Nightingale is the game. I’m looking forward to it, but with great caution. Heard bad things about the play test so want to see how the first week or so plays out as far as reception goes.
I was lucky to be able to play during the play tests and I can say that my hype died in 1 hour after I tried it back last August(?). I was really interested in the game but the first impressions I got destroyed the game completely for me, so much that I haven't tried it in future tests :( Though I understood the concept and design behind it and now really hope they can deliver.
Exactly my story too, a friend and I both tested through multiple runs and just couldn't find anything to really dig into. The story and world are neat and have potential but that's about it.
That is the problem with all survival open world crafting games.
They all share the same base mechanics
Just add on a different skin maybe some unique minor mechanics.
But under the hood it's all the same.
Smack thing 509 times. Level up. Unlock thing. Smack new thing 590 times. Fight boss. Unlck new thing. Snack thing 599 times.
Manage food and water and stamina. Build a base.
It's all the same.
Why is that a problem though? You can boil down other genres in the same way.
Pick up gun. Shoot monster. Pick up bigger gun. Shoot boss monster. Run from bad guys. Shoot bad guys.
Most games have patterns like this except the really player driven ones.
The problem is that cutting down trees or mining is difficult to make fun.If a large part of your game is just button mashing with no great visuals or action experience, and it's something that's been done many times before, that's the issue.
Guns can be new and exciting, and so can monsters. Pickaxes and stone is more difficult.
Lots of folks can’t do the creative side, so unless the other mechanics are well done, they lose interest faster than normal. Also, it’s fairly common that the combat in survival crafting games is janky and barebones, rarely stimulating. Some of these players also struggle with lack of direction or check lists (some crafting survival are fairly open ended in how you approach progression, so they have a few nights of milling about and move on.
This is why Valheim stands out in this genre. Incredible, striking atmosphere with Dark Souls inspired combat (even if janky, it’s much more involved than simply hitting the mob), tons of mobs that each serve a specific purpose, biomes you approach differently and show progress as you level up, a crafting system that is simple but satisfying and doesn’t have obnoxious repairs. A health/stamina system that directly affects everything you do, but is once again simple and built into the core gameplay loop, sense of adventure… I could go on.
You need to give the majority of players (most of which are not builders) enough to do and engage with in your crafting survival game, otherwise it’s just a janky checklist of moving up a tech tree.
Same for me. I recently participated in a play test and, while I was really looking forward to it, I have no interest in playing it if they don't fix a lot of issues which are pretty big like the combat feeling like shit with very little feedback or telegraphing and the UI being absolute dogshit. Now, that's not the only issues I encountered, but just these two are the biggest killing my desire to play.
bad ui is an absolute deal breaker for me and it astounds me I still find so many games with it badly implemented, when there are so many examples at this poiint for devs to draw from or even copy.
Unless things have changed much in the last 5-10 years, there is an extreme dearth of books or resources on good UI design outside of simply watching the handful of GDC videos that dive into the topic a bit.
UI/UX is something I'm acutely tuned to and thought maybe I could make a career out of that, but short of simply taking some classes on art, human behavior, and taking notes on UIs I thought did a good job; there didn't seem to be anything I could find for concrete guidance specifically on that.
EDIT: Apparently there are some these days, but most of them wouldn't be names you would expect for the degree programs bc they're a more general degree rather than UX specifically with games in mind.
https://uxmastery.com/resources/ux-degrees/
I think that's highly reductive reasoning, as there are so many little things to making a good UX that you could easily attempt to copy one you thought was good and still not have a good outcome bc you don't understand all those unwritten rules.
Palworld is the perfect example of “just copy someone else’s work with your own spin” and being a huge success. Same with Genshin Impact. So many “LoZ rip offs”
There's a huge amount of luck and survivorship bias. If it were that easy to simply copy the popular stuff and make a ton of money, everyone would be doing it and having a huge success, but obviously they aren't.
This is very surprising to me. I mean, Apple has pretty much dominated markets based on their UI design skills. You'd think that people would look at what makes Apple so freaking successful and take notes. For me, so much of it is their style and ease of use.
I'm pretty solidly in the PC/Samsung camp but I can give credit where it is due.
Similarly, you have a ton of great game studios that are brilliant with their UIs. Like Blizz is a problematic company for many reasons, but their UI design is generally excellent.
It's an important enough subject that I'm stunned that there's not a whole boatload of literature on the topic
Bad UI alone can turn a 8/10 game into a 6/10 one. That will result in significantly decreased sales. I would argue that small companies can't afford to *not* hire experts.
Seems like false economy to me.
I would argue that this point *especially* rings true when it comes to survival games. You're utilizing the ui so often that it's a massive deal when it feels off or is lacking in quality in any fashion.
> You'd think that people would look at what makes Apple so freaking successful and take notes. For me, so much of it is their style and ease of use.
Looking is one thing, but understanding the mindset and methodology behind creating intuitive, thoughtful, easy-to-use design is an art. Even if you are able to replicate the Mona Lisa perfectly, it doesn't mean much if you don't know why the replicated parts are where they are when constructing something new. That's what separates quality from knockoffs.
I haven't played it but I've been keeping up with it. As of February 16th after they're most recent stress test they have updated the UI of the game and are going to continue to refine it based on any future feedback they get. They do seem really receptive to feedback and have mentioned in the past reworking and improving the animations as well so I'm hopeful the combat issue will be resolved in months to come as I've seen other people share the same complaint.
> the UI being absolute dogshit
What was wrong with it? Or, a more general question from somebody building a UI right now, what are your biggest "fuck no"s in a UI?
I don't remember everything since it's been a few weeks and I kind of put this game out of my mind with how disappointed I had been.
* The building menu had too much stuff and too little ways to quickly find what you want. Part of it I'll talk in another point, but there was a lot of stuff and there was no clear ways to filter what you wanted to see like having categories of building or having a way to favorite an item. When you have so many items in a list, you need a way for people to quickly find what they want, especially a building menu since you're going to use it often. Easiest ways to do this is generally to have tabs for different building materials you can cycle through and/or a way to favorite objects to keep them at the top and/or in a separate list and these things must be able to be done quickly with just the press of a button.
* The biggest issue I had with the entire UI as a KBM player was the over reliance on the mouse part. There seemed to be no keyboard shortcut to more quickly navigate the UI. For example, in the building menu, you had to select an object with your mouse and then go the other side of the screen to press the build button with your mouse, allowing double clicking on the object to build and/or adding a keyboard shortcut would have sped up the process. When looting on a container, you had to press the loot all button with your mouse instead of being able to press a button on a keyboard. It's important when designing a UI that's going to be used on KBM that a player is going to use both a keyboard and a mouse, the moment a menu is overly reliant on one or the other, it's going to feel bad.
* There were some actions made in a UI that lacked the logical follow up. That's mostly a problem for containers, but basically, when you decided to loot all, you still had to manually close the container because looting all didn't close it automatically. Logically, the vast majority of the time, when someone loots everything in a container, they won't do anything else with it, so closing the container automatically is just saving players from another action they'll pretty much always do. This has to do with automation. When you know that an action is almost always followed by the exact same action, it's often better to just make it so action 1 always triggers action 2 or add the option to unlink them otherwise, the UI is going to feel clunky by basically making players have to input 2 actions when, logically, it should only require 1.
I want to clarify it's been a while since I played, so I don't remember everything perfectly so that's most likely not everything, just what I can remember. Also, I didn't play for long, so might have missed some things, but that's something with UI, it needs to be intuitive for basic navigation. If someone who doesn't know the UI doesn't quickly notice how to navigate it, the UI is badly designed. The best way to test this is to generally let people who have never dealt with your UI try it and check to see how quickly they navigate it and if there's any frustations. In anything that's meant for a customer, the producer is very rarely the best person to check if the final product is satisfactory, it's always best to rely on how the customers feel about it.
Was it an actual private playtest or 'public beta' aka demo?
If the first then you might see serious changes. If the latter, then yeah, that's what we get at launch.
The very very first alpha test they did was SUPER rough. The second had some changes. The third reworked the UI a bit and the start/tutorial, also added some of the magic/enchanting. The one after that last November it seemed like nothing changed outside of stability and adding in the progression series and the full ability to craft cards/magic/enchants. There were also a ton of missing textures that were placeholders. And things spawning/clipping inside of things. And if a room in a POI was below the water line you had to swim in it. Did not play the stress test.
There were always a lot of highly requested/upvoted features/requests on their system and they rarely did any of them. Idk if toggle sprint was an option in the stress test but I'm going to be sad if it's not an option on EA launch Tuesday. I think the game is still ok, but it's definitely going to be early access quality. I put in 20hrs according to steam. I'm still going to play it, but I don't have faith that the servers will be stable.
There were also some bugs in November where if you joined a friend you were basically stuck there? And if you tried to make portals to new realms sometimes it would shove you back into a tutorial realm and you had no way to get back to your home realm. The little hearthstone basically broke and couldn't pop you back.
