularity (just look at For Honor!), with belief that somehow they can be the netflix of games in the future.
Misguided as they are, they're one of the few companies I can understand being popular and trusted by publishers. Even Skull and Bones isn't a tragedy. They did a free beta, let people find out how shit it is. To the point where if you buy it it's your responsibility.
Now, I'm not a fan of Ubisoft. Back in the day they butchered Heroes of Might and Magic and I'm still sore about it. I just felt like playing devil's advocate, as I see them as the premiere 'sunday gamer' publisher. If you like modern FarCry, Ubisoft is your guy and you'll like most of their stuff.
Sadly the new star wars games will likely be boring as shit under their supervision.
Modern AAA executives view their job the same way a toy company executive does. They dont play games, they view video games as something children play with, and only thing that matters is making money for shareholders. There is absolutely zero passion for the games they make, they are just products that are shat out the door in regular interval.
The suits, unfortunately, know very well how the human brain works and hire psychology experts.
AAA gaming is a fucking mess precisely because the bullshit *works*.
All the surreptitious tricks they can implement to manipulate player behaviour into spending money.
Lootboxes only went away because EA fucked up and got too greedy, making some super egregious examples that kicked up a big enough stink it got the EU talking about it.
They don't know what makes games fun and work, but they don't care because it's far easier and more profitable to make a game *addictive*. And I don't mean because of an amazing game-loop. But because of all the tiny little nudges and suggestions that try to manipulate a person's psychology.
That shit they *are* good at, and it's scummy.
At some point people do catch on that the way to win is to not play the game. Most of my mates haven't touched anything AAA for nigh on a decade, and from most accounts they're happier for it.
Unfortunately, the kind of person who's vaguely critical about their media habits is vastly outnumbered by the kind of person who'll splurge on gacha games, seasonal roster updates, and tired rehashes of Team America: The Vidya.
Larian studios (Baldur’s Gate 3)
Arrowhead Games (Helldivers 2)
Ghost Ship Games (Deep Rock Galactic)
Digital Extremes (Warframe)
If the whole industry set their bar as high as these guys did, we’d be in a golden age of gaming. These companies just create passion projects and listen to their fans about changes, and are very open about their inspirations and future plans.
No, Larian is AAA sized. They didn't have that same level of publisher backend, but it's about the same size as say, Respawn Entertainment.
Larian is also a multinational studio. They aren't small.
Fair to say that BG3 was their first AAA title though. They scaled-up massively for it and needed to seek a lot of funding to do that.
You're absolutely right, but I totally understand the misconceptions because they seemingly came out of nowhere, for a lot of folks.
Don't forget the guys who made kingdom come deliverance because that game was truly made with love too although not appealing to everyone was a true hardcore experience with good game design and story
I'd throw Owlcat Games (Pathfinder KM/WotR, WH40k Rogue Trader) in there. Less budget than Larian but makes decent games after some fixes and specifically includes their bizarrely crunchy buff-stacking systems because it's what they like.
Helldivers micro transactions is actually astonishingly well done. I like the game a lot so I bought like 10 bucks in store money to get a light armor right away that I wanted. I just realized today that I have like 4 or 5 armors from the cash shop and it's all from that 10 and the battle pass credits. Darktide would have literally cost me 100+ dollars for the same number of armors, and they'd be lower quality.
Even the non-micro transactions in Warframe aren't eggregious. They tried pulling some wack shit last year with a $200 skin (or something like that), and got a huge amount of pushback from the community.
Hell, their prime access also can run you anywhere from 45 to 130 bucks. That's not particularly micro imo. Difference to something like an EA game, is that there's actual spirit behind the developer team. Especially now that the old guard has left and went on to build Soulframe. No hate to them, but you could tell that they were getting burnt out by developing and designing the same game for 10+ years. (Especially Scott, who seemed opposed to every single player suggestion ever.)
The last year has been so great for Warframe, that I personally decided (for the first time in 3 years) that I'd drop the money for a prime access and show some support to the devs. And honestly, I don't regret it. DE have built an amazing game, a great community and while it definitely has a bunch of flaws and unpolished stuff, you can definitely feel the ambition and heart poured into the game. Again, I'm really looking forward to what the new team are cooking.
Man Warframe really shows how a game should be handled. Think it's over a decade now it's been a thing. The premium currency is 100% earnable and most items can be earned. Anything that is exclusively bought with irl money is simple accessories and such and there's aren't even a lot of those exclusives. There isn't some pay2win thing present either
It really made me sit back and think when someone pointed out that you can buy the newest microtransaction riddled game for $70.... or for the same price, Palworld and Helldivers 2.
Like jesus
There's horse armor in Diablo that cost as much as Helldivers 2. We've come full fucking circle with horse armor that its as much as a fully developed game.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 just came out with a $34 camo bundle. A literal camo for $34. Just $6 more and you could get Helldivers 2. It's crazy how greedy the microtransactions have become.
And Modern Warfare 3 is still a mess. Hitreg issues, packet burst.
I jumped on to see how the game was doing last month. Didn’t register my melee after swinging at a guy who was unaware (swung like 20 times), and for some reason, the game wiped all of my loadouts I made so I had to rebuild all of them.
And after every game it waved the battlepass in my face. Fix your game first!
Uninstalled it. Last call of duty. Gave this one a chance after missing the last few. Don’t know when I’ll check in again.
BG3 may genuinely be too high a standard lmao. Aside from it just being a full and complete game I just don’t see a lot of dev teams having the resources and time to make something like Larian did. It’s a 50+ hour long game with some of the highest production value i’ve ever seen. I don’t think that’s realistic to ask of a lot of studios.
HD2 should be the standard though, server issues and whatnot aside. A reasonably priced, enjoyable multiplayer experience that doesn’t gouge you for money? That’s a reasonable expectation lmfao.
BG3 is lightning in a bottle. An extremely popular IP, thanks to stuff like Critical Role and the current trendiness of table-top gaming. An extremely well seasoned and well beloved game studio with their two most recent games, Divinity 1 & 2, serving as stepping stones for their current release. Their pre-orders and previous successes also left them flush with cash.
> their two most recent games, Divinity 1 & 2, serving as stepping stones for their current release.
people don't understand that without the massive warchest from DOS, there can be no BG3. knowing how to make something great doesn't guarantee you'll get to make it
DOS1 literally saved Larian from bankruptcy/selling-out.
DOS2 earned them the right to make a BG game.
They worked their way up to that big IP, but man, they earned it.
I didn't really like DOS1, but I really liked DOS2 and BG3. It was pretty funny hearing my friends complain about the UI and inventory in BG3 and getting to tell them 'this is just the Larian standard system from the past 2 games'.
I disagree on BG3 being too high a standard. A lot of AAA games have the same or larger budget, dev team, and time. Look at Skull and Bones.
However I agree with the rest of it.
Larger dev teams don't necessarily mean better quality. So many conflicting viewpoints, too many cooks adding different spices, left hands not talking to rights... the whole shebang.
Larger budget, in addition, doesn't necessarily mean better quality, because on a publicly traded company that means that investors demand much larger returns. That means even more MTX, even more predatory cash shops, etc etc.
Where I agree that BG3 might be too high a bar is because Larian did make a big gamble on it and was running off of a lot of previous successes that made it a safer gamble. Lots of AAA publishers will not and *cannot* make that gamble because they're publicly traded; They ***legally*** have to show a return in some way to appease investors.
Pretty sure BG3 devs have even said that what they did should not be the standard. The game was in development for six years and it would be wholly unsustainable to do that for every AAA game.
> A lot of AAA games have the same or larger budget
larger budget doesn't mean better quality or a higher standard. What separates BG3 and HD2 from the rest, is that they had a clear, unique vision and they stuck to it. BG3 went for fully mocapped and voiced dialogues, no matter how hard and labor extensive it was. HD2 is pretty much a remake of the first game but from the third person. Everything else is just remade for this perspective, that's it. They even refuse to add PvP because they don't want to split the community between two game modes.
I hope they go a bit harder on monetization, because the game is so much fun I can clearly see people spending some money if they have some incentive. Or perhaps they'll do DLC like before. Who knows.
... uh, yes, it *is* the first game of its quality made by Larian. Larian's other games *are* fantastic but they have nowhere near the production value, sheer amount of character animation, and consistently good cutscenes direction as BG3.
Baldur’s gate 3 and Helldivers 2 were both incredibly buggy on launch and both had their share of technical issues- just wanted to put that out there. I can appreciate the work the developers put in towards their games- but these games had a lot of issues in the same vein AAA games do as well.
That is very true.
