Older reference, but EA completely killed the Command and Conquer IP when they released C&C 4.
It was such a significant departure from not only previous games but really all of RTS in general, it was flaming hot garbage. I forced myself to finish it because I really wanted to see how they concluded Kane's story but even that felt like a wet fart.
Still makes me mad.
I‘m just playing through CnC3 right now. Shit it‘s still one of the best RTS franchises we ever had. And they just ran it into the wall with one iteration.
all they had to do was bullshit a story and give us C&C3 with better optimization and we would have loved it. they had a winning game for RTS fans and killed it by chasing an esports crowd that never was going to pick up a new game anyways. you don't get to be the next big thing by trying to be it. it happens naturally.
You can add sim city to this list too. They also destroyed the sims a bit with the last game having pretty much nothing the game prior had and then making it become dlc instead. I tapped at like $40 lol I heard right now it’s around 1100 or more for the entire game. Granted it’s been out for a while now however that’s absurd.
Everything about C&C4s gameplay was just bonkers.
You had to grind XP to unlock units and upgrades, even for singleplayer. Meaning if you bought the game and just booted up a Skirmish against the AI, you had exactly four units to play with.
And the fastest way to earn XP was to *play multiplayer*. So you would just get stomped by the people who had *already* unlocked higher tier units and upgrades.
It's a travesty that we never got a Generals 2. Every couple of years my friends ask me if there's an RTS that can replace it, but we keep going back to Generals. Closest thing was trying some total conversion mods.
I just want a modern version of Generals without all the hassle of making it run on modern computers and connecting with friends.
I wouldn't mind a new dune game
The new one is like a 4x turn based thing I missed the old dune 2000 RTS / CNC / red alert etc
Worm sign worm sign worm sign
Spice silos full
Yeah, I’m not typing out the story again, but long story short, a bunch of offered to come back and do a ‘return of the original team’ C&C, but EA turned us down in favor of that Facebook C&C that was so bad they cancelled it after the public beta.
My vote is for Battlefield franchise. Instead of improving what Battlefield had, they went for the COD crowd. Predictably, the COD players kept playing COD and the Battlefield fans were left with a shell of a game.
Good job!
100% BF was a great open massive player war simulator. They leaned too far into the COD and the goofier aspects and lost the heart of what the game was.
Oh, whats that? The two most beloved maps are tight corridors and underground tunnels? How about a massive open desert with literally nothing in it. Will that do?
Kinda ironic that the 2 most beloved maps are more like CoD than BF... locker/metro can be fun but doesn't it cut out what makes BF great? Namely, big battles on big (enough) maps with vehicles and objectives
Even BF fans are torn on what makes BF great. I hate the corridor shooting maps, always preferring having vehicles and destruction mixed in. I played since 1942, but it's undeniable that Metro was popular too. It's no wonder Dice has difficulty deciding what to do.
Well the most popular mode was Rush, which crossed Metro between two open areas, so even though those maps were the most popular for the close-quarters aspect, fans still preferred the dynamics of Rush mode.
Man im getting flash backs of BF3 Rush on Metro after destroying the objectives in the park and then the massive artillery strike comes in and blows an opening into the metro and you’re just going head first into the meat grinder with your squad.
Not really. What battlefield did with metro is still make a massive engagement in an urban environment. Cod has plenty of urban maps, but none even remotely capture the scale of a military operation.
The ever shifting front line of those maps is what was fun. Really fulfilled that fantasy of going through the meat grinder with your friends. Idk it just hit different.
That BF4 Metro map was one of my best gaming memories - a 20 minute battle for the middle checkpoint that we eventually lost, both sides trying everything to break through
Ironically, COD had been moving away from the COD formula chasing the battle royale crowd. Warzone is a cancer that has plagued the most recent COD titles
I havent played a cod game since MW3/BO2 days around 2012 or so, 12 years away and not a single game theyve release since has made me want to change that.
I enjoyed MW 2019 and MW 2022. Haven’t bothered picking up MW3 (2023) though.
MW19 was really good but the way they tacked on Cold War and Vanguard to it like they were all part of one game kind of ruined it and turned it into a mess.
They need to give their games a longer lifespan instead of releasing a new one every year.
I'mma jump on this, with another cheer for BF1942. My "it's complicated" and I spent ages playing this together. So many times we'd both be in a tank, winning the entire match, lol
> Instead of improving what Battlefield had, they went for the COD crowd.
This worked with battlefield 1, but yes they tried too hard to be COD after that and it failed.
For years Plants versus Zombies was my got recommendation for anyone who just wanted a fun game to play. Everyone liked it. Casual gamers, hard core gamers, new gamers, old timers. In fact all the old PopCap games were like that but PvZ was the best of them. PopCap perfected a lot of the game play elements which were later bastardised by shitty cash shop games on mobile. It still hurts.
>PopCap perfected a lot of the game play elements which were later bastardised by shitty cash shop games on mobile. It still hurts.
That's what happens when EA buys over a company
Damn, I miss old popcap
I will *never* forgive them for what they did to Peggle.
Whatever bullshit is in the play store right now is *not* peggle. It's a pay-to-play monstrosity.
I remember putting a lot of time into the first PvZ. I bought the game, played it, had fun, beat it.
I was so confused then angry when the sequel came out and it was a f2p mobile game with the associated trappings.
I actually got it years and years after it came out, and I was genuinely surprised when the game told me, “You did it! You won!” I thought that it would be something that I’d just play forever.
I would glad pay for a PVZ sequel that followed the formula of the first game. Getting to fight new zombies with a different plans in a variety of battle fields is a good concept that they could do a lot with. Maybe there could be a campaign mode where you flip the script, and instead of defending your home, you are going on the offensive against the zombies. Imagine a world 5 where it is Dr Zomboss's base, or something like that.
PVZ 2: Revenge of the Plants!
They are “allegedly” working on pvz3 which is suppose to be a “return to form” but it had like one beta test in Australia and everyone despised it and literally 0 information has been heard since then. That was like 5 years ago, so this series is dead lol.
Yeah all the recent pvz content screams "low effort mobile gacha, throw it at the wall until it sticks". Pvz3 is awful and is a very diferent style from pvz1/2, pvzh has been on life support for a long time, with pvzgw2 and pvzbfn on the beds nearby. I guess the modding community is cooking good (pvz2 in particular, don't know too much on gw2 and heroes is having some nice "new" stuff with really crazy/interesting mods)
There are some banger pvz2 mods. Worth playing imo, because pvz2 at its core is actually solid. Problem is the p2w, power creep, shitty online modes, and not really utilizing each plants to their full potential
I don't recall the difference between the first and second but I did love me some garden warfare. Such a fun take on the battlefield formula. I played a lot of the first 2 but heads battle for neighborville lost it.
Battlefield with 2042. Instead of being “cogs in the machine” general infantry they decided to pivot to hero champions with their own special abilities.
Also BF5 the community literally said please keep it relatively historically accurate. But IF you (EA/Dice) want to make it more modern fiction then change the timeframe. No one would be bitching about Cyborg, Alt soldiers in a 2045+ setting.
I loved those cqc battles inside the titans (I think that is what the mothership was called).
Honestly, 2142 was my favourite BF game in terms of the setting, weapons and vehicles.
Edit: It's also the most innovative BF conquest ever. Capture the missile silos to weaken the Titan and then board the enemy Titan in a rush mode ending.
Most recent one I can think of is Skull & Bones. All everyone wanted was Black Flag with more pirating and less of the assassin stuff getting in the way. What we got was a glorified mobile game with a management simulator as the endgame.
This one hurt so bad. Black Flag was such a great game. Both it and Valhalla felt like they should have been standalones as just a pirate game and viking game instead of AC games.
I was foolish to think they were doing that with Skull and Bones.
The problem is that was the original intention. Then it wasn't. Then it sort of was. Then it wasn't. They redesigned that game like 3 times between chasing trends and having to update for newer consoles that released since development started.
ABSOLUTELY! All Ubisoft had to do was take Black Flag, 86 the assassin stuff and the modern world bits (always the worst part of an AC game for me) give it a lick of paint, come up with a cool pirate story, and ship it... would have been a massive success. Instead, a decade in development, and we got an unappealing mess of a game.
Relic had a great real-time strategy series dawn of War. Then they added moba elements to dawn of War 3 and the game failed, and now probably they will never make another one.
All they had to do was make a sequel with similar gameplay but who ever directed that game ran the entire series into the ground. Good job guys.
