Amazon's MMO is coming out soon and it looks okay, but I doubt it'll get any real traction unless big streamers latch onto it. Initial response is good, but that doesn't mean anything about the staying power of an MMO.
General Gaming News.
- Thread starter BrawlMan
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"Tom Clancy's" says Ubisoft.
Where's the gritty, realistic gunplay? Hell, even Division 1 & 2 got this right. Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint, as much as how bad both games are, got the realistic aspect right. This game does not look like a TC game in any shape or form. IDK how fun the game will be or how successful it will be (and I doubt that'll happen), I don;t think this will ever be a TC game
Just from the colorful punk-theme alone I can tell this game is designed to be a MTX-milking cow.
I am seriously getting Metal Gear Survive flashbacks here; Using the franchise name to sell itself
Don't expect anything, but more crap from Ubisoft. They're almost not worth reporting at this point. Whenever they announce a new "game", my reaction is still "not bothering buying your shit.".
You know, I have been giving Ubisoft some credit for at least staying consistent; Watch Dogs has always been about hacking and sneaking, AC series always had some form of stealth gameplay, and As I've said, TC games always had that tactical, grounded gunplay. I also think they have been doing rather well when it comes to designing each game's world and their aesthetic, despite the disappointing gameplays.
But this one? IDK where the game is supposed to belong, looks more sci-fi than grounded, and it's reeking of MTX.
So yeah, I agree. We really shouldn't give any attention to Ubisoft from now on
Ah yes, Tom Clancy. So famous for tearing it up in the mosh pit.
Anyway, I love how it likes to present a punk rock tone and aesthetic, but keeps cutting away to these two middleaged corporate douchenozzles listing off every buzzword under the sun. That name tho. Xdefiant? Truly inspired how they completely avoided any and all howdoyoudofellowkids.gif energy.
The problem being, Watch Dogs only has one good game out of three. Stealth and combat got less interesting as time went on in Assassin's Creed. AC games had plenty of evil micro transactions lately and before, that only get worse and worse each year. The Tom Clancy games lost their tactical badge when they release Ghost Recon Wildlands. Another generic open-world game would not much else to stand out on. Yeah it's sold fine, but lost the heart and soul of what goes Ghost Recon all about. The Division does not have much to stand on either. At the end of the day, it's just a grindy third person shooter. Despite their consistency, as far as I'm concerned, they have nothing left for me at all. Not to mention all the shady and evil stuff that goes on behind the scenes.
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I'm under the belief that the "Tom Clancey" feel of the games under his name died along with him
Yeah the mech selection is so odd, I was thinking maybe Asshimar is to represent Zeta and have a transformable, but then why not have the zeta? Then there's the Sazabi which is like 5 generation ahead of everything else (and should be much bigger).
Best I can think is that they're keeping some of the more popular suits in reserve so they can sell them as DLC in the future. Oh well, I'll probably play it a bit cause I'm a sucker for anything with mechs (if they have NA server).
So people in my circle of friend are excited about the amazon mmo and I can't figure out why (the last game amazon studio made was abadonned after a few weeks or something). I guess its good the response is good since I'll probably be dragged in.
Hey look, fellow kids, we're totally "hip" and "with it". Throw money at us!
I honestly would expect it to be on the front of a can of Axe body spray.
I know a Twitch streamer who's going all-in on New World. Thing is, the last game he went all-in on was Disintegration, and, well, that didn't exactly set the world on fire....
I'll probably give the game a pass. I got sick of Overwatch ages ago and stopped playing that. I'm not about to jump into an Overwatch clone just because it has Gundam. I do love Gundam, but I've never had much faith for most of its videogames.
The roster is definitely weird, since it includes rather obscure chump units for a so called Hero shooter. I feel like they included things like the Asshimar and DOM Trooper just because they had usable models lying around. That or one of the developers has a strange boner for those mobile suits. But it's almost like if "Talon Grunt" was a playable "Hero" in Overwatch. While I'm a grunt unit lover myself, this seems like the wrong game to have them be playable. I might understand certain iconic grunt choices like the Gouf since you have Ramba Ral written all over it but.... I don't really recall the Asshimar being the signature suit of a notable character.
If you look up their website you'll find some other absolutely weird mechs for their lineup too. Methuss? Really? The bog standard GM and Zaku II? Pale Rider's definitely the definition of incredibly obscure.
Anyway this game just feels like a weird misguided attempt at getting into trends(E-SPORTS LEL), except some of these trends(Hero Shooters) are a bit old. And of course a new IP is too risky so lets slap an existing brand(GUNDAM!) onto it.
Well best of luck to whoever's working on it, but I can't say I'm particularly convinced.
The GM, GM sniper and pale rider probably share the same base 3D model so that's probably why they made those available, the pale rider was introduced in a video game too so that's probably why its in (it's also fairly popular, they made quite a few p-bandai release of the model lately). Zaku II is part of the original gundam which seem to be the main audience their trying to capture so that's probably why its there, same for DOM and guntank.
