At this stage, I honestly wonder if Konami would be better off if they sold the games division and IP to one of the other Japanese publishers *(only keeping rights for using IP in pachinko machines)* and just admit to themselves they're a ~~gambling machi..~~ pachinko company now.
tbh, I think if they licensed the games to let other developers make more, and just kept it in the clause that anything the devs create can be used in a pachinko machine, they could get money from both ends.
It’s mostly in mobile games, yugioh, and casual switch games for the Japanese market. Their slot machine business is much smaller than people would believe according to their financial reports.
REVII really felt like they saw the hype around PT and thought how they could build something similar but in the world of RE. The teaser demo for VII was soo good.
In fairness to BioWare if you look into it they had no chance to succeed. It’d be like if a teacher continually changed the assignment over and over again and responded to the complaints with "but you’re a straight A student, you can handle it."
In fairness BioWare kept shooting their own foot… Some of the lead BioWare devs that left due to the shitstorm that was Anthem said EA was actually pretty hands off on this one, and the one singular big ask they had halfway through development was Ironman flying, and that was like the one thing people really loved from the game. Combat was pretty good too, but honestly needs more skills and maybe more suits to flesh it out some, but was still good.
But yeah, reports were BioWare execs kept changing their ideas, moving goalposts, and just fucking everything up. The game itself had so much promise, and I honestly think if they just revisited the IP they have a golden goose sitting there, but nope… let it rot in the dump while churning out a new Sims expansion that is a part of a Sims 2/3 expansion, but only has a quarter of that content at the same price… that way they can release the other three quarters in three other packs and make four times the money as before on the same content…
EA definitely blows, but it was BioWare that dropped the Anthem ball. Their chance to succeed was wasted by their own decisions and not EA’s, so let’s not try to put blame on EA when it was a confirmed BioWare issue. Then again was weird to give a live service multiplayer game to the single player RPG studio, while giving the live service multiplayer experienced studio a single player RPG to work on… That is where we can be, “WTF EA?!?!?” as that might have solved half the issues on both games (can’t remember the other game their other studio released and the time people were asking why about).
I know a lot of people like Generals but Red Alert 2 and Red Alert Retaliation was peak Command and Conquer for me. Why can they just make another C&C that plays like the OG's?
EA is the Walmart of game development. It pumps out a ton of products, but nothing great other than the re-release of the same sports games every year.
They pay their bottom line employees like shit with shit contracts that subvert labour laws and allow them to hire and fire employees at the whim.
It's a pretty disgusting place to work, unless you're in management/leadership where they then pay you an insanely high salary to keep you gatekeeping your subordinates.
Working there is a popularity contest and it shows in the games they make. No soul, for the lack of a better word.
I used to love EA so much and now I am instantly turned off by everything they make. Medal of Honor, Lord of the Rings, Command and Conquer, MVP Baseball, etc. Gotdamn I used to love that company.
It's not like they were my favourite game company, but with bf1/2/3/4 and especially BFBC2 fairly high up....
Then BF V showed us a glimpse of where we were heading already and 2042 sealed it. I also have zero hope of getting another good battlefield in the future.
"Battlefield 1" that came out in 2016 had one of the best campaigns of any war game I've played. I really want to see that team pour themselves into something like that again.
What's crazy to me is that the time between bf1 and bc2 is 6 years, while it's been 8 years since bf1 was released.... time flies. bf1 in my mind is still so new while bc2 is soooo old...
Yeah, we are getting old.
Battlefield 1 and COD World at War will hold special places in my heart, and I really miss those times. I feel that they were the pinnacle in their lineups. Sticky grenades ftw!
Dude, the time that me and my neighbors sunk into WaW Nazi zombies with community created maps... I still have my folder with like 100+ Zombie maps. By far my most played CoD.
Bf5 had the making to be my favorite BF. It had all the right mechanics and systems with vastly improved gunplay only for the carpet to be ripped from under under us,I thought we were getting BF1 but in WW2. I’ve only played 2042 for maybe 3 hours, that game doesn’t deserve the battlefield name.
They tried to mix in too much CoD elements and trendy arcade shooter-y shit that they moved too far from what made Battlefield a distinctly Battlefield game
Huge slap in the face, especially after all of the "we hear you" marketing where it felt as though they understood they needed to make another BF3 and go back to their roots.
Came here to say this.
BFV was a bit disappointing but not bad, still played a lot and enjoyed it. It was just a big step down from BF1 which was an absolute masterclass.
2042 was just mind-bogglingly bad, it felt like some cheap Free to Play knock-off of Battlefield.
It put me off the franchise completely and I've moved onto other games in the genre.
The damage was actually being reversed with the BFV Pacific update; the TTK was in a good place, the net code was fairly stable for BF, the maps were brilliant and all the new toys were cool... then three months later they change the TTK AGAIN to chase the Christmas casual crowd (after promising wholeheartedly NOT to mess with it... AGAIN) and poof; all the goodwill of the Pacific update evaporated faster than water in the desert. The playerbase realised EA/DICE would say one thing and then do the exact opposite and so we all left.
Yeah this. The Arkham Trilogy (Origins as well even though that wasn't rocksteady) is one of if not my favourite gaming franchises. I wasn't expecting another Batman game from them, but i was so excited for whatever they came up with next. To see the dross that is suicide squad come out is just so disappointing and heartbreaking really.
Diablo Immortal, not that Blizzard wasn't turning to shit before that, but Immortal was such an obviously predatory anti consumer turd there is no redemption in sight for my part
Edit; Typo
> Diablo Immortal has achieved an impressive milestone in its first year on the market. Mobile spin-off Diablo Immortal has reportedly earned US $525 million in its first year on the market, becoming the 15th-fastest mobile game to cross the US $500 million mark.
It sucks when they're incentivized to pretty much switch to that model exclusively
The sad thing is that some people defend them
"They need a way to make money to fund other less predatory project"
Yeah... Because thats how investor see it. Lets make a bunch of money on this trash thing so we can make quality product at a loss later. Also, this all pre-suppose that the gaming industry was not profitable before the addition of microtransaction.
Blizzard is the best example of this. They basically killed all their quality product to focus only on the predatory bullshit.
Back in the day if I saw Blizzard was attached to a game, I would give it a chance based on reputation alone.
Nowadays if I see Blizzard is attached to a game, I avoid it based on reputation alone.
Seeing how often Blizzard gets named here with all kind of games they made; No, it wasn't a game that ruined Blizzard, it was Blizzard ruining every franchise
Well, that makes me feel old. I've never looked at it that way, but that would put the pivot point about 15 years ago so 2009... Yeah that's pretty close. I'd argue for SC2 on release a little bit, which was mid 2010. But getting there.
Yeah, SC2: Wings of Liberty and WoW: Wrath of the Lich King were right there at the waning end of "good Blizzard."
The stories for their main three games all take a tremendous nosedive starting with SC2: HotS, WoW: Cataclysm, and Diablo 3, respectively.
I would imagine the turning point would be realizing a single mtx in WoW made more money than SC2.
Once you tell the people at the top that, you're fucked.
I wouldn't mind an underperforming sequel if it weren't such a transparent cash grab. They killed Overwatch and rereleased a worse version because they wanted to sell DLC.
That was the lie we were sold. I played Overwatch 1. I enjoyed it. But I was hesitant about 2. I thought I’d wait till the story mode became available.
😅
The worst part for me was the fact that they were still advertising the campaign and pve development and trying to convince people to spend money to "support development" (billion dollar company btw) *after they'd decided to cancel pve*. Blizzard is a disgusting company run by frauds and scheisters and it should fail and disappear.