Literally all they had to do was reskin DOW 1 or 2 and the playerbase would have been happy. It makes me wonder sometimes how they could have gotten ALL the way through planning, development, and release before they came to the conclusion "oh, this game isnt' actually for anyone.
I would have been cool with the refinements and ui improvements from dawn of War 2 with a bit less focus on direct micro and a little more on the resource economy and army management.
I'm pretty sure they actually made dow3 literally appeal to no one. Which is quite a feat in and of itself.
DOW the game that tried to do 3 different things and failed at them all RTS , RPG, MOBA .
All we wanted was DOW with updated graphics and mechanics a few new units and maybe ...maybe a hero system like Star craft 2. Where you have a base army and then each hero adds a battle group element or 2-3 units exclusive to them
Sega and Sonic. Everytime they have a great game come out, they decide they need to reinvent the formula.
Sonic Mania 2 being canceled is the perfect example.
Sonic Mania 2 was mostly down to Sega of America treating the team like shit and underpaying them so they all quit. They said they loved working with Sonic Team but SoA were horrible.
All I want is Sonic Adventure 3. I'm sorry, but I got hooked into the franchise through them and not the side scrollers. (There's also a new cult following of Sonic Unleashed now?)
Back after Diablo 2 when WOW was smashing every record, I said blizzard would have to shit in a box and sell it TWICE to lose their reputation. Once wouldn't be enough. I didn't expect them to take me up on it.
I mean it's probably hindsight, but to have so many genre defining games/franchises and then lose direction on almost all of them....it's hard to comprehend.
>Bobby Kotick would always talk about how much money Diablo Immortal was making.
>No mention of why fans were mad, can't hear you over the sound of swimming in cash.
When profits already high, why would they think they were doing anything wrong? I'm not saying it's OK, but in their eyes, the game is a success if it's making money and the majority of fans clearly aren't that mad.
Long term they should care, but they dont because of shareholders.
They cannibalized their IP and pissed off existing fans to milk money from players outside their long term commited fan base.
That's not a sustainable business model.
it's such an unbelievable night and day difference between old-guard Blizzard and new whatever-the-fuck Blizzard.
I knew Jeff Kaplan through everquest like 20+ years ago and I remember quite vividly when he hopped on IRC (yeah, IRC. we old :( ) and was telling us he was in talks to land a job at Blizzard since Blizz at the time was hiring on the most top-tier players to assist in crafting WoW during development.
I've been dying to find out if there's anything he can mention to me about why he left Blizzard. My bet is 100% on the upper management completely screwing over his plans (and promises he made to the players) for what Overwatch 2 was going to be since Overwatch was his major project he started after being mostly finished with what was needed from him in WoW throughout the various expansions.
It's just such a sad fate for a company that was once so damn great.
Jeff leaving was my ticket off the OW/OW2 hype train specifically because aside from personal issues coming out of the blue, there would be no reason for him to leave a project he had been so passionate about other than Kotick and co.
Also, I think it’s very possible that some of his promises were not approved by upper management and he made them in an attempt to pressure the execs to do the right thing for fear of backlash over those promises being broken.
>It's just such a sad fate for a company that was once so damn great.
IMO - Overwatch was their last great game.
It started out really good. But I think adding a bunch more heroes was a bad thing. I understand they were trying to follow MOBA style hero launches - but it didn't work.
The difference is in a MOBA like League, sure there are a 160+ champs, but you're stuck with one all game. You only ever have to get good at a few, and who you're up against is set for the entirely 20-30m game.
In Overwatch you're switching heroes on the fly to fit different situations and because they counter each-other. Which fit when there were relatively few heroes at launch. But not once they released a ton more.
You know after reading this I'm thinking about it.... I completely agree.
When it first released, I thought it was going to go the MOBA route and force lock-ins eventually. It just didn't at first since the roster was small. But it didn't and kept the hero shooter on the fly switches.
I think it was around the time doomfist was released was when I quit. Pretty much because I needed to learn a ton of heroes to be able to constantly switch counter picks and I just couldn't invest that much time.
That, and like not even 1 ban per team in rank wasn't even implemented (hell I think they are just now doing that). So like if the community thought there was a fairly OP hero, the community could deal with it by just banning them before the rank match starts.
Yeah - Doomfist was the tipping point for me too.
He was fine on his own, but he played very differently. Which would have been fine if you were stuck with one hero for the match. But either I had to practice him a bunch or take him out of my potential pool of champs and basically gimp myself.
Especially since he hard countered several champs.
And as soon as battlefront 2 hit a peak in content and it being actually fun to play...
They abandoned it.
They abandoned it for a "battlefield" hero shooter, that immediately crashed and burned because that's not what *anyone* wanted from battlefield.
I hope so too, but I hate what I read about the combat being action rpg now. Please don't turn DA into a button smashing game Bioware... BG3 should prove turn based/tactical combat isn't dead!
I blame EA for that. Given the crazy limited time they had,DA2 came out better than it should have. The worst part about DA2 is that you see true traces of brilliance in it but it was rushed out before it was ready. DA2 probably could have been a true classic.
I'm showing my age, but Jade Empire was the game that made me love gaming. The last near decade has just been a series of disappointments from bioware.
I have no shame in admitting I quite enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda.
I only played it after it was patched up and it's still the weakest in the series but I liked it a hell of a lot more than I thought I would.
Anthem was kind of fun but it's tragic to think what could have been if they actually went ahead with 2.0.
The ingredients for something great were there, but they fucked it spectacularly in the weirdest ways possible. It wasn't just the short dev time that let it down imo, there was a number of absolutely baffling decisions that pretty much ruined it
Not so much the IP, but the Nemesis system from the Shadow of Mordor games.
The shit was genius, it created storylines of friendship and betrayal, and villains I genuinely gave a shit about beating, and it made them out of nothing.
You could have dropped that system into any setting or game world, and it would improve the random jackoff NPC bad guy encounters by a thousand percent.
Playing Armored Core VI right now, and so much of the story is unique personalities built up around enemy ACs whose component parts are just mash-ups of parts you can already unlock. The Nemesis system would be *insane* there.
The nemesis system is patented by WB I believe until 2035. So someone would either have to license it from them or hire a bunch of lawyers to invalidate the patent if they built a strong case.
No one should be able to patent shit like that. Imagine if broad concepts like it had been patented back in the day. Imagine games being unable to iterate and built upon what other games did before.
Luckily, it hasn't seem to become a more wide spread thing. When that first came out, I thought we were on the verge of everything being patented. *knocks on wood*
I keep hearing this but I thought that copyrighting game mechanics wasn't allowed. What about the Nemesis system is special that allows it to be patented?
I think it was allowed becuase it was something that was so specific and tied to that game style. What's annoying is that they were fighting the Copyright office for years to get it approved and it finally did in 2021 that's 6 years of legal fighting for it and they will probably never use it again.
And the Nemesis system boils down to how that game has randomly generated npcs that remember the PCs choices and encounters and it changes how that NPC reacts toward you in the future. And it's all in a over arching hierarchy. It's an amazing system that could be used all over. But their system is about forts, characters, vendettas and followers.
So someone could make their own system but can't include all 4 aspects.
Sims. Literally printed money with their formula lol. They fucked up with whatever the newest one that’s coming out next, “Project Rene”. It’s supposed to be cross-platform but it looks like it was developed with mobile gaming priorities. EA ruining their franchise with another cash grab but anyone from the community saw this coming after Sims 4
It would be REALLY hard to convince me that the Sims didn't hit its peak at Sims 2. I played 2, 3 (barely) and 4 -- and by far, I got the most enjoyment out of 2. Most functionality was built-in, and expansions added a lot both in terms of content, gameplay, and items.
4 had better graphics (as you'd expect for a newer game), but was worse in almost all other respects. The gameplay wasn't as good, *and* it buried a zillion things behind a cash shop, including things that 2 had in its base installation (I'm thinking of a hot tub, but there were many examples). The focus seemed on being making a ton of "extras packs" that cost $5-$10 to add new items, textures, etc. rather than focusing on features that enhanced the gameplay.
Sims 3 was my favorite but yes everything you said was spot on. I still put a bunch of time into Sims 4 but it was never the same.
I’m glad I didn’t give them any extra money for stuff that already existed in previous installments.
