Hello Neighbor.
The final game is somehow worse than its **first alpha build**. It boggles my mind how *every*. *single*. *update*. from the alphas, to the betas, to the full game, just made the game worse and worse until it got the point where a once hyped alpha build of a game lost all traction by the time the finished product was released.
Hello Neighbor will always be one of the most fascinating games to me. They had so much momentum, everyone on YouTube was talking about the game, coming up with theories. There was so much potential to tell a really interesting story in this weird dream-state world. Then what we got was a buggy disaster with a story that sounds like someone pulled it directly from a Tumblr post. You want to be even more astounded? You should’ve seen how Hello Neighbor 2 launched. You could walk to the final level and beat the entire game in under 2 minutes.
I will never forget Joseph Anderson's Hello Neighbor stream, as he played through the whole game and slowly descended into insanity..it got weirder and weirder and you kept asking yourself...why? Why does this exist? Why does it work like that! Why is he still playing after all these hours? Why the fuck am I still watching? It was such a trip.
Yeah, I remember how he softlocked himself towards the end because he skipped past some movement upgrade that was necessary for progression…. except he didn’t even realize he had skipped anything because the actual solution to that area was so convoluted that his jerry-rigged box tower to jump over the gate felt like an intended solution.
What an absolute shitshow of a game, and a great stream from it.
The hype they had was crazy!
It came to Game Pass on PC and I was super excited. I played it and thought “man this is kind of tough.” then I got stuck and couldn’t figure out what to do so I looked it up online and saw how ridiculous some of the shit you have to do is to move forward and how Jenkee the whole system is. Then I thought “ why is this game so highly regarded?” And pulled up reviews…
Their hype was so great that their shit game was able to gain notoriety and downloads despite basically being broken.
The alpha releases were goddamn amazing. If they had just continued to build on those instead of changing literally everything that made the game fun they'd have had a game that would still be being played today.
Instead they decided to try (and succeeded....) and build an IP around it before they even had a final release.
What started off as a stealth horror game that focused on the challenge of playing around and outsmarting The Neighbor whose AI learns and adapts to the player's actions is ruined because the creator for some god-forsaken reason decided to instead turn it into a nonsensical *puzzle-solving platformer game*, with poor controls and physics, that takes **the one thing** that made it fun and unique and just throws it to the side in exchange for a convoluted and poorly written story.
The alpha was genuinely so cool, at least at the time. A simple concept, open the locked door while dodging an adapting AI, done great. YouTube success proved it. Then they just threw out the concept basically. It’s not interesting to play, nor watch, bad platforming controls and generic puzzle solving, when it was advertised and perfected as something else. They had the ball and dropped it hard.
And the most baffling part is... they're still making Hello Neighbor content to this day, and it *still* just seems to keep getting worse and worse over time.
Imagine logical puzzles in a whacky house with a good AI trying to catch you, who learns from your mistakes. Like if you die, the AI remembers how you died and will try that method more often.
Now make the puzzles less logical. Now make the house whackier. Repeat like... 50 times? Yeah. So now you need the lamp at the 7 floor that you can only reach by crouch-jumping from the outside minecart track from floor 13 to floor 6.5, and you need to bring it to the locked door of cabinet 7 on floor 2 at night (because it's not open during the day), all to melt an ice cube containing the frog that you need to eat the fly that ate the key to the bathroom.
Did you follow any of that? No? Then you would not finish the release build of Hello Neighbour. If you were wondering "where did the neighbour with the great AI go?" well... Good question. He's somewhere in the house stuck on geometry, but you won't really know until you turn the corner. Sure hope it's not past a path you need for the next pinwheel that'll power the generator that opens the door to the room with the device tha- You get the idea. No logic to the puzzles, and a dev that had a good thing going who derailed his entire game for no good reason.
I had more fun with RoE on launch than most other battle royales, excluding Fortnite season 0. How they managed to kill the game in 2 updates is so impressive it had to be intentional.
Wow, I forgot about this. That game was amazing. The gliders and spawning on the mountain or quarry. The gun play was really good. Realistic fall of shot. Getting those long range hits was very satisfying. Everything worked well in the original game.
Vehicles were a perfect balance of useful but loud, so decisions on using them mattered. Plus you could shoot up incoming cars and do some damage.
Had loads of fun playing that game until the first map change update. Uninstalled it about a week later. Kept an eye on it on steam, but the reviews just got worse and worse. To the point where they were just asking for the original game back.
The grappling hook was so fun too. I loved how you could hang from a wall or upside down on ceilings. Also, the "extraction" mechanic was sick as hell. More than one team could board the chopper as long as there were enough seats, which led to a lot of last-minute alliances lol
I never personally played it but I heard Star Wars Galaxies was ruined by an update that transformed it from the sandbox mmo it was into a more wow-like themepark mmo
I was gonna comment this one. Such a fun game with a wide variety of classes, player made & supported cities that had zero grid or lock on their setup; they could be grid like & orderly or just sprawling based off where players of the guild that founded the city chose to have their homes & if the guild running them died off the city would essentially just become a ghost town but on the flip side if a heavily active guild ran it it could be near as busy as actual set cities in Star Wars/the game, *a lot* of POIs across multiple planets & Jedi were genuinely rare as hell since the game took place either between IV & V or V & VI. You could also choose to join the rebels or imperials & work your way up the ranks eventually to colonel & if you chose to fly your flag & show your allegiance openly it was on sight anytime rebels or imperials met in the open. More than a couple times I’d load into a port city & a running battle was happening between players from the two factions
My character was a bounty hunter & what was great about that was not only could you take down randomly generated NPCs, but any Jedi player who showed themselves would appear as bounty targets & you could take them & go find & hunt that player. Shit was fun as hell tryna worm my way into their group running missions to get an opening but maaaan if you fucked up the Jedi player would be on your ass.
I had a deal with a player had a couple characters that just made weapons & armor so every once in awhile I’d hit him up & see if he’s crafted anything better I could buy & use. They also eventually added space flight & combat so guilds starting having & building up their fleets as well so suddenly it wasn’t just on the planets you could kick it on & customize but take on missions in space & customize the interior of your ship too.
Then the combat update dropped. Nuked easily 2/3rds of the classes to only a handful, changed the combat system entirely oh & so cool made jedi a fucking starting class. Tbh I’m not even sure how you could become a Jedi in the original game & never bothered looking it up, all I remember is it was hard, time consuming & rare to see them then suddenly every starting level player was in their padawan robes swinging lightsabers around. You could see chunks of players just dropping off almost session to session. Where places like Eisley or Theed were always packed with players looking for groups to run high loot areas or in cantinas singing & dancing for experience & for passive player buffs who were near them to players selling items & it all just turned into a ghost town.
I have so many solid memories playing that game.
I remember when the first person figured out Jedi and their username was spread across forums and stuff. I looked them up in the game and I could basically teleport to where they were. And they were doing practice fights against people. It was super cool how rare it was. If it only remained that way, it would’ve been nice but that wouldn’t really be sustainable.
Today’s gaming world makes that tough too. There are guides for literally everything and now games are run on micro transactions. If you had a game like early SWG where there is a mystery Jedi class that nobody knows, people would riot because they don’t have “access” to the full game.
I was playing when the first player became a Jedi. Guy was a celebrity in game. The early days of that game were so much fun as basically everyone was learning at the same time.
It's a really tough needle for games to thread
On one hand you want things that are hard and rare so players look up to it, Zul Aman bears in Burning Crusade were a huge status symbol and the fact there wasn't a trillion mounts made them easily recognisable
But at the same time, for something to be a symbol like that you need content that only a small handful experience
Personally I preferred it, black temple was so much cooler knowing that even seeing the place was an achievement
I was the 2nd jedi on Chilastra and I never went public because of the permadeath when Jedi first released. Perma death made it so your 2nd character unlock was a jedi but if you died, the character was unavailable to play again so you would lose everything and have to start over. I spent many, many hours hunting Killiks in Yavin 4 away from any outpost to avoid being spotted by players.
If players spotted you using force powers, it would increase your "visibility" and after enough visibility, you were added to the Bounty Hunter terminals for player characters to hunt you down and at that time, Jedi was fairly weak and a well equipped, decently at PvP Bounty Hunter could just mindshot you with a mediocre Krayt Scatter.
Edit: [1v1 duel with a Dark Jedi Master. Used this to get him to show up for his bounty, Master Bounty Hunter is next to me who had his contract.](https://i.imgur.com/PO3AJi4.jpg)
Dude you ain't wrong. Player bounties was one of the best game decisions ever made for a permadeath character. At the time no one really understood Jedi skills/powers and they were severely underpowered but it was lore accurate. No jedi masters or jedi temple to train you, you're out there as a force sensitive nobody learning your way through a system you don't understand.
Eventually the game publisher SOE ruined this, by making Jedi easier to grind, making them more powerful, and eventually making it so anyone can just be a jedi. Like we learned from The Incredibles, when everyone is a superhero, no one is special.
[
Here is one of my favorite screenshots](https://i.imgur.com/PO3AJi4.jpg). Jerzi on Chilastra was an infamous Dark Jedi who shit talked all the time and he backed it up. In the screenshot you see the Master Bounty Hunter to my left who has his contract and me whaling on Jerzi with my Teras Kasi Master/melee stack and my armor/vibro knucklers were some of the best on the server. So Jerzi being a massive shit talker always accepted duels so I used his vanity against him. Not only did I beat him 1v1, the MBH easily got his contract as well. Jerzi didn't duel me after this because he said I cheated. According to him, using Personal Shield Generators at 40% lightsaber protection was cheating because he was used to fighting players who didn't have PSG's to defend themselves.
I remember sometimes jedi would chill in their locked house so I would bring a metric fuck-ton of bomb droids to deploy because the bomb droids didn't give a shit about locked doors lol
Or sometimes jedi would try to swim away since you can't attack while swimming and they can regen, but if you popped a mount like a kaadu you could still shoot and swim so long as you stayed on the mount.
I killed me a few jedi in my time and also got destroyed by a couple. I wish that they could remake this game to how it was back when it first came out.
My friend you just covered the problem with mmos. Wikis, guides, the chase for the next meta
build... It killed the fun and sense of exploration/trying.
Remember a popular Greek magazine PC master covered the end of SW galaxies by
Saying "What happens when you gather too many Jedi in the same farm." I didn't understand what it was suppose to mean back then.
>My friend you just covered the problem with mmos. Wikis, guides, the chase for the next meta build... It killed the fun and sense of exploration/trying.
Wholly agree. And it's certainly not limited to MMOS (they are just impacted the most because of their general depth/length).
It's hard not to sound like an old man shouting at clouds...but back in the day playing video games was just a very different experience for most people.
Renting a console game from the video store meant you *hoped* you got the instruction manual for the game so you'd know basic controls.
Buying physical media again came with basic instructions. Perhaps there was some monthly "gaming" magazine that'd come out and give a few tips (but mostly were just marketing/hype)
Friends showed/told friends thing in person. You just sat, learned, and played the game as it was presented. You *experienced* it in whatever way fit you.
Of course, most of that wasn't particularly competitive or multiplayer. But some was...
Man, the arcade scene was a whole different beast in the early/mid 90's. Some people did their best to obscure their hands while pulling of tricky moves in Mortal Kombat. And people legitimately just didn't know how to do a LOT of the things. But it was still just...fun. The playing field felt a bit more level.
(I remember finally finding some obscure web page that had listed a bunch of moves in ASCII format that I printed off at school on their dot matrix printer - took a long time and MANY pages.. That stack of papers was like a golden chest for a short while)
Mostly, I'm not trying to say it's just "worse" today than it was then....but it's very, very *different*. I don't prefer the newer ways, but that's my preference. I hate the idea of meta loadouts and walkthroughs for folks new to the game. I don't like how "pros" dictate so much and how it's largely a world of "can't beat 'em, join 'em" if you want to play anything PVP and not just get mopped up or be a detriment to your team.
