- supersquirrel@lemmy.caEnglish12 days
Ubisoft is an anti-corporation in that it brings together valuable assets into something worth far less than the sum of the parts individually.
11 daysYears ago, just as the first teaser dropped, I was an “insider” on the project. The direction they had was pretty clear; single player with some co-op. RPG with robust character creator and classes. Open world with seamless ground-to-space travel, and a single solar system to explore with your pirate ship.
They showed off some early gameplay, their city tech, and their planet generation tech. Then silence.
I’m technically still an “insider”, but they just stopped sending updates about 10 years ago.
Now you’re telling my they scrapped all of that to make a Fortnite game, then scrapped that to make a 4 player live service game, they scrapped that too and now we’re right back where we fucking started at single player with some co-op!?
- Railcar8095@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Seeing how things go, just going back to that point seems the option with more opportunities to succeed. Trying to shoehorn the middle parts will be a mess
- Railcar8095@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
It’s UniSoft. Basically reverting 20 years would make their share price go to the moon.
- 11 days
I remember this too, and just recently figured it must have died. The seamless space transition looked incredible.
- QueenHawlSera@piefed.socialEnglish12 days
Why the fuck would a Beyond Good And Evil sequel be a Fortnite clone?
- 11 days
Because pizza is good and cake is good. Lets just imagine how fantastic it would be if they are mixed together.
- yermaw@sh.itjust.worksEnglish11 days
You just described every single attempt at homemade pizza i ever did
- Archer@lemmy.worldEnglish10 days
You had deep dish sitting right there but decided to post slop instead?!
Not a clone of Fortnite, but a Fornite killer. Making a clone would be too easy, it needs to destroy it. Which is basically impossible. I don’t know what the gameplay loop and objectives would be, but don’t think it was same gameplay of Fortnite (therefore not a clone of it).
If it was just “Fortnite but a bit better”, then very few people would play it, as having a lot of people to play against is important and network effects would keep them on Fortnite. (See also every other “X-killer” - Facebook killer, WhatsApp killer, e-Bay killer, etc. A slight improvement will not do.) Also, Fortnite wasn’t really the game it is until they cloned PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds into it, so it needs to be:
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something with a really compelling gameplay loop that’s good with a few people but gets better with more people
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not a Fortnite clone, nor something that could be introduced into Fortnite as a game mode
Like you say, just a clone will not do. Need some really exciting innovations in gameplay, which is not Ubisoft’s thing, to put it kindly.
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- mechoman444@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Everyone wants to make the next Fortnite, GTA, or Destiny.
For the love of God, stop chasing other games. Make your own game and let it stand on its own merits.
It doesn’t have to be a live service. It doesn’t need engagement metrics designed to appease shareholders. It doesn’t need to chase whatever trend is currently making someone else money.
It just needs to be a good game.
Stop trying to replicate things you clearly don’t understand and haven’t been able to reproduce successfully. Have some original ideas, take some creative risks, and make something worth playing on its own merits.
- Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
The problem with trying to be the next fortnite is that the people who would be interested in the next fortnite are already playing the current fortnite.
I didn’t get into that game but I was into WoW. And while I was playing WoW, I had no interest in the clones; they didn’t even make it to my radar. Even if another option was good, I had already invested a lot of time into characters and relationships in WoW. And then when I got tired of WoW, I just wasn’t interested in jumping into another MMO.
- flameleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
MMOs are time vampires. I’ve got the same experience with Guild Wars.
Yeah it’s the Simpsons bit where a TV exec in the boardroom says “we need a new idea, quick turn on your TVs and see what’s good on the other channels we can copy.”
- Crankenstein@lemmy.worldEnglish10 days
Yea but capitalism demands that number go up and corporate suits are so far removed from the creative process they have no understanding of how it works.
I’m sure devs would love to have the freedom to make what they want and let it stand but unfortunately they are trapped inside service to a bunch of fucking dip shits who only see the world through spreadsheets.
- zarathustrad@lemmy.worldEnglish10 days
If only small groups of creatives could get together and utilize some new technology that allows them to make games quickly, with less initial investment and without social backlash. Mabey next year.
Such is life.
- Crankenstein@lemmy.worldEnglish9 days
Sure it is, cupcake.
AI slop will never replace genuine human effort and creativity. AI slop will go the same way as the countless shovelware shitfests that came before them. Lazy devs will only ever produce lazy, soulless projects.
- zarathustrad@lemmy.worldEnglish9 days
People with ideas will use tools to make those ideas a reality. It’s not asking an AI to make you a game. It’s a creative using an LLM to do the hard and non creative parts.of making a game.
*Go burn down a data center and relax about people using tools.
Video killed the radio star.
*Edit: Sorry, don’t burn them. They are insured. They will probably lose more money when they have to liquidate their depreciating assets after they collapse the economy. (Plus I’ll need a new GPU some day)
- Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish10 days
Something I want to teach these people is that a lot of the big-name repetitious games we have now started as largely singleplayer efforts.
Early Halo/COD didn’t have much effort in multiplayer, just putting all the SP tools in. As that saw appreciation, they built more effort in. Even the famous CODZombies mode was originally not even in the budget, and came in specifically from overtime actions.
Fortnite started as a coop zombie defense game. It pivoted based on trends but had a decent basis.
One game I play, Dead by Daylight, premiered as a low-effort 1v4 party game that the devs expected to last a year at most. It’s now at year 7 with 44 characters across many franchises.