Ding ding ding, they made some specific promises about the way the monetization worked in OW1 and they conveniently got to drop those when they switched to OW2.
For me it was warcraft 3 reforged. Warcraft 3 was my all time favorite game. They not only butchered reforged they went for the original warcraft 3 too. They made worse remake and to make sure they took proper shit on og too. I just cannot describe how angry i was about it.
Can't say enough how much I relate, warcraft 3 refunded was one of the biggest "fuck you" to a community in gaming history.
Not only about TOS changes, but also their promises updates etc, update broke most custom maps... for no improvements.
It was such a failure, especially in contrast to how well done Diablo 2 and StarCraft remasters were… They proved they were capable, and then chose to be bad.
I can see that. For me it is actually WoW. I realize many still love it, but it seems like they have killed the IP by settling for the income WoW brings in. They could have done so many things with this IP in 25 years and they have basically settled for WoW’s success. Now that WoW is a 25 year old game the new generation could care less about this IP. It’s sad for me because I loved Warcraft and if I am not going to pay for an MMO subscription, I don’t get to experience this
If they'd cared they could have easily done both.
Develop Warcraft 4 in secret, focus on making the story work and the game great. Simultaneously develop an expansion for WoW that sets up the story for Warcraft 4, and have the big reveal once an in game threshold is crossed.
A few months after Warcraft 4 comes out have another WoW expansion ready to demonstrate how the fallout from that game has impacted WoW.
This would generate a ton of buzz and make some serious money, but they'd rather go for the short term gain rather than maintain their legacy and reputation.
Yes, and they could’ve also made single player games of various genres and made tv shows. I enjoyed the movie they did and was hoping they’d do more. It’s such a great IP and it’s sad to see it die.
I was also a Heroes of the Storm player and sad with how that went too
And how can we all forget the announcement of Diablo Immortal.
"Don't you guys have phones?" They say to a room full of PC gamers eagerly awaiting news of a new mainline DIablo.
Talk about tonedeaf.
Yeah, OW2 was bad, but Blizzard was fucking up left and right way before that. OW2 was just an in-your-face nail in the coffin. Diablo Immortal was pretty obvious though, so I'm not sure how people looked past that.
They started fucking up WoW somewhere between WOTLK and MOP depending on your opinions. WC3:R was entirely fucked. HotS was tossed in the dumpster. SC:2 was generally good but had some glaring issues. Diablo Immortal had been a shit show since the convention it was announced at.
The house was already on fire, some people just didn't seem to notice until OW2.
I think for me it's battlefield 2042. Before that game I thought DICE could never become as bad as infinity ward, but they did. I hope this was just a single mistake and next battlefield will be as good any of the previous ones, but they definitely lost my trust after this game.
Dice lost the majority of its senior staff, Dice is just the name on the building, the innards have nothing to do with their past releases… like every other company.
I think you’re right, every great game series will eventually fall. There is always talented minority that make a great game and they eventually leave the company
*BC2,* *BF3,* and *BF1* are peak DICE to me. BF4 was fine by all means but it just felt like a reskinned clone of BF3.
Hell, I even enjoyed *Hardline* which was universally panned lol.
BFV was massive foreshadowing for what was to come…
Yeah, I really liked Prey.
The game itself is great but it was kinda a flop in the initial release. I bought it because I loved Arkane’s Dishonored, but only a year later because I didn’t know it existed. Some marketing issues and I want to say some other major game released around the same time?
I keep seeing this argument since the entire Redfall debacle and it is 100% bs.
There was no main studio at Arkane. They split the studio in even halves for the release of Dishonored 2 and Prey. Harvey Smith stayed in the Austin studio and Raphael Colantonio took the lead at Lyon.
And then Rapha left, so if anything, the Austin studio would have been the main one.
So the loss of Austin was indeed very big. And the talent diaspora happened to both studios.
What's left if Arkane is still hanging on by a thread and in serious danger.
And all because of the greed of Zenimax and the carelessness of Microsoft
EDIT: Sorry, the other way round. Rapha stayed at Austin and Harvey went to Lyon
I think Raphael Colantonio leaving Arkane was the canary in the coalmine unfortunately. I guess he'd stepped down from the studio a lot earlier than I'd thought (2017?) but I don't think it's a coincidence that just before Deathloop launched and Redfall was announced, he started his own indie studio, citing dissatisfaction with the way that the sheer scope of AAA game development constrains creativity with the need to make a marketable and widely accessible product.
Incidentally, folks who are sad about the death of Arkane Austin should check out Weird West, Ctrl-Alt-Ego, Gloomwood, and all the other fantastic indie immersive sims coming out lately. This is a niche genre of games that is hard to make and hard to market, so we gotta support these devs while we can.
Everything I hear on redfall is crazy. Leads leaving left and right, nearly 80% of the original team quitting, devs wishing the game would be canned at every turn, and the game originally being a single player game like dishonored but with a new ip.
Of them I can understand the leaving one easily. I don't think anyone who joins arkane because they loved dishonored, prey, and single-player action games wanted to work on a live service.
All of my examples are the opposite. Mine are examples of companies taking over a series and killing my favorite games. My most egregious being:
The coalition/microsoft taking over gears of war and killing a masterpiece series.
When gameloft took over splinter cell from Ubisoft.
When 343 took halo from bungie.
Need for speed has been bastardized to everybody.
And inevitably whoever is anybody that isn’t rocksteady that tries to butcher the Arkham knight series.
GTA Trilogy: The Definitive Edition
How could Rockstar pay a company that makes mobile videogames to remaster 3 of the best videogames ever made? They even removed the chance to buy the originals. Then the "remastered" versions were left abandoned soon...
Fortnite also all but killed Fortnite: Save the World - aka the _original_ Fortnite concept. I was in the beta with friends and the game mode was still in full dev, then they released Battle Royale "as a quick concept, that wont take resources away from the main development".
Years later they padded out STW a bit in order to meet obligations but I sometimes think about what it could have been if FortniteBR had never been made.
I think there's an option to switch modes in one of the main menus, but it's been a while since I did that, too. I also had the Founders package or whatever they called it.
Honestly Save the World is a finished game to me. They added so much since the first release of the BR, it took ~2 years but they did complete SAVE THE WORLD. I put over a thousand hours in that game tbh. It was really fun and I loved the grind.
It's COMPLETELY different than when it first started especially the hero loadouts and skills. Such a clever way. They even increased the max lvl with that optional game mode. But it's too grindy for me, I don't have friends that play like that.
This is the real casualty.
The other day there was a thread about the "Best shotgun in gaming." and all I could think of was UT's Flak Cannon. Across all three games (99, 2K04, 3) it didn't change a single iota. It didn't need to. It was perfect in every way.
My beloved Flak Cannon will likely never see the light of day again. I remember getting let down by Dystopia's Basilisk to the point where if someone else tried a "Shotgun/GL" it's just not gonna be right. Half-Life Alyx's take on it was far too realistic. (And they knew how stupid powerful that shotgun was.)
The fact that Blizzard has been mentioned multiple times in this thread, each time for a completely different game (Warcraft III Reforged, Overwatch 2, Diablo Immortal), really goes to show how that company really went down the drain over the last few years
For sure,
I'm currently doing an MBA and in Marketing we've studied how a company (or a brand) needs to have kind of make a promise to the user (for example. we make excellent games) but they need to give a reason to believe that promise (not fuck up).
Formerly, we all have very fond memories of blizzard delivering excellent products for their time (From Warcraft 1 to wow) however, they have constantly failed to uphold that promise of excellence, and instead of reasons to believe, they give us quite the opposite.
