Is Lawbreaker's (relatively) low population a dealbreaker for you?

[Burnouts3s3]

Over the weekend, Lawbreakers, the new game from Cliff Bleszinski, was released and was met with overall positive reviews. Having an 81 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.9 User Score, the general reception has been overall good.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/lawbreakers

However, upon further analysis, much of the coverage and positive word of mouth was overshadowed by one factor: low player population.

With a current population of 1,707 players (based on Steam Charts as to the writing of this thread) and 500 viewers on Twitch (again as to the writing of this review) many players are passing by Lawbreakers because of its relatively low population. Some are even going so far as to condemn the game as it fails to compete with other games in the genre, or to use a Strawman Fallacy

"Overwatch is better than Lawbreakers because more people are playing it".

Now, obviously how many people are currently playing a game and how many people are watching it on Twitch isn't necessarily indicative of the game's overall quality but it does show insight (especially for Multiplayer focused games) of how well a game's lifespan will do and how it will be received.

Less people playing Lawbreakers means longer waiting times for matches to start and less people buying the various amounts of microtransactions in the game store.

So, does a low player population and low Twitch following mean a no-buy for you or do you ignore those stats when purchasing a game? Does this change when deciding to buy a singer player game instead?

 

[sXeth]

The main dealbreaker would've been that I tried out the Beta and had literally no idea what anything was. Just random names (and not even conventional ones) for the classes and abilities, and learning basic gameplay elements on the fly in PvP is just garbage design.

Population would be a secondary or third concern (the maps also seemed pretty poor). I've never claimed to be anything more then maybe slightly past average in shooters. So low population = mosty the die hards = matchmaking being horrible one sided garbage for anyone who isn't a die hard. Which just exacerbates the first point.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

No, the population doesn't stop me from playing it. The fact that is looks utterly bland and lacking in style and personality is why I don't play it. It looks like the most generic thing imaginable.

 

[DeliveryGodNoah_v1legacy]

It didn't stop me. But while I enjoy the game, it has a lot against it.

For one, it has a terrible "tutorial". But Overwatch didn't have a great one either. However, Overwatch had the benefit of bot matches to practice in and not just stationary dummies. And I understand it would probably be difficult to make bots that take advantage of the zero gravity gameplay, but unfortunately, the trade off to that is people who want proper practice before hopping into a public match would be turned off.

The characters are dreadfully boring, which an online shooter doesn't need good characters, but Law Breakers is obviously trying to put some emphasis on the fact that they want it to be a character driven shooter.

Also, no servers. Don't like a mode? Fuck you, you have to go into a random pool with everyone else. There's only "Quick Match" and "Custom Match". So let's hope you have a bunch of friends to invite to your custom matches.

And the community is already kind of garbage. Either small dick players thinking they're king shit from winning a couple matches, or people shouting how dead the game is already. I've only run into a handful of players who have anything reasonable to say.

 

[DaCosta]

"Overwatch is better than Lawbreakers because more people are playing it".

And it is.

People complain about Overwatch's matchmaking as it is, it can only be worse if the game only has 1700 players worldwide to pull from.

 

[Zhukov]

Not quite a dealbreaker.

The godawful visual design is though. It looks like what you'd get if Overwatch had outsourced it's visual design to a team of second rate comic book artists.

Low population is a kind of delayed-action dealbreaker. Especially since I live in Australia, so I would only have a small portion of those players within decent ping range. A game's player base only goes down over time, so a low starting population ensures that I won't be buying this game even when it goes on sale. Nobody wants to buy into a dead multiplayer game.

 

[The Lunatic]

There's a number of things that put me off LawBreakers.

There's far too many Hero-shooters coming out, and that are out. I didn't like TF2. I don't like Overwatch. I most likely won't like Hero Shooter #52.

The design is fairly boring. Nothing particularly stands out with the game. Fair generic setting. I mean, admittedly, making it cartoony would have been even worse. But, there's surely some interesting settings that could be looked into rather than "Drab Military shooter" and "Cartoon Network".

The character design is easily the worst I have ever seen. How on earth did anyone go with this awful group of characters? They're all... So ugly... Not just in a physical sense, just, everything.

 

[Deadguy2322]

We would have been fine with just one ?Over the weekend?. Just sayin?.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Yes, the low population is absolutely a deal breaker for me.

I've bought into quite a few shooters that were marketed on unique movement, or fast speed, and high skill ceilings.

Nexuiz, Shattered Horizon, Strike Vector, etc.

They were great games with low player populations, but I naively thought "once people learn about how awesome these games are they'll get more popular." After a couple of weeks it became impossible to even get a full lobby.

You'll only get to play for a couple of weeks until the population of the game completely dies, and for a multiplayer only title, the player population is EVERYTHING.

I've been burned and I've learned my lesson. I don't buy low player pop games anymore, regardless of how fun they look and how much I feel the developer deserves success for their creation.

 

[darkcalling]

nah

What kills all interest for me is it's an interesting setting that, like Overwatch, has no story mode to explore it. Instead you've just got randos shooting each other for no reason. I hate that multiplayer only is a thing but I'll just ignore them as long as I've got good single player stuff to do.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Truth be told, the game never really registered on my radar.

The biggest deal breaker for me with most games nowadays is time investment. I don't have the free time that I used to in my teens and twenties, and I already have a massive backlog both on my PC and PS4. Between the ongoing events in Overwatch and Killing Floor 2 along with wanting to replay Wolfenstein: The New Order to name just a few, my gaming schedule's pretty much booked right now.

 

[Rednog]

Why would I want to play a PC exclusive from a guy who bashed PC gamers for years?
That said, for a multiplayer only game one of the first things I'm going to look at is play population. Especially on PC, there's so much competition for people's attention, populations can die overnight. Let's be real this isn't a F2P game, it's population isn't going to have a massive spike in population. Who wants to drop $30 on a multiplayer only game whose population could die at the drop of a hat?

It looks bland and the concept is bland.
Also, with something like Quake Champions pulling shit numbers who is asking for a new arena shooter in 2017?

 

[BrawlMan]

1. Sonic Mania

2. Other games to play.

3. Cliff can eat a dick. The game looks boring and uninteresting, and I can think of literally a thousand other shooters that are better than this.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

Not quite a dealbreaker.

The godawful visual design is though. It looks like what you'd get if Overwatch had outsourced it's visual design to a team of second rate comic book artists.

Low population is a kind of delayed-action dealbreaker. Especially since I live in Australia, so I would only have a small portion of those players within decent ping range. A game's player base only goes down over time, so a low starting population ensures that I won't be buying this game even when it goes on sale. Nobody wants to buy into a dead multiplayer game.

This is pretty much why I haven't bothered to try Rainbow Six Siege (aside from Uplay). I'm in Aus too, and playing fast paced action games on laggy connections is pretty much pointless. The great thing about Overwatch is its huge population of players AND (most important) the fact that it has servers here in Australia.

 

[Jerast]

Overwatch is better because people are playing it. That is a valid point for an online multiplayer shooter that relies on matchmaking

 

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

And here's Crowbcat to tell you why it sucked

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ4v2LgVlEA

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

It's one of the dealbreakers. A big one. Another one is that there's no point to this game. If I wanted to get into a hero shooter I could go back to TF2, I could play the new Quake (which is also free) or I could get Overwatch which I know is going to be active for years and years to come. Why on Earth did they think that this game was a good idea? Even Quake can't compete without being a f2p and hero based. Think about that for a second. Motherfuckin' Quake is now a free to play title because everyone and their mother is playing Overwatch.

 

[Myria]

This one tanked even faster than Battleborn.

I hadn't even thought that possible...

 

[meiam]

This one tanked even faster than Battleborn.

I hadn't even thought that possible...

Battle born was playable for about 6 month which I think is fine, the server were emptying out around the same time I was getting a bit bored by it. Ultimately I don't regret buying it and I knew this was going to happen. I do think they should have made the F2P switch much sooner.

Lawbreaker will also probably be forced to go F2P, I hope they don't wait as long.