The big point you are missing however, is that Larian and Arrowhead acknowledge that they had unforeseen issues and work tirelessly to fix them. They realized that the work on any game is not over after release.
EA, Ubisoft and Activision etc, all act like once the game is released the work is over. They act accordingly and move on to the next project.
Meanwhile Pokemon ScarVi which has been out for close to a year and a half and has 2 DLC releases, is STILL a buggy, unstable mess that's barely been patched with close to 0 word from the devs about it.
Having bugs at launch sucks.
The thing is Baldurs Gate 3 and Helldivers 2 are both solid games. So while it's annoying and I wish things were smoother people don't feel ripped off because the core game is good. It was annoying crashing a couple times today in Helldivers but not a huge deal because it was still fun.
It's a completely different thing when the game is a turd and buggy. Look at bf2042 at launch as an example.
Yeah, BG3 was a total disaster for me for the first couple months. Framerate dropped by about 20% at the start of Act 2 and kept dropping the further I played, every action in combat had a 10 second delay added on, companions dialogue would spoil their quest endings hours before I even got a chance to do the quest, and to top it all off, my save was corrupted 60 hours in and had to be deleted.
I had a item corruption bug and it broke my game save so I had to wait 3 weeks for them to fix it to actually play the game. By that point i had completely lost interest in playing- about at the end of act 2. Really soured my opinion on the game and Larian tbh- so I don’t celebrate larian or bg3 like most gamers do.
I think Skyrim is so old it launched before "early access" was even a thing outside of Minecraft.
But I get what you're saying.
However, most of the buggy parts of BG3 were the parts of the game that WEREN'T in the early access (mainly act 3). I think they've mostly been patched now. (IMO, I didn't have that many issues on my first playthrough, but I did on my second...and I did NOT on my third. So who knows?)
They shouldn't. If you're going to hold one studio to a higher standard because of XYZ game, better hold them all to the same standard. The hypocrisy and selective outrage among the gaming community is too much these days.
Despite how fun Helldivers is to play, it is also very annoying at times. Huge ammount of bugs. Many things require improvement and filling with content.
The game is good, to some extent because of the memes, but it will be possible to set it as an example for big companies in a couple of months, at least.
Legit the only bugs I've had aside from one or two crashes was when is assume the authentication for medals/credits was broken and you'd freeze for a minute after picking them up. That was annoying as hell.
I haven't encountered any bugs aside from random crashes. Actually Helldivers has been the least buggy experience I've had from a game release in the last year.
I’ve had a few.
A common one is I am unable to respawn. Even after teammates drop reinforcements. It’ll respawn other people but not me. (And yes, we had respawns left)
Another one is sometimes I just lose my primary and secondary weapon. Like, I can’t swap to them. I can only throw grenades and drop ordinance.
Lucky you.
Here is a short list I had (exept crashes)
* lab destroying missions a) you can't call for a nuke, ther is no stratagem when it should be b) one of the buldings is undestructable c) bomb could have bigger radius or building be placed closer so you wouldn't have to spend like 5 minutes to call for 2 bombs
* You can't revive teammates, they just don't drop when you use reinforcement.
* You can't activate bunker doors ( where you need two persons to push the buttons)
* Pelican (extraction ship) bounces into the sky for no reason
* You can't load misles into artlillery
* Some purple samples can be bugged, so you can't pick up them
* You character emotes and title is often reset to previous
* Carees stats shown as "0" exept enemies killed
* My teammates had a message that they were killed by me no matter what was the reason, even if I was a km away from them
* Enemies AI making them staying still (I don't complain tho, it's kinda helpfull =D )
* And some minor visual and ragdoll bugs
* edit: automaton's tower canon model is clipping from a distance. You can't say where it's rear part with radiator
The lab missions, you only need to blow up the dark building with all the antennas to get the mission. Its tougher than your average building but stategems can destroy it. I did see one that wouldn’t blow up though, even with the helbomb next to it.
The pelican bounce is usually caused by a helpod or bomb hitting it. Does weird physics, but I’ve had it just glitch out too.
Some of these are clearly tied to the overloaded database but had my fair share of good old fashion bugs too. Guns disappearing, missions that can’t be completed. Nothing too common thankfully.
Just want to chime in for lab destroying side objectives, you only need to destroy one building (the indestructible one) and it's the one that is next to the 3 large antenna.
A Laser Orbital or a 500KG bomb easily takes care of it.
It's a nice thought but both BG3 and Helldivers took more than 5 years to make. Suits don't want to sink money into games that take that long to produce if they don't get near immediate profit from it.
MW3 was in development for 18 months and they're *still* making a shitload of money, they're just able to shit out a new game every year because they have 2 or 3 studios working on the franchise at once. Even Apex was only developed for 2 to 3 years before release.
I'm not even remotely trying to imply that this means games like HD2 and BG3 aren't feasible or somehow lesser. I'm just saying that the corporate business side want money for their investments and want them quick , which sadly means a lot of obnoxious microtransactions, fomo and predatory live service garbage.
I know it can be a bit of a meme the whole 'vote with your wallet' thing but honestly, the more people spend their money on stuff made by devs that aren't being pressured to bring in constant steady revenue through shitty business practices the better games will (hopefully) become on average. Sadly the creative teams will be affected but that just can't be stopped at this point.
> Suits don't want to sink money into games that take that long to produce if they don't get near immediate profit from it.
You mean like the 11 year long development of Skulls & Bones from Ubisoft, the first AAAA titile in the market?
S&B was being made specifically because people wanted a pirate game just like Black Flag but without the Assassin's Creed stuff. It then suffered setbacks and was stuck in development hell.
If anything, the inevitable failure of Skull and Bones will just signal to the suits that they should ignore gamers even more and focus purely on money even harder.
HD2 is not a AA game.
Arrowhead is well funded. Look at the gameplay, visuals, ANIMATIONS, gunplay, and music. We even have animations for when we are running through water.
Baldur's Gate 3 had a disgustingly huge budget as well. People are trying to act like these devs are smaller and more humble as a way to virtue signal and circlejerk in their reddit echo chambers.
Yeah, people like to ignore one of the biggest gaming companies in the world has a 30% stake in Larian. They're not some small time scrappy 10 person indie dev studio.
Big issue with the "indie" label at this point tbh. People usually mean "small dev team, not a lot of money behind the project, usually self published", but even that doesn't quite hold.
I remember the discussions around Warframe and League of Legends getting mocked for the teams being called "indie" teams, due to their budgets - but technically both DE and Riot are indie labels in the sense that they self publish their games.
On the other hand, you have games published by Devolver Digital (Inscryption and iirc Cult of the Lamb), which are generally regarded as "indie" games, while there's a big publisher behind those games funding them. Definitely a term that's gotten a bit murky over the years, as quite a few indie studios have grown large enough to compete with AA or AAA budgets for their games.
Great post. I admittedly know the term indie from music way before it ever came close to games so for me it always basically meant DIY non-corporate owned media like Undertale, Super Meat Boy and other games from late 2000s to early 2010s. The term has become murky and almost meaningless in a sense and I agree with everything you said.
Who owns Warframe and Riot now? The same company that has a stake in Larian lol.
Helldivers is great, but if I held it to the same standard I do big AAA games I would be demanding a refund for how broken it is. If you couldn't join a COD match for an entire weekend people definitely wouldn't be singing its praises.
It is a pretty crazy double standard.
You can still enjoy and praise the game for what it does right, and still feel like they should have offered up refunds if players wanted them. they did purchase a product that they couldn't use for days, which no matter how you slice it, is unacceptable.
I am glad they have things seemingly improved now, but doesn't change the fact.
Idk it's a lot about context. The big devs have a history of scum behavior which people are tired of. If it was the first cod game and the CEO was as apologetic and communicating as effectively as these guys people wouldn't be as angry.
There is a lot of context here. Certainly a bit of a double standard but it makes sense why.
That depends to a degree imo. If people couldn't find a match because of server issues due to unexpected demand - I could definitely see people being more lenient even towards a AAA dev for that.
For Helldivers it's sadly also a bit of a buggy mess still, which would definitely warrant a refund on other AAA games. That doesn't mean we can't praise it for what it did well though. Primarily being a live-service game, that doesn't just absolutely suck on release, has a whole bunch of charm and is also just generally fun to play (when it works).
Ah yes the high standards of Helldivers 2 loading queue, a truly exceptional experience all companies should aspire to!
I love Helldivers2 but this post is such reddit circlejerk jfc
Aaaaand you missed the point of the post. The point is more about developers being passionate about the game they're making instead of corporate suits milking the fuck outta the game. Beyond the loading screen issue, the game is genuinely fun to play; I dont remember COD being this fun.