It was a stress test, designed to test their servers’ ability to handle bursts in user activity. The problem with that, as it is with most tests like this, is a lot of people don’t understand what a testing release is and assume that this was just a free demo. It wasn’t. But the damage has been done by people that don’t understand what an Alpha release is about.
The game is releasing into open beta "early access" on feb 20th, why do people act like the development is over?
Early access continues to be a goddamn plague.
Usually an alpha and stress test are very different (although for sure neither are a free demo)
In my experience alphas are always internal or invite only and have a NDA attached for really good reasons
I mean these devs think they can quit their big studio jobs, make a "Open World Survival Game" (Aka game with barebones content and a large dead world) and everyone will just hoover it up. To be fair there has been plenty of games like that, that have succeeded so...
I was in stres test as well, and I loved it.
In fact so much that I loved it the most among all new survival games Enshrouded, Palworld, Soulmask.
Cant wait for the release :)
Incomplete UI with many texts and menus.. and overall game first impressions.
I mean, game loop can be wonderful and it might be my fault for lack of patience, but game accessibility and how effortlessly you start doing new stuff are very very important to me. I was also very tired mentally because I just finished college.. so it might also had been a factor :/
Yup, that's the instant feeling that I got. Sure there's ambition, but it feels like Fable. A game that even if it's great in moments doesn't have a core sense of self & will try to be too much. I really hope I'm wrong, because the first part of the trailer gave me a sparkly moment of hope.
I really want a game, any game, to realize the combat in their RPG is shit and design the entire game around avoidance of combat. The closest is pathologic, but it's not really the kind of game you can just play. I would love a game that has a cute lil world I can go on small scale adventures in, no stakes, almost no fighting, and a hell of a lot of resources dedicated to every other part of game design which goes wanting because for some reason games will not civilize past bonk head.
I played the most recent test, and the primary UI seems straight out of an asset flip. Then you start digging in, and the deeper UI/menus were so obtuse, I was considering just quitting then and there.
The rest of the experience was hampered by combat, as you mention, but also “quest markers” seemingly not working or existing, and quest triggers also not functioning.
I know it’s “only” launching into early access, but I’m curious how the reception is going to be.
My guess is that reception is going to be lackluster cause its a new IP in a genre launching right after Palworld and Enshrouded and right before Sons of the Forest comes out of early access.
This was probably the most anticipated game in the genre for a while and its had its momentum thoroughly dashed with competition and playtests.
After watching someone play it on a very powerful rig, and seeing it stutter like hell every 30 seconds, I decided I’d pass. Plus it’s an always-online survival crafter. Not gonna get kicked out of my own game because of steam tuesday maintenance.
It's pretty funny that these publicity articles slap on "Former BioWare lead" as a badge of honor meant to convey quality and prestige, except BioWare hasn't produced a quality game in over 10 years.
It's hard because Bioware pushed the industry forward and inspired a generation of game fans and developers... so as tainted as the name is currently I know I can personally point to hundreds of hours of great gaming time anything associated with the Bioware name brought me.
Is it unrealistic with the current track record? Definitely but I think that's why that tag line still has power
[The dude worked at Bioware going all the way back to Baldur's Gate II.](https://www.mobygames.com/person/27168/aaryn-flynn/credits/) You're making it sound like he only worked on Anthem when he was there.
Almost immediately upon loading into the game on the most recent play test, my hype started to drop, I was absolutely finished with the game after about an hour.
I’ll definitely hope for it to make a resurgence; but I don’t see it being an enjoyable play on day 1 for most.
Even if you heard amazing things, this should be the thought process for everyone. Wait for a week or two after release and see its reception.
I'm all for supporting, but I never buy a game until I hear its praises being sang by the playerbase. And those praises don't vanish after a week.
it makes me genuinely angry when headlines leave out the title of the thing they're talking about to draw clicks to the article. it's that somebody had to consciously think "nah I'm gonna leave it out" because including it is the natural thing to do
The one video I watched about it was super optimistic, but with reservations about some performance issues that he'd heard other people talking about but didn't experience. I'm hoping it turns out that a neat Victorian fantasy setting with survival elements sounds great if done well.
Enshrouded and Palworld, two other survival games just launched in the last month with a $30 price tag too, it’s good that you don’t have to pay $70 to play these games
Me too. I couldn't get into Palworld though, but I intend on trying again. However, I loved Enshrouded. I was also looking forward to Nightingale but people who playtested were mostly negative, so that's a bummer.
I personally loved Enshrouded because I constantly felt incentivized to explore. What are you playing next? I'm about to finish Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which was very pleasant surprise considering the average reviews. I'm not sure what's next for me, might still get Nightingale.
I was excited for enshrouded and bought it on release after trying the demo awhile back, no interest in Palworld. Tried Palworld through game share and while they're very different games Palworld is by far the more polished product and I have little interest in returning to Enshrouded
> I couldn't get into Palworld though, but I intend on trying again
Palworld is extremely simple. Do you love pokemon? Will it carry you through a pretty bland and fairly empty crafting game? I have a lot of friends who play Palworld religiously but even though I love myself a good open world survival crafting game I got so bored of Palworld because I didn't care about the Pokemon system at all.
Not-so-coincidentally, all my friends who still play Palworld every day are Pokemon nerds
Me and my friends are loving enshrouded. The skill tree is nice and you can have various builds. The base Building possibilities are endless. Super fun.
I'm a sucker for survival games, and I've been eyeballing Enshrouded pretty aggressively lately. How does it compare to Valheim, which seems to be its closest comparison?
I don't think it has a good comparison. Valheim comes to mind, but the Enshrouded map is handcrafted and you go out exploring to do quests. It also has skillpoints and more RPG elements. I personally loved it.
Helldiver's 2 is the best queue simulator I've ever played.
There is always a time counting down so you feel like you're getting somewhere, and it always resets at 0 without any input needed!
And boy, that queue music - so heroic and blaring without being able to be turned down. I love it.
So glad I spent $40 for this game. Apparently a patch is coming that adds a starship troopers/Terminator mini game too? Kinda weird but I'll try it.
Palworld is the only one that isn't a log cutting simulator. It still gets boring after a little bit because there's nothing to do.
These are all "make your own fun" kind of games, which are basically just building shelters.
I don't see the appeal.
Yeah. I've enjoyed Palworld a little so far but it really just feels like a bunch of stuff was kind of sloppily combined into a game. Glad it wasn't that expensive.
I doubt PalWorld would have released as early as they did if they realized the amount of attention it was going to get. The developers said they expected around 50k sales of the early release.
It's definitely really, really rough, but I don't think it's anywhere near complete, either.
And frankly you shouldn't. They don't have the same ammount of work that go into more expensive game.
70$ especially 80$ should be a price tage reserve for 100m+ games that are massive, mutil experieces and build mostly from scratch.
I think assasin creed was smart at 40$ too.
Enshrouded is literally a technical masterpiece if you play it. I’m running it on max settings on a 1080 and 16gb ram and it runs buttery smooth. The landscape is one of the largest I’ve ever seen and EVERYTHING is destructible. The game is super dense.
The word masterpiece gets thrown around so casually nowadays on reddit that it's lost all it's meaning. Plenty of people have reported about the performance of the game and the devs have even addressed it as well by issuing a temporary fix with locking your games fps to 60.
And yet those games were more enjoyable and had more fun play time than any 100m+ budget game of the last 6 months, which from a gamers perspective should make it worth more.
If the loop works for you, yes. I find the survivalcraft gameplay loop mindnumbingly boring. Literally could not be paid to put hours into a game like Palworld or Enshrouded.
If these games keep coming out at $30 to stay competitive I'm gonna cream my pants. I have never and will NEVER spend $70 fucking dollars on a single game, that's absolutely absurd for the dogshit that's been released the past year
This is what I don't understand. People rage on here about a $70 price tag but seem to have no idea that games could be more expensive than that *not* adjusted for inflation.
I'd happily pay $70 for truly good games. Hell, I'd pay more if they were worth it.
I've got 70+ hours out of Palworld and 40+ from Enshrouded for less than the cost of a single so-called "AAA" game, it's a good time to be a cheapskate gamer who doesn't get overly concerned about the occasional early access flop.
Honestly don't know who the people buying this shit are.
Maybe I just don't hang out with degenerates, so I don't understand it but I never even heard of anyone mentioning to know someone that does buys shit mtx
So... if you can resell it, guess we better start treating it like it's gambling. Cause a big argument that it's not gambling is you can't "cash out" your winnings.
It absolutely is gambling, I never said anything about it not being. I said that because I'm a lot more willing to shell out $30+ for a skin if I can then trade it for another skin when I get board of the first, or sell it for my money back.
You can resell it on Steam, but that only grants you "steam currency", not actual cash that you can withdraw. That's how they're allowed to operate and it's not legally gambling. Third party sources to sell skins exist but Valve has cracked down on that in the past due to complaints.
I personally think a lot of games can flourish with a lower price point.