Part of the point is, it’s not punitive to grow and pivot into live service. Each of those projects started off small and low budget, and only grew once it was clear players were going to spend hundreds of hours in it. Hence it feels so dumb to invest that cash early, à la Concord, BGE2, pretty much anything decided in a boardroom before release.
- mechoman444@lemmy.worldEnglish10 days
It’s the trend chasing that is a problem it is one thing for a publisher or developer to notice what their players are doing and favoring and optimizing and developing for that and a completely different thing when like you said these things are decided on in a boardroom.
Executives function only through their spreadsheets and what appears to make money they are disconnected from how these things actually work.
- Reginald_T_Biter@lemmy.worldEnglish10 days
You cant force lightning into a bottle. You put the bottle out and wait for it to strike.
- myyass@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Yep. It’s not your fault when your boss says do dumb shit. This is so common in the video game industry.
- MagicPterodactyl@lemmy.mlEnglish12 days
Ubisoft is allergic to good decisions. At this point it’s been a good decade since the last time they made a game that i wanted to play.
- knuk@piefed.caEnglish11 days
I worked there for a while. Any time there’d be a viral trend of some sort (like battle royales, nfts), they’d wait about a year then stary a multi year project to jump on the trend. We always knew it was too late to start but we didn’t have any say in it. I expect they’re probably working on some sort of ai games now that will be ready after the ai bubble pops
- 11 days
Do you think the original direction was deemed too much like Starfield? If this had just released as a competitor, it looked like it could have trounced it. I was so much more excited for this tech than what Starfield turned out to be.
- knuk@piefed.caEnglish11 days
I never saw the work done on that game personally,it was a studio in a different continent and I didn’t know the franchise
- 10 days
There are videos with prototype demos from years ago. I think it had a big procedurally generated planet, and outer space with seamless transition between them like No Man’s Sky.
- Bonesince1997@lemmy.worldEnglish12 days
I think the last one I played from them was a cooperative effort with Nintendo, the Mario + Rabbids games. I only played the first, but did enjoy it; thought it was a solid tactics game. I wanted to play the latest Prince of Persia, the 2D one, but didn’t get around to it. Heard good things. But, that’s about it for me. I never was a huge fan of their games. They seem to often target mediocrity, with series like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry having way too many entries, with too few bangers, and bargain prices to quickly follow.
- MagicPterodactyl@lemmy.mlEnglish12 days
Actually you’re right I forgot about Mario + Rabbids which I played at my sister’s house 9 years and it seemed ok.
- jacksilver@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
The Metroidvania Prince of Persia (Lost Crown) is amazing, the rouge lite Prince of Persia is just okay.
- brsrklf@jlai.luEnglish11 days
And then the second Mario+Rabbids is another designed-by-committee, unfocused game that adds grinding and busywork to a game that never needed them.
They just have to make all their games converge toward the same mediocre model.
The second one was such a disappointment. My son and I had hundreds of hours into the first one. He still plays the first one sometimes. We never got close to finishing the second.
- Tigeroovy@lemmy.caEnglish10 days
Imagine the games we’d have if these companies weren’t constantly chasing always online multiplayer money machines.
I mean we do still have lots of cool good games. But we’d have more.
- 11 days
“This is what the statistics says not what gamers want!” -fucking corporate financebros.
Also, why the hell compete in an overcrowded live service battle royale shooter market? Have corporates not heard of blue ocean strategy?
- Clasm@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
C-suite business-people only know how to follow numbers.
There isn’t an original thought in their heads or a creative bone in their bodies.
- ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zipEnglish11 days
That is quite literally the stupidest thing you could have done with the franchise.
For that matter, I’ve always wondered why anyone would invest notably sums of money into Beyond Good and Evil. The first game was fine, but it seems to continue to be one of the great money pits in the gaming industry.
I have to say, it takes some serious creative outside the box thinking, to turn Beyond Good & Evil into a Fortnite killer. That earns my respect. I never would have expected that. Like ever.
- 11 days
No, it just takes greedy C-suite execs that never played the game demaning the change
- nullspace@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Everyone wants to be Fortnite, but they forget Fortnite was a fun game before it got popular and it almost bombed if not for a hard course-correction on its gameplay.
- CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish11 days
at this point, the only question is “What could possibly go right?”
- QuandaleDingle@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Ugh, Battleroyale shooters are so 2016. CEOs are still chasing that segment? And screwing up BGE of all games?
Yeah, it’s all about making lame extraction shooters now! Five years from now when they finish making the AAA extraction shooters they’re working on now, that will be outdated.
- QuandaleDingle@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Oh yeah, the extraction shooters. They’re everywhere. Thanks, Tarkov. XD
- zarathustrad@lemmy.worldEnglish10 days
I was about to claim it’s been almost 10 years since I played Tark, then remembered I have not played it since beta testing and it just released… (I’m too old to play these sweaty multiplayer games, I’ll stick to ZERO Sievert)
- TheArtfulLlama@lemmy.zipEnglish10 days
Jesus H the gaming industry sucks so much ass right now. Not everything needs to be live service and multiplayer. Games like Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3, along with the hype for the now cancelled Mass Effect show there’s still plenty of demand for single player, story driven games. I don’t understand how companies are so out of touch that they pump out sloppy live service shit no one wants or asks for and then scratch their heads wondering why it fails. LISTEN TO THE PUBLIC FFS