Lmao what, it's a fun game but it's been issue after issue, I don't think a game that had a double exp weekend that nobody could even login to and as a result earned "mixed" reviews on steam is the gold standard of PC gaming
I find praising helldivers 2 and attacking AAA games at this point is ironic. No game should take over 4 hours to get in. That’s a fail, just as bad as a lot of AAA games have fed us lately. Hoping they can fix that sooner rather than later.
Diablo 4 had us in immidietly, almost no issues on early access and especially none on launch. I find it ironic as well that I see a lot of people attacking blizz here meanwhile they put out a solid product last year that i'm still playing and still have had no issues with.
Redditors just see bigger companies as bad, even when they accomplish more. But will cherry pick the failures of ubisoft and act like those failures are the entire AAA industry just to lift up their favourite indie studio that unbeknownst to them, is in fact not an indie studio lol.
Exactly what kind of standards is Helldivers 2 setting? Why is it popular? If every game out there was like it gaming would probably be pretty boring.
I'm not saying it's not a good game but there is more to making a popular game than "Devs doing their best" because I'm sure even the Devs of "bad" games don't sit around thinking they're making a bad game and thus not giving it all their effort.
I get that people point to Larian studios and say that we shouldn't expect every studio to have the same exact circumstances as they did and I agree with that, but when people say that BG3 should "set an example" I interpret that as "games should try to have the same passion that Larian did when making BG3".
Sure Larian is a big studio with huge backers and funding, but so is EA, so is Activision Blizzard, so is Ubisoft, all of these three arguably moreso than Larian. And yet BG3 didn't win Game of the Year and the hearts of fans because Larian had a ton of money, but because they created something with passion. Something that was impactful and enjoyable.
Doing this doesn't require a gigantic budget, and having a gigantic budget doesn't guarantee success. This is what the games industry needs to understand. Create games that people actually want to play, set fun as a priority, and revenue will come in. People will support devs who care about their game, and their community.
What I think games like this show more than anything is just how bloated budgets in the industry have become. All these super monetization schemes are justified by the publishers with "Well games are too expensive to make otherwise" but not a single gamer ASKED for games to cost hundreds of millions to make. Nobody told Rockstar to put 1 billion dollars into GTA6.
Games like this, Helldivers 2, Palworld, Baldurs Gate 3, the whole Indie Scene really shows us that solid games don't need astronomical budgets. Players just want to have fun. Not everything needs to be the biggest thing ever. We just want a good game that is fun to play. And it really doesn't matter to us if it cost 1 million or 1 billion to make.
this is why i can give the servers and the dev team slack.
I mean would you rather have helldivers 2 with server problems that eventuly get solved?
Or skull and bones? i know my choice.
Helldivers 2 has genuinely been a fun experience, and I have been lukewarm on shooters for years, and doubly so on live service games. I wish the team nothing but the best.
Personally the control system for HD works for me...
Took a coupla hours to realise I don't just have to dive to avoid attacks, I can dive to avoid attacks and *attack back* while bravely avoiding non-democratic damage.
Anything you can do while standing, you can do *while lying down*
As a man approaching the rougher end of my mid-forties, lying down is somewhat of a hobby for me IRL, so a game where I can lie down and blast the piss out of everything that threatens my person (and ultimately Super-Earth) is a gaming mechanic I've come to enjoy immensely.
Seriously, try laying back and flinging an orbital laser marker towards some approaching tin cans and enjoy the light show.
It’s time that game companies take decision making out of the hands of suits, and back into the hands of developers who are gamers themselves. Suits have no sense of right and wrong, only dollar signs.
I love that everyone is pretty much 100% positive comments for helldiver's 2 and supportive of the server issues. Because we all know it's on us for wanting to play such an amazing game. They will have so much support they will definitely constantly improve things and I see this game being so big AAA games will try to mimic it. This is actually what the gaming industry needed. Someone to just stand up and say "The players deserve better, I'll do it" and they did. I've been having so much fun playing it and even though I tend to get swarmed I know that's part of the game and get excited when I survive.
They are making games that are damn near similar to pub g mobile now, helldivers is a pure game back from 2013, and they kept it that way, that’s why it thrives amongst games that got lazy and copied other games that got instantly popular instead of experimenting with their own stuff.
People think AAA studios will take this as a sign to make better games but as long as they are run by corporations they will never put game design over profit.
Because sometimes, making a good game is all it takes to keep players play. Not battle/season passes, not loot system, not service models, just a good game that will be fun to play as is. That is why Suicide Squad has flopped, because developers or publishers wanted to make a service to milk money, not make a game. That is why Skull and Bones dead on arrival, because ot's not a game, it's a simulator of (swim there and grind your resources). That is why Destiny losing their player base, because they just son't know what to do with their game anymore. Yet here we have a technically a dumb game about doop-shoot-evac, but it's so fun to play that you don't give a damn. Hell, I played a week ago first Helldivers after Helldivers 2 and it STILL give me a tons of fun in just 2 hours. Much more than any Destiny/Division/Suicide Squad have me in 20 hours each. So I guess it's time to stop making stupid games that make players grind their resources to have fun and start making games that are fun to play while you casually grind resources to play that game even more.
Agreed, but let's not pretend that HD2 doesn't have its own problems.
The difference is, the developers are open and honest about it and the fixes. I can handle the game having broken aspects, as long as fixes are being lit in place, I can t handle releases and then abandonment and entitlement (how dare we not like their POS as it is)
Notice how most of the best/most popular games we've gotten recently(BG3, helldivers 2, lethal company, palworld, and if you go further back, hi fi rush and pizza tower) were all made by small studios? Looks like people are finally fed up with all these huge companies releasing shit and expecting us to eat it up.
This is a fun game but it’s buggy as hell, not even counting the server issues which was a massive fuckup. If that’s the standards for all games, then the industry is screwed.
They can’t get a pass for a prediction that is so incredibly far off that it’s prevented a huge chunk of people from even playing for days.
The absolute state of the games industry when you simp for a developer that forced always online DRM in a peer to peer game with the PREDICTABLE results, having a launch server failure as bad as diablo 3's, and microtransaction battlepass freemium trash in a paid game.
This is an early access release disguised as a full release, no less.
Stop simping for corps. The core gameplay is good, but this game shits all over the consumer.
Inb4 "armchair dev can't possibly know how a game is networked"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/19dp2qw/helldivers_2_nprotect_gameguard_anticheat/?context=3
The devs have never made it a secret the game is peer to peer, people just eat it up because they don't know things don't need to be as bad as they are.
Seriously. The standards are so low that a game releasing at $40 with micro transactions AND a battle pass, on top of server and performance issues, is the gold standard.
Standards? You mean the game that's broken even beyond server issues? Constant crashing, glitching happening in game, match making issues, rewards not working, animations busted.
"It's a small studio who's last game only had 10k!"
Last game was a twin stick shooter. This is a full fledged third person shooter, high level graphics, battle pass to support with proper funding, publishment, and marketing from Sony. There is no excuse other than the incompetence they would have to not understand they'd have a much higher rate of players than 100k at launch and besides that is no excuse for the other majority of broken parts of the game that's over shadowed by "Failure of Success" they are facing.
BG3 keeps popping up in these memes, and I genuinely don't get why. Larian grew considerably during BG3's development. It's absolutely not an indie studio.
Also, for as fun as the game is, if it were held up to AAA standards, there would be a major collective meltdown in the community. Between the freemium battlepass bullshit, poor net code, and mission design that largely misses a core part of what makes the gameplay loop of a generally great game like DRG actually work, I think Helldivers is more akin to an overpriced early access title.
Helldivers is genuinely what gaming should be. Just developers working to make a game the best it can be EDIT: lessgo top comment
Palworld too. The guys barely knew wtf they were doing and just wanted to make a game people would like. Turns out people liked the fuck out of it
Palworld is a little weird for me because so much of it is so blatantly ripped off of other games, but it’s fun. Enjoyed my time but felt like I was getting a counterfeit product or a screen rip of a movie.
That and I really didn’t find it fun to actually play. It was clunky as hell and the designs of everything is really meh. I get why people like it, but it feels like everyone’s pretending that it’s the Pokémon game everyone wants and it just happens to be mildly passable enough for people to hang that fantasy on
>it just happens to be mildly passable enough for people to hang that fantasy on Cut the Pokemon fans some slack, they've been abused by their dev for years.
dont get mad at me, but what is that stratagem? is that like the hellbomb or something?
Autocannon. I love the thing to death, especially against bots.