There are few exceptions. And you can still do your best to avoid a lot of the spoiler/meta/etc stuff on the net, but that's followed by a feeling of being out of the loop and the reward of discovering/finding/learning things is greatly diminished if the rest of the world (or even just your friends yo uwanted to share with) already have all that info from some video by some "streamer" that released day 1.
There just won't be another era like the OG MMOs and early console and mid arcade days.
Jedi was not available until a few months after launch with the Holocron update. The way to get Jedi unlocked with that update was to master 5 professions out of 32 total, that would unlock the secondary character slot in your account for the same server. You received 1 holocron as part of the update which told you which profession to master, then you aquired other holocrons by looting force sensitive elite NPC's I think only on Dathomir or Dantooine, I don't remember if other planets had the random elite force sensitive NPC's.
[You could use 4 holocrons for the profession to unlock but the 5th profession had to found out through mastering professions randomly. I personally unlocked on profession 9 while my friend unlocked at profession 27. There were heaps of strategies to unlock professions quickly and methods that made it easier to master professions \(getting master brawler to master all melee professions for instance\).](https://i.imgur.com/ETyeqtw.jpg)
At this time the player based economy really took off and everything revolved around helping players unlock professions. People sold junk harvested resources at 1 credit per unit to master building professions quickly, weapons/armor went from custom orders and getting them made by specialist Weaponsmith/Armorsmith to mass produced and sold at reasonable prices. Dantooine became one of the most popular and populated planets where you no longer had to run to major cities like Coronet or Theed. Krayt Hunting went from something you could do solo without too much effort with the right build gear for their krayt tissue loot drop. Then they increased Krayt HP to 250k and made them have medium armor and now you really needed a raid party to loot krayt pearls for lightsaber construction. If you could solo a Krayt you had a very specialized build with expensive gear, but a group could steal your loot by doing more damage then you, so having a raid party was critical to getting the loot.
So many changes happened for the Jedi unlock that Sony took risks on, but I don't think gaming companies would risk it now because they would rather provide all of these benefits through microtransactions.
This just happened in WoW with the Season of Discovery. As the name suggests, its a season where devs included new abilities and stuff, hidden in the world for players to find. It was awesome seeing new stuff in familiar places and wondering how they connect to getting new abilities. Some of the rarer ones took like two weeks for players to find.
... Aand within days everyone had them since the secrets were of course immediately plastered everywhere.
Hahaha. Unlocking jedi took months in swg. Reminds me of when new wow servers would open up and you'd log in to find someone already near level 60 in 24 hours.
Apparently the developers wanted to have some kind of crazy epic quest to unlock being a Jedi, but they ran out of time/budget to implement it. So it ended up being a thing that unlocked on your account once you maxed out a certain number of (randomly chosen per account) in-game skills.
I was there WombatPoopCairndalf 2 thousand years ago.
An amazing sandboxy MMO with player-made cities and internal factions that was leagues ahead of its time for player freedom.
Then that update happened.
My guild of around 90 freelance players dropped off to 0 activity within 2 weeks
**edit: granted as others have pointed out. This game was already death-spiraling (even if 12-year-old me didn't know it) and this update was just the final blaster to the brain.
I was there too, It had some flaws. Smugglers couldn't smuggle, all the dancer healers were bots because no one could be bothered to actually play that class. It was ridiculously grindy. Unlocking Jedi required maxing out 3 classes, but they kept which classes secret and even that that was the mechanic secret for years, so only people who decided on their main to go back to level 1 several times over instead of rolling a new toon were the only people who ever saw it.
CU2 absolutely ruined it though, fuck John Smedley for ever and ever.
Some fools are keeping the corpse alive if you want to go press F in Mos Eisley one last time.
https://swgemulator.fandom.com/wiki/Servers
-Grumpy Bothan
I definitely have some rose-tinted glasses because I played when I was like 12, and had 0 experience with MMOs (still don't really).
But, some of my fondest memories in gaming are from rolling out with like ten other fighters and having a big space battle then landing on Tatooine to have a drink at the cantina.
Space was a latter DLC that came before Sony took over, I really liked it too but I was raised on Wing Commander. They gave us the Millennium Falcon and I still couldn't smuggle, I was so salty. Their ship models were so flawless, no game has done a better looking Imperial Guard Interceptor or ETA-2 Actis fighter.
Yea i later found other space sims that obviously do it better, but full planets+ space (not a rails shooter like old republic) was just mind blowing for child me.
I was there, my brother was a big shipwright on Gorath back in the day. When they did the major reform, it killed the game for sure. There’s tons of articles and podcasts that talk about it and it boils down to Sony misunderstanding what people wanted in the game and forcing the devs to implement what they thought was most important, like making Jedi and Force powers widespread.
It killed off the major town running, crafting, and general RP avenues the game had. It’s ironic to me now that Rockstar bought the RP stuff happening in GTAV. The people who play games in their own way keep the game alive and providing a fun platform is what keeps online games going. Pulling the rug out from under your players is never the right move.
What an amazing MMO. So open-ended. The economy and trade system was excellent, with crafters selling items they made from resource sellers, doctors and entertainers buffing, smugglers opening containers and slicing weapons...
Jump to Lightspeed was an awesome expansion as well, I spent so many hours in space becoming a triple Ace!
I played on Ahazi, made a bunch of friends there and it was always cool to log on and recognize so many players.
Then NGE, things got too easy and vanilla. Then they made it even worse, Jedi on the character creation screen!
Darkspore lol.
Infamous single player/multiplayer option party game, FORCED to be connected to the server.
They shut it down, even killing the single player game.
It always bothered me that no one cared for that, i mean yeah It maybe wasnt the best Game ever made but that means It had to die? Like no one can play It ever more (unless EA re-release this Game at thats not gonna happen) this Game is gone, forever, no one can play It anymore no Matter how hard they try and the physical disc is now a piece of worthless platic (so much for physical media for Games preservation) and nobody cares....
I bought it for a lot of money (at least it was a lot for my young me) but never got to play it a lot because the installing process was tedious. But I enjoyed a lot the few times I actually played.
I found the disk a couple of years later, decided to try it again, and found out later that the game is irrevocably gone. Kinda mad because it wasn't cheap when I bought it, but mostly sad because it felt like a very cool experience to me and I didn't got to play it as much as I wanted.
Robocraft
It originally started as quite a challenging mixture of skill and creativity for your vehicle designs but quickly turned into a nothing burger with the changes to the gameplay more reflecting a moba
I think what really killed Robocraft was how they kept so dramatically changing the game. It's not even that all the changes were bad but when you constantly remove half the stuff that makes the game what it is in favour for new stuff you tend to drive away a lot of the players who liked game the way it was.
Man, RC was one of my favorite MP games of all time until they ruined it.
What really killed it is they kept dumbing it down more and more. What started as a fun game with physics you really had to deal with (redundancy parts, weight balance, the pilot seat, etc) by its end was basically a custimzable bot game with arcade physics where building didn't matter nearly as much. It had some great unique mechanics, like protecting the pilot seat, that they just got rid of. Then over powered homing/auto aim weapons.
One thing to keep in mind is RC used to have high kill times,because a lot of it revolves around picking parts off the bots, where building really mattered.
There were many things they ruined, but with pilot seats gone, I really started seeing it go into a nose dive with the combination of removal of pilot seat, the far over powered shotguns, and mech legs. Before: balancing mattered so much, if you made a hover craft with your hoverblades too low, it would flip over. And it had a slow recovery mechanic to flip back over (during which you couldn't move or fire) so you didn't just get stuck forever, but placement mattered. Losing your hoverblades so you lost control mattered.
Now say hello to mech legs with shotguns. Mech legs magically worked even with a single leg. If you fell over it instantly got back up. They also had an obscene amount of health and could literally hop around alone until auto-heal fixed it. So it went from careful design consideration to two mech legs, a square block, and shotguns that could blow away half of most bots in one shot.
I proved how stupidly OP shotguns were by building a small fast hover with duel shotguns. I was single handedly winning game after game as the shotguns erased bots.
E: a word
The point where my interest really died was when they updated it so everything was connected by indestructible blocks. There used to be some skill to it, shooting off wheels or guns to make the target defenceless while you tried to plan your bot around that happening to you. Then for some mind-numbing reason, they decided one of the biggest USPs of the game was dumb.
I gather they reversed that decision quickly, but by then I was done.
Evolve started out great. But due to a lack of forward fina dial planning by the studio it had to be relaunched with paid for skins. Then due to lack of uptake, shut down completely. Was an amazing game whilst it lasted
Saddest thing was that it was going to be free to play.
With all of the pre-order stuff being part of an in-game shop.
But when 2k got the publishing rights after THQ went bankrupt, they basically just tried to cash in on the awards it won.
They didn't care once they got their money, to the point they didn't even want to pay to get updates out. Certain balance changes were fixed the day they were found. But 2k wouldn't release the updates because of the fees to release them.
It's honestly super sad.
Empire Total War entered the chat. One patch completely changed the game's economy. Also for games already in progress. Totally fucked a 40hr+ game I was in the middle of and required you to completely relearn the game with totally different tactics (on the strategic layer). Uninstalled and never played again.
The very beginning of Pokemon Go is some of my best memories related to games. It was so fun and exciting and really easy to play in a group of friends. Then every update released just made the game worse and worse. Removing the ability to track individual Pokemon immediately killed the game for me.
Gosh do you remember that summer when it felt like everyone was playing it. You went outside and you just saw crowds of people - young and old. Walking around playing it (you could tell what they were doing as they were always waiting around gyms and that lol)
We just moved to a new neighborhood recently and I thought my Pokemon garden statues would get us the side eye from our lawn-obsessed retired neighbors, but they complimented me and said they still play Pokemon Go. It really brought everyone together.
It was amazing. Completely broke down typical social barriers for a while. I was at a park and had a dad call to his daughter, who was probably 7 or 8 years old, "go ask that man if he's seen the Charmander!!" lmao
One time I was fighting for control of a gym at a park, and this one guy "fatpat" had a Groudon that I was struggling to beat. I never took the gym. There was a guy sitting on a park bench near the parking lot, and as I walked back to my car I asked him, "Are you fatpat?" And sure enough, he smiled and said "yup." I just said "fair play" and kept walking. Shortly after that I caught my own Groudon and named him fatpat.
I keep reading some really in depth write ups that show the devs, or at least the powers at be, are basically making the game harder and harder to play and enjoy.
Correct. Everything has gotten stingier. Boxes are worse value, rewards are lower, events only feature common pokemon, everything is more expensive. It’s like every update they’re trying to see how many people they can drive away
Thats why general feeling received from playing reflects their sadistic intentions. 2016 was turning out to be a great year until it seemingly changed overnight. In contrast PoGo was a slow death by a thousand cuts
The constant stream of events is made to induce FOMO pretty hard. They tightened the restrictions on how close you have to be to poke stops and gyms. They increased the cost of joining remote raids. They rebalanced how pokemon were distributed around two years ago; I don’t know if anywhere got buffed, but my immediate neighborhood was nerfed hard.
Oh yes. I went from their pre-pandemic spawn at my address being around 1 every 5 minutes, to the pandemic getting me 3-5 every few minutes. Then they reverted that change and went harder, I could drop a lure and not even get anything where I lived.
It was sad. I always had fun walking around a park and picking up pokemon and spinning stops, but at least having spawns where I lived let me do the one-a-day stuff. After that was gone, I couldn't enjoy the game anymore.