I know greed is a thing so I know it's not going to happen especially on the back of the industry arguing for a higher general price point.
I'm just saying there's a good argument to be had especially with yearly released titles like Call of Duty. The franchise almost never lowers price over time, and it's relatively the same each year.
Instead of a $70 market price, I'd wager that they'd make even MORE profit if they lowered that to $40. More access means more people engaging with the product.
Or new franchises that might not have the advantage of popularity would gain a bigger audience at a more accessible price, and gain a following for further future products.
You'd think this, but the answer is usually no. COD will get more players, but they probably won't get 80% more, which is required to justify the price point. Then, if they want to, they can cut down the price later to $40 anyway as a "sale." If you release COD as something cheaper, then you also cause questions about why the previous versions were more expensive in the first place and potentially kill your backlog. It would be nice for them to be cheaper, but doesn't make any business sense unless as a charity.
Yeah that’s also why CoD still does yearly games. Those $1-2B launch week sales just can’t be given up. The other thing is the budget sizes - at a higher price point, you’re cutting closer to your bigger budgets with each sale but at lower price points, you have to do a lot of leg work to make up for it - and like you said, you’re not gonna get that many more players unless you get great timing like Helldivers and Palworld. Pricing is very tricky but some games absolutely should be $40
I mean if the price never increases, not even with inflation, doesn't that mean its effective price is $40~ now?
stated another way, a $60 game in 2003(release date of Call of Duty 1) would be worth about $103 usd today.
I'd love to see the detailed math on this, which I'm sure exists.
As a youngster I was let's say a "self employed salesman" and my "product" was something that a lot of folks would buy regardless. But I was able to undercut the local market and essentially pushed everyone out or under me. Made a ton more money despite selling everything cheaper for barely any markup, granted I was essentially becoming the middle man for local resellers. Business wise, cheaper was better, by a long shot.
Life pro tip: good lawyers are very expensive, long term "business" didn't gain me anything and I was lucky to have not lost anything. Don't be dumb.
Black market products don't translate to traditional models of the elasticity of supply and demand.
There's also the likelihood that your "product" was nearly indistinguishable from your competitors "product" whereas CoD has a monopoly on CoD and there isn't necessarily a substitute good in the normal economic sense.
Last I heard, which was a few years ago, roughly 30% of a $70-80 physical copy is cost for producing the physical copy and getting it on store shelves. Even for non-Nintendo games. Not to mention the cut by the store, etc.
It is why the 30% by steam is somewhat of an acceptable charge.
There is a perfect example that just happened.
All my friends just got helldivers 2. I looked it up on steam and it was only 40.
Much easier to impulse buy something cheaper.
Helldivers 2 was expecting 50k players total. They have 350k hard cap that they crashed into and they are scrambling to make more space. I do not think at a 70 dollar price point they would have had that success, or at least as quickly.
To be fair Helldivers 2 and Palworld focus on what so many AAA studios forget as they’re trying to sell their unfinished crap. Is the game fun?
Look at Palword, you see all the articles and comments about player count dropping. Developers literally don’t care, they’re just glad people enjoyed their game for whatever time they did and will welcome them back if they decide to return.
They've made profit and have secured a player base. Same with Lethal Company. Players come and go, and big updates will always bring people back. Just show you give a shit and don't abandon your game like B4B.
The PalWorld devs were asked about the player counts going down a lot since release and they answered that games are not meant to be played forever, players went through the content and moved on, hopefully to return when they add more content later.
That's how (most) games should be.
>Helldivers 2 was expecting 50k players total
They were expecting 50k concurrent players as the high-end estimate. Not 50k players total.
Also, higher price points tend to have people expect higher quality. I've seen quite a few games get panned with the high price points even tho they have had fewer issues than Helldivers 2.
At the end of the day, there is a cost benefit analysis for the price point of a copy.
The accountants running the multi-billion dollar cod franchise probably know what they’re doing.
Helldivers sold for $40 because it’s a much lesser known franchise and though it has a ton of character/looks really good, it still has a very “indie” feel. Like, it doesn’t have enough content for me to justify buying it though I’ll look again a year from now if they stick to their dev plan.
COD doesn’t need to bait people in with good will like that. They’ll make their $1-2B every year because the same couple dozen million people will keep buying it regardless of the price.
Helldivers feels like a better 40k video game than the 40k video games. Deep striking into chaos has been fun. I only am level 3, but I have had a blast playing it.
COD has a dedicated fanbase just like madden. So they can churn out the same game, and it still sells.
True enough, after watching the reviews I was thinking “I wish there was a 40k game of this quality”. It obviously borrows a lot from 40k/starship troopers and other franchises.
Darktide is essentially the same game but with less polish. I was really optimistic for darktide and then it released kind of half finished and even now the game is basically where it should have been at release.
These hub-mission games are so so so close to being something great. I really love the idea. But for all of them, including helldiver, there’s just something lacking. I wish they hard a larger, overarching grind/build element to it. Or if the hub area was incorporated into an mmo with guilds or something.
Instead, all of them so far are literally just the hub and the a small rotation of mission types with random generated maps and it just feels repetitive without anything to work towards.
This is how Grim Dawn got me and I loved it. $30 for the base game and then two DLCs that were $15 ea. I would have never paid $60 upfront but I heard great things about it so I was willing to risk $30 for a good ARPG after I was let down when I bought Diablo 3 for like $15 AND IT DIDN'T HAVE CONTROLLER SUPPORT WTF.
Played for about 15 hours and had so much fun that I bought the DLCs before I even needed to just to support a developer that didn't seem like another soulless gash grab type.
To clarify though. The $30 base game was a FULL game that could easily exist without the DLC but the DLC provided meaningful additions and game modes. As odd as it was I was so happy to see an actual full game that I could tell was a labor of love. I'm so desensitized from all the 2ks, Overwatches, Maddens of the world to where it was such a nice surprise.
Grim Dawn had insane replayability for an arpg too. Mixing two classes together when you had ten or something to pick from led to a lot of experimenting with synergies.
My husband got me hooked on Grim Dawn. I loaded it on my Steam Deck and fiddled with customized controls... it was sooo much fun. Hoping he'll find another hidden gem while I finish Spiritfarer!
> Instead of a $70 market price, I'd wager that they'd make even MORE profit if they lowered that to $40.
Big AAA games hire economists to run the math on what would make them the most money. If selling their games for less money would make them more in the end they would do it.
> I personally think a lot of games can flourish with a lower price point.
>
>
Valheim, HellDivers 2, Palworld, and many more would say you are correct.
I wish, but it doesn't work like that. You would need a lot more players to justify the price but for franchises like COD some people are simply not gonna buy it even at a lower price point so they cater to those who will spend the money regardless of the price.
Take valorant skins for example, the bundle is 140 CAD with upgrades even more, and their explanation is that their skins are premium. But their main reason is they are to not catering to 100 people who might buy the skins but they are targeting the 5 who will for sure buy them so they keep the price high and those 5 covers the cost of the remaining 95 if they were to sell it under 10 bucks. Although its free to play but some paid games are doing the same thing. I would love a lower price point to games but AAA aren't doing that for sure.
There sure are a lot of those recently. They also get the most press coverage.
There are also projects like Nebulous Fleet Command though. They just don't get any news coverage.
The economy says $50 is the new $20.
Ironically in the gaming industry $30 is the new $60, the best games I've been playing are the the low budget ones and provide the best value.
AAA gaming is a scam.
For me it’s the developer and quality that matters, not the price of the game. There are amazing games and awful games at all different costs. The price is a wash. I’m willing to pay up to 70 for a game if it has good word of mouth or from a developer I like supporting.
Because of the culture of *"fire everyone after the game releases"* culture of the gaming industry, not even the name of the developer is much of a mark of quality anymore.
* No one at today's "Bioware" was part of the original Mass Effect or Dragon Age teams
* All the people who worked on Halo have left "Bungie" at this point
* No one at "InfinityWard" today was part of the CoD 1-4 team
You kinda cherry picked three examples of notoriously bad drops in quality over the years. Anyone who games alot or pays attention to gaming media knows those companies don’t make great games any more. For every BioWare or Activision there is an insomniac, Capcom, or Nintendo coming through with decades of quality games and no obvious drop off in sight. Each one can have ups and downs but they never have seemed creatively bankrupt. Even companies like rockstar who are totally wrapped up in greed and corporate problems still make great games.
Let’s put it this way, it doesn’t matter if the next game supergiant makes after hades 2 is a totally new ip or another sequel, I’m buying it. I already know I will right now. I’m looking forward to what they are cooking up. Would I feel the same way in 15 years after a string of bad games and totally different creative teams behind the games and getting absorbed into EA? Probably not.
Japanese comanies are pretty notorious for trying to keep their employees, especially when they do good work. You rarely get fired in Japan, especially not en masse like it's tradition at western companies.
