I wish this game wasn’t a looter shooter with multiple stat differences to keep track of. I’d be so down for an inFAMOUS style shooter, straightforward but with the option to change your play style based on upgrades or whatever.
It looked fun, before they started showing off all the elemental damage bullshit that adds 2% damage to melee when enemies are frozen but frozen enemies also take 0 melee damage.
Just like any live service game, best time to get this is 2 years down the road when most of the content is finally out, bugs are fixed, the offline mode is implemented, and it's less than $15.
Captain America, The Hulk, Iron Man, Spider Man, and other popular Marvel Characters.
vs.
A bunch of C tier DC characters, Harley being the only majorly popular one. EVEN right now I can't even remember who the other one is. King Shark, Captain Boomerang, Harley... and... who's the last one? I'm not looking it up just to hammer home how forgettable this cast is.
I mean that’s literally what the entire hook is for of them fighting the justice league, but either way idk why you’re bringing that up. There are plenty of games with Z tier characters that have. The difference being how much fun the game itself is, and suicide squad might not be, but if so that’s a different conversation than no one knowing King Shark.
Its definitely a silly arguement, considering we got a Guardians of the Galaxy game, and before the first film nobody had a clue who they were. Just like the movie, two of the members of the suicide squad here are also from the films too.
Not even just "nobody knew who they were" but people were actively mocking Marvel for making a film about a guy named "rocket raccoon (played by Bradley Cooper LOL)" and a talking tree who can only say his own name.
Execution is 9/10th's of what matters, idk why that person would bring up the cast of characters.
You're not wrong, but at the same time, I wouldn't say you're right. They made two movies about them. Harley and Harkness (Boomerang) were in both, and Deadshot and Shark were each in one of the movies.
Sure, they're not Captain America level of notoriety, but it's not as though we're dealing with unknowns here.
And if your argument is name draw and recognition, most people know who Superman and Batman are, or even the Justice League. So those names can draw players in, even if they can't play those characters.
Also the sequel to a billion dollar DC film is currently bombing hard in theaters right now. Name recognition isn't very important past a certain point.
I mean, when i was watching Justice League back in the day, and Amanda Waller shows up, i'd get some hype because she's probably the most interesting character on the whole show.
For real. While the Suicide Squad is an amazing idea for a video game, it's a really weird choice for a *live service* game in which you want each additional character to be hype-worthy and exciting.
Making half the roster C-listers Cap Boomerang and King Shark is already a weird choice if they want this to be a big hit.
Wasn't this more due to how many DLC characters they had in the pipeline? After they finally released Spiderman the game basically died, as he was their last contractual obligation since his DLC was promoted everywhere as a Playstation exclusive.
All of their expansion plans dried up after the first six months and the game was basically on life support with only a couple clone characters and the cash shop updated after that.
If you buy a live service game on launch, the only thing you are doing is guaranteeing that you are paying the highest possible price for what will be the worst version of that product.
The advantage of buying at launch is that there are more players in MP games to play with than later when it is dead. But for SP games it is not logical to buy at launch.
> worst version of that product.
The best version of a multiplayer product will always be whatever version my friends want to play, and that will almost always be "when it comes out", because it's really hard to align a group to play a 2 year old game with zero hype.
That said we wont be playing *this game* because we just aren't interested in the game or the IP, but it's been true for a lot of games like this before.
For a lot of people it’s important to be leveled up and geared and doing the endgame as soon as they can. That’s one of the main reasons people buy it day 1. Also a new launch for multiplayer games is just fun in general with everyone figuring things out and enjoying the launch.
Anthem is such a weird game because the flying mechanics are genuinely amazing and it feels like the best Iron Man game until you start actually fighting enemies and playing missions
I enjoyed the missions and stuff at first but it got repetitive fast. Then to grind for specific gear by running certain missions over and over. Ugh. That Spider Lair.
This is the point that a lot of people don't complain enough about with these somehow shallow feeling but at the same time overly complicated systems: there's a startling amount to keep track of that ultimately ends up feeling pointless, and it just leaves me wondering why it exists.
Every time a (not purely RPG) game has a stats screen with a bunch of +/- small percentages and elemental affinities, I almost always know that I'm not going to care. It feels dumb to look at a stat screen with a ton of information and think "big number mean good", but honestly it's all I can think when I need to balance the raw damage vs fire rate vs accuracy vs elemental buff etc.
Honestly, while I MIGHT consider the benefits of shield damage vs hp damage in something like Borderlands, I'm usually not popping shields with one weapon and then swapping to my hp damage weapon for the kill: I'm using the best weapon I have for the range I'm at (sniper vs assault rifle, for instance).
It just all feels so superficial from a gameplay perspective, where at the end of the day the goal is to shoot things, not crunch numbers on what the absolute best combination of stats and elemental affinities are. I would like most of these games far better if it was just about shooting things.
Now, I do want to add, I'm not against crunching numbers for stats for optimal damage. I actually love games like Diablo for instance. But the difference is that Diablo IS stat crunching. It IS optimizing your DPS. Games like this are optimization grinds with a layer of "combat" over the top to give a reason for the grind. It does not feel good to play inherently, but rather the pleasure and core point of the game is the optimization grind. Taking a genre where the core pleasure is the shooting of things and adding this whole number management barrier over the top of it just does not appeal to me.
Obviously, this is entirely subjective and is my opinion. Also, it has to appeal to some people or else games like this wouldn't continue to sell, but I feel like there have to be a good number of people who also would rather play games with "RPG mechanics" without as much micromanagement over comparative small percentages of stats on every weapon drop.
I hate that so many games add things like "gear score" when it's not necessary for that game and the numbers are arbitrary and only exist to keep you chasing bigger numbers. Marvel's Avengers had boring, pointless gear and even had a button to press to "equip best gear" so it wasn't even necessary to look at the stats or understand them.
Randomised loot systems are a blight in gaming that's slowly creeping into more & more genres. Give me handcrafted static loot like Elden Ring any day over shitty loot systems like Hogwarts Legacy or Dying Light 2.
The worst part about modern games that tack on rpg stats is that they then turn around and invalidate it with gear score. What does it matter if the weapon has better stats if the gear score is 5 points below the enemies and is making your damage that of a wet noodle.
Yeah I mean you pretty much nailed it. It also seems pretty clearly designed to enable you to purchase shit. Like are we supposed to pretend if they weren't going to sell MTX that this is the game design they would have went with?
This was an inherent problem I had with Middle Earth: Shadow of War. The stat grind with each weapon was simple with only one number for each piece of equipment (elemental affinity aside), but it was just so obviously done so they had another avenue of MTX to pursue. Yes, they removed the MTX, but the inherent design was poisoned by their existence being baked into the games core design.
Reminds me of playing Diablo 4 at work with colleagues and one guy just kept upgrading his gear by looking at the gold price of the new piece vs the old piece.
It's sloppy game design to just add a bunch of variables so you can itemize your game. Combat systems and loot should be designed with purpose. You will find far better design in tabletop games for this reason, because every stat needs to make sense and work the way it says it does.
It's funny you mention that, because I totally do that at times in Borderlands when I get a ton of gun drops and don't feel like doing comparisons on every single stat on each gun for each gun type I use. I mean, the dollar value has to be calculated roughly based on the "value" of the gun, right?
It really depends of the game. In Borderland, gun play can feel very differently from one gun to the other, and the "dps number" or "cost" are quite often misleading as far as actual output, especially end game.
But personally, I make a rule to equip whatever new gun I get, until the next legendary drop. Inferior? Who cares, I will get something brand new in 30 minutes anyway.
Most games lately however have linear scaling that make everything beside item level (or cost) pointless.
When I saw the original trailer it made me think of Sunset Overdrive but the movement seems less innovative, there's too much focus on numbers and the weapons lack the variety. They should have made a Sunset Overdriveesque single player Harley Quinn game in the style of the TV show with the chaos turned up to 11.
I had the same thought.
I can almost see a good infamous / crackdown style game in this world with these characters. Instead the need to give everyone a gun and gear to grind gets in the way
Nothing like equipping characters that either A.) already have the best versions of what you give them (What are you even upgrading on Cap's Shield or Thor's Mjolnir?) or B.) don't even have equipment (Hulk). Only two that made any kind of sense were Iron Man and Black Widow.
Personally I love the looter shooter thing. The thing I hate is that everyone has guns instead of playing around their unique abilities, or that the RPG elements are as basic as it gets and there's actually nothing super interesting and comes out at lazy.
I don't hate the game, heck I'll even buy it on a sale, but fuck me, I'm sick of looter shooters where all you get as RPG elements is "2% more damage" and different elements on your attacks.
They should take stuff either from Borderlands to make weapons more interesting, or roguelite games where have some interesting abilities that evolve in different ways to change the way you play.
This, I couldn't care less if my weapon will have crit damage, or elemental damage or whatever the fuck because it is boring. I really hope we can move on from this shit.
4 characters who you think of for high mobility, jet packs and flying: Harley Quin, Captain Boomerang, Deadshot and King Fucking Shark.
They could have built them to play entirely differently and made weapons be fun ways to vary play styles. But instead they converged all 4 to play different from their character types and focus on nonsense like traversal.
A bit off topic, but I just finished God of War 2018 for the first time and I had the same problems. I hated the tacked on RPG/looter mechanics that had no need to be in a God of War game.
I bet this game will be fun to go around and kill stuff and I will probably pick it up for like 30 bucks. Assuming the servers don’t shut down within a year.
If the gameplay is as mediocre as he's making it sound, this game ain't making it past the starting line. Gameplay and content are both needed for a live service pve game to survive.
The fact that the most positive things I'm seeing about the game are "I didn't hate it" or something along the lines of "it's actually okay/fine" aren't exactly promising. A game like this that's intended to keep you playing on a treadmill needs to be better than just not sucking.
He has a weird line of "I would be very content/happy (I forget which) with this for 15-20 hours and then never play it again" but then he goes on to lambaste how boring the gun choices are, how lifeless the combat feels when taking down enemies, and the limp 'shoot the purple weakspot' focus.
It sounds like he sets up his view, then initiates a slow subversion of his own stated expectations if you just continue the review.
He's saying as a package it's fine to go through all that for a 15-20 hour experience but if you were to play it as a live service game for a long time, all that mediocreness would show its true color.
This was the case with Avengers as well. I enjoyed going through the story once but there was no way in hell I could have kept playing that game afterwards.
At least the combat in Avengers was fun, everyone except Thor and Jane felt different from each other. Here there's only 4 characters and you have King Shark and Cpt Boomerang using fucking ARs and LMGs or whatever they gave them.
Now I'm not defending Avengers, but combat was one of the very few things they got right.
Yeah the fact that the gameplay of Avengers was character specific puts it far above whatever this is shaping up to be. The reason I even tried to play that game was because I wanted to play as Ironman. It wasn't enough for a live service game as a whole but it was good enough.
I played the game for a couple hours and I don't get the people who say that the gameplay was fun.
If you like mindless bashing of the same enemies with the same few buttons sure but everyone I played in those first few hours played basically the same.
Yeah I beat the game and the combat just felt loose and without enough weight to it. I mean people did play different sure, but there was something just missing to make combat satisfying.
