Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”. Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:
- Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
- Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
- The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
- The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn’t lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.
Can’t really say I’m surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.
If you don’t have a vision, don’t try to turn money into more money by making a game. Everyone loses. Dumping money on assets doesn’t make your trope copy/paste any better than the other million cheap Chinese clones on an app store.
Single player shooter’s aren’t bad or even unpopular right now. But I think people are beginning to realize that anything that has EA’s name attached to it is trash and just avoid it on principal.
Jup, even new iterations of their older IP seem to be devolving instead of taking that which was fun and expanding on it.
Maybe they should use all these behaviour experts to investigate why people keep playing games instead of figuring out how to maximally predate on your customer base.
Ubi does the same. I found the last farcy so Uninteresting that I stopped playing somewhere mid game. And the first signals from their pirate game are also not encouraging, while I know many people that looked forward to it.
Everyone in the single player fps demo is replaying the old good games, or seeking out like custom doom wads or the occasional actually good indie fps single player game, having at this point long given up on large studios being able to make a compelling single player fps.
Sure, a lot of us enjoy lots of other kinds of games too, but good lord is there an unscratchable itch for a new, compelling FPS campaign thats actually interesting and challenging.
It’s boomer shooters or nothing in that space right now. We’re starving out here. On my radar in the coming year or two are Mouse, Core Decay, and Agent 64, but no one knows what kind of quality we’ll get out of those. Also, is it a crime to just throw in some competitive multiplayer that’s meant to be played a handful of times with friends instead of being the next e-sport?
Trying to act like it flopped because it’s single player… What a joke.
I think BG3 showed conclusively that no one will ever play single player games no matter how great they are. /s
but that was like 6 whole months ago. the market is totally different now. /s
I get what you’re saying but FPS specifically are mostly played competitively, so a single player game in THAT specific genre in 2023 sounds like a very bad idea.
Every other genre than FPS needs more games where you’re allowed to only play single player and use tons of mods if you want to without risking being locked out of playing, though.
Fallout New Vegas, Baldurs Gate 3, Skyrim, The Outer Worlds and the older Bioware games are where it’s at for my favorite genre, to name a few examples.
Yep, nobody enjoyed playing through Half Life 1/2, or FEAR or Deus Ex, or the early Medal of Honor or Call of Duty campaigns, or the Doom series or Battlefield Bad Company or the Wolfenstein Series.
Just because most modern popular FPSs are basically cartoony tf2/overwatch clones/derivatives and there are a lot of highly competitive multiplayer FPSs doesnt mean theres no market for a single player FPS.
It means that making a single player FPS game these days is apparently too hard for modern game devs to figure out how to do.
I’m not sure that’s really true that you’re saying about single player FPS games being mostly competitive or that it’s a bad idea. See: Doom, Metro, Ghostwire, Dying Light, System Shock, people seem stoked for Space Marine, etc.
Fair enough, I’ll retract that part heh
Props to you for using strikethrough instead of deleting in your edit so the context still makes sense. I think you bring up an interesting point about competitive fps games. I imagine companies structure their development similar to games-as-a-service because they are essentially two flavors of the same thing, right? I had never really considered whether the growth of the competitive scene was part of the drive towards GaaS and away from tight single player experiences.
I think underlying all of this is that publishers want a guaranteed profit margin. That doesn’t exist in art, of course, but they still want it. And if that means choosing what they think is a safe bet, they’ll choose it. I think Bungie made GaaS look way easier than it actually is, and maybe the competitive scene contributed to that too. “Look at all the money these hero shooters are making, let’s get a piece of that pie.” Formulas just never quite work out that simply in real life.
I’m very into shooters and this was a hard pass because it looked like a generic and boring Call of Duty re-skin and I’m not into that game.
Maybe the problem is not the current AAA or shooters landscape. Maybe it is more about the quality and the fun your games are.
Also EA has to understand more and more people have experienced their garbage launches and will skip their gold plated launch prices because of the risk you end up buying a lemon that is subsequently abandoned.
Making sure the gameplay loop is interesting and the game performs properly is important. Focussing on all the latest engine features that requires people to have top tier hardware is only good for marketing. Marketing then eats up a tremendous amount of budget without adding anything to the offer they make.
