Saturday Morning Gaming: All I Wanted Was A Rehash
Way back at the height of the pandemic, I talked about playing Bloodbowl 2.
A really fun game with a single-player mode that gently walks a new player through the rules of the game and gets them ready for 1-on-1 play. Heck, starting around game 5 in the single-player mode, it starts being a good single-player game in and of itself. All of the fun of Bloodbowl and you don’t even need a second person. Heck, if you had a second person, it was even more fun. Multiple people? START A LEAGUE!
It was the perfect game for Safer at Home.
When I heard that there was going to be a Blood Bowl 3? Man, I got excited. I loved 2, after all. The main things I wanted were:
1. A decent AI
2. A decent story mode. Heck, I would have been okay with a revamp of 2’s storyline. Plucky underdog goes on to win the Superbowl! Why would you need a better storyline than that?
So when Bloodbowl 3 got released, I immediately went to the Steam store and looked around.
The first thing I saw was this:
Uh-oh.
So I went to check out the discussion page:
Hoo boy.
Finally, I visited the reviews themselves to see what was up and the devs have done what they can to reply to the majority of the mostly negative reviews. Most of the replies include something like this:
Hoo boy. That right there tells me the following:
The hope was for the BB2 people to jump in with both feet, a handful of BB2 people jumped in with both feet, they immediately started screaming about how they shouldn’t have jumped in with both feet.
And they are currently on their back foot because they have no intention of changing how they’re doing stuff but they also don’t know how to deal with everybody being so very unhappy that they are publicly advertising “DO NOT BUY THIS GAME”. Like, at all.
Personally, I’m curious as to whether someone in a room with a whiteboard has written down “we will make more money by selling the game with fully free cosmetics than we will by responding to every single negative review with boilerplate about how we understand that monetization is divisive” on it.
As it is, I’m mostly disappointed that one of the games that I have been looking forward to for the last few years has had such an inept launch and, now, an inept team trying to manage that just-over-nobody appears to want the game that they shipped.
Pity and alas.
My recommendation is just to play Bloodbowl 2 again. It’s even on sale.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is a screenshot of Steam’s weighting of the various reviews of the game. Screenshot taken by the author.)
I’ve been enjoying Ancient Dungeon VR on the Quest — roguelike dungeon-crawler with pixelated graphic style, basic but very fun. Unfortunately all the slashing and dagger-throwing has aggravated my tennis elbow (which I got originally from too much bow-and-arrowing in “In Death Unchained” VR) — you don’t see this aspect of VR mentioned much in mainstream articles.Report
The death of the Metaverse inspired literally dozens of takes on the twitter but my favorite one of them pointed out that VR’s killer ap should be something like Wheel of Fortune. Hell, maybe make it multiplayer as well so you can play with friends.
Spin the wheel. Guess a consonant. Buy a vowel.
Would *I* want a game like this? Heck no.
But they’re not trying to get me to buy a VR helmet. Letting boomers show up on their favorite game show? That would sell millions of the silly things.Report
I suspect the whole Metaverse thing and the Ready Player One stuff has given a lot of normies the wrong idea about what VR is. “Put this thing on and you can be spinning the wheel with Pat Sajak!” is definitely a more enticing pitch. But there’s a high barrier to surmount — most of my (non-gamer) friends see it as an oddity and aren’t even interested to try it.Report
I’m as disappointed as you are. I was tentatively hopeful when, at the end of 2022, Cyanide pushed the release date back to mid-February 2023. “Oh good, they’re going to improve the AI!” I thought.
Nope.
Graphics-wise, the game looks fantastic. but the news from the closed Beta was disappointing. I’m left with hoping that BB3 gets the “No Man’s Sky” treatment and gets quietly updated/improved well after release, making an actually pretty good game. I won’t be holding my breath.
Meanwhile, XCOM2’s LWotC mod (playing on Normal difficulty while I figure everything out, with the Chosen themselves sent “on vacation”) has been fun, so I’ll keep playing that.Report
There’s not much that they can do against that accusation, though. A buggy release or whatever, you can promise that the patches are on the way. But too many microtransactions?
Anyway, they might not need the product to be popular. If you have the microtransactions structured well enough, all you need is a few thousand people to be willing to pay a fortune, and the product will be a financial success. And Warhammer is a proven seller.Report
True enough, I guess. If you rely on the whales who spend $300 on the game, it doesn’t matter if you miss out on 9 people willing to spend $30 on it.
Apparently they’ve fixed the majority of the worst bugs from the first week or so of the pre-launch and people in the discussion pages are saying “it’s a lot better than it was” with a particularly optimistic person saying that in-game transactions are moving from egregiously greedy to merely irritating.
Nobody is talking about the strength of single-player, though.Report
It’s a good sign that users are feeling less accosted by the advertising.
My thinking is, today’s money may come from the whales, but tomorrow’s money comes from building up the franchise and the creators’ reputations. Games aren’t Disneyland; you don’t have to maximize revenue from a fixed number of attendees.Report
Gaming as a Service strikes me as a very good way to make money today and go bankrupt tomorrow.
See, for example, what happened with Avengers. One of the biggest money-makers in movie history, one of the biggest franchises, and it was within months of the movie coming out.
They came out with a GaaS game for it and…
Well, they forgot to make it fun.
If you put too much effort into maximizing advertising and monetization and figuring out the exact sweet spot for the price point… well, you might do very well for yourself and your company.
Just don’t forget to make the game too.Report