Read this again
A most deadly combination when combined with blind greed. They're idiots that think they're smart, but only come off as "smart" some of the time because they're so goddamn stupid and highly egosticial.
EA will decide Anthem's fate this week
- Thread starter FakeSympathy
- Start date
I'm kind of curious as to what would happen to the IP if it was canned. Like, what does BioWare do with the lore, if anything, if Anthem is cancelled?
I mean, to be frank, Mass Effect is an IP that has gone well past its sell-by date, but BioWare's still flogging that horse, even to the extent that it's apparently carrying on from ME3, and the ending invalidations that'll require.
I mean, to be frank, Mass Effect is an IP that has gone well past its sell-by date, but BioWare's still flogging that horse, even to the extent that it's apparently carrying on from ME3, and the ending invalidations that'll require.
Because when you're utterly creatively bankrupt, the next lukewarm thing looks like the next hot thing.
Ironically both games have already paused development for post launch content. Which sucks for the communities, because from what I've heard they were expecting much, much more.
Both games have me thinking I'd prefer going back to the season pass model. Yeah, its fucking expensive and usually way too expensive, but at least more often than not the promised extra content actually comes and you even have the chance to purchase it for dirt cheap a year down the road.
EDIT: Woops forgot to talk about Anthem. Meh. The game is the exact kind of third person game I abhor, so whatever they do I don't particularly care. Hopefully Bioware can move on to literally anything else.
Can I ask you to elaborate on that, out of curiousity?
Usually the run of the mill complaints about third person involve "slow", "cover based" and "brown".
Which doesn't really describe anthem at all, so I'm curious about it being "the sort of third person game you abhor", what does that encompass?
I actually LIKE cover based third person shooters. With what I've seen of Anthem, being a shooter seems to be the least of its priorities. All you're doing is strafing left and right and holding your recoil-less reticle over enemies that take way too long to kill. Maybe the flying shakes things up, but then I wouldn't know. I've only seen "First 15 minutes of Anthem" videos.
I gotta say, you have a pretty inaccurate perception of the game. Which, if its based on "first fifteen minute" quicklooks, I can see how that would happen. People's first 15 minutes are going to be played like an ultra generic shooter because it takes time to get a feel for movement systems, combat and powers. We default to what we know, and we know how to strafe and shoot.
That is rather hyperbolic.
Destiny 2 sits close to the top 10 games played on Steam every day, with a 24h peak of almost 100K concurrent players - not to mention that it also sits in a similar spot on Xbox, and likely Playstation, too.
I'd say that is quite popular.
For a franchise that is supposedly not successful, it has spawned a sequel, 5 major expansions between the two games, with at least 2 more on the horizon, and a roadmap stretching into 2022.
Sure, it might not make all of the money, nor attract all of the players, but it certainly has its fanbase, and it appears to draw in more than enough revenue to continue to support it for around 2 more years, at least.
Last edited:
Likely nothing?
Dead franchises tend not to get supported.
I doubt EA would humour the idea of commissioning a book or a comic, or whatever, based on a 2019 game that was dead on arrival, and subsequently failed to meet almost all expectations.
Im sure Anthem has its lore fans (as seemingly all franchises do), but im sure all 2 of them have long since accepted that unless the game is revived, and is subsequently successful, any and all chance of additional material is unlikely to appear.
This is truly Anthem's last gasp.
Destiny was initially marketed to be this massive, 10-year project from iconic developer Bungie, and the whole thing ended up being a shaggy dog story. Destiny 2 came out only 3 years later. I'm sure they've still got BIG plans for Destiny 1 though...
As far as I know, the "10 year plan" never precluded the idea of there being multiple games, only that Activision/Bungie had a "10 year plan" for Destiny, as a franchise. It is likely that Destiny 2 and possibly even 3 were always planned - though I am of the understanding that it was Activision who pushed for sequels.
From a consumer standpoint, there being a Destiny 2 made zero sense, seeing as, lets be honest, Destiny 1 and 2 are basically the same game, and MMO sequels in general have never really made sense - hence why we have never seen World of Warcraft 2.
But, now that Destiny is firmly back in Bungie's control, I would assume that we will be seeing Destiny 2 as the only Destiny game for the foreseeable future. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they just rename it Destiny, now that a lot of the content from the first game is being reintroduced.
I'll be nearing the front of the line to dump on Destiny... but they had their golden period. Year 3 of Destiny 1. They were doing well with microtransactions, had a steady and enagged playerbase etc.
The thing which has horribly sunk Destiny... is that the was their "B" team doing that. After the initial biotchfest and departure of half the original folks, Luke Smith became the director and did the TAken King (year 2 D1). An uptick in story presentation and campgin, but the endgame on and ongoing activity stream was total garbage.
