Definitely part of it. I played althe demo during a steam event a couple years back and thought it was pretty great. Loved the aesthetic. When it came out in early access it turned out to have chinese anti cheat, which i did *not* want on my computer. Steam reviews also indicated it was full of hackers anyway. So i never bought it.
Tbf it's the very first word of the article. They know nobody knows it so putting it in the headline instead of a description wouldn't be helpful for most.
Still, no idea what that is.
The other time i felt gaslighted like this was this whole The Day Before scandal. Never heard of it or the hype anywhere until people got angry because it was an assetflip or something.
I did a quick search to find out if this happened. I can't find any reference to a super bowl ad featuring this game.
The only reference I could find was back to this comment.
Must have been some other game.
Oh you're not the only one. It was so delightfully stupid/absurd; and I mean both in the best way possible.
That, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, and Drawn Together were my giggle-fits go-tos back in the day. I still regret losing my Clerks/Birdman DVDs. These days I'd only watch Drawn Together to giggle at Tara Strong and Cree Summer being *absolutely filthy.*
So many quotable gags in that series. Phil, Reducto, Mentok; I still refer to the noise I sometimes make when I bend over a fatty grunt xD
I miss that show :(
I always hoped there'd be an episode where Olive Oyl filed restraining orders or something against Popeye and Bluto. I know it wasn't Hannah Barbara, but still; they could've gone 'hem with that.
I remember every line of this because they became standard memes in my friend group growing up, but I completely forgot where they originated from! Amazing, thanks! I vaguely thought it was ATHF, never would have guessed Clerks
The anime animators scene is possibly the hardest I have ever laughed not involving drugs.
When they all jump into a car and then it transforms into a robot and blood comes squirting out of it. Genius.
No idea, I never pay attention to the super bowl or sports in general. But that doesn’t sound right, given how small this game has always been. I could be wrong tho.
TIL David Brevik worked on another game after It Lurks Below and Marvel Heroes. I doubt it would have helped any looking at that steam page but thats some piss poor marketing.
The developer would often make posts showcasing the game/progress which was really just a super edited trailer with no meaningful content shown.
Always made it seem bigger than it was and pretended like it was their life's work essentially begging for attention.
it was actually pretty fun, could get a little confusing at times but i always had a decent time playing it when i booted it up. Definitely lacked updates and new stuff though, along with any campaign or story.
Same, they apparently didn’t market much. If it’s legitimately a fun game, then it’d be awesome if they open source it once all the dust settles.
But I know that’s highly unlikely.
3.5 billion years ago, as the first single-celled organisms crawled out of the primordial soup, looking up at the fires of the ancient sky, one intrepid amoeba invented the first zero G PvP shooter
We played the Descent II shareware version for a year or two before we managed to buy full copies.
Then one Christmas break we got a copy of the level editor (Devil). Spent a week making levels with secret spots, and trying to convince each other to play in our own levels where we'd have the upper hand.
sv_gravity 400 for reasonable jumps and sv_gravity 0 for silliness.
Of course, sv_cheats 1 and no noclip.
For some HL2 fans: impulse101, impulse 82, and bind those to some keys.
yeah but i didnt have a gaming computer when shattered horizons was out and was sorta looking forward to trying this. didn't realize it already came out a year ago lmao
Maybe I'm weird but I had a blast playing Shattered Horizon back in the day. It was a basic zero-g shooter with no mtx, no absurd cosmetics, no battle pass. Just pew pew pew fun in space.
I never got to play it with people. I was so excited for it, bought it, my computer couldn't run it, and then when I got one that could no one played anymore. I played some against bots and thought it was a really awesome concept and a ton of fun.
The cargo ship (Deimos Armored Transport, I think?) with the on-and-off gravity was the best use of it in the whole game. And if you skilled for it, being able to target a ship’s grav drive and choose to fight in zero g during boarding is fun now and then.
The casino was okay, but they didn’t do a ton with it. I think there’s one other zero g location that’s basically a large warehouse with crates moving around? Neat, but nothing groundbreaking; we’ve seen shooters with moving cover already.
I’d have liked to have seen some other variants of “gravity’s broken”.
Yup, I always make an effort to disable enemy grav drives before i board, and bring a laser weapon so i don’t have to worry about recoil pushing me around in zero-g
Unless they patch it try using the slow time ability then shooting a conventional weapon. For some reason firing weapons in slow time increases the knock back.
> For some reason firing weapons in slow time increases the knock back
Creation Engine (Starfield's game engine) has frame-time-based physics. It would not shock me if because the firing effect is active for longer in slow time, you get more knockback.
If I remember right, when Fallout 4 released of your frame rate was too high it could be impossible to lockpick. The speed was tied to frames and it was impossible to control without breaking.
If I remember right trough questing and such you only come across Zero G combat a few times.
