Horizon with co-op would be excellent. As a mode inside ordinary Horizon. No one asked for whatever this is.
There’s an offline mode, but it still needs to be authenticated through the Riot launcher, and depending on how it works, it could be a concern for preservation.
I think the smart money is on them continuing to do what they’ve been doing for decades, which is the kind of campaign they’ve made for decades, especially since there’s no online mode out of the gate.
This expectation is crazy to me. Most of what we’ve seen in an official capacity is cut scenes for a story mode resembling what they’ve been putting out since 2008, and that’s if you ignore the fact that gameplay has leaked multiple times and there won’t even be multiplayer at launch. Smart money is that there’s a campaign like they’ve always made and then the online rolls out months later, like their last two games.
Someone is probably far more likely to pick up a game like that that they just didn’t know was out rather than one they’ve never heard of before. If they could pull that trick on any game, they probably wouldn’t let a day go by without a banner, like today.
The reality is they want you to find those other games to maximize profit, which is where all of their work into recommendation engines and personalized release calendars has gone. But it’s not going to convince millions of people who want to play NBA 2K that they should buy the latest indie game instead.
I never felt like I formed a community on servers out of a server browser. I did get that years later on Discord. Matchmaking was always a far better experience, but the population will drop eventually, so you need the server browser.
Money. If you can host your own servers, you won’t be peer pressured to buy the latest skins.
PlayStation multiplayer games suffer when there’s no one to play with, so there’s a chance.
These days I find I’m drowning in a deluge of game releases, so even filtering those down to prioritize the ones on GOG first is a form of curation that helps. Regional pricing doesn’t affect me, but I feel for you. And there are exceptions to the multiplayer problem on GOG, which is what makes it harder than if it was just a blanket bad option for multiplayer. I’d love to see GOG implement something that allows for truly offline implementation of their Galaxy backend so that devs taking the easy porting route can still say that their game is 100% DRM-free; as it stands, I’m writing off buying a game like MechWarrior 5 on GOG.
It’s a shame, but GOG is still my default store. They make it difficult to shop for multiplayer games there though. They need to create some kind of incentive (carrot, not stick) to make sure devs keep their games in parity. They all talk about how hard it is to support multiple stores and then also complain about Steam being a monopoly. The reason they have so much market share is staring at the developers in the mirror.
The 4th installment, Veilguard, was so obviously written with HR (People & Culture) in the room.
It was salvaged from an entirely different game design altogether, likely with pieces they could use and pieces they threw away, and I’m sure there were limits on how much they could redo. When it was a multiplayer game, it may have been written so every player was the star, which could create this sort of dynamic. That’s purely conjecture, and I haven’t played the game, but there are a lot of reasons why it could have manifested that way without it being HR’s fault.
I’m not a fan of this lady. Her channel is used as a justification for right-wing channels complaining about “woke”, which makes it no surprise that her first cited video is from Colin Moriarty; or that the recommended next video after this one is “The Woman Who Ruined Videogames - The Story of Anita Sarkeesian”. Meanwhile, last I saw before tuning this lady out, she put more fuel on the fire about games media being told how to review a game by citing phrases that they used in common (that’s not how it works). At best, this video seems like a different perspective on the pitfalls of what happens to all companies as they grow large, and at worst, it comes across as some weird kind of conspiracy for corporate power.
It’s a real shame, too, because I’d love to be able to play it. I had a lot of fun with the beta at a friend’s place.
If you’re endorsing piracy as a political stance in any way, I don’t see it gaining traction. People need to be paid for their work; especially those who built a product for you that’s meant to last and can’t be taken away from you. I don’t know how you convey that in a three- or four-word slogan, but I don’t think this one does it.
It is not self-explanatory. You needed to explain it. On its face, it sounds like it’s saying to just pirate. I can get behind the message, but these three words aren’t it. I know that coming up with effective, catchy slogans is hard, but this one’s not going to do well.
They could have been phenomenally successful if they released a game with rollback back when there were almost none. Then 2021 came along and rollback fighters are basically all that exist anymore.