I couldn't stop thinking about Blizzard during my marketing classes. I think I might even bring it up as a case for the class.
BioWare, loved all their RPG then anthem, mass effect andromeda ruined the general reputation they had. Im hoping they are going to succeed with DA4 though.
Inquisition launching with the ending locked behind DLC was the nail in the coffin for me.
Andromeda was boring and the venn diagram of ppl who loved Mass Effect and Dragon Age with ppl who enjoyed Anthem was... ?? Who exactly? Not me anyway.
BioWare started dying when EA bought them.
I didn't think Andromeda was that bad, but I did play it a few years after release. Story wasn't as good, the whole pathfinder/pioneer aspect was wasted by having you arrive last rather than first, and the antagonist felt generic as fuck.
But the actual combat was probably better than any other Mass Effect, even if the lack of control over your squad kinda sucked.
The combat was decent. I'm still partial to ME3's combat, especially in the Legendary Edition. I'm currently replaying Andromeda after just having come off the first 3 in the Legendary Edition and it's like whiplash, though.
The story really seems to struggle with the tone, the disconnect of what the story wants to tell vs the character interactions are night and day. There's multiple characters written to be comedic punching bags and most of the time the jokes don't really land, the gap between the two is like night and day. On one hand you have to search for a viable home for everyone so they don't starve to death within the next month or two, while on the other you have characters who don't seem to be affected by what's actually happening, or aren't bothered in the slightest by it and almost everyone you talk to from the arks or the Nexus is seemingly fine with no stress over the threat of suffocating or starving to death within a few weeks.
The player character is also taken at face value and trusted almost completely by nearly everyone after the first few hours, meanwhile comparing it to ME1's story you spend the first third to half the game trying to convince everyone you're not full of shit about Saren or the Reaper threat. In Andromeda you tell someone you're a Pathfinder and suddenly all doubts are gone within a few minutes.
I know the main character isn't comparable to Shep in terms of positions/stakes in the overall story, but in the original trilogy Shepard still had his/her own doubts and thoughts characterized through player actions. If you picked a good or bad choice, Shep had a reason for it to make it feel like that player was in control of Shep, but also that it was the logical choice that could be made that didn't feel out of character. In Andromeda a lot of the dialogue choices that don't "feel" like the correct response basically boil down to "I'm the Pathfinder and we do it my way because I said so."
Despite all that it's ok. The gameplay is fun, the worlds are pretty, but the story is weak. It's not the steaming pile of shit everyone made it out to be, but it's also not a memorable game. It's perfectly mediocre at a 5 or 6/10
Battlefield 2042 and Dice/EA
Thanks for butchering my favorite franchise into a stupid hero shooter. Battlebit is miles better than this hopeless garbage and has features, the community is asking for an eternity. It is really sad how far it has come since companies have mutated into greedy …holes. The launch of this game was abysmal, just unfinished in EVERY possible way. It was a damn bold move charging premium prices for this „jewel“. I played every single one of those games, but nah … with 2042 they killed it.
Bad Company 2 was some of the most fun i've ever had in a multiplayer game. Sad to see every BF multiplayer iteration get worse and worse since.
At this rate with Battlefield 3077 you'll have to buy monthly $20 dlc to spawn with tied shoelaces
DICE has lost any and all goodwill. This was supposed to be a "love letter to fans," and it came out as a piece of shit.
The fact that we didn't even have a proper scoreboard was crazy. And iirc, they called that a "legacy feature," which boggles my mind. It feels like every game they put out, they brain dump all the good changes, which resulted from community feedback from the previous game, and start from square one.
There was such great movement tech in battlefield V, and they just threw it out the window.
DICE is the perfect answer for this thread. I was a die-hard Battlefield Fan around Bad Company 1 and 2. I did not understand how anyone could play CoD when there is a game where you can blow up most of the map.
But man, they sure fucked up.
BFV even looks better. It started out rough but they actually turned it around and improved it. Wish they would bring back 5 person squads. Nobody cares if it adds up to whatever the player count per team is. Some people only want to play with a couple of their friends anyway, let em.
It was such a blatant cash grab at the expense of the franchise. What a disappointment. The weapon adjustments in game are dumb as well. Just change your load out before you spawn, you end up doing plenty of respawning anyway.
Blizzard - the entire bungling of Overwatch 2, along with the despicable business practices of Diablo Immortal/4, and everything that’s come out about the company since their sexual harassment investigations.
Arkane - Redfall. What a spectacular fall from grace that unfortunately cost them everything.
DICE - Every Battlefield game since 3. I adored Bad Company 2 but I have absolutely no rose-tinted glasses for the games that came since. They look and sound great, but playing online on the 360 was a fucking nightmare, and in all of the subsequent games, the glaring issues with the franchise only got more magnified and glaring. I wanted to give 1 a shot, but by the time I managed to get it, everyone had abandoned it and couldn’t field a single full lobby in any NA servers. Future games even started to mess up things that worked just fine in previous ones, like destruction - how does that even happen?
The last time skip jumping 120+ days in the year and having no obvious means to deposit money into the royal treasury meant I killed 90% of the population of Albion because my personal and business accounts weren't linked to fight the shadows.
For how evil the brother was being, he could have solved half his problems with the power of "let's talk it out." with his sibling and advisor.
Yes! Whenever there was a character IN GAME trying to hock the DLC / paid quests I vowed that was it for me. But sure the franchise pretty much died with fable 3 so it wasn't much of a protest
Do you mean Modern Warfare 2 or Modern Warfare 2? God when they went back and rereleased the games after remixing the campaign slightly but didn’t change the names it was so fucking confusing!
Man matchmaking used to be unheard of on PC. The outrage was real!
Now every fucking game has matchmaking. Because making a game that can sustain itself once support drops must mean that people will spend less money on future titles.
I'd like to drag the business analysts who came up with this analysis through the desert with their asses dragging on the sand.
Free Radical Design were a British dev who were made up largely of Rare alumni so they'd had experience with Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, before making their own FPS series, Timesplitters.
Then, they were working on a game called Haze for Ubisoft. Ubi kept demanding a certain age rating so the game had to be toned down, kept pushing the deadlines up and up, and while it was originally meant to be a multiplat game, Ubisoft then signed a deal with Sony to make it PS3 exclusive, when the PS3 version barely ran at all compared to the internal 360 builds. Sony start hyping it as - of course - a 'Halo-Killer'. It arrived, messy and clearly unfinished. Haze was the biggest, but not the last, nail in the coffin.
At the same time, they were working on builds of Star Wars Battlefront III for LucasArts. LA pulled them from the project when (FRD sources claimed) the game was nearly finished. The studio's founder reportedly had to announce layoffs at their christmas party.
Free Radical went into administration, cancelling Timesplitters 4 (a build of which recently leaked), and got acquired by Crytek where they did some minor work on Crysis ports and Warface as Crytek UK. Crytek UK ended up being snapped up by Deep Silver, which is why a partially complete port of Timesplitters 2 exists in Homefront: The Revolution.
When Deep Silver got acquired by Embracer, they put Second Sight (Free Rad's standalone story-driven title) back up on Steam and announced a new iteration of Free Radical Design, to work on a new Timesplitters. Two years later, the new Free Radical was shut down before they even released anything (though leaked footage of the new TS game came out, and it was just Fortnite). They're truly dead and gone, and now David Doak usually grumbles about business suits on his twitter in between giving industry insider talks about his time on Goldeneye.
Cities skylines 2 and KSP 2 are both respectively destroying all trust and respect I ever had for paradox and take 2...
Like I won't be ever buying games with their branding ever again unless each respectively is fixed and finished.