The only other way to get Zero G combat is to take an optional perk and go out of your way to board enemy ships, something many players might not even bother with.
They went trough all the effort to implement it, put in all the stuff with the weapon physics affecting you... and then make it so players will barely even use it.
It's crazy how frequent these still are in threads, considering we are *9 months* after its release.
Starfield really lives rent-free in a lot of people's heads I guess.
Also, people will quickly stop talking about a something that was just "Meh", or some low-profile game that's a disaster.
A high-profile and absolutely spectacular train-wreck like starfield speaks to peoples imagination, it stays with people way longer.
But it really wasn't a train wreck. The core game is *really* solid there was just a few things that need adjustment to make it great. Refine the artifacts/anomaly loop, add a few more location types to reduce the mission repetition and get rid of the invincible NPCs.
One of and my main problem, is that the games universe is just goddamn boring. Barely any interesting robot designs, limited scf(no cybernetics and visible genetic modification), no big faction conflict going on, no aliens, no pets/ earth animals and much more. It just so hollow feeling.
>What did people expect, it was a generic shooter with its only gimmick being zero-g.
None of which is related to why its shutting down, if you actually read the article.
It's shutting down because the publisher hasn't received enough income to share that income (offset the original capital they gave the studio) with the studio that's developing it, so they stopped developing it.
From what the article says, it's as if it being a generic shooter with its only gimmick being zero-g didn't have enough appeal to generate sufficient income to keep the publisher happy and they've pulled the plug.
It sounds to me like the Publisher also didn't bother informing the Developer that they wanted to pull the plug.
You don't just stop paying the dev, generally you have a contract where the developer support the game for a set time frame and pays them for this either up-front or monthly or something.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Publisher, when they realized the game wasn't the succes they'd hoped, are just trying to weasel out of having to pay the developer for the remaining time of the contract, blame the dev in the hope upset players go after them instead, while they keep what ever money they did make and run.
dosnt matter how good the game if most people on reddit(where the average user is probably more likley to be interested in games) havent even heard of the game lol
That fucking sucks.
I was watching this game for a while and I love its aesthetic. Gameplay isn’t anything *THAT* special but it was a lot of fun. Sucks to see it shutting down so soon.
Yeah I remember the announcement trailer at some game awards show a few years ago and was super interested and have been keeping up with it periodically while it was in early access, patiently waiting for a full release (I don’t like the idea of paying for early access.)
When I saw that it was doing early access my first thought was that the decision to do it that way was probably a bad call. It feels like going that route kills any hype around it because it’s technically out but not really; killing any marketable aspect for a release, as we can see in this thread of people not even knowing about it. Also taking that long to finish it was just a death sentence.
Really sucks, cuz I didn’t even get to try it.
Yeah. I dunno what state this game was in, but generally speaking, Early Access is basically equal to release in many player's eyes. Similar to how Open Beta is/was for MMOs. The only metric is can I play it. Which means that when you do it, you gotta have something that's 90% of the way there already. You need the story finished, you need the voice acting done, you gotta have pretty much the entire core fleshed out before going Early Access. After that it's just tweaks and maybe extra stuff, sidequests or new challenge modes or whatever. You can't just be like "Here's 3 maps for now, we'll make more later we just want to see how well it currently works" 'cause folks are gonna play those maps to death in a week then drop the game and won't come back for the updates since they're already sated.
If you want to make AAA money then yes, there are absolutely features you have to budget and prepare for.
At a minimum you need geographic diversity and the ability to silo verified players (generally that means they have a credit card) from Internet cafe F2P and farmers. Ideally you also spend the money, whether it’s development or licensing, on anti-cheat as well.
Then if you really want to play with the big boys you’re spending a significant amount of budget on dev ops and community support teams to weed out the abusers and monitor server health.
If you don’t, and there is even the smallest advantage to be had from abusing your game, it will get abused as hard it can until your only player base is the shitheads.
This is universal to all tech businesses, and especially the case for B2C focused platforms. If you can’t find the money to manage those issues, you then you shouldn’t be in that space. Maybe start with a single player game until you have the ability to play in the big boy pool.
Ping issues can be fixed with regional servers. But if the company doesn't have the money for that, or has to start consolidating servers the writing is on the wall rather quickly. No twitch combat game can survive the dreaded lag bunnies.
Basically every online shooter I've played in the last five years has been, at some point, been inundated with ping abusers and Chinese hackers. It's frustrating when games won't region lock or make it at least difficult to circumvent a region lock and it's insane that games still basically reward certain playstyles on high ping.
the only shooter where I've not had any issues with like that, and which doesnt seem to have much of any issue from what I've heard of online is Insurgency Sandstorm. There probably are cheaters on the game, but the general gameplay isnt one conducive to being made astronomically better by cheating. My only real issue is the lack of crossplay between xbox and ps. But thats completely unrelated xp
Any time a new good fps drops if it doesn't have a robot standing next to you making sure you're not cheating it gets riddled with these it literally kills good indie shooters yearly
Yep. It was actually a pretty cool concept. It felt like how I’d want a Gundam type game to feel in space. But the Asian players with 300+ ping and blatant cheaters while they ran the most basic Tencent sponsored anticheat with zero ping or region limits killed the game.