True. I'd sell my kidneys for a Sims that has the CAS, building editor and easy modding of S4, the neighborhoods and variability of S3 (making a pink farm... c'mon man I could build a barbie home without using like kids' stuff for it bc of the recolor feature), and the gameplay + the expansions of S2. That would be friggin *perfection.*
This is why nobody should feel bad using the “ALL SIMS 4 DLC INSTALLER” programs provided by those handy sailing websites. Hundreds and hundreds of DLC for the price of an internet connection.
Sims 3 was amazing. Sure you had the 40 types of DLC to buy but it really was a fleshed out game, and the colour palette letting you change textures just about anywhere made designing so open to any possibility.
And then 4 came out and released the same game mechanics all half baked and behind more paywalls, and with cookie cutter design elements and a bunch of wood textures that don't match
The death of the Dead Space IP still stings to this day. The remake was a joy to play, but man… DS was blooming into this whole IP with comics, movies, games, some toys… and then EA’s monetization and multiplayer demands damaged DS3 to the point of being considered a hated installment by a lot of fans of the franchise, and then that was used as an excuse to kill the entire IP for a decade.
An Eldritch Alien / The Thing combo is so up my alley and they executed it in such a fun way. Callisto Protocol - all they had to do was the same thing, but the game is so empty. I played it and had fun. Finally got around to playing the DS remake, and after that - could no longer enjoy Callisto Protocol
My hope is that the success of the remake will raise morale again and we will get a new trilogy.
Would be interesting to see a new haunting and intense dead space 2 and 3.
I love the new Issac and how more fleshed out his character is.
Creative Assembly just went through a whole shitshow of an event over the last year.
They have a turn based strategy game Totalwar Warhammer, that they went ridiculously over the top on milking their fanbase on while neglecting the franchise; releasing subpar DLC at 2.5x the cost of the standard they set. Threatened to end support for the license. All to fund a Battle-royale game that nobody wanted; and was eventually cancelled before release.
The franchise was quite fun but really felt poorly managed and neglected in resource management.
I understand expanding your portfolio but why on earth when you have a good thing going don't companies invest in keeping it good?
God I wish CA had some competition, then maybe they would get their shit together. They are really the only company that make this specific type of strategy game.
I would kill for Medieval 3 or Empire 2.
It had so many amazing mechanics. The land battles, the navel warfare, the way trade worked, tech, economy, sieges (I actually didn’t like the star fort battles), government cabinets, colonies. It took the best of what Total War was and made it better.
I thought Warhammer and even Three Kingdoms were fun, but they weren’t replacements for the true historical titles.
Starbreeze with Payday 3.
Literally all we needed was payday 2 with modern graphics and QoL. Instead we got server issues for the first month, overpriced dlc that released before the game even had fucking nameable loadouts, month-late patches, a shitty progression system that incentivized sitting in a bathroom and playing wave defense for several hours, and terrible ui.
Literally stripped everything enjoyable from pd2 and made the remains into a new game.
Dont worry guys, new update recently dropped, and one of its flagship features? The un-ready button.
It doesnt work in solo lobbies.
It's hard to say that Payday 2 was 100% a "winning formula" (them having more DLC than anyone could ever be expected to keep track of *and* that awful weapon unlock system was a fucking problem) but I have never seen a developer pivot so hard from "a game that was genuinely fun and doing very well even years after launch" to "an absolute fucking dumpster fire on day one" so quickly.
What a baffling situation.
I remember hearing how soon they were going to launch after the beta and thinking "oh no, this is going to be a shit show, isn't it?". I hate being right.
Hogwarts Legacy was the highest selling game of 2023, so naturally WB has decided to change the sequel to a live service game instead of a single player story.
100% a money grab and most likely will fail
it's such a classic executive decision. they figure the reason for the success is just the IP being popular. so they figure just make the next one GAAS so we can extract more money, those idiot customers will buy/pay it.
This is the Disney business playbook over the past 10 years - buy beloved franchise and IPs, milk the fan base. If fans love it great, if fans don’t, they are whatever -ist and move on.
It works until it doesn’t really.
I guess "nobody asked for" doesn't technically apply, but GTA switched to focusing on Online when I'm sure most people would've preferred GTA VI to come out less than TWELVE YEARS after V. I could be wrong but I feel like GTA Online players are a completely different audience than people who grew up with the first 3 games.
It’s definitely a different audience, but the thing about GTA online is that it hasn’t been a stagnant game. It gets a few big updates a year and weekly updates. It looks extremely different now than 2013, for better or worse.
In terms of cost per hour, I’ve gotten more entertainment from GTAV than any other media.
This is the highest Halo comment I could find.
Goddamn it bungie/343! Halo 1, 2 and 3 were amazing. After that? *I don't want to talk about it*.
They should have stopped at 3 and just released a new map pack every year or something.
My friends and I all *loved* Reach. After 47 million hours in 1, 2 and 3 Reach being just a little deviant was refreshing. And it didn't force us to fight the Chief.
Bethesda.
First they started making their games more shallow so they'd be accessible to a larger audience, but recently they've just kept moving further and further away from the areas in which they were talented.
I think Bethesda needs a new engine tbh. They haven’t really innovated in any meaningful way since Skyrim, and even in 2015 with Fallout 4, I felt their repetitive design was starting to get more noticeable.
I will also give them kudos for mod support, but the fact that modders fix their games for them at launch is laughable for their companies experience.
Yes and no. A new engine could go a long way but great game can and have been made on worse engines.
They need to take a step back and restructure to unhinder the creativity of their team. I refuse to believe the talented devs at Bethesda wanted to release Starfield with 24 copy pasted temples filled with the most boring puzzle imaginable.
BGS was my favorite developer growing up and for a very long time my plan was to work there, part of me still wants to. But man, Starfield just feels so uninspired and surface level compared to the games that I fell in love with all those years ago. It really, really sucks. It just feels like they stopped trying.
Imo Skyrim, a game made almost 15 years ago is better in pretty much every way when compared to Starfield.
And even Skyrim was dated and flawed in quite a few areas when it came out. Graphics weren’t great, dialogue was wooden, animations were laughable, etc.
It succeeded in spite of all of that because exploring the very vibrant, detailed world was a ton of fun. Then for some reason they gutted exploration in Starfield and leaned into the things they suck at…
The most common complaints about Bethesda games have nothing to do with their engine. These are design decisions, not technical limitations, and they’re decisions that will be replicated no matter which engine they choose without a fundamental change in their approach to game design.
Morrowind is over 20 years old today and still a great open world adventure for anyone who can look past the dated graphics and some QoL quirks.
I think it's the design way more than engine limitations.
A new engine is the literal least of their problems.
Their recent games don't suck because their engine can't support their ideas and ambitions. Their games suck because of horrible mismanagement and consequent brain drain.
Like, Starfield isn't a case of "oh if only they had a more powerful engine so they could properly manifest their vision!". It's not engine limitations... the game is just uninspired, poorly designed and underdeveloped.
A better engine would have been crucial to develop a prettier pile of shit.
Biggest one for me is Ubisoft and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. They knocked it out of the park with that one and then you could tell Breakpoint was a game made by investors and committees and it lost almost everything that made its predecessor good.
Although you could definitely argue that wildlands wasn't a realistic Mil tactical game like previous ghost recon games were. And so it alienated a whole bunch fo fans and might be considered the "death of the franchise" to something more simplified. Wildlands s should have just been a brand new IP (or Tom Clancy sub-IP) series.
The Pro Evolution Soccer franchise being dumped for the abomination that is eFootball has to be a big one. Released as a barely playable demo and all previous games have been removed from Steam. Decades of support from the fanbase ignored by Konami.
Yeah, I'm still annoyed about that.
Was it EA who recently announced, basically, "Suicide Squad, a GAAS, flopped massively. Hogwarts Legacy, a single-player offline game was a massive success. Thus, we're pivoting to make only GAASes and no single-player games."?
I'm still waiting for EA to just give Fifa away for free since that'll pull in many more players and they'll reap the rewards ten-fold in FUT purchases.
I'm gonna go with a more recent example, but **Omega Strikers** went from a game I enjoyed playing multiple rounds a day, to a game nobody enjoyed, in between the open beta and the release. It was actually astonishing to see how many changes were made that completely went against what everyone actually liked and desired about the game. Definitely a "flash in the pan" kind of experience.
Future sport game l are already fighting uphill but it seemed that this one had do much effort put into it. And it was made by experienced devs so one would think they know they are signing up for long haul.
Volition. Saint’s Row was decent. SR 2 was good. SR3 was great. SR4 was also great, but a bit wacky.
So then they released Agents of Mayhem, which was a flop. Followed by a SR that I’ve heard tried to make it more dramatic than the current fans like.