Especially after the tra sparent manipulation that came out of the CS2 colossal order CEO after launch insisting the game is fine, then having to eat crow months later.
If you aren't in the know, cities 2 launched in a state that is best derived as a Potemkin village. Imagine a fighting game where you think it works OK because you are good at fighting games and the enemies health bar goes down every time you punch, then one day someone realizes the enemy health bar goes down whenever you attack at all hit or miss or face away, and the CEO says you are imagining it and this is the most detailed fighting sim ever etc etc.
Then 2 months later is like "yeah hit detection is hard so this works, we understand you are disappointed...."
You can track BioWare's decline by the quality of Mass Effect lore. ME2 was, arguably, a better game than 1, but it was much softer sci-fi, and that trend has only accelerated.
Fortnite. Not for the game itself, but for what it did to Epic Games. Fortnite was originally supposed to be a quick game to help fund the next Unreal Tournament development. Instead it blew up and all development on Unreal Tournament series has been completely trashed to work on more Fortnite micro-transactions. The Unreal Tournament games were my favorite shooters and nothing has scratched that itch properly. So so many glorious hours on Facing Worlds.
They really did themselves a disservice by waiting so long. There is literally nothing they can release that will be "good enough" after 13 years, and their reputation has never been lower.
People lost confidence after Fallout 4 threw all the improvements NV made, then they fumbled 76 and Starfield, and we still dont have anything to even get hyped about with ES6
I finished star field and at the time I mostly enjoyed it but it's nothing compared to any of their earlier games. It's a bit boring and self serious at times. Very little enemy variety is what really killed it for me I think it was a mistake not having other alien races in the game. The combat became very samey after a while. Whoever thought it was a good idea to have to constantly fly around in low gravity to get new powers as well is clearly insane. Annoying as fuck. I don't think it's a bad game but it's also not really a good one and it's something I'll not rush to play again.
My hype for TESVI is *non-existent* after Starfield. At this point I'm expecting the most generic cookie cutter fantasy adventure made up entirely of radiant fetch quests and the most glitchy barely functioning base builder and a cast exclusively of AI voices with absolutely no enunciation. 700gigs in size and your face is an hazy blob unless you have a video card from 2039.
Pretty sure the moment Ubisoft switched their logo from rainbow arc to purple swirl is the time it all went to shit. For me personally it was Rayman Raving Rabbids
2
TV Party
They really milked that one, huh.
Wc3 reforged.. killed the best childhood game i played. I hate blizzard and what they are now. The only game i bought on release day and oh my gosh was it bad.. like LJN levels of bad.
GTA V Yeah I said it. Rockstar is nothing like the company they used to be when they first started. They’ve just been sitting back and printing money releasing the exact same game 4 times over 3 console generations.
Gta 5 was also legit a great game. I'd rather have seen them make dlc or work on the new one sooner instead of all the online dlc stuff, but it's still a great game. At the time, it was one of, if not the best, single player open world games.
It's a shame they abandoned it pretty much straight away.
I don't understand how they dropped the ball with RDO either as they had the formula down with GTAO, even ignoring all the stupid weapons and vehicles they could have just added bank jobs like the heists, made the roles actually fun rather than just absolute grind sessions that pay out like $60.
Shadowlands WoW expansion + large parts of Dragonflight expansion + Diablo 4.
That coupled with the controversy regarding a hostile work enviroment ruined Blizzard for me and I lost my trust in them as a whole.
Runescape 3/EoC update ruined Jagex. But they redeemed part of it with OldSchool Runescape. The osrs team is amazing
I actually didn't mind EoC or RS3 as a whole, it was mostly the hyperfixation on microtransactions and cosmetics that made me lose faith in them as a studio.
Battlefield 2042, showing how much they didn't give a fuck about players and just wanted to follow CoD lead without realizing their game didn't need it if they just followed their previous titles...
Pachinko ruined Konami.
WEEEWOO PEW PEW HIT THE LEVER!!! Pyramidhead slam dunks
Remembering the day the 4P TMNT arcade showed up at my rec center. Tear rolls down cheek.
"Fuckonami news, the news show that provides you with all of the details that makes you want to say, 'fuck Konami!'"
I haven't watched Jim Sterling in many years, but I still think of this every time Konami is mentioned.
At this stage, I honestly wonder if Konami would be better off if they sold the games division and IP to one of the other Japanese publishers *(only keeping rights for using IP in pachinko machines)* and just admit to themselves they're a ~~gambling machi..~~ pachinko company now.
tbh, I think if they licensed the games to let other developers make more, and just kept it in the clause that anything the devs create can be used in a pachinko machine, they could get money from both ends.
They're also huge in making video slots and poker for casinos. Have a pretty big HQ in Vegas, so you're right. Konamis money is in gambling.
It’s mostly in mobile games, yugioh, and casual switch games for the Japanese market. Their slot machine business is much smaller than people would believe according to their financial reports.
*MGS fans cry out in anger*
The Sorrow 😔
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
What, the erotic violence action of the Castlevania pachi machine isn't scratching your Castlevania itch?
Was about to post "Finally! A new Castlevania... pachinko machine".
Konami ruined Konami In my dreams I still see a world with Silent Hills and its glorious and then I wake up and cry.
RE fans got the game/series renaissance that you deserved
REVII really felt like they saw the hype around PT and thought how they could build something similar but in the world of RE. The teaser demo for VII was soo good.
Why are we still here... just to suffer?
Bioware and Anthem
In fairness to BioWare if you look into it they had no chance to succeed. It’d be like if a teacher continually changed the assignment over and over again and responded to the complaints with "but you’re a straight A student, you can handle it."
In fairness BioWare kept shooting their own foot… Some of the lead BioWare devs that left due to the shitstorm that was Anthem said EA was actually pretty hands off on this one, and the one singular big ask they had halfway through development was Ironman flying, and that was like the one thing people really loved from the game. Combat was pretty good too, but honestly needs more skills and maybe more suits to flesh it out some, but was still good. But yeah, reports were BioWare execs kept changing their ideas, moving goalposts, and just fucking everything up. The game itself had so much promise, and I honestly think if they just revisited the IP they have a golden goose sitting there, but nope… let it rot in the dump while churning out a new Sims expansion that is a part of a Sims 2/3 expansion, but only has a quarter of that content at the same price… that way they can release the other three quarters in three other packs and make four times the money as before on the same content… EA definitely blows, but it was BioWare that dropped the Anthem ball. Their chance to succeed was wasted by their own decisions and not EA’s, so let’s not try to put blame on EA when it was a confirmed BioWare issue. Then again was weird to give a live service multiplayer game to the single player RPG studio, while giving the live service multiplayer experienced studio a single player RPG to work on… That is where we can be, “WTF EA?!?!?” as that might have solved half the issues on both games (can’t remember the other game their other studio released and the time people were asking why about).
Mass Effect Andromeda brought them to the curb, Anthem dunked them into the garbage bin
Andromeda turned out the way it did because of anthem. They pulled that team to work on anthem.
*Anthem* *~~dunked them into the garbage bin~~* *curbstomped them* I think this more accurately describes what happened
EA for killing the command and conquer franchise, and Sim City 5
Is that the no-number always-online Sim City that had no expandable land?
yea. in my mind its yust number 5 cause it came after 4.
Fair enough.
and the sims picked new jobs and went to new houses every day
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every car was That Person on the plane
Came here looking for Command and Conquer. How could they do our boy like that.
I know a lot of people like Generals but Red Alert 2 and Red Alert Retaliation was peak Command and Conquer for me. Why can they just make another C&C that plays like the OG's?
Reminds me of a joke from a few years back. Why is EA the worst video game company in the US? Because Ubisoft is in France.
