I’m taking some sick pleasure in this. And it’s even spread by the same people as last year!
ahaha I’m gonna smack you upside the head
No seriously, I balanced that game and it was in no way set up to do that. Instead it ended up with the exact issues Metal Gear Solid V did; an asynchronous Clash-of-Clans-esque multiplayer mode, threaded through infinite sandbox play in a way that confuses whether the microtrans are for single- or multiplayer focused players, and an ending that ends with enough vagueness and then immediately ushers the player into a slightly-structure and narrativized back section really only intended for the weirdos who want to keep playing, but which was interpreted as the ‘true end’. Long and slow because it wanted to provide infinite runway, not to lock content behind.
I think what’s happening is these reviewers have never diverged from the audience as much as they are now. These single-player sandbox games all want to project Skyrim-like endlessness (Ubisoft uses the same consultants we do and I know they hear this message) and so they’re just stuffed with either systemic play (Shadow of War) or cheap quest content (Assassin’s) or expensive quality foreign quest content that nobody else can match (Witcher 3) (and Bethesda can do this while remaining small and expensive because unlike anyone else they’re willing to cut fidelity and just let the level designers do the writing and cutscene scripting and everything).
At any rate, audiences are expected to play this game for dozens of hours over months, while reviewers have a week to churn through the main story. And for them it’s becoming less and less representative of the game experience, and while trying to get ahead of social issues they’re projecting what microtrans strategies are but it’s rather an unintended effect for a small segment of the game’s audience, the time-starved adult.
Make shorter games! is the real answer, but it seems we only get there by saying, make cheaper games! and try to claw out a middle as the power of digital distribution eats the middle ground.
I have to be careful because I don’t want to jump all over anyone for talking bad about it, but I’ve found it really interesting to learn exactly how the combination of boxed-in AAA thinking, boring taste, and smart committed people creates the dysfunctions of AAA. So I share it.
I took the job at Monolith because I’d been unemployed for 8 months but in hindsight it’s probably a better fit than most any other AAA studio because they’re single-player systems-driven; the political power in the design team is the 8 or so of us who want little pieces interacting and that’s definitely my groove.
Plus I’ll dunk on Assassin’s Creed any day because even more than Elder Scrolls it’s the game where every single part is mediocre
Well, I guess I ended up personally insulting you! I didn’t mean that and I never played Shadow, nor did I imply that I did. It’s just what I read. But I have to say, of course if you have an ending after the ending people are going to want to see it and consider it even more important than the first ending. Endings are important because they are the end and if you have an ending that’s not the end then… it’s not the important ending
What can you tell us about the rebalancing that the game went through after microtransactions were removed? Because that just seems suspicious and like an admittance of guilt. I guess you’re going to say it wasn’t because of the microtransactions and instead just an update where you took player feedback into consideration. Correct?
No insult taken, I just have to pipe up because the communication through mechanics is misunderstood in the popular narrative and it’s the same feeling as someone taking what you said and misinterpreting it. Maddening!
I agree, as did design – and we even had the exact example of MGSV and it was so obvious this wasn’t going to feel right. But it was a creative director decision to sacrifice this in favor of extending the game; the thinking was, even though Ghost Recon and The Division are poorly rated and even poorly rated in community reviews, people keep playing and buying them and that’s important.
Turns out everyone left our game at the moment they hated it the most and that was pretty important!
It was two things happening at the same time: one, we removed the microtransactions, and two, we gave up on our pretensions of a living game in favor of a drastically faster power ramp at elder game, while at the same time building some endless progression features we wanted but didn’t have at launch. More specifically, we allowed players to recruit Captains from online invasions; previously we worried about the power curve quickly spinning to an overpowered equilibrium but now threw the gates open. We built an endless, systemic Fort Defense mission so players could engage in it as much as possible; at launch, these had to be hand-crafted, so we gave players 20 of them, trying to compromise between a reasonable time to ‘secret ending’ and feeding players who wanted to keep playing those (it made neither group happy). This also allowed us to shorten the number of Fort Defense missions to 5, to give only a taste. We also added Prestige skills and gear levelups and perk rerolls so players had an endless grind treadmill to occupy them (oh, and I got to make some near-game-breaking pieces of gear I’d always wanted like the ability to endlessly teleport-dash around the map! but that’s just because I wanted to spend my weekends building nice things).
So it sits right next to the microtransaction bits but it’s not the same thing, but I never expected anyone to understand that we would have done that in a world which never included microtransactions, or in a world where they didn’t cause a firestorm. It’s too subtle to tell and no one gives us the benefit of the doubt.
Similarly, the prevailing narrative that ‘they took the microtransactions away once everyone spent money on them’ is frustratingly dumb. Microtransactions support a long tail and are most important for long-term service model games. Games add them as they get older, not remove them. Of course, it was a business decision in some right – we were able to convince the publisher that the money we’d be making from microtransactions was low enough that it was worth trying to remove them to improve the game’s image and help the long tail – but it’s very silly to suggest that it was some nefarious scheme rather than a blunder and a backout.
Well, even Forza7/turn10 must have gotten enough… feedback that warranted them to, finally, do away with their lootbox thing.
idk what the idea or reasoning behind these was, never used them, never will - so i cannot comment on what may have turned the tide, but it is interesting to see that these are seemingly(?) starting to disappear.
n. b. i’m firmly in the ‘plunk down cash upfront, only get the peasant-default-version’ camp, for the record. And, if possible, as a disc… yeah, i know, i sound like that dude…
I stopped playing Of War close to launch but I’m glad you put in the best part of Of Mordor. I’ve told this story before, but right as I was getting bored with the game I started getting the final abilities which are real dumb and the game was not built around them at all, which powered me through another few hours. I didn’t finish the game, regardless, but it was a very nice surprise.