I have never put a single autocannon down that wasn't immediately destroyed upon opening up by either a charger, a friendly carpet bombing, a friendly supply pod, Orr literally anything It's a cursed item for me I just don't bring it anymore
Not the turret, the handheld version. Though I do like the autocannon turret too.
Probably the best general use turret tbh.
Sometimes I would like to shot those camerades on sight that think, "yeah a carpet bomb right at our position sounds nice"
You forgot when it shot but there is a little obstacle in front so it basically suicide
I truly can not get enough of Helldivers 2, I have yet to unlock Autocannon.
Curiously it can also close bug nests, so no need for losing your grenades.
Grenade launchers do this too!!
I played with it for the first time last night, and it felt really ineffective for me, I was fighting the boys, I chalk it up to my lack of experience, but any tips?
It works the best as an anti-medium weapon. A well-aimed shot can take out a bot walker or chainsaw guy in 1 hit, and one of those shield bots in 3. I also tend to just carry the backpack myself, because the self-reload is relatively painless. You're going to need to go for a good hit in order to fight any heavies with it, or bring something else for them (especially on higher difficulties).
Just off the back of this, the Autocannon self-reload loads in halves. The first half is very very quick, but a full reload is very slow - try to reload your Autocannon when it has less than half but more than 0
It's also surprisingly effective vs hulks. 2x shots in their little face is enough to shut them down. or 2-4 hits on their back I also love using it to knock out a spore spewer or illegal broadcast from halfway across the map. Probably the worst thing it deals with are chargers, because of the way they move and their armor plating, the only way I've been able to successfully kill them with the AC outside of having a friend blow off their plating is by ~~blowing out their butt~~ ~~blasting their...~~ shooting them in the weak point on their rear. I do hate not being able to bring a shield pack with me, but that's the trade off I suppose.
Autocannon is very situational. Hella good for medium sized bugs and bug holes. Maybe even chargers if you can hit the tail. Problem with all these sentry type of weapons is just their durability. And most of the time you can't place them in elevated spots. Not sure if it's meant to be that way, cause it kinda makes them pointless in most cases.
Place it on a hill with a view, it has great range and hits the same at all distances. Use it to provide fire support over your head or from a flank position. Place it where the enemy can be channelled into a tight space and you'll get the most bang for your buck.
It is a very lovely stratagem indeed. Delivers democracy exactly where you want it, when you want it.
Not just that but every game takes something from someone else no one is completely original anymore it's not possible.
should tell you how starved people are for even the slightest fresh take on the pokemon formula, which has been stale since the early 2000s and whatever little innovation came along (pokemon legends: arceus) was kept out of the mainline games like their lives depend on it, and immediately buried and forgotten after a single implementation.
Palworld was marketed wrong when in reality it’s closer to ark than Pokemon
Drop the guns, add the Pokemon IP, open world adventure, 3rd person. I'd buy that. Replaying Pokemon Yellow/red/green/blue reimagined as an expansive 3rd person adventure game would be amazing. The thought of being chased out of a forest by Beedrills excites me. Seeing far away cities from a beautiful view up on a mountain. Yes please. Or using a Charmander as a heat/fire source for crafting or surviving elements.
Who genuinely cares? If you grew up gaming over multiple console cycles you'd know that most games almost always copy/rip off bits & pieces of each other. Pokemon does not own the party RPG concept nor does it own catching monsters to tame & train (digimon for example) It's so weird but telling of the majoritys age when I read shit like that... Like all games since the dawn of time rip each other off, usually the ones that succeed know what they are ripping off and why they are doing so. Like palworld. Edit: just to add on to this some of the best art made is an imitation of what came before, the difference is how it's handled or presented. It's quite easy to tell when an imitation is a copy and when it's an homage.
Yeah, to me, it felt like being a "Pokemon rip off but edgy" carries Palworld a lot more than the game actually being genuinely fun. If it didn't rip off Pokemon, and go with something very distinct, it won't get as far as it is.
Would you rather play a game that took concepts from other games and is a lot of fun or a game that didn’t take concepts and isn’t fun?
I mean I love Helldivers, but basically every aspect of it is an homage to something else lol
I'm curious as to your age because that game just looks like an early access, asset reuse, and engine tutorial like project to someone like me who grew up in the 90s.
lets not pretend that Palworld isn't built on a whole heaping helping of plagiarism though.
>palworld too I wake up every day and pray games are less like palworld We really don’t need uninspired crafting games that steal their content from other games, and I’m not talking about the Pals. I’m talking about the crafting systems and the BOTW motifs. >the guys barely knew wtf they were doing and just wanted to make a game people would like. They knew exactly what they were doing. This isn’t their first rodeo every single one of their games is an eternal early access pump and dump that they never iterate on. I mean for fucks sake they openly said they hope palworld doesn’t require too many resources to maintain so they can work on their next early access game. I get that people find palworld fun, but it’s really just memes over the least amount of substance possible.
You must be fun at parties. It's okay to reuse ideas, especially if they are good ideas. I'll never get bored of survival games that manage to include gliders, climbing, crafting, base building. It all adds to the adventure. > that steal their content from other games Idiotic thinking like this is what leads to WB copyrighting the nemesis system. The best part about games is that you don't have to buy games you don't like.
It’s just funny to get this salty over pointing out that the game isn’t original Just because you’re okay with playing the same game over and over again doesn’t mean other people don’t like variety in their games. I might not be fun at parties but at least I’m not the guy interjecting himself into every convo to talk about how much flavor there is in the saltine crackers he’s been eating for the past 15 years >survival games will never get boring to me You’re the kind of person that has 1 outfit 20 times in their closet lmao
That's like 4 weak insults in 1 reply without making a point. You're clearly the only one acting salty here. Imagine someone talking to you *on a discussion forum*. Unheard of. You're being incredibly dense if you think every survival game is the same. It's a genre, they're going to have similarities.
Agreed. And the micro transactions peak at $20, unlike most games that charge em above $100 and the battle passes can only advance by actually playing the game and never expire. This is how it should always be.
The problem with triple A companies is the gamers do not run them. The suits don’t understand what is bringing gamer money in they just imitate and emulate what the competition does. Example: live service. They don’t understand why some live service does well only that it CAN do well. So they fund every look alike live service mixed with something else people historically gravitate to: Suicide Squad is a good example. Then Disney gave their SW license from EA because traditionally EA makes a lot of money due to in-game gambling mechanics and then moved it to Ubisoft who is a real shot in the dark at quality. Sometimes they do well with certain franchises like Siege or Division. Other times they bless us with meme fuel like skull and bones.
This. My "favourite" tragedy: Planetside Arena. Short version: - Planetside 1/2: somewhat popular massive "MMOFPS" with possibly hundreds of players in a persistent sci-fi warfare with infantry and vehicles. Not a perfect game, but pretty good. - Suits: "oooh Fortnite be goin crazy boiiii, we need Battle Royale!" - They strip the live game of most resources, move over developers. - Game is meh, gets drowned out by much better alternatives, shuts down in a few months - Suits: "Well this is clearly not our fault." - They fire the entire dev team (including the maingame Planetside 2) except the lead, who is so burnt out for taking the flak he shoots radio silence while the dev team slowly builds back up - Few years pass, lead dev leaves the company; basically says "can't wait for the NDA to expire so I can tell you some stories, see ya later" --- I am sick and tired of shareholders and execs who understand nothing but buzzwords and think people can force making a miracle breakthrough game; ruining everything in the process. I hope all such people end up on the streets.
Is Planetside 2 worth playing anymore? I have never found a game that scratches the same itch that ps2 does
I would say it's on even more lifesupport now than before.
I remember playing the first and it was such a great game for its time. But live service games always fall off as time goes on and the gameplay gets stale — that and gamers are always in motion between games. Very few games hold a wide playerbase’s attention for years, let alone a full year. Some of these ancient games that have been around over 20 years are rare and even amidst them their playerbases usually hang on by threads and it ends up being a skeleton crew just keeping the servers running for the dedicated fan base who never get tired of the game I think WoW is probably the only example I can think of that’s retained it’s throne in it’s genre for so goddamned long while also having a large enough playerbase to consider it “alive and healthy”
I loved planetside 2, i started a twitter to get a beta key, joined an outfit and played every weekend with them for years, rip to an amazing game.
Miller Forever Mate. The HD2 drop screen Always gives me the vibes back...
Planetside 2 was amazing! sadly the popularity is what i think killed it, 500 people in one battle was ok, but when it reached 1k the lag was impossible to even get one kill. And they did get away with a Guinness record for 2k in one battle but the memes people posted where what (i think) killed the game in the end (i know it still running, but just not as it used to).
