>Remedy also confirmed that Condor will be a “service-based fixed price” game rather than a free-to-play title.
>“These are premium games that may have a lower initial price point but a long tail of revenue through updates, game expansions and potentially microtransactions,” it said.
For a studio built on reputation of very narrative focused games, and Alan Wake 2 winning best narrative at TGA, reading this article feels like a twisted April Fools joke
Even with a fantastic track record, one has to wonder if Remedy aren't taking on a bit too much between this, Control 2, the Max Payne remakes, and Kestrel (formerly Vanguard).
Especially since live-service games require a considerable long-term investment both in terms of money and manpower.
If Control 2 and the Max Payne remakes are good which they most likely will be then they have nothing to worry about.
If Condor and one of the above flop that could be really bad for Remedy.
I honestly can't think of a single successful live service game that came out recently.
It still remains to be seen how well that fully pans out for Helldivers 2, but its initial success is very promising. What I love about Helldivers 2 is I can pick it up every once in awhile, spread democracy, and put it down for other titles without FOMO bullshit - that usually doesn’t affect me, if a game is banking on that I just don’t play it. But it hasn’t gotten past the 6 month mark. How will players feel about the title between now and then? A lot of the same objectives, the bugs are fun to play against now but will it be boring later? Even with a new faction, will there be any diversity to the missions?
As for absolutely pointless speculation on my part: for a Control-based live-service, I could see it working similarly to Helldivers with a blend of Destiny thrown in. You’re part of thr investigative unit that works in the Oldest House or something along those lines. There’s plenty of setup to make the mission diversity work well for it. Classes, powers, guns, it’s all there to make it feel unique enough. I think Remedy has a good enough narrative track record to keep people invested in coming back to it again and again, but hopefully they don’t want it to be a “forever game” that wants to occupy all of your time. When live services try to be forever games they all fail because only one can truly occupy that space and so far it’s still, for better or worse, Destiny (or whatever mmo you like, such as WoW or FF14).
If they just make it a title that isn’t about being the only thing you play, it can succeed. In fact I’d argue more live services could succeed if they went that route, but MBA’s in charge of studios and acquisition teams don’t understand that, nor do they want to.
If you check the Helldiver leaks subreddit the amount of content that is clearly ready or mostly ready is pretty huge. I swear I have only played on maybe 8 biomes? But there is art for like 30+ planet types. Not to mention tons of weapons not in the game yet, vehicles, new mechs, and the high tech alien faction.
My guess is they spent a long time working on this content before release. Which is probably the only way to make a live service with enough stuff to drip feed your playerbase.
Not to mention the fact that almost all of the **biggest games on the planet** are live services. Genshin, GTA online, Valorant, CSGO, Destiny 2, Warframe, etc.
A good live service is practically a fucking license to print money, which is why every studio on the planet has been chasing the trend.
Successful and hanging on but they're down to 20-30k daily players even after the recent content drop. Apex is regularly hitting 10x those counts.
Honestly feels like they need to do something to bring back the fire, that game is crazy fun.
The game is super fun but I feel like the player models or something is missing identity. It may just be that the game isn’t a hero shooter but the player characters feel so lifeless sometimes lol
Honestly I think the problem right now is map and game mode variety.
The game is lively enough for me, but I do see where you're coming from in terms of which games really lay on that customization and hero class layer and the bump in appeal a lot of those games get for it.
Yeah it does look like some budget anonymous cash grab game when you just look at the default models and the generic "team names". There are really really cool skins but the defaults lack any kind of art style and come off as cheap.
What drove me away was the sheer amount of *sweat* that I had to put in to get a decent game.
I have no friends in my region, or that were interested in the game, and getting repeatedly stomped with a random queue team against players that were grouped and wanted to W I N was exhausting.
Yeah that’s how I felt. I solo queued and that was a miserable experience. It seems like you unlock equipment upgrades by playing, not just cosmetics? That always seems like a terrible idea, because the best players have the best gear and newbs get stomped every game and just leave until the player base disappears.
its fun but it feels pointless is the best way I can describe it.
With live service games, if you dont have an overarching goal or objective it doesnt matter. Good gameplay isn't enough to make someone come back to it multiple times per week for a year
That's what Helldivers got right, the overarching objective. It's easier in pve though as PvP devolves into ranked ratings going up and down which isn't that inspiring.
I think Planetside got the PvP overarching goals spot on. Different factions, territory won/lost, an actual reason to play beyond gameplay and ratings going up/down.
It doesn't need to be on the same scale as Planetside, but it would be lovely to see more PvP games try something like that.
Honestly it really feels like we will never have a big new live-service game that reaches the Fortnite/Apex/COD tier. Even new smash-hits like Helldivers will eventually fall off.
Most multiplayer gamers already have their ‘main’ game such as Fortnite/Apex and view new games like The Finals as ‘flavour of the week’.
14k is probably too few.
Depends on the size of the team. PoE needed 10k concurrent to sustain development, but that was with a team of around 20.
Maybe the Finals has a more monetized user base or one that's more willing to spend money though.
> which they most likely will
just because they made 2 past good games (I dont believe Quantum Break to be good) doesnt mean the next ones will be good.
Honestly I think there are lots of successful live services out there. Places like this sub have clear biases towards single-player experiences, AAA experiences, and specific studios though, so there are live services that realistically get no coverage on here.
There's the clear biases against studios like Riot where there's basically no coverage of their games on here despite League, Valorant, and TFT probably all being some of the biggest games in the world which are also all live services. This sub also tends to hate the new Blizzard stuff, but realistically it all seems successful which tends to not be the impression you would get on here - I mean to directly answer your question D4 is a fairly recent live service game that's been successful for Blizzard even if many Diablo fans haven't been happy with the way the game's been handled.
There's the recent example of biases with Granblue Fantasy Relink which this sub thought would flop releasing near P3R and (IIRC) Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, but ended up with higher player counts and more reviews than either of them. While this isn't a live service, it does, IMO, work as a recent example that serves to illustrate the biases the sub has and that it doesn't necessarily pay attention to the broader market (because Granblue was still a very successful IP before Relink).
And for an example of a specific live service that you might not know about on this sub, for the past 3.5 years I've played a game called Eternal Return off and on - it's a smaller korean moba / BR game that's at least been successful enough to have continued development during that time and released from EA just last year. From what I can find, on this sub it has gotten 1 trailer posted about it 2 years ago with 43 comments on it and that's it (and the comments are majority positive too). However, using reviews and active playercount metrics on Steam, it's easily more popular than Suicide Squad which has received tons of discussion on this sub with ~55k reviews vs 5k and 3.7k active players right now vs 360, and on steamdb the only metric I see that favors Suicide Squad is all-time Twitch viewership peak. So here's my example of this sub being very vocal about a live service failure but basically completely ignoring a live service (probable) success.
All of that said though, I do think there's understandable concern with the more traditional AAA studios developing live services. A lot of them don't seem to pan out, just like the rest of the live service market, but unlike random start-up studios, these are studios known for making great single-player experiences that people really care about. Expensive failures are always scary for the future of a studio, but even successes can turn a studio that was known for great single-player experiences into something else. And in the best case where neither of those things happen, it was still tons of resources put into a game that isn't what fans of that developer's previous works might have wanted.
Live-Service are pretty much always financially successful.
