The wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook
The studios behind these mega hits spent more than a decade iterating on their favorite design ideas until they went supernova.
Here's the thing though, these games are highly reviewed and played but it may still in fact be more profitable to keep pumping out mid tier trash. For companies that have long forgotten the time when they had a soul and were a group of passionate gamers, that's all that matters.
Im starting to believe the big triple A game industry is starting to collapse, not the gaming industry it self, but the big companies that make generic after generic blockbuster kind of games. They keep getting more and more desperate and predatory in order to appeal to the share holders and maximize profits because their type of games have become so expensive to produce.
Remember when games didnt have to put the same amount (or even more) of the development cost into marketing? Good games sells themselves, every gamer knows it, but the monkeys with suits who run the companies nowdays cant compute that. Instead they keep coming with more and more shitty ways to steal our money. They will try anything instead of listening to their developers ( who are the actual gamers that know what works and what dosnt).
And so here we are. Just in this year I have seen a single player game put a mechanic like the NG+ mode only availible for the deluxe edition (yakuza), an extra save game file or fast travels as microtransactions (dragon dogmas 2), extra missions and a 3 days early launch acces for single player game only allowed in the 110$ edition (star wars outlaws), and a company literally changing their former terms and conditions in order to sell a 250$ p2w pack and killing it self and the work of the last 5 years? in less than 24h (tarkov)
Im starting to believe the big triple A game industry is starting to collapse, not the gaming industry it self, but the big companies that make generic after generic blockbuster kind of games.
I'm not that hopeful, casual gamers keep buying the same low effort games like Fifa, NBA, Pokemon every year even though they got enshitified 10 years ago. The opinion of game-educated and demanding people that represent a minority of their market will not change those game companies. It's like asking fat food chains to get into Michelin ranking, they don't care. All we can do is allow good quality independent game makers to exist by giving our money to them instead of the fast food games companies.
Exactly. Ubisoft is the perfect example of this. Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, R6. They used to take risks and try to push gaming forward with amazing ideas and design that made my kid brain explode.
Now those IPs are dead or extremely stale. And it's because releasing an AC with microtransactions makes them more money than making an offline single player Splinter Cell. Or releasing a skin for 20 euros for R6 siege makes them a huge profit for the time invested in creating it.
God I wish we'd get a new single player Splinter Cell. Some of my best memories I have as a kid are playing the original Splinter Cell. Even if we do, it'll be riddled with microtransactions and will fail to capture the magic of the original games.
Yup. The go-to example is that Blizzard made more money off of a single $5 mount in World of Warcraft, than it made on the release of Diablo 3. An entire fucking game launch made less money than a $5 microtransaction. Why would a publishing company bother with creating solid self-contained games, when a single micro transaction can make more money for far less dev time?
Players need to stop purchasing shitty games and shitty microtransactions, because it only encourages devs to keep making them.
It's strange though, because Ubisoft on paper should be something I hate, but when I actually play one (and I'm a single player gamer), they've got fun gameplay, and the store, although it is there, generally keeps out the way and when I accidentally press the button in the menu that goes into it, there's nothing I'd ever consider handing over actual money for. The game never points you at it, or makes you feel it's needed.
I don't even know who it's for. Who buys cosmetics in a single player game? It genuinely feels like it's just been put in to appease the beancounters.
That said I don't get excited enough to buy them at full price, and normally wait until they're on PSPlus or something. There's nothing in most of these AAA games to truly love. They're a sea of merely "alright", and they're all way too long.
Especially as Michael Ironside seems to have gotten over his medical troubles. I know he's 74 now but one last outing as Sam Fisher? Imagine?
At some point it's really up to the consumers to stop buying shit games
This is it. The reviews only matter to the extent they affect sales. Many shit-scored titles make billions for the suits (eg. FIFA, COD), and do so year after year without significant risks involved
I, for one, intend to stop paying for mid tier trash
This is modern and late stage capitalism in general
Principal Skinner = no. The children yearn for the microtransactions
Helldivers’ business model is primarily microtransactions. The microtransactions affect gameplay, so it’s in the direction of “pay to win”. It’s not the paragon of non-predatory monetization that people make it out to be.
(Baldurs Gate 3 and Palworld both are good examples of a healthy pay once and actually own a copy games)
Also none of these games released without serious bugs.