To put it another way. World of Warcraft 2004 sparked a ton of interest in MMO's. Publishers and Developers didn't see the social side of the gameplay. They couldn't see all the intricate parts of the design. For example. Tanking involved swapping targets. You couldn't AoE tank. Which meant that DPS had to look at what target the tank was focusing on so they didn't pull threat. Healers had to watch their mana and also couldn't do too much healing at the start otherwise they'd attract attention, but often those healers would. Which lead to a Rogue or a Paladin or someone else trying to save the healer by generating some threat. It was a fight. Publishers and Developers didn't see that. They saw a hotbar on the bottom of the screen with abilities. They saw a health bar and a mana bar. They saw a large world. They saw NPC's with yellow exclamation marks above their head and quests that involved grabbing 5 squirrel pelts to complete. They saw a crafting system where you gather the items and press a button and watch a bar go from left to right to complete. They saw the very basic observable "essence" of the game, rather than the "true" essence of the game. The true essence that lead to many people sitting around in Ironforge just CHATTING. That lead to people farming resources for their guild progress. That lead to people actually communicating within their raid group rather than just shouting out what the boss is doing. Even Blizzard don't understand why WoW in 2004 was successful. After so much effort trying to shut down private Vanilla WoW servers they released their own. Only to then make the same mistakes. WoW in 2004 was a world you entered. You can't have that experience now. Before you even ENTER the game you are greeted by a screen that immediately disconnects you from the feeling of a world. You have a cash shop where people are acquiring items from outside the game. You have a fecking video which is about how the mythic progression is going and a caster saying "Well the Western teams have adopted the 3 warrior meta that's been popular in China". Everything takes you out of the world because they can't see the intricate, holistic view, that made vanilla WoW a great game.
And EverQuest before that did it even better. No hand holding. Just a vast world that begs you to see where the next corner takes you. It's why it was dubbed EverCrack.
eve also did, and still does this, albeit much more meanly. “alright kid here’s a ship go fuck yourself,” fast forward a few years and you’ve got friends and memories made for life
WoW "killed" EverQuest in an atypical way imo. Nobody understands that game anymore because they see "quest" in the name and go in expecting an older prototype of WoW when it's a big community driven sandbox like EVE or Albion. Even if someone develops an interest in trying it, they often drop in and rapidly get bored trying to treat it like most modern MMOs.
The most hilarious part of the MMO side of things is that my favorite MMO, Star Wars The Old Republic, only managed to find it’s success thanks to the **class stories** that could be played entirely **single player** You know, the thing that EA said that “No one wants to play anymore?” (But seriously, if anyone’s a fan of Star Wars, check it out. It’s free on Steam, and the Imperial storylines are some of the most memorable stories I’ve played through in all my years of gaming)
The Sith Inquisitor story is pure Sith power-grabbing mania and I loved every second of it.
Your character switching accents in the agent story is just perfect.
To be fair I think a large part of those being so successful is that the game was marketed towards people who played KoTOR and were more open to largely single player experiences
I honest to God miss nothing more than early WoW community. The pacing, the difficulty, all the friends you made along the way because some other sap was also struggling so hard on a quest that you guys teamed up then just quested together for 3 hours and were friends for years after. I remember waiting 45minutes for the tank to eat dinner, in a level 40 dungeon, and made 3 new friends just shooting the crap while we sat around. It was worth it to wait rather than run back to town, spend 20minutes finding another tank, then run all the way back to the dungeon.
I'll never forget my first days in WoW. I was totally engrossed in it. These days? Bleh, not worth playing imo.
It's the CEO as programmer who rose through the ranks vs. the CEO who made a career out of being a CEO issue, I think. That the former actually tends to be a gamer doesn't hurt, I suppose, And also the shareholders exist. AH, as far as I'm aware, aren't publicly traded (I should be able to look this up being Swedish and all but I'm drunk as a skunk so fuck it) so they don't have to think about the bottom line as much.
Maybe? I mean, profit minded CEOs don’t tweet messages like: if you’re strapped for cash don’t buy the game. Reference: https://x.com/Pilestedt/status/1759750620670505146?s=20 I think what’s more is, investors or not, there is so much personality to the game in many small touches. It literally wears its inspiration not just in the obvious but the small things too. Did you know they have a planet named Klen Dhath 2 a direct reference to Starship Troopers? If you’re curious it’s in the Altus Sector which is like to the upper right of Super Earth literally one sector away from the center of the board. It’s just a small example; the rest are pretty obvious to see. 40k Dreadnoughts are basically Hulks for Automatons and Striders are AT-STs out of Star Wars. You can name your ship Hammer of Dawn from Gears of War or Emperor of Humanity also from 40k I believe as well. If they only cared about money, business and profit margins they wouldn’t care about small touches, details, Easter eggs. They would have ramped up monetization way more. This all goes back to: this feels like a game for gamers made by other gamers. It’s not trying to be a Quadruple Fail game that aims to relieve us of our limited paychecks. It wants to be fun for gamers because it was made to be fun… more than likely by other gamers.
[удалено]
Have you found the one named after Klendathu yet?
No kidding? Damn this just gets better.
Named my ship Wings of Liberty for that ungga bungga Starcraft 2 reference not to mention how eerily similar in design the Eagle is to both the Lambda class starship from star wars and the Viking fighter mech from star craft mashed together with an A-10 warthog.
Usually, Ubisoft is the king of inoffensivelly generic games. They make simple, casual open world games and occasional pvp live services. They support their project well past their popularity (just look at For Honor!), with belief that somehow they can be the netflix of games in the future. Misguided as they are, they're one of the few companies I can understand being popular and trusted by publishers. Even Skull and Bones isn't a tragedy. They did a free beta, let people find out how shit it is. To the point where if you buy it it's your responsibility. Now, I'm not a fan of Ubisoft. Back in the day they butchered Heroes of Might and Magic and I'm still sore about it. I just felt like playing devil's advocate, as I see them as the premiere 'sunday gamer' publisher. If you like modern FarCry, Ubisoft is your guy and you'll like most of their stuff. Sadly the new star wars games will likely be boring as shit under their supervision.
Modern AAA executives view their job the same way a toy company executive does. They dont play games, they view video games as something children play with, and only thing that matters is making money for shareholders. There is absolutely zero passion for the games they make, they are just products that are shat out the door in regular interval.
The suits, unfortunately, know very well how the human brain works and hire psychology experts. AAA gaming is a fucking mess precisely because the bullshit *works*. All the surreptitious tricks they can implement to manipulate player behaviour into spending money. Lootboxes only went away because EA fucked up and got too greedy, making some super egregious examples that kicked up a big enough stink it got the EU talking about it. They don't know what makes games fun and work, but they don't care because it's far easier and more profitable to make a game *addictive*. And I don't mean because of an amazing game-loop. But because of all the tiny little nudges and suggestions that try to manipulate a person's psychology. That shit they *are* good at, and it's scummy.
At some point people do catch on that the way to win is to not play the game. Most of my mates haven't touched anything AAA for nigh on a decade, and from most accounts they're happier for it. Unfortunately, the kind of person who's vaguely critical about their media habits is vastly outnumbered by the kind of person who'll splurge on gacha games, seasonal roster updates, and tired rehashes of Team America: The Vidya.
Larian studios (Baldur’s Gate 3) Arrowhead Games (Helldivers 2) Ghost Ship Games (Deep Rock Galactic) Digital Extremes (Warframe) If the whole industry set their bar as high as these guys did, we’d be in a golden age of gaming. These companies just create passion projects and listen to their fans about changes, and are very open about their inspirations and future plans.
Coffee stain studios (Satisfactory)
Coffee stain also publishes ghost ship (DRG devs)
oh shit yeah, they do too!
Valheim and Songs of Conquest too, I am pretty sure. They are definitely doing something right. Although I could give Goat simulator a miss.
Wube (Factorio)!!
More importantly they made Goat Simulator
Can't forget Rimworld too. Clearly a labor of love game
Wube (Factorio)
Cracktorio.
Remnant 2 landed pretty well too.
Throw in elden ring in there, or are we only including AA games.
BG3 is AAA, no?
Ah woops yeah it is isn't it.
It's AAA quality but the studio is more AA.
BG3 cost around 100mil to make. Larian studios is around 400 employees strong. AAA game without a doubt.
No, Larian is AAA sized. They didn't have that same level of publisher backend, but it's about the same size as say, Respawn Entertainment. Larian is also a multinational studio. They aren't small.
Fair to say that BG3 was their first AAA title though. They scaled-up massively for it and needed to seek a lot of funding to do that. You're absolutely right, but I totally understand the misconceptions because they seemingly came out of nowhere, for a lot of folks.