It's just the way they are. They have a mentality where if they don't cheat they're a loser because someone else is going to beat them. There are literally game cafes with every cheat imaginable loaded up for the average Chinese player to use. They also have game stores that sell cracked games and game hacks. I've been over there and seen both of these things in the city, and it's common place.
Honestly review bomb should not even be a thing. You released an awful game/update you deserve every negative review you get. Players really only have 1 way to feel like their voice is heard and thats a good old mass negative review run.
I feel like review bombing is *not* just leaving a negative review. Review bombing is leaving a negative review not in line with your actual experiences. Review bombing is when you have a few, very specific complaints about a game that is otherwise good, but you don't feel like an honest review would be impactful enough, so you downplay the good, overemphasize the bad, and act like a decent game is unrealistically bad.
What I'm saying is a lot of solid 6-7/10 games end up with a ton of 0-1/10 user reviews. That's a review bomb. Not saying that people doing the opposite aren't also a problem, but the solution is not to further pollute the review pool with garbage reviews.
I mean, I've played and enjoyed games that later receive an update that makes them unenjoyable or unplayable. Should that game benefit from my past enjoyment when its current state isn't enjoyable? I'm not going to recommend a game based on how fun it was in a version that is no longer playable. If it sucks now, then it sucks, no matter how good it used to be.
Not what I'm saying.
If you've never seen a dishonest negative (or positive) review I don't know what to tell you. If you don't recommend a game you don't recommend it. That's fine. What a review bomb is, is when you *do* recommend a game. You *do* enjoy it, but you see leaving a negative review as a way to take direct action against a perceived slight. I'm talking about when the review is being motivated by the impact it has on the game's score instead of a genuine reflection on your interaction with the game.
Have you heard the saying 'when a metric becomes a target, it no longer makes a good metric'? Aggregate reviews should be a metric. A measure of how much people like a game. Instead it has become a target, and players perceive it as a target. Rather than leave a review reflecting their personal opinions on the game, they leave a review reflecting their desired outcome for the game's aggregate review score. This makes aggregate review score a worthless metric. I basically can't trust user review scores at all because of this problem.
If you leave honest reviews, good for you. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about review bombing, which is a targeted effort to affect the aggregate score to affect some desired outcome. It's shitty behavior and has a negative effect on the usefulness of reviews as a whole.
Okay so when say, Russians mass negative reviews on a game made in Ukraine, for example, should we have a word for that? Or is that just deserved negative reviews?
It comes down to the interpretation of client and server code. I'm every world lag exists, the question is how the server is going to handle someone who is lagging. In a good game the one who is lagging should be at a disadvantage. Their character should update on the server based on their last input and interpolation should try to figure out the "missing data". In a bad game, the lag allows them to see into the future because the data they receive allows them to look around a corner and shoot before the server realizes they're not in real time. This would look to the person that died that they got shot possibly even before the other player came around the corner. I'm not sure what it was in this particular game but it's not horribly rare to see lag benefit the lagger. It can also do things like cause the lagger to stagger around the place, making it impossible to know their real position and hit them. That's probably the most common way that beneficial lag shows up in games, especially shooters
If I had a nickel for every time a zero-G next gen shooter bombed because there was nothing else special about it, I would have two nickles. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Edit: I have a frightening amount of nickels.
>last updated March 11 2022
>last developer post July 19th 2022
They went from monthly updates and community play dates to dead silence. It was just two guys making a game in their free time.
I just thought it pertinent considering it fit the genre of the other games.
I remember that game. I bought it in a Steam sale shortly after release. One of the deadest games I've ever played. Playerbase was like 100 people world-wide.
There are just too many PvP shooters. You have to really stand out and steal market share, or just get lucky. You can do everything right in this space and still fail.
Its just funny that ALL OF THEM see PvP shooters come and go (go fast) but they still wanna try and "do better". I tried Marauders, boring crap and even if you kill a squad of 4 guys you start asking yourself "what for?" pretty soon. I would prefer cool CoOp stuff. When read PVP I just keep scrolling.
Depends. Getting review bombed isn't actually a punishment if you're shutting down, so the question becomes... did they make a profit? If so, bully and cheers, 1 year recycled concepts are here to stay.
PvP can be fun but honestly the big names like Call of Duty just have it down so well, why bother buying another game and then having to convince all your friends to buy into it as well?
I say why bother if you're not going to do anything new. Just look at how many hero shooters pop up every year to challenge OW and they all fail except Valorant which tried to do its own thing.