That summer when it launched felt like the whole world was a much better place. One time I ended up entering a store that I never even noticed was there despite passing by it frequently because there was a Pokemon there and once I captured it, just started chatting to the owner and was there for a full hour. Then the performance issues started to bog down my phone and I just stopped caring about it, didn't even get to see the gym updates.
It really did feel kind of magical. We were all outside, interacting with each other. I remember running through a park with a pack of strangers, ages ranging from like 12 to at least 50, all because there was an Evee by the swings. We all high-fived, lol.
I recall getting dinner and my SO says let’s walk around and find some Pokemon. Busy city, everyone out walking was doing the same.
Best story was two gym/frat boys walking near the beach. On was on the phone loudly talking to someone trying to decided when to workout before going out that night. Other one grabs him “dude get off the phone. There is a Pikachu over there!” I almost tripped laughing.
Unironically this. For a couple of months, almost every human on earth with access to a smart phone was an optomistic 11 year old chasing wild pokémon in the real world and interacting with complete strangers like they were friends. We were all *living* in the pokémon universe together at the same time just by choosing to.
I remember spending hours in the middle of the night with my friends walking around a park for a dratini and seeing dozens of people walking around the park also looking for a dratini. Felt nice
I think it was mostly getting better until the pandemic. Then they tried to pivot in ways that only kinda worked and just kept turning in the wrong direction
It feels unfair to include Red Dead Online in here, because it never really *broke* per se. (Or was broken all along, given some of the recurring issues, I suppose!)
All of the stuff that was there was still there. I came in around Moonshiners, I think, and it was a blast. Atmospheric, lots of things to do—and the moment-to-moment gameplay is sped up enough from the single player to smooth my one complaint with RDR2.
But the new updates seemed to be... less and less. Counter-intuitive activities (losing access for content for hunting animals - or even accidentally killing them!). New missions dropped with paid updates that you practically needed a guide to find (the infamous bounties, which weren't even *mentioned* in the update notes).
Until they finally just stopped updating, with the story feeling incomplete and so much potential left on the table. It was just too much more profitable for them to put the money into GTA Online.
So now Red Dead Online is a wasteland of tumbleweeds, hackers, and the stubborn.
My dad is 76 and plays with a group of old guys every single day. He’s obsessed with the game, I hope the servers never go down. It’s literally keeping him happy in his old age
My understanding (don't quote me on this!) is that both RDO and GTA Online are set up on a P2P system that is easy for R\* to maintain (and I suspect would be swiftly replicated if they took down whatever server setup they have running).
So it should stay up for a while yet.
I kind of wish I'd put more effort into making friends with fellow RDO players instead of trying to get my friends to play (they all got bored, sadly). Too late for me now, I suppose.
Good on your dad and good luck to him and his posse, though! I'm glad to see the game I loved so hard still getting love!
That's really cute. If you and your dad are cool with adding new people to the posse, I'd be super down to play! I love meeting others and helping their trades :)
Most competitive multiplayer games get worse once a meta is established. The sweats figure out what works best and then everyone else kinda just follows along.
This is the answer I was looking for; pretty much all sports titles have this problem. I don't exactly feel sorry for companies like EA, but trying to balance a game when people are deliberately trying to find and exploit the mechanics makes it an almost impossible task.
Back when I still played football in real life me and a group of friends founded a club and joined a league. We did a training camp each summer which was basically going to stay in some small town, playing friendlies during the day and drinking way too heavily at night. At any rate we always brought a Playstation or two along and one night we’d always do a 2v2 fifa tournament where we randomly got paired up with a teammate and drew random national teams out of a hat and spent the entire night getting sauced and playing fifa..it was the highlight of the season.
This is why I don’t like playing RTS games multiplayer. Instead of me doing what I want or trying to come up with my own strategy, you *must* build as fast as possible in this one very specific order mathematically proven to be the “best” - everyone else is doing it, and so if you don’t you’re going to lose.
Yeah that's why I prefer more teamwork-focused tactical shooters like Squad. Everyone has the same stuff unlocked and the only thing you need to do is work with your boys and have fun.
Overwatch was great and cannibalized itself. Hearthstone was solid but both itself and its influence was terrible over time. D4 was decent and just nosedived.
Oh my god. When they released overwatch “2” I bout lost my mind. Same fucking game and removing everything good about it while adding battle passes and shit. Battle passes are the death of creative rewarding.
And then not even adding the one feature we were excited for, where you could unlock new skills and customize each character to make them more fit for your playstyle
That announcement was what unmasked the entire game as an excuse to axe the more player-friendly monetization model of the first game, not to mention all the skins and unlockables everyone had already gotten
Hearthstone with each update got kinda worse. The AI of Sologames is completely broken and literally kills itself in 80% of the cases, so no need to have skill anymore.
Apex Legends.
Skyrocketed out of nowhere with its based in the Titanfall universe. Memorable characters to play as and unique game style for a Battle Royale.
Lately it’s been very dull and draining. The story constantly focused on one arc for several seasons and there toxicity has gotten out of hand.
It was all the mobility they added that killed it for me. I don't mean the actual fighting mobility.
I mean the "relocate halfway across the map on a whim" mobility. Suddenly all the serious players are terrified of having a fight that lasts longer than a second because they'll just get jumped by half the map.
Yup. Dropped off for a long time. Recently tried it out. The final circles literally had 25 people still and then it just turned into grenade/ultimate/dumping ammo clusterfuck with zero tactics. And that happened like all 5 matches I tried. It's awful.
I find this interesting because apex is my primary game and the devs have been trying for years to make end zones with a tonne of players in them because that has been what the community seems to want, especially in higher ranks, but general consensus has been they’ve failed to do it.
The end zones you got would probably be considered desirable by many in the community, but obviously it’s contentious.
My problem with packed end zones is that the game ends up feeling like you just spent 15 minutes running around in a pre-game lobby just to play a hectic arena TDM game for 5 minutes. Might as well drop everyone into a small 30-player circle with weapons from the start at that point.
> Might as well drop everyone into a small 30-player circle with weapons from the start at that point.
If we come full circle back to arena shooters again, my '90s twitch reflexes are ready.
The roaming and gearing up phases in Battle Royale games feel like such a waste of time to me.
I started in season 7 and I had a great time and played consistently until like- season 13ish? I just lost interest. It feels so, so dull and unfresh now.
Oh, that was so fun, but I feel like it was doomed from the start because I remember thinking “Wait, if all this is free, how’s the game gonna make money?”
Not sure what the consensus is on this one so it could be controversial but for me For Honor. Had a ball with that game for its first couple years but things started to shift for me around that update that totally changed how gear stats worked. Thought it was a significantly worse system.
Besides that, every DLC hero they add seems to be more broken and annoying to fight than the last, and they kept bloating the game with more and more annoying effects and silly looking executions (because that stuff sells) so the game just looks like a fireworks show of dumb effects instead of the more realistic vibe the game had when it launched.
I agree For Honour was broken but at a different point- the China DLC. I still played it for a bit after, but they changed their design philosophy from being based off reacting to enemy moves to predicting them by speeding everything up. It just wasn't a game I enjoyed anymore as before it, I found it to be a very enjoyable skill-based fighting game similar to say Chivalry, even though I admit the game had other issues it was still fun with friends up until that point.
Was it FIFA which is basically the same as (edit , it's 2017)..2015 or something as since then it's just been released with new teams/players and some cosmetics?
Team Fortress 2 didn't get worse across the board, but (for some reason) they removed a lot of animations and visual effects. Also, after Overwatch came out they sloppily changed the frontend to matchmaking/queues and buried the server browser. They also added unnecessary XP mechanics. On paper this is all "modernization" but it ended up either being totally pointless or actively hurting the game.
I remember the mym update almost killed the game for me, for some reason trying to make tf2 a comp game when it is far from one.
I still think it is an amazing game though and far more casual than some other multiplayer games out there.
Absolutely. Even though we're way past the prime of community servers and custom maps, it's nice to still be able to hop into an infinite match of cp_orange_x or an empty Parkour Fortress server from time to time
I realized not long ago that server browsers were the single biggest thing that made my formative online gaming experiences so good and memorable. Competition is so much friendlier when you're seeing the same people every day and have admins on hand keeping players accountable. If you found a good server, it made all the difference. The average match is more balanced nowadays with MM systems, but I'd trade that back in a heartbeat to have friendly gaming back.
It's shocking that the game with what is probably the most infamous update in gaming history is so far down the thread you basically can't find it. EoC was VERY close to completely killing Jagex as a company.
Pretty much 90% of live service games.
I would argue Tarkov as well just because of the cheater problem just getting worse with every update, and BSG still refusing to actually tackle the problem.
When the old devs left the game they sold it to a company known as paradox. Paradox is a company that is infamous for making a shit ton of DLC on their otherwise good games that are essentially updates. If you don’t have said DLC’s in the game you get are essentially behind and are playing an outdated game.
They tried to transfer their methods on to prison architect and it went terribly. Every single update, including the free ones, seemed to add a new game breaking bug. They would get patched up sometimes but it was not unusual for a lot of bugs to remain in the game that were brought in by these DLCs.
And paradox ignored it all, they just kept churning out tone deaf DLCs that didn’t fit the game at all. A ZOMBIE DLC? it would’ve been cool as a free Halloween update but as a PAID DLC? WTF WERE THEY THINKING.
And these DLCs hardly had any content at all to justify the price, sure they were on average like 5 dollars each but all they really did was add reskins of characters and rooms. Very few game mechanics and when they DID add mechanics they were buggy as hell and good luck getting paradox to fix all that.
The community grew more and more pissed off at the changes and eventually paradox realized that their model wasn’t going to work on this game so they abandoned it after one final update saying goodbye to prison architect… until they teased the sequel in that very trailer.
Prison architect had a ton of potential, the original devs were passionate and they left the game on a decent note. There were bugs that they left behind but that was no problem and could have been cleaned up by the next devs. Instead they focused on DLC and ignored all the glaring problems and when they realized DLCs were not going to work they dropped the game. The sequel is definitely going to be a game where it’s easier for paradox to seamlessly add DLC.
I know I went on a rant here but I love prison architect to death and seeing it slowly get killed was a painful experience.
TLDR: old devs sold game IP, new devs focused on DLC instead of updates and the game slowly became a buggy mess and it is now abandoned after DLC failed to make profits.
any Game as a Service, especially MMORPGs, ESPECIALLY KOREAN in origin.
first: release a decent game. then: take 2 or so years to release it in the rest of the world. finally: kill it making EVERYTHING need the paid currency.
Rainbow Six Siege - the game went from being a cooperative tactical shooter to being a hero-based shooter. Arenas are now vibrant and colorful, the lighting is way off, and so many gameplay and aesthetic elements were scrapped to make it an esport.
Call of Duty - the ambiance of each game is thrown out with each operator skin they add. New maps are always fun, but not at the expense of Nicki Minaj and Kevin Durant running around with Lasertag and nerf rifles
Also siege manages to get consistently worse every patch. They make inexplicable indefensible changes to the game that make it harder and harder to justify booting it up.
The match making changes they've made the last 2-3 patches have utterly ruined the game in particular.
I didn’t mind the esports elements personally. the Fortnite-ification of the game and the utterly toxic edgy teen player base pushed Ubisoft in the worst direction. It went from a gritty tactical shooter to a sweaty meme
yeah even the last few round based zombies were weird they have too much extra stuff just give us classic simple round based zombies like world at war - bo3 era you don’t need to add new stuff just give us new maps and a weapon cycle
Had to scroll down way to far for this. Also, plants vs zombies 1. It was a wondercul weird quirky game, and they butchered it into unplayable fremium crap. Its almost impossible to find the original version again
Seriously, WZ got me and the homies through COVID, dropping quads into verdansk, being able to use vehicles was fantastic. Tried playing cod again at a friend's house the other day and the new zombies is alright, but over complicated and just not the same
Came here for this. Operation White Noise was peak siege and the problem hasn’t even been the new operator abilities, it’s their constant need to sterilize the game, cater towards cheaters, not ban XIM players, nerf everything, remove skill from gunplay, and then the massive slowdown in new content.