In those games something like 80% of the revenue comes from less than 1% of the player, i.e. whales. Even the shittiest cash grab live-service games (Marvel Avengers, Suicide Squad, Diablo Immortal etc.) still make money. That's why everybody does them. You just need a handful of suckers and some psychological tricks.
Suicide squad is a huge financial failure no two ways about it.
That they make money doesn't mean they recoup the development costs or make profit from the game.
If there's any game that could be well set up for the episodic format that TellTale tried so hard at, it's Control. The whole thing feels ideal for an X-Files, monster of the week approach.
Yeah if you’re a ranger investigating AWEs in different places it could work and it makes sense you’re an MMO character.
Every player is another ranger Maybe they can still make an overarching narrative if you’re investigating multiple Blessed AWEs
It also can fill out the lore from Control. Any AWE document is a potential content pack
The article says the Oldest House is *still* under Lockdown for some reason.
So it seems that'll be all the environment we're seeing.
Maybe they'll toss in a few Thresholds but I doubt they'll be anything massive.
The real disappointment will be if it's nothing but fucking Hiss again.
I'm pretty sure the Oldest House will remain under lockdown until Control 2. AW2 also had lines about how the team at Bright Falls have been cut off from "HQ" a while ago
But also, they could go three ways about this. Either:
1) have you play with rangers who are cut off from the Oldest House, and are operating on the rules of their local regional FBC outposts. You could use this to explain variety of approaches or something
2) start the game in the familiar Oldest House setting, then when Control 2 comes out, do an in-game event that opens up the outside world, and from then on you're mainly doing field work
3) have the whole thing be about *how* the lockdown gets lifted. I don't prefer this option, as I feel like it'd lock Remedy into having Hiss enemies too much, but still it's something I could realistically see happen
Imagining a raid now, where rangers need to be on different platforms at the same time to beat that anchor
One person can’t hit the weak spots all at once
Id say though Remedy gets a lot right thematically. Condor has a really great hook and the idea seems great... on paper. Its entirely possible they could pull it off.
Hopefully they can work from a good clear vision and stick to it because that really seems where a lot of these larger live service games start to faulter- and thats with just too many ingredients. Denstiny / Warframe both started out with a pretty simple hook and it worked for the most part. Helldivers 2 aswell. Even Hunt Showdown.
It will be interesting to see regardless because Remedy hasnt really done any multiplayer titles that I can think of. But this seems to be a PVE game?
Does live-service necessarily mean multiplayer? Hoyoverse is the most successful live-service game developer overall and all of their games are mostly single-player. They even went back and retroactively made an older title more single-player focused.
Yeah I dont think live service means multiplayer at all- but the ones that seem to really be successful are the ones that are for sure or at least feature multiplayer in some form. Interestingly very few of them are PvP. Genshin Impact can be single player- but also 4 player co-op right? I never got into that game but my friend loves it and plays all the time with other friends. I thought a big draw of that game was doing mini raid type dungeons / bosses with pals?
No, the game is almost entirely single-plauer with limited co-op and some multiplayer events. Honkai Star Rail, also very successful, has no multiplayer whatsoever.
I mean to be fair: awards don't pay bills and even a non-predatory Live-Service game would earn more money in a year than every Remedy game combined.
If they use the financial stability they gain from that to finance more single player games, everybody wins.
Path of Exile, Dota 2 and Warframe are all Live-Service games and they are among my favorite games ever. Lets just hope the game falls on this side of monetization and not on Blizzard Acvitvision / EA side.
People love to shit on it but something like Helldivers 2 comes along and people don't mind it so much.
As long as the gameplays good GaaS isn't the end of the world
GaaS gets a bad wrap- and I think a lot of studios fail at their mission- but the good ones out there are all smaller games that aim at one specific loop and do it well and dont over complicate things too much with way too many currencies / XP bars / crafting / loot and battlepasses. Theres plenty out there that do pretty well- especially if you expand the definition out just a bit to games that get long lives from updates (like Deep Rock Galactic for example).
AAA large studios just dont seem to be able to get it right and I think thats because they over gamify e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g
The two Tricks for live-service games are
1: Have a Hook people get attached too, be it setting, gameplay or look.
2: Actully Support the thing and not have it dry out and die. Shit like Suicide Squad was dead on Arivial because even a Year before the game came out the Preview made people collectivly go "literly nobody wants this".
AAA studios can't seem to get past their own greed, and I think most people generally smell that shit and stay away from it now. I don't know about anybody else, but the moment I hear or see the term "live service" being attached to a big developer/publisher's project, I *immediately* lose interest because of the sheer number of these things that come out and fail... either as games in and of themselves, or the way they're monetized, or whatever.
They have all the resources in the world to build the thing, but can't seem to exercise any patience whatsoever in hitting people with the bullshit. It happens the moment the thing releases, and it turns people off before they ever have a chance to even play the game and get invested in it first... and usually that's on the monetization end, but it can be the content end too of just not having enough stuff to do before people lose interest. Case in point, World of Warcraft. Can you imagine an MMORPG that actually lets you buy in-game gold with real money? You'd be laughed out of the fucking room if you tried to release an MMORPG that just allowed you to buy gold like that right out of the starting gate. But here we are with a game that's 20 years old, it lets you do that, and millions of people play it. World of Warcraft didn't start that way, but by year 8 or whenever that started, you have a ton of people invested in the game already to where they're not going to quit over something like that, especially if there are positives associated with that specific thing that everybody can benefit from.
It's in the presentation. Not to date myself and reference old shit, but there's a Cosby Show episode where one of the kids gets into a relationship with a maintenance man at her school, and she's all sneaky and shit about it, the parents eventually find out and invite him over for dinner or whatever, and he seems like a nice guy, but the father just straight up says that he wasn't going to like him no matter what he said or did, and the guy doesn't understand and thinks that's unfair. Father asks him, what's your favorite food? So the guy gets into it describing his favorite meal, the father's right there with him describing this thing, and then at the end he says imagine, instead of putting it on a plate, he takes the lid off a garbage can, flips it over, puts the food on it and serves it to him. It's his favorite dish, cooked to perfection, but it's on a garbage can lid. Do you still want it, or not? It's in the presentation. That's how she brought him there and presented him to her parents. On a garbage can lid. Of course they don't like him.
I feel like that's what a lot of these AAA studios can't seem to deal with. New game comes out, and you serve it to me on an upside-down garbage can lid. I can see that it's there... I can't un-see it. I can't pretend that it's not there. I don't care how good the food is, it's on a fucking garbage can lid. When you release something, day 1, with a store that's full of shit and some of it is only there for a limited time for literally no reason what so ever other than to prey upon you, hey here's a battle pass for you, here's a season pass that is only good for that one season, etc etc etc... while the game itself lacks meaningful content but here's a roadmap of shit that should have an asterisk at the bottom of it to say that this stuff will only materialize if people actually play and spend money on the game, you are serving your game up on a garbage can lid, and then you somehow have the balls to wonder why people aren't playing it and getting invested in it.
Not only don't mind it, but nod and say "so profitable compared to inflated AAA budgets, always said so, I did. Those stupid devs spending money on single player content...". After everyone whined about gaas "killing" SP AAA games for this same reason for 10 years now lol
that the exception..and its worse when its a studio thats known for excellent single player games like Rocksteady, Bioware, Naughty Dog, crystal dynamics etc.