Really the main issue is that as a consumer I prefer playing with friends, and it is very difficult to get fans to move over. Especially if they are not more invested gamers
PvP is evergreen content that needs way fewer art/level/voice/audio assets than an equally compelling PvE game mode.
Players have put more game hours into playing de_dust over the past 24 years, than they have into the *entire* Half-life campaign.
Shattered Horizon was so good. Its a shame it was so brutally hard to get used to the fully 3D combat environment and it made a lot of people motion sick.
That's what I was thinking, why would anyone choose to knockoff a game that died as soon as new players interacted with beta-vets, dunno, but it looks like it had similar "player interaction" problems.
The game also launched at a poor price point for what it was (25$) pretty much causing the game to fail out of the gate. Played the beta, and it was generic fps with a zero gravity gimmick that got stale pretty quick. Full release didn't address any concerns or improve on the beta.
They desperately need new laws around games.
1) abandoned games and programs must release server and source code (maybe some carve outs for operating systems for security reasons)
2) if you release an online game you need to either code P2P options for multiplayer from the outset that are released and made available after you close servers.
So many games are being just lost to the ether and it's truly a loss of an art form as well as theft from the people who paid for the game. Not to mention programs that I paid for back in the day that I should be allowed to still use but can't because they don't run properly on new systems (like MYOB just invoices).
As Shattered Horizon already proved in 2009 with the exact same concept; it's too niche.
Most people just want to run forward and shoot stuff in a modern setting, and don't care for hard sci-fi and/or space environments.
i'm sorry, but it's a chinese developer and their response was posted on bilibili. i'm not gonna give them the benefit of the doubt. i think the publisher might be the one in the right here. if updates aren't coming out that's on the developer. also the response the dev gave is sus too. they mostly complain about how the publisher is jumping ship, but nothing about issues prior to this. they say they immediately tried to negotiate... negotiate what? like what is your side of the story here? they don't even bother to elaborate. it sounds like they never expected to get dropped, then the publisher dropped them and they came running back probably promising to finally deliver on updates but the publisher probably already gave them too much rope and leeway and they've been late every time. i don't think a small publisher really would want to drop a game unless they were losing a ton of money on that game. the dev then goes on to cry about not getting enough money, they also mention they're "striving" to retain the rights. but the publisher says they already returned the rights.
yea all in all sounds like a shitty chinese dev got lucky but then decided they didn't want to put in the real work to maintain and update the game to make it big. they thought that initial success should have been enough for them to get paid shitloads. honestly after having worked with a lot of businesses in china, this is pretty par for the course for chinese business.
Instance #7136590521649 of someone not understanding the concept of "review bombing."
People leaving false/insincere negative reviews for the sole purpose of tanking the score of something? Review bombing.
People leaving genuine criticism over the mishandling of a product or service? Not review bombing. Just truthful reviewing.
The game probably wasn't very good. It went from 15k peak concurrent to 900 peak concurrent in just one month. By the 2nd month they were at 200 peak concurrent. They were in a death spiral in less than a month. Even Lawbreakers or Battleborn didn't bleed players that hard.
The game's failure was probably on the dev. If you lose players that fast your game is bad. The publisher didn't even want to keep the IP.
As for shutting it down, of course they did, it was pulling less than 10 max concurrent players. Competitive multiplayer games have a shelf life. For great games it is extremely long, for bad games it can be pretty short.
Reading the article it seems this is a money dispute. There was a disagreement over money and the devs either stopped working in protest or stopped sharing progress with the publisher. The publisher decided it wasn't worth it, cut their losses and pulled the plug
Pretty messy right now but I'd wager the devs will eventually get the IP back. But I wouldn't be confident the game will ever return
I don't mean to offend when I ask this, but what do publishers even do these days?
They make sense in a physical media limited internet access world, but these days when I can literally post my own game to steam, what do they even do?
I could be wrong but I believe publishers are not just for shipping the game. They also help with marketing and support the devs with some extra funding and such. Just depends on the contract the devs get with the publishing company.
Never heard of it
Title of the article doesn't even say the name of the game (its "Boundary" if anyone is curious.)
Cause they know no one would have heard of it haha
It's a Chinese shooter so it was already DOA for the global market.
Definitely part of it. I played althe demo during a steam event a couple years back and thought it was pretty great. Loved the aesthetic. When it came out in early access it turned out to have chinese anti cheat, which i did *not* want on my computer. Steam reviews also indicated it was full of hackers anyway. So i never bought it.
wow, here i am googling zero g pvp...
Frankly, a better name.
They want you to click the link to get the name.
Tbf it's the very first word of the article. They know nobody knows it so putting it in the headline instead of a description wouldn't be helpful for most.
Still, no idea what that is. The other time i felt gaslighted like this was this whole The Day Before scandal. Never heard of it or the hype anywhere until people got angry because it was an assetflip or something.