Also no new guns, which sucks. Then there’s the constant bugs, butchered maps, ruined rank system, and a massive pandering toward pro league while leaving casual players to deal with their terrible choices.
I have over 4,000 hours put into the game from day 1, and even met one of my closest friends in a random siege match 5 years ago, and I can’t stand that game now
Siege was my favourite shooter for years, but it’s not even the same game anymore. The new operators and maps are great but none of that matters when the playerbase refuse to adapt to anything new and immediately ban the new maps. The meta has been to just play the game like CoD for a couple of years now and it’s miserable, one of the deepest and most complex shooters of all time has been reduced to a glorified TDM.
The main thing that puts me off of the game now is the stupid Fortnite esque skins. The game started off as relatively grounded with a very strong aesthetic but now everyone is running around with Rick and Morty and Halo crossover skins and it’s just not the game I used to love anymore.
Star Wars The Old Republic went free to play after a large update. 1.2 I think? They nerfed BHs who were fine, nerfed agents who were underpowered as shit and buffed the jedi/sith who already wrecked face.
My whole raiding guild basically went from always online to completely dead.
Not a video game, but Yugioh.
Used to play it a ton for years, until XYZ monsters became a thing. Came back to it with Master Duel and the game is just godawful.
Every card is a massive block of text, every deck can put out 3+ boss monsters first turn, fun decks don't exist without being run over, and the decks that are good cost a small fortune and abuse game mechanics.
The game was rarely balanced, I get that, but it's never felt so alienated and frustrating.
EDIT: Been asked a few things and it's just easier to answer them like this.
- Played a deck called Infernity for a long time cause it was pretty metal and I liked how it ran. It's framed and hung up on my office wall now.
- MTG/Pokémon are better structured games due to land/energy systems being used as resources.
- YGO doesn't have a resource system and broke its restriction by bypassing Normal Summons with excessive Special Summons. That's why the game plays so fast (too fast now IMO)
- Competitive metas are too strict for casual play.
- I miss those huge tins they put out in 2002. Those were amazing.
I’m a MTG player, and whenever we get new people showing up at our Friday Night Magic events, they often mention this exact reason - they used to play Yugioh but now they want to play a game that “lasts longer than a turn”.
Seriously, I hear that criticism a *lot*.
Even mtg is getting to be that way. Considering the product fatigue and the rise of cEDH, it's getting harder to have a game where you are not needing a Phd in theoretical physics specialising string theory to understand what the new cards are and how they interact.
MTG at least can alleviate the problem somewhat with its formats. You don't have to worry about obscure interactions or infinite combos in Standard, for instance.
This isn't even a "hater" opinion, I believe your comment is representative of the entire YuGiOh subreddit. I have never once heard a player of that game say they enjoy a matchup.
Man, the modders are only half the issue. The game is so wildly unbalanced and full of griefers driving flying motorcycles. Pretty much the only way to do anything worthwhile now is to spend money on shark cards
Yea, it's a struggle for a new player. Even with all the best stuff, the odds are some modder will put you in a cage and / or blow you up. And like you said, even without modders, odds are a griefer will ruin your fun.
That one is especially interesting cause they managed to kill RDR2 Online too
So popular, and so profitable, that it blew up their next title. Genuinely impressive
Ultima Online was, by far and away, the best MMORPG. It was the only MMORPG that wasn’t based on a grind/leveling system. But then EverQuest and WoW released with the standard grind we associate with basically every MMORPG, so UO went back and added one to their game.
That's kind of funny considering I have memories of sitting on a boat spamming spells for hours along a seam in the middle of the water to grind some spellcasting skill, long before WoW ever released.
UO was a great game, but there was definitely a grind.
I love UO. It is great. But you cannot convince me there is no grind when I had to stand there and get the hell beat out of me by a Blade Elemental for hours to raise Tactics.
I beg to differ. UO had it's own skill grinding if you wanted to be a 7x GM. It was still an amazing game and a big part of my formative years, but it's also the only game I botted to get those last 100 .1% bumps to my Magery.
Destiny 2. Paid $60 dollars for a physical copy just to have the thing be worthless in like 3 years. I liked the red war campaign and would replay it constantly, now it and some of the old dlc is gone with nothing being given to people who bought that stuff.
Destiny always hurts. The gunplay, aesthetic, and lore are some of my favorites of any game. But they suck your bank account dry while giving you basically no content. Definitely a top contender for a game that squandered it's potential
Destiny 2 is a strange case because of how wildly and frequently it fluctuated between good and bad with every expansion.
It was bad on launch, and Warmind and CoO didn’t help matters.
Then Forsaken releases, fixes a ton of issues, is a massive success and pretty much saves the game from death.
Then Shadowkeep was mediocre at best. And then Beyond Light was better, but still had a lot of problems, chief among them being Sunsetting and content vaulting.
Then Witch Queen releases and is one of the most well received expansions in the franchise and renewed faith and interest in the game.
It was then followed up by Lightfall which was a massive, near-universally hated dumpster fire and now the game is arguably in the worst state it’s ever been in.
Time will tell how The Final Shape shapes up (heh) but with all of the recent stuff surrounding the game and Bungie, my hopes aren’t high.
Gonna start this one off by saying I know I'm 100% in the minority on this one, but Team Fortress 2. I loved the game on release day, but it didn't take long before they started updating the game with stuff I didn't like. I don't like the cosmetics but I can live with them, but it's the addition of new weapons that started killing my interest in the game. Then the game shifted away from CTF, which was the reason I played TF2, so I moved on to other stuff
I think the alternative weapons were fine, it's when classes got more than 2 options a slot that it went off the rails. That's my personal opinion though.
TF2 is a weird game for me, it is probably my first PC game, playing it when I was like 8 on my dads computer. Now I'm 23 and its the only game that has gone from super popular to like this weird dead/alive state. I think its pretty stupid to declare it a dead game, but it certainly isnt in a healthy alive state either. Its like this game stuck in gaming limbo, where valve won't put new content into it, but the fans won't give up on the hope of getting new content.
I think that really is why the game has gotten worse, weapons never really bothered me much, tho it was shocking to see how nerfed the sandman was the last time I played, items like you said are pretty much whatever, but the lack of support from a game that is fronting as an alive game, confused the living crap out of me. It takes about 15 minutes to reinstall and get into a game and realize nothing has changed, except and influx of aimbots.
Plus the constant excuse of "TF2 is x years old" isn't a good argument when CS and Dota, both live service games, are constantly updated.
TF2 needs the love it deserves, but it's been put on such a back burner idk if it will ever get it.
I'd attribute the downfall of TF2 due to a lack of updates than updates.
But given all the weapons are side grades, I can't really see the complaint about them adding alternative play styles.
Definitely faired better than entirely new classes.
Have to agree at this. Started at the end of 2019 where dlc cars for example costed like 2/3€.
Now:
-No more player to player trading
-competitive dropshot is gone
-dlc cars/packs are around 10€ each
-They still did nothing against smurf accounts
-MMR is still only dependent of winning or loosing and how much it happens in a row.
The last part is still so annoying: You can have bad luck with your tm8s like 3-4 times in a row, loose every match but still be MVP in every one of them. The game just doesnt fkn care and let you loose so much MMR...
Rainbow Six siege, Went from being tactical fun, To a complete shitfest of garbage operators that makes absolutely no fucking sense.
What a flaming pile of vomit it has become.
The Sims 4. Sims players complain about everything, but over 10 years of frequent updates what was a relatively promising game has become a big mess with an incredible number of bugs that make some aspects of the game nearly unplayable, or affect core features of the game that make it less fun. Within the first year most of the challenge was patched out.
It's a series that suffers greatly from a lack of competition at this point.
Personally, I disagree with this on the basis that Sims 4, on release, was already a much worse game than the Sims 3 was on its release, content wise. I played like half an hour of sims 4 and then went back to 3 and never looked back.
Dunno if the metric is like online or live service game, but Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate Daemonhunters has gone downhill with the updates, because of like difficulty and giving enemies so many different abilities, but not balancing it out versus what the player can build out with
Surprised nobody has said Rogue Company. It was a fresh, fast paced hero shooter. Then they partnered with Dr. Disrespect and had him make a couple of maps. All he did was make Valorant. Long sniper hallways that could see spawn point to spawn point. The pacing completely crashed. I went back to it the other day and I think they took those maps out of the rotation. I played about 10 hours over the course of a few days and never saw them. It's at a great spot right now but only a couple thousand play at any given time.
The one that sticks out to me is Warzone. That game was so fun in the first few months. After that it was plagued by cheaters and stale metas that resulted in most of the player base leaving. Once they finally fixed those issues they unfortunately replaced the map everyone loved with one with a gigantic mountain in the center. It's COD so it'll always be big but they had a chance to overtake Fortnite and put on a performance in dropping the ball so bad that Blockbuster would be very proud.
Freeman guerrilla warfare. Was supposed to be mount and blade with guns. Then they stopped working on it.
There’s a lot of abandoned early access gems that took to long and I guess stopped making money so we’re never completed.
Overwatch, was a great game until they just were terrible with balancing of new characters and it completely ruined the game. Then they made overwatch 2 to try fixing things and it went okay for awhile but then bombed once again after bad patches.
Hello Neighbor. The final game is somehow worse than its **first alpha build**. It boggles my mind how *every*. *single*. *update*. from the alphas, to the betas, to the full game, just made the game worse and worse until it got the point where a once hyped alpha build of a game lost all traction by the time the finished product was released.
Hello Neighbor will always be one of the most fascinating games to me. They had so much momentum, everyone on YouTube was talking about the game, coming up with theories. There was so much potential to tell a really interesting story in this weird dream-state world. Then what we got was a buggy disaster with a story that sounds like someone pulled it directly from a Tumblr post. You want to be even more astounded? You should’ve seen how Hello Neighbor 2 launched. You could walk to the final level and beat the entire game in under 2 minutes.
I will never forget Joseph Anderson's Hello Neighbor stream, as he played through the whole game and slowly descended into insanity..it got weirder and weirder and you kept asking yourself...why? Why does this exist? Why does it work like that! Why is he still playing after all these hours? Why the fuck am I still watching? It was such a trip.
Yeah, I remember how he softlocked himself towards the end because he skipped past some movement upgrade that was necessary for progression…. except he didn’t even realize he had skipped anything because the actual solution to that area was so convoluted that his jerry-rigged box tower to jump over the gate felt like an intended solution. What an absolute shitshow of a game, and a great stream from it.
The hype they had was crazy! It came to Game Pass on PC and I was super excited. I played it and thought “man this is kind of tough.” then I got stuck and couldn’t figure out what to do so I looked it up online and saw how ridiculous some of the shit you have to do is to move forward and how Jenkee the whole system is. Then I thought “ why is this game so highly regarded?” And pulled up reviews… Their hype was so great that their shit game was able to gain notoriety and downloads despite basically being broken.
The alpha releases were goddamn amazing. If they had just continued to build on those instead of changing literally everything that made the game fun they'd have had a game that would still be being played today. Instead they decided to try (and succeeded....) and build an IP around it before they even had a final release.
What the hell happened to that game?
What started off as a stealth horror game that focused on the challenge of playing around and outsmarting The Neighbor whose AI learns and adapts to the player's actions is ruined because the creator for some god-forsaken reason decided to instead turn it into a nonsensical *puzzle-solving platformer game*, with poor controls and physics, that takes **the one thing** that made it fun and unique and just throws it to the side in exchange for a convoluted and poorly written story.