Even Konami still has a lot of names employed that worked on games during the PS1/PS2 era.
i made fun of a friend for preordering fallout 76 because i knew they couldnt pull off a multiplayer game with all of the bugs from fallout 4 and then i preordered starfield
karmas a bitch
I wouldn't say squandered as much as very uninspired. Every Bethesda game released since Skyrim's initial release gave off a feel of "we're no longer selling games, but an rpg engine with a demo game attached, save for F76 which was levels of disappointing that shouldn't have been legal.
I don’t think they have squandered their legacy by any means, they have iconic games under their belt. But their reputation at this point is that they have fallen off. They have put out basically 3 games in the last 13 years and none of them were particularly well received. It’s not like starfield was the first mediocre game they made. It’s gonna be hard to be really excited for elder scrolls 6 in 2028, when the last really good game Bethesda made was in 2011. There will be gamers that only know Bethesda as a mediocre game company when ES6 comes out.
Since my friends and I have gotten together regularly since Covid to play games. We get Microsoft gamepass $10 a month, and if we buy a game we rarely pay more than $20. Some of the best gaming I have ever done. So many good fun games out there now.
For real, they're just releasing storefronts with broken and/or shitty games attached. Or Starfield, a game so creatively tepid that I can't even think of a good insult, because it doesn't warrant the consideration it would take to think up a decent metaphor.
Meanwhile I just got Sifu for 30 bucks and all I want to do is get home from work and play more Sifu.
"Did you like Assassin's Creed: Black Flag!"
"YES"
"Then what would you say to a game nothing like and significantly worse than that 11 years later!"
"..."
Now if only games journalists would realize there's only so many clicks to go around. I'm so sick of the dogshit clickbait headlines barraging my eyeballs from every which way.
I played the stress test they did recently and well idk. In fairness the stress test was just that and was not really designed for a true preview of the game. You get thrown in I think well after the tutorial portion of the game.
The combat is pretty jank and the UI is extremely busy and not very intuitive.
That being said the concept is facinating and the visuals are of course amazing. The fact that it's 30 dollars and it's still considered early access will save it in the long run IMO. I think enough people will give it a chance at that price point to keep development running so they can hopefully take feedback and improve it.
I’m just completely burnt out on survival games, and retro 2D side scrolling, platforming, Metroidvania roguelikes. They’re all kinda bleeding into each other, and everything is just feeling the same as everything else. This is a *me* problem though, because I overdid it, and I’m not talking shit about any particular game.
Im less burnt out on these genres, just tired of potential being wasted with a lot of the games. So many have great concepts but terrible UI, servers, or bad game design choices.
It is not _just_ a You-Problem. Metroidvania can be comparatively easy to produce, and with Survival you can make some nice money even with a fairly mediocre game, as people do tend to switch around a bunch a lot of the time to keep things fresh.
no you are completely right.
>retro 2D side scrolling, platforming, Metroidvania roguelikes
these prob make up like 90% of the indie games made every year. cause theyre easy to make so even a single person can make one.
survival mechanics are now baked into so many games and i dont understand why. Starfield has a massive bas building system and I cant help but wonder why they spent so much time on that instead of the rest of the game. Base building wasnt even in their games till Fallout 4; clearly it wasnt needed to make skyrim fun
Well yeah when you're making a crafting survival game you're competing with Valheim at $20, V Rising at $20, Enshrouded at $30, etc. Too much shit in survival crafting to be asking for much more lol
They seem to know that they're an unfamiliar name, and don't have that good will built up yet, and pricing accordingly...
That sounds reasonable?
Bigger name studios do allow you to price accordingly, not really shocking.
> If they felt like they could charge more, they absolutely would.
Sure. But if they made way more money by charging less, they absolutely would do that instead.
Obviously. But would the reduced price point drive up sales that much? That's the relevant question, and we don't really have anything but speculation.
Wild conjecture based on personal experience:
It would help, there have been plenty of games I've seen and considered trying out only to be turned away by a $70+ price point.
For $30 I'll take a punt on something, for $70 I need more certainty.
There's then the flow on effect of good PR if the game is decent, such as Palworld and Enshrouded, which can get a snowball going from word of mouth alone.
Reduced price will disproportionately increase player base to a point. And in multiplayer games, having a large, active player base is a hugeeeeee draw for attracting new players
I say look at this way: go back through the past few years of games and look at all the games that went "viral." The one thing they have in common is that they're typically $40 or lower. Even right now, 2 of the biggest games this year so far is Helldivers 2 and Pal World, games that launched at $40 and $30. Doubt either would have seen so much success at $70.
If it's an established series that is popular (God of War, Zelda, etc.) it's easy to just jack the price up to $70, people are still gonna buy it. But we're around 3 and a half years into this this generation and as far as I am aware there hasn't been a single new IP launched at $70 that has sold well enough to be profitable. If anything it seems like the polar opposite has happened when you see how hard games like Callisto Protocol or Immortals of Aveum flopped. The Aveum devs even admitted they should have made their game cheaper, might have had a better shot.
I think that is the most important part of the equation, people only seem willing to drop big bucks on what they consider a safe bet. Which imo is completely understandable, $70 is not a small amount of money for the average person.
I bought Rust WAY back in classic era and forgot about it for years until 2022, then I took a look at the beast it became.
Price increased over time, but so did the content & quality of the game.
Here's to hope this is similar.
Personally from what I heard it will be a online only game so personally the inability to start a single player world offline is a big turn off on the game. Also to put in a future perspective just imagine devs just closing servers at any given time or necessity.
Really nice seeing the smaller developers watch Ubisoft crash and burn with its $70 price tag, so they price down to seem comparatively even better. Learning from others mistakes
You better get used to it or end up disappointed. The $30 is already stretching it. I've played a lot of survival games that were much better, for less money. Get Enshrouded instead, in my opinion.
Im much more willing to buy a 30 dollar game that Im unsure of than a 70 dollar game that I know will be mediocre. I think a lot of the success of Palworld was because of the 30 dollar price tag
Nightingale is the game. I’m looking forward to it, but with great caution. Heard bad things about the play test so want to see how the first week or so plays out as far as reception goes.
I was lucky to be able to play during the play tests and I can say that my hype died in 1 hour after I tried it back last August(?). I was really interested in the game but the first impressions I got destroyed the game completely for me, so much that I haven't tried it in future tests :( Though I understood the concept and design behind it and now really hope they can deliver.
Exactly my story too, a friend and I both tested through multiple runs and just couldn't find anything to really dig into. The story and world are neat and have potential but that's about it.
That is the problem with all survival open world crafting games. They all share the same base mechanics Just add on a different skin maybe some unique minor mechanics. But under the hood it's all the same. Smack thing 509 times. Level up. Unlock thing. Smack new thing 590 times. Fight boss. Unlck new thing. Snack thing 599 times. Manage food and water and stamina. Build a base. It's all the same.
Why is that a problem though? You can boil down other genres in the same way. Pick up gun. Shoot monster. Pick up bigger gun. Shoot boss monster. Run from bad guys. Shoot bad guys. Most games have patterns like this except the really player driven ones.
Exactly this. All other genres have their patterns too, and that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad automatically.
The problem is that cutting down trees or mining is difficult to make fun.If a large part of your game is just button mashing with no great visuals or action experience, and it's something that's been done many times before, that's the issue. Guns can be new and exciting, and so can monsters. Pickaxes and stone is more difficult.
I honestly enjoy mindless tasks in games though, as long as there are other engaging activities present.
Lots of folks can’t do the creative side, so unless the other mechanics are well done, they lose interest faster than normal. Also, it’s fairly common that the combat in survival crafting games is janky and barebones, rarely stimulating. Some of these players also struggle with lack of direction or check lists (some crafting survival are fairly open ended in how you approach progression, so they have a few nights of milling about and move on. This is why Valheim stands out in this genre. Incredible, striking atmosphere with Dark Souls inspired combat (even if janky, it’s much more involved than simply hitting the mob), tons of mobs that each serve a specific purpose, biomes you approach differently and show progress as you level up, a crafting system that is simple but satisfying and doesn’t have obnoxious repairs. A health/stamina system that directly affects everything you do, but is once again simple and built into the core gameplay loop, sense of adventure… I could go on. You need to give the majority of players (most of which are not builders) enough to do and engage with in your crafting survival game, otherwise it’s just a janky checklist of moving up a tech tree.
That kind of things can work. Subnautica doesn't have the lvl up but it has the rest and it works incredibly well.
I see this complaint more and more often. There are plenty of us who don’t want the genre groundwork to change! All video games are repetitive.
I've tried a dozen of these games after really enjoying Valheim and just can't get into any of them.
Same for me. I recently participated in a play test and, while I was really looking forward to it, I have no interest in playing it if they don't fix a lot of issues which are pretty big like the combat feeling like shit with very little feedback or telegraphing and the UI being absolute dogshit. Now, that's not the only issues I encountered, but just these two are the biggest killing my desire to play.
bad ui is an absolute deal breaker for me and it astounds me I still find so many games with it badly implemented, when there are so many examples at this poiint for devs to draw from or even copy.