TL;DR:
It's not hard to earn the ingame currency. No FOMO. Definetly not pay to win, since you get decent equipment, can unlock everything else with little time, it's a PvE Co-Op game with many difficulty levels to serve most player tastes. Buying ingame currency has some dark patterns though, but it's extremely better in comparison to other games with microtransactions.
Long version:
You can earn the paid (and sadly obfuscated) currency by playing the game and collecting some stuff. You don't need to pay at all despite the game's price initially.
It takes me about 15 to 30 hours to get enough of the paid currency in order to buy a warbond (the "battlepass", basically a package of weapons, tools and skins you get access to by buying such a warbond once). And that's me not even trying to farm the currency. I'm sure you can get there a lot faster if you're aiming for farming it.
It's also not pay to win. I understand the first impression, since it's actual different sets of weapons and armour which are locked behind it. But: on the one hand, you still have the standard warbonds which you don't need to unlock using that special currency; there, a decent collection of items is already present in order to find a style with which you can beat the game. On the other hand, it's a PvE Co-Op game with a lot of different difficulties to choose from. You can play it from extremely easy to very hard. It's not intended to be played solo. Although you absolutely can if you're good. That means: winning is easy. Even with equipment you don't like as much.
And let's not forget that it isn't that hard to earn the paid currency by playing the game. Unlocking the paid warbonds that way can be another incentive to play and get a feeling of progression.
What's also very important:
There is no FOMO. The warbonds stay where they are. You can complete any of them at any time in any order you like. Also, even in the ingame shop, there is not really FOMO: there are literally just four items: two helmets and two armours. Those switch every couple of days. But that switch is a cycle. Meaning, after some days those, you've seen on one day, are back.
The devs also made clear in a statement that they explicitly don't want that FOMO stuff and don't want it to be pay to win.
I have more than 200 h in the game and have unlocked every item in every warbond earlier than that. Never paid a cent. Not even for the game itself since I got it as a gift, lol. Also several of the shop items. (That depends on difficulty though. With lower difficulties might take longer.)
Yes, they are not "the paragon of microtransactions". First, because they still have microtransactions at all. Secondly, because it's obfuscated and superlinear (ratio between spent money and amount of received currency is not the same between the packages: you get much more if you spend a bit more). But if you compare that to other games, which employ microtransaction shit, it's waaaaay better and right at the top, after Deep Rock Galactic.
microtransactions isn't relayed to this at all though... I hate them as much as anyone else but this is about giving the devs the time they need.
Your reply is basically "I know buzzwords but don't know what they really mean so I'll just reply with whatever comes to mind about games nowadays being bad".
Crazy, if you make good games, people will buy them and pay for them.
And don't over price it, I can buy a copy for myself and a friend for less than a shitty "AAA"/"AAAA" Title
Insane
that can't be true, it's way too simple, there must be a catch somewhere
Naw, the companies will miss the point and demand studios go as cheap and dirty as they want for Helldivers 3 and Baldur's Gate 4
I suspect that may be part of the reason Larian isn't making a Baldur's Gate 4. At the very least, they probably realize that lightning is very unlikely to strike twice, so why tempt fate? Get out of the series while everyone still loves you. They probably also recognize that they would face a Knights of the Old Republic 2 situation where the IP owner will want more profit faster, and so they will set deadlines which don't fit with Larian's design model. At best, BG4 would be a rushed mess, with Larian struggling for years afterwards trying to deliver the game they wanted to deliver and burning down all of the goodwill they have built up with gamers. It's just not worth it. If they walk away and stand up their own IP, they get complete control and can take the time to deliver what they want to deliver. Sure, they don't have the built in fanbase that a D&D title would have; but, I suspect they are going to have a lot of that fanbase follow them anyway.
Sadly, Hasbro absolutely will be willing to burn down any and all goodwill BG3 has built up. I expect we'll see some smaller developer handed BG4, put under unrealisting timelines and the result will be a disaster. It will not be the fault of the development team. I suspect any dev team is going to be salivating at the prospect of making a D&D title. It's a dream project and they will bend over backwards to get it. They just won't realize, or hope they can avoid, Hasbro breaking their back in the quest for short term profit.