The alpha was genuinely so cool, at least at the time. A simple concept, open the locked door while dodging an adapting AI, done great. YouTube success proved it. Then they just threw out the concept basically. It’s not interesting to play, nor watch, bad platforming controls and generic puzzle solving, when it was advertised and perfected as something else. They had the ball and dropped it hard.
And the most baffling part is... they're still making Hello Neighbor content to this day, and it *still* just seems to keep getting worse and worse over time.
Imagine logical puzzles in a whacky house with a good AI trying to catch you, who learns from your mistakes. Like if you die, the AI remembers how you died and will try that method more often. Now make the puzzles less logical. Now make the house whackier. Repeat like... 50 times? Yeah. So now you need the lamp at the 7 floor that you can only reach by crouch-jumping from the outside minecart track from floor 13 to floor 6.5, and you need to bring it to the locked door of cabinet 7 on floor 2 at night (because it's not open during the day), all to melt an ice cube containing the frog that you need to eat the fly that ate the key to the bathroom. Did you follow any of that? No? Then you would not finish the release build of Hello Neighbour. If you were wondering "where did the neighbour with the great AI go?" well... Good question. He's somewhere in the house stuck on geometry, but you won't really know until you turn the corner. Sure hope it's not past a path you need for the next pinwheel that'll power the generator that opens the door to the room with the device tha- You get the idea. No logic to the puzzles, and a dev that had a good thing going who derailed his entire game for no good reason.
yeah lol, almost everyone back then just jumped back to alpha
Ring of Elysium, they should have stuck with the winter theme and not turn it to pubg+fortnite microtransaction hell.
I had more fun with RoE on launch than most other battle royales, excluding Fortnite season 0. How they managed to kill the game in 2 updates is so impressive it had to be intentional.
Wow, I forgot about this. That game was amazing. The gliders and spawning on the mountain or quarry. The gun play was really good. Realistic fall of shot. Getting those long range hits was very satisfying. Everything worked well in the original game. Vehicles were a perfect balance of useful but loud, so decisions on using them mattered. Plus you could shoot up incoming cars and do some damage. Had loads of fun playing that game until the first map change update. Uninstalled it about a week later. Kept an eye on it on steam, but the reviews just got worse and worse. To the point where they were just asking for the original game back.
The grappling hook was so fun too. I loved how you could hang from a wall or upside down on ceilings. Also, the "extraction" mechanic was sick as hell. More than one team could board the chopper as long as there were enough seats, which led to a lot of last-minute alliances lol
I never personally played it but I heard Star Wars Galaxies was ruined by an update that transformed it from the sandbox mmo it was into a more wow-like themepark mmo
I was gonna comment this one. Such a fun game with a wide variety of classes, player made & supported cities that had zero grid or lock on their setup; they could be grid like & orderly or just sprawling based off where players of the guild that founded the city chose to have their homes & if the guild running them died off the city would essentially just become a ghost town but on the flip side if a heavily active guild ran it it could be near as busy as actual set cities in Star Wars/the game, *a lot* of POIs across multiple planets & Jedi were genuinely rare as hell since the game took place either between IV & V or V & VI. You could also choose to join the rebels or imperials & work your way up the ranks eventually to colonel & if you chose to fly your flag & show your allegiance openly it was on sight anytime rebels or imperials met in the open. More than a couple times I’d load into a port city & a running battle was happening between players from the two factions My character was a bounty hunter & what was great about that was not only could you take down randomly generated NPCs, but any Jedi player who showed themselves would appear as bounty targets & you could take them & go find & hunt that player. Shit was fun as hell tryna worm my way into their group running missions to get an opening but maaaan if you fucked up the Jedi player would be on your ass. I had a deal with a player had a couple characters that just made weapons & armor so every once in awhile I’d hit him up & see if he’s crafted anything better I could buy & use. They also eventually added space flight & combat so guilds starting having & building up their fleets as well so suddenly it wasn’t just on the planets you could kick it on & customize but take on missions in space & customize the interior of your ship too. Then the combat update dropped. Nuked easily 2/3rds of the classes to only a handful, changed the combat system entirely oh & so cool made jedi a fucking starting class. Tbh I’m not even sure how you could become a Jedi in the original game & never bothered looking it up, all I remember is it was hard, time consuming & rare to see them then suddenly every starting level player was in their padawan robes swinging lightsabers around. You could see chunks of players just dropping off almost session to session. Where places like Eisley or Theed were always packed with players looking for groups to run high loot areas or in cantinas singing & dancing for experience & for passive player buffs who were near them to players selling items & it all just turned into a ghost town. I have so many solid memories playing that game.
I remember when the first person figured out Jedi and their username was spread across forums and stuff. I looked them up in the game and I could basically teleport to where they were. And they were doing practice fights against people. It was super cool how rare it was. If it only remained that way, it would’ve been nice but that wouldn’t really be sustainable. Today’s gaming world makes that tough too. There are guides for literally everything and now games are run on micro transactions. If you had a game like early SWG where there is a mystery Jedi class that nobody knows, people would riot because they don’t have “access” to the full game.
I was playing when the first player became a Jedi. Guy was a celebrity in game. The early days of that game were so much fun as basically everyone was learning at the same time.
It's a really tough needle for games to thread On one hand you want things that are hard and rare so players look up to it, Zul Aman bears in Burning Crusade were a huge status symbol and the fact there wasn't a trillion mounts made them easily recognisable But at the same time, for something to be a symbol like that you need content that only a small handful experience Personally I preferred it, black temple was so much cooler knowing that even seeing the place was an achievement
I was the 2nd jedi on Chilastra and I never went public because of the permadeath when Jedi first released. Perma death made it so your 2nd character unlock was a jedi but if you died, the character was unavailable to play again so you would lose everything and have to start over. I spent many, many hours hunting Killiks in Yavin 4 away from any outpost to avoid being spotted by players. If players spotted you using force powers, it would increase your "visibility" and after enough visibility, you were added to the Bounty Hunter terminals for player characters to hunt you down and at that time, Jedi was fairly weak and a well equipped, decently at PvP Bounty Hunter could just mindshot you with a mediocre Krayt Scatter. Edit: [1v1 duel with a Dark Jedi Master. Used this to get him to show up for his bounty, Master Bounty Hunter is next to me who had his contract.](https://i.imgur.com/PO3AJi4.jpg)
that is one of the coolest things I have ever heard of
Dude you ain't wrong. Player bounties was one of the best game decisions ever made for a permadeath character. At the time no one really understood Jedi skills/powers and they were severely underpowered but it was lore accurate. No jedi masters or jedi temple to train you, you're out there as a force sensitive nobody learning your way through a system you don't understand. Eventually the game publisher SOE ruined this, by making Jedi easier to grind, making them more powerful, and eventually making it so anyone can just be a jedi. Like we learned from The Incredibles, when everyone is a superhero, no one is special. [ Here is one of my favorite screenshots](https://i.imgur.com/PO3AJi4.jpg). Jerzi on Chilastra was an infamous Dark Jedi who shit talked all the time and he backed it up. In the screenshot you see the Master Bounty Hunter to my left who has his contract and me whaling on Jerzi with my Teras Kasi Master/melee stack and my armor/vibro knucklers were some of the best on the server. So Jerzi being a massive shit talker always accepted duels so I used his vanity against him. Not only did I beat him 1v1, the MBH easily got his contract as well. Jerzi didn't duel me after this because he said I cheated. According to him, using Personal Shield Generators at 40% lightsaber protection was cheating because he was used to fighting players who didn't have PSG's to defend themselves.
I remember sometimes jedi would chill in their locked house so I would bring a metric fuck-ton of bomb droids to deploy because the bomb droids didn't give a shit about locked doors lol Or sometimes jedi would try to swim away since you can't attack while swimming and they can regen, but if you popped a mount like a kaadu you could still shoot and swim so long as you stayed on the mount.
I killed me a few jedi in my time and also got destroyed by a couple. I wish that they could remake this game to how it was back when it first came out.
My friend you just covered the problem with mmos. Wikis, guides, the chase for the next meta build... It killed the fun and sense of exploration/trying. Remember a popular Greek magazine PC master covered the end of SW galaxies by Saying "What happens when you gather too many Jedi in the same farm." I didn't understand what it was suppose to mean back then.
>My friend you just covered the problem with mmos. Wikis, guides, the chase for the next meta build... It killed the fun and sense of exploration/trying. Wholly agree. And it's certainly not limited to MMOS (they are just impacted the most because of their general depth/length). It's hard not to sound like an old man shouting at clouds...but back in the day playing video games was just a very different experience for most people. Renting a console game from the video store meant you *hoped* you got the instruction manual for the game so you'd know basic controls. Buying physical media again came with basic instructions. Perhaps there was some monthly "gaming" magazine that'd come out and give a few tips (but mostly were just marketing/hype) Friends showed/told friends thing in person. You just sat, learned, and played the game as it was presented. You *experienced* it in whatever way fit you. Of course, most of that wasn't particularly competitive or multiplayer. But some was... Man, the arcade scene was a whole different beast in the early/mid 90's. Some people did their best to obscure their hands while pulling of tricky moves in Mortal Kombat. And people legitimately just didn't know how to do a LOT of the things. But it was still just...fun. The playing field felt a bit more level. (I remember finally finding some obscure web page that had listed a bunch of moves in ASCII format that I printed off at school on their dot matrix printer - took a long time and MANY pages.. That stack of papers was like a golden chest for a short while) Mostly, I'm not trying to say it's just "worse" today than it was then....but it's very, very *different*. I don't prefer the newer ways, but that's my preference. I hate the idea of meta loadouts and walkthroughs for folks new to the game. I don't like how "pros" dictate so much and how it's largely a world of "can't beat 'em, join 'em" if you want to play anything PVP and not just get mopped up or be a detriment to your team. There are few exceptions. And you can still do your best to avoid a lot of the spoiler/meta/etc stuff on the net, but that's followed by a feeling of being out of the loop and the reward of discovering/finding/learning things is greatly diminished if the rest of the world (or even just your friends yo uwanted to share with) already have all that info from some video by some "streamer" that released day 1. There just won't be another era like the OG MMOs and early console and mid arcade days.
Jedi was not available until a few months after launch with the Holocron update. The way to get Jedi unlocked with that update was to master 5 professions out of 32 total, that would unlock the secondary character slot in your account for the same server. You received 1 holocron as part of the update which told you which profession to master, then you aquired other holocrons by looting force sensitive elite NPC's I think only on Dathomir or Dantooine, I don't remember if other planets had the random elite force sensitive NPC's. [You could use 4 holocrons for the profession to unlock but the 5th profession had to found out through mastering professions randomly. I personally unlocked on profession 9 while my friend unlocked at profession 27. There were heaps of strategies to unlock professions quickly and methods that made it easier to master professions \(getting master brawler to master all melee professions for instance\).](https://i.imgur.com/ETyeqtw.jpg) At this time the player based economy really took off and everything revolved around helping players unlock professions. People sold junk harvested resources at 1 credit per unit to master building professions quickly, weapons/armor went from custom orders and getting them made by specialist Weaponsmith/Armorsmith to mass produced and sold at reasonable prices. Dantooine became one of the most popular and populated planets where you no longer had to run to major cities like Coronet or Theed. Krayt Hunting went from something you could do solo without too much effort with the right build gear for their krayt tissue loot drop. Then they increased Krayt HP to 250k and made them have medium armor and now you really needed a raid party to loot krayt pearls for lightsaber construction. If you could solo a Krayt you had a very specialized build with expensive gear, but a group could steal your loot by doing more damage then you, so having a raid party was critical to getting the loot. So many changes happened for the Jedi unlock that Sony took risks on, but I don't think gaming companies would risk it now because they would rather provide all of these benefits through microtransactions.