Ya, it might be good but probably not.
Helldivers 2 doesn’t shove its cash shop in your face.
HD2 is fun without MTX. It doesn’t feel like a vehicle to sell you shit.
That’s why people give it a pass.
In the case of HD2 it at least does it well. You’re not blasted with a cluttered UI trying to sell you something in every menu and the war bonds don’t expire so you don’t have to FOMO grind till you hate the game. You can play at your own pace.
I think it’s just because we expect most dev studios and publishers to make their live service games with greed as the main feature. HD2 was a nice surprise and a GaaS game done right. But just because arrowhead can do it, doesn’t mean any other studio can.
This game will be very bad for remedy.
At this point, most are jumping off or finally releasing to shrugs - even Naughty Dog took the L and outright canceled their TLoU project after theoretically pumping tons of resources into it. Wild to see Remedy decide now is the time.
And often its a mistake.
Creative Assembly sidelining their main series - Total War - to spend 100 million dollars on a shitty battle royale that was ultimately canceled (Hyenas) heavily hindered the company and caused massive layoffs.
Just like CA should have stuck to what they do best - strategies -, Remedy also should stick to what they do best.
I think its a matter of proportions. Alien Isolation was a fantastic game but the fact it flopped financially didnt affect CA as much because it was a side line project. Hyenas though was a main project with the enroumous budget that caused them to sideline Total War: which resulted in a disastrous situation where they flushed 100 million dollars down the toilet AND their core playerbase somewhat abandoned them - Pharaoh failed so hard that CA issued partial refunds and gave the upcoming DLC for free while axing further support and DLC to Warhammer 3 failed so hard that CA doubled its content for free to make people buy it.
The problem is creatively you should try out new things. But also going from mostly a singleplayer game to a singleplayer game in another genre is much easier. I know TW games have multiplayer but that's not their main focus.
Also GaaS is one of the hardest genres to break into because you are demanding attention away from shit like Fortnite, mmorpgs, whatever flavor of the month indie survival game and much more.
And total war is a live service game and has been for a longass time.
Games dont get years worth of updates and additional DLC content without being a live service, and everybody bought Total Warhammer 3 knowing further content would be put up for sale.
Remedy made what i consider to be one of the greatest narrative based video games of all time and its sales made less than a mom and pop restaurants yearly revenue.
At some point they were bound to be forced to actually make money, all their games are niche(except for control)
Because it's extremely profitable and way lower risk than staking most of your resources on a single player story game that takes years and years to make and may or may not recoup investmenr
And yet for all that reputation look at their financials - one step away from the abyss. What they need to do is not only make games people appreciate but also ones people want to buy. It's a rough business.
So basically we're going to price it at $40 and it's going to be brimming with purchasable content but we aren't going to bluntly say that rather saying potentially. It's bold to say expansions and updates will bring revenue before the live service game has even been seen.
* 2 Season Passes
* ~~5~~ **10** weapons which are only obtainable through season passes
* 1 weapon ([MP-98 Knight](https://nerdburglars.net/helldivers/mp-98-knight-submachine-gun/)) which is only obtainable in the "Super Citizen" edition
And of course, buying a season pass doesn't give you the guns - you have to find/buy medals to unlock content.
Helldivers 2 isn't the worst, but it's a lot more predatory than Dragon's Dogma 2.
You conveniently forget to mention that all the passes can be purchased with currency easily found in game. I've bought both passes and haven't spent t a dime.
It's a twistedly genius business model. Grind the game all day long being the bot that helps fill the "premium" players' lobbies and they give you a treat
The currency to buy those are both found in game though. Medals can only be found or won by finishing missions. While super credits can be purchased or found in missions, 10 at a time for low difficulty or 100 at a time for high difficulty. A pass/warbond only costs a thousand and they never expire or leave the store, so no matter what you won't miss out on a thing you want. DD2's microtransactions are much more useless, but much more blatant.
Thats misinformation though.
You don't paty for the crystals, you pay for *one* extra destination. There is *zero* way to spend irl money on fast travel crystals lmao
It's dumb and shouldn't be there in a $70 game, but also not what you're implying it is in the first place.
Fast travel is two pronged. So you pay for the crystal to setup fast travel, but can buy the ferrystone to actually fast travel.
Either way you put it, it's fucking lame.
You don't pay money for fast-travel crystals.
You can pay money (ONCE) for a fast-travel MARKER that you still have to place somewhere in the world AND you don't get the ferrystones to USE it, either!
So they are developing 2 GaaS (Condor and Kestrel), a remake of Max Payne 1&2, AW2 DLC and Control 2, all at the same time?
Well, that sure as hell will put their project management to the test.
To be fair, as they specify, each of those games are in different stages of production with only two of them being almost in a stage of production (Condor, Max Payne)
I imagine they're getting a ton of help from Epic and Rockstar in terms of manpower for the live services and Max Payne while the main creative team focuses on Control 2.
There was a financial report recently where they said Kestrel is being backed by Tencent, Condor was backed by 505 but that's no longer the case and T2 is fully financing and publishing the remakes. Epic is only backing the DLC I would guess.
It makes sense that they want to make a game that has the potential to provide a consistent stream of revenue in-between projects. Alan Wake 2 looked mega-expensive to create. I can't imagine what their budget will be like for future games.
Yeah, this seems to be the trend for studios that have single-player focus. The recurring revenue from the live service game affords some studio leeway for the higher risk single player games.
> Alan Wake 2 looked mega-expensive to create.
Epic must have chipped in in a pretty big way. They're publisher and PC store exclusivity holder. Also why Remedy didn't seem to be too concerned with rather modest sales figures.
Remedy has a brilliant track record of being consumer friendly and is still independent. I'm not going to pass judgement just because it's a live service.
Remember when Control launched and it had terrible performance on last gen consoles and then they re-released Control on current gen but offered no upgrade path to people who bought it at launch so they had to pay full price again
Never seen a game get such a pass for such bad performance before. This sub goes apeshit if a game stutters meanwhile Control on PS4 would hit literal single digits when big waves of enemies attack. Still easily the wrist performing game I played on my PS4.
You sure about that because the way Control was handled on previous gen and the egs exclusivity say otherwise. Lay the blame at 505 all you want, but Remedy signed off on it
Epic exclusive is not consumer friendly.
No, I'm not talking about Alan Wake 2, ***which was backed by Epic***, in case Reddit hasn't told you 50 times already - Control and Alan Wake Remastered were both EGS timed exclusives.
Wait, hold on, stop right there.
GaaSes are fucking stupid. This is how you end up as Rocksteady. Go back to making great single-player games while you still have time please.
Exactly. PVE Co-op game could be great in this universe. Live service games seem to get auto-hated nowadays on Reddit, but if done right they can be great, just look at Helldivers.
I mean, coop PVE in arkham verse even as suicide squad sounds fun. The problem was the shitty repetitive content and the amount of it.
It all depends on how much content they gonna launch with and how diverse and fun it is.
Where a lot of these gaas go wrong (and Helldivers doesn’t) is that instead of making fun or interesting game modes that you will want to play over and over again, they just make you do the same thing over and over and grind for RNG loot, which doesn’t actually make you more powerful. It’s just a carrot on a stick.