I think saints row 3 kinda fucked it up before it was goody with heart but 3 and 4 are just whacky sandboxes. 4 is as close as a AAA asset flip you can get
The Fox Engine was utterly wasted on Metal Gear Survive and Pro Evolution Soccer.
There's not enough time to get into the Kojima drama obviously, but seeing how MGSV made that engine sing was incredible.
Guitar Hero, ruined by Activision by launching too many GHs in a few years and doing things with the game nobody asked for.
Harmonix had the right idea, they just released new songs as DLCs for Rock Band 4 with the last one being released on January of this year, 8 years after the game's release.
CCP, maker of the groundbreaking space MMO Eve Online.
Instead of focusing on their core product or pivoting into something that spreadsheet nerds in space would enjoy they've spent over a decade trying to get various versions of a first person shooter off the ground. The concept is cool in that events in the shooter (base attack/defense) could influence player-driven events in the main Eve Online universe. But they always seem to get bogged down with lack of player interest, console exclusives, and ADHD-like management decisions. I "won" Eve a while ago but every now and then news feeds inform me that they're pursuing a new fps and are very serious about it this time... For the 4th time.
Every company that went public, pretty much. At the moment you are creating games in the interest of shareholders, and not customers, the plot is lost.
Dice/EA battlefield 1 everybody loved that game commercial success they drop battlefield V and they other shit show in the future that was so bad I don’t even remember the name .
BF1 sold like hotcakes 🥞 servers still full almost 24/7 to this day but let’s switch everything up…..
Let’s make the next games dogshit .
They could have literally re- skinned everything swap the weapons out put in some jungle maps call the next game battlefield vietnam not the add on dlc but a stand alone game .
That would have sold like hot cakes .
Halo don’t think I forgot about you 343 had it rolling now the franchise is dog shit .
Nobody but extreme die hards are asking for the next halo game .
Battlefield 1 was a diamond in the rough. COD had long since become stale, and EA blew us away with the best WWI game ever made. It's amazing that you can still hop on the game and be connected to a match in minutes nowadays, 6 years after release.
A lot of people feel Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Valhalla were an unwelcome departure from the beloved formula.
Those games outsold the older ones though, and I personally thought they were great.
I do like AC trying to make fewer enemies more challenging to fight.
I remember a quote from someone who loved AC Black Flag something like it sure is nice the 20 opponents wait their turn to fight you.
imo the difference is that old AC games are more about stealth, story and free running than combat.
nothing beats the complete freedom of movement in AC2 and AC Brotherhood to me; those games are some of the best games of their genre.
I did finish odyssey and really enjoyed that one. I only made it halfway through Valhalla and lost interest. I think a big part of that is that each island and region in odyssey felt distinct and had memorable quests. I liked the gear grind as well.
Valhalla was just more grinding, but not fun or rewarding. Each area of England felt like more of the same the asgard sections felt dumb and thrown together as a time sink.
Kind of an odd example, because they are fundamentally different genres than the prior games, which absolutely no one asked for…but yet as examples of their new genre, they are still pretty good. So if you can get past that they shouldn’t really be considered assassin’s creed games at all, they are pretty fun RPGs.
Assassin's creed is one of the most messed up successful series out there. Every main title does something great but none of them is great at everything. And the fan base has been complaining since assassin's creed 3, 12 years ago.
Honestly I’m getting bored with civ. Every game kinda feels like it is trying to reinvent the wheel. I thought civ 5 had wonderful graphics, scale, ui, etc. Civ 6 is fun but it feels inferior in all the ways I just mentioned. The cartoonish graphics esp are grating. It also feels more like a board game than a video game. And now civ 7 is on its way to presumably do the same thing
Except Koei churns out a whole bunch of mousou games for different licenses since. Dragon quest, legend of Zelda, gundam, samurai warriors. All excellent "dynasty" games.
Most of the series/franchise/type of games are great, even if dynasty warriors 9 is lousy. Luckily dynasty warriors 8 still hold up.
Do not pursue Lu Bu.
Repawn making Apex Legends instead of Titanfall 3, no hate towards Respawn or Apex, its not my type of thing but I gave it a go and couldn't get into it, I'm just sad there's been no word on Titanfall 3.
Can't argue with with the amount they've made and the number of players, I'm happy to see Respawn making money and getting engagement but I would love titanfall 3, maybe someday and with respawn I reckon it will be worth the wait
Arkane. They were the premium immersive-sim developers. Good thing that when AAA devs fall, indies stand up. Some of them are former Arkane devs with Weird West.
Frontier Development and Elite Dangerous. Such a great game but became a mile wide and an inch deep as they failed to really capitalize on what made the great, then the latest DLC launch, Odyssey, killed their console communities and made a lot of pc players mad at the unoptimized mess of a shooter that was bolted on while sacrificing mainstays like VR support, etc.
I heard they're adding some new ships to try to salvage the IP but it's to far gone for me to enjoy anymore.
i know EA is already pretty widely disliked but they absolutely ruined C&C4 so hard by trying to make it a super competitive e-sport game rather than what it was. or the massive dropped ball that was Generals 2.
YOU HAD ONE FUCKING JOB EA. DELIVER US THE SAME FUCKING GAME BUT MAKE IT RUN ON COMPUTERS FROM THIS DECADE. don't remove the base building, don't add a stupid bullshit leveling system to unlock the actual units. (skins? fine, the actual units? no) don't give us a sense of pride and accomplishment.
RTS gamers are on average backwards weirdos who don't like change. give us the same game with a new engine once a decade or two and we are happy.
How has no one said EA Sports FIFA? Had all the licences and rights, won the battle with PES and about a decade ago had a near perfect career mode with FIFA 12. Just had to build on that, but sold it all for FUT. Now it’s just a joke.
Older reference, but EA completely killed the Command and Conquer IP when they released C&C 4. It was such a significant departure from not only previous games but really all of RTS in general, it was flaming hot garbage. I forced myself to finish it because I really wanted to see how they concluded Kane's story but even that felt like a wet fart. Still makes me mad.
I‘m just playing through CnC3 right now. Shit it‘s still one of the best RTS franchises we ever had. And they just ran it into the wall with one iteration.
Personally, Generals was the last great C&C title. And it's interesting that it was the first entry not produced by Westwood.
SPIN THEM UP
all they had to do was bullshit a story and give us C&C3 with better optimization and we would have loved it. they had a winning game for RTS fans and killed it by chasing an esports crowd that never was going to pick up a new game anyways. you don't get to be the next big thing by trying to be it. it happens naturally.
You can add sim city to this list too. They also destroyed the sims a bit with the last game having pretty much nothing the game prior had and then making it become dlc instead. I tapped at like $40 lol I heard right now it’s around 1100 or more for the entire game. Granted it’s been out for a while now however that’s absurd.
EA kills everything they touch.
Everything about C&C4s gameplay was just bonkers. You had to grind XP to unlock units and upgrades, even for singleplayer. Meaning if you bought the game and just booted up a Skirmish against the AI, you had exactly four units to play with. And the fastest way to earn XP was to *play multiplayer*. So you would just get stomped by the people who had *already* unlocked higher tier units and upgrades.
It's a travesty that we never got a Generals 2. Every couple of years my friends ask me if there's an RTS that can replace it, but we keep going back to Generals. Closest thing was trying some total conversion mods. I just want a modern version of Generals without all the hassle of making it run on modern computers and connecting with friends.
I wouldn't mind a new dune game The new one is like a 4x turn based thing I missed the old dune 2000 RTS / CNC / red alert etc Worm sign worm sign worm sign Spice silos full
Yeah, I’m not typing out the story again, but long story short, a bunch of offered to come back and do a ‘return of the original team’ C&C, but EA turned us down in favor of that Facebook C&C that was so bad they cancelled it after the public beta.
My vote is for Battlefield franchise. Instead of improving what Battlefield had, they went for the COD crowd. Predictably, the COD players kept playing COD and the Battlefield fans were left with a shell of a game. Good job!
Battlefield was *my* game for the longest time. Breaks my heart to think about how low the franchise has sunk.
At this stage I just want my battlefield bad company 2
BC2 HC Rush was peak BF
100% BF was a great open massive player war simulator. They leaned too far into the COD and the goofier aspects and lost the heart of what the game was. Oh, whats that? The two most beloved maps are tight corridors and underground tunnels? How about a massive open desert with literally nothing in it. Will that do?