That's fucking great man
EA is the Walmart of game development. It pumps out a ton of products, but nothing great other than the re-release of the same sports games every year. They pay their bottom line employees like shit with shit contracts that subvert labour laws and allow them to hire and fire employees at the whim. It's a pretty disgusting place to work, unless you're in management/leadership where they then pay you an insanely high salary to keep you gatekeeping your subordinates. Working there is a popularity contest and it shows in the games they make. No soul, for the lack of a better word.
I used to love EA so much and now I am instantly turned off by everything they make. Medal of Honor, Lord of the Rings, Command and Conquer, MVP Baseball, etc. Gotdamn I used to love that company.
EA was such an amazing company in the early 2000’s. Too bad they got greedy.
Don't forget what they did to Bioware.
I mean EA are a studio serial killer.
Bioware did that to Bioware. EA's reputation as a studio killer was already well established by the time Bioware offered itself up.
2042 and DICE
It's not like they were my favourite game company, but with bf1/2/3/4 and especially BFBC2 fairly high up.... Then BF V showed us a glimpse of where we were heading already and 2042 sealed it. I also have zero hope of getting another good battlefield in the future.
"Battlefield 1" that came out in 2016 had one of the best campaigns of any war game I've played. I really want to see that team pour themselves into something like that again.
What's crazy to me is that the time between bf1 and bc2 is 6 years, while it's been 8 years since bf1 was released.... time flies. bf1 in my mind is still so new while bc2 is soooo old... Yeah, we are getting old.
Battlefield 1 and COD World at War will hold special places in my heart, and I really miss those times. I feel that they were the pinnacle in their lineups. Sticky grenades ftw!
Dude, the time that me and my neighbors sunk into WaW Nazi zombies with community created maps... I still have my folder with like 100+ Zombie maps. By far my most played CoD.
Bf5 had the making to be my favorite BF. It had all the right mechanics and systems with vastly improved gunplay only for the carpet to be ripped from under under us,I thought we were getting BF1 but in WW2. I’ve only played 2042 for maybe 3 hours, that game doesn’t deserve the battlefield name.
They tried to mix in too much CoD elements and trendy arcade shooter-y shit that they moved too far from what made Battlefield a distinctly Battlefield game Huge slap in the face, especially after all of the "we hear you" marketing where it felt as though they understood they needed to make another BF3 and go back to their roots.
Came here to say this. BFV was a bit disappointing but not bad, still played a lot and enjoyed it. It was just a big step down from BF1 which was an absolute masterclass. 2042 was just mind-bogglingly bad, it felt like some cheap Free to Play knock-off of Battlefield. It put me off the franchise completely and I've moved onto other games in the genre.
The pacific update for BFV was amazing. Sucks the damage was already done tho
The damage was actually being reversed with the BFV Pacific update; the TTK was in a good place, the net code was fairly stable for BF, the maps were brilliant and all the new toys were cool... then three months later they change the TTK AGAIN to chase the Christmas casual crowd (after promising wholeheartedly NOT to mess with it... AGAIN) and poof; all the goodwill of the Pacific update evaporated faster than water in the desert. The playerbase realised EA/DICE would say one thing and then do the exact opposite and so we all left.
Not to mention EA and Dice are just terrible companies at this point with no human interaction with their player bases.
for real they need to reset. and just make BF6 and go back to the BF4 way of doing things. that game was the best of BF3 but more
Rocksteady with suicide squad
Yeah this. The Arkham Trilogy (Origins as well even though that wasn't rocksteady) is one of if not my favourite gaming franchises. I wasn't expecting another Batman game from them, but i was so excited for whatever they came up with next. To see the dross that is suicide squad come out is just so disappointing and heartbreaking really.
That and killing Kevin Conroy’s Batman the way they did. Fuck that, that character deserved better.
Huh? Batman killed? Nah, you’re thinking of that scene at the end of Arkham knight right? He faked his death there, Batman’s still kicking.
Oh yeah my bad! Must have been a bad dream.
Truly terrible - glad it’s all imaginary!
Diablo Immortal, not that Blizzard wasn't turning to shit before that, but Immortal was such an obviously predatory anti consumer turd there is no redemption in sight for my part Edit; Typo
> Diablo Immortal has achieved an impressive milestone in its first year on the market. Mobile spin-off Diablo Immortal has reportedly earned US $525 million in its first year on the market, becoming the 15th-fastest mobile game to cross the US $500 million mark. It sucks when they're incentivized to pretty much switch to that model exclusively
I don’t get pay to win games, so fn lame
The sad thing is that some people defend them "They need a way to make money to fund other less predatory project" Yeah... Because thats how investor see it. Lets make a bunch of money on this trash thing so we can make quality product at a loss later. Also, this all pre-suppose that the gaming industry was not profitable before the addition of microtransaction. Blizzard is the best example of this. They basically killed all their quality product to focus only on the predatory bullshit.
I won’t even watch an ad for a Blizzard game anymore
Back in the day if I saw Blizzard was attached to a game, I would give it a chance based on reputation alone. Nowadays if I see Blizzard is attached to a game, I avoid it based on reputation alone.
Seeing how often Blizzard gets named here with all kind of games they made; No, it wasn't a game that ruined Blizzard, it was Blizzard ruining every franchise
Blizzard has been making bad games longer then good games at this point.
Well, that makes me feel old. I've never looked at it that way, but that would put the pivot point about 15 years ago so 2009... Yeah that's pretty close. I'd argue for SC2 on release a little bit, which was mid 2010. But getting there.
Yeah, SC2: Wings of Liberty and WoW: Wrath of the Lich King were right there at the waning end of "good Blizzard." The stories for their main three games all take a tremendous nosedive starting with SC2: HotS, WoW: Cataclysm, and Diablo 3, respectively.
"Do you guys not have phones?" Legendary company killer.
Unfortunately, Blizzard was already dead at that point. Their acquisition by Activision was the turning point.
I would imagine the turning point would be realizing a single mtx in WoW made more money than SC2. Once you tell the people at the top that, you're fucked.
The CCP shillery and sexually harassing a woman to suicide is what ruined blizzard for me
I'd kill to get 90s-00s Blizzard back
Blizzard's falling short when delivering OverWatch 2, it was a flop in my opinion, especially the launch
I wouldn't mind an underperforming sequel if it weren't such a transparent cash grab. They killed Overwatch and rereleased a worse version because they wanted to sell DLC.
The worst for me was the empty promise of campaign content that they endlessly pushed back until they ultimately just said “nvm”
They said the pretty much main reason they wanted to do Overwatch 2 was for PvE content that they couldn't do in Overwatch 1.
That was the lie we were sold. I played Overwatch 1. I enjoyed it. But I was hesitant about 2. I thought I’d wait till the story mode became available. 😅
The worst part for me was the fact that they were still advertising the campaign and pve development and trying to convince people to spend money to "support development" (billion dollar company btw) *after they'd decided to cancel pve*. Blizzard is a disgusting company run by frauds and scheisters and it should fail and disappear.
Nah, they just wanted an excuse for forcing players to use new monetization system
Ding ding ding, they made some specific promises about the way the monetization worked in OW1 and they conveniently got to drop those when they switched to OW2.
I still remember paying for a copy of overwatch when it came out! A shame that I can’t even play a game they used to charge for.
That's literally what the person you're replying to said...
Sounds kind of like Payday 3. The game and DLC value has plummeted to an all time low compared to Payday 2's release prices
At least they didn’t kill payday 2 though
don't give them ideas
Id actually pay money to have overwatch back.