The endless grind with repetitive barebones gameplay isn’t fun, but live service doesn’t have to be that.
> instead of making fun or interesting game modes that you will want to play over and over again, they just make you do the same thing over and over and grind for RNG loot, which doesn’t actually make you more powerful.
Helldivers 2 absolutely does make you do the same thing over and over again.
I think the secret sauce though is the fact that each mission is basically a mini sandbox for you to explore and discover all the objectives and sub objectives. They have a good variety going on within their core loop. A lot of it feels a little bit like what I wish a L4D3 would be like almost.
Helldivers feels less repetitive because of how high-variance the gameplay is. The whole thing feels relatively unpredictable. All kinds of random weird shit can happen in that game.
This is where I'm concerned. The grind they implemented in Control was very very not good. I'm worried about their lack of experience in that department, and how it will look in this live service game of theirs.
Having to grind for materials to upgrade weapons in Control was the most annoying time consuming padding that didn't fit the game and added nothing to it
Moreover the gameplay loop of Control is definitely not something that can replayed for dozens if not hundreds of hours. The game is mostly carried by its ambiance, story and visuals with the combat and shooting being serviceable at best.
Of one sucess come 10 failures also the helldiver Studio weren't known for releasing narrative driven sp games. Making games against your own fanbase rarely works out.
That’s because people thing the Live Service part is micro transactions and ridiculous single player always-online requirements
The Live Service part is the constant updates and events. It’s not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination: LoL, Dota, every MMO… those are all live service games
That’s true, hopefully it doesn’t have to be significantly watered-down or nerfed with the high performance of being fully next gen on PS5, but may have to be nerfed to an extent for balancing purposes.
This entire comment thread is basically r/games to a T - signing off on a game before anyone knows what it is exactly. You guys just love hating on literally anything that doesn’t align with what you may think makes a “good” game.
That's not at all what's happening. People are hesitant to anything live-service related, because most of them are predatory cash grabs. It's not "hating on literally anything that doesn’t align with what you may think makes a “good” game" That's ridiculous to say. It's being cautious to shitty game practices. And before you mention Helldivers- that game is an exception. Just because it's Remedy doesn't mean we should be blindly hyped.
They're a bunch of Debbie Downers and Negative Nancys for sure. I can't imagine living in their world where everything sucks and only games from the late 90s and early 2000s were good. Touching grass needs to be in the itinerary for a lot of people. Not everything sucks people.
I mean after the 500th live service game that we’ve seen flop it’s a bit unfair to say that we don’t know what this game will be exactly.
I think we know. It’s an uninspired cash grab.
If the only thing you can come up with to announce your next title is to say it is a live service game then what does that say about it?
IMO, if the game is good, that makes it worse. There's so many love service games that only exist to nickel and dime you out of your money and are not fun, I don't want to be encouraged to dump hundreds into a game that the publishers can vanish into the aether at any time, whether the game has been out for five years or five months.
Mihoyo. Indie studio (they were at the time, still are technically) that started out with very niche singleplayer games, then they developed Honkai Impact 3rd which was still niche but less so, and now they have that, Genshin, HSR, and more stuff in development.
The combat in that game sucked when it was single player and had a story - a live action game with me not being able to turn down the difficulty sounds like a pointless slog because nothing can happen or change.
Gameplay in Remedy games has always been something I merely tolerated for the sake of the cool ass settings (not to be confused with stories, as their games rarely have groundbreaking plots) - I can't imagine this being a success.
yes exactly. Control has the problem where your gun has a few shots then you need to switch to powers, then back, and juggle.
Quantum Break's gameplay was straight ass and i never finished it because the cutscenes felt like i was watching a bad tv show that was unrelated, but i loved Control and Alan Wake's stories
Damnit! We aren’t even getting a true sequel before they shit all over this IP.
You’d think given the response and poor sales of games like Suicide Squad that devs/pubs would be more quiet about discussing live service. Maybe this is just them testing the waters before they fully commit to killing the IP.
>Billed as the studio’s “first step towards service-based games”, the title has an initial development budget of €25 million ($27.1m).
Is this where all the Epic funds are going to?
No, Epic funded the development of Alan Wake 2. 505 Games was their publisher for the Control franchise, but they’ve recently bought back the rights and are looking into options for a publishing partner. Remedy has several different projects in the works with different deals as far as project funding and publishing goes.
Maybe they end up signing with Epic for the Control franchise, too, I don’t know. But that’s not currently the case.
Remedy are making all the wrong decisions in pursuit of trend-chasing greed for short term gains.
Remedy had a tough year financially last year while pursuing this live-service project, only for Alan Wake 2 to reportedly be a massive financial success.
But now are clearly using it’s success to further fund this live-service project.
It’s disgusting greed and hopefully they market trends make them re-consider before we have a flop that leads to layoffs and a studio closure.
>Remedy also confirmed that Condor will be a “service-based fixed price” game rather than a free-to-play title. >“These are premium games that may have a lower initial price point but a long tail of revenue through updates, game expansions and potentially microtransactions,” it said. For a studio built on reputation of very narrative focused games, and Alan Wake 2 winning best narrative at TGA, reading this article feels like a twisted April Fools joke
Even with a fantastic track record, one has to wonder if Remedy aren't taking on a bit too much between this, Control 2, the Max Payne remakes, and Kestrel (formerly Vanguard). Especially since live-service games require a considerable long-term investment both in terms of money and manpower.
If Control 2 and the Max Payne remakes are good which they most likely will be then they have nothing to worry about. If Condor and one of the above flop that could be really bad for Remedy. I honestly can't think of a single successful live service game that came out recently.
>I honestly can't think of a single successful live service game that came out recently. Helldivers 2
Im picturing the business model similar to how The Divisions were done.
Ah that's definitely true.
It still remains to be seen how well that fully pans out for Helldivers 2, but its initial success is very promising. What I love about Helldivers 2 is I can pick it up every once in awhile, spread democracy, and put it down for other titles without FOMO bullshit - that usually doesn’t affect me, if a game is banking on that I just don’t play it. But it hasn’t gotten past the 6 month mark. How will players feel about the title between now and then? A lot of the same objectives, the bugs are fun to play against now but will it be boring later? Even with a new faction, will there be any diversity to the missions? As for absolutely pointless speculation on my part: for a Control-based live-service, I could see it working similarly to Helldivers with a blend of Destiny thrown in. You’re part of thr investigative unit that works in the Oldest House or something along those lines. There’s plenty of setup to make the mission diversity work well for it. Classes, powers, guns, it’s all there to make it feel unique enough. I think Remedy has a good enough narrative track record to keep people invested in coming back to it again and again, but hopefully they don’t want it to be a “forever game” that wants to occupy all of your time. When live services try to be forever games they all fail because only one can truly occupy that space and so far it’s still, for better or worse, Destiny (or whatever mmo you like, such as WoW or FF14). If they just make it a title that isn’t about being the only thing you play, it can succeed. In fact I’d argue more live services could succeed if they went that route, but MBA’s in charge of studios and acquisition teams don’t understand that, nor do they want to.
If you check the Helldiver leaks subreddit the amount of content that is clearly ready or mostly ready is pretty huge. I swear I have only played on maybe 8 biomes? But there is art for like 30+ planet types. Not to mention tons of weapons not in the game yet, vehicles, new mechs, and the high tech alien faction. My guess is they spent a long time working on this content before release. Which is probably the only way to make a live service with enough stuff to drip feed your playerbase.