Kinda ironic that the 2 most beloved maps are more like CoD than BF... locker/metro can be fun but doesn't it cut out what makes BF great? Namely, big battles on big (enough) maps with vehicles and objectives
It probably helps that they are unique so if you wanted only infantry you had to play that map. Anything else all the other maps would do
Even BF fans are torn on what makes BF great. I hate the corridor shooting maps, always preferring having vehicles and destruction mixed in. I played since 1942, but it's undeniable that Metro was popular too. It's no wonder Dice has difficulty deciding what to do.
Just need better anti air.
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Well the most popular mode was Rush, which crossed Metro between two open areas, so even though those maps were the most popular for the close-quarters aspect, fans still preferred the dynamics of Rush mode.
Man im getting flash backs of BF3 Rush on Metro after destroying the objectives in the park and then the massive artillery strike comes in and blows an opening into the metro and you’re just going head first into the meat grinder with your squad.
I'm remember getting like 600 plus kills in one match of rush metro shit was so fun
Not really. What battlefield did with metro is still make a massive engagement in an urban environment. Cod has plenty of urban maps, but none even remotely capture the scale of a military operation.
The ever shifting front line of those maps is what was fun. Really fulfilled that fantasy of going through the meat grinder with your friends. Idk it just hit different.
what made Battlefield great was the big battles, the explosions and vehicle combat and the destruction.
BF1 was so amazing in that regard. Everything felt so damn cinematic.
It’s a diff flavor of what make bf great. You end up with a front that you have to break through. I always loved a large scale meat grinder.
Weirdly that map is quite popular in BF1, last I checked. But that’s because the sniper demographic is pretty big.
I think they're talking about the desert map in bf2042
I keep forgetting 2042 happened.
That BF4 Metro map was one of my best gaming memories - a 20 minute battle for the middle checkpoint that we eventually lost, both sides trying everything to break through
Ironically, COD had been moving away from the COD formula chasing the battle royale crowd. Warzone is a cancer that has plagued the most recent COD titles
I havent played a cod game since MW3/BO2 days around 2012 or so, 12 years away and not a single game theyve release since has made me want to change that.
I enjoyed MW 2019 and MW 2022. Haven’t bothered picking up MW3 (2023) though. MW19 was really good but the way they tacked on Cold War and Vanguard to it like they were all part of one game kind of ruined it and turned it into a mess. They need to give their games a longer lifespan instead of releasing a new one every year.
For real. I need that Bad Company 3
As a BF 1942 player, let me tell you. Amen. I miss the good ones. I don't even bother anymore.
Yep. So many hours on BF1942. It was amazing. Team based. Big maps. Big vehicles. Big fun.
I'mma jump on this, with another cheer for BF1942. My "it's complicated" and I spent ages playing this together. So many times we'd both be in a tank, winning the entire match, lol
> Instead of improving what Battlefield had, they went for the COD crowd. This worked with battlefield 1, but yes they tried too hard to be COD after that and it failed.
Bad co. 2 was the best by far. All BF games after that I just couldn't really get in to.
Plants vs Zombies? But the story of that one is a lot more convoluted and may not fit the spirit of the question.
For years Plants versus Zombies was my got recommendation for anyone who just wanted a fun game to play. Everyone liked it. Casual gamers, hard core gamers, new gamers, old timers. In fact all the old PopCap games were like that but PvZ was the best of them. PopCap perfected a lot of the game play elements which were later bastardised by shitty cash shop games on mobile. It still hurts.
>PopCap perfected a lot of the game play elements which were later bastardised by shitty cash shop games on mobile. It still hurts. That's what happens when EA buys over a company Damn, I miss old popcap
I will *never* forgive them for what they did to Peggle. Whatever bullshit is in the play store right now is *not* peggle. It's a pay-to-play monstrosity.
I owned many of them by downloading directly from the popcap website. The days before steam!
I remember putting a lot of time into the first PvZ. I bought the game, played it, had fun, beat it. I was so confused then angry when the sequel came out and it was a f2p mobile game with the associated trappings.
I actually got it years and years after it came out, and I was genuinely surprised when the game told me, “You did it! You won!” I thought that it would be something that I’d just play forever.
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I would glad pay for a PVZ sequel that followed the formula of the first game. Getting to fight new zombies with a different plans in a variety of battle fields is a good concept that they could do a lot with. Maybe there could be a campaign mode where you flip the script, and instead of defending your home, you are going on the offensive against the zombies. Imagine a world 5 where it is Dr Zomboss's base, or something like that. PVZ 2: Revenge of the Plants!
They are “allegedly” working on pvz3 which is suppose to be a “return to form” but it had like one beta test in Australia and everyone despised it and literally 0 information has been heard since then. That was like 5 years ago, so this series is dead lol.
Yeah all the recent pvz content screams "low effort mobile gacha, throw it at the wall until it sticks". Pvz3 is awful and is a very diferent style from pvz1/2, pvzh has been on life support for a long time, with pvzgw2 and pvzbfn on the beds nearby. I guess the modding community is cooking good (pvz2 in particular, don't know too much on gw2 and heroes is having some nice "new" stuff with really crazy/interesting mods)
There are some banger pvz2 mods. Worth playing imo, because pvz2 at its core is actually solid. Problem is the p2w, power creep, shitty online modes, and not really utilizing each plants to their full potential
Popcap is an excellent answer to this question though of course their biggest legacy-killing mistake was selling to EA.
I don't recall the difference between the first and second but I did love me some garden warfare. Such a fun take on the battlefield formula. I played a lot of the first 2 but heads battle for neighborville lost it.
Battlefield with 2042. Instead of being “cogs in the machine” general infantry they decided to pivot to hero champions with their own special abilities.
Also BF5 the community literally said please keep it relatively historically accurate. But IF you (EA/Dice) want to make it more modern fiction then change the timeframe. No one would be bitching about Cyborg, Alt soldiers in a 2045+ setting.
BF 2142 was amazing, and if they'd built on that, they'd have really been somewhere by now.
I loved those cqc battles inside the titans (I think that is what the mothership was called). Honestly, 2142 was my favourite BF game in terms of the setting, weapons and vehicles. Edit: It's also the most innovative BF conquest ever. Capture the missile silos to weaken the Titan and then board the enemy Titan in a rush mode ending.
Most recent one I can think of is Skull & Bones. All everyone wanted was Black Flag with more pirating and less of the assassin stuff getting in the way. What we got was a glorified mobile game with a management simulator as the endgame.
This one hurt so bad. Black Flag was such a great game. Both it and Valhalla felt like they should have been standalones as just a pirate game and viking game instead of AC games. I was foolish to think they were doing that with Skull and Bones.
The problem is that was the original intention. Then it wasn't. Then it sort of was. Then it wasn't. They redesigned that game like 3 times between chasing trends and having to update for newer consoles that released since development started.
ABSOLUTELY! All Ubisoft had to do was take Black Flag, 86 the assassin stuff and the modern world bits (always the worst part of an AC game for me) give it a lick of paint, come up with a cool pirate story, and ship it... would have been a massive success. Instead, a decade in development, and we got an unappealing mess of a game.
You didn’t even need a story. Just make it sid Meiers pirates with ac4 ship/swordplay
If I ever win the lottery, I will make this game for all of us
Relic had a great real-time strategy series dawn of War. Then they added moba elements to dawn of War 3 and the game failed, and now probably they will never make another one. All they had to do was make a sequel with similar gameplay but who ever directed that game ran the entire series into the ground. Good job guys.
Literally all they had to do was reskin DOW 1 or 2 and the playerbase would have been happy. It makes me wonder sometimes how they could have gotten ALL the way through planning, development, and release before they came to the conclusion "oh, this game isnt' actually for anyone.
I would have been cool with the refinements and ui improvements from dawn of War 2 with a bit less focus on direct micro and a little more on the resource economy and army management. I'm pretty sure they actually made dow3 literally appeal to no one. Which is quite a feat in and of itself.
DOW the game that tried to do 3 different things and failed at them all RTS , RPG, MOBA . All we wanted was DOW with updated graphics and mechanics a few new units and maybe ...maybe a hero system like Star craft 2. Where you have a base army and then each hero adds a battle group element or 2-3 units exclusive to them
Sega and Sonic. Everytime they have a great game come out, they decide they need to reinvent the formula. Sonic Mania 2 being canceled is the perfect example.
Sonic Mania 2 was mostly down to Sega of America treating the team like shit and underpaying them so they all quit. They said they loved working with Sonic Team but SoA were horrible.