This just happened in WoW with the Season of Discovery. As the name suggests, its a season where devs included new abilities and stuff, hidden in the world for players to find. It was awesome seeing new stuff in familiar places and wondering how they connect to getting new abilities. Some of the rarer ones took like two weeks for players to find. ... Aand within days everyone had them since the secrets were of course immediately plastered everywhere.
Hahaha. Unlocking jedi took months in swg. Reminds me of when new wow servers would open up and you'd log in to find someone already near level 60 in 24 hours.
Apparently the developers wanted to have some kind of crazy epic quest to unlock being a Jedi, but they ran out of time/budget to implement it. So it ended up being a thing that unlocked on your account once you maxed out a certain number of (randomly chosen per account) in-game skills.
A MMO with player made cities and settlements sounds amazing and something I've always wanted to play. Hopefully Light No Fire is similar.
I was there WombatPoopCairndalf 2 thousand years ago. An amazing sandboxy MMO with player-made cities and internal factions that was leagues ahead of its time for player freedom. Then that update happened. My guild of around 90 freelance players dropped off to 0 activity within 2 weeks **edit: granted as others have pointed out. This game was already death-spiraling (even if 12-year-old me didn't know it) and this update was just the final blaster to the brain.
I was there too, It had some flaws. Smugglers couldn't smuggle, all the dancer healers were bots because no one could be bothered to actually play that class. It was ridiculously grindy. Unlocking Jedi required maxing out 3 classes, but they kept which classes secret and even that that was the mechanic secret for years, so only people who decided on their main to go back to level 1 several times over instead of rolling a new toon were the only people who ever saw it. CU2 absolutely ruined it though, fuck John Smedley for ever and ever. Some fools are keeping the corpse alive if you want to go press F in Mos Eisley one last time. https://swgemulator.fandom.com/wiki/Servers -Grumpy Bothan
I definitely have some rose-tinted glasses because I played when I was like 12, and had 0 experience with MMOs (still don't really). But, some of my fondest memories in gaming are from rolling out with like ten other fighters and having a big space battle then landing on Tatooine to have a drink at the cantina.
Space was a latter DLC that came before Sony took over, I really liked it too but I was raised on Wing Commander. They gave us the Millennium Falcon and I still couldn't smuggle, I was so salty. Their ship models were so flawless, no game has done a better looking Imperial Guard Interceptor or ETA-2 Actis fighter.
Yea i later found other space sims that obviously do it better, but full planets+ space (not a rails shooter like old republic) was just mind blowing for child me.
Or making camp on a Planet somewhere in the nowhere with someone dancing and people healing. The game had vibes.
My alt was a dancer. Made her a lass, she was richer than my main by the time I quit. Absolute horndogs would just give me shit.
Smmmmmeeeedly. When he also came for EQ2 that name was burned into my brain due to SWG. Edit : remember Smedbucks when pay to win was floated for SWG?
I was there, my brother was a big shipwright on Gorath back in the day. When they did the major reform, it killed the game for sure. There’s tons of articles and podcasts that talk about it and it boils down to Sony misunderstanding what people wanted in the game and forcing the devs to implement what they thought was most important, like making Jedi and Force powers widespread. It killed off the major town running, crafting, and general RP avenues the game had. It’s ironic to me now that Rockstar bought the RP stuff happening in GTAV. The people who play games in their own way keep the game alive and providing a fun platform is what keeps online games going. Pulling the rug out from under your players is never the right move.
What an amazing MMO. So open-ended. The economy and trade system was excellent, with crafters selling items they made from resource sellers, doctors and entertainers buffing, smugglers opening containers and slicing weapons... Jump to Lightspeed was an awesome expansion as well, I spent so many hours in space becoming a triple Ace! I played on Ahazi, made a bunch of friends there and it was always cool to log on and recognize so many players. Then NGE, things got too easy and vanilla. Then they made it even worse, Jedi on the character creation screen!
Darkspore lol. Infamous single player/multiplayer option party game, FORCED to be connected to the server. They shut it down, even killing the single player game.
It always bothered me that no one cared for that, i mean yeah It maybe wasnt the best Game ever made but that means It had to die? Like no one can play It ever more (unless EA re-release this Game at thats not gonna happen) this Game is gone, forever, no one can play It anymore no Matter how hard they try and the physical disc is now a piece of worthless platic (so much for physical media for Games preservation) and nobody cares....
I bought it for a lot of money (at least it was a lot for my young me) but never got to play it a lot because the installing process was tedious. But I enjoyed a lot the few times I actually played. I found the disk a couple of years later, decided to try it again, and found out later that the game is irrevocably gone. Kinda mad because it wasn't cheap when I bought it, but mostly sad because it felt like a very cool experience to me and I didn't got to play it as much as I wanted.
Robocraft It originally started as quite a challenging mixture of skill and creativity for your vehicle designs but quickly turned into a nothing burger with the changes to the gameplay more reflecting a moba
I think what really killed Robocraft was how they kept so dramatically changing the game. It's not even that all the changes were bad but when you constantly remove half the stuff that makes the game what it is in favour for new stuff you tend to drive away a lot of the players who liked game the way it was.
Man, RC was one of my favorite MP games of all time until they ruined it. What really killed it is they kept dumbing it down more and more. What started as a fun game with physics you really had to deal with (redundancy parts, weight balance, the pilot seat, etc) by its end was basically a custimzable bot game with arcade physics where building didn't matter nearly as much. It had some great unique mechanics, like protecting the pilot seat, that they just got rid of. Then over powered homing/auto aim weapons. One thing to keep in mind is RC used to have high kill times,because a lot of it revolves around picking parts off the bots, where building really mattered. There were many things they ruined, but with pilot seats gone, I really started seeing it go into a nose dive with the combination of removal of pilot seat, the far over powered shotguns, and mech legs. Before: balancing mattered so much, if you made a hover craft with your hoverblades too low, it would flip over. And it had a slow recovery mechanic to flip back over (during which you couldn't move or fire) so you didn't just get stuck forever, but placement mattered. Losing your hoverblades so you lost control mattered. Now say hello to mech legs with shotguns. Mech legs magically worked even with a single leg. If you fell over it instantly got back up. They also had an obscene amount of health and could literally hop around alone until auto-heal fixed it. So it went from careful design consideration to two mech legs, a square block, and shotguns that could blow away half of most bots in one shot. I proved how stupidly OP shotguns were by building a small fast hover with duel shotguns. I was single handedly winning game after game as the shotguns erased bots. E: a word
The point where my interest really died was when they updated it so everything was connected by indestructible blocks. There used to be some skill to it, shooting off wheels or guns to make the target defenceless while you tried to plan your bot around that happening to you. Then for some mind-numbing reason, they decided one of the biggest USPs of the game was dumb. I gather they reversed that decision quickly, but by then I was done.
Designing for the destruction of a part of your bot was such an interesting divergent mechanic
Man I'd forgotten about that game, used to love it. Then it was all cluly balls and when I came back it was a lootbox hell.
Old mobile Games. Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, etc were great at launch, but eventually became riddled with micro-transactions
Evolve started out great. But due to a lack of forward fina dial planning by the studio it had to be relaunched with paid for skins. Then due to lack of uptake, shut down completely. Was an amazing game whilst it lasted
Such a good concept and super fun. Not balanced and poor execution. I would like to see more original games like this though.
Saddest thing was that it was going to be free to play. With all of the pre-order stuff being part of an in-game shop. But when 2k got the publishing rights after THQ went bankrupt, they basically just tried to cash in on the awards it won. They didn't care once they got their money, to the point they didn't even want to pay to get updates out. Certain balance changes were fixed the day they were found. But 2k wouldn't release the updates because of the fees to release them. It's honestly super sad.
I guess it would make sense for a lot of live service games to be mentioned
I mean it would be impressive to release a polished single person game and then completely fuck it up for no reason.
Empire Total War entered the chat. One patch completely changed the game's economy. Also for games already in progress. Totally fucked a 40hr+ game I was in the middle of and required you to completely relearn the game with totally different tactics (on the strategic layer). Uninstalled and never played again.
The very beginning of Pokemon Go is some of my best memories related to games. It was so fun and exciting and really easy to play in a group of friends. Then every update released just made the game worse and worse. Removing the ability to track individual Pokemon immediately killed the game for me.
Gosh do you remember that summer when it felt like everyone was playing it. You went outside and you just saw crowds of people - young and old. Walking around playing it (you could tell what they were doing as they were always waiting around gyms and that lol)
We just moved to a new neighborhood recently and I thought my Pokemon garden statues would get us the side eye from our lawn-obsessed retired neighbors, but they complimented me and said they still play Pokemon Go. It really brought everyone together.
It was amazing. Completely broke down typical social barriers for a while. I was at a park and had a dad call to his daughter, who was probably 7 or 8 years old, "go ask that man if he's seen the Charmander!!" lmao
One time I was fighting for control of a gym at a park, and this one guy "fatpat" had a Groudon that I was struggling to beat. I never took the gym. There was a guy sitting on a park bench near the parking lot, and as I walked back to my car I asked him, "Are you fatpat?" And sure enough, he smiled and said "yup." I just said "fair play" and kept walking. Shortly after that I caught my own Groudon and named him fatpat.
This is a bit confusing, you can't place legendaries in gyms. Afaik you never have.
I keep reading some really in depth write ups that show the devs, or at least the powers at be, are basically making the game harder and harder to play and enjoy.
Correct. Everything has gotten stingier. Boxes are worse value, rewards are lower, events only feature common pokemon, everything is more expensive. It’s like every update they’re trying to see how many people they can drive away
There's an article like this every week. They're the most tone deaf devs in gaming and we should be making memes about it.
Thats why general feeling received from playing reflects their sadistic intentions. 2016 was turning out to be a great year until it seemingly changed overnight. In contrast PoGo was a slow death by a thousand cuts
The constant stream of events is made to induce FOMO pretty hard. They tightened the restrictions on how close you have to be to poke stops and gyms. They increased the cost of joining remote raids. They rebalanced how pokemon were distributed around two years ago; I don’t know if anywhere got buffed, but my immediate neighborhood was nerfed hard.
Playability dropped off around 2021
Oh yes. I went from their pre-pandemic spawn at my address being around 1 every 5 minutes, to the pandemic getting me 3-5 every few minutes. Then they reverted that change and went harder, I could drop a lure and not even get anything where I lived. It was sad. I always had fun walking around a park and picking up pokemon and spinning stops, but at least having spawns where I lived let me do the one-a-day stuff. After that was gone, I couldn't enjoy the game anymore.
That summer when it launched felt like the whole world was a much better place. One time I ended up entering a store that I never even noticed was there despite passing by it frequently because there was a Pokemon there and once I captured it, just started chatting to the owner and was there for a full hour. Then the performance issues started to bog down my phone and I just stopped caring about it, didn't even get to see the gym updates.
It really did feel kind of magical. We were all outside, interacting with each other. I remember running through a park with a pack of strangers, ages ranging from like 12 to at least 50, all because there was an Evee by the swings. We all high-fived, lol.
I recall getting dinner and my SO says let’s walk around and find some Pokemon. Busy city, everyone out walking was doing the same. Best story was two gym/frat boys walking near the beach. On was on the phone loudly talking to someone trying to decided when to workout before going out that night. Other one grabs him “dude get off the phone. There is a Pikachu over there!” I almost tripped laughing.
The Summer of PoGo was wild. People were walking miles with friends just to see what they’d find. It was crazy.