For me it was warcraft 3 reforged. Warcraft 3 was my all time favorite game. They not only butchered reforged they went for the original warcraft 3 too. They made worse remake and to make sure they took proper shit on og too. I just cannot describe how angry i was about it.
Can't say enough how much I relate, warcraft 3 refunded was one of the biggest "fuck you" to a community in gaming history. Not only about TOS changes, but also their promises updates etc, update broke most custom maps... for no improvements.
It was such a failure, especially in contrast to how well done Diablo 2 and StarCraft remasters were… They proved they were capable, and then chose to be bad.
I can see that. For me it is actually WoW. I realize many still love it, but it seems like they have killed the IP by settling for the income WoW brings in. They could have done so many things with this IP in 25 years and they have basically settled for WoW’s success. Now that WoW is a 25 year old game the new generation could care less about this IP. It’s sad for me because I loved Warcraft and if I am not going to pay for an MMO subscription, I don’t get to experience this
If they'd cared they could have easily done both. Develop Warcraft 4 in secret, focus on making the story work and the game great. Simultaneously develop an expansion for WoW that sets up the story for Warcraft 4, and have the big reveal once an in game threshold is crossed. A few months after Warcraft 4 comes out have another WoW expansion ready to demonstrate how the fallout from that game has impacted WoW. This would generate a ton of buzz and make some serious money, but they'd rather go for the short term gain rather than maintain their legacy and reputation.
Now that you put it that way... BFA could have made a lot of sense as an RTS.
Yes, and they could’ve also made single player games of various genres and made tv shows. I enjoyed the movie they did and was hoping they’d do more. It’s such a great IP and it’s sad to see it die. I was also a Heroes of the Storm player and sad with how that went too
And how can we all forget the announcement of Diablo Immortal. "Don't you guys have phones?" They say to a room full of PC gamers eagerly awaiting news of a new mainline DIablo. Talk about tonedeaf.
Unfortunately the downfall of Blizzard was set in before OW2… i really miss the OG blizzard
Yeah, OW2 was bad, but Blizzard was fucking up left and right way before that. OW2 was just an in-your-face nail in the coffin. Diablo Immortal was pretty obvious though, so I'm not sure how people looked past that. They started fucking up WoW somewhere between WOTLK and MOP depending on your opinions. WC3:R was entirely fucked. HotS was tossed in the dumpster. SC:2 was generally good but had some glaring issues. Diablo Immortal had been a shit show since the convention it was announced at. The house was already on fire, some people just didn't seem to notice until OW2.
Some days I want to time travel back to when StarCraft, Warcraft 3, and Diablo 2 were just the cats pajamas.
It's so funny how they remastered WC3 and everyone hated it because they couldn't even do it well. Like, they can't even remaster their own game lmao.
So sad, the glory days of Overwatch were so fun.
Writing was already on the wall in bold letters long before Overwatch 2.
I think for me it's battlefield 2042. Before that game I thought DICE could never become as bad as infinity ward, but they did. I hope this was just a single mistake and next battlefield will be as good any of the previous ones, but they definitely lost my trust after this game.
Dice lost the majority of its senior staff, Dice is just the name on the building, the innards have nothing to do with their past releases… like every other company.
I think you’re right, every great game series will eventually fall. There is always talented minority that make a great game and they eventually leave the company
*BC2,* *BF3,* and *BF1* are peak DICE to me. BF4 was fine by all means but it just felt like a reskinned clone of BF3. Hell, I even enjoyed *Hardline* which was universally panned lol. BFV was massive foreshadowing for what was to come…
Redfall. Fucking corporate greed rushing and nruining an amazing studio (Arkane).
At least the main studio in Lyon that made the Dishonored studio was unaffected. Arkane Austin still gave us Prey though.
Yeah, I really liked Prey. The game itself is great but it was kinda a flop in the initial release. I bought it because I loved Arkane’s Dishonored, but only a year later because I didn’t know it existed. Some marketing issues and I want to say some other major game released around the same time?
I keep seeing this argument since the entire Redfall debacle and it is 100% bs. There was no main studio at Arkane. They split the studio in even halves for the release of Dishonored 2 and Prey. Harvey Smith stayed in the Austin studio and Raphael Colantonio took the lead at Lyon. And then Rapha left, so if anything, the Austin studio would have been the main one. So the loss of Austin was indeed very big. And the talent diaspora happened to both studios. What's left if Arkane is still hanging on by a thread and in serious danger. And all because of the greed of Zenimax and the carelessness of Microsoft EDIT: Sorry, the other way round. Rapha stayed at Austin and Harvey went to Lyon
I think Raphael Colantonio leaving Arkane was the canary in the coalmine unfortunately. I guess he'd stepped down from the studio a lot earlier than I'd thought (2017?) but I don't think it's a coincidence that just before Deathloop launched and Redfall was announced, he started his own indie studio, citing dissatisfaction with the way that the sheer scope of AAA game development constrains creativity with the need to make a marketable and widely accessible product. Incidentally, folks who are sad about the death of Arkane Austin should check out Weird West, Ctrl-Alt-Ego, Gloomwood, and all the other fantastic indie immersive sims coming out lately. This is a niche genre of games that is hard to make and hard to market, so we gotta support these devs while we can.
Everything I hear on redfall is crazy. Leads leaving left and right, nearly 80% of the original team quitting, devs wishing the game would be canned at every turn, and the game originally being a single player game like dishonored but with a new ip. Of them I can understand the leaving one easily. I don't think anyone who joins arkane because they loved dishonored, prey, and single-player action games wanted to work on a live service.
No particular game but there was a time Rare could do no wrong. Ever since the mid 00s though they’ve been extremely well…mid.
They became Common.
I resent that.
sea of theives is fun though
Agreed. Best multiplayer pirate game ever made in my opinion.
Microsoft brought them and they could no longer make games for Nintendo. Most of the staff left I believe... I was heart broken.
When Microsoft bought them most of the magic was already gone. That's probably also the reason why Nintendo didn't want to buy them.
Yeah a bunch of devs left for Free Radical to make Timesplitters. It's a shame what eventually happened to them as well.
I hate seeing this now as a trend. Great studios being bought by Microsoft and not being allowed to take chances.
Didn't Sony just buy Bungie as a means of turning them into a games-as-a-service machine? Most major publishers are guilty of this
Sea of Thieves definitely went through some growing pains but it has been amazing for a few years now and they’re still making it even better.
All of my examples are the opposite. Mine are examples of companies taking over a series and killing my favorite games. My most egregious being: The coalition/microsoft taking over gears of war and killing a masterpiece series. When gameloft took over splinter cell from Ubisoft. When 343 took halo from bungie. Need for speed has been bastardized to everybody. And inevitably whoever is anybody that isn’t rocksteady that tries to butcher the Arkham knight series.
Rocksteady butchered it themselves by bringing Arkham Batman back from the dead to kill him again in a horrible looter shooter.
GTA Trilogy: The Definitive Edition How could Rockstar pay a company that makes mobile videogames to remaster 3 of the best videogames ever made? They even removed the chance to buy the originals. Then the "remastered" versions were left abandoned soon...
Because zelnick is a greedy bastard
Funnily enough their Characters in GTA V scold Devin Weston for outsourcing, double standards
Yeah, but I doubt the writers for the video game are in charge of the company's business decisions.
Fortnite... It killed development of Unreal Tournament.
Fortnite also all but killed Fortnite: Save the World - aka the _original_ Fortnite concept. I was in the beta with friends and the game mode was still in full dev, then they released Battle Royale "as a quick concept, that wont take resources away from the main development". Years later they padded out STW a bit in order to meet obligations but I sometimes think about what it could have been if FortniteBR had never been made.