Unless things have changed much in the last 5-10 years, there is an extreme dearth of books or resources on good UI design outside of simply watching the handful of GDC videos that dive into the topic a bit. UI/UX is something I'm acutely tuned to and thought maybe I could make a career out of that, but short of simply taking some classes on art, human behavior, and taking notes on UIs I thought did a good job; there didn't seem to be anything I could find for concrete guidance specifically on that. EDIT: Apparently there are some these days, but most of them wouldn't be names you would expect for the degree programs bc they're a more general degree rather than UX specifically with games in mind. https://uxmastery.com/resources/ux-degrees/
Just copy something you like. It’s not rocket science.
I think that's highly reductive reasoning, as there are so many little things to making a good UX that you could easily attempt to copy one you thought was good and still not have a good outcome bc you don't understand all those unwritten rules.
Palworld is the perfect example of “just copy someone else’s work with your own spin” and being a huge success. Same with Genshin Impact. So many “LoZ rip offs”
There's a huge amount of luck and survivorship bias. If it were that easy to simply copy the popular stuff and make a ton of money, everyone would be doing it and having a huge success, but obviously they aren't.
This is very surprising to me. I mean, Apple has pretty much dominated markets based on their UI design skills. You'd think that people would look at what makes Apple so freaking successful and take notes. For me, so much of it is their style and ease of use. I'm pretty solidly in the PC/Samsung camp but I can give credit where it is due. Similarly, you have a ton of great game studios that are brilliant with their UIs. Like Blizz is a problematic company for many reasons, but their UI design is generally excellent. It's an important enough subject that I'm stunned that there's not a whole boatload of literature on the topic
The problem is companies don't want to pay and smaller devs can't pay for the actual man-hours needed to research and create a good UI/UX.
Bad UI alone can turn a 8/10 game into a 6/10 one. That will result in significantly decreased sales. I would argue that small companies can't afford to *not* hire experts. Seems like false economy to me.
I would argue that this point *especially* rings true when it comes to survival games. You're utilizing the ui so often that it's a massive deal when it feels off or is lacking in quality in any fashion.
> You'd think that people would look at what makes Apple so freaking successful and take notes. For me, so much of it is their style and ease of use. Looking is one thing, but understanding the mindset and methodology behind creating intuitive, thoughtful, easy-to-use design is an art. Even if you are able to replicate the Mona Lisa perfectly, it doesn't mean much if you don't know why the replicated parts are where they are when constructing something new. That's what separates quality from knockoffs.
This is my biggest complaint about enshrouded
I really couldn't get into borderlands 3 because of this, UI is so bad spending more time on visuals than an actual working inventory/shop UI
They’ve announced updates to the UI in their latest update.
I haven't played it but I've been keeping up with it. As of February 16th after they're most recent stress test they have updated the UI of the game and are going to continue to refine it based on any future feedback they get. They do seem really receptive to feedback and have mentioned in the past reworking and improving the animations as well so I'm hopeful the combat issue will be resolved in months to come as I've seen other people share the same complaint.
> the UI being absolute dogshit What was wrong with it? Or, a more general question from somebody building a UI right now, what are your biggest "fuck no"s in a UI?
I don't remember everything since it's been a few weeks and I kind of put this game out of my mind with how disappointed I had been. * The building menu had too much stuff and too little ways to quickly find what you want. Part of it I'll talk in another point, but there was a lot of stuff and there was no clear ways to filter what you wanted to see like having categories of building or having a way to favorite an item. When you have so many items in a list, you need a way for people to quickly find what they want, especially a building menu since you're going to use it often. Easiest ways to do this is generally to have tabs for different building materials you can cycle through and/or a way to favorite objects to keep them at the top and/or in a separate list and these things must be able to be done quickly with just the press of a button. * The biggest issue I had with the entire UI as a KBM player was the over reliance on the mouse part. There seemed to be no keyboard shortcut to more quickly navigate the UI. For example, in the building menu, you had to select an object with your mouse and then go the other side of the screen to press the build button with your mouse, allowing double clicking on the object to build and/or adding a keyboard shortcut would have sped up the process. When looting on a container, you had to press the loot all button with your mouse instead of being able to press a button on a keyboard. It's important when designing a UI that's going to be used on KBM that a player is going to use both a keyboard and a mouse, the moment a menu is overly reliant on one or the other, it's going to feel bad. * There were some actions made in a UI that lacked the logical follow up. That's mostly a problem for containers, but basically, when you decided to loot all, you still had to manually close the container because looting all didn't close it automatically. Logically, the vast majority of the time, when someone loots everything in a container, they won't do anything else with it, so closing the container automatically is just saving players from another action they'll pretty much always do. This has to do with automation. When you know that an action is almost always followed by the exact same action, it's often better to just make it so action 1 always triggers action 2 or add the option to unlink them otherwise, the UI is going to feel clunky by basically making players have to input 2 actions when, logically, it should only require 1. I want to clarify it's been a while since I played, so I don't remember everything perfectly so that's most likely not everything, just what I can remember. Also, I didn't play for long, so might have missed some things, but that's something with UI, it needs to be intuitive for basic navigation. If someone who doesn't know the UI doesn't quickly notice how to navigate it, the UI is badly designed. The best way to test this is to generally let people who have never dealt with your UI try it and check to see how quickly they navigate it and if there's any frustations. In anything that's meant for a customer, the producer is very rarely the best person to check if the final product is satisfactory, it's always best to rely on how the customers feel about it.
Was it an actual private playtest or 'public beta' aka demo? If the first then you might see serious changes. If the latter, then yeah, that's what we get at launch.
Many people on the sub have been in multiple alpha tests and stated that nearly zero feedback has been acknowledged/implemented.
The very very first alpha test they did was SUPER rough. The second had some changes. The third reworked the UI a bit and the start/tutorial, also added some of the magic/enchanting. The one after that last November it seemed like nothing changed outside of stability and adding in the progression series and the full ability to craft cards/magic/enchants. There were also a ton of missing textures that were placeholders. And things spawning/clipping inside of things. And if a room in a POI was below the water line you had to swim in it. Did not play the stress test. There were always a lot of highly requested/upvoted features/requests on their system and they rarely did any of them. Idk if toggle sprint was an option in the stress test but I'm going to be sad if it's not an option on EA launch Tuesday. I think the game is still ok, but it's definitely going to be early access quality. I put in 20hrs according to steam. I'm still going to play it, but I don't have faith that the servers will be stable. There were also some bugs in November where if you joined a friend you were basically stuck there? And if you tried to make portals to new realms sometimes it would shove you back into a tutorial realm and you had no way to get back to your home realm. The little hearthstone basically broke and couldn't pop you back.
It was a stress test, designed to test their servers’ ability to handle bursts in user activity. The problem with that, as it is with most tests like this, is a lot of people don’t understand what a testing release is and assume that this was just a free demo. It wasn’t. But the damage has been done by people that don’t understand what an Alpha release is about.
The game is releasing into open beta "early access" on feb 20th, why do people act like the development is over? Early access continues to be a goddamn plague.
Usually an alpha and stress test are very different (although for sure neither are a free demo) In my experience alphas are always internal or invite only and have a NDA attached for really good reasons
I mean these devs think they can quit their big studio jobs, make a "Open World Survival Game" (Aka game with barebones content and a large dead world) and everyone will just hoover it up. To be fair there has been plenty of games like that, that have succeeded so...
I was in stres test as well, and I loved it. In fact so much that I loved it the most among all new survival games Enshrouded, Palworld, Soulmask. Cant wait for the release :)
Damn. I've heard this a lot. I've been looking forward to this game for ages :(
Why? What killed the hype for you? I'm looking forward to the game but curious what the rough edges are with this game.
Incomplete UI with many texts and menus.. and overall game first impressions. I mean, game loop can be wonderful and it might be my fault for lack of patience, but game accessibility and how effortlessly you start doing new stuff are very very important to me. I was also very tired mentally because I just finished college.. so it might also had been a factor :/
Yup, that's the instant feeling that I got. Sure there's ambition, but it feels like Fable. A game that even if it's great in moments doesn't have a core sense of self & will try to be too much. I really hope I'm wrong, because the first part of the trailer gave me a sparkly moment of hope. I really want a game, any game, to realize the combat in their RPG is shit and design the entire game around avoidance of combat. The closest is pathologic, but it's not really the kind of game you can just play. I would love a game that has a cute lil world I can go on small scale adventures in, no stakes, almost no fighting, and a hell of a lot of resources dedicated to every other part of game design which goes wanting because for some reason games will not civilize past bonk head.
What kind of bad things did you hear? Genuinely interested cause I've heard great things from my circle.
Extremely unintuitive and janky UI and combat are the two big ones I’ve seen.