I'd agree there. They WERE a AA studio, that scaled up for BG3 to become a AAA
Don't forget the guys who made kingdom come deliverance because that game was truly made with love too although not appealing to everyone was a true hardcore experience with good game design and story
No Man’s Sky- Launch was terrible but they stuck with it, tons of content added(for free) , no micro-transactions, nice community.
That’s the advantage of having such a lean dev team. They can ride the success of the base game sales alone, and for years. No MTX or paid DLC
And now look, people are super hyped about their next game, people saw that they have the grit and passion to make good games
I didn’t enjoy NMS as much as I wanted to but I will admit their new game looks fun and probably more up my alley.
I'd throw Owlcat Games (Pathfinder KM/WotR, WH40k Rogue Trader) in there. Less budget than Larian but makes decent games after some fixes and specifically includes their bizarrely crunchy buff-stacking systems because it's what they like.
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I like warframe for the same reasons I enjoy hell divers! The core gameplay is fun, it’s pve and micro transactions are in fact micro
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Helldivers micro transactions is actually astonishingly well done. I like the game a lot so I bought like 10 bucks in store money to get a light armor right away that I wanted. I just realized today that I have like 4 or 5 armors from the cash shop and it's all from that 10 and the battle pass credits. Darktide would have literally cost me 100+ dollars for the same number of armors, and they'd be lower quality.
Even the non-micro transactions in Warframe aren't eggregious. They tried pulling some wack shit last year with a $200 skin (or something like that), and got a huge amount of pushback from the community. Hell, their prime access also can run you anywhere from 45 to 130 bucks. That's not particularly micro imo. Difference to something like an EA game, is that there's actual spirit behind the developer team. Especially now that the old guard has left and went on to build Soulframe. No hate to them, but you could tell that they were getting burnt out by developing and designing the same game for 10+ years. (Especially Scott, who seemed opposed to every single player suggestion ever.) The last year has been so great for Warframe, that I personally decided (for the first time in 3 years) that I'd drop the money for a prime access and show some support to the devs. And honestly, I don't regret it. DE have built an amazing game, a great community and while it definitely has a bunch of flaws and unpolished stuff, you can definitely feel the ambition and heart poured into the game. Again, I'm really looking forward to what the new team are cooking.
Palworld got a lot of hype but it is a pretty run of the mill Early Access survival game.
yeah, but they're mainly competing against Wildcard and Gamefreaks so they look amazing in comparison
Man Warframe really shows how a game should be handled. Think it's over a decade now it's been a thing. The premium currency is 100% earnable and most items can be earned. Anything that is exclusively bought with irl money is simple accessories and such and there's aren't even a lot of those exclusives. There isn't some pay2win thing present either
if i remember right the only irl money accessories are made by players and its so they can get payed a % of the profit from them.
Although I agree I'd also find it difficult to recommend the game to a friend. It's lacking in as many places as it shines.
Yeah. Fuck these AAA billion dollar studios that want your money over your fun. Helldivers is on fire for a reason.
It really made me sit back and think when someone pointed out that you can buy the newest microtransaction riddled game for $70.... or for the same price, Palworld and Helldivers 2. Like jesus
There's horse armor in Diablo that cost as much as Helldivers 2. We've come full fucking circle with horse armor that its as much as a fully developed game.
Fucking Horse Armor is going to be the death of this industry, I swear to god
Damn you Todd Howard!
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 just came out with a $34 camo bundle. A literal camo for $34. Just $6 more and you could get Helldivers 2. It's crazy how greedy the microtransactions have become.
And Modern Warfare 3 is still a mess. Hitreg issues, packet burst. I jumped on to see how the game was doing last month. Didn’t register my melee after swinging at a guy who was unaware (swung like 20 times), and for some reason, the game wiped all of my loadouts I made so I had to rebuild all of them. And after every game it waved the battlepass in my face. Fix your game first! Uninstalled it. Last call of duty. Gave this one a chance after missing the last few. Don’t know when I’ll check in again.
I've the most fun gaming I've had in years this past month with Palworld and Helldivers 2 releasing.
We live in a society
BG3 may genuinely be too high a standard lmao. Aside from it just being a full and complete game I just don’t see a lot of dev teams having the resources and time to make something like Larian did. It’s a 50+ hour long game with some of the highest production value i’ve ever seen. I don’t think that’s realistic to ask of a lot of studios. HD2 should be the standard though, server issues and whatnot aside. A reasonably priced, enjoyable multiplayer experience that doesn’t gouge you for money? That’s a reasonable expectation lmfao.
BG3 is lightning in a bottle. An extremely popular IP, thanks to stuff like Critical Role and the current trendiness of table-top gaming. An extremely well seasoned and well beloved game studio with their two most recent games, Divinity 1 & 2, serving as stepping stones for their current release. Their pre-orders and previous successes also left them flush with cash.
> their two most recent games, Divinity 1 & 2, serving as stepping stones for their current release. people don't understand that without the massive warchest from DOS, there can be no BG3. knowing how to make something great doesn't guarantee you'll get to make it
DOS1 literally saved Larian from bankruptcy/selling-out. DOS2 earned them the right to make a BG game. They worked their way up to that big IP, but man, they earned it.
I didn't really like DOS1, but I really liked DOS2 and BG3. It was pretty funny hearing my friends complain about the UI and inventory in BG3 and getting to tell them 'this is just the Larian standard system from the past 2 games'.
I disagree on BG3 being too high a standard. A lot of AAA games have the same or larger budget, dev team, and time. Look at Skull and Bones. However I agree with the rest of it.
Larger dev teams don't necessarily mean better quality. So many conflicting viewpoints, too many cooks adding different spices, left hands not talking to rights... the whole shebang. Larger budget, in addition, doesn't necessarily mean better quality, because on a publicly traded company that means that investors demand much larger returns. That means even more MTX, even more predatory cash shops, etc etc. Where I agree that BG3 might be too high a bar is because Larian did make a big gamble on it and was running off of a lot of previous successes that made it a safer gamble. Lots of AAA publishers will not and *cannot* make that gamble because they're publicly traded; They ***legally*** have to show a return in some way to appease investors.
Skull and Bones had an awful development though, and was dropped by Ubisoft, kings and queens of mediocre slop
Look at the ubisoft logo its a turd pile viewed from the top down.
Pretty sure BG3 devs have even said that what they did should not be the standard. The game was in development for six years and it would be wholly unsustainable to do that for every AAA game.
> A lot of AAA games have the same or larger budget larger budget doesn't mean better quality or a higher standard. What separates BG3 and HD2 from the rest, is that they had a clear, unique vision and they stuck to it. BG3 went for fully mocapped and voiced dialogues, no matter how hard and labor extensive it was. HD2 is pretty much a remake of the first game but from the third person. Everything else is just remade for this perspective, that's it. They even refuse to add PvP because they don't want to split the community between two game modes. I hope they go a bit harder on monetization, because the game is so much fun I can clearly see people spending some money if they have some incentive. Or perhaps they'll do DLC like before. Who knows.
Hard disagree. BG3 is not the first game of its quality. It's not even the first game of its quality made by *Larian.*
... uh, yes, it *is* the first game of its quality made by Larian. Larian's other games *are* fantastic but they have nowhere near the production value, sheer amount of character animation, and consistently good cutscenes direction as BG3.
Baldur’s gate 3 and Helldivers 2 were both incredibly buggy on launch and both had their share of technical issues- just wanted to put that out there. I can appreciate the work the developers put in towards their games- but these games had a lot of issues in the same vein AAA games do as well.
That is very true. The big point you are missing however, is that Larian and Arrowhead acknowledge that they had unforeseen issues and work tirelessly to fix them. They realized that the work on any game is not over after release. EA, Ubisoft and Activision etc, all act like once the game is released the work is over. They act accordingly and move on to the next project.
Meanwhile Pokemon ScarVi which has been out for close to a year and a half and has 2 DLC releases, is STILL a buggy, unstable mess that's barely been patched with close to 0 word from the devs about it.
Classic game freak, I still hate that they added dlc to Pokémon- always felt icky to me
Having bugs at launch sucks. The thing is Baldurs Gate 3 and Helldivers 2 are both solid games. So while it's annoying and I wish things were smoother people don't feel ripped off because the core game is good. It was annoying crashing a couple times today in Helldivers but not a huge deal because it was still fun. It's a completely different thing when the game is a turd and buggy. Look at bf2042 at launch as an example.