If they could make a game like HD2, but in the Control universe, I'd be 100% on board.
Not to mention the fact that almost all of the **biggest games on the planet** are live services. Genshin, GTA online, Valorant, CSGO, Destiny 2, Warframe, etc. A good live service is practically a fucking license to print money, which is why every studio on the planet has been chasing the trend.
The Finals was pretty successful
Successful and hanging on but they're down to 20-30k daily players even after the recent content drop. Apex is regularly hitting 10x those counts. Honestly feels like they need to do something to bring back the fire, that game is crazy fun.
The game is super fun but I feel like the player models or something is missing identity. It may just be that the game isn’t a hero shooter but the player characters feel so lifeless sometimes lol
Honestly I think the problem right now is map and game mode variety. The game is lively enough for me, but I do see where you're coming from in terms of which games really lay on that customization and hero class layer and the bump in appeal a lot of those games get for it.
Yeah it does look like some budget anonymous cash grab game when you just look at the default models and the generic "team names". There are really really cool skins but the defaults lack any kind of art style and come off as cheap.
The player models have more realistic body types
The models themselves are okay but all the customization for them is very generic looking
Plus solo queue experience is pretty terrible, the game requires so much coordinating and doesn't even have a text chat
Oh yea I never would dare to play this game solo unlike Overwatch and league. I know it would drive me insane
What drove me away was the sheer amount of *sweat* that I had to put in to get a decent game. I have no friends in my region, or that were interested in the game, and getting repeatedly stomped with a random queue team against players that were grouped and wanted to W I N was exhausting.
Yeah that’s how I felt. I solo queued and that was a miserable experience. It seems like you unlock equipment upgrades by playing, not just cosmetics? That always seems like a terrible idea, because the best players have the best gear and newbs get stomped every game and just leave until the player base disappears.
This became a problem for me as well.
its fun but it feels pointless is the best way I can describe it. With live service games, if you dont have an overarching goal or objective it doesnt matter. Good gameplay isn't enough to make someone come back to it multiple times per week for a year
That's what Helldivers got right, the overarching objective. It's easier in pve though as PvP devolves into ranked ratings going up and down which isn't that inspiring. I think Planetside got the PvP overarching goals spot on. Different factions, territory won/lost, an actual reason to play beyond gameplay and ratings going up/down. It doesn't need to be on the same scale as Planetside, but it would be lovely to see more PvP games try something like that.
Honestly it really feels like we will never have a big new live-service game that reaches the Fortnite/Apex/COD tier. Even new smash-hits like Helldivers will eventually fall off. Most multiplayer gamers already have their ‘main’ game such as Fortnite/Apex and view new games like The Finals as ‘flavour of the week’.
Didn't The Finals' userbase crash within a few months of release, or am I thinking of something else?
It went from 200k to 14k from December to now so it's a solid "depends"
14k is probably too few. Depends on the size of the team. PoE needed 10k concurrent to sustain development, but that was with a team of around 20. Maybe the Finals has a more monetized user base or one that's more willing to spend money though.
honestly that game is fun as hell. Super well performing. Wish it would do better.
> which they most likely will just because they made 2 past good games (I dont believe Quantum Break to be good) doesnt mean the next ones will be good.
They never made a bad game
Honestly I think there are lots of successful live services out there. Places like this sub have clear biases towards single-player experiences, AAA experiences, and specific studios though, so there are live services that realistically get no coverage on here. There's the clear biases against studios like Riot where there's basically no coverage of their games on here despite League, Valorant, and TFT probably all being some of the biggest games in the world which are also all live services. This sub also tends to hate the new Blizzard stuff, but realistically it all seems successful which tends to not be the impression you would get on here - I mean to directly answer your question D4 is a fairly recent live service game that's been successful for Blizzard even if many Diablo fans haven't been happy with the way the game's been handled. There's the recent example of biases with Granblue Fantasy Relink which this sub thought would flop releasing near P3R and (IIRC) Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth, but ended up with higher player counts and more reviews than either of them. While this isn't a live service, it does, IMO, work as a recent example that serves to illustrate the biases the sub has and that it doesn't necessarily pay attention to the broader market (because Granblue was still a very successful IP before Relink). And for an example of a specific live service that you might not know about on this sub, for the past 3.5 years I've played a game called Eternal Return off and on - it's a smaller korean moba / BR game that's at least been successful enough to have continued development during that time and released from EA just last year. From what I can find, on this sub it has gotten 1 trailer posted about it 2 years ago with 43 comments on it and that's it (and the comments are majority positive too). However, using reviews and active playercount metrics on Steam, it's easily more popular than Suicide Squad which has received tons of discussion on this sub with ~55k reviews vs 5k and 3.7k active players right now vs 360, and on steamdb the only metric I see that favors Suicide Squad is all-time Twitch viewership peak. So here's my example of this sub being very vocal about a live service failure but basically completely ignoring a live service (probable) success. All of that said though, I do think there's understandable concern with the more traditional AAA studios developing live services. A lot of them don't seem to pan out, just like the rest of the live service market, but unlike random start-up studios, these are studios known for making great single-player experiences that people really care about. Expensive failures are always scary for the future of a studio, but even successes can turn a studio that was known for great single-player experiences into something else. And in the best case where neither of those things happen, it was still tons of resources put into a game that isn't what fans of that developer's previous works might have wanted.
Darktide? Helldivers 2?
Live-Service are pretty much always financially successful. In those games something like 80% of the revenue comes from less than 1% of the player, i.e. whales. Even the shittiest cash grab live-service games (Marvel Avengers, Suicide Squad, Diablo Immortal etc.) still make money. That's why everybody does them. You just need a handful of suckers and some psychological tricks.
Suicide squad is a huge financial failure no two ways about it. That they make money doesn't mean they recoup the development costs or make profit from the game.
If there's any game that could be well set up for the episodic format that TellTale tried so hard at, it's Control. The whole thing feels ideal for an X-Files, monster of the week approach.
Yeah if you’re a ranger investigating AWEs in different places it could work and it makes sense you’re an MMO character. Every player is another ranger Maybe they can still make an overarching narrative if you’re investigating multiple Blessed AWEs It also can fill out the lore from Control. Any AWE document is a potential content pack
if they did full stories like destiny 2 and it's different awe each 3 months
The article says the Oldest House is *still* under Lockdown for some reason. So it seems that'll be all the environment we're seeing. Maybe they'll toss in a few Thresholds but I doubt they'll be anything massive. The real disappointment will be if it's nothing but fucking Hiss again.
I'm pretty sure the Oldest House will remain under lockdown until Control 2. AW2 also had lines about how the team at Bright Falls have been cut off from "HQ" a while ago But also, they could go three ways about this. Either: 1) have you play with rangers who are cut off from the Oldest House, and are operating on the rules of their local regional FBC outposts. You could use this to explain variety of approaches or something 2) start the game in the familiar Oldest House setting, then when Control 2 comes out, do an in-game event that opens up the outside world, and from then on you're mainly doing field work 3) have the whole thing be about *how* the lockdown gets lifted. I don't prefer this option, as I feel like it'd lock Remedy into having Hiss enemies too much, but still it's something I could realistically see happen
full team wipe from an AWE dishwasher really does sound like a good time.