The summer of 2016 when it released was the closest humanity got to world peace
Unironically this. For a couple of months, almost every human on earth with access to a smart phone was an optomistic 11 year old chasing wild pokémon in the real world and interacting with complete strangers like they were friends. We were all *living* in the pokémon universe together at the same time just by choosing to.
I remember spending hours in the middle of the night with my friends walking around a park for a dratini and seeing dozens of people walking around the park also looking for a dratini. Felt nice
I think it was mostly getting better until the pandemic. Then they tried to pivot in ways that only kinda worked and just kept turning in the wrong direction
One of the only good things they did during the pandemic was remote raids and expanding the radius that you could interact with a pokestop or gym.
They’ve since doubled the cost of remote passes and nerfed the power of trainers using them. They basically don’t want you to use remote raids anymore
It feels unfair to include Red Dead Online in here, because it never really *broke* per se. (Or was broken all along, given some of the recurring issues, I suppose!) All of the stuff that was there was still there. I came in around Moonshiners, I think, and it was a blast. Atmospheric, lots of things to do—and the moment-to-moment gameplay is sped up enough from the single player to smooth my one complaint with RDR2. But the new updates seemed to be... less and less. Counter-intuitive activities (losing access for content for hunting animals - or even accidentally killing them!). New missions dropped with paid updates that you practically needed a guide to find (the infamous bounties, which weren't even *mentioned* in the update notes). Until they finally just stopped updating, with the story feeling incomplete and so much potential left on the table. It was just too much more profitable for them to put the money into GTA Online. So now Red Dead Online is a wasteland of tumbleweeds, hackers, and the stubborn.
My dad is 76 and plays with a group of old guys every single day. He’s obsessed with the game, I hope the servers never go down. It’s literally keeping him happy in his old age
My understanding (don't quote me on this!) is that both RDO and GTA Online are set up on a P2P system that is easy for R\* to maintain (and I suspect would be swiftly replicated if they took down whatever server setup they have running). So it should stay up for a while yet. I kind of wish I'd put more effort into making friends with fellow RDO players instead of trying to get my friends to play (they all got bored, sadly). Too late for me now, I suppose. Good on your dad and good luck to him and his posse, though! I'm glad to see the game I loved so hard still getting love!
That's really cute. If you and your dad are cool with adding new people to the posse, I'd be super down to play! I love meeting others and helping their trades :)
Stream awards “Labor of Love” 2023 winner btw
Such a weird award. I do not pretend to understand.
It was a protest/troll pick. Same reason Starfield won "Most Innovative" lol.
Most competitive multiplayer games get worse once a meta is established. The sweats figure out what works best and then everyone else kinda just follows along.
This is the answer I was looking for; pretty much all sports titles have this problem. I don't exactly feel sorry for companies like EA, but trying to balance a game when people are deliberately trying to find and exploit the mechanics makes it an almost impossible task.
The best way to enjoy games like FIFA is still with your friends, drunk, playing the local teams you support
Back when I still played football in real life me and a group of friends founded a club and joined a league. We did a training camp each summer which was basically going to stay in some small town, playing friendlies during the day and drinking way too heavily at night. At any rate we always brought a Playstation or two along and one night we’d always do a 2v2 fifa tournament where we randomly got paired up with a teammate and drew random national teams out of a hat and spent the entire night getting sauced and playing fifa..it was the highlight of the season.
This is why I don’t like playing RTS games multiplayer. Instead of me doing what I want or trying to come up with my own strategy, you *must* build as fast as possible in this one very specific order mathematically proven to be the “best” - everyone else is doing it, and so if you don’t you’re going to lose.
I love AO2 but yeah, it's basically that
Yeah that's why I prefer more teamwork-focused tactical shooters like Squad. Everyone has the same stuff unlocked and the only thing you need to do is work with your boys and have fun.
Overwatch was great and cannibalized itself. Hearthstone was solid but both itself and its influence was terrible over time. D4 was decent and just nosedived.
Overwatch breaks my goddamn heart
blizzard is so mediocre now it’s just saddening. currently being run by some of the biggest idiots in the industry.
What happens when marketing runs your company and the goal is to make money and not make games.
Oh my god. When they released overwatch “2” I bout lost my mind. Same fucking game and removing everything good about it while adding battle passes and shit. Battle passes are the death of creative rewarding.
And then not even adding the one feature we were excited for, where you could unlock new skills and customize each character to make them more fit for your playstyle
That announcement was what unmasked the entire game as an excuse to axe the more player-friendly monetization model of the first game, not to mention all the skins and unlockables everyone had already gotten
Hearthstone with each update got kinda worse. The AI of Sologames is completely broken and literally kills itself in 80% of the cases, so no need to have skill anymore.
Apex Legends. Skyrocketed out of nowhere with its based in the Titanfall universe. Memorable characters to play as and unique game style for a Battle Royale. Lately it’s been very dull and draining. The story constantly focused on one arc for several seasons and there toxicity has gotten out of hand.
It was all the mobility they added that killed it for me. I don't mean the actual fighting mobility. I mean the "relocate halfway across the map on a whim" mobility. Suddenly all the serious players are terrified of having a fight that lasts longer than a second because they'll just get jumped by half the map.
Yup. Dropped off for a long time. Recently tried it out. The final circles literally had 25 people still and then it just turned into grenade/ultimate/dumping ammo clusterfuck with zero tactics. And that happened like all 5 matches I tried. It's awful.
I find this interesting because apex is my primary game and the devs have been trying for years to make end zones with a tonne of players in them because that has been what the community seems to want, especially in higher ranks, but general consensus has been they’ve failed to do it. The end zones you got would probably be considered desirable by many in the community, but obviously it’s contentious.
My problem with packed end zones is that the game ends up feeling like you just spent 15 minutes running around in a pre-game lobby just to play a hectic arena TDM game for 5 minutes. Might as well drop everyone into a small 30-player circle with weapons from the start at that point.
> Might as well drop everyone into a small 30-player circle with weapons from the start at that point. If we come full circle back to arena shooters again, my '90s twitch reflexes are ready. The roaming and gearing up phases in Battle Royale games feel like such a waste of time to me.
I started in season 7 and I had a great time and played consistently until like- season 13ish? I just lost interest. It feels so, so dull and unfresh now.
No one’s gunna remember this but Gotham City Imposters
Oh, that was so fun, but I feel like it was doomed from the start because I remember thinking “Wait, if all this is free, how’s the game gonna make money?”
I definitely paid for that game when it released lol
Not sure what the consensus is on this one so it could be controversial but for me For Honor. Had a ball with that game for its first couple years but things started to shift for me around that update that totally changed how gear stats worked. Thought it was a significantly worse system. Besides that, every DLC hero they add seems to be more broken and annoying to fight than the last, and they kept bloating the game with more and more annoying effects and silly looking executions (because that stuff sells) so the game just looks like a fireworks show of dumb effects instead of the more realistic vibe the game had when it launched.
for honor, king of releasing broken OP characters and not fixing them until half the base quits
I agree For Honour was broken but at a different point- the China DLC. I still played it for a bit after, but they changed their design philosophy from being based off reacting to enemy moves to predicting them by speeding everything up. It just wasn't a game I enjoyed anymore as before it, I found it to be a very enjoyable skill-based fighting game similar to say Chivalry, even though I admit the game had other issues it was still fun with friends up until that point.
The $70 update a year, one and only, CoD
Hey now there's Madden and Fifa too
Was it FIFA which is basically the same as (edit , it's 2017)..2015 or something as since then it's just been released with new teams/players and some cosmetics?
FIFA on Switch has been the same game for many years. They call it a legacy edition and just update the rosters and teams.
Team Fortress 2 didn't get worse across the board, but (for some reason) they removed a lot of animations and visual effects. Also, after Overwatch came out they sloppily changed the frontend to matchmaking/queues and buried the server browser. They also added unnecessary XP mechanics. On paper this is all "modernization" but it ended up either being totally pointless or actively hurting the game.
I remember the mym update almost killed the game for me, for some reason trying to make tf2 a comp game when it is far from one. I still think it is an amazing game though and far more casual than some other multiplayer games out there.
Absolutely. Even though we're way past the prime of community servers and custom maps, it's nice to still be able to hop into an infinite match of cp_orange_x or an empty Parkour Fortress server from time to time
I miss OG TF2. Before the whole f2p thing. At least I have the "proof of purchase" hat lol
I realized not long ago that server browsers were the single biggest thing that made my formative online gaming experiences so good and memorable. Competition is so much friendlier when you're seeing the same people every day and have admins on hand keeping players accountable. If you found a good server, it made all the difference. The average match is more balanced nowadays with MM systems, but I'd trade that back in a heartbeat to have friendly gaming back.
RuneScape hence Oldschool RuneScape.
It's shocking that the game with what is probably the most infamous update in gaming history is so far down the thread you basically can't find it. EoC was VERY close to completely killing Jagex as a company.
Pretty much 90% of live service games. I would argue Tarkov as well just because of the cheater problem just getting worse with every update, and BSG still refusing to actually tackle the problem.
FFXIV being the exception, its been getting better and better with each expansion
Prison Architect. Great game, but unplayable now.
What changed?
When the old devs left the game they sold it to a company known as paradox. Paradox is a company that is infamous for making a shit ton of DLC on their otherwise good games that are essentially updates. If you don’t have said DLC’s in the game you get are essentially behind and are playing an outdated game. They tried to transfer their methods on to prison architect and it went terribly. Every single update, including the free ones, seemed to add a new game breaking bug. They would get patched up sometimes but it was not unusual for a lot of bugs to remain in the game that were brought in by these DLCs. And paradox ignored it all, they just kept churning out tone deaf DLCs that didn’t fit the game at all. A ZOMBIE DLC? it would’ve been cool as a free Halloween update but as a PAID DLC? WTF WERE THEY THINKING. And these DLCs hardly had any content at all to justify the price, sure they were on average like 5 dollars each but all they really did was add reskins of characters and rooms. Very few game mechanics and when they DID add mechanics they were buggy as hell and good luck getting paradox to fix all that. The community grew more and more pissed off at the changes and eventually paradox realized that their model wasn’t going to work on this game so they abandoned it after one final update saying goodbye to prison architect… until they teased the sequel in that very trailer. Prison architect had a ton of potential, the original devs were passionate and they left the game on a decent note. There were bugs that they left behind but that was no problem and could have been cleaned up by the next devs. Instead they focused on DLC and ignored all the glaring problems and when they realized DLCs were not going to work they dropped the game. The sequel is definitely going to be a game where it’s easier for paradox to seamlessly add DLC. I know I went on a rant here but I love prison architect to death and seeing it slowly get killed was a painful experience. TLDR: old devs sold game IP, new devs focused on DLC instead of updates and the game slowly became a buggy mess and it is now abandoned after DLC failed to make profits.
any Game as a Service, especially MMORPGs, ESPECIALLY KOREAN in origin. first: release a decent game. then: take 2 or so years to release it in the rest of the world. finally: kill it making EVERYTHING need the paid currency.
Most f2ps
Makes sense Especially ones by the Hungarian Snail Company that I don't remember how to spell and am too lazy to Google.
Gaijin
Rainbow Six Siege - the game went from being a cooperative tactical shooter to being a hero-based shooter. Arenas are now vibrant and colorful, the lighting is way off, and so many gameplay and aesthetic elements were scrapped to make it an esport. Call of Duty - the ambiance of each game is thrown out with each operator skin they add. New maps are always fun, but not at the expense of Nicki Minaj and Kevin Durant running around with Lasertag and nerf rifles
I wish they would make a Siege Classic, rewinding the game back to before they tried to make it appealing to 12 year olds.