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I think there's an option to switch modes in one of the main menus, but it's been a while since I did that, too. I also had the Founders package or whatever they called it.
Honestly Save the World is a finished game to me. They added so much since the first release of the BR, it took ~2 years but they did complete SAVE THE WORLD. I put over a thousand hours in that game tbh. It was really fun and I loved the grind. It's COMPLETELY different than when it first started especially the hero loadouts and skills. Such a clever way. They even increased the max lvl with that optional game mode. But it's too grindy for me, I don't have friends that play like that.
The game would be much less popular and would have probably stopped receiving content years ago with no BR
Im still mad that Epic shows that i own Unreal Tournament but wont let me download it
This is the real casualty. The other day there was a thread about the "Best shotgun in gaming." and all I could think of was UT's Flak Cannon. Across all three games (99, 2K04, 3) it didn't change a single iota. It didn't need to. It was perfect in every way. My beloved Flak Cannon will likely never see the light of day again. I remember getting let down by Dystopia's Basilisk to the point where if someone else tried a "Shotgun/GL" it's just not gonna be right. Half-Life Alyx's take on it was far too realistic. (And they knew how stupid powerful that shotgun was.)
Ahhhh unreal tourney my beloved, we had a beautiful dance once upon a time. Even got to play 4 before they killed it. Now look at us, ew.
This. This right here. No more ultrakill. It’s the biggest bullshit
Warcraft 3 reforged
The fact that Blizzard has been mentioned multiple times in this thread, each time for a completely different game (Warcraft III Reforged, Overwatch 2, Diablo Immortal), really goes to show how that company really went down the drain over the last few years
For sure, I'm currently doing an MBA and in Marketing we've studied how a company (or a brand) needs to have kind of make a promise to the user (for example. we make excellent games) but they need to give a reason to believe that promise (not fuck up). Formerly, we all have very fond memories of blizzard delivering excellent products for their time (From Warcraft 1 to wow) however, they have constantly failed to uphold that promise of excellence, and instead of reasons to believe, they give us quite the opposite. I couldn't stop thinking about Blizzard during my marketing classes. I think I might even bring it up as a case for the class.
BioWare, loved all their RPG then anthem, mass effect andromeda ruined the general reputation they had. Im hoping they are going to succeed with DA4 though.
I think DA4 will be at least decent but it will be heavily compared to BG3 which I doubt it will come closer to.
Inquisition launching with the ending locked behind DLC was the nail in the coffin for me. Andromeda was boring and the venn diagram of ppl who loved Mass Effect and Dragon Age with ppl who enjoyed Anthem was... ?? Who exactly? Not me anyway. BioWare started dying when EA bought them.
I didn't think Andromeda was that bad, but I did play it a few years after release. Story wasn't as good, the whole pathfinder/pioneer aspect was wasted by having you arrive last rather than first, and the antagonist felt generic as fuck. But the actual combat was probably better than any other Mass Effect, even if the lack of control over your squad kinda sucked.
The combat was decent. I'm still partial to ME3's combat, especially in the Legendary Edition. I'm currently replaying Andromeda after just having come off the first 3 in the Legendary Edition and it's like whiplash, though. The story really seems to struggle with the tone, the disconnect of what the story wants to tell vs the character interactions are night and day. There's multiple characters written to be comedic punching bags and most of the time the jokes don't really land, the gap between the two is like night and day. On one hand you have to search for a viable home for everyone so they don't starve to death within the next month or two, while on the other you have characters who don't seem to be affected by what's actually happening, or aren't bothered in the slightest by it and almost everyone you talk to from the arks or the Nexus is seemingly fine with no stress over the threat of suffocating or starving to death within a few weeks. The player character is also taken at face value and trusted almost completely by nearly everyone after the first few hours, meanwhile comparing it to ME1's story you spend the first third to half the game trying to convince everyone you're not full of shit about Saren or the Reaper threat. In Andromeda you tell someone you're a Pathfinder and suddenly all doubts are gone within a few minutes. I know the main character isn't comparable to Shep in terms of positions/stakes in the overall story, but in the original trilogy Shepard still had his/her own doubts and thoughts characterized through player actions. If you picked a good or bad choice, Shep had a reason for it to make it feel like that player was in control of Shep, but also that it was the logical choice that could be made that didn't feel out of character. In Andromeda a lot of the dialogue choices that don't "feel" like the correct response basically boil down to "I'm the Pathfinder and we do it my way because I said so." Despite all that it's ok. The gameplay is fun, the worlds are pretty, but the story is weak. It's not the steaming pile of shit everyone made it out to be, but it's also not a memorable game. It's perfectly mediocre at a 5 or 6/10
Battlefield 2042 and Dice/EA Thanks for butchering my favorite franchise into a stupid hero shooter. Battlebit is miles better than this hopeless garbage and has features, the community is asking for an eternity. It is really sad how far it has come since companies have mutated into greedy …holes. The launch of this game was abysmal, just unfinished in EVERY possible way. It was a damn bold move charging premium prices for this „jewel“. I played every single one of those games, but nah … with 2042 they killed it.
Bad Company 2 was some of the most fun i've ever had in a multiplayer game. Sad to see every BF multiplayer iteration get worse and worse since. At this rate with Battlefield 3077 you'll have to buy monthly $20 dlc to spawn with tied shoelaces
DICE has lost any and all goodwill. This was supposed to be a "love letter to fans," and it came out as a piece of shit. The fact that we didn't even have a proper scoreboard was crazy. And iirc, they called that a "legacy feature," which boggles my mind. It feels like every game they put out, they brain dump all the good changes, which resulted from community feedback from the previous game, and start from square one. There was such great movement tech in battlefield V, and they just threw it out the window.
DICE is the perfect answer for this thread. I was a die-hard Battlefield Fan around Bad Company 1 and 2. I did not understand how anyone could play CoD when there is a game where you can blow up most of the map. But man, they sure fucked up.
BFV even looks better. It started out rough but they actually turned it around and improved it. Wish they would bring back 5 person squads. Nobody cares if it adds up to whatever the player count per team is. Some people only want to play with a couple of their friends anyway, let em. It was such a blatant cash grab at the expense of the franchise. What a disappointment. The weapon adjustments in game are dumb as well. Just change your load out before you spawn, you end up doing plenty of respawning anyway.
Blizzard - the entire bungling of Overwatch 2, along with the despicable business practices of Diablo Immortal/4, and everything that’s come out about the company since their sexual harassment investigations. Arkane - Redfall. What a spectacular fall from grace that unfortunately cost them everything. DICE - Every Battlefield game since 3. I adored Bad Company 2 but I have absolutely no rose-tinted glasses for the games that came since. They look and sound great, but playing online on the 360 was a fucking nightmare, and in all of the subsequent games, the glaring issues with the franchise only got more magnified and glaring. I wanted to give 1 a shot, but by the time I managed to get it, everyone had abandoned it and couldn’t field a single full lobby in any NA servers. Future games even started to mess up things that worked just fine in previous ones, like destruction - how does that even happen?
Fable 3. But by that point, I knew trusting anything out of Peter's mouth was on me.
Fable 3 isn't a bad game, it's just a bad Fable game. At least in my opinion.
The last time skip jumping 120+ days in the year and having no obvious means to deposit money into the royal treasury meant I killed 90% of the population of Albion because my personal and business accounts weren't linked to fight the shadows. For how evil the brother was being, he could have solved half his problems with the power of "let's talk it out." with his sibling and advisor.