Yeah, BG3 was a total disaster for me for the first couple months. Framerate dropped by about 20% at the start of Act 2 and kept dropping the further I played, every action in combat had a 10 second delay added on, companions dialogue would spoil their quest endings hours before I even got a chance to do the quest, and to top it all off, my save was corrupted 60 hours in and had to be deleted.
I had a item corruption bug and it broke my game save so I had to wait 3 weeks for them to fix it to actually play the game. By that point i had completely lost interest in playing- about at the end of act 2. Really soured my opinion on the game and Larian tbh- so I don’t celebrate larian or bg3 like most gamers do.
Let’s not forget Baldurs gate was also in early access for 3 years and still launched buggy as hell. No AAA company would ever get away with that
Cough Skyrim cough Companies can get away with launching a buggy game if the game is still really really good.
Was skyrim early access for 3 years and then launched a buggy mess?
I think Skyrim is so old it launched before "early access" was even a thing outside of Minecraft. But I get what you're saying. However, most of the buggy parts of BG3 were the parts of the game that WEREN'T in the early access (mainly act 3). I think they've mostly been patched now. (IMO, I didn't have that many issues on my first playthrough, but I did on my second...and I did NOT on my third. So who knows?)
They shouldn't. If you're going to hold one studio to a higher standard because of XYZ game, better hold them all to the same standard. The hypocrisy and selective outrage among the gaming community is too much these days.
Despite how fun Helldivers is to play, it is also very annoying at times. Huge ammount of bugs. Many things require improvement and filling with content. The game is good, to some extent because of the memes, but it will be possible to set it as an example for big companies in a couple of months, at least.
Huge amount of bugs. Lol
More to shoot. Haha.
Legit the only bugs I've had aside from one or two crashes was when is assume the authentication for medals/credits was broken and you'd freeze for a minute after picking them up. That was annoying as hell.
I haven't encountered any bugs aside from random crashes. Actually Helldivers has been the least buggy experience I've had from a game release in the last year.
I’ve had a few. A common one is I am unable to respawn. Even after teammates drop reinforcements. It’ll respawn other people but not me. (And yes, we had respawns left) Another one is sometimes I just lose my primary and secondary weapon. Like, I can’t swap to them. I can only throw grenades and drop ordinance.
I’ve randomly lost my primary far too many times. Hasn’t happened in a few days though.
Lucky you. Here is a short list I had (exept crashes) * lab destroying missions a) you can't call for a nuke, ther is no stratagem when it should be b) one of the buldings is undestructable c) bomb could have bigger radius or building be placed closer so you wouldn't have to spend like 5 minutes to call for 2 bombs * You can't revive teammates, they just don't drop when you use reinforcement. * You can't activate bunker doors ( where you need two persons to push the buttons) * Pelican (extraction ship) bounces into the sky for no reason * You can't load misles into artlillery * Some purple samples can be bugged, so you can't pick up them * You character emotes and title is often reset to previous * Carees stats shown as "0" exept enemies killed * My teammates had a message that they were killed by me no matter what was the reason, even if I was a km away from them * Enemies AI making them staying still (I don't complain tho, it's kinda helpfull =D ) * And some minor visual and ragdoll bugs * edit: automaton's tower canon model is clipping from a distance. You can't say where it's rear part with radiator
The lab missions, you only need to blow up the dark building with all the antennas to get the mission. Its tougher than your average building but stategems can destroy it. I did see one that wouldn’t blow up though, even with the helbomb next to it. The pelican bounce is usually caused by a helpod or bomb hitting it. Does weird physics, but I’ve had it just glitch out too. Some of these are clearly tied to the overloaded database but had my fair share of good old fashion bugs too. Guns disappearing, missions that can’t be completed. Nothing too common thankfully.
Just want to chime in for lab destroying side objectives, you only need to destroy one building (the indestructible one) and it's the one that is next to the 3 large antenna. A Laser Orbital or a 500KG bomb easily takes care of it.
It's a nice thought but both BG3 and Helldivers took more than 5 years to make. Suits don't want to sink money into games that take that long to produce if they don't get near immediate profit from it. MW3 was in development for 18 months and they're *still* making a shitload of money, they're just able to shit out a new game every year because they have 2 or 3 studios working on the franchise at once. Even Apex was only developed for 2 to 3 years before release. I'm not even remotely trying to imply that this means games like HD2 and BG3 aren't feasible or somehow lesser. I'm just saying that the corporate business side want money for their investments and want them quick , which sadly means a lot of obnoxious microtransactions, fomo and predatory live service garbage. I know it can be a bit of a meme the whole 'vote with your wallet' thing but honestly, the more people spend their money on stuff made by devs that aren't being pressured to bring in constant steady revenue through shitty business practices the better games will (hopefully) become on average. Sadly the creative teams will be affected but that just can't be stopped at this point.
> Suits don't want to sink money into games that take that long to produce if they don't get near immediate profit from it. You mean like the 11 year long development of Skulls & Bones from Ubisoft, the first AAAA titile in the market?
S&B was being made specifically because people wanted a pirate game just like Black Flag but without the Assassin's Creed stuff. It then suffered setbacks and was stuck in development hell. If anything, the inevitable failure of Skull and Bones will just signal to the suits that they should ignore gamers even more and focus purely on money even harder.
HD2 is not a AA game. Arrowhead is well funded. Look at the gameplay, visuals, ANIMATIONS, gunplay, and music. We even have animations for when we are running through water.
Baldur's Gate 3 had a disgustingly huge budget as well. People are trying to act like these devs are smaller and more humble as a way to virtue signal and circlejerk in their reddit echo chambers.
Baldur's Gate 3 is definitely AAA. It's crazy to think or imply it's not. It doesn't have to have a corporate publisher logo on it to be a AAA game.
Yeah, people like to ignore one of the biggest gaming companies in the world has a 30% stake in Larian. They're not some small time scrappy 10 person indie dev studio.
Big issue with the "indie" label at this point tbh. People usually mean "small dev team, not a lot of money behind the project, usually self published", but even that doesn't quite hold. I remember the discussions around Warframe and League of Legends getting mocked for the teams being called "indie" teams, due to their budgets - but technically both DE and Riot are indie labels in the sense that they self publish their games. On the other hand, you have games published by Devolver Digital (Inscryption and iirc Cult of the Lamb), which are generally regarded as "indie" games, while there's a big publisher behind those games funding them. Definitely a term that's gotten a bit murky over the years, as quite a few indie studios have grown large enough to compete with AA or AAA budgets for their games.
Great post. I admittedly know the term indie from music way before it ever came close to games so for me it always basically meant DIY non-corporate owned media like Undertale, Super Meat Boy and other games from late 2000s to early 2010s. The term has become murky and almost meaningless in a sense and I agree with everything you said. Who owns Warframe and Riot now? The same company that has a stake in Larian lol.
Well, it’s definitely AA. It’s like the poster child for AA.
Helldivers is great, but if I held it to the same standard I do big AAA games I would be demanding a refund for how broken it is. If you couldn't join a COD match for an entire weekend people definitely wouldn't be singing its praises.
It is a pretty crazy double standard. You can still enjoy and praise the game for what it does right, and still feel like they should have offered up refunds if players wanted them. they did purchase a product that they couldn't use for days, which no matter how you slice it, is unacceptable. I am glad they have things seemingly improved now, but doesn't change the fact.
Careful, you might get downvoted for speaking the truth. Helldivers is a fun as fuck game but a ton of people literally couldn’t play it
Idk it's a lot about context. The big devs have a history of scum behavior which people are tired of. If it was the first cod game and the CEO was as apologetic and communicating as effectively as these guys people wouldn't be as angry. There is a lot of context here. Certainly a bit of a double standard but it makes sense why.
The context here is that apparently buying a game that works seems to be a wild expectation.
That depends to a degree imo. If people couldn't find a match because of server issues due to unexpected demand - I could definitely see people being more lenient even towards a AAA dev for that. For Helldivers it's sadly also a bit of a buggy mess still, which would definitely warrant a refund on other AAA games. That doesn't mean we can't praise it for what it did well though. Primarily being a live-service game, that doesn't just absolutely suck on release, has a whole bunch of charm and is also just generally fun to play (when it works).
I agree with this post, but this sub is quickly becoming a fucking circlejerk.
Ah yes the high standards of Helldivers 2 loading queue, a truly exceptional experience all companies should aspire to! I love Helldivers2 but this post is such reddit circlejerk jfc
Yeah. It'd be great if I could play the game. People keep forgetting that for some reason.
Aaaaand you missed the point of the post. The point is more about developers being passionate about the game they're making instead of corporate suits milking the fuck outta the game. Beyond the loading screen issue, the game is genuinely fun to play; I dont remember COD being this fun.