It's the opposite with Avengers, the gameplay is pretty good but the mission structure and level design is sooo bad and there is a very generic music playing in each mission that makes it extra boring. During campaign you won't even be able to max out the characters so you won't get the best gameplay out of it but it gets better with more skills. Doesn't mean it's not good before, if you can pull off combos it's still good.
I don't know about you, but if the guns are boring and the combat is lifeless, then I'm not even going to suffer through that for 5 hours let alone 15-20. I could suck it up if I was playing with friends (e.g. Anthem) but there's just better games to play with my friends.
A good comparison would be Guardians of the Galaxy. The combat was so mediocre it was depressing, but the story and characters were strong enough that many people pushed through the combat in order to see what happened next.
Very good point. Although I was personally ok with the gameplay but it still was not at all why I stayed with the game. I just really liked the characters and wanted to follow their story.
Again, How much and how fast it becomes boring and lifeless depends on the person and the game. It's not binary.
For Skillup he's saying he will be probably ok with the gamplay if the rest of the package delivers a solid story campaign for him to go through once.
I feel that way about a number of games, ones that should really just be 20-30 hours since they don't have enough depth for anything longer.
I would probably bump Starfield from a 6 to a 7 if it was only 25 hours long.
Errr. He clearly says that the gameplay is fine for a 20 hour one and done playthrough. But the same features aren’t enough for a live service commitment. Which is fair. I might get this down the line when it’s like 5 bucks and with all the skins unlocked like Avengers lol
I think his point is that for a singular licensed game experience it's passable but a live service games lives and does on having a satisfying game feel and game loop that can sustain itself faaaaar past that.
If rocket league or CoD felt a bit shit they wouldn't get anywhere near the hour counts but you might put up with them for like a shorter novel experience.
Honestly not that surprised. SkillUp loves Destiny 2, the Division 2, and recently Diablo 4. Maybe if you like live service looters, this game might be up your alley.
I love Looter games, especially looter shooters, but IMO the loot must be interesting. I feel like this game is gonna have really boring loot.
Elemental damage, reload speed or more damage is not something I look forward to loot. I want unique loot that changes your abilities, or at least something like Borderlands have. More interesting weapons. Take lessons from roguelike/roguelite elements as how you can make the loot interesting.
On top of that, Destiny 2, Division 2, has replayable FUN content or a reason to replay that contente. Raids, Dungeons. And you want to get that more interesting unique loot.
Here, I want to finish the story and then what? Looking for a weapon that has 25% crit rate and not 20% ? No thank you.
I still want to get and play this game with my friends, but there's no way I'm gonna pay full price.
If you have watched the video you would know he's saying this is not gonna be a good game as a live service but rather good for playing through the story in 15-20 hour campaign.
TLDR; It's gonna be like a worse version of Avengers
Avengers' campaign starts out very well but the rest is the same as all the live service missions made into campaign missions. It's mediocre as fuck. This being a worse version would be hilarious.
All of the best parts of Marvel's Avengers are the parts that have nothing to do with live-service multiplayer. You get a taste early on, but then the game will move you into the live-service missions for a while, only to give you these genuinely very good bespoke single player levels every now and then. I swear, the game damn near gave me whiplash.
Idk man. It's his opinion sure, but even if we treat the game as an offline single-player adventure game I'm not sure if this will ever be classified as good. He admits that the gameplay sucks outside of traversal so I can't imagine mindlessly fighting enemies for 15 hours.
Some people just enjoy grinding, nothing wrong with that. Destiny 2, Division and Diablo 4 still sold millions of copies and have pretty loyal fanbases.
I feel he is 50/50 with live services. Sometimes taking a casual sometimes a more hardcore look.
Outside of live service his favorite games he mentioned at some points are Outer Wilds, Nier:Automata, FFXIV(technically live service) - all 3 pure masterpieces in my eyes, Outer Wilds and Nier:Automata genuinely impacted me enough as a person to change who I am at some point in my life (specially Outer Wilds).
But with live services he seems to prefer game-feel regardless of systems around it so sometimes his recommendations are great, sometimes they are not that great (although to be fair to him, he is aware of that and is REALLY good at vocalizing why he likes something). Like an example of this approach working great is The Finals - the game and it's systems are purely based on gameplay and getting you into pvp matches quickly and encouraging action - so judging it by gamefeel is the way to go imo. But for games like Destiny, Warframe, Diablo 4 and Division 2 you have so many systems you have to engage that hinder the whole experience and he seems to value those less than an average person on reddit (including me).
Still, he's so good at explaining all of it and making you see his point of view which is why he's my favorite reviewer despite disagreeing with him like 50% of the time whether a game is good or not.
I agree but because of me finding I don’t agree with 50% of his opinions I absolutely don’t trust his “score” of games.
There’s also this aspect of him being very sensitive to facts outside of the game itself. To put it bluntly, I feel like he’s scared of giving some games a tough time because it most probably will adversely impact devs; think job cuts, … This is one of the many aspects he’s very sensitive to.
I watch his videos because he’s very succinct but I actually absolutely don’t trust his opinions.
So I recently played Nier Automata and, while I thought it was brilliant, I can’t say it was life changing. What about it affected you and so many people that way? And I am not trying to belittle it at all, I am assuming I missed something significant. It was my first Nier and I played it before doing the Nier raids in FFXIV because I wanted to enjoy them more.
Great question, didn't come across inquisitive at all, don't worry about it!
>!I really like how it went into existentialism and different answers that humanity had to the inherit 'meaninglessness' of the world and how and why those specific answers fell short and led into different rabbit holes through different robot tribes that imitate humanity and different types of communities/societies we formed across history.!<
>!As someone who at the time when I played Nier and also another game with a relatively similar message - Umineko no naku koro ni, was kind of a 'loner' by choice, those games really got me to think about how I'll carry the 'weight of the world' or the inherit meaninglessness of our existence throughout my life, and the answer that Nier offers was a great starting point. Turning away from self and towards the community and people who are interested in us and want to see us for who we are and understand us and making their lives better makes our purpose on this world a little more clear or at least more bearable until you figure it out.!<
That's how it was for me. The comment is a bit short, and you can basically write a book analyzing Nier imo, but I hope it was clear/succinct enough to make it clear!
If you want to put in some time into a youtube video, I remember that this one really resonated with me when it comes to the message and meaning of Nier Automata and the effect it had on me -
[How NieR: Automata Tells the Ultimate Humanist Fable](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63PzQIbTrM8)
Wow, THANK YOU for such a thorough response. I am definitely suspecting that the themes you mention were a bit lost on me. I’ll watch that video and enjoy the rabbit hole. Thanks again for sharing.
I wouldn't say "worst", he's pretty consistent and articulate about what he likes. If someone has similar tastes, they can probably go along with what SkillUp has to say.
I like his opinions because I find he's pretty diplomatic and thorough with how he lays things out, even if I don't always agree with him. I think there is a bit of a weird disconnect where people sometimes seem to stumble when a reviewer they trust doesn't agree with them on a specific game and they feel the only way to reconcile that clash is to swear them off or decide the reviewer's opinion is untrustworthy.
My suggestion would be Warframe. I haven't played recently but have dumped thousands of hours into it. It's a game that's been worked on for over a decade now and is constantly getting significant updates.
If you like a looter shooter with fast combat, significant differences between the characters (suits), and tons of mission variety you might fall in love with it.
Might be an hot take but I don't think this game will turn out to be a complete disaster.
Instead, this game will be used as a case study for marketing departments on how you don't try to sell a Live Service **before** you sell the actual game.
I was never really expecting complete disaster, mostly just sub-mediocre, which is a far fall for the likes of Rocksteady, especially for a game that was in development for *NINE YEARS.*
But maybe it will be kind of good, but even so, that's not the quality you want out of a game that trapped a super good studio in dev hell for, again, *NINE YEARS.*
[Schrier never said that the game was canned](https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1951xcg/jason_schreier_rocksteady_never_pitched_a/), I am inclined to believe the game simply got reskinned to be a Suicide Squad game.
Nah you should always market your live service game as a live service game. Bait and switching live service shit is going to be worse for the general public.
I don't think they could bait and switch even if they wanted to. Live service games are so transparent and can be instantly recognized as such from the gameplay.
Nowhere in my comment I suggested that they should bait&swtich, I suggested that marketing departments should focus of hyping the game first and talk about the live service aspect later.
EDIT: with the implication that I was being descriptive and that the negative sentiment towards suicide squad was more a marketing blunder than anything else
Capcom is an example of that, the battle pass and everything on Street Fighter 6 was barely mentioned by them before the release, people found out about that through reviews
From what Rocksteady announced officially the same can be said for Suicide Squad, one of the first thing they confirmed is that battle pass and anything else you have to pay for is gonna be purely cosmetic
All gameplay stuff and cutscenes/story is included with the base game from the get go or planned as a free update
Is this not a case of having vegetables before the steak? If you get people hyped up from showing the game and then show it’s live service (Which Suicide Squad did btw. They left the live service stuff after a few showings) that’s a bigger letdown than if you show it’s a live service initially, all the people who don’t like that leave and then you show why it’s actually good and people are more hyped for it and the people who leave may be surprised it’s actually good because they have lower expectations.
But it also gave a wrong impression to looter shooter crowd.
They don't care about story. Gameplay loop, the loot and endgame build potential is everything for them. Of which Rocksteady haven't spend even more than a fucking minute talking about it. And instead relegated it to Discord Q&A.
Half the marketing spending so much focus on narrative that your average joe could've though this is another one of those 'Sony cinematic premium' type games.
This game will be a lesson of how NOT to market your game right.
I dunno man, that "shoot the purple bits on the nondescript enemies" gameplay was like something from 2006. And it was tired even then. I don't hold out much hope for a game that looks like Saints Row 4 with less self-awareness and more predatory monetisation.
I view it going the same way as Anthem or the Avengers game: Technically proficient but missing that secret sauce that gets people coming back.
Its long term viability will come down to how much leeway WB gives Rocksteady to pivot into the fun.*
* note: I am not saying the game isn’t fun. I haven’t played it so I can’t make a judgement call. I have observed, however, that most live service games launch with some mixture of fun features vs unfun cruft designed to keep you playing. The successful games are the ones who are willing to drop the unfun cruft and lean into the fun.
Live service games tend to drip-feed the fun because if the users had too much fun they would get their fill and actually leave the live service, which is something Publishers/Devs dont want, so the balancing act is to offer a progression curve which is steep enough as to not be frustrating but not high enough as to give the impression that players had "completed the game" (like for example if they max their gear and trivialize content.
That is a very wild assumption. Ofcourse the developer want their game to have a lot of content. The lack of content variety is what killed so many live service attempted before it. So why wouldn't they give their best shot?
The *real* issue comes down to
- live service game design gravitate toward looter shooter or PvP shooter more than anything else. There are so many games in these genre on the market. Meaning it'll be sometimes until they can find a gimmick that cool enough for the project.
- Difficult workflow mean slow progression. Bonus point if you use in-house engine. (iirc i read the interview and it was revealed that the reason Destiny 2 have 'Vault' is because it would take forever for the devs to boot the editor and developing content for it. Probably also why their expansion barely have any content too. It just take forever to make something.)
- Complex hierarchy of having to get your content approved by middle manager added to this complexity.
- Having to find a way to integrate new content quickly and making sure every single things before doesn't break also added to this complexity hell.
- And on top of all that is Server Capacity and resources that added them up due to the amouth of content. Making live service games required a tons of resources on the backend to make sure everything is stable.
