After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
Same, although maybe it was targeted more at console players and fans of fps games. I looked it up just now and it looks well made, and also interesting. Finger guns and lots of movement, etc. Something went very wrong to get low numbers on this.
I can't imagine how soul-destroying it must be to put so much time and effort into a big-budget game like this only for it to flop so utterly. Even notoriously bad games sell at least a few thousand copies; being ignored is even worse. I'd say "at least it's not an indie game," but then most indie developers would expect their games to have minimal uptake these days.
I don't necessarily think title is the issue. Some of the biggest name games out there use pretty basic words: "God of War", "The Last of Us". They definitely lose some attention by being a brand new IP without much of a "signature feel" to them, like giant mechs, zombies, or princess magic.
"God of War" and "The Last of Us" are both incredible titles. They consist of simple words, immediately signal what the game is about, and have a poetic ring to them.
Just looked at Steam reviews and apparently it's another shitty launch that doesn't run on anything other than the best cpu and gpu combos, so they can't even promise good graphics lol
I've literally never heard about it until this post.
Looking at the reviews seems like a shame as the only complaints are the hardware limitations. Still won't be getting it until I finish (at least some of) my backlog.
Gee, certainly had nothing to do with it releasing while BG3 is still all-engrossing and the queen of the looter shooter, Warframe, had its convention yesterday and pulled in over 200k people into the main livestream yesterday, as well as having events all week.
I wouldn't blame BG3. The FPS and CRPG markets generally aren't that closely related. I'm finding all the BG3 clips people post online interesting, but I'm certainly more interested in a good singleplayer FPS. "Good" being key.
No one was really predicting Baldur's Gate would blow up THIS much, honestly. And besides, what could they do? Delay it any amount and you get close to something that IS predictably going to explode: Starfield.
Damn, I haven't played Warframe in years (and never will again, 5000h is enough), but it's good to hear it's going strong. It's an incredible game that at the time of my quitting just needed some clear direction.
RockPaperShotgun did a performance analysis on this - long story short, a 30xx card will be good for about medium settings, a 40xx for high, and really a 4090 for ultra. According to the Steam hardware survey, that's about one-in-five PC gamers that could start this up if they wanted to; a few percent can run it with all the flashy graphics. Combine the hardware exclusivity and the distinctly 'meh' reviews, get some seriously low player numbers.
It is funny to see the consumer pov change I guess. Back when crysis 1 released everyones PCs could barely play it too and the shooting gameplay wasn't anything really ground breaking either. Yet it's remembered very fondly today. This game kinda does the same thing 15 years later and everyone's like 'hard pass'.
A bit after release, it was either the developers or the publisher who called it a mistake to limit their sales to those who could run Crysis. It might have been when they were talking about WARHEAD being more accessible.
Except this engine is going to be used by every other developer, so it won't be special. I'm guess other UE5 games will run better and look better while also being more fun.
The visual design of their game world looks like it tried to replicate "stock asset" in blender. Everything feels devoid of any real artistic intent. So it feels overwhelmingly shiny and chrome and just bland. That's just based on visuals, but I legitimately confused this with the other God's of whatever title from 6-8 months ago.
It's actually pretty fun. The combat feels fun enough shooting spells from your hands. The world is pretty cool. Gina Torres was fantastic to see.
There are two showstoppers though. The PC performance is horrid, with a 3070 on pretty low settings with DLSS I'm still getting horrible framerates at points. The other issue is at $60-70 its a very high ask for such a short/simple game. I went the route of buying a month of EA play plus or whatever for $15 to play through it. If it was released at $30-40 might have felt a bit more fair for what it is.
I didn't see any marketing for it until release personally, and with the mixed/negative reviews my expectations were low. So going in with that perspective, and enjoying my playtime overall was a nice surprise.
Not surprising, but disappointing. The premise was interesting (first person magic shooter) but the execution was tepid. The presentation / atmosphere, the generic graphics, the dopey dialogue, the lack of an interesting story. A lot of the success of games like Halo is how the world sucks you in with its atmosphere and storyline, I think developers really underestimate how much that matters in a single player game. Cinematogrophy is important, the feel of an experience is more than the simple gameplay of moving a character around and pushing buttons.
The first two halo games were masterpieces in world building and suspense in gameplay. When the flood is first introduced your on the edge of your seat it's on par with the best horror games ever made.
Even Halo 3, for all its faults ("to war" immediately springs to mind), kept everything largely within the world-building of the previous two games, and it made the whole trilogy feel super cohesive and immersive when played back to back.
I kinda mentally dropped away from it when I saw the graphics, no way I can run that remotely usefully on a 3070. And from the reviews on Steam, it seems performance is bad in general. I'm curious to try it, but not if running it would just be frustration.
I don't know anything about the game, maybe there was some big outrage I don't know. Everyone always mad about games these days.
But that's kind of sad. Doesn't make me happy to see success siloed so much these days. In this industry it feels like there's no space for anyone but the giant success stories, or the bedroom developer that can live on tiny indie sales
There isn't any outrage or anything, I wouldn't feel too bad about it because it seems like an extremely generic shooter with mictrotransactions and menus that look exactly like Destiny. It just had terrible marketing and was very uninspired.
Also the minimum specs are so high that most people can't play it, and it runs very poorly.
It was put out by EA, and this flop very likely solidifies their logic that "Singleplayer games don't sell" - although I'm sure most people around here would confidently say it failed for other reasons.
Honestly performance is a big selling factor for PC games for me. I was more interested in Immortals than Armored Core 6 pre launch, but Armored Core apparently runs great on steam deck and will be a good experience on any PC I own, while I'm not sure Immortals would run acceptably on my main PC.
I wonder how much of that is just due to it being an EA game and so people pick it up on the EA store.
Although could also be their marketing. Maybe I’m just not in the target demographic but I saw 1 ad for it before launch and it explained nothing about the game. From that all I took was that it looked like a shitty early access game.
Honestly I'm not sure you can make a AAA game in a brand new franchise and have it succeed in the current market. Nobody wants to pay the big bucks for something completely unproven, especially not when there are so many huge but familiar games around.
If you go to metacritic right now, it’s mediocre on console (5.2 on ps5 & 5.3 on seriesX) and awful on PC (3.9). A lot of people complaining about poor performance on a 3070 and such. One of them recommends you wait for the 5090 to play this lol.