The methus... that one I really don't understand though...
It's long since stopped meaning anything. Even a bunch of the books with his name on them are ghostwritten because people buy for the brand name.
Also, speaking of Dev Hell.
First It Was An Assassin's Creed Expansion, Now It's Ubisoft's 8 Year Nightmare
Inside Ubisoft Singapore’s struggle to ship Skull & Bones
kotaku.com
I know it's Kotaku but i's also Ubisoft and it's hard to find any good reason Skull and Bones is so delayed without something seriously wrong going on behind the scenes.
Is anyone still interested in this? Is anyone shocked?
As someone else on this forum once put it:
"Why is EA the worst company in America?"
"Because Ubisoft is French"
I wasn't super interested in Multiplayer Black Flag 8 years ago. Now I'm done with Ubisoft and their BS, for so many reasons and it's hard not to see this as yet another symptom of the rotting from within.
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It's not even the MS-09 Dom though, it's the shitty SEED DOM. Yeah I do kinda hate the SEED UC-reboot MS. Does it even have a Master Grade kit?
It's been announced that it's free to play so I wonder what their monetization model will be. "Cosmetics" is definitely gonna fall short. You're going to be quite limited in how much you can 'reskin' some of those mobile suit designs. At least compared to Overwatch where they can do a full model revamp with different effects. Plain old paintjobs/decals is going to be rather underwhelming. They'll probably do it anyway.
I wonder if they expect this to make much of a dent in Apex' grip on the Japanese market. I seriously doubt it will.
The thing that annoys me the most about WoW, is just how infrequent the updates are.
WoW Disappointment, Plus Twitch, Start Mass Exodus Into Final Fantasy XIV
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands’ newest patch underwhelmed a lot of players
Wow sucks so hard and so many big wow guys are streaming FF14 that Square has had to STOP digital sales of the game to prevent their servers from exploding.
It's crazy right now, like WoW has finally reached such a low that even people resisting FF14 are giving up and saying "fuck it let's try" and then getting blown away. FF14 strikes an incredible balance of what WoW used to be on top of also allowing for a great single player JRPG experience.
This is a game that triple-dips with its monetization. You need to pay a £9p/m subscription to even play the game, there are paid-expansions, and the game even also has an in-game microtransaction store.
If a free 2 play game like Fortnite can update their game as often as it does, a game that is monetised up the wazoo has no excuse to need to wait eight months for its first major update since the new expansion.
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Games a service is here to stay and there is absolutely fuck all you can do about it. Crying about how people are brainwashed in a small forum will change nothing. Especially in an age where people want to spend money on services and some go overboard with it
The Clancy ghost writing thing sounds roll-over-in-grave levels of fishy, including from a legal standpoint. Or hell, maybe he’d just say, “Oh, I don’t care about my name as long as it’s still brining in the bacon.” Or something, which while not my place to judge, kinda sucks in a legacy-tarnishing kind of way.It's long since stopped meaning anything. Even a bunch of the books with his name on them are ghostwritten because people buy for the brand name.
Also, speaking of Dev Hell.
First It Was An Assassin's Creed Expansion, Now It's Ubisoft's 8 Year Nightmare
Inside Ubisoft Singapore’s struggle to ship Skull & Bones
I know it's Kotaku but i's also Ubisoft and it's hard to find any good reason Skull and Bones is so delayed without something seriously wrong going on behind the scenes.
Is anyone still interested in this? Is anyone shocked?
As someone else on this forum once put it:
"Why is EA the worst company in America?"
"Because Ubisoft is French"
I wasn't super interested in Multiplayer Black Flag 8 years ago. Now I'm done with Ubisoft and their BS, for so many reasons and it's hard not to see this as yet another symptom of the rotting from within.
For Skull and Bones, they had arguably the best game in the series already in the bag, and all they really had to do was add an MP component to that formula and fill it with the typical MP-centric dopamine triggers. Now it sounds like they’re kicking a huge turd down a road, while bits and pieces keep flaking off. Just what the Sam hell.
I don't feel bad for Clancy. He was whoring his name out as a Brand when he was still alive. I can only imagine he was fully aware of that deal and it made him lots of sweet cash, so he don't care. I remember some of the Clancy books/games that came out a while back, such as SSN and Politika, which were clearly cash-in projects because they sure as hell weren't good or memorable. I used to read him back in the day and his work had some things going for it(Hunt for Red October/Red Storm Rising could be considered good techno-thrillers), which was clearly lacking in the ghost-written, licensed stuff. There's more I could speculate but I don't want to drag politics into this.
Yeah, it sounds like the original plan was to just Re-use as much Black Flag as they could to make it MP and get it out the door quickly, but I can only imagine the "We need to GaaS this shit up" reared it's ugly head and complicated the shit out of that plan and I can only wonder what the fucking point is now. Sea of Thieves is already doing the open world pirate thing and S+B is gonna look really late to the party.