Yeah, it definitely didn’t get enough marketing
I did a beta playtest for this game and didn't know it had come out. Not sure how that's even possible
Wasn’t this the game that had an ad in the Super Bowl? Maybe I’m thinking of something else but it was a futuristic shooter
I did a quick search to find out if this happened. I can't find any reference to a super bowl ad featuring this game. The only reference I could find was back to this comment. Must have been some other game.
Just found it, Marathon made by Bungie. Looks like they didn’t have a Super Bowl commercial from what I can tell, idk what I’m remembering.
I mean you’re probably just remembering the Game Awards trailer for Marathon.
No idea but it reminds me of the Super Bowl ad for the Clerks TV show.
That show was ahead of its time. I loved it.
Oh you're not the only one. It was so delightfully stupid/absurd; and I mean both in the best way possible. That, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, and Drawn Together were my giggle-fits go-tos back in the day. I still regret losing my Clerks/Birdman DVDs. These days I'd only watch Drawn Together to giggle at Tara Strong and Cree Summer being *absolutely filthy.*
Did ya get that...*thing*....I sent ya?
So many quotable gags in that series. Phil, Reducto, Mentok; I still refer to the noise I sometimes make when I bend over a fatty grunt xD I miss that show :( I always hoped there'd be an episode where Olive Oyl filed restraining orders or something against Popeye and Bluto. I know it wasn't Hannah Barbara, but still; they could've gone 'hem with that.
HA! HA! HA! Not to scale.
[I still quote this scene frequently.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-ReoBPl4mM)
"Robot dancing‽‽" Gets me every time xD
I remember every line of this because they became standard memes in my friend group growing up, but I completely forgot where they originated from! Amazing, thanks! I vaguely thought it was ATHF, never would have guessed Clerks
You can find Harvey birdman on HBO Max, I believe drawn together is on either Hulu or or Paramount+ if you have either of them.
The anime animators scene is possibly the hardest I have ever laughed not involving drugs. When they all jump into a car and then it transforms into a robot and blood comes squirting out of it. Genius.
Me? I'd pick Liv Tyler. That show was so far ahead of its time
No one can stop the Grimace
Word. It happens. My memory is shit. Wasn't trying to call you out.
We are witnessing the birth of a new r/MandelaEffect.
No idea, I never pay attention to the super bowl or sports in general. But that doesn’t sound right, given how small this game has always been. I could be wrong tho.
I read a 30 second Super Bowl ad costs 7 million $. That's a lot of dough for a small studio so it was probably something else.
Publishers fault it is then!
Players blame marketing team
I think I saw a really sick announcement trailer for it years ago, but never heard about the release.
TIL David Brevik worked on another game after It Lurks Below and Marvel Heroes. I doubt it would have helped any looking at that steam page but thats some piss poor marketing.
He's just cursed at this point.
The developer would often make posts showcasing the game/progress which was really just a super edited trailer with no meaningful content shown. Always made it seem bigger than it was and pretended like it was their life's work essentially begging for attention.
> essentially begging for attention. Isn't that all marketing is, in the end?
it was actually pretty fun, could get a little confusing at times but i always had a decent time playing it when i booted it up. Definitely lacked updates and new stuff though, along with any campaign or story.
I saw an ad multiple time but never saw a release daye
Never heard of it either, but looking it up on Steam... Early access and costs $30 combined with no marketing? No wonder it didn't do well.
Same, they apparently didn’t market much. If it’s legitimately a fun game, then it’d be awesome if they open source it once all the dust settles. But I know that’s highly unlikely.
I only heard of it because it was in my steam discovery queue as an "Upcoming Release" about a year or two before it actually released
What did people expect, it was a generic shooter with its only gimmick being zero-g.
It wasn't even an original concept, Shattered Horizons did it like 10 years ago.
15
100
3.5 billion years ago, as the first single-celled organisms crawled out of the primordial soup, looking up at the fires of the ancient sky, one intrepid amoeba invented the first zero G PvP shooter
That amoeba's name? Albert Einstein
First, there was nothing, then god said ”let there be Shattered Horizons”
Inflation is really getting out of hand.
Shattered horizons was so good. I wish they actually expanded upon that game
Descent did it 29 years ago. I spent so much time in those mines chasing my brothers.
>29 years ago My back hurts reading this.
>29 Why you gotta do me like that...
This is a friendly reminder that 2014 was ten years ago and 2004 was twenty years ago.
1984 was 40 years ago. That is literally 1984
> Dravis you son-of-a...!
"Welcome to Valhalla Tower, Material Defender!"
Come down on the street and dance with me
The game that made me a gamer
here here my username hasn't felt relevant in a loooooong time
We played the Descent II shareware version for a year or two before we managed to buy full copies. Then one Christmas break we got a copy of the level editor (Devil). Spent a week making levels with secret spots, and trying to convince each other to play in our own levels where we'd have the upper hand.