Your comment just says that you don't know anything about Larian, so don't slander them for no reason at all
larian isn't making bg4, and hasbro are
going to fuck it up trying to milk it
Hasn't Larian already said they aren't doing Baldur's Gate 4?
also no rebalancing the games progression so you can shoehorn mtx into it helps a lot too
Eh, there's a lot that could be said about Helldivers, at least as a PC port.
Great game, nice content delivery, very cool. No DLSS, no modern FSR (it straight up uses an horrendous implementation of FSR 1.0), very bad usage of multiple threads, quite a few bugs - the armour ratings literally did not work, as in, a crucial feature of the game that changes the entire balancing of gear and enemies did not apply, meaning you could have a party of a heavy gear tank and light gear medic and both would take the same damage from the same enemies.
Again, the game itself is very fun. But I'm absolutely not going to praise this port and claim it's a shining example of developer quality.
Releasing a perfect game that doesn't have any bugs isn't what the article is about.
It's talking about teams that have honed their craft over many years of developing titles they cared about working on and investing in continuous improvements, of which both Arrowhead and Larian have done.
That's true for virtually every game. Diablo IV: hated by many, considered a major downgrade, Blizzard bad, gets boring, doesn't handle live content updates right... yet go watch the videos with the team that designed the dungeons and the assets, they're extremely passionate, they are proud of their work, they explain how they spent a looooong time just working on little details they thought people would appreciate.
It's super unfair to raise Helldivers and Baldur's Gate to this elevated "worthy passionate developer" status and disregard others while, at the same time, being selectively blind about the issues both of these games had and still have. In fact, Baldur's Gate straight up required months of Microsoft intervention to finally (partially!) fix CPU affinity issues.
It's using an ancient discontinued engine. Hopefully we see improvements with time
quite a few bugs
Those are a feature.
yeah but ultimately it doesn't matter because the end product is good on the whole
i feel those kinds of details are exactly what meddlers would want to meddle in, when the entire argument of the article is that the game manages to be good on the whole not despite its lack of meddlers but because of it
There's a much better game in that regard:
Factorio
Been on my wishlist for quite some time. Don't really know much about it. Is it really that good?
It is the best, and the benchmark, for the survivalcraft factory RTS genre. They optimised the game to an absolutely ridiculous degree, that it will even run smooth on a Nintendo Switch.
I expected Helldivers 2 to be good, but not "unforeseeable appeal that knocks out back-end servers and leaves players in a weeks-long login purgatory" good
It continues to boggle my mind that people will take this objectively bad thing built in to the game's design and turn it into good press. Being unable to play the game you paid for is a bad thing. They could have let you host the game yourself. Yes, even the dungeon master part that Joel does. That they don't let you not only leads to login problems with unexpectedly populous launches but also an expiration date that Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't even have when it comes to online multiplayer.
Agreed. This is one of the frustrating casualties of live service microtransaction games. Can't let people run servers or mod it because otherwise how can you sell them stuff?
Having launch issues seems to be the norm nowadays.I do lot think anyone expects complex software to be bug free.
But the response and speed of fixing issues from arrow head are very good, and an example for others to follow.
Dedicated servers are awesome tho. And all great games have that. Makes the game live forever if the community cares enough. Cnc renegade and enemy territory still have players.
Considering Helldivers 1 just finished it's 135th War cycle, I'm not particularly afraid about an expitation date from the DM/online play side. Heck, I'd imagine when Arrowhead finally pulla the plug on HD1, they'll likely update it so it works offline.
And the gameplay portion kinda already does.
I’m not particularly afraid about an expitation date from the DM/online play side
It's actually inevitable.
Heck, I’d imagine when Arrowhead finally pulla the plug on HD1, they’ll likely update it so it works offline.
I'm pretty sure I can count on my fingers the number of games that have actually patched their online-only functionality to work offline. Off the top of my head, it's just Knockout City, and I think maybe a Gran Turismo game somewhere along the line.
Liberty will see you through
Most games lose something like 80%-90% of their players in the first couple months. Helldivers 2 is still at about 35% of peak. That's pretty huge. Is it, literally, losing steam? Yes, in a technical sense, you're right. But all games lose steam. Helldivers 2 is losing it way slower than comparable games, which is much more important imo.
I play this game exclusively on Linux without issues so the anticheat doesn’t seem that intrusive. Could be my perception of it though.
Yeah, a true rootkit kernel-level anticheat wouldn't work on Linux at all (see: Valorant and its anticheat - Vanguard).