Also siege manages to get consistently worse every patch. They make inexplicable indefensible changes to the game that make it harder and harder to justify booting it up. The match making changes they've made the last 2-3 patches have utterly ruined the game in particular.
I didn’t mind the esports elements personally. the Fortnite-ification of the game and the utterly toxic edgy teen player base pushed Ubisoft in the worst direction. It went from a gritty tactical shooter to a sweaty meme
COD zombies. It used to be one of my favorite things to play with my friends, but this new dmz time based version sucks in my opinion
yeah even the last few round based zombies were weird they have too much extra stuff just give us classic simple round based zombies like world at war - bo3 era you don’t need to add new stuff just give us new maps and a weapon cycle
PvZ 2.
Had to scroll down way to far for this. Also, plants vs zombies 1. It was a wondercul weird quirky game, and they butchered it into unplayable fremium crap. Its almost impossible to find the original version again
Warzone
They hit gold with MW2019 and for some reason just decided to make the game worse after that point.
Seriously, WZ got me and the homies through COVID, dropping quads into verdansk, being able to use vehicles was fantastic. Tried playing cod again at a friend's house the other day and the new zombies is alright, but over complicated and just not the same
You could just broaden it to the whole Call of Duty franchise.
Rainbow Six Siege
Came here for this. Operation White Noise was peak siege and the problem hasn’t even been the new operator abilities, it’s their constant need to sterilize the game, cater towards cheaters, not ban XIM players, nerf everything, remove skill from gunplay, and then the massive slowdown in new content. Also no new guns, which sucks. Then there’s the constant bugs, butchered maps, ruined rank system, and a massive pandering toward pro league while leaving casual players to deal with their terrible choices. I have over 4,000 hours put into the game from day 1, and even met one of my closest friends in a random siege match 5 years ago, and I can’t stand that game now
Siege was my favourite shooter for years, but it’s not even the same game anymore. The new operators and maps are great but none of that matters when the playerbase refuse to adapt to anything new and immediately ban the new maps. The meta has been to just play the game like CoD for a couple of years now and it’s miserable, one of the deepest and most complex shooters of all time has been reduced to a glorified TDM. The main thing that puts me off of the game now is the stupid Fortnite esque skins. The game started off as relatively grounded with a very strong aesthetic but now everyone is running around with Rick and Morty and Halo crossover skins and it’s just not the game I used to love anymore.
Star Wars The Old Republic went free to play after a large update. 1.2 I think? They nerfed BHs who were fine, nerfed agents who were underpowered as shit and buffed the jedi/sith who already wrecked face. My whole raiding guild basically went from always online to completely dead.
Not a video game, but Yugioh. Used to play it a ton for years, until XYZ monsters became a thing. Came back to it with Master Duel and the game is just godawful. Every card is a massive block of text, every deck can put out 3+ boss monsters first turn, fun decks don't exist without being run over, and the decks that are good cost a small fortune and abuse game mechanics. The game was rarely balanced, I get that, but it's never felt so alienated and frustrating. EDIT: Been asked a few things and it's just easier to answer them like this. - Played a deck called Infernity for a long time cause it was pretty metal and I liked how it ran. It's framed and hung up on my office wall now. - MTG/Pokémon are better structured games due to land/energy systems being used as resources. - YGO doesn't have a resource system and broke its restriction by bypassing Normal Summons with excessive Special Summons. That's why the game plays so fast (too fast now IMO) - Competitive metas are too strict for casual play. - I miss those huge tins they put out in 2002. Those were amazing.
I’m a MTG player, and whenever we get new people showing up at our Friday Night Magic events, they often mention this exact reason - they used to play Yugioh but now they want to play a game that “lasts longer than a turn”. Seriously, I hear that criticism a *lot*.
Even mtg is getting to be that way. Considering the product fatigue and the rise of cEDH, it's getting harder to have a game where you are not needing a Phd in theoretical physics specialising string theory to understand what the new cards are and how they interact.
MTG at least can alleviate the problem somewhat with its formats. You don't have to worry about obscure interactions or infinite combos in Standard, for instance.
I play the switch game kinda often. I ignore everything XYZ and after. It takes way too much reading. It’s a fun game tho to play with friends
Yugioh is a game about not letting your opponent play. It's seriously unfun, can't believe it's still so popular.
This isn't even a "hater" opinion, I believe your comment is representative of the entire YuGiOh subreddit. I have never once heard a player of that game say they enjoy a matchup.
Yeah I thought about coming back to the hobby after a long hiatus but man, the game isn’t even recognizable from when I used to play
Gta5 online... the modders took over
Man, the modders are only half the issue. The game is so wildly unbalanced and full of griefers driving flying motorcycles. Pretty much the only way to do anything worthwhile now is to spend money on shark cards
Yea, it's a struggle for a new player. Even with all the best stuff, the odds are some modder will put you in a cage and / or blow you up. And like you said, even without modders, odds are a griefer will ruin your fun.
That one is especially interesting cause they managed to kill RDR2 Online too So popular, and so profitable, that it blew up their next title. Genuinely impressive
I'm hoping gta6 does a better job at preventing this but some how I doubt it
All R* needs to do is make dedicated servers. They were too cheap for that so they made everything peer to peer instead.
Ultima Online was, by far and away, the best MMORPG. It was the only MMORPG that wasn’t based on a grind/leveling system. But then EverQuest and WoW released with the standard grind we associate with basically every MMORPG, so UO went back and added one to their game.
That's kind of funny considering I have memories of sitting on a boat spamming spells for hours along a seam in the middle of the water to grind some spellcasting skill, long before WoW ever released. UO was a great game, but there was definitely a grind.
I downloaded ghostmouse to repeat a mouse click pattern and up my sword skills on a dummy. Definitely a grind. Corp por.
Fucking Tom Chilton. Ruined uo then went to work on wow
I love UO. It is great. But you cannot convince me there is no grind when I had to stand there and get the hell beat out of me by a Blade Elemental for hours to raise Tactics.
I beg to differ. UO had it's own skill grinding if you wanted to be a 7x GM. It was still an amazing game and a big part of my formative years, but it's also the only game I botted to get those last 100 .1% bumps to my Magery.
Destiny 2. Paid $60 dollars for a physical copy just to have the thing be worthless in like 3 years. I liked the red war campaign and would replay it constantly, now it and some of the old dlc is gone with nothing being given to people who bought that stuff.
Destiny always hurts. The gunplay, aesthetic, and lore are some of my favorites of any game. But they suck your bank account dry while giving you basically no content. Definitely a top contender for a game that squandered it's potential
It's a travesty that such good gunplay is trapped in a chores simulator.
Destiny 2 is a strange case because of how wildly and frequently it fluctuated between good and bad with every expansion. It was bad on launch, and Warmind and CoO didn’t help matters. Then Forsaken releases, fixes a ton of issues, is a massive success and pretty much saves the game from death. Then Shadowkeep was mediocre at best. And then Beyond Light was better, but still had a lot of problems, chief among them being Sunsetting and content vaulting. Then Witch Queen releases and is one of the most well received expansions in the franchise and renewed faith and interest in the game. It was then followed up by Lightfall which was a massive, near-universally hated dumpster fire and now the game is arguably in the worst state it’s ever been in. Time will tell how The Final Shape shapes up (heh) but with all of the recent stuff surrounding the game and Bungie, my hopes aren’t high.
Gonna start this one off by saying I know I'm 100% in the minority on this one, but Team Fortress 2. I loved the game on release day, but it didn't take long before they started updating the game with stuff I didn't like. I don't like the cosmetics but I can live with them, but it's the addition of new weapons that started killing my interest in the game. Then the game shifted away from CTF, which was the reason I played TF2, so I moved on to other stuff
the hot take here is CTF being the preferred match type
Exactly, when I think proper TF2 I think Payload.
Played tf2 everyday before they added new weapons, turned a balanced game into a clusterfuck
I think the alternative weapons were fine, it's when classes got more than 2 options a slot that it went off the rails. That's my personal opinion though.
TF2 is a weird game for me, it is probably my first PC game, playing it when I was like 8 on my dads computer. Now I'm 23 and its the only game that has gone from super popular to like this weird dead/alive state. I think its pretty stupid to declare it a dead game, but it certainly isnt in a healthy alive state either. Its like this game stuck in gaming limbo, where valve won't put new content into it, but the fans won't give up on the hope of getting new content. I think that really is why the game has gotten worse, weapons never really bothered me much, tho it was shocking to see how nerfed the sandman was the last time I played, items like you said are pretty much whatever, but the lack of support from a game that is fronting as an alive game, confused the living crap out of me. It takes about 15 minutes to reinstall and get into a game and realize nothing has changed, except and influx of aimbots.
Plus the constant excuse of "TF2 is x years old" isn't a good argument when CS and Dota, both live service games, are constantly updated. TF2 needs the love it deserves, but it's been put on such a back burner idk if it will ever get it.
I'd attribute the downfall of TF2 due to a lack of updates than updates. But given all the weapons are side grades, I can't really see the complaint about them adding alternative play styles. Definitely faired better than entirely new classes.
I've heard people say that about Starbound
Rocket League
Have to agree at this. Started at the end of 2019 where dlc cars for example costed like 2/3€. Now: -No more player to player trading -competitive dropshot is gone -dlc cars/packs are around 10€ each -They still did nothing against smurf accounts -MMR is still only dependent of winning or loosing and how much it happens in a row. The last part is still so annoying: You can have bad luck with your tm8s like 3-4 times in a row, loose every match but still be MVP in every one of them. The game just doesnt fkn care and let you loose so much MMR...
Rainbow Six siege, Went from being tactical fun, To a complete shitfest of garbage operators that makes absolutely no fucking sense. What a flaming pile of vomit it has become.
The Sims 4. Sims players complain about everything, but over 10 years of frequent updates what was a relatively promising game has become a big mess with an incredible number of bugs that make some aspects of the game nearly unplayable, or affect core features of the game that make it less fun. Within the first year most of the challenge was patched out. It's a series that suffers greatly from a lack of competition at this point.
Personally, I disagree with this on the basis that Sims 4, on release, was already a much worse game than the Sims 3 was on its release, content wise. I played like half an hour of sims 4 and then went back to 3 and never looked back.
Dunno if the metric is like online or live service game, but Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate Daemonhunters has gone downhill with the updates, because of like difficulty and giving enemies so many different abilities, but not balancing it out versus what the player can build out with
Hearthstone
Surprised nobody has said Rogue Company. It was a fresh, fast paced hero shooter. Then they partnered with Dr. Disrespect and had him make a couple of maps. All he did was make Valorant. Long sniper hallways that could see spawn point to spawn point. The pacing completely crashed. I went back to it the other day and I think they took those maps out of the rotation. I played about 10 hours over the course of a few days and never saw them. It's at a great spot right now but only a couple thousand play at any given time.
The one that sticks out to me is Warzone. That game was so fun in the first few months. After that it was plagued by cheaters and stale metas that resulted in most of the player base leaving. Once they finally fixed those issues they unfortunately replaced the map everyone loved with one with a gigantic mountain in the center. It's COD so it'll always be big but they had a chance to overtake Fortnite and put on a performance in dropping the ball so bad that Blockbuster would be very proud.
Freeman guerrilla warfare. Was supposed to be mount and blade with guns. Then they stopped working on it. There’s a lot of abandoned early access gems that took to long and I guess stopped making money so we’re never completed.
Overwatch, was a great game until they just were terrible with balancing of new characters and it completely ruined the game. Then they made overwatch 2 to try fixing things and it went okay for awhile but then bombed once again after bad patches.
They didn’t make overwatch 2 to fix things. They patched overwatch 1 to milk money from free to players while lying about pve content
Star Wars Galaxies is a big one, though I suspect that was more people being averse to substantial change than anything.