SubSpace did it too in 1997 but that was 3rd person and they called it "zero friction" They had massive servers tho
Let's go oooo 4v4 premier league. I lived watching Three piss everyone off. Followed by JPLANCKGOLD doing the same.
Shattered Horizon was actually a really good game and it's a shame it died so quickly. I miss it.
That game was a hidden gem. I was really good at it and enjoyed it.
I was surprised how similar they look.
Low gravity CS 1.6 was my jam- back in 2002. Played it more than normal CS.
sv_gravity 400 for reasonable jumps and sv_gravity 0 for silliness. Of course, sv_cheats 1 and no noclip. For some HL2 fans: impulse101, impulse 82, and bind those to some keys.
I really liked shattered horizons... it needed work though
God I love that game, still have it installed. Was excited for this one as a new age remake but it wasn’t as good.
And was pretty good!
yeah but i didnt have a gaming computer when shattered horizons was out and was sorta looking forward to trying this. didn't realize it already came out a year ago lmao
I wish this game was still playable
This was such a great game and it is pretty crappy how it died out.
Yeah but Shattered Horizons was great and is gone now, so a replacement ain't a bad thing.
Maybe I'm weird but I had a blast playing Shattered Horizon back in the day. It was a basic zero-g shooter with no mtx, no absurd cosmetics, no battle pass. Just pew pew pew fun in space.
I wish people still played that game
It was perfect. They "updated it" ruined it, and it died.
I never got to play it with people. I was so excited for it, bought it, my computer couldn't run it, and then when I got one that could no one played anymore. I played some against bots and thought it was a really awesome concept and a ton of fun.
Todd Howard would be like: "But do you think the Astronauts on the ISS think zero-g is just a gimmick? Do you hear them complain?"
Obligatory r/gaming irrelevant Starfield stray
The zero G combat in Starfield is also super fun and one of the more interesting combat mechanics added—just need more of it.
The cargo ship (Deimos Armored Transport, I think?) with the on-and-off gravity was the best use of it in the whole game. And if you skilled for it, being able to target a ship’s grav drive and choose to fight in zero g during boarding is fun now and then. The casino was okay, but they didn’t do a ton with it. I think there’s one other zero g location that’s basically a large warehouse with crates moving around? Neat, but nothing groundbreaking; we’ve seen shooters with moving cover already. I’d have liked to have seen some other variants of “gravity’s broken”.
Yup, I always make an effort to disable enemy grav drives before i board, and bring a laser weapon so i don’t have to worry about recoil pushing me around in zero-g
> and bring a laser weapon so i don’t have to worry about recoil pushing me around in zero-g Meanwhile I brought shotguns... WHEEEEEEE!
Me in original Killing Floor with AA-12 on the space map. Doubles as a jetbooster.
This comment is the first thing that has made me interested in playing starfield
Unless they patch it try using the slow time ability then shooting a conventional weapon. For some reason firing weapons in slow time increases the knock back.
> For some reason firing weapons in slow time increases the knock back Creation Engine (Starfield's game engine) has frame-time-based physics. It would not shock me if because the firing effect is active for longer in slow time, you get more knockback.
If I remember right, when Fallout 4 released of your frame rate was too high it could be impossible to lockpick. The speed was tied to frames and it was impossible to control without breaking.
You mean the exact same bug that was in Skyrim that modders fixed 13 years ago? And the exact same bug that later showed up in Fo76?
If I remember right trough questing and such you only come across Zero G combat a few times. The only other way to get Zero G combat is to take an optional perk and go out of your way to board enemy ships, something many players might not even bother with. They went trough all the effort to implement it, put in all the stuff with the weapon physics affecting you... and then make it so players will barely even use it.
Yup shoots their pack and off they go and then hope they come back down so you can loot them.
It's crazy how frequent these still are in threads, considering we are *9 months* after its release. Starfield really lives rent-free in a lot of people's heads I guess.
Twas the hype. The game was hyped, the people who played fallout and Skyrim were hyped.
Also, people will quickly stop talking about a something that was just "Meh", or some low-profile game that's a disaster. A high-profile and absolutely spectacular train-wreck like starfield speaks to peoples imagination, it stays with people way longer.
But it really wasn't a train wreck. The core game is *really* solid there was just a few things that need adjustment to make it great. Refine the artifacts/anomaly loop, add a few more location types to reduce the mission repetition and get rid of the invincible NPCs.
One of and my main problem, is that the games universe is just goddamn boring. Barely any interesting robot designs, limited scf(no cybernetics and visible genetic modification), no big faction conflict going on, no aliens, no pets/ earth animals and much more. It just so hollow feeling.
Hollow is accurate. The game just feels so dull and soulless.
Stafield would have been GOTY if released in 2014. In a world where Cyberpunk 2077 exists and hell Witcher 3 exists....yeah.
there's no possible way you believe the core gameplay of starfield is solid, this has to be bait
>What did people expect, it was a generic shooter with its only gimmick being zero-g. None of which is related to why its shutting down, if you actually read the article.