I’m told the gamebreaking abilities were a conscious choice because they knew they couldn’t grow the character or enemies any more without everything spinning out of control, so, running out of time, they just flipped the switch to overpowered. It’s of a part with all the rest of the decisions they made by running out of time, moreso than the way every game project runs out of time; most glaringly, the story that ends on, ‘revenge is a good thing in Middle-Earth, right? Right,’ because they cut the fall.
So in War I had to keep high-level play balanced while supporting twice the skills and triple the power growth; the result is that there are some notable constraints in the beginning hours and, while the character is eventually much more powerful, there are some notable gaps that keep it from spinning away.
Better was the roguelike expansion where I put the character through the entire power growth and beyond in a >2-hour period of time; there are easy combos in there of infinite-slow-motion and endlessly chaining explosive kills and mortal damage redirected to your allies (“Iron Glove”, I think I named it) and it’s so liberating to be able to push past because the game will end.
I mean, I don’t know the guts of the thing, but it’s yet to strike me with a feeling of “ah shit I need to buy this boost!”
That kinda DLC has always struck me as some real “divorced doctor dad who lost custody of his kids”-ass stuff. That Need for Speed “bwuh I gotta unlock these cars? How much to give them all to me now?” tier garbage.
Most of the weapons you get in the game get outclassed by the next drop you get, so the idea of paying extra cash to have a mid-tier sword that looks like it’s covered in barnacles, and then spend the rest of the game constantly having to upgrade it? I dunno, sounds like a waste to me!
It’s shitty that it’s even a thing, no doubt, but it doesn’t feel like the game was specially tweaked to drive the average person toward it, either. Some real “a fool and their money” kinda offerings.
I’ll be sure to check out Shadow of War at some point, so I know what I’m talking about and to see your work @BustedAstromech
I understand your explanation and of course I believe you over what dudes on the internet rhymed together for themselves. It’s just really unfortunate that things ended up looking as they did. I guess if the game had no microtransactions from the start you’d all be heroes of the industry now because as I understand it the game was really good. You must really want to have a word with Jim Sterling
The time-starved gamer is a thing but I don’t think they should be exploited. Just put these features in for free for them
As much as I’m (mostly) enjoying the game, the diminishing returns, especially coming off of Origins, is hitting hard.
Maybe more in this game than in Origins, it’s really easy to see the pieces that sort of hold everything together. Virtually identical forts, sometimes with virtually identical caves behind them, with all the same structures and bends and turns.
I mean, that’s the nature of using the assets at hand, but when Athens alone has something like four military bases within it, surrounded by four other forts, it’s…a lot, and not in a good way.
I dunno! Maybe the magic is worn off this time around, maybe Greece doesn’t have the same draw as Egypt, but this go around just doesn’t feel the same despite, uh, feeling very much the same?
I mean, I’ll forever be part of the problem and play these things until the wheels completely come off, but the idea of another one of these in a year or two, yeah, I dunno.
Also @BustedAstromech, I’ve been meaning to get back to Shadow of War for ages now. The stuff y’all did at Monolith with the game led to at least two or three moments that stand out as some of the most surprising I’ve probably ever had (trying to poison a nemesis orc, sneaking up to a rooftop, only for a chemist orc to talk shit about my poisoning skills…was very good an unexpected). Anyway, rest assured that comparing the merc system in Odyssey to Shadow of War or Mordor’s nemesis system is some extreme shorthand. It’s really not even close.
Thanks for the thoughts but don’t play this massive behemoth game just because I shaped the balance and progression systems; you can and will overdose on Assassin’s-likes and I can’t have that blood on my hands
That being said, I think the game is ok but it actually started singing once I built a mode to crank the difficulty up and it’s a real struggle to fill out your army when every death upgrades the enemy army; you honestly risk breaking your save and it’s a big strategy board and there are real consequences and–
unfortunately within the confines of Arkham-style combat high-skill means knowing arbitrary rule interactions more than basic movement, timing, positioning and I believe these high difficulty modes only work for people who already know the game backwards and front. I made it fun for myself, at least.
Hah, that’s fair. Though I’m a huge baby who never really plays beyond Normal, so I won’t see it the way it’s meant to be.
Still plugging away at this game. It’s exhausting.
“Mercenary looking for their family and unraveling a conspiracy plot” just doesn’t have the same hook as Origins and its “good dude and his wife are hornt for vengeance after their son dies, and seek to unravel a conspiracy plot as their relationship also unravels.”
At least they kept the one bit of Greek history I remember from college (everyone wants to fuck Socrates, the Man Who Will Not Fuck).
Yeah I don’t know how you can pay this if you already placed Origins. From what I’ve geard they’re just too similar. You gotta be a superfan to take that.
I’m 20 hours in and I’m loving it. There’s another system introduced at around 15 hours that I just love.
Also, I’m playing in exploration mode instead of guided and I’m really enjoying that. Truth be told it could be even more exploratory and I’d still be on board.
Athens is as big as the starting island and that’s hard to wrap my head around. Truly massive city, don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it in videogames. Also, ancient Athens is much prettier in this game than modern day Athens in real life. Especially because people on the street just jump out of your way when you ride past them and they never get in your hair trying to scam you somehow. What class!
I really like the gear in this. There’s some really cool looking armor and weapons in there.
Was so cool to meet the historical figures so far. I mean fucking Herodotos stands next to you on your ship as you do sea battle, how badass is that
Moving around the map never feels tedious. Everything is so well laid out. There’s always either something to discover or to look at on your way from A to B. Fast travel is really helpful too and the ft points are placed intelligently
This game’s been really good to me and I haven’t been bored a second by it yet