The last EA game I bought was Jedi: Fallen Order for $4, and I still felt ripped off, because EA adds a mandatory online connection check to every game they release now, including Immortals.
Most notable thing about this game was it was one of the first to launch with FSR3 frame generation. Other than that I think I’d have completely forgotten about it.
Of course, Doom doesn’t exist right
Yeah, but you see… Doom was a rare unicorn. It came with refreshing ideas, looked visually attractive, played good, and was fun.
That’s a tall ask from EA.
Whenever I saw that game it looked like a generic, soulless, made-by-committee shooter… All footage had strong tech demo vibes. The only thing I can remember about it is „the guns looked kinda weird.“
Because EA games is weak. It’s all retreads of ancient franchises or bloated games with no risks taken.
What part of this game fits your statement here?
Did you read the post? I think the well formatted and easy to read bullet pointed list explains it
Because EA games is weak. It’s all retreads of ancient franchises or bloated games with no risks taken.
Which part of this sentence fits this game.
All dictated by management with zero input from anyone else. I get sad for developer’s working for EA. Having zero influence on the games they make. I believe that everyone can have a great idea or a solution to a problem no matter what department they’re in.
Lots of developers have overlapping skills from making they’re own games that aren’t being utilised.
Working under EA is probably alot like working for McDonald’s, yeah if they did it ‘this way’ they would sell more burgers but good luck getting your voice heard.
Or maybe EA is just a garbage corporation that aren’t actually good at making video games?
I play a lot of games but Ive never heard of this game before this post
Same. This seems to be getting more common with various media and products. Too many choices which is a good thing for consumers but not good for publishers.
“Nobody bought our game we didn’t market. Guess we’ll stop making an entire genre of games.”
From the article:
“At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio’s debut project,” the former employee said. "The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution…
They must have done extremely bad marketing even though they spent so much on marketing because I’ve never heard of this game
I mean, it’s my favorite genre, so if EA can stay the fuck away from it, that’s not a bad outcome
I mean, it’s my favorite genre, so if EA can stay the fuck away from it, that’s not a bad outcome
Had you heard of it?
I’ve literally never heard of it, but not my genre.
I think they mean single player shooter is their favorite genre, and would be happy for EA to stay away from them. Not the ‘game nobody heard of’
They did market it. A lot.
It’s just that the game’s trailers were wildly forgettable.
They claim to have spent 40 million usd marketing it, I saw some people on twitch playing it when it first came out but it looked meh and was priced way too high so I didn’t watch much
There are many genres EA needs to stop making, but I doubt they’ll take the right lesson from this
“(…) AAA (…) was a truly awful idea”
ftfy devI’ll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I’d say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I’m honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.
Yeah I will say, it’s painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it’s not a bad game per se. It’s just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.
The worst offense to me though is how there’s no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That’s the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.
Just FYI, the term triple-A doesn’t refer directly to the quality of the game. It simply means it was made by a larger, well-established company.
The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally “AAA” now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that’s “AA”.
Much like “alpha” and “beta”, the meanings are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.
I’m so old when I started in games “alpha” meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.
Now it’s basically “alpha” means a demo, and “beta” means they’re buying time for GM release.
Regarding the alpha/beta point, increase in internet availability and rolling updates probably made all the work in that shift. In the old days if you published a raw product it would take a hell of an effort to amend it. Now it’s just a matter of a user not plugging the internet off for some time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This started happening when studios got bigger and marketing controlled release dates. By the 2010s or so, the actual devs had zero say. So some idiot owner would promise a game in 18 months, half the ideas would be removed due to time, and a rushed product went out.
“Games as a service” was just corporate speak for how to streamline putting out a game with less components and then adding them over time.
Unfortunately it worked, and players bought in.
I agree 100%. The magic was not magic. It was just different looking guns. Which made the game seem more dull to me. Even if it was an okay shooter.
Peak player count was less than 800 players on steam… Flop is an understatement.
Those 100 workers EA laid off dont deserve to be thrown in the trash; why dont the execs take a nice paycut instead?
I think companies that make profits should not be allowed to lay off people. You‘re welcome.
Edit: without cause