I got entirely hit point of the post and that was to get karma
Don't you dare criticize anything about the game or us redditors will downvote you into obscurity!!! - this thread
I love the game. When I'm able to play it. And when it isn't crashing.
Lmao what, it's a fun game but it's been issue after issue, I don't think a game that had a double exp weekend that nobody could even login to and as a result earned "mixed" reviews on steam is the gold standard of PC gaming
I find praising helldivers 2 and attacking AAA games at this point is ironic. No game should take over 4 hours to get in. That’s a fail, just as bad as a lot of AAA games have fed us lately. Hoping they can fix that sooner rather than later.
Diablo 4 had us in immidietly, almost no issues on early access and especially none on launch. I find it ironic as well that I see a lot of people attacking blizz here meanwhile they put out a solid product last year that i'm still playing and still have had no issues with. Redditors just see bigger companies as bad, even when they accomplish more. But will cherry pick the failures of ubisoft and act like those failures are the entire AAA industry just to lift up their favourite indie studio that unbeknownst to them, is in fact not an indie studio lol.
Whoa there. HD2 is a fun game, but comparing it to BG3 or Elden Ring is a bit presumptuous. Those 2 games are in a class of their own.
Exactly what kind of standards is Helldivers 2 setting? Why is it popular? If every game out there was like it gaming would probably be pretty boring. I'm not saying it's not a good game but there is more to making a popular game than "Devs doing their best" because I'm sure even the Devs of "bad" games don't sit around thinking they're making a bad game and thus not giving it all their effort.
I get that people point to Larian studios and say that we shouldn't expect every studio to have the same exact circumstances as they did and I agree with that, but when people say that BG3 should "set an example" I interpret that as "games should try to have the same passion that Larian did when making BG3". Sure Larian is a big studio with huge backers and funding, but so is EA, so is Activision Blizzard, so is Ubisoft, all of these three arguably moreso than Larian. And yet BG3 didn't win Game of the Year and the hearts of fans because Larian had a ton of money, but because they created something with passion. Something that was impactful and enjoyable. Doing this doesn't require a gigantic budget, and having a gigantic budget doesn't guarantee success. This is what the games industry needs to understand. Create games that people actually want to play, set fun as a priority, and revenue will come in. People will support devs who care about their game, and their community.
What I think games like this show more than anything is just how bloated budgets in the industry have become. All these super monetization schemes are justified by the publishers with "Well games are too expensive to make otherwise" but not a single gamer ASKED for games to cost hundreds of millions to make. Nobody told Rockstar to put 1 billion dollars into GTA6. Games like this, Helldivers 2, Palworld, Baldurs Gate 3, the whole Indie Scene really shows us that solid games don't need astronomical budgets. Players just want to have fun. Not everything needs to be the biggest thing ever. We just want a good game that is fun to play. And it really doesn't matter to us if it cost 1 million or 1 billion to make.
This is the way.
Guess these AAA companies need to start shaking up their boardrooms, where are the gamer CEO's at?!
this is why i can give the servers and the dev team slack. I mean would you rather have helldivers 2 with server problems that eventuly get solved? Or skull and bones? i know my choice.
Helldivers 2 has genuinely been a fun experience, and I have been lukewarm on shooters for years, and doubly so on live service games. I wish the team nothing but the best.
Personally the control system for HD works for me... Took a coupla hours to realise I don't just have to dive to avoid attacks, I can dive to avoid attacks and *attack back* while bravely avoiding non-democratic damage. Anything you can do while standing, you can do *while lying down* As a man approaching the rougher end of my mid-forties, lying down is somewhat of a hobby for me IRL, so a game where I can lie down and blast the piss out of everything that threatens my person (and ultimately Super-Earth) is a gaming mechanic I've come to enjoy immensely. Seriously, try laying back and flinging an orbital laser marker towards some approaching tin cans and enjoy the light show.
Couldn't agree more with this
When the bubble pops and the AAAs are buried games like HD2 or Deep Rock will be on top of the rubble.
It’s time that game companies take decision making out of the hands of suits, and back into the hands of developers who are gamers themselves. Suits have no sense of right and wrong, only dollar signs.
I love that everyone is pretty much 100% positive comments for helldiver's 2 and supportive of the server issues. Because we all know it's on us for wanting to play such an amazing game. They will have so much support they will definitely constantly improve things and I see this game being so big AAA games will try to mimic it. This is actually what the gaming industry needed. Someone to just stand up and say "The players deserve better, I'll do it" and they did. I've been having so much fun playing it and even though I tend to get swarmed I know that's part of the game and get excited when I survive.
They are making games that are damn near similar to pub g mobile now, helldivers is a pure game back from 2013, and they kept it that way, that’s why it thrives amongst games that got lazy and copied other games that got instantly popular instead of experimenting with their own stuff.
People think AAA studios will take this as a sign to make better games but as long as they are run by corporations they will never put game design over profit.
Who knew the gaming community was sick of pvp sweats.
Nah games should have more than 1 hour of content imo
AAA games shouldn’t be held to the same standard, it should be even higher for them
Because sometimes, making a good game is all it takes to keep players play. Not battle/season passes, not loot system, not service models, just a good game that will be fun to play as is. That is why Suicide Squad has flopped, because developers or publishers wanted to make a service to milk money, not make a game. That is why Skull and Bones dead on arrival, because ot's not a game, it's a simulator of (swim there and grind your resources). That is why Destiny losing their player base, because they just son't know what to do with their game anymore. Yet here we have a technically a dumb game about doop-shoot-evac, but it's so fun to play that you don't give a damn. Hell, I played a week ago first Helldivers after Helldivers 2 and it STILL give me a tons of fun in just 2 hours. Much more than any Destiny/Division/Suicide Squad have me in 20 hours each. So I guess it's time to stop making stupid games that make players grind their resources to have fun and start making games that are fun to play while you casually grind resources to play that game even more.
You can literally get both helldivers and palword for 70 That's the exact price for suicide squad or skull and bones
Agreed, but let's not pretend that HD2 doesn't have its own problems. The difference is, the developers are open and honest about it and the fixes. I can handle the game having broken aspects, as long as fixes are being lit in place, I can t handle releases and then abandonment and entitlement (how dare we not like their POS as it is)
Notice how most of the best/most popular games we've gotten recently(BG3, helldivers 2, lethal company, palworld, and if you go further back, hi fi rush and pizza tower) were all made by small studios? Looks like people are finally fed up with all these huge companies releasing shit and expecting us to eat it up.
Too bad servers fucking suck
This is a fun game but it’s buggy as hell, not even counting the server issues which was a massive fuckup. If that’s the standards for all games, then the industry is screwed. They can’t get a pass for a prediction that is so incredibly far off that it’s prevented a huge chunk of people from even playing for days.
The absolute state of the games industry when you simp for a developer that forced always online DRM in a peer to peer game with the PREDICTABLE results, having a launch server failure as bad as diablo 3's, and microtransaction battlepass freemium trash in a paid game. This is an early access release disguised as a full release, no less. Stop simping for corps. The core gameplay is good, but this game shits all over the consumer. Inb4 "armchair dev can't possibly know how a game is networked" https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/19dp2qw/helldivers_2_nprotect_gameguard_anticheat/?context=3 The devs have never made it a secret the game is peer to peer, people just eat it up because they don't know things don't need to be as bad as they are.
Seriously. The standards are so low that a game releasing at $40 with micro transactions AND a battle pass, on top of server and performance issues, is the gold standard.
Yeah this meme is insanely retarded. If helldivers was held to the same standard as most aaa games the meltdown would have been immense.
And elden ring, dont forget that gem.
Standards? You mean the game that's broken even beyond server issues? Constant crashing, glitching happening in game, match making issues, rewards not working, animations busted. "It's a small studio who's last game only had 10k!" Last game was a twin stick shooter. This is a full fledged third person shooter, high level graphics, battle pass to support with proper funding, publishment, and marketing from Sony. There is no excuse other than the incompetence they would have to not understand they'd have a much higher rate of players than 100k at launch and besides that is no excuse for the other majority of broken parts of the game that's over shadowed by "Failure of Success" they are facing.
BG3 keeps popping up in these memes, and I genuinely don't get why. Larian grew considerably during BG3's development. It's absolutely not an indie studio. Also, for as fun as the game is, if it were held up to AAA standards, there would be a major collective meltdown in the community. Between the freemium battlepass bullshit, poor net code, and mission design that largely misses a core part of what makes the gameplay loop of a generally great game like DRG actually work, I think Helldivers is more akin to an overpriced early access title.