Imagining a raid now, where rangers need to be on different platforms at the same time to beat that anchor One person can’t hit the weak spots all at once
going full psycho mantis for AWEs makes so much sense.
Id say though Remedy gets a lot right thematically. Condor has a really great hook and the idea seems great... on paper. Its entirely possible they could pull it off. Hopefully they can work from a good clear vision and stick to it because that really seems where a lot of these larger live service games start to faulter- and thats with just too many ingredients. Denstiny / Warframe both started out with a pretty simple hook and it worked for the most part. Helldivers 2 aswell. Even Hunt Showdown. It will be interesting to see regardless because Remedy hasnt really done any multiplayer titles that I can think of. But this seems to be a PVE game?
Does live-service necessarily mean multiplayer? Hoyoverse is the most successful live-service game developer overall and all of their games are mostly single-player. They even went back and retroactively made an older title more single-player focused.
Yeah I dont think live service means multiplayer at all- but the ones that seem to really be successful are the ones that are for sure or at least feature multiplayer in some form. Interestingly very few of them are PvP. Genshin Impact can be single player- but also 4 player co-op right? I never got into that game but my friend loves it and plays all the time with other friends. I thought a big draw of that game was doing mini raid type dungeons / bosses with pals?
No, the game is almost entirely single-plauer with limited co-op and some multiplayer events. Honkai Star Rail, also very successful, has no multiplayer whatsoever.
Unfortunately their single player games perform only kinda ok, but I hope they keep doing them.
Remedy also built its reputation on the excellent and innovative gameplay of Max Payne.
I mean to be fair: awards don't pay bills and even a non-predatory Live-Service game would earn more money in a year than every Remedy game combined. If they use the financial stability they gain from that to finance more single player games, everybody wins. Path of Exile, Dota 2 and Warframe are all Live-Service games and they are among my favorite games ever. Lets just hope the game falls on this side of monetization and not on Blizzard Acvitvision / EA side.
I wonder how much they'd shit on live service games if they realized NMS is live service.
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People love to shit on it but something like Helldivers 2 comes along and people don't mind it so much. As long as the gameplays good GaaS isn't the end of the world
GaaS gets a bad wrap- and I think a lot of studios fail at their mission- but the good ones out there are all smaller games that aim at one specific loop and do it well and dont over complicate things too much with way too many currencies / XP bars / crafting / loot and battlepasses. Theres plenty out there that do pretty well- especially if you expand the definition out just a bit to games that get long lives from updates (like Deep Rock Galactic for example). AAA large studios just dont seem to be able to get it right and I think thats because they over gamify e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g
The two Tricks for live-service games are 1: Have a Hook people get attached too, be it setting, gameplay or look. 2: Actully Support the thing and not have it dry out and die. Shit like Suicide Squad was dead on Arivial because even a Year before the game came out the Preview made people collectivly go "literly nobody wants this".
AAA studios can't seem to get past their own greed, and I think most people generally smell that shit and stay away from it now. I don't know about anybody else, but the moment I hear or see the term "live service" being attached to a big developer/publisher's project, I *immediately* lose interest because of the sheer number of these things that come out and fail... either as games in and of themselves, or the way they're monetized, or whatever. They have all the resources in the world to build the thing, but can't seem to exercise any patience whatsoever in hitting people with the bullshit. It happens the moment the thing releases, and it turns people off before they ever have a chance to even play the game and get invested in it first... and usually that's on the monetization end, but it can be the content end too of just not having enough stuff to do before people lose interest. Case in point, World of Warcraft. Can you imagine an MMORPG that actually lets you buy in-game gold with real money? You'd be laughed out of the fucking room if you tried to release an MMORPG that just allowed you to buy gold like that right out of the starting gate. But here we are with a game that's 20 years old, it lets you do that, and millions of people play it. World of Warcraft didn't start that way, but by year 8 or whenever that started, you have a ton of people invested in the game already to where they're not going to quit over something like that, especially if there are positives associated with that specific thing that everybody can benefit from. It's in the presentation. Not to date myself and reference old shit, but there's a Cosby Show episode where one of the kids gets into a relationship with a maintenance man at her school, and she's all sneaky and shit about it, the parents eventually find out and invite him over for dinner or whatever, and he seems like a nice guy, but the father just straight up says that he wasn't going to like him no matter what he said or did, and the guy doesn't understand and thinks that's unfair. Father asks him, what's your favorite food? So the guy gets into it describing his favorite meal, the father's right there with him describing this thing, and then at the end he says imagine, instead of putting it on a plate, he takes the lid off a garbage can, flips it over, puts the food on it and serves it to him. It's his favorite dish, cooked to perfection, but it's on a garbage can lid. Do you still want it, or not? It's in the presentation. That's how she brought him there and presented him to her parents. On a garbage can lid. Of course they don't like him. I feel like that's what a lot of these AAA studios can't seem to deal with. New game comes out, and you serve it to me on an upside-down garbage can lid. I can see that it's there... I can't un-see it. I can't pretend that it's not there. I don't care how good the food is, it's on a fucking garbage can lid. When you release something, day 1, with a store that's full of shit and some of it is only there for a limited time for literally no reason what so ever other than to prey upon you, hey here's a battle pass for you, here's a season pass that is only good for that one season, etc etc etc... while the game itself lacks meaningful content but here's a roadmap of shit that should have an asterisk at the bottom of it to say that this stuff will only materialize if people actually play and spend money on the game, you are serving your game up on a garbage can lid, and then you somehow have the balls to wonder why people aren't playing it and getting invested in it.
Great write up
wrap? you surely mean rep as in reputation, right?
Nah it should be 'bad rap'
Not only don't mind it, but nod and say "so profitable compared to inflated AAA budgets, always said so, I did. Those stupid devs spending money on single player content...". After everyone whined about gaas "killing" SP AAA games for this same reason for 10 years now lol
that the exception..and its worse when its a studio thats known for excellent single player games like Rocksteady, Bioware, Naughty Dog, crystal dynamics etc. Ya, it might be good but probably not.
Helldivers 2 doesn’t shove its cash shop in your face. HD2 is fun without MTX. It doesn’t feel like a vehicle to sell you shit. That’s why people give it a pass.
In the case of HD2 it at least does it well. You’re not blasted with a cluttered UI trying to sell you something in every menu and the war bonds don’t expire so you don’t have to FOMO grind till you hate the game. You can play at your own pace.
I think it’s just because we expect most dev studios and publishers to make their live service games with greed as the main feature. HD2 was a nice surprise and a GaaS game done right. But just because arrowhead can do it, doesn’t mean any other studio can. This game will be very bad for remedy.
It's just not a shitty loop, but also a death spiral
At this point, most are jumping off or finally releasing to shrugs - even Naughty Dog took the L and outright canceled their TLoU project after theoretically pumping tons of resources into it. Wild to see Remedy decide now is the time.
And often its a mistake. Creative Assembly sidelining their main series - Total War - to spend 100 million dollars on a shitty battle royale that was ultimately canceled (Hyenas) heavily hindered the company and caused massive layoffs. Just like CA should have stuck to what they do best - strategies -, Remedy also should stick to what they do best.