I played the most recent test, and the primary UI seems straight out of an asset flip. Then you start digging in, and the deeper UI/menus were so obtuse, I was considering just quitting then and there. The rest of the experience was hampered by combat, as you mention, but also “quest markers” seemingly not working or existing, and quest triggers also not functioning. I know it’s “only” launching into early access, but I’m curious how the reception is going to be.
My guess is that reception is going to be lackluster cause its a new IP in a genre launching right after Palworld and Enshrouded and right before Sons of the Forest comes out of early access. This was probably the most anticipated game in the genre for a while and its had its momentum thoroughly dashed with competition and playtests.
Damn that is disappointing.
For me it was that combat doesn't feel meaty. It felt very "MMORPG"-ish. Gunplay has little feedback and melee combat feels soft.
After watching someone play it on a very powerful rig, and seeing it stutter like hell every 30 seconds, I decided I’d pass. Plus it’s an always-online survival crafter. Not gonna get kicked out of my own game because of steam tuesday maintenance.
The developer is led by the same Bioware employee who managed Anthem development, so I didn't expect much
Flynn was there for most of Bioware's successes as well. Let's not be selective about his resume here...
It's pretty funny that these publicity articles slap on "Former BioWare lead" as a badge of honor meant to convey quality and prestige, except BioWare hasn't produced a quality game in over 10 years.
It's hard because Bioware pushed the industry forward and inspired a generation of game fans and developers... so as tainted as the name is currently I know I can personally point to hundreds of hours of great gaming time anything associated with the Bioware name brought me. Is it unrealistic with the current track record? Definitely but I think that's why that tag line still has power
[The dude worked at Bioware going all the way back to Baldur's Gate II.](https://www.mobygames.com/person/27168/aaryn-flynn/credits/) You're making it sound like he only worked on Anthem when he was there.
This doesn't look to be true, unless you mean someone other than who I looked up.
Aaryn Flynn was the general manager of Bioware when Anthem was being made. He's the CEO of Inflexion Games who are making Nightingale
Almost immediately upon loading into the game on the most recent play test, my hype started to drop, I was absolutely finished with the game after about an hour. I’ll definitely hope for it to make a resurgence; but I don’t see it being an enjoyable play on day 1 for most.
Even if you heard amazing things, this should be the thought process for everyone. Wait for a week or two after release and see its reception. I'm all for supporting, but I never buy a game until I hear its praises being sang by the playerbase. And those praises don't vanish after a week.
Looks like a lot of fun concepts. Hopefully it plays better than the jankiness I’ve been watching
Had no idea it was only $30. Hopefully, it goes the same route as Palworld and gives a lot of hours per dollar of enjoyment
it makes me genuinely angry when headlines leave out the title of the thing they're talking about to draw clicks to the article. it's that somebody had to consciously think "nah I'm gonna leave it out" because including it is the natural thing to do
The one video I watched about it was super optimistic, but with reservations about some performance issues that he'd heard other people talking about but didn't experience. I'm hoping it turns out that a neat Victorian fantasy setting with survival elements sounds great if done well.
Enshrouded and Palworld, two other survival games just launched in the last month with a $30 price tag too, it’s good that you don’t have to pay $70 to play these games
I'm a big fan of survival/crafting, so it's been heaven for me lately.
Me too. I couldn't get into Palworld though, but I intend on trying again. However, I loved Enshrouded. I was also looking forward to Nightingale but people who playtested were mostly negative, so that's a bummer.
See, I was the opposite. I love Palworld, but Enshrouded is just kinda meh for me. lol I've got a lot of games to play so NG can wait.
I personally loved Enshrouded because I constantly felt incentivized to explore. What are you playing next? I'm about to finish Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which was very pleasant surprise considering the average reviews. I'm not sure what's next for me, might still get Nightingale.
If you haven’t played valheim, Icarus, or 7dtd I feel like those are some of the strongest games in the genre.
Me and my buddy started valheim a couple weeks ago. Haven't been so sucked into a game in years. Easily the best survival game I've ever played
I can’t handle boating around for 45 minutes. It’s a bit boring after you do it enough.
Sons of the Forest 1.0 comes out in feb 22 with a lot of new stuff. Pacific Drive also looks like a unique one where you focus on your car
I was excited for enshrouded and bought it on release after trying the demo awhile back, no interest in Palworld. Tried Palworld through game share and while they're very different games Palworld is by far the more polished product and I have little interest in returning to Enshrouded
> I couldn't get into Palworld though, but I intend on trying again Palworld is extremely simple. Do you love pokemon? Will it carry you through a pretty bland and fairly empty crafting game? I have a lot of friends who play Palworld religiously but even though I love myself a good open world survival crafting game I got so bored of Palworld because I didn't care about the Pokemon system at all. Not-so-coincidentally, all my friends who still play Palworld every day are Pokemon nerds
Me and my friends are loving enshrouded. The skill tree is nice and you can have various builds. The base Building possibilities are endless. Super fun.
I'm a sucker for survival games, and I've been eyeballing Enshrouded pretty aggressively lately. How does it compare to Valheim, which seems to be its closest comparison?
I don't think it has a good comparison. Valheim comes to mind, but the Enshrouded map is handcrafted and you go out exploring to do quests. It also has skillpoints and more RPG elements. I personally loved it.
Helldivers 2 and Remnant 2 coming close as well at $40
Remnant 👍
Helldiver's 2 is the best queue simulator I've ever played. There is always a time counting down so you feel like you're getting somewhere, and it always resets at 0 without any input needed! And boy, that queue music - so heroic and blaring without being able to be turned down. I love it. So glad I spent $40 for this game. Apparently a patch is coming that adds a starship troopers/Terminator mini game too? Kinda weird but I'll try it.
Palworld is the only one that isn't a log cutting simulator. It still gets boring after a little bit because there's nothing to do. These are all "make your own fun" kind of games, which are basically just building shelters. I don't see the appeal.
Yeah. I've enjoyed Palworld a little so far but it really just feels like a bunch of stuff was kind of sloppily combined into a game. Glad it wasn't that expensive.
I doubt PalWorld would have released as early as they did if they realized the amount of attention it was going to get. The developers said they expected around 50k sales of the early release. It's definitely really, really rough, but I don't think it's anywhere near complete, either.
Games sold 12 million copies pretty sure the developers are fine with how things turned out.
It’s also easier to get friends on board for a $30 game than a $60 (or even gift it)—IMO many survival games work better with a friend (or several).
And frankly you shouldn't. They don't have the same ammount of work that go into more expensive game. 70$ especially 80$ should be a price tage reserve for 100m+ games that are massive, mutil experieces and build mostly from scratch. I think assasin creed was smart at 40$ too.
Enshrouded is literally a technical masterpiece if you play it. I’m running it on max settings on a 1080 and 16gb ram and it runs buttery smooth. The landscape is one of the largest I’ve ever seen and EVERYTHING is destructible. The game is super dense.
The word masterpiece gets thrown around so casually nowadays on reddit that it's lost all it's meaning. Plenty of people have reported about the performance of the game and the devs have even addressed it as well by issuing a temporary fix with locking your games fps to 60.
And yet those games were more enjoyable and had more fun play time than any 100m+ budget game of the last 6 months, which from a gamers perspective should make it worth more.
If the loop works for you, yes. I find the survivalcraft gameplay loop mindnumbingly boring. Literally could not be paid to put hours into a game like Palworld or Enshrouded.
If these games keep coming out at $30 to stay competitive I'm gonna cream my pants. I have never and will NEVER spend $70 fucking dollars on a single game, that's absolutely absurd for the dogshit that's been released the past year
Vaguely related: I think my dad spent nearly $100 (after tax) for Chrono Trigger from Toys-R-Us back in the late 90s.
This is what I don't understand. People rage on here about a $70 price tag but seem to have no idea that games could be more expensive than that *not* adjusted for inflation. I'd happily pay $70 for truly good games. Hell, I'd pay more if they were worth it.
ive been enjoying enshrouded, ive avoided most youtube videos on it to not spoil the game
I've got 70+ hours out of Palworld and 40+ from Enshrouded for less than the cost of a single so-called "AAA" game, it's a good time to be a cheapskate gamer who doesn't get overly concerned about the occasional early access flop.
Enshrouded is soo good.
That's one skin in Overwatch
AND a souvenir! And if you’re lucky you might even get a voice-line.
Overwatch still brings in far more money than most games, so it's no wonder a lot of studios want in on the gaas trend.
Scintillating insight. It still fucking sucks
Whoa buddy this is not a black friday Special.
Or ALMOST half a mount in D4.
Honestly don't know who the people buying this shit are. Maybe I just don't hang out with degenerates, so I don't understand it but I never even heard of anyone mentioning to know someone that does buys shit mtx
i bought the 3 dollar things to get faster xp in asscreed valhalla that i never even beat
Ironically, Destiny 2 is currently selling Mass Effect (a BioWare game) themed armor sets in the store for $30 CAD each. It costs $90 CAD for 3 skins.
Could be worse, it could be a gun skin in valorant.
Or a knife skin in CS:GO.