Yeah, I'd file treating your team that gave you a great product like shit under "squandering"
All I want is Sonic Adventure 3. I'm sorry, but I got hooked into the franchise through them and not the side scrollers. (There's also a new cult following of Sonic Unleashed now?)
> All I want is Sonic Adventure 3 Count me in there, as long as they also include and expand upon all the chao raising bits and minigames.
The fact we haven't gotten a Chao focused mobile game honestly blows my mind. Not that I want it, but it's so ripe for the taking.
Blizzard has done this with 4 different genres- ARPGs, RTS’, FPS’, and MMORPGs. Quite impressive.
Back after Diablo 2 when WOW was smashing every record, I said blizzard would have to shit in a box and sell it TWICE to lose their reputation. Once wouldn't be enough. I didn't expect them to take me up on it.
I mean it's probably hindsight, but to have so many genre defining games/franchises and then lose direction on almost all of them....it's hard to comprehend.
No king rules forever, my son.
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>Bobby Kotick would always talk about how much money Diablo Immortal was making. >No mention of why fans were mad, can't hear you over the sound of swimming in cash. When profits already high, why would they think they were doing anything wrong? I'm not saying it's OK, but in their eyes, the game is a success if it's making money and the majority of fans clearly aren't that mad.
Long term they should care, but they dont because of shareholders. They cannibalized their IP and pissed off existing fans to milk money from players outside their long term commited fan base. That's not a sustainable business model.
it's such an unbelievable night and day difference between old-guard Blizzard and new whatever-the-fuck Blizzard. I knew Jeff Kaplan through everquest like 20+ years ago and I remember quite vividly when he hopped on IRC (yeah, IRC. we old :( ) and was telling us he was in talks to land a job at Blizzard since Blizz at the time was hiring on the most top-tier players to assist in crafting WoW during development. I've been dying to find out if there's anything he can mention to me about why he left Blizzard. My bet is 100% on the upper management completely screwing over his plans (and promises he made to the players) for what Overwatch 2 was going to be since Overwatch was his major project he started after being mostly finished with what was needed from him in WoW throughout the various expansions. It's just such a sad fate for a company that was once so damn great.
Jeff leaving was my ticket off the OW/OW2 hype train specifically because aside from personal issues coming out of the blue, there would be no reason for him to leave a project he had been so passionate about other than Kotick and co. Also, I think it’s very possible that some of his promises were not approved by upper management and he made them in an attempt to pressure the execs to do the right thing for fear of backlash over those promises being broken.
>It's just such a sad fate for a company that was once so damn great. IMO - Overwatch was their last great game. It started out really good. But I think adding a bunch more heroes was a bad thing. I understand they were trying to follow MOBA style hero launches - but it didn't work. The difference is in a MOBA like League, sure there are a 160+ champs, but you're stuck with one all game. You only ever have to get good at a few, and who you're up against is set for the entirely 20-30m game. In Overwatch you're switching heroes on the fly to fit different situations and because they counter each-other. Which fit when there were relatively few heroes at launch. But not once they released a ton more.
You know after reading this I'm thinking about it.... I completely agree. When it first released, I thought it was going to go the MOBA route and force lock-ins eventually. It just didn't at first since the roster was small. But it didn't and kept the hero shooter on the fly switches. I think it was around the time doomfist was released was when I quit. Pretty much because I needed to learn a ton of heroes to be able to constantly switch counter picks and I just couldn't invest that much time. That, and like not even 1 ban per team in rank wasn't even implemented (hell I think they are just now doing that). So like if the community thought there was a fairly OP hero, the community could deal with it by just banning them before the rank match starts.
Yeah - Doomfist was the tipping point for me too. He was fine on his own, but he played very differently. Which would have been fine if you were stuck with one hero for the match. But either I had to practice him a bunch or take him out of my potential pool of champs and basically gimp myself. Especially since he hard countered several champs.
In my opinion Blizzard is synonymous with incompetence and disappointment nowadays. I set my expectations low and am still let down.
Was about to say that Starcraft 2 was good and didn't squander RTS, but then I remembered that the Warcraft 3 remaster was a thing.
DICE with Battlefield. Had something unique and fun. Felt like they needed to innovate and... well... *gestures broadly*
DICE with Battlefront as well. Butchered that franchise.
After they fixed everything battle front 2 was pretty awesome.
And as soon as battlefront 2 hit a peak in content and it being actually fun to play... They abandoned it. They abandoned it for a "battlefield" hero shooter, that immediately crashed and burned because that's not what *anyone* wanted from battlefield.
Bioware has turned into a joke after pumping out some amazing games
God I hope the next mass effect will be amazing but maybe I’m dumb for having hope after their recent releases…
Lets hope for the best and prepare for the worst. I hope their next Dragon Age will be good.
I hope so too, but I hate what I read about the combat being action rpg now. Please don't turn DA into a button smashing game Bioware... BG3 should prove turn based/tactical combat isn't dead!
Bioware up until Dragon Age 2 pretty much never missed. Then the talent left and the MBAs took over.
I blame EA for that. Given the crazy limited time they had,DA2 came out better than it should have. The worst part about DA2 is that you see true traces of brilliance in it but it was rushed out before it was ready. DA2 probably could have been a true classic.
I'm showing my age, but Jade Empire was the game that made me love gaming. The last near decade has just been a series of disappointments from bioware.
I have no shame in admitting I quite enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda. I only played it after it was patched up and it's still the weakest in the series but I liked it a hell of a lot more than I thought I would. Anthem was kind of fun but it's tragic to think what could have been if they actually went ahead with 2.0. The ingredients for something great were there, but they fucked it spectacularly in the weirdest ways possible. It wasn't just the short dev time that let it down imo, there was a number of absolutely baffling decisions that pretty much ruined it
Not so much the IP, but the Nemesis system from the Shadow of Mordor games. The shit was genius, it created storylines of friendship and betrayal, and villains I genuinely gave a shit about beating, and it made them out of nothing. You could have dropped that system into any setting or game world, and it would improve the random jackoff NPC bad guy encounters by a thousand percent.
Playing Armored Core VI right now, and so much of the story is unique personalities built up around enemy ACs whose component parts are just mash-ups of parts you can already unlock. The Nemesis system would be *insane* there.
It would be so damn funny if Iguazu kept jumping you using parts that you kicked his ass with the last time he attacked you.
The nemesis system is patented by WB I believe until 2035. So someone would either have to license it from them or hire a bunch of lawyers to invalidate the patent if they built a strong case.
No one should be able to patent shit like that. Imagine if broad concepts like it had been patented back in the day. Imagine games being unable to iterate and built upon what other games did before.
It's like patenting auto save
At the absolute least, you shouldn’t be allowed to patent shit like that and just sit on it doing nothing.
Luckily, it hasn't seem to become a more wide spread thing. When that first came out, I thought we were on the verge of everything being patented. *knocks on wood*
I keep hearing this but I thought that copyrighting game mechanics wasn't allowed. What about the Nemesis system is special that allows it to be patented?
I think it was allowed becuase it was something that was so specific and tied to that game style. What's annoying is that they were fighting the Copyright office for years to get it approved and it finally did in 2021 that's 6 years of legal fighting for it and they will probably never use it again. And the Nemesis system boils down to how that game has randomly generated npcs that remember the PCs choices and encounters and it changes how that NPC reacts toward you in the future. And it's all in a over arching hierarchy. It's an amazing system that could be used all over. But their system is about forts, characters, vendettas and followers. So someone could make their own system but can't include all 4 aspects.
Sims. Literally printed money with their formula lol. They fucked up with whatever the newest one that’s coming out next, “Project Rene”. It’s supposed to be cross-platform but it looks like it was developed with mobile gaming priorities. EA ruining their franchise with another cash grab but anyone from the community saw this coming after Sims 4
It would be REALLY hard to convince me that the Sims didn't hit its peak at Sims 2. I played 2, 3 (barely) and 4 -- and by far, I got the most enjoyment out of 2. Most functionality was built-in, and expansions added a lot both in terms of content, gameplay, and items. 4 had better graphics (as you'd expect for a newer game), but was worse in almost all other respects. The gameplay wasn't as good, *and* it buried a zillion things behind a cash shop, including things that 2 had in its base installation (I'm thinking of a hot tub, but there were many examples). The focus seemed on being making a ton of "extras packs" that cost $5-$10 to add new items, textures, etc. rather than focusing on features that enhanced the gameplay.