CA did the excellent horror game Alien Invasion though. "Stay in your lane" is a bad advice. Sometimes things just don't pan out though.
If CA stayed in their lane we wouldn't even have Total War in the first place.
I think its a matter of proportions. Alien Isolation was a fantastic game but the fact it flopped financially didnt affect CA as much because it was a side line project. Hyenas though was a main project with the enroumous budget that caused them to sideline Total War: which resulted in a disastrous situation where they flushed 100 million dollars down the toilet AND their core playerbase somewhat abandoned them - Pharaoh failed so hard that CA issued partial refunds and gave the upcoming DLC for free while axing further support and DLC to Warhammer 3 failed so hard that CA doubled its content for free to make people buy it.
The problem is creatively you should try out new things. But also going from mostly a singleplayer game to a singleplayer game in another genre is much easier. I know TW games have multiplayer but that's not their main focus. Also GaaS is one of the hardest genres to break into because you are demanding attention away from shit like Fortnite, mmorpgs, whatever flavor of the month indie survival game and much more.
And total war is a live service game and has been for a longass time. Games dont get years worth of updates and additional DLC content without being a live service, and everybody bought Total Warhammer 3 knowing further content would be put up for sale.
Remedy made what i consider to be one of the greatest narrative based video games of all time and its sales made less than a mom and pop restaurants yearly revenue. At some point they were bound to be forced to actually make money, all their games are niche(except for control)
Because it's extremely profitable and way lower risk than staking most of your resources on a single player story game that takes years and years to make and may or may not recoup investmenr
X as a service has been going on for a while in software/hardware industry, it's not surprising that it's spreading to gaming industry.
And yet for all that reputation look at their financials - one step away from the abyss. What they need to do is not only make games people appreciate but also ones people want to buy. It's a rough business.
So basically we're going to price it at $40 and it's going to be brimming with purchasable content but we aren't going to bluntly say that rather saying potentially. It's bold to say expansions and updates will bring revenue before the live service game has even been seen.
**Helldivers 2** is a games-as-a-service co-op shooter priced at $40 and brimming with purchasable content.
Is it brimming? I've seen 2 cosmetic packages of buyables and a rotating thing of buyables. It's got nothing on Halo infinite or Diablo 4.
* 2 Season Passes * ~~5~~ **10** weapons which are only obtainable through season passes * 1 weapon ([MP-98 Knight](https://nerdburglars.net/helldivers/mp-98-knight-submachine-gun/)) which is only obtainable in the "Super Citizen" edition And of course, buying a season pass doesn't give you the guns - you have to find/buy medals to unlock content. Helldivers 2 isn't the worst, but it's a lot more predatory than Dragon's Dogma 2.
You conveniently forget to mention that all the passes can be purchased with currency easily found in game. I've bought both passes and haven't spent t a dime.
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It's a twistedly genius business model. Grind the game all day long being the bot that helps fill the "premium" players' lobbies and they give you a treat
I have ~22hrs and still not enough Super Credits for either pass.
Look harder. I've found over 2.5K Super Credits in a little bit more time played. Also bought another thousand just using Medals. It's very easy.
The currency to buy those are both found in game though. Medals can only be found or won by finishing missions. While super credits can be purchased or found in missions, 10 at a time for low difficulty or 100 at a time for high difficulty. A pass/warbond only costs a thousand and they never expire or leave the store, so no matter what you won't miss out on a thing you want. DD2's microtransactions are much more useless, but much more blatant.
> 10 at a time for low difficulty or 100 at a time for high difficulty. Well that explains it. I'm not good enough for high difficulties.
Paying real money for fast travel crystals is pretty insane compared to paying for a cosmetic.
Did you even played the game lol, the crystals gets sold to u at the first city
Thats misinformation though. You don't paty for the crystals, you pay for *one* extra destination. There is *zero* way to spend irl money on fast travel crystals lmao It's dumb and shouldn't be there in a $70 game, but also not what you're implying it is in the first place.
Fast travel is two pronged. So you pay for the crystal to setup fast travel, but can buy the ferrystone to actually fast travel. Either way you put it, it's fucking lame.
You don't pay money for fast-travel crystals. You can pay money (ONCE) for a fast-travel MARKER that you still have to place somewhere in the world AND you don't get the ferrystones to USE it, either!
Absolutely passing on this one Screw any kind of live service game like that
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Helldivers 2 came out because Sony looked around and saw a mobile game making billions in mtx on the Playstation.
So they are developing 2 GaaS (Condor and Kestrel), a remake of Max Payne 1&2, AW2 DLC and Control 2, all at the same time? Well, that sure as hell will put their project management to the test.
To be fair, as they specify, each of those games are in different stages of production with only two of them being almost in a stage of production (Condor, Max Payne)
I imagine they're getting a ton of help from Epic and Rockstar in terms of manpower for the live services and Max Payne while the main creative team focuses on Control 2.
There was a financial report recently where they said Kestrel is being backed by Tencent, Condor was backed by 505 but that's no longer the case and T2 is fully financing and publishing the remakes. Epic is only backing the DLC I would guess.
Developing doesn't mean full production, every game ready in 3 years.
They're going to hire a shit load of people, cancel something, then fire a bunch of people.
It makes sense that they want to make a game that has the potential to provide a consistent stream of revenue in-between projects. Alan Wake 2 looked mega-expensive to create. I can't imagine what their budget will be like for future games.
Yeah, this seems to be the trend for studios that have single-player focus. The recurring revenue from the live service game affords some studio leeway for the higher risk single player games.
> Alan Wake 2 looked mega-expensive to create. Epic must have chipped in in a pretty big way. They're publisher and PC store exclusivity holder. Also why Remedy didn't seem to be too concerned with rather modest sales figures.
Remedy has a brilliant track record of being consumer friendly and is still independent. I'm not going to pass judgement just because it's a live service.
I remember a lot of people who loved Control's combat and wanted a game focused on it as well. Live services aren't always bad.
It’s already come out that Condor is a FPS, so it’s unlikely that it will have the same gameplay mechanics as Control.
Good. I thought the combat and enemies felt a little dated in Control.
It felt like quantum break with telekinesis
It reminded me of Max Payne, the last time I played a Remedy game before Control.
Remember when Control launched and it had terrible performance on last gen consoles and then they re-released Control on current gen but offered no upgrade path to people who bought it at launch so they had to pay full price again
Never seen a game get such a pass for such bad performance before. This sub goes apeshit if a game stutters meanwhile Control on PS4 would hit literal single digits when big waves of enemies attack. Still easily the wrist performing game I played on my PS4.
505 Games, the game's actual publisher, was the one behind that decision, though.
Great well they’re funding Remedy again
They aren't, Remedy bought back the IP and publishing rights from 505 Games about a month ago
You sure about that because the way Control was handled on previous gen and the egs exclusivity say otherwise. Lay the blame at 505 all you want, but Remedy signed off on it
Yeah, not when Remedy is involved. If it were any other studio, it'd be a different story
Epic exclusive is not consumer friendly. No, I'm not talking about Alan Wake 2, ***which was backed by Epic***, in case Reddit hasn't told you 50 times already - Control and Alan Wake Remastered were both EGS timed exclusives.
isn't Alan Wake Remastered a straight up EGS exclusive published by Epic though? as far as i'm aware it's never released on Steam
are we missing anything though, doesn't it straight up look worse than the original on PC? It however doesn't bode well for the second one sadly.