Smith and the A-team f***'d off start Destiny 2. The B-team, who had previously done the only well-received Year 1 DLC (House of Wolves) took over, and basically started widening the pool. More and more loot showed up. Old raids got brought back to light level. etc. You could play basically whatever you wanted and have a ton of stuff to do and loot to chase. They even get some microtansactiosn that were mostly accepted by the playerbase.
Swing D2 around and it suddenly all caved in backwards. Microtransactions had become a major chase. And there were 0 non-micro transaction cosmetics other then the singkle-use shaders (shaders were always kind of imperfect, but at least in D1, you unlocked it then that was that). Ships, sparrows, ornaments (skins) were all Eververse (micros) only. Customization and just plain old outirght power levels of loot took a huge step back (customization trees from D1 were totally gone, and the 2 (no longer 3-5) perks on a gear were RNG now).
The other big shift in D2c was that PvP (And later their weird garbage balanced PvEvP mode) became mandatory to actually get enough light to reach endgame activies (Which were placed bloatedly above standard drop caps) to hit enough milestoens. And even then, you could just get RNG shit on and get helmets on all your milestones when you needed higher boots to push your light up. Which was effectively when I left the franchisve (people gifting me DLCs got me to play briefly on occasion after), when both Curse of Osiris and Warming I literally could not play the new activities because RNG decided I didn't get to be light level enough (And light levle has never actually increased your power, it only keeps you stable so that enemies don't double damage you/take half damage/become invulnerable to you in those afrbitrarily gated activities).
And then they just kept on doing the same thing. Even when the other team took over for Forsaken, Smith was still director because there's noD3 to f off too, so all the problems persisted even as Forsaken delivered more activities then usual.
EDIT : As someone above noted, Destiny maintains players, sure. But miles and miles away from their previous peaks, even when dropping new expansions. Also they had to hand off their AAA game as a freebie to keep their momentum. "Free" is always going to pull in a reasonable stream of window shoppers, especially with AAA polish behind it.
Actual retention and dedicated players is another thing entirely. And you can dig upstuff like playstation trophy stats showing how little the ongoing content is touched comparitively.
Last edited:
Also to be on topic. Well, my main experience of Anthem was you had a 9/10 chance of being trapped in an infinite loading screen every time you crossed zones. And the in between was terrible gun play, limited powers, and the same six generic guns from every shooter with fancy names. Jetpacks were cool but also had stupidy short cooldowns making them totally impractical to actually use. And everything felt like a sponge to shoot. MMO health mechanics are f-ing awful with shooter gameplay in every instance i've run across it. The one thing Destiny got right was that if you shot things inn the head, they usually die (unless its a bosss mega-thing)
So yeah, Warframe added jetpack mechs now (well, last fall) that even with the limited selection are about twenty times more fun to use.
So yeah, Warframe added jetpack mechs now (well, last fall) that even with the limited selection are about twenty times more fun to use.
Just because they made money doesn't mean they had the best strategy for doing so. EA's been in the yearly habit of lumping all their eggs in one basket per genre for the past decade and when it doesn't go well it completely blows up in their face. Anthem is the latest example of this. Dead Space 3 didn't break even and lead to Visceral's closure. Battlefront 2 had the big lootbox gambling scandal. People are getting sick of the obvious laziness seen in Madden and FIFA where the newest games in both franchises are just roster updates which could've been accomplished with a $5 patch file to last year's games. There's also the multiple failed MMOs EA put money into to try and compete with Activision when WoW was at its peak: Warhammer Online, Hellgate London, Darkspore, and Secret World. Their only MMO still going is Star Wars Old Republic and it was nearly destroyed by its subscription only model before having to go free to play with an optional subscription model to get the DLCs.
It's born of a combination of exorbitant budgets for hi-fi development, marketing that tries way too hard, and shareholders who demand infinite growth every quarter because they're addicted to their own wealth. That's been the trend since the 2000s cause David Jaffe started complaining back then when he realized games were getting too expensive to make during the production of God of War. For reference, GoW's development cost about $4 Million. Destiny cost over $140 Million in development alone.
That's why the big companies are so desperate for the perpetual motion live service machine to be a thing because on paper it promises an infinite circle of incoming money for less effort and cost after initial release. In practice it never takes because they try to artifically force high adoption numbers to the Skinner box via gimmicks and licenses at the expense of engaging gameplay. Add the slow rate of updates and new content releases by a burnt out and creatively bankrupt dev team and most players get bored and abandon the game before anything new comes out. The hangers on are then turned off by the weak content updates because the burnt out team has no inspiration left to make anything good. The whole thing slowly goes down in flames, bleeding subscribers all the while, before it can even get going.
Last edited:
I also want to throw out the oversaturation of these services. The point of them is for gamers to spend all their time in any given one which inherently means they're ignoring all others. Any given player simply doesn't have the time to play all of Destiny, Anthem, The Division, Battlefield, Battlefront, etc, etc because each individually attempts to monopolize "engagement."
This is pretty much objectively untrue and falls under the "just world" fallacy.
Just-world fallacy - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