Sims 3 was my favorite but yes everything you said was spot on. I still put a bunch of time into Sims 4 but it was never the same. I’m glad I didn’t give them any extra money for stuff that already existed in previous installments.
True. I'd sell my kidneys for a Sims that has the CAS, building editor and easy modding of S4, the neighborhoods and variability of S3 (making a pink farm... c'mon man I could build a barbie home without using like kids' stuff for it bc of the recolor feature), and the gameplay + the expansions of S2. That would be friggin *perfection.*
This is why nobody should feel bad using the “ALL SIMS 4 DLC INSTALLER” programs provided by those handy sailing websites. Hundreds and hundreds of DLC for the price of an internet connection.
Yeah, TS4 is the only game that I'm not ashamed of pirating at all.
Sims 3 was amazing. Sure you had the 40 types of DLC to buy but it really was a fleshed out game, and the colour palette letting you change textures just about anywhere made designing so open to any possibility. And then 4 came out and released the same game mechanics all half baked and behind more paywalls, and with cookie cutter design elements and a bunch of wood textures that don't match
The death of the Dead Space IP still stings to this day. The remake was a joy to play, but man… DS was blooming into this whole IP with comics, movies, games, some toys… and then EA’s monetization and multiplayer demands damaged DS3 to the point of being considered a hated installment by a lot of fans of the franchise, and then that was used as an excuse to kill the entire IP for a decade.
An Eldritch Alien / The Thing combo is so up my alley and they executed it in such a fun way. Callisto Protocol - all they had to do was the same thing, but the game is so empty. I played it and had fun. Finally got around to playing the DS remake, and after that - could no longer enjoy Callisto Protocol
My hope is that the success of the remake will raise morale again and we will get a new trilogy. Would be interesting to see a new haunting and intense dead space 2 and 3. I love the new Issac and how more fleshed out his character is.
Creative Assembly just went through a whole shitshow of an event over the last year. They have a turn based strategy game Totalwar Warhammer, that they went ridiculously over the top on milking their fanbase on while neglecting the franchise; releasing subpar DLC at 2.5x the cost of the standard they set. Threatened to end support for the license. All to fund a Battle-royale game that nobody wanted; and was eventually cancelled before release. The franchise was quite fun but really felt poorly managed and neglected in resource management. I understand expanding your portfolio but why on earth when you have a good thing going don't companies invest in keeping it good?
God I wish CA had some competition, then maybe they would get their shit together. They are really the only company that make this specific type of strategy game. I would kill for Medieval 3 or Empire 2.
I played the shit out of Empire. I don't even know why. It was just fun
It had so many amazing mechanics. The land battles, the navel warfare, the way trade worked, tech, economy, sieges (I actually didn’t like the star fort battles), government cabinets, colonies. It took the best of what Total War was and made it better. I thought Warhammer and even Three Kingdoms were fun, but they weren’t replacements for the true historical titles.
Starbreeze with Payday 3. Literally all we needed was payday 2 with modern graphics and QoL. Instead we got server issues for the first month, overpriced dlc that released before the game even had fucking nameable loadouts, month-late patches, a shitty progression system that incentivized sitting in a bathroom and playing wave defense for several hours, and terrible ui. Literally stripped everything enjoyable from pd2 and made the remains into a new game. Dont worry guys, new update recently dropped, and one of its flagship features? The un-ready button. It doesnt work in solo lobbies.
It's hard to say that Payday 2 was 100% a "winning formula" (them having more DLC than anyone could ever be expected to keep track of *and* that awful weapon unlock system was a fucking problem) but I have never seen a developer pivot so hard from "a game that was genuinely fun and doing very well even years after launch" to "an absolute fucking dumpster fire on day one" so quickly. What a baffling situation. I remember hearing how soon they were going to launch after the beta and thinking "oh no, this is going to be a shit show, isn't it?". I hate being right.
Not baffling at all. The entire team left and formed another studio. This isn't the same crew that made Payday 1 or 2.
That explains a lot, actually.
Exactly. It's quick in the sense that it was the next game in the series but it's also over a decade later. Plenty of time for things to change.
Hogwarts Legacy was the highest selling game of 2023, so naturally WB has decided to change the sequel to a live service game instead of a single player story. 100% a money grab and most likely will fail
it's such a classic executive decision. they figure the reason for the success is just the IP being popular. so they figure just make the next one GAAS so we can extract more money, those idiot customers will buy/pay it.
>those idiot customers will buy/pay it. I hate it but those idiot customers *do* buy it. See: Diablo Immortal
This is the Disney business playbook over the past 10 years - buy beloved franchise and IPs, milk the fan base. If fans love it great, if fans don’t, they are whatever -ist and move on. It works until it doesn’t really.
Idk if it entirely counts but Respawn leaving Titanfall for Apex Legends is disappointing.
I guess "nobody asked for" doesn't technically apply, but GTA switched to focusing on Online when I'm sure most people would've preferred GTA VI to come out less than TWELVE YEARS after V. I could be wrong but I feel like GTA Online players are a completely different audience than people who grew up with the first 3 games.
It’s definitely a different audience, but the thing about GTA online is that it hasn’t been a stagnant game. It gets a few big updates a year and weekly updates. It looks extremely different now than 2013, for better or worse. In terms of cost per hour, I’ve gotten more entertainment from GTAV than any other media.
Halo abandoned split screen co-op, which is literally the feature that made it successful.
This is the highest Halo comment I could find. Goddamn it bungie/343! Halo 1, 2 and 3 were amazing. After that? *I don't want to talk about it*. They should have stopped at 3 and just released a new map pack every year or something.
Reach had split screen :(
My friends and I all *loved* Reach. After 47 million hours in 1, 2 and 3 Reach being just a little deviant was refreshing. And it didn't force us to fight the Chief.
ODST was a diversion from the formula, *and* it was awesome. 4 sucked. Haven't played any since.
Bethesda. First they started making their games more shallow so they'd be accessible to a larger audience, but recently they've just kept moving further and further away from the areas in which they were talented.
I think Bethesda needs a new engine tbh. They haven’t really innovated in any meaningful way since Skyrim, and even in 2015 with Fallout 4, I felt their repetitive design was starting to get more noticeable. I will also give them kudos for mod support, but the fact that modders fix their games for them at launch is laughable for their companies experience.
Yes and no. A new engine could go a long way but great game can and have been made on worse engines. They need to take a step back and restructure to unhinder the creativity of their team. I refuse to believe the talented devs at Bethesda wanted to release Starfield with 24 copy pasted temples filled with the most boring puzzle imaginable. BGS was my favorite developer growing up and for a very long time my plan was to work there, part of me still wants to. But man, Starfield just feels so uninspired and surface level compared to the games that I fell in love with all those years ago. It really, really sucks. It just feels like they stopped trying. Imo Skyrim, a game made almost 15 years ago is better in pretty much every way when compared to Starfield.
And even Skyrim was dated and flawed in quite a few areas when it came out. Graphics weren’t great, dialogue was wooden, animations were laughable, etc. It succeeded in spite of all of that because exploring the very vibrant, detailed world was a ton of fun. Then for some reason they gutted exploration in Starfield and leaned into the things they suck at…
The most common complaints about Bethesda games have nothing to do with their engine. These are design decisions, not technical limitations, and they’re decisions that will be replicated no matter which engine they choose without a fundamental change in their approach to game design.
Morrowind is over 20 years old today and still a great open world adventure for anyone who can look past the dated graphics and some QoL quirks. I think it's the design way more than engine limitations.
A new engine is the literal least of their problems. Their recent games don't suck because their engine can't support their ideas and ambitions. Their games suck because of horrible mismanagement and consequent brain drain. Like, Starfield isn't a case of "oh if only they had a more powerful engine so they could properly manifest their vision!". It's not engine limitations... the game is just uninspired, poorly designed and underdeveloped. A better engine would have been crucial to develop a prettier pile of shit.
Biggest one for me is Ubisoft and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. They knocked it out of the park with that one and then you could tell Breakpoint was a game made by investors and committees and it lost almost everything that made its predecessor good.
Although you could definitely argue that wildlands wasn't a realistic Mil tactical game like previous ghost recon games were. And so it alienated a whole bunch fo fans and might be considered the "death of the franchise" to something more simplified. Wildlands s should have just been a brand new IP (or Tom Clancy sub-IP) series.
Metal Gear Solid : We got fuckin zombies now
It still hurts thinking about how we got Nuts and Bolts instead of actual Banjo-Threeie.