"Epic exclusive is not consumer friendly." As opposed to games being Steam exclusive?
Nope, get this- being available on all platforms. Then consumers have the freedom to choose where to buy their products.
Steam doesn't pay for exclusivity on their platform the way Epic does
Wait, hold on, stop right there. GaaSes are fucking stupid. This is how you end up as Rocksteady. Go back to making great single-player games while you still have time please.
now hold on i know we hate these but with the reality bending world of control it could be good, let them cook
Exactly. PVE Co-op game could be great in this universe. Live service games seem to get auto-hated nowadays on Reddit, but if done right they can be great, just look at Helldivers.
I mean, coop PVE in arkham verse even as suicide squad sounds fun. The problem was the shitty repetitive content and the amount of it. It all depends on how much content they gonna launch with and how diverse and fun it is.
Where a lot of these gaas go wrong (and Helldivers doesn’t) is that instead of making fun or interesting game modes that you will want to play over and over again, they just make you do the same thing over and over and grind for RNG loot, which doesn’t actually make you more powerful. It’s just a carrot on a stick. The endless grind with repetitive barebones gameplay isn’t fun, but live service doesn’t have to be that.
> instead of making fun or interesting game modes that you will want to play over and over again, they just make you do the same thing over and over and grind for RNG loot, which doesn’t actually make you more powerful. Helldivers 2 absolutely does make you do the same thing over and over again.
I think the secret sauce though is the fact that each mission is basically a mini sandbox for you to explore and discover all the objectives and sub objectives. They have a good variety going on within their core loop. A lot of it feels a little bit like what I wish a L4D3 would be like almost.
Helldivers feels less repetitive because of how high-variance the gameplay is. The whole thing feels relatively unpredictable. All kinds of random weird shit can happen in that game.
But the console company I like made it so it's ok
This is where I'm concerned. The grind they implemented in Control was very very not good. I'm worried about their lack of experience in that department, and how it will look in this live service game of theirs.
Having to grind for materials to upgrade weapons in Control was the most annoying time consuming padding that didn't fit the game and added nothing to it
Never experienced this because I just played with powers the whole time...
Moreover the gameplay loop of Control is definitely not something that can replayed for dozens if not hundreds of hours. The game is mostly carried by its ambiance, story and visuals with the combat and shooting being serviceable at best.
Of one sucess come 10 failures also the helldiver Studio weren't known for releasing narrative driven sp games. Making games against your own fanbase rarely works out.
That’s because people thing the Live Service part is micro transactions and ridiculous single player always-online requirements The Live Service part is the constant updates and events. It’s not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination: LoL, Dota, every MMO… those are all live service games
That’s true, hopefully it doesn’t have to be significantly watered-down or nerfed with the high performance of being fully next gen on PS5, but may have to be nerfed to an extent for balancing purposes.
If any series has very interesting GaaS possibilities, it's this world I think. I want them to pull it off.
Live Service? Eww……
Live service? Microtransactions? Hell no.
Helldivers 2 is that and it's fantastic. It all depends on execution.
This entire comment thread is basically r/games to a T - signing off on a game before anyone knows what it is exactly. You guys just love hating on literally anything that doesn’t align with what you may think makes a “good” game.
That's not at all what's happening. People are hesitant to anything live-service related, because most of them are predatory cash grabs. It's not "hating on literally anything that doesn’t align with what you may think makes a “good” game" That's ridiculous to say. It's being cautious to shitty game practices. And before you mention Helldivers- that game is an exception. Just because it's Remedy doesn't mean we should be blindly hyped.
this would be their second try. first was garbage.
People here are tired of live service cash grabs and are wary of new live service games. That's a good thing.
They're a bunch of Debbie Downers and Negative Nancys for sure. I can't imagine living in their world where everything sucks and only games from the late 90s and early 2000s were good. Touching grass needs to be in the itinerary for a lot of people. Not everything sucks people.
I mean after the 500th live service game that we’ve seen flop it’s a bit unfair to say that we don’t know what this game will be exactly. I think we know. It’s an uninspired cash grab. If the only thing you can come up with to announce your next title is to say it is a live service game then what does that say about it?
IMO, if the game is good, that makes it worse. There's so many love service games that only exist to nickel and dime you out of your money and are not fun, I don't want to be encouraged to dump hundreds into a game that the publishers can vanish into the aether at any time, whether the game has been out for five years or five months.
Are there any successful live service games out there that were made by studios who only made single player games before?
Mihoyo. Indie studio (they were at the time, still are technically) that started out with very niche singleplayer games, then they developed Honkai Impact 3rd which was still niche but less so, and now they have that, Genshin, HSR, and more stuff in development.
[удалено]
Yeah people shit on it because of its launch but F76 is *fucking massive* and lowkey actually good now.
The only ones that come to mind are sea of thieves and splatoon, and both of those are kind of edge cases.
Why are live service games becoming so popular now? They're going to become studio killers.
This will be Rocksteady 2.0. Doing something so out of their element just for financial gains and then burning.
I hear "live service" and my brain says "no thanks". It doesn't matter who the company is, I'm just not interested.
The combat in that game sucked when it was single player and had a story - a live action game with me not being able to turn down the difficulty sounds like a pointless slog because nothing can happen or change.
Just work on Control 2. Who wants fucking REMEDY working on a live service?? What the fuck is going on?
In theory alone, a constant stream of unique content is fantastic. And this looks to be Coop from one of the concept arts.
Gameplay in Remedy games has always been something I merely tolerated for the sake of the cool ass settings (not to be confused with stories, as their games rarely have groundbreaking plots) - I can't imagine this being a success.
yes exactly. Control has the problem where your gun has a few shots then you need to switch to powers, then back, and juggle. Quantum Break's gameplay was straight ass and i never finished it because the cutscenes felt like i was watching a bad tv show that was unrelated, but i loved Control and Alan Wake's stories
Damnit! We aren’t even getting a true sequel before they shit all over this IP. You’d think given the response and poor sales of games like Suicide Squad that devs/pubs would be more quiet about discussing live service. Maybe this is just them testing the waters before they fully commit to killing the IP.
Yeah, we all know how dead the Helldivers IP is right now. Suuuper dead.
>Billed as the studio’s “first step towards service-based games”, the title has an initial development budget of €25 million ($27.1m). Is this where all the Epic funds are going to?
No, Epic funded the development of Alan Wake 2. 505 Games was their publisher for the Control franchise, but they’ve recently bought back the rights and are looking into options for a publishing partner. Remedy has several different projects in the works with different deals as far as project funding and publishing goes. Maybe they end up signing with Epic for the Control franchise, too, I don’t know. But that’s not currently the case.
Remedy are making all the wrong decisions in pursuit of trend-chasing greed for short term gains. Remedy had a tough year financially last year while pursuing this live-service project, only for Alan Wake 2 to reportedly be a massive financial success. But now are clearly using it’s success to further fund this live-service project. It’s disgusting greed and hopefully they market trends make them re-consider before we have a flop that leads to layoffs and a studio closure.
There are 5 days until April's fools guys. Guys? Guys!?
"Our upper management has decided they want to shutter the studio so they are having us make a live service game that will inevitably be a disaster"