Apparently the game can't even be canceled because Ubisoft Promised the Singaporean government it would release as a condition for the sweet tax breaks they got.
I have to wonder, if there a video game equivalent of just setting fire to the whole project and trying to claim the insurance money, because I can only imagine that's the only way this is gonna make a profit at this point. This is either Star Citizen or Anthem Ubisoft depending on how you want to look at it.
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I imagine some of the skin will just be different model altogether. Like let say the Zaku II could have skin for everything from Zaku I and II variant to upgarded version like Marasai. Rx 78 will probably have a MK. 2 skin and such.
Yeah I enjoyed those books. I really remember loving Red Storm Rising as a kid, and LOVED the submarine game based on it on my ancient PC. Having to do things like hide under the thermal curtain, and run slow and silent to try and avoid patrols, and get your various attacks in, was really fun and tense, even with the low rez graphics for the engagement maps. Watching those blips move around the map between sensor sweeps...and seeing one vanish as you lost track of it, only to have it show up behind you, was tense as hell.
The...I think it was the first Rainbow 6 game was really fun. I enjoyed how you spent so much time trying to plan out the different squads routing paths, and breach orders, and it felt SO good when you got an engagement to go off with zero injuries or fatalities, on both the team and hostages. I don't recall playing any of the other ones after that, so I have no clue if they kept with the "spend as much time or more in the planning phase" or if they just went over to shooty pew pew, bang bang, like most FPS's after it.
Blizzard is a broken company at this point. There have been internal e-mail leaks, employee statements, and the physical evidence of what the public can see. Blizaard's leaders have no idea what the fuck they are doing because Activision's influence has literally pushed away every single creative person the company had. Metzen, Caplan, Morhaime, you name any big name in Blizzard's hayday and they are long gone from the company.
What has happened is two fold:
Number 1: People like Ion Hostikosas have been promoted beyond their ability. Ion was and still is a great raid designer, but he has no idea wtf he is doing for the entire scope of WoW itself. Which is why many of the latest gameplay mechanics and systems only benefit raiders. And even then it has dogpiled too much into being a near impossible rng treadmill that raiders are no longer happy with. As a result Ion is forced to look at analytics that tell him what people are doing in the game (if they are doing it that must mean it is fun) but he doesn't understand that the bullshit systems is FORCING players to do certain things and therefore he cannot separate the difference between doing a thing in game because it is fun and doing it because they must in order to progress.
Number 2: A focus on trapping the customer. Over the past two years the cycle has been the same. Release a major patch, immediately follow it up with a new cool mount for 6-month subs, repeat. Blizzard does have to rush content anymore and in fact is benefitting from milking each patch as much as possible. They can blame things on Covid for why 9.1 took so long, but we know that's bullshit because this is what they've been doing for years. Long before any lockdowns or covid's. There is so much focus on making the microtransaction a money maker, and trapping people into long subscriptions, that there is no longer a focus on making the game good.
And Number 3 because why not:
Blizzard has lost touch with their fans. The lack of communication for YEARS has made the community more and more hostile towards the game, despite still playing it, and Blizzard treats the criticism from fans as threats and challenges. Basically they don't think of their users as anything more than an enemy. So as a result they do not care or listen to what people are complaining about in the games. They look an statistics and make decisions based on that, which makes the game itself feel more and more inhuman everyday.
Compared to FF14 where the devs actively listen to fans, stick to a very rigid patch cycle (90-100 days without fail), and focus on keeping the game true to itself. Meaning every expansion isn't bringing with it some new piece of shit system or feature that nobody fucking asked for. And new special gameplay systems are ALWAYS option side content, things like Boaja, Palace of the Dead, Heaven on High etc. The game remains true to what makes it good expansion after expansion because they stick to the formula. And while that might be a negative for some, people like knowing they are getting more of what they like. More story, more dungeons, more raids, more MUSIC, and more jobs to play. Each expansion has done that and each expansion has been better than the last.
Top that off with when fans do say they don't like things, the devs listen and either explain why they have to do it a certain way or say they'll look into it and change it. Yoshi-P is famous for when he was at a Fan Fest and a fan asked if they could make a certain task, or something I can't recall exactly, Yoshi nodded and said, "That sounds like a good idea, I will take a look." Then like two weeks later they patched the game with the change the fan asked for. The fan had brought up a valid concern, Yoshi agreed and made the change...Boom simple and it is the kind of thing that does wonders towards good will from your players.
Blizzard has fucked that all up. Everything. I can't think of many people (even streamers and youtubes focused on Blizzard) that hold much hope for the company anymore. Warcraft Reforged, the last TWO expansions (aka FOUR FUCKING YEARS) of WoW, Overwatch dying, Starcraft dying, Diablo being a fucking mobile joke. Everything Blizzard had, has been systematically burned to the ground.