In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller
In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller
Not at all surprised, the demo for this was really solid.
I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.
Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.
There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.
I have no clue why it says MOBA gameplay because it is nothing like a MOBA unless there are multiple definitions on that term. The only thing is that you have 4 (5) skills?
Played the demo for like 8 hours which was enough for getting all my 5 chars to level 10 or more which feel enough to put on whatever in the skilltree.
Agree with the slow progress however but I don't mind too much. I have a lot of fun with the game.
It helps that Borderlands runs like shit
...
DID Blands 4 "dominate"? The only mention of it I saw was pitchford (and his magic flash drive) bragging that the servers wouldn't get hugged over the weekend and... yeah.
Looks like a rogue version of Grim Dawn, but I did not try the demo.
If developers have a solid game, I wish they to put one promo video and one here' how game play works video out.
I am genuinely curious how Steam puts games in its Top Seller list. It would seem that sometimes a game gets into the list that does not belong merely because it is new. I amnot saying that applies to this game, but I would like to see some metrics that show whether Steam alters anything for anything in the Top Seller list.
It's by revenue over a certain amount of time, but I don't know what that period of time is. A $35 game has to sell twice as many copies as a $70 game to rank just as high. Since the Steam Deck is about $400, depending on SKU, it's usually in that top sellers list despite not matching the volume of sales that certain games do.
Why can't a game you haven't heard about be in the top sellers? I did hear about it a couple of weeks ago, played the demo and it was a no brainer for me to buy it.
How Steam measures whatever sells what I don't know but it can be 15 minutes of fame for smaller studios also. If the game is good, it is earned imo.
Edit: read your comment a bit better now. I am sorry if this got a negative feeling to it. Not my intention.
I have an issue with the idea that Borderlands is dominating gaming news. I didn't even realise it had launched so I wouldn't exactly call it popping off the shelf.
I get where you're coming from, I found out Borderlands 4 launched when I saw the news about it having performance issues. That said, if you look at Steam charts Borderlands 4 is just smidge below Silksong numbers and at the time of writing this comment Silksong is the 4th most popular game and Borderlands is 6th most popular game, barely beaten out by a game called Banana (which I've never even heard of and I have no clue why it's that popular).
It's an idle/clicker game that drops steam items that can, theoretically, be sold for money. I can't recommend it.
I was going to comment the same thing. Maybe it's just the circles i'm in, but like the only thing i've heard about it is the price and the performance issues on PC
Boards like these don't talk about Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed much either, but all of these are multi billion dollar franchises.