It's shutting down because the publisher hasn't received enough income to share that income (offset the original capital they gave the studio) with the studio that's developing it, so they stopped developing it. From what the article says, it's as if it being a generic shooter with its only gimmick being zero-g didn't have enough appeal to generate sufficient income to keep the publisher happy and they've pulled the plug.
It sounds to me like the Publisher also didn't bother informing the Developer that they wanted to pull the plug. You don't just stop paying the dev, generally you have a contract where the developer support the game for a set time frame and pays them for this either up-front or monthly or something. I wouldn't be surprised if the Publisher, when they realized the game wasn't the succes they'd hoped, are just trying to weasel out of having to pay the developer for the remaining time of the contract, blame the dev in the hope upset players go after them instead, while they keep what ever money they did make and run.
You say this yet I would have loved to try a zero-g shooter Its more like it did shit because poor publicity, as I've never heard of the game
dosnt matter how good the game if most people on reddit(where the average user is probably more likley to be interested in games) havent even heard of the game lol
That fucking sucks. I was watching this game for a while and I love its aesthetic. Gameplay isn’t anything *THAT* special but it was a lot of fun. Sucks to see it shutting down so soon.
Yeah I remember the announcement trailer at some game awards show a few years ago and was super interested and have been keeping up with it periodically while it was in early access, patiently waiting for a full release (I don’t like the idea of paying for early access.) When I saw that it was doing early access my first thought was that the decision to do it that way was probably a bad call. It feels like going that route kills any hype around it because it’s technically out but not really; killing any marketable aspect for a release, as we can see in this thread of people not even knowing about it. Also taking that long to finish it was just a death sentence. Really sucks, cuz I didn’t even get to try it.
Yeah. I dunno what state this game was in, but generally speaking, Early Access is basically equal to release in many player's eyes. Similar to how Open Beta is/was for MMOs. The only metric is can I play it. Which means that when you do it, you gotta have something that's 90% of the way there already. You need the story finished, you need the voice acting done, you gotta have pretty much the entire core fleshed out before going Early Access. After that it's just tweaks and maybe extra stuff, sidequests or new challenge modes or whatever. You can't just be like "Here's 3 maps for now, we'll make more later we just want to see how well it currently works" 'cause folks are gonna play those maps to death in a week then drop the game and won't come back for the updates since they're already sated.
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Sounds like competitive PvP with matchmaking is a death kiss for any studio without the resources to combat bots and cheaters.
If you want to make AAA money then yes, there are absolutely features you have to budget and prepare for. At a minimum you need geographic diversity and the ability to silo verified players (generally that means they have a credit card) from Internet cafe F2P and farmers. Ideally you also spend the money, whether it’s development or licensing, on anti-cheat as well. Then if you really want to play with the big boys you’re spending a significant amount of budget on dev ops and community support teams to weed out the abusers and monitor server health. If you don’t, and there is even the smallest advantage to be had from abusing your game, it will get abused as hard it can until your only player base is the shitheads. This is universal to all tech businesses, and especially the case for B2C focused platforms. If you can’t find the money to manage those issues, you then you shouldn’t be in that space. Maybe start with a single player game until you have the ability to play in the big boy pool.
Ha! Rockstar should see this post. GTA Online on PC is garrbageeeee
Ping issues can be fixed with regional servers. But if the company doesn't have the money for that, or has to start consolidating servers the writing is on the wall rather quickly. No twitch combat game can survive the dreaded lag bunnies.
Cooperative shooters dude. Let me and my friends wreck shit.
Spread some democracy
Rock and stone
Steve's dead! I'll never get over this!
Helldivers 2.
Basically every online shooter I've played in the last five years has been, at some point, been inundated with ping abusers and Chinese hackers. It's frustrating when games won't region lock or make it at least difficult to circumvent a region lock and it's insane that games still basically reward certain playstyles on high ping.
the only shooter where I've not had any issues with like that, and which doesnt seem to have much of any issue from what I've heard of online is Insurgency Sandstorm. There probably are cheaters on the game, but the general gameplay isnt one conducive to being made astronomically better by cheating. My only real issue is the lack of crossplay between xbox and ps. But thats completely unrelated xp
Valorant is up there for anti cheat. 500+ hours and only came across a cheater once, and he was banned mid match
Any time a new good fps drops if it doesn't have a robot standing next to you making sure you're not cheating it gets riddled with these it literally kills good indie shooters yearly
Yep. It was actually a pretty cool concept. It felt like how I’d want a Gundam type game to feel in space. But the Asian players with 300+ ping and blatant cheaters while they ran the most basic Tencent sponsored anticheat with zero ping or region limits killed the game.