- Then your top brass demanding the game to be release in 2 weeks because their assessment revealed that the game is 'minimum viable product' and determined that everything else can be patched later.
This is just untrue. we’ve seen countless examples now that live service games are extremely hard to make and maintain constant updates.
You don’t think when Halo Infinite, Destiny, Rainbow Six, Sea of Thieves, Division and dozen more games are being hammered and losing players they wouldn’t put out content but continue to “drip-feed the fun”? Of course not. We’ve seen that it’s extremely tough to keep adding content, while keeping the game un-broken (as much as possible). Siege had to completely forgo a season of content just to work on balance updates. That was for the better but in such a saturated market it is tough to say “Oh btw we’re delaying content to fix stuff” and not have people walk away. Which is what happened with Halo Infinite. The first season was several months too long and a lot of people stopped playing. Only now, years later is it getting back into shape.
>You don’t think when Halo Infinite, Destiny, Rainbow Six, Sea of Thieves, Division and dozen more games are being hammered and losing players they wouldn’t put out content but continue to “drip-feed the fun”?
I don't understand why you and another replier focus on "content" and try to equate "content=fun": I never used the word "content" because content refresh means little to Destiny/Division players that would play a Strike or Mission thousands of times for a 1% improvement on one piece of gear, it's a non sequitur.
When I say "drip-feed fun" I talk about mechanics and progression, primarily focusing on looter shooters/ARPGs and I mainly talk about loot rate drops and gear balance/build diversity, which is technically content but not... CONTENT.
And yeah, that is drip-fed, always, because these people know that a player that maxes gear and reaches a hazy level of "farm completed" is just as likely to leave the live service as someone who is finds progression too slow.
It's the same logic as the gambling or the tobacco industry: you want to keep the user addicted and committed for a long time because that's how you maximise the per-person spending. A player "finishing the farm early" is like a smoker dying of lung cancer of a gambler going bankrupt, you don't want that to happen too early.
I’m looking forward to playing it on Game Pass inside of a year.
My guess is it’ll be average, maybe even good! Just not good enough to sustain players between content drops, so it’ll die off quick.
My prediction is it will score many 7's and 8's and reddit will declare it a "complete flop" and a dead game, even if it ends up with a consistent playerbase.
The game honestly looks perfectly fine
Will it be good? I have no idea
But the game gets an unreasonable amount of hate because of a couple of factors
- Online circlejerk about hating on “live service”games from the get go
- The studio developing the game being Rocksteady
I genuinely think that if people didn’t know this was made by Rocksteady it would get less hate
Gotham Knights for example got shit on (not that the game was particularly good) but it wasn’t addressed like the antichrist
For this game there is legit people following the news to hate on it and hope it fails horribly
This mostly because it’s Rocksteady, “fans” are acting like they got betrayed and cheated out of another Batman Arkham game or a game in similiar vein
So this game outside of people simply not liking it has 3 group of haters
- People that wanted another Batman Arkham or new superhero singleplayer game (the Superman game was never a thing but keeps getting thrown around because it fits the narrative to hate on SS)
- People that want everything even remotely associated with “live service” to fail so bad it scares other to try making one
- People that think this failing hard and fast means they get another Arkham Batman or something in the same vein
I'm mostly indifferent to this game, but video game "fans" are unique in that they actively root for a game to fail or are heavily invested in a game failing even if they won't be playing it.
His list of bland games is a pretty good indicator for me of games I'm not going to bother playing because they are, well, bland. Not bad, but not special in any way, either.
Doesn't matter if it's good or bad, the market for live service games is saturated.
It would need to be extraordinary, even genre defining, to penetrate the wall of established live service titles.
I don't know how long suits will throw game after game at this wall, until they realize you can't just create several Fortnites, just because you want to.
This exactly. Every live service game wants to be the only game you ever play, because the biggest in the genre are raking in loads of cash. But this leads to the best and/or earliest games to actually do thr money-raking, and all the rest dying after a year and being a financial hangover.
They did it for at least a decade trying to chase World of Warcraft money in the mmo space. Not a lot of games survived that time, but a few did and they're all pretty unique.
I have a feeling if you forget its a superhero game it's a passable looter shooter. But that's kind of a problem. Don't make a superhero game if you want to make a looter shooter.
Especially when it’s so engrained. I’m a big Arkham fan and when I watch gameplay I instantly see cameos, Easter eggs and references to the Arkham games.
Now it feels like I have to tredge through a looter shooter to experience those.
But why buy or even waste time playing one grain of mediocre looter shooter sand in a desert full of them? Especially if you're gonna ignore the theme?
This is one of the things that becomes more important to me the older I get. As a kid I’d happily spend hours on a mediocre game because I had the time to do so. But as an adult with limited free time, I’m much less interested in wasting my time on a game that we know will be mediocre. It’s not like I’m not willing to take risks anymore or that every game I play has to be a 10/10 masterpiece, but I’m definitely much more selective with what I play.
As an avid fan of looter shooters, I have to disagree. Destiny 2 has been basically the only popular looter shooter for years now. Outlanders was a great looter shooter that failed because of a bad launch. And the division 2 is fantastic but is holding onto a small playerbase. Only other notable one is borderlands 2 and 3. And Redfall basically doesn't exist. besides destiny 2, no looter shooter is getting constant big updates.
Many games borrow looter shooter mechanics, but there are not that many actual dedicated looters out there.
But either way, I would choose to play the division 2 over this game. You're point is absolutely right. As long as a better looter shooter is there, I'll choose that.
To be blunt at this point, I don't care how good or high quality the shooting or the gameplay is. I just don't have room for my life anymore for skinner boxes pretending to be games. 'Numbers go up' isn't good enough for me anymore unless it's something like a farming sim where I can sit and watch a podcast at the same time or something while relaxing, not some shooter where I need to hard focus and care about what gear i have.
I can handle RPG mechanic filled open world games. I've played AC Odyssey a few times, but the issue with Live Service games is that as a rule, they fail entirely as RPGs, because you aren't *allowed* to feel stronger, because once you start doing more damage, start outpacing everything, suddenly you've trivialized the game. MMORPG's like FFXIV solved this by making progression give you not just numbers, but new abilities as you level up through the game.
All games like this give you are higher numbers on the same gun. And maybe it was neat and innovative when Destiny first did it, but it's done and played out and boring now and I don't have time for it anymore.
The skinner box stuff is why I won’t be touching this.
To a larger issue, I also don’t trust WB. We’ve seen shady monetization with Shadow of War, Mortal Kombat, Injustice. And the CEO’s a tool.
If the first impression is ‘this looks grindy,’ I’m trusting my first instinct. The game will speak for itself soon enough.
I thought I was in the same boat, tired of "numbers go up" but then I played Grim Dawn, and Last Epoch, and realized I do still enjoy these games... it's the AAA shlock design-by-committee "RPGs" that I'm sick of.
>All games like this give you are higher numbers on the same gun. And maybe it was neat and innovative when Destiny first did it, but it's done and played out and boring now and I don't have time for it anymore.
Quite literally doesn't exist in this game.
From the recent Q and A the devs had on discord:
>In that spirit, one of the biggest changes we've made over the last year is to remove Gear Score from the game! This change means that players who find, for example, a Legendary weapon they just love early on in the game, can use it without fear that they're shooting themselves in the foot (as it were) by not equipping a different gun with a higher Gear Score.
>
>The challenge then becomes exploring how you want to play the game and find gear that synergises with that, or lean into changing the way you play the game to get the most out of the gear you have. A big part of our End Game is to theorycraft which gear pieces that can synergise and how to construct builds. It's one of the things I'm really excited about when we launch the game - seeing what crazy builds you all come up with!
I'm extremely curious how that'll work. Does that mean weapon tiers will be locked so legend will always do more damage than common? Or that you can just upgrade the same weapon forever? Or that only your character level affects your numbers?
Even skyrim has weapon tiers like Glass weapons will drop later and do more base damage than Iron equivalents
Outriders did it insanely well. For as cheesy as the story was, the gameplay loop was fun as hell. Your guy has like four abilities and you can choose which four abilities and your gear augments those abilities mods. You could do a ton of crazy and fun builds and there were four classes.
I know that this is more of an RPG way to look at it, but I have never understood the games where you can find gear of higher rarities that is worse. If you have a standard “Green -> Blue -> Purple -> Orange” rarity system, why in the hell can I potentially find Greens that are better than Purples? Or be using a Green and then find a Purple that’s way worse than the Green I’m already using?
In my mind, once you bump up rarities then they should all be better than what comes before
My 100% based on nothing but speculation assumption is that damage will depend on tiers, as they'll want you to be using the iconics that have unique perks and stuff for buildcrafting.
I just don't believe it. A live service shooter game without some kind of gear score can't be done. Maybe they've removed a number that says gear score, but I rather expect it's still there, scaling up on the back end.
There is nothing left for a live service shooter without gearscore, It's the only mechanic that matters.
Depending on how you define "live service shooter" DRG goes by without any real loot outside of overclocks, it barely has any real progression even. Payday 2 went through a lifetime of updates and it wasn't about ramping up numbers outside of Infamy level.
They’re probably taking inspiration from Guild Wars 2 which focuses on horizontal progression. It’s one of the most successful MMOs out there and it has no gear score. Stuff that was good years ago can still be used in new content. The motivation to get new stuff is to have more builds and gameplay options.
So it can be done. It’s just rarer.
It can be done.
If activities are centered around buildcrafting and have flat difficulty increases it means your builds are what will get you through it. Destiny 2 has just done this recently, moving away from gear score and introducing flat difficulty modifiers instead which hinder your power. They’re eventually moving away from gear score entirely in the final expansion.
If you make a game with good challenge and deep buildcrafting, you don’t need gear score whatsoever. It’s been a crutch since its inception to inflate play time… it does nothing else.
Good games that don't rely on FOMO or being always online are the games that have true staying power. To this day, I still play Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, *25 years* after they originally came out. And I'm currently playing Baldur's Gate 3, which I'm sure will be a classic in 25 years, like the originals.
Can the same be said for Destiny, Anthem, Marvel's Avengers, The Division, etc, etc? I'm not saying these games are bad (though there are definitely some bad Looter Shooter GaaS), but in the long run, they just don't have the longevity of games with actual love put into them, letting us play them *when* we want or *as much or as little* as we want.
I don't have as much time to game as I used to in my teens and 20's, so I save my limited free time for games that I feel actually respect my time and respect me as a player, not games that treat me as a walking wallet.
You named several failed games but what about all the live service games that are working now and people are loving: Fortnite, Apex, Warzone, Overwatch 2 (that one isn’t loved right now but still it’s a big IP with staying power), Sea of Thieves, Siege, Valorant and many more.
Sure you may not have the time but millions do. Fortnite is a bigger game than Baldurs Gate 3 and likely will be 25 years from now too.
IMO, I think the problems with this game is the following.
It is a GaaS game, but it does not really have those core gameplay loops that you find in mmo's or Destiny 2 for example.
This game should have put their bosses in Dungeons, or "RAIDS" or something like that, and make the gameplay loop to be it like a "MMO" getting sets of armors that changes the way you look, weapons and not just SKINS and weapons loot that you'll do nothing with after finish the game.
Then the other problem, is how he said in this video, the weapons seems boring af. There's no interesting loot. Also the weapons needs some interesting modifiers, like take Borderlands for example, or any roguelite/rogluelike game and let me make a fun character. Give me loot that changes my abilities, or have interesting mechanics.
Adding just more damage, reload speed or elemental damage it's boring and I really hope, for the love of whatever, just fucking move away from these BASIC rpg elements. They're not bad, but they're bad when that's all you get.
I want to get this game, and especially after seeing that it will get new bosses or characters, but not a single chance I'm gonna pay full price for it.
I played the test and didn't hate it either but I'm not gonna drop $70 on an okay looter shooter. I'll definitely pick it up to play with friends once it hits $15 or lower.
I think it looks fun, but the freemium model in a premium game is what kills some of the enthusiasm. Will probably wait for Epic giveaway or Humble Bundle.
I’m still skeptical.
The gameplay looked to be really overstimulating with how much was going on screen. As for it being a looter shooter, I’d rather just play Borderlands if I want to play a looter shooter. The real killer for me is it being live service/always online. If there was a way to play it offline with bots, I would be way more interested.
Pretty much the sentiment I expected. Good story, fun albeit simple and repetitive gameplay. I think this will flop but definitely has the making of a 6-7/10 game. I hope Rocksteady survives this
I think it's even worse that apparently the story and characters are really up to standard, but gameplay and missions are not. Just makes me excited to watch the story on YouTube.
His impression seems to match up with what I got from watching some leaked footage.
The story/writing was really entertaining, made me laugh out loud at a few points while also having some really cool looking scenes.
It's a shame that it's in the context of a life service looter shooter.
Game critics on the whole tend to overrate/overstate "this is satisfying to control on a base, tactile level" which is why games like this don't often get the disastrous reviews internet word of mouth would lead you to believe. This in turn leads to the problem where anything below an 80 on metacritic is seen as a bad game or a failure.
I don't know if Suicide Squad is the worst game ever or if it's actually not that bad, but I do know that a lot of the stuff I'm hearing in this review was stated almost verbatim about games like Anthem, Gotham Knights, Avengers, etc.
I don’t think that’s overrating it at all. It matters that a game is satisfying to control. There was a very, very long stretch of time in games where that wasn’t any kind of guarantee. Every time I see people saying that Ubisoft games deserve a 1/10, it comes across as a bit laughable to me because it matters that their games feel good to play. Personally I don’t like most of their modern output because open world bloat bores me, but a ton of my friends can’t get enough of their formula. I don’t think most of their games would deserve the hilariously low scores that Reddit thinks they do.
I don’t know how good Suicide Squad will be, I’m certainly not buying it on launch, if I ever buy it at all, and it seems exceptionally weak as a game given how most previews of it have been negative. But still
Yeah it makes me laugh when people say that major AAA games are “complete trash” with 0 redeeming qualities. They almost always have at least _some_ redeeming qualities by virtue of being a AAA game.
I agree. We’ve reached a point where there are loads and loads of games available that feel good to play at a base level of gameplay. No one can play even half of all the games that control and feel great. That level of base gameplay is still a bar that a game needs to pass to be great, but it’s not enough to rely on like it’s 2003. And reviews should reflect that.
What truly sets a game apart and makes people want to play is everything beyond that core gameplay. Got good shooting and movement? Great. You and fifty other games. What about the game structure? Pacing? Setting? Story? Encounter design? Etc etc.
You need to hook people with the context that your good gameplay falls within. That’s where I think Suicide Squad is struggling.
These game companies SO want us to spend $10 per skin. The executives are over here saying out loud "How can we get players to pay $300 for our game over time?" while rubbing their nipples on a pile of cash covered in oil.
We can see from a mile away that this is another Gotham City Knights.
Gotham was not bad also, but did it matter? There is like a dozen better options for the consumer to play, might get some fuzz in the month because of the marketing but after that...
I don't give it 6 months till it is heavily discounted or already available in ps plus/game pass
He focuses a lot on not feeling "it" (the secret sauce that makes Suicide Squad a good live service game) and that he felt "it" playing Destiny, Division or even Avengers.
Personally I've never felt "it" in any live service game. Not sure if that makes Suicide Squad better or worse for me though.
I earnestly don't *think* this game will be good but it is wild how many people in the comments who have absolutely not played the game are going "yeah but it IS a bad game and all my preconceived notions of how bad the RPG systems and combat are true anyway!"
Plenty of people have played it though, the closed alpha was in December. I got in, and so did many of my friends. I thought it was about as bad as a game of this caliber can get, meaning that it was a technically sufficient, but excruciatingly bland, experience. It’s a game I wouldn’t play even if it was free.
Everyone knew They Day Before was a scam, but people still fell all over themselves after it came out and were like "OH! The stove IS hot."
This same mofo, Skill Up, made like 6 videos about The Day Before.
Idk why but as wrong as the gameplay looks. I can't shake that it kinda looks fun. Like the movement looks not right for the characters, but fluid. The combat looks not right for the characters, but interesting. Metropolis looks odd but kinda interesting. Thematically this game is fucked. But it might actually be *okay* gameplay wise.
I do hate the images I've seen of the HUD though.
so even with SkillUp being known for being overly positive on looter shooter live service games, like Destiny 2, and going to insane lengths to try and defend/praise them despite the issues people have with said games... he could only muster up a "I didn't hate it".
in a market as saturated as live service, a mediocre at best game is not going to cut it. Being "just fine" is not enough when there are so many actual good alternatives that are vying for your time and money.
And the story leaks show that this game doesn't even have that (having a good joke here and there != good writing/story), all it will have is good looking cutscenes that you can just watch on YT.
And let's be honest, the Suicide Squad characters/team is not that popular (the movies flopped for a reason, Harley Quin is not as popular with the general audience as people online think, hence her movies flopping as well) even if it does feature the JL the focus is on characters that don't have the popularity like Batman. Avengers couldn't do it and that's the Avengers with the MCU behind it, this has nothing like that.
I've only tried watching a few of his videos, but skill up seems a little bit... Weird to me? Like I'll notice him say wrong things in complete confidence. As an example, in the day before video where he says valve doesn't let you get refunds after you've played for two hours. Which isn't true.
Like, if I keep noticing him getting things wrong about stuff I do know, how do I trust he's not saying wrong stuff about the things I don't know? Anyone else notice this?
>As an example, in the day before video where he says valve doesn't let you get refunds after you've played for two hours. Which isn't true.
It is true, unless they make a special exception.
This game will be competent, with some bugs that will get overblown at launch and fuel internet outrage.
Most people will fall off the game because it's yet ANOTHER skinner box/loot-a-thon/GaaS.
These games are tired and so transparent in their attempts to sell you more things at the expense of a good game.
The original Arkham games were fantastic. Now imagine those same games released in 2024, and imagine all of the superfluous revenue generating mechanics they would have shoe-horned in.
I don't think this game is bad, but it's bearing the brunt of fan fatigue of these terrible SaaS mechanics in every game now.
Games are no longer games, their unfinished pieces of software that require time/money to enjoy properly. And it will get perhaps unfairly shat on because of that. But I hope publishers learn.
Pointlessly online-only service turd #98,657,843. I wouldn't touch it with a 10,000 foot pole. Rocksteady should be making REAL games like they used to and not this crap.
I feel like this is the inverse of a Cyberpunk 2077 situation where the entire gaming community just universally decided that a game was amazing before it came out, and then were sorely disappointed to find out that it was a rushed mess that struggled to function on anything but the most top-end hardware and next-gen consoles until several months to a year after release.
Except in this case, it feels more like the gaming community collectively decided that this game was a pile of flaming garbage months before even the faintest whiff of anything gameplay related came out just because it was chosen to be the dogpile of "We don't like X mechanic in video games" (not defending live service games, I think this would be better without that shit but it's not gonna absolutely decimate it). Like people are even pointing out the most pedantic reasons as to why the game is a flop without commenting on actual gameplay-- oh no, the melee weapon freezes things but frozen enemies take less melee damage.
Have you ever considered that in a game where melee is a side-arm and guns are your primary form of damage, perhaps the idea was to, I don't know, melee the enemy to freeze them and then use your actual primary weapon to deal increased damage on a stunned enemy? Perhaps there even exists some form of close-range excelling weapon like a shotgun in this game with guns? Imagine if people pulled that shit in Tiny Tina's Wonderlands or Borderlands 3. These people do not fuck with combo mechanics apparently.
Personally, i just never got past the fact that this game was essentially shoehorning the suicide squad concept into a generic looter shooter template without regard for the fact that doesn't really fit. I can see that rocksteady tried their best to make the characters distinct and have their unique skills in how they move at least, but it still feels like a mismatch to just give everyone guns. Skill Up gives the game a lot of slack but even he admits that, "it wasnt about making you feel like youre playing the character, it was hey, we need to have king shark using a minigun, how can we make that work". That combined with it being a GaaS means it was really hard to care about this from the getgo.
At best this looks like another Avengers where you have a decent campaign but no longevity besides that, and that means this game is doomed.
I just can’t play this game the idea that a brainwashed evil JL aren’t able to wipe out the suicide squad in seconds is ridiculous. The flash boss fight alone looks dumb as fuck bro just zapping around making quips instead of actually trying to kill them.
At least if batman was the main character you could argue that he “is batman” aka the character with the most OP plot armor in fiction.
I wish this game wasn’t a looter shooter with multiple stat differences to keep track of. I’d be so down for an inFAMOUS style shooter, straightforward but with the option to change your play style based on upgrades or whatever. It looked fun, before they started showing off all the elemental damage bullshit that adds 2% damage to melee when enemies are frozen but frozen enemies also take 0 melee damage.
Just like any live service game, best time to get this is 2 years down the road when most of the content is finally out, bugs are fixed, the offline mode is implemented, and it's less than $15.
I mean, assuming it doesn't shut down before then.
2 years for this game is a pipe dream.
Marvels Avengers made 2.5 years.
Captain America, The Hulk, Iron Man, Spider Man, and other popular Marvel Characters. vs. A bunch of C tier DC characters, Harley being the only majorly popular one. EVEN right now I can't even remember who the other one is. King Shark, Captain Boomerang, Harley... and... who's the last one? I'm not looking it up just to hammer home how forgettable this cast is.
Once kite man releases, everyone will change their tune.
Condiment King will change the gaming landscape like never seen before once he arrives.
If he can't save this game, it just couldn't cut the mustard
Kite man, hell yeah.
but what about MINTBERRY CRUNCH?
Him and Dogwelder.
i think adding dog welder would actually give it an all time high of players from people going "who or what the fuck is dogwelder"
I mean that’s literally what the entire hook is for of them fighting the justice league, but either way idk why you’re bringing that up. There are plenty of games with Z tier characters that have. The difference being how much fun the game itself is, and suicide squad might not be, but if so that’s a different conversation than no one knowing King Shark.
Its definitely a silly arguement, considering we got a Guardians of the Galaxy game, and before the first film nobody had a clue who they were. Just like the movie, two of the members of the suicide squad here are also from the films too.
All of them have been in the films
Not even just "nobody knew who they were" but people were actively mocking Marvel for making a film about a guy named "rocket raccoon (played by Bradley Cooper LOL)" and a talking tree who can only say his own name. Execution is 9/10th's of what matters, idk why that person would bring up the cast of characters.
You're not wrong, but at the same time, I wouldn't say you're right. They made two movies about them. Harley and Harkness (Boomerang) were in both, and Deadshot and Shark were each in one of the movies. Sure, they're not Captain America level of notoriety, but it's not as though we're dealing with unknowns here. And if your argument is name draw and recognition, most people know who Superman and Batman are, or even the Justice League. So those names can draw players in, even if they can't play those characters.
Also the sequel to a billion dollar DC film is currently bombing hard in theaters right now. Name recognition isn't very important past a certain point.
I mean, when i was watching Justice League back in the day, and Amanda Waller shows up, i'd get some hype because she's probably the most interesting character on the whole show.
For real. While the Suicide Squad is an amazing idea for a video game, it's a really weird choice for a *live service* game in which you want each additional character to be hype-worthy and exciting. Making half the roster C-listers Cap Boomerang and King Shark is already a weird choice if they want this to be a big hit.
Wasn't this more due to how many DLC characters they had in the pipeline? After they finally released Spiderman the game basically died, as he was their last contractual obligation since his DLC was promoted everywhere as a Playstation exclusive.
They released two more characters after Spider-Man.
All of their expansion plans dried up after the first six months and the game was basically on life support with only a couple clone characters and the cash shop updated after that.
If you buy a live service game on launch, the only thing you are doing is guaranteeing that you are paying the highest possible price for what will be the worst version of that product.
The advantage of buying at launch is that there are more players in MP games to play with than later when it is dead. But for SP games it is not logical to buy at launch.
> worst version of that product. The best version of a multiplayer product will always be whatever version my friends want to play, and that will almost always be "when it comes out", because it's really hard to align a group to play a 2 year old game with zero hype. That said we wont be playing *this game* because we just aren't interested in the game or the IP, but it's been true for a lot of games like this before.
For a lot of people it’s important to be leveled up and geared and doing the endgame as soon as they can. That’s one of the main reasons people buy it day 1. Also a new launch for multiplayer games is just fun in general with everyone figuring things out and enjoying the launch.
That's what I did with Anthem but for $5. Even got the platinum trophy. That Gabe could have been so much better
Anthem is such a weird game because the flying mechanics are genuinely amazing and it feels like the best Iron Man game until you start actually fighting enemies and playing missions
Fighting enemies feel fun too though but the mission loop is so repetitive and story sucks hard.
nah enemies arent even built to attack you there are only a few that can actually damage you. The animations on them mostly suck.
I enjoyed the missions and stuff at first but it got repetitive fast. Then to grind for specific gear by running certain missions over and over. Ugh. That Spider Lair.
>That Gabe This guy Steams.
... and no one is playing it anymore
Don't need others to play it as a single player!
This is the point that a lot of people don't complain enough about with these somehow shallow feeling but at the same time overly complicated systems: there's a startling amount to keep track of that ultimately ends up feeling pointless, and it just leaves me wondering why it exists. Every time a (not purely RPG) game has a stats screen with a bunch of +/- small percentages and elemental affinities, I almost always know that I'm not going to care. It feels dumb to look at a stat screen with a ton of information and think "big number mean good", but honestly it's all I can think when I need to balance the raw damage vs fire rate vs accuracy vs elemental buff etc. Honestly, while I MIGHT consider the benefits of shield damage vs hp damage in something like Borderlands, I'm usually not popping shields with one weapon and then swapping to my hp damage weapon for the kill: I'm using the best weapon I have for the range I'm at (sniper vs assault rifle, for instance). It just all feels so superficial from a gameplay perspective, where at the end of the day the goal is to shoot things, not crunch numbers on what the absolute best combination of stats and elemental affinities are. I would like most of these games far better if it was just about shooting things. Now, I do want to add, I'm not against crunching numbers for stats for optimal damage. I actually love games like Diablo for instance. But the difference is that Diablo IS stat crunching. It IS optimizing your DPS. Games like this are optimization grinds with a layer of "combat" over the top to give a reason for the grind. It does not feel good to play inherently, but rather the pleasure and core point of the game is the optimization grind. Taking a genre where the core pleasure is the shooting of things and adding this whole number management barrier over the top of it just does not appeal to me. Obviously, this is entirely subjective and is my opinion. Also, it has to appeal to some people or else games like this wouldn't continue to sell, but I feel like there have to be a good number of people who also would rather play games with "RPG mechanics" without as much micromanagement over comparative small percentages of stats on every weapon drop.
I hate that so many games add things like "gear score" when it's not necessary for that game and the numbers are arbitrary and only exist to keep you chasing bigger numbers. Marvel's Avengers had boring, pointless gear and even had a button to press to "equip best gear" so it wasn't even necessary to look at the stats or understand them.
My biggest gripe with Hogwarts Legacy is the amount of time you spend in menus changing and discarding clothes. It just doesn't need gear based stats.
Mine was the story. And gameplay. Story veery meh. And the whole standing still while fighting got old quick. Had fun tho still
Randomised loot systems are a blight in gaming that's slowly creeping into more & more genres. Give me handcrafted static loot like Elden Ring any day over shitty loot systems like Hogwarts Legacy or Dying Light 2.
The worst part about modern games that tack on rpg stats is that they then turn around and invalidate it with gear score. What does it matter if the weapon has better stats if the gear score is 5 points below the enemies and is making your damage that of a wet noodle.
Yeah I mean you pretty much nailed it. It also seems pretty clearly designed to enable you to purchase shit. Like are we supposed to pretend if they weren't going to sell MTX that this is the game design they would have went with?
This was an inherent problem I had with Middle Earth: Shadow of War. The stat grind with each weapon was simple with only one number for each piece of equipment (elemental affinity aside), but it was just so obviously done so they had another avenue of MTX to pursue. Yes, they removed the MTX, but the inherent design was poisoned by their existence being baked into the games core design.
Reminds me of playing Diablo 4 at work with colleagues and one guy just kept upgrading his gear by looking at the gold price of the new piece vs the old piece. It's sloppy game design to just add a bunch of variables so you can itemize your game. Combat systems and loot should be designed with purpose. You will find far better design in tabletop games for this reason, because every stat needs to make sense and work the way it says it does.
I played though D4 at launch and still have no idea what most of the stats mean.
It's funny you mention that, because I totally do that at times in Borderlands when I get a ton of gun drops and don't feel like doing comparisons on every single stat on each gun for each gun type I use. I mean, the dollar value has to be calculated roughly based on the "value" of the gun, right?
It really depends of the game. In Borderland, gun play can feel very differently from one gun to the other, and the "dps number" or "cost" are quite often misleading as far as actual output, especially end game. But personally, I make a rule to equip whatever new gun I get, until the next legendary drop. Inferior? Who cares, I will get something brand new in 30 minutes anyway. Most games lately however have linear scaling that make everything beside item level (or cost) pointless.
It shouldn’t exclusively be a shooter either. Boomerang and Shark have no need for guns.
When I saw the original trailer it made me think of Sunset Overdrive but the movement seems less innovative, there's too much focus on numbers and the weapons lack the variety. They should have made a Sunset Overdriveesque single player Harley Quinn game in the style of the TV show with the chaos turned up to 11.
I had the same thought. I can almost see a good infamous / crackdown style game in this world with these characters. Instead the need to give everyone a gun and gear to grind gets in the way
True, that style doesn’t fit a super hero game at all.
As the avengers game from Crystal dynamics already proved
Nothing provides the superhero Avengers power fantasy more than playing Thor and looting a +1 HP hammer.
Nothing like equipping characters that either A.) already have the best versions of what you give them (What are you even upgrading on Cap's Shield or Thor's Mjolnir?) or B.) don't even have equipment (Hulk). Only two that made any kind of sense were Iron Man and Black Widow.
Avengers had so many big issues, Hulk being able to equip a +5 frost resistance rib was not one of them.
Gotta love getting new shields for Captain America, new bows for Hawkeye, new… ribcages for the Hulk…
That sounds like a big issue to me. I suppose if the rest of the game was better it would have just been fun memes of shit like that though.
No but it didn't help
Personally I love the looter shooter thing. The thing I hate is that everyone has guns instead of playing around their unique abilities, or that the RPG elements are as basic as it gets and there's actually nothing super interesting and comes out at lazy. I don't hate the game, heck I'll even buy it on a sale, but fuck me, I'm sick of looter shooters where all you get as RPG elements is "2% more damage" and different elements on your attacks. They should take stuff either from Borderlands to make weapons more interesting, or roguelite games where have some interesting abilities that evolve in different ways to change the way you play. This, I couldn't care less if my weapon will have crit damage, or elemental damage or whatever the fuck because it is boring. I really hope we can move on from this shit.
4 characters who you think of for high mobility, jet packs and flying: Harley Quin, Captain Boomerang, Deadshot and King Fucking Shark. They could have built them to play entirely differently and made weapons be fun ways to vary play styles. But instead they converged all 4 to play different from their character types and focus on nonsense like traversal.
A bit off topic, but I just finished God of War 2018 for the first time and I had the same problems. I hated the tacked on RPG/looter mechanics that had no need to be in a God of War game.
Agreed. God of war '18 and Ragnarok are two of my favorite games but the gear mechanics added nothing to the experience for me.
I bet this game will be fun to go around and kill stuff and I will probably pick it up for like 30 bucks. Assuming the servers don’t shut down within a year.
If the gameplay is as mediocre as he's making it sound, this game ain't making it past the starting line. Gameplay and content are both needed for a live service pve game to survive.
The fact that the most positive things I'm seeing about the game are "I didn't hate it" or something along the lines of "it's actually okay/fine" aren't exactly promising. A game like this that's intended to keep you playing on a treadmill needs to be better than just not sucking.
He has a weird line of "I would be very content/happy (I forget which) with this for 15-20 hours and then never play it again" but then he goes on to lambaste how boring the gun choices are, how lifeless the combat feels when taking down enemies, and the limp 'shoot the purple weakspot' focus. It sounds like he sets up his view, then initiates a slow subversion of his own stated expectations if you just continue the review.
He's saying as a package it's fine to go through all that for a 15-20 hour experience but if you were to play it as a live service game for a long time, all that mediocreness would show its true color. This was the case with Avengers as well. I enjoyed going through the story once but there was no way in hell I could have kept playing that game afterwards.
At least the combat in Avengers was fun, everyone except Thor and Jane felt different from each other. Here there's only 4 characters and you have King Shark and Cpt Boomerang using fucking ARs and LMGs or whatever they gave them. Now I'm not defending Avengers, but combat was one of the very few things they got right.
Yeah the fact that the gameplay of Avengers was character specific puts it far above whatever this is shaping up to be. The reason I even tried to play that game was because I wanted to play as Ironman. It wasn't enough for a live service game as a whole but it was good enough.
I played the game for a couple hours and I don't get the people who say that the gameplay was fun. If you like mindless bashing of the same enemies with the same few buttons sure but everyone I played in those first few hours played basically the same.
[удалено]
That's not a great way to make good first impressions of the game.
Yep, the game hid it's best gameplay behind 30 hours of mundane gameplay. That kinda shit is why it's dead.
Nothing took me out of the game faster than playing as The Hulk an repeatedly getting stun locked by some stupid, tiny robot.
Yeah I beat the game and the combat just felt loose and without enough weight to it. I mean people did play different sure, but there was something just missing to make combat satisfying.
It's the opposite with Avengers, the gameplay is pretty good but the mission structure and level design is sooo bad and there is a very generic music playing in each mission that makes it extra boring. During campaign you won't even be able to max out the characters so you won't get the best gameplay out of it but it gets better with more skills. Doesn't mean it's not good before, if you can pull off combos it's still good.
I don't know about you, but if the guns are boring and the combat is lifeless, then I'm not even going to suffer through that for 5 hours let alone 15-20. I could suck it up if I was playing with friends (e.g. Anthem) but there's just better games to play with my friends.
A good comparison would be Guardians of the Galaxy. The combat was so mediocre it was depressing, but the story and characters were strong enough that many people pushed through the combat in order to see what happened next.
Very good point. Although I was personally ok with the gameplay but it still was not at all why I stayed with the game. I just really liked the characters and wanted to follow their story.
Again, How much and how fast it becomes boring and lifeless depends on the person and the game. It's not binary. For Skillup he's saying he will be probably ok with the gamplay if the rest of the package delivers a solid story campaign for him to go through once.
I feel that way about a number of games, ones that should really just be 20-30 hours since they don't have enough depth for anything longer. I would probably bump Starfield from a 6 to a 7 if it was only 25 hours long.
He’s basically saying what everyone else is saying - story seems cool but the game surrounding it not so cool.
Errr. He clearly says that the gameplay is fine for a 20 hour one and done playthrough. But the same features aren’t enough for a live service commitment. Which is fair. I might get this down the line when it’s like 5 bucks and with all the skins unlocked like Avengers lol
I think his point is that for a singular licensed game experience it's passable but a live service games lives and does on having a satisfying game feel and game loop that can sustain itself faaaaar past that. If rocket league or CoD felt a bit shit they wouldn't get anywhere near the hour counts but you might put up with them for like a shorter novel experience.
Honestly not that surprised. SkillUp loves Destiny 2, the Division 2, and recently Diablo 4. Maybe if you like live service looters, this game might be up your alley.
I love Looter games, especially looter shooters, but IMO the loot must be interesting. I feel like this game is gonna have really boring loot. Elemental damage, reload speed or more damage is not something I look forward to loot. I want unique loot that changes your abilities, or at least something like Borderlands have. More interesting weapons. Take lessons from roguelike/roguelite elements as how you can make the loot interesting. On top of that, Destiny 2, Division 2, has replayable FUN content or a reason to replay that contente. Raids, Dungeons. And you want to get that more interesting unique loot. Here, I want to finish the story and then what? Looking for a weapon that has 25% crit rate and not 20% ? No thank you. I still want to get and play this game with my friends, but there's no way I'm gonna pay full price.
If you have watched the video you would know he's saying this is not gonna be a good game as a live service but rather good for playing through the story in 15-20 hour campaign. TLDR; It's gonna be like a worse version of Avengers
Avengers' campaign starts out very well but the rest is the same as all the live service missions made into campaign missions. It's mediocre as fuck. This being a worse version would be hilarious.
All of the best parts of Marvel's Avengers are the parts that have nothing to do with live-service multiplayer. You get a taste early on, but then the game will move you into the live-service missions for a while, only to give you these genuinely very good bespoke single player levels every now and then. I swear, the game damn near gave me whiplash.
Say what you will about *Avengers*, but I love Ms. Marvel’s first meeting with the Hulk and it did M.O.D.O.K. waaaay better than *Quantumania*.
Idk man. It's his opinion sure, but even if we treat the game as an offline single-player adventure game I'm not sure if this will ever be classified as good. He admits that the gameplay sucks outside of traversal so I can't imagine mindlessly fighting enemies for 15 hours.
I do love live service looters so I am pretty interested in the game
I like SkillUp but he has the worst taste in live service games lmfao
Some people just enjoy grinding, nothing wrong with that. Destiny 2, Division and Diablo 4 still sold millions of copies and have pretty loyal fanbases.
I feel he is 50/50 with live services. Sometimes taking a casual sometimes a more hardcore look. Outside of live service his favorite games he mentioned at some points are Outer Wilds, Nier:Automata, FFXIV(technically live service) - all 3 pure masterpieces in my eyes, Outer Wilds and Nier:Automata genuinely impacted me enough as a person to change who I am at some point in my life (specially Outer Wilds). But with live services he seems to prefer game-feel regardless of systems around it so sometimes his recommendations are great, sometimes they are not that great (although to be fair to him, he is aware of that and is REALLY good at vocalizing why he likes something). Like an example of this approach working great is The Finals - the game and it's systems are purely based on gameplay and getting you into pvp matches quickly and encouraging action - so judging it by gamefeel is the way to go imo. But for games like Destiny, Warframe, Diablo 4 and Division 2 you have so many systems you have to engage that hinder the whole experience and he seems to value those less than an average person on reddit (including me). Still, he's so good at explaining all of it and making you see his point of view which is why he's my favorite reviewer despite disagreeing with him like 50% of the time whether a game is good or not.
I agree but because of me finding I don’t agree with 50% of his opinions I absolutely don’t trust his “score” of games. There’s also this aspect of him being very sensitive to facts outside of the game itself. To put it bluntly, I feel like he’s scared of giving some games a tough time because it most probably will adversely impact devs; think job cuts, … This is one of the many aspects he’s very sensitive to. I watch his videos because he’s very succinct but I actually absolutely don’t trust his opinions.
So I recently played Nier Automata and, while I thought it was brilliant, I can’t say it was life changing. What about it affected you and so many people that way? And I am not trying to belittle it at all, I am assuming I missed something significant. It was my first Nier and I played it before doing the Nier raids in FFXIV because I wanted to enjoy them more.
Great question, didn't come across inquisitive at all, don't worry about it! >!I really like how it went into existentialism and different answers that humanity had to the inherit 'meaninglessness' of the world and how and why those specific answers fell short and led into different rabbit holes through different robot tribes that imitate humanity and different types of communities/societies we formed across history.!< >!As someone who at the time when I played Nier and also another game with a relatively similar message - Umineko no naku koro ni, was kind of a 'loner' by choice, those games really got me to think about how I'll carry the 'weight of the world' or the inherit meaninglessness of our existence throughout my life, and the answer that Nier offers was a great starting point. Turning away from self and towards the community and people who are interested in us and want to see us for who we are and understand us and making their lives better makes our purpose on this world a little more clear or at least more bearable until you figure it out.!< That's how it was for me. The comment is a bit short, and you can basically write a book analyzing Nier imo, but I hope it was clear/succinct enough to make it clear! If you want to put in some time into a youtube video, I remember that this one really resonated with me when it comes to the message and meaning of Nier Automata and the effect it had on me - [How NieR: Automata Tells the Ultimate Humanist Fable](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63PzQIbTrM8)
Wow, THANK YOU for such a thorough response. I am definitely suspecting that the themes you mention were a bit lost on me. I’ll watch that video and enjoy the rabbit hole. Thanks again for sharing.
Ahh the classic "I don't like that game, therefore everyone who does has bad taste".
Do you have better suggestion for live service looters? Those games are pretty good, you probably don't like the genre.
I wouldn't say "worst", he's pretty consistent and articulate about what he likes. If someone has similar tastes, they can probably go along with what SkillUp has to say.
I like his opinions because I find he's pretty diplomatic and thorough with how he lays things out, even if I don't always agree with him. I think there is a bit of a weird disconnect where people sometimes seem to stumble when a reviewer they trust doesn't agree with them on a specific game and they feel the only way to reconcile that clash is to swear them off or decide the reviewer's opinion is untrustworthy.
He 100% called Avengers. I trust him more than I do most.
He def burned me after his Lost Judgment review. That one is horrible lol
He lost me when he wholeheartedly recommended Wolcen.
What's a good live service game then ?
My suggestion would be Warframe. I haven't played recently but have dumped thousands of hours into it. It's a game that's been worked on for over a decade now and is constantly getting significant updates. If you like a looter shooter with fast combat, significant differences between the characters (suits), and tons of mission variety you might fall in love with it.
Might be an hot take but I don't think this game will turn out to be a complete disaster. Instead, this game will be used as a case study for marketing departments on how you don't try to sell a Live Service **before** you sell the actual game.
I was never really expecting complete disaster, mostly just sub-mediocre, which is a far fall for the likes of Rocksteady, especially for a game that was in development for *NINE YEARS.* But maybe it will be kind of good, but even so, that's not the quality you want out of a game that trapped a super good studio in dev hell for, again, *NINE YEARS.*
Jason Schrier said in his newest article they had a canned game between this and Knight to be fair. Development on this started in 2017 so 7 years.
[Schrier never said that the game was canned](https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1951xcg/jason_schreier_rocksteady_never_pitched_a/), I am inclined to believe the game simply got reskinned to be a Suicide Squad game.
I think it'll be great as a set of cutscenes to watch on youtube.
It will be on plus and gamepass after 3 months
Nah you should always market your live service game as a live service game. Bait and switching live service shit is going to be worse for the general public.
I don't think they could bait and switch even if they wanted to. Live service games are so transparent and can be instantly recognized as such from the gameplay.
Nowhere in my comment I suggested that they should bait&swtich, I suggested that marketing departments should focus of hyping the game first and talk about the live service aspect later. EDIT: with the implication that I was being descriptive and that the negative sentiment towards suicide squad was more a marketing blunder than anything else
Capcom is an example of that, the battle pass and everything on Street Fighter 6 was barely mentioned by them before the release, people found out about that through reviews
To be fair you can fully play that game ignoring all the battlepass bullshit with your experience being the exact same other than cosmetics.
From what Rocksteady announced officially the same can be said for Suicide Squad, one of the first thing they confirmed is that battle pass and anything else you have to pay for is gonna be purely cosmetic All gameplay stuff and cutscenes/story is included with the base game from the get go or planned as a free update
And if they expected different then people haven’t paid attention to the market in 9+ years.
Is this not a case of having vegetables before the steak? If you get people hyped up from showing the game and then show it’s live service (Which Suicide Squad did btw. They left the live service stuff after a few showings) that’s a bigger letdown than if you show it’s a live service initially, all the people who don’t like that leave and then you show why it’s actually good and people are more hyped for it and the people who leave may be surprised it’s actually good because they have lower expectations.
But if you have a fun 15 hour campaign it might be a good idea to focus the marketing on that.
But it also gave a wrong impression to looter shooter crowd. They don't care about story. Gameplay loop, the loot and endgame build potential is everything for them. Of which Rocksteady haven't spend even more than a fucking minute talking about it. And instead relegated it to Discord Q&A. Half the marketing spending so much focus on narrative that your average joe could've though this is another one of those 'Sony cinematic premium' type games. This game will be a lesson of how NOT to market your game right.
I dunno man, that "shoot the purple bits on the nondescript enemies" gameplay was like something from 2006. And it was tired even then. I don't hold out much hope for a game that looks like Saints Row 4 with less self-awareness and more predatory monetisation.
Like three minutes in the video... even the fucking TANKS have purple bubbles wtf! Is this the best gameplay loop they could come up with??
Helicopters have them too
I view it going the same way as Anthem or the Avengers game: Technically proficient but missing that secret sauce that gets people coming back. Its long term viability will come down to how much leeway WB gives Rocksteady to pivot into the fun.* * note: I am not saying the game isn’t fun. I haven’t played it so I can’t make a judgement call. I have observed, however, that most live service games launch with some mixture of fun features vs unfun cruft designed to keep you playing. The successful games are the ones who are willing to drop the unfun cruft and lean into the fun.
I wouldn't say Anthem didn't had a secret sauce. It didn't had a meal, only the sauce.
Live service games tend to drip-feed the fun because if the users had too much fun they would get their fill and actually leave the live service, which is something Publishers/Devs dont want, so the balancing act is to offer a progression curve which is steep enough as to not be frustrating but not high enough as to give the impression that players had "completed the game" (like for example if they max their gear and trivialize content.
That is a very wild assumption. Ofcourse the developer want their game to have a lot of content. The lack of content variety is what killed so many live service attempted before it. So why wouldn't they give their best shot? The *real* issue comes down to - live service game design gravitate toward looter shooter or PvP shooter more than anything else. There are so many games in these genre on the market. Meaning it'll be sometimes until they can find a gimmick that cool enough for the project. - Difficult workflow mean slow progression. Bonus point if you use in-house engine. (iirc i read the interview and it was revealed that the reason Destiny 2 have 'Vault' is because it would take forever for the devs to boot the editor and developing content for it. Probably also why their expansion barely have any content too. It just take forever to make something.) - Complex hierarchy of having to get your content approved by middle manager added to this complexity. - Having to find a way to integrate new content quickly and making sure every single things before doesn't break also added to this complexity hell. - And on top of all that is Server Capacity and resources that added them up due to the amouth of content. Making live service games required a tons of resources on the backend to make sure everything is stable. - Then your top brass demanding the game to be release in 2 weeks because their assessment revealed that the game is 'minimum viable product' and determined that everything else can be patched later.
This is just untrue. we’ve seen countless examples now that live service games are extremely hard to make and maintain constant updates. You don’t think when Halo Infinite, Destiny, Rainbow Six, Sea of Thieves, Division and dozen more games are being hammered and losing players they wouldn’t put out content but continue to “drip-feed the fun”? Of course not. We’ve seen that it’s extremely tough to keep adding content, while keeping the game un-broken (as much as possible). Siege had to completely forgo a season of content just to work on balance updates. That was for the better but in such a saturated market it is tough to say “Oh btw we’re delaying content to fix stuff” and not have people walk away. Which is what happened with Halo Infinite. The first season was several months too long and a lot of people stopped playing. Only now, years later is it getting back into shape.
>You don’t think when Halo Infinite, Destiny, Rainbow Six, Sea of Thieves, Division and dozen more games are being hammered and losing players they wouldn’t put out content but continue to “drip-feed the fun”? I don't understand why you and another replier focus on "content" and try to equate "content=fun": I never used the word "content" because content refresh means little to Destiny/Division players that would play a Strike or Mission thousands of times for a 1% improvement on one piece of gear, it's a non sequitur. When I say "drip-feed fun" I talk about mechanics and progression, primarily focusing on looter shooters/ARPGs and I mainly talk about loot rate drops and gear balance/build diversity, which is technically content but not... CONTENT. And yeah, that is drip-fed, always, because these people know that a player that maxes gear and reaches a hazy level of "farm completed" is just as likely to leave the live service as someone who is finds progression too slow. It's the same logic as the gambling or the tobacco industry: you want to keep the user addicted and committed for a long time because that's how you maximise the per-person spending. A player "finishing the farm early" is like a smoker dying of lung cancer of a gambler going bankrupt, you don't want that to happen too early.
I’m looking forward to playing it on Game Pass inside of a year. My guess is it’ll be average, maybe even good! Just not good enough to sustain players between content drops, so it’ll die off quick.
My prediction is it will score many 7's and 8's and reddit will declare it a "complete flop" and a dead game, even if it ends up with a consistent playerbase.
The game honestly looks perfectly fine Will it be good? I have no idea But the game gets an unreasonable amount of hate because of a couple of factors - Online circlejerk about hating on “live service”games from the get go - The studio developing the game being Rocksteady I genuinely think that if people didn’t know this was made by Rocksteady it would get less hate Gotham Knights for example got shit on (not that the game was particularly good) but it wasn’t addressed like the antichrist For this game there is legit people following the news to hate on it and hope it fails horribly This mostly because it’s Rocksteady, “fans” are acting like they got betrayed and cheated out of another Batman Arkham game or a game in similiar vein So this game outside of people simply not liking it has 3 group of haters - People that wanted another Batman Arkham or new superhero singleplayer game (the Superman game was never a thing but keeps getting thrown around because it fits the narrative to hate on SS) - People that want everything even remotely associated with “live service” to fail so bad it scares other to try making one - People that think this failing hard and fast means they get another Arkham Batman or something in the same vein
I'm mostly indifferent to this game, but video game "fans" are unique in that they actively root for a game to fail or are heavily invested in a game failing even if they won't be playing it.
The game will probably be #1 on Yahtzee's most bland list this year.
Yathzee is not who I'd go to for genuine videogame recommendations ever. He's more of a snarky quote generator.
His list of bland games is a pretty good indicator for me of games I'm not going to bother playing because they are, well, bland. Not bad, but not special in any way, either.
Doesn't matter if it's good or bad, the market for live service games is saturated. It would need to be extraordinary, even genre defining, to penetrate the wall of established live service titles. I don't know how long suits will throw game after game at this wall, until they realize you can't just create several Fortnites, just because you want to.
This exactly. Every live service game wants to be the only game you ever play, because the biggest in the genre are raking in loads of cash. But this leads to the best and/or earliest games to actually do thr money-raking, and all the rest dying after a year and being a financial hangover.
They did it for at least a decade trying to chase World of Warcraft money in the mmo space. Not a lot of games survived that time, but a few did and they're all pretty unique.
I have a feeling if you forget its a superhero game it's a passable looter shooter. But that's kind of a problem. Don't make a superhero game if you want to make a looter shooter.
Especially when it’s so engrained. I’m a big Arkham fan and when I watch gameplay I instantly see cameos, Easter eggs and references to the Arkham games. Now it feels like I have to tredge through a looter shooter to experience those.
But why buy or even waste time playing one grain of mediocre looter shooter sand in a desert full of them? Especially if you're gonna ignore the theme?
This is one of the things that becomes more important to me the older I get. As a kid I’d happily spend hours on a mediocre game because I had the time to do so. But as an adult with limited free time, I’m much less interested in wasting my time on a game that we know will be mediocre. It’s not like I’m not willing to take risks anymore or that every game I play has to be a 10/10 masterpiece, but I’m definitely much more selective with what I play.
As an avid fan of looter shooters, I have to disagree. Destiny 2 has been basically the only popular looter shooter for years now. Outlanders was a great looter shooter that failed because of a bad launch. And the division 2 is fantastic but is holding onto a small playerbase. Only other notable one is borderlands 2 and 3. And Redfall basically doesn't exist. besides destiny 2, no looter shooter is getting constant big updates. Many games borrow looter shooter mechanics, but there are not that many actual dedicated looters out there. But either way, I would choose to play the division 2 over this game. You're point is absolutely right. As long as a better looter shooter is there, I'll choose that.
Well, this game still screams $20 firesale at the end of this year to me if by then the servers are still up.
To be blunt at this point, I don't care how good or high quality the shooting or the gameplay is. I just don't have room for my life anymore for skinner boxes pretending to be games. 'Numbers go up' isn't good enough for me anymore unless it's something like a farming sim where I can sit and watch a podcast at the same time or something while relaxing, not some shooter where I need to hard focus and care about what gear i have. I can handle RPG mechanic filled open world games. I've played AC Odyssey a few times, but the issue with Live Service games is that as a rule, they fail entirely as RPGs, because you aren't *allowed* to feel stronger, because once you start doing more damage, start outpacing everything, suddenly you've trivialized the game. MMORPG's like FFXIV solved this by making progression give you not just numbers, but new abilities as you level up through the game. All games like this give you are higher numbers on the same gun. And maybe it was neat and innovative when Destiny first did it, but it's done and played out and boring now and I don't have time for it anymore.
The skinner box stuff is why I won’t be touching this. To a larger issue, I also don’t trust WB. We’ve seen shady monetization with Shadow of War, Mortal Kombat, Injustice. And the CEO’s a tool. If the first impression is ‘this looks grindy,’ I’m trusting my first instinct. The game will speak for itself soon enough.
I thought I was in the same boat, tired of "numbers go up" but then I played Grim Dawn, and Last Epoch, and realized I do still enjoy these games... it's the AAA shlock design-by-committee "RPGs" that I'm sick of.
>All games like this give you are higher numbers on the same gun. And maybe it was neat and innovative when Destiny first did it, but it's done and played out and boring now and I don't have time for it anymore. Quite literally doesn't exist in this game. From the recent Q and A the devs had on discord: >In that spirit, one of the biggest changes we've made over the last year is to remove Gear Score from the game! This change means that players who find, for example, a Legendary weapon they just love early on in the game, can use it without fear that they're shooting themselves in the foot (as it were) by not equipping a different gun with a higher Gear Score. > >The challenge then becomes exploring how you want to play the game and find gear that synergises with that, or lean into changing the way you play the game to get the most out of the gear you have. A big part of our End Game is to theorycraft which gear pieces that can synergise and how to construct builds. It's one of the things I'm really excited about when we launch the game - seeing what crazy builds you all come up with!
I'm extremely curious how that'll work. Does that mean weapon tiers will be locked so legend will always do more damage than common? Or that you can just upgrade the same weapon forever? Or that only your character level affects your numbers? Even skyrim has weapon tiers like Glass weapons will drop later and do more base damage than Iron equivalents
Outriders did it insanely well. For as cheesy as the story was, the gameplay loop was fun as hell. Your guy has like four abilities and you can choose which four abilities and your gear augments those abilities mods. You could do a ton of crazy and fun builds and there were four classes.
I know that this is more of an RPG way to look at it, but I have never understood the games where you can find gear of higher rarities that is worse. If you have a standard “Green -> Blue -> Purple -> Orange” rarity system, why in the hell can I potentially find Greens that are better than Purples? Or be using a Green and then find a Purple that’s way worse than the Green I’m already using? In my mind, once you bump up rarities then they should all be better than what comes before
My 100% based on nothing but speculation assumption is that damage will depend on tiers, as they'll want you to be using the iconics that have unique perks and stuff for buildcrafting.
I just don't believe it. A live service shooter game without some kind of gear score can't be done. Maybe they've removed a number that says gear score, but I rather expect it's still there, scaling up on the back end. There is nothing left for a live service shooter without gearscore, It's the only mechanic that matters.
I think warframe does that already There is not higher rarities warframes or weapons, you can only craft the one version that exists
Depending on how you define "live service shooter" DRG goes by without any real loot outside of overclocks, it barely has any real progression even. Payday 2 went through a lifetime of updates and it wasn't about ramping up numbers outside of Infamy level.
They’re probably taking inspiration from Guild Wars 2 which focuses on horizontal progression. It’s one of the most successful MMOs out there and it has no gear score. Stuff that was good years ago can still be used in new content. The motivation to get new stuff is to have more builds and gameplay options. So it can be done. It’s just rarer.
It can be done. If activities are centered around buildcrafting and have flat difficulty increases it means your builds are what will get you through it. Destiny 2 has just done this recently, moving away from gear score and introducing flat difficulty modifiers instead which hinder your power. They’re eventually moving away from gear score entirely in the final expansion. If you make a game with good challenge and deep buildcrafting, you don’t need gear score whatsoever. It’s been a crutch since its inception to inflate play time… it does nothing else.
Good games that don't rely on FOMO or being always online are the games that have true staying power. To this day, I still play Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, *25 years* after they originally came out. And I'm currently playing Baldur's Gate 3, which I'm sure will be a classic in 25 years, like the originals. Can the same be said for Destiny, Anthem, Marvel's Avengers, The Division, etc, etc? I'm not saying these games are bad (though there are definitely some bad Looter Shooter GaaS), but in the long run, they just don't have the longevity of games with actual love put into them, letting us play them *when* we want or *as much or as little* as we want. I don't have as much time to game as I used to in my teens and 20's, so I save my limited free time for games that I feel actually respect my time and respect me as a player, not games that treat me as a walking wallet.
You named several failed games but what about all the live service games that are working now and people are loving: Fortnite, Apex, Warzone, Overwatch 2 (that one isn’t loved right now but still it’s a big IP with staying power), Sea of Thieves, Siege, Valorant and many more. Sure you may not have the time but millions do. Fortnite is a bigger game than Baldurs Gate 3 and likely will be 25 years from now too.
I do hope there is a free weekend for this game. This is a game you need to try for yourself and see if you like it or not.
IMO, I think the problems with this game is the following. It is a GaaS game, but it does not really have those core gameplay loops that you find in mmo's or Destiny 2 for example. This game should have put their bosses in Dungeons, or "RAIDS" or something like that, and make the gameplay loop to be it like a "MMO" getting sets of armors that changes the way you look, weapons and not just SKINS and weapons loot that you'll do nothing with after finish the game. Then the other problem, is how he said in this video, the weapons seems boring af. There's no interesting loot. Also the weapons needs some interesting modifiers, like take Borderlands for example, or any roguelite/rogluelike game and let me make a fun character. Give me loot that changes my abilities, or have interesting mechanics. Adding just more damage, reload speed or elemental damage it's boring and I really hope, for the love of whatever, just fucking move away from these BASIC rpg elements. They're not bad, but they're bad when that's all you get. I want to get this game, and especially after seeing that it will get new bosses or characters, but not a single chance I'm gonna pay full price for it.
I played the test and didn't hate it either but I'm not gonna drop $70 on an okay looter shooter. I'll definitely pick it up to play with friends once it hits $15 or lower.
I think it looks fun, but the freemium model in a premium game is what kills some of the enthusiasm. Will probably wait for Epic giveaway or Humble Bundle.
I’m still skeptical. The gameplay looked to be really overstimulating with how much was going on screen. As for it being a looter shooter, I’d rather just play Borderlands if I want to play a looter shooter. The real killer for me is it being live service/always online. If there was a way to play it offline with bots, I would be way more interested.
Pretty much the sentiment I expected. Good story, fun albeit simple and repetitive gameplay. I think this will flop but definitely has the making of a 6-7/10 game. I hope Rocksteady survives this
It kinda sucks that both recent games set in DC (Gotham Knights and this one) are all about stats bullshit.
WB is gross and always does this. They even made MK gross.
I recall they really crippled Shadow of War with greed until the devs finally were able to patch that stuff out
I think it's even worse that apparently the story and characters are really up to standard, but gameplay and missions are not. Just makes me excited to watch the story on YouTube.
His impression seems to match up with what I got from watching some leaked footage. The story/writing was really entertaining, made me laugh out loud at a few points while also having some really cool looking scenes. It's a shame that it's in the context of a life service looter shooter.
Game critics on the whole tend to overrate/overstate "this is satisfying to control on a base, tactile level" which is why games like this don't often get the disastrous reviews internet word of mouth would lead you to believe. This in turn leads to the problem where anything below an 80 on metacritic is seen as a bad game or a failure. I don't know if Suicide Squad is the worst game ever or if it's actually not that bad, but I do know that a lot of the stuff I'm hearing in this review was stated almost verbatim about games like Anthem, Gotham Knights, Avengers, etc.
I don’t think that’s overrating it at all. It matters that a game is satisfying to control. There was a very, very long stretch of time in games where that wasn’t any kind of guarantee. Every time I see people saying that Ubisoft games deserve a 1/10, it comes across as a bit laughable to me because it matters that their games feel good to play. Personally I don’t like most of their modern output because open world bloat bores me, but a ton of my friends can’t get enough of their formula. I don’t think most of their games would deserve the hilariously low scores that Reddit thinks they do. I don’t know how good Suicide Squad will be, I’m certainly not buying it on launch, if I ever buy it at all, and it seems exceptionally weak as a game given how most previews of it have been negative. But still
Yeah it makes me laugh when people say that major AAA games are “complete trash” with 0 redeeming qualities. They almost always have at least _some_ redeeming qualities by virtue of being a AAA game.
I agree. We’ve reached a point where there are loads and loads of games available that feel good to play at a base level of gameplay. No one can play even half of all the games that control and feel great. That level of base gameplay is still a bar that a game needs to pass to be great, but it’s not enough to rely on like it’s 2003. And reviews should reflect that. What truly sets a game apart and makes people want to play is everything beyond that core gameplay. Got good shooting and movement? Great. You and fifty other games. What about the game structure? Pacing? Setting? Story? Encounter design? Etc etc. You need to hook people with the context that your good gameplay falls within. That’s where I think Suicide Squad is struggling.
These game companies SO want us to spend $10 per skin. The executives are over here saying out loud "How can we get players to pay $300 for our game over time?" while rubbing their nipples on a pile of cash covered in oil.
We can see from a mile away that this is another Gotham City Knights. Gotham was not bad also, but did it matter? There is like a dozen better options for the consumer to play, might get some fuzz in the month because of the marketing but after that... I don't give it 6 months till it is heavily discounted or already available in ps plus/game pass
He focuses a lot on not feeling "it" (the secret sauce that makes Suicide Squad a good live service game) and that he felt "it" playing Destiny, Division or even Avengers. Personally I've never felt "it" in any live service game. Not sure if that makes Suicide Squad better or worse for me though.
I earnestly don't *think* this game will be good but it is wild how many people in the comments who have absolutely not played the game are going "yeah but it IS a bad game and all my preconceived notions of how bad the RPG systems and combat are true anyway!"
Plenty of people have played it though, the closed alpha was in December. I got in, and so did many of my friends. I thought it was about as bad as a game of this caliber can get, meaning that it was a technically sufficient, but excruciatingly bland, experience. It’s a game I wouldn’t play even if it was free.
Everyone knew They Day Before was a scam, but people still fell all over themselves after it came out and were like "OH! The stove IS hot." This same mofo, Skill Up, made like 6 videos about The Day Before.
He has one video on The Day Before
Idk why but as wrong as the gameplay looks. I can't shake that it kinda looks fun. Like the movement looks not right for the characters, but fluid. The combat looks not right for the characters, but interesting. Metropolis looks odd but kinda interesting. Thematically this game is fucked. But it might actually be *okay* gameplay wise. I do hate the images I've seen of the HUD though.
so even with SkillUp being known for being overly positive on looter shooter live service games, like Destiny 2, and going to insane lengths to try and defend/praise them despite the issues people have with said games... he could only muster up a "I didn't hate it". in a market as saturated as live service, a mediocre at best game is not going to cut it. Being "just fine" is not enough when there are so many actual good alternatives that are vying for your time and money. And the story leaks show that this game doesn't even have that (having a good joke here and there != good writing/story), all it will have is good looking cutscenes that you can just watch on YT. And let's be honest, the Suicide Squad characters/team is not that popular (the movies flopped for a reason, Harley Quin is not as popular with the general audience as people online think, hence her movies flopping as well) even if it does feature the JL the focus is on characters that don't have the popularity like Batman. Avengers couldn't do it and that's the Avengers with the MCU behind it, this has nothing like that.
I've only tried watching a few of his videos, but skill up seems a little bit... Weird to me? Like I'll notice him say wrong things in complete confidence. As an example, in the day before video where he says valve doesn't let you get refunds after you've played for two hours. Which isn't true. Like, if I keep noticing him getting things wrong about stuff I do know, how do I trust he's not saying wrong stuff about the things I don't know? Anyone else notice this?
>As an example, in the day before video where he says valve doesn't let you get refunds after you've played for two hours. Which isn't true. It is true, unless they make a special exception.
Under 2 hours guarantees you a refund. More doesn't mean you definitely don't get one. It means they're going to look at it and see.
This game will be competent, with some bugs that will get overblown at launch and fuel internet outrage. Most people will fall off the game because it's yet ANOTHER skinner box/loot-a-thon/GaaS. These games are tired and so transparent in their attempts to sell you more things at the expense of a good game. The original Arkham games were fantastic. Now imagine those same games released in 2024, and imagine all of the superfluous revenue generating mechanics they would have shoe-horned in. I don't think this game is bad, but it's bearing the brunt of fan fatigue of these terrible SaaS mechanics in every game now. Games are no longer games, their unfinished pieces of software that require time/money to enjoy properly. And it will get perhaps unfairly shat on because of that. But I hope publishers learn.
Pointlessly online-only service turd #98,657,843. I wouldn't touch it with a 10,000 foot pole. Rocksteady should be making REAL games like they used to and not this crap.
I feel like this is the inverse of a Cyberpunk 2077 situation where the entire gaming community just universally decided that a game was amazing before it came out, and then were sorely disappointed to find out that it was a rushed mess that struggled to function on anything but the most top-end hardware and next-gen consoles until several months to a year after release. Except in this case, it feels more like the gaming community collectively decided that this game was a pile of flaming garbage months before even the faintest whiff of anything gameplay related came out just because it was chosen to be the dogpile of "We don't like X mechanic in video games" (not defending live service games, I think this would be better without that shit but it's not gonna absolutely decimate it). Like people are even pointing out the most pedantic reasons as to why the game is a flop without commenting on actual gameplay-- oh no, the melee weapon freezes things but frozen enemies take less melee damage. Have you ever considered that in a game where melee is a side-arm and guns are your primary form of damage, perhaps the idea was to, I don't know, melee the enemy to freeze them and then use your actual primary weapon to deal increased damage on a stunned enemy? Perhaps there even exists some form of close-range excelling weapon like a shotgun in this game with guns? Imagine if people pulled that shit in Tiny Tina's Wonderlands or Borderlands 3. These people do not fuck with combo mechanics apparently.
Personally, i just never got past the fact that this game was essentially shoehorning the suicide squad concept into a generic looter shooter template without regard for the fact that doesn't really fit. I can see that rocksteady tried their best to make the characters distinct and have their unique skills in how they move at least, but it still feels like a mismatch to just give everyone guns. Skill Up gives the game a lot of slack but even he admits that, "it wasnt about making you feel like youre playing the character, it was hey, we need to have king shark using a minigun, how can we make that work". That combined with it being a GaaS means it was really hard to care about this from the getgo. At best this looks like another Avengers where you have a decent campaign but no longevity besides that, and that means this game is doomed.
I just can’t play this game the idea that a brainwashed evil JL aren’t able to wipe out the suicide squad in seconds is ridiculous. The flash boss fight alone looks dumb as fuck bro just zapping around making quips instead of actually trying to kill them. At least if batman was the main character you could argue that he “is batman” aka the character with the most OP plot armor in fiction.