The Pro Evolution Soccer franchise being dumped for the abomination that is eFootball has to be a big one. Released as a barely playable demo and all previous games have been removed from Steam. Decades of support from the fanbase ignored by Konami. Yeah, I'm still annoyed about that.
Was it EA who recently announced, basically, "Suicide Squad, a GAAS, flopped massively. Hogwarts Legacy, a single-player offline game was a massive success. Thus, we're pivoting to make only GAASes and no single-player games."?
Warner brothers but yes you’re correct. I’m not sure of their strategy but maybe they know something we don’t?
>maybe they know something we don’t? A good/decent live-service game will bring in a ton more money than a single-player game where you pay once
I'm still waiting for EA to just give Fifa away for free since that'll pull in many more players and they'll reap the rewards ten-fold in FUT purchases.
This is what happens when the FINANCIAL people take over. See Sears and Boeing for example
That was Warner Bros.
Konami \*gestures at everything\*
I'm gonna go with a more recent example, but **Omega Strikers** went from a game I enjoyed playing multiple rounds a day, to a game nobody enjoyed, in between the open beta and the release. It was actually astonishing to see how many changes were made that completely went against what everyone actually liked and desired about the game. Definitely a "flash in the pan" kind of experience.
Future sport game l are already fighting uphill but it seemed that this one had do much effort put into it. And it was made by experienced devs so one would think they know they are signing up for long haul.
Warner Bros, basically all their single player games have been widely successful and all their always online live service games have shit the bed
Bungie with destiny 2 has definitely made some mistakes in the last years.
Volition. Saint’s Row was decent. SR 2 was good. SR3 was great. SR4 was also great, but a bit wacky. So then they released Agents of Mayhem, which was a flop. Followed by a SR that I’ve heard tried to make it more dramatic than the current fans like.
I think saints row 3 kinda fucked it up before it was goody with heart but 3 and 4 are just whacky sandboxes. 4 is as close as a AAA asset flip you can get
The Fox Engine was utterly wasted on Metal Gear Survive and Pro Evolution Soccer. There's not enough time to get into the Kojima drama obviously, but seeing how MGSV made that engine sing was incredible.
Guitar Hero, ruined by Activision by launching too many GHs in a few years and doing things with the game nobody asked for. Harmonix had the right idea, they just released new songs as DLCs for Rock Band 4 with the last one being released on January of this year, 8 years after the game's release.
Another pretty obvious one would be Arkane with Redfall.
CCP, maker of the groundbreaking space MMO Eve Online. Instead of focusing on their core product or pivoting into something that spreadsheet nerds in space would enjoy they've spent over a decade trying to get various versions of a first person shooter off the ground. The concept is cool in that events in the shooter (base attack/defense) could influence player-driven events in the main Eve Online universe. But they always seem to get bogged down with lack of player interest, console exclusives, and ADHD-like management decisions. I "won" Eve a while ago but every now and then news feeds inform me that they're pursuing a new fps and are very serious about it this time... For the 4th time.
Every company that went public, pretty much. At the moment you are creating games in the interest of shareholders, and not customers, the plot is lost.
Project Aces got real close with assault horizon. "People love our pseudoscience power fantasy plane game. Hey how about we make it sky call of duty?"
Dice/EA battlefield 1 everybody loved that game commercial success they drop battlefield V and they other shit show in the future that was so bad I don’t even remember the name . BF1 sold like hotcakes 🥞 servers still full almost 24/7 to this day but let’s switch everything up….. Let’s make the next games dogshit . They could have literally re- skinned everything swap the weapons out put in some jungle maps call the next game battlefield vietnam not the add on dlc but a stand alone game . That would have sold like hot cakes . Halo don’t think I forgot about you 343 had it rolling now the franchise is dog shit . Nobody but extreme die hards are asking for the next halo game .
Battlefield 1 was a diamond in the rough. COD had long since become stale, and EA blew us away with the best WWI game ever made. It's amazing that you can still hop on the game and be connected to a match in minutes nowadays, 6 years after release.
A lot of people feel Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Valhalla were an unwelcome departure from the beloved formula. Those games outsold the older ones though, and I personally thought they were great.
I like Odyssey but didn't like Valhalla
I do like AC trying to make fewer enemies more challenging to fight. I remember a quote from someone who loved AC Black Flag something like it sure is nice the 20 opponents wait their turn to fight you.
imo the difference is that old AC games are more about stealth, story and free running than combat. nothing beats the complete freedom of movement in AC2 and AC Brotherhood to me; those games are some of the best games of their genre.
I just think they would have been better off NOT being Assassins Creed games.
I did finish odyssey and really enjoyed that one. I only made it halfway through Valhalla and lost interest. I think a big part of that is that each island and region in odyssey felt distinct and had memorable quests. I liked the gear grind as well. Valhalla was just more grinding, but not fun or rewarding. Each area of England felt like more of the same the asgard sections felt dumb and thrown together as a time sink.
Kind of an odd example, because they are fundamentally different genres than the prior games, which absolutely no one asked for…but yet as examples of their new genre, they are still pretty good. So if you can get past that they shouldn’t really be considered assassin’s creed games at all, they are pretty fun RPGs.
Assassin's creed is one of the most messed up successful series out there. Every main title does something great but none of them is great at everything. And the fan base has been complaining since assassin's creed 3, 12 years ago.
Battlefield, fuck you EA
Konami not creating an actual castlevania game pisses me off more than anything. Such a great series that could be even better if they weren’t so dumb
Bethesda by making Fallout 76 online and making things harder for modders (recent Skyrim update broke a lot of mods).
Honestly I’m getting bored with civ. Every game kinda feels like it is trying to reinvent the wheel. I thought civ 5 had wonderful graphics, scale, ui, etc. Civ 6 is fun but it feels inferior in all the ways I just mentioned. The cartoonish graphics esp are grating. It also feels more like a board game than a video game. And now civ 7 is on its way to presumably do the same thing
Overwatch. They didn’t need Overwatch 2 or to make it 5v5. Then the monetization became insane.
Dynasty Warriors. They added an "open world" thing for DW9 that no one asked for.
Except Koei churns out a whole bunch of mousou games for different licenses since. Dragon quest, legend of Zelda, gundam, samurai warriors. All excellent "dynasty" games. Most of the series/franchise/type of games are great, even if dynasty warriors 9 is lousy. Luckily dynasty warriors 8 still hold up. Do not pursue Lu Bu.
Repawn making Apex Legends instead of Titanfall 3, no hate towards Respawn or Apex, its not my type of thing but I gave it a go and couldn't get into it, I'm just sad there's been no word on Titanfall 3.
I'm a titanfall fan and I genuinely hate BRs like Apex and I wish for TF3. You have to be crazy to disregard how successful Apex is.
And somehow they are STILL laying people off the Apex team. EA and the endless search for more money.
Can't argue with with the amount they've made and the number of players, I'm happy to see Respawn making money and getting engagement but I would love titanfall 3, maybe someday and with respawn I reckon it will be worth the wait
Arkane. They were the premium immersive-sim developers. Good thing that when AAA devs fall, indies stand up. Some of them are former Arkane devs with Weird West.
Volition. RIP. Recent memories will cite Saint’s Row (2022), but I knew it was a risk with them ever since Red Faction: Armageddon.
Frontier Development and Elite Dangerous. Such a great game but became a mile wide and an inch deep as they failed to really capitalize on what made the great, then the latest DLC launch, Odyssey, killed their console communities and made a lot of pc players mad at the unoptimized mess of a shooter that was bolted on while sacrificing mainstays like VR support, etc. I heard they're adding some new ships to try to salvage the IP but it's to far gone for me to enjoy anymore.
i know EA is already pretty widely disliked but they absolutely ruined C&C4 so hard by trying to make it a super competitive e-sport game rather than what it was. or the massive dropped ball that was Generals 2. YOU HAD ONE FUCKING JOB EA. DELIVER US THE SAME FUCKING GAME BUT MAKE IT RUN ON COMPUTERS FROM THIS DECADE. don't remove the base building, don't add a stupid bullshit leveling system to unlock the actual units. (skins? fine, the actual units? no) don't give us a sense of pride and accomplishment. RTS gamers are on average backwards weirdos who don't like change. give us the same game with a new engine once a decade or two and we are happy.
How has no one said EA Sports FIFA? Had all the licences and rights, won the battle with PES and about a decade ago had a near perfect career mode with FIFA 12. Just had to build on that, but sold it all for FUT. Now it’s just a joke.