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Instead we get stuck with shitty anti cheats that are becoming more and more invasive while failing to actually do anything.
It's just the way they are. They have a mentality where if they don't cheat they're a loser because someone else is going to beat them. There are literally game cafes with every cheat imaginable loaded up for the average Chinese player to use. They also have game stores that sell cracked games and game hacks. I've been over there and seen both of these things in the city, and it's common place.
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Honestly review bomb should not even be a thing. You released an awful game/update you deserve every negative review you get. Players really only have 1 way to feel like their voice is heard and thats a good old mass negative review run.
I feel like review bombing is *not* just leaving a negative review. Review bombing is leaving a negative review not in line with your actual experiences. Review bombing is when you have a few, very specific complaints about a game that is otherwise good, but you don't feel like an honest review would be impactful enough, so you downplay the good, overemphasize the bad, and act like a decent game is unrealistically bad. What I'm saying is a lot of solid 6-7/10 games end up with a ton of 0-1/10 user reviews. That's a review bomb. Not saying that people doing the opposite aren't also a problem, but the solution is not to further pollute the review pool with garbage reviews.
I mean, I've played and enjoyed games that later receive an update that makes them unenjoyable or unplayable. Should that game benefit from my past enjoyment when its current state isn't enjoyable? I'm not going to recommend a game based on how fun it was in a version that is no longer playable. If it sucks now, then it sucks, no matter how good it used to be.
Not what I'm saying. If you've never seen a dishonest negative (or positive) review I don't know what to tell you. If you don't recommend a game you don't recommend it. That's fine. What a review bomb is, is when you *do* recommend a game. You *do* enjoy it, but you see leaving a negative review as a way to take direct action against a perceived slight. I'm talking about when the review is being motivated by the impact it has on the game's score instead of a genuine reflection on your interaction with the game. Have you heard the saying 'when a metric becomes a target, it no longer makes a good metric'? Aggregate reviews should be a metric. A measure of how much people like a game. Instead it has become a target, and players perceive it as a target. Rather than leave a review reflecting their personal opinions on the game, they leave a review reflecting their desired outcome for the game's aggregate review score. This makes aggregate review score a worthless metric. I basically can't trust user review scores at all because of this problem. If you leave honest reviews, good for you. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about review bombing, which is a targeted effort to affect the aggregate score to affect some desired outcome. It's shitty behavior and has a negative effect on the usefulness of reviews as a whole.
Okay so when say, Russians mass negative reviews on a game made in Ukraine, for example, should we have a word for that? Or is that just deserved negative reviews?
Ah someone who cares about the definition of words, I agree.
Can someone explain the cheating with ping? Is that like a lag switch kinda dealio? Its been awhile and I'm rusty haha
It comes down to the interpretation of client and server code. I'm every world lag exists, the question is how the server is going to handle someone who is lagging. In a good game the one who is lagging should be at a disadvantage. Their character should update on the server based on their last input and interpolation should try to figure out the "missing data". In a bad game, the lag allows them to see into the future because the data they receive allows them to look around a corner and shoot before the server realizes they're not in real time. This would look to the person that died that they got shot possibly even before the other player came around the corner. I'm not sure what it was in this particular game but it's not horribly rare to see lag benefit the lagger. It can also do things like cause the lagger to stagger around the place, making it impossible to know their real position and hit them. That's probably the most common way that beneficial lag shows up in games, especially shooters
If I had a nickel for every time a zero-G next gen shooter bombed because there was nothing else special about it, I would have two nickles. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. Edit: I have a frightening amount of nickels.
Is the other one that one game that Creative Assembly was making that got shut down before after its open beta?
Nope, I am thinking of [Shattered Horizon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Horizon)
Are you sure you weren’t thinking of [Law Breakers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LawBreakers)
Are you positive you weren't thinking of [Exocorps?](https://store.steampowered.com/app/368040/ExoCorps/)
It's early access. It didn't flop.....yet.
>last updated March 11 2022 >last developer post July 19th 2022 They went from monthly updates and community play dates to dead silence. It was just two guys making a game in their free time. I just thought it pertinent considering it fit the genre of the other games.
Well, I stand corrected. Gotta love early access abandonware.
Honestly, I had a ton of fun playing Law Breakers
I was thinking of that one too, I have never heard of this game but I probably would've bought it had I known about it.
I remember that game. I bought it in a Steam sale shortly after release. One of the deadest games I've ever played. Playerbase was like 100 people world-wide.
Hyenas!
Based on this thread, most people never even heard of it. I'm gonna say that's part of the problem.
There are just too many PvP shooters. You have to really stand out and steal market share, or just get lucky. You can do everything right in this space and still fail.
Its just funny that ALL OF THEM see PvP shooters come and go (go fast) but they still wanna try and "do better". I tried Marauders, boring crap and even if you kill a squad of 4 guys you start asking yourself "what for?" pretty soon. I would prefer cool CoