Dalisclock said:
Apparently its $35 on amazon. A week after launch. Yep. Not a bad sign at all.
I'm not sure it was doomed to fail but it sounds like they had no idea what they wanted to do with it and what there is is fairly sloppy in execution on top of being buggy as hell mess. Besthesda needs to spend a lot of time and effort to salvage this and it remains to be seen if they want to do is.
No Man's Sky spent the last 2 years trying to build itself into something. Wether or not that actually improves the game or makes it what people want is debatable but nobody can say they haven't been putting in some major effort to fix things.
Regarding the pricing, I think they have issues with a *lot* of refunds being requested and not many sales, combining into efforts to shift units by any means (lower price, bundles).
I say doomed because of how tone-deaf the whole exercise was. If you think of all the things that made Fallouts 3, NV and 4 as enjoyable as they were, then take all of those out and replace them with things no fan wanted, except maybe the multiplayer, that's what 76 is. Always online, no modding, no NPCs, no story, no context, hours and hours of grind, etc. Then you have VATS...since it can't slow time down in a multiplayer game, all it does now is "snap" to an enemy, leaving janky combat that doesn't please action gamers or RPG players. Without NPCs, there's no personality in the world, it's just devoid of life; all it is is audiologs everywhere, by all reports.
I don't have an issue with survival elements per se, tho I don't personally find them particularly compelling. Keeping hunger/thirst meters filled isn't compelling enough by itself; it's meant to keep you engaged and immersed in the world while you play. But this game makes me think of something I said with regard to ME: Andromeda. I played ME:A originally at...v1.04 but tried it again with v1.09 and with some PC mods that made improvements, fixed bugs, made SAM STFU, etc. What I said then was that even with all the bug fixes and mods and all the glaring issues now gone, what was left was still just a dull, mediocre game I simply did not want to play. Nothing fixed the awful story, characters, voice acting, villains, gameplay loop, etc.
Even if we fast-forward today to a bug-free (Hah!) FO76, stable servers, no loss of progress, no ice skating enemies or borked AI, no bugs or glitches at all, what will be left will still be a tone-deaf, always-online, boring game I wouldn't want to play, with bad combat, crafting and survival elements and hours of grinding. Instead, I could play FO4 with mods, offline and have a better experience.
Saints Row 3-4 are great examples of what Bethesda could've done. They could've made a single-player game that supported drop-in coop. THAT is a fallout/TES game I would love to play, to share those worlds and adventures with a friend. But they're chasing "live service" money. I do believe it was doomed because even if you magicked away the bugs, unreliability and other technical flaws today, you'd still be left with a shallow game aping a years old paradigm that Rust has been doing better for years.