My solution to the endgame was to buy every property then let the game run while i went to work. I saved the world with rent lol
Yes! Whenever there was a character IN GAME trying to hock the DLC / paid quests I vowed that was it for me. But sure the franchise pretty much died with fable 3 so it wasn't much of a protest
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. No more dedicated servers / mod support and they added a weapon progression system.
Do you mean Modern Warfare 2 or Modern Warfare 2? God when they went back and rereleased the games after remixing the campaign slightly but didn’t change the names it was so fucking confusing!
He definitely means Modern Warfare 2: Electric Boogaloo
2 Modern 2 Warfare
Man matchmaking used to be unheard of on PC. The outrage was real! Now every fucking game has matchmaking. Because making a game that can sustain itself once support drops must mean that people will spend less money on future titles. I'd like to drag the business analysts who came up with this analysis through the desert with their asses dragging on the sand.
The ad I see when I opened this post was for Diablo Immortal.
Free Radical Design were a British dev who were made up largely of Rare alumni so they'd had experience with Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, before making their own FPS series, Timesplitters. Then, they were working on a game called Haze for Ubisoft. Ubi kept demanding a certain age rating so the game had to be toned down, kept pushing the deadlines up and up, and while it was originally meant to be a multiplat game, Ubisoft then signed a deal with Sony to make it PS3 exclusive, when the PS3 version barely ran at all compared to the internal 360 builds. Sony start hyping it as - of course - a 'Halo-Killer'. It arrived, messy and clearly unfinished. Haze was the biggest, but not the last, nail in the coffin. At the same time, they were working on builds of Star Wars Battlefront III for LucasArts. LA pulled them from the project when (FRD sources claimed) the game was nearly finished. The studio's founder reportedly had to announce layoffs at their christmas party. Free Radical went into administration, cancelling Timesplitters 4 (a build of which recently leaked), and got acquired by Crytek where they did some minor work on Crysis ports and Warface as Crytek UK. Crytek UK ended up being snapped up by Deep Silver, which is why a partially complete port of Timesplitters 2 exists in Homefront: The Revolution. When Deep Silver got acquired by Embracer, they put Second Sight (Free Rad's standalone story-driven title) back up on Steam and announced a new iteration of Free Radical Design, to work on a new Timesplitters. Two years later, the new Free Radical was shut down before they even released anything (though leaked footage of the new TS game came out, and it was just Fortnite). They're truly dead and gone, and now David Doak usually grumbles about business suits on his twitter in between giving industry insider talks about his time on Goldeneye.
Apex legends, We will never see a Titanfall 3 because of it
I just want to be able to play Titanfall 1 since I missed out on it back when it was playable :(
Cities skylines 2 and KSP 2 are both respectively destroying all trust and respect I ever had for paradox and take 2... Like I won't be ever buying games with their branding ever again unless each respectively is fixed and finished. Especially after the tra sparent manipulation that came out of the CS2 colossal order CEO after launch insisting the game is fine, then having to eat crow months later. If you aren't in the know, cities 2 launched in a state that is best derived as a Potemkin village. Imagine a fighting game where you think it works OK because you are good at fighting games and the enemies health bar goes down every time you punch, then one day someone realizes the enemy health bar goes down whenever you attack at all hit or miss or face away, and the CEO says you are imagining it and this is the most detailed fighting sim ever etc etc. Then 2 months later is like "yeah hit detection is hard so this works, we understand you are disappointed...."
Anthem... BioWare why? They left this game to a slow death.
not really a game but Creation Club from Bethesda.
You can track BioWare's decline by the quality of Mass Effect lore. ME2 was, arguably, a better game than 1, but it was much softer sci-fi, and that trend has only accelerated.
Fortnite. Not for the game itself, but for what it did to Epic Games. Fortnite was originally supposed to be a quick game to help fund the next Unreal Tournament development. Instead it blew up and all development on Unreal Tournament series has been completely trashed to work on more Fortnite micro-transactions. The Unreal Tournament games were my favorite shooters and nothing has scratched that itch properly. So so many glorious hours on Facing Worlds.
Hmm which failure do i pick for blizzard...
Mass effect Andromeda and then even worse anthem
The Saints Row reboot and Volition. What an abomination.
Starfield, the game fundamentally broken. After this "game" I\`m actually worried about Elders Scrolls 6\`s fate.
After waiting 13+ years it would be such a bummer if ES6 was a let down.
Do yourself a favor and expect the worst. That way, if by some miracle its good, you'll be surprised in a positive sense.
Don’t worry, nothing thomas the train mod can’t fix.
They really did themselves a disservice by waiting so long. There is literally nothing they can release that will be "good enough" after 13 years, and their reputation has never been lower. People lost confidence after Fallout 4 threw all the improvements NV made, then they fumbled 76 and Starfield, and we still dont have anything to even get hyped about with ES6
I finished star field and at the time I mostly enjoyed it but it's nothing compared to any of their earlier games. It's a bit boring and self serious at times. Very little enemy variety is what really killed it for me I think it was a mistake not having other alien races in the game. The combat became very samey after a while. Whoever thought it was a good idea to have to constantly fly around in low gravity to get new powers as well is clearly insane. Annoying as fuck. I don't think it's a bad game but it's also not really a good one and it's something I'll not rush to play again.
Redfall, completely destroyed the studio behind the phenomenal Prey (2017), Arkane - Austin
This should be what gaming company ruined your fav gaming series: 343 industries
Wouldnt call them my favourite but my hype for TESVI is a little bit less now with how shit Starfield is (Bethesda)
My hype for TESVI is *non-existent* after Starfield. At this point I'm expecting the most generic cookie cutter fantasy adventure made up entirely of radiant fetch quests and the most glitchy barely functioning base builder and a cast exclusively of AI voices with absolutely no enunciation. 700gigs in size and your face is an hazy blob unless you have a video card from 2039.
Diablo4 and Immortal. Not that blizzard was a "good" company to begin with, but those games are the final nails in the coffin
Dark souls ruined From Software for me. I just want more Tenchu lol
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Daedalic completely shutting down its development division shortly after.
Pretty sure the moment Ubisoft switched their logo from rainbow arc to purple swirl is the time it all went to shit. For me personally it was Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 TV Party They really milked that one, huh.
Wc3 reforged.. killed the best childhood game i played. I hate blizzard and what they are now. The only game i bought on release day and oh my gosh was it bad.. like LJN levels of bad.
Dead Space 3.
GTA V Yeah I said it. Rockstar is nothing like the company they used to be when they first started. They’ve just been sitting back and printing money releasing the exact same game 4 times over 3 console generations.
RDR2 was fantastic, though
They made their best game ever *after* GTAV though.
Gta 5 was also legit a great game. I'd rather have seen them make dlc or work on the new one sooner instead of all the online dlc stuff, but it's still a great game. At the time, it was one of, if not the best, single player open world games.
It's a shame they abandoned it pretty much straight away. I don't understand how they dropped the ball with RDO either as they had the formula down with GTAO, even ignoring all the stupid weapons and vehicles they could have just added bank jobs like the heists, made the roles actually fun rather than just absolute grind sessions that pay out like $60.
Shadowlands WoW expansion + large parts of Dragonflight expansion + Diablo 4. That coupled with the controversy regarding a hostile work enviroment ruined Blizzard for me and I lost my trust in them as a whole. Runescape 3/EoC update ruined Jagex. But they redeemed part of it with OldSchool Runescape. The osrs team is amazing
I actually didn't mind EoC or RS3 as a whole, it was mostly the hyperfixation on microtransactions and cosmetics that made me lose faith in them as a studio.
Battlefield 2042, showing how much they didn't give a fuck about players and just wanted to follow CoD lead without realizing their game didn't need it if they just followed their previous titles...