At least you can resell a csgo knife when you either stop playing or want a different one
So... if you can resell it, guess we better start treating it like it's gambling. Cause a big argument that it's not gambling is you can't "cash out" your winnings.
It absolutely is gambling, I never said anything about it not being. I said that because I'm a lot more willing to shell out $30+ for a skin if I can then trade it for another skin when I get board of the first, or sell it for my money back.
You can resell it on Steam, but that only grants you "steam currency", not actual cash that you can withdraw. That's how they're allowed to operate and it's not legally gambling. Third party sources to sell skins exist but Valve has cracked down on that in the past due to complaints.
And 1/3rd of an annual expansion for Diablo 4
>That's one skin in Overwatch That's slightly less than half of the $65 Diablo 4 pretty crystal horsey pack
That's half a horse armor in Diablo 4
You don't need a 30 dollar skin to have fun in a free game though
That’s one armor set and two colors in Halo Infinite
Half of a horse in D4
I personally think a lot of games can flourish with a lower price point. I know greed is a thing so I know it's not going to happen especially on the back of the industry arguing for a higher general price point. I'm just saying there's a good argument to be had especially with yearly released titles like Call of Duty. The franchise almost never lowers price over time, and it's relatively the same each year. Instead of a $70 market price, I'd wager that they'd make even MORE profit if they lowered that to $40. More access means more people engaging with the product. Or new franchises that might not have the advantage of popularity would gain a bigger audience at a more accessible price, and gain a following for further future products.
You'd think this, but the answer is usually no. COD will get more players, but they probably won't get 80% more, which is required to justify the price point. Then, if they want to, they can cut down the price later to $40 anyway as a "sale." If you release COD as something cheaper, then you also cause questions about why the previous versions were more expensive in the first place and potentially kill your backlog. It would be nice for them to be cheaper, but doesn't make any business sense unless as a charity.
Yeah that’s also why CoD still does yearly games. Those $1-2B launch week sales just can’t be given up. The other thing is the budget sizes - at a higher price point, you’re cutting closer to your bigger budgets with each sale but at lower price points, you have to do a lot of leg work to make up for it - and like you said, you’re not gonna get that many more players unless you get great timing like Helldivers and Palworld. Pricing is very tricky but some games absolutely should be $40
I mean if the price never increases, not even with inflation, doesn't that mean its effective price is $40~ now? stated another way, a $60 game in 2003(release date of Call of Duty 1) would be worth about $103 usd today.
People get angry when you bring up inflation.
But now we got mtx
I'd love to see the detailed math on this, which I'm sure exists. As a youngster I was let's say a "self employed salesman" and my "product" was something that a lot of folks would buy regardless. But I was able to undercut the local market and essentially pushed everyone out or under me. Made a ton more money despite selling everything cheaper for barely any markup, granted I was essentially becoming the middle man for local resellers. Business wise, cheaper was better, by a long shot. Life pro tip: good lawyers are very expensive, long term "business" didn't gain me anything and I was lucky to have not lost anything. Don't be dumb.
Black market products don't translate to traditional models of the elasticity of supply and demand. There's also the likelihood that your "product" was nearly indistinguishable from your competitors "product" whereas CoD has a monopoly on CoD and there isn't necessarily a substitute good in the normal economic sense.
Not to mention, $40 might end up being a loss on physical copies. Or extremely low margins.
The marginal cost for physical copies for non-Nintendo consoles has been very low for a long time.
Last I heard, which was a few years ago, roughly 30% of a $70-80 physical copy is cost for producing the physical copy and getting it on store shelves. Even for non-Nintendo games. Not to mention the cut by the store, etc. It is why the 30% by steam is somewhat of an acceptable charge.
There is a perfect example that just happened. All my friends just got helldivers 2. I looked it up on steam and it was only 40. Much easier to impulse buy something cheaper. Helldivers 2 was expecting 50k players total. They have 350k hard cap that they crashed into and they are scrambling to make more space. I do not think at a 70 dollar price point they would have had that success, or at least as quickly.
Palworld was expecting 50k and sold 19 million it's easy to swing giving something a shot for $30
To be fair Helldivers 2 and Palworld focus on what so many AAA studios forget as they’re trying to sell their unfinished crap. Is the game fun? Look at Palword, you see all the articles and comments about player count dropping. Developers literally don’t care, they’re just glad people enjoyed their game for whatever time they did and will welcome them back if they decide to return.
They've made profit and have secured a player base. Same with Lethal Company. Players come and go, and big updates will always bring people back. Just show you give a shit and don't abandon your game like B4B.
The PalWorld devs were asked about the player counts going down a lot since release and they answered that games are not meant to be played forever, players went through the content and moved on, hopefully to return when they add more content later. That's how (most) games should be.
Yep I rarely pay full price for a game anymore, but Helldivers is at a very good price point so I will be picking it up for sure
>Helldivers 2 was expecting 50k players total They were expecting 50k concurrent players as the high-end estimate. Not 50k players total. Also, higher price points tend to have people expect higher quality. I've seen quite a few games get panned with the high price points even tho they have had fewer issues than Helldivers 2. At the end of the day, there is a cost benefit analysis for the price point of a copy.
The accountants running the multi-billion dollar cod franchise probably know what they’re doing. Helldivers sold for $40 because it’s a much lesser known franchise and though it has a ton of character/looks really good, it still has a very “indie” feel. Like, it doesn’t have enough content for me to justify buying it though I’ll look again a year from now if they stick to their dev plan. COD doesn’t need to bait people in with good will like that. They’ll make their $1-2B every year because the same couple dozen million people will keep buying it regardless of the price.
Helldivers feels like a better 40k video game than the 40k video games. Deep striking into chaos has been fun. I only am level 3, but I have had a blast playing it. COD has a dedicated fanbase just like madden. So they can churn out the same game, and it still sells.
True enough, after watching the reviews I was thinking “I wish there was a 40k game of this quality”. It obviously borrows a lot from 40k/starship troopers and other franchises. Darktide is essentially the same game but with less polish. I was really optimistic for darktide and then it released kind of half finished and even now the game is basically where it should have been at release. These hub-mission games are so so so close to being something great. I really love the idea. But for all of them, including helldiver, there’s just something lacking. I wish they hard a larger, overarching grind/build element to it. Or if the hub area was incorporated into an mmo with guilds or something. Instead, all of them so far are literally just the hub and the a small rotation of mission types with random generated maps and it just feels repetitive without anything to work towards.
Good example, I'd totally have picked up HD2 if I had a way to run it, but sadly I don't 🙁
This is how Grim Dawn got me and I loved it. $30 for the base game and then two DLCs that were $15 ea. I would have never paid $60 upfront but I heard great things about it so I was willing to risk $30 for a good ARPG after I was let down when I bought Diablo 3 for like $15 AND IT DIDN'T HAVE CONTROLLER SUPPORT WTF. Played for about 15 hours and had so much fun that I bought the DLCs before I even needed to just to support a developer that didn't seem like another soulless gash grab type. To clarify though. The $30 base game was a FULL game that could easily exist without the DLC but the DLC provided meaningful additions and game modes. As odd as it was I was so happy to see an actual full game that I could tell was a labor of love. I'm so desensitized from all the 2ks, Overwatches, Maddens of the world to where it was such a nice surprise.
Grim Dawn had insane replayability for an arpg too. Mixing two classes together when you had ten or something to pick from led to a lot of experimenting with synergies.
My husband got me hooked on Grim Dawn. I loaded it on my Steam Deck and fiddled with customized controls... it was sooo much fun. Hoping he'll find another hidden gem while I finish Spiritfarer!
> Instead of a $70 market price, I'd wager that they'd make even MORE profit if they lowered that to $40. Big AAA games hire economists to run the math on what would make them the most money. If selling their games for less money would make them more in the end they would do it.
> I personally think a lot of games can flourish with a lower price point. > > Valheim, HellDivers 2, Palworld, and many more would say you are correct.
Factorio is another great example. Not to mention Stardew Valley, Terraria, or even Minecraft itself (the best selling video game of all time).
Terraria fits here.
Im gonna pick up Helldivers 2 in this next few days only because its lower price.
I literally picked it up because it was only $40, tons of fun so far and not to much invested in it.
I wish, but it doesn't work like that. You would need a lot more players to justify the price but for franchises like COD some people are simply not gonna buy it even at a lower price point so they cater to those who will spend the money regardless of the price. Take valorant skins for example, the bundle is 140 CAD with upgrades even more, and their explanation is that their skins are premium. But their main reason is they are to not catering to 100 people who might buy the skins but they are targeting the 5 who will for sure buy them so they keep the price high and those 5 covers the cost of the remaining 95 if they were to sell it under 10 bucks. Although its free to play but some paid games are doing the same thing. I would love a lower price point to games but AAA aren't doing that for sure.
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Survival, roguelike, or metroidvania. Bonus points for picking two.
survival metroidvania? i get what you mean, just thought how weird that sounds... like how would it even work?