Since the butthurt mods didn't like it and removed the comment, I'll summarize it for future readers:
A wave of downvotes hits every comment critical of Helldivers 2. This whole post and discussion is paid shillery.
You are wrong, and you should be ashamed of yourself for accusing people without any proof. If you really believe everyone who praises the game to be shills, then you're also deluded.
I've 250 hours in, and loving the game. Sure it's starting to lose the appeal slowly after this long in, but I sure as hell got my 40€ worth, and I know me and friends will return to have fun with it periodically, similarly to L4D2. The gameplay loop is just that good.
Okay yes, but helldivers is still filled to the brim with bugs. Not quite an equal comparison
Edit: wild that fanboys will down vote you for simply stating a fact
People talk like it's game breaking, or completely unplayable. But I have an absolute blast playing this game every night with my friends. Bugs be damned.
The bugs are quite literally a feature.
There’d be half a game if they took out the Terminids.
Not a word of a lie. Filled to the brim with bugs and automatons.
I find the game in general pretty mid. I'd rather play DRG 100% of the time.
That was true when it launched, but past month I've had 0 crashing in about 100 hours of gametime. It was unfortunate, but it's not filled to brim with bugs, unless you're referring to the Terminids 😄
We killed 2 billion of them a week ago, but they just keep coming.
Your comment's score has convinced me that the above post is just paid shillery to promote helldivers.
Or we just have no fucking idea what they are talking about and the game works fine for us.
Helldivers stole the matchmaking form Warframe/Destiny (more Warframe) and I got thousands of hours in both, but Helldivers made it so obscure that I could not figure out how to find a group. I was placed on one once. Then I had a loading screen, then a hidden loading screen (aka "ships fly next to each other sequence"), then walked up to the person I was apparently in a group with, then got kicked, had the same amount of loading, just backwards. After that, I tried several missions, all without any support by anything. The combat system is utterly useless when alone (which I only was because of matchmaking). I refunded this very undercooked game.
Why not use Horizon (doesn't matter which one) as an example? Or Xenoblade Chronicles? God of war?
You know what, I am gonna call skill issue.
I get that the "press R to join a group" can be overlooked or that not everyone has the intuition to click on the active missions on a planet (alright, these are currently bugged and do not refresh quick enough so always full).
But all one has to do is a quick google search to find out you just open the big holo planet and press R, there are also definitely worse offenders in cryptic/useless UIs.
I do have to generally agree, however this is also easily the weakest part of the game. The game doesn't hand hold you through explaining everything with full screen explanations like some games, and there's a lot going on with the map screen to notice the difficulty and matchmaking functions when you first jump into the game. However, it is right there. The first couple missions it steers you towards are so simple and short you definitely don't need teammates to complete, and from my experience they basically assume you won't have any. After you play a couple short missions alone, it makes sense you'd look at more in the interface, it's not rocket science.
However, the high number of loading screens and animations to get into and out of a party simply to make it "look" nice is absurd. An animation of the ship jumping to a planet, then an animation of you coming out of a pod onto the ship, then if you are kicked an animation of you doing the exact same thing back to your ship, taking 30-60 seconds to run through. Animating it all for a single ship to deploy from, versus a standard matchmaking room is just a waste of time for matchmaking. It looks cool and for friends is awesome, but to just play the game, it's a massive waste of time. This is made even more annoying with players kicking people from their teams for any number of reasons so all of those nice looking loads just waste that time and the kicked player then needs to walk all the way back through their ship to get to the map and try again. This is the most annoying part of getting kicked honestly.
I think part of this is also a good chunk of the community either not knowing how, or not utilizing the party privacy functionality. So people aren't putting themselves into things like friends-only or closed parties when they don't want to play with randoms. And then there's always the toxic players kicking people simply for not playing the meta.
A party leader kicking players within a couple minutes of joining a party should negatively affect that player in some form to ensure people use the privacy system correctly and help stop some of this meta toxicity. Like an inability to call stratagems for some time in mission (and it not counting until actually playing, so they can't just sit on the ship to wait it out). They already have the in game propaganda system setup, declare the player anti-democratic or something to make in game punishment seamless with the lore.
Of course, this can be described as a skill issue. Yet, the OP states that games get better and more polished if you let “Developers cook”, using Helldivers 2 as an example. My reply was that the game is not an example of what I'd call “polished”.