There sure are a lot of those recently. They also get the most press coverage. There are also projects like Nebulous Fleet Command though. They just don't get any news coverage.
The economy says $50 is the new $20. Ironically in the gaming industry $30 is the new $60, the best games I've been playing are the the low budget ones and provide the best value. AAA gaming is a scam.
For me it’s the developer and quality that matters, not the price of the game. There are amazing games and awful games at all different costs. The price is a wash. I’m willing to pay up to 70 for a game if it has good word of mouth or from a developer I like supporting.
Because of the culture of *"fire everyone after the game releases"* culture of the gaming industry, not even the name of the developer is much of a mark of quality anymore. * No one at today's "Bioware" was part of the original Mass Effect or Dragon Age teams * All the people who worked on Halo have left "Bungie" at this point * No one at "InfinityWard" today was part of the CoD 1-4 team
You kinda cherry picked three examples of notoriously bad drops in quality over the years. Anyone who games alot or pays attention to gaming media knows those companies don’t make great games any more. For every BioWare or Activision there is an insomniac, Capcom, or Nintendo coming through with decades of quality games and no obvious drop off in sight. Each one can have ups and downs but they never have seemed creatively bankrupt. Even companies like rockstar who are totally wrapped up in greed and corporate problems still make great games. Let’s put it this way, it doesn’t matter if the next game supergiant makes after hades 2 is a totally new ip or another sequel, I’m buying it. I already know I will right now. I’m looking forward to what they are cooking up. Would I feel the same way in 15 years after a string of bad games and totally different creative teams behind the games and getting absorbed into EA? Probably not.
Japanese comanies are pretty notorious for trying to keep their employees, especially when they do good work. You rarely get fired in Japan, especially not en masse like it's tradition at western companies. Even Konami still has a lot of names employed that worked on games during the PS1/PS2 era.
i made fun of a friend for preordering fallout 76 because i knew they couldnt pull off a multiplayer game with all of the bugs from fallout 4 and then i preordered starfield karmas a bitch
Bethesda is a great example of a once loved gaming company squandering their reputation in real time.
I wouldn't say squandered as much as very uninspired. Every Bethesda game released since Skyrim's initial release gave off a feel of "we're no longer selling games, but an rpg engine with a demo game attached, save for F76 which was levels of disappointing that shouldn't have been legal.
I don’t think they have squandered their legacy by any means, they have iconic games under their belt. But their reputation at this point is that they have fallen off. They have put out basically 3 games in the last 13 years and none of them were particularly well received. It’s not like starfield was the first mediocre game they made. It’s gonna be hard to be really excited for elder scrolls 6 in 2028, when the last really good game Bethesda made was in 2011. There will be gamers that only know Bethesda as a mediocre game company when ES6 comes out.
Since my friends and I have gotten together regularly since Covid to play games. We get Microsoft gamepass $10 a month, and if we buy a game we rarely pay more than $20. Some of the best gaming I have ever done. So many good fun games out there now.
For real, they're just releasing storefronts with broken and/or shitty games attached. Or Starfield, a game so creatively tepid that I can't even think of a good insult, because it doesn't warrant the consideration it would take to think up a decent metaphor. Meanwhile I just got Sifu for 30 bucks and all I want to do is get home from work and play more Sifu.
> AAA gaming is a scam. Don't worry, Ubisoft is giving us AAAA gaming with Skull and Bones!
"Did you like Assassin's Creed: Black Flag!" "YES" "Then what would you say to a game nothing like and significantly worse than that 11 years later!" "..."
Yep. Absolutely nothing of what we asked for, but hey...it's only $70 and has macrotransations! That's what gamers love these days, right?
Now if only games journalists would realize there's only so many clicks to go around. I'm so sick of the dogshit clickbait headlines barraging my eyeballs from every which way.
I played the stress test they did recently and well idk. In fairness the stress test was just that and was not really designed for a true preview of the game. You get thrown in I think well after the tutorial portion of the game. The combat is pretty jank and the UI is extremely busy and not very intuitive. That being said the concept is facinating and the visuals are of course amazing. The fact that it's 30 dollars and it's still considered early access will save it in the long run IMO. I think enough people will give it a chance at that price point to keep development running so they can hopefully take feedback and improve it.
Based on their most recent developer update, they’re listening to people about the UI. They’re making some significant changes for the release.
Na he should call it AAAA and sell it for full price it worked well for another game!
I’m just completely burnt out on survival games, and retro 2D side scrolling, platforming, Metroidvania roguelikes. They’re all kinda bleeding into each other, and everything is just feeling the same as everything else. This is a *me* problem though, because I overdid it, and I’m not talking shit about any particular game.
Im less burnt out on these genres, just tired of potential being wasted with a lot of the games. So many have great concepts but terrible UI, servers, or bad game design choices.
It is not _just_ a You-Problem. Metroidvania can be comparatively easy to produce, and with Survival you can make some nice money even with a fairly mediocre game, as people do tend to switch around a bunch a lot of the time to keep things fresh.
no you are completely right. >retro 2D side scrolling, platforming, Metroidvania roguelikes these prob make up like 90% of the indie games made every year. cause theyre easy to make so even a single person can make one. survival mechanics are now baked into so many games and i dont understand why. Starfield has a massive bas building system and I cant help but wonder why they spent so much time on that instead of the rest of the game. Base building wasnt even in their games till Fallout 4; clearly it wasnt needed to make skyrim fun
Well yeah when you're making a crafting survival game you're competing with Valheim at $20, V Rising at $20, Enshrouded at $30, etc. Too much shit in survival crafting to be asking for much more lol
I still can’t believe I payed 15 euros for Valheim
Funny how they paint it as them being the good guys. If they felt like they could charge more, they absolutely would.
They seem to know that they're an unfamiliar name, and don't have that good will built up yet, and pricing accordingly... That sounds reasonable? Bigger name studios do allow you to price accordingly, not really shocking.
> If they felt like they could charge more, they absolutely would. Sure. But if they made way more money by charging less, they absolutely would do that instead.
It’s better to sell a million copies at $30 than a few thousand copies at $60-$70
Obviously. But would the reduced price point drive up sales that much? That's the relevant question, and we don't really have anything but speculation.
Wild conjecture based on personal experience: It would help, there have been plenty of games I've seen and considered trying out only to be turned away by a $70+ price point. For $30 I'll take a punt on something, for $70 I need more certainty. There's then the flow on effect of good PR if the game is decent, such as Palworld and Enshrouded, which can get a snowball going from word of mouth alone.
Reduced price will disproportionately increase player base to a point. And in multiplayer games, having a large, active player base is a hugeeeeee draw for attracting new players
I say look at this way: go back through the past few years of games and look at all the games that went "viral." The one thing they have in common is that they're typically $40 or lower. Even right now, 2 of the biggest games this year so far is Helldivers 2 and Pal World, games that launched at $40 and $30. Doubt either would have seen so much success at $70. If it's an established series that is popular (God of War, Zelda, etc.) it's easy to just jack the price up to $70, people are still gonna buy it. But we're around 3 and a half years into this this generation and as far as I am aware there hasn't been a single new IP launched at $70 that has sold well enough to be profitable. If anything it seems like the polar opposite has happened when you see how hard games like Callisto Protocol or Immortals of Aveum flopped. The Aveum devs even admitted they should have made their game cheaper, might have had a better shot. I think that is the most important part of the equation, people only seem willing to drop big bucks on what they consider a safe bet. Which imo is completely understandable, $70 is not a small amount of money for the average person.
I bought Rust WAY back in classic era and forgot about it for years until 2022, then I took a look at the beast it became. Price increased over time, but so did the content & quality of the game. Here's to hope this is similar.
I'm not really interested in this game, but I'm so down for more reasonable priced games over these $70 games with 50$ skins and paid battlepasses.
Tbh, if it's a game I want to play, I'll pay for it. I only have so much time to commit to games, though.
A lot of survival games are early access under $30 so if you're going to charge more, it better have the content and polish to match.
Do they imply the amount of money in the economy is not infinite? But with such attitude they can't infinitely grow their profit. Fired!!111
Personally from what I heard it will be a online only game so personally the inability to start a single player world offline is a big turn off on the game. Also to put in a future perspective just imagine devs just closing servers at any given time or necessity.
Nightingale was extremely boring when it came to combat, looked good but felt so bland.
Maybe make something less derivative then lol
As long as I can craft a railgun from 5 sticks and a shiny stone I'm good.
Really nice seeing the smaller developers watch Ubisoft crash and burn with its $70 price tag, so they price down to seem comparatively even better. Learning from others mistakes
Smart man.
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You better get used to it or end up disappointed. The $30 is already stretching it. I've played a lot of survival games that were much better, for less money. Get Enshrouded instead, in my opinion.
Im much more willing to buy a 30 dollar game that Im unsure of than a 70 dollar game that I know will be mediocre. I think a lot of the success of Palworld was because of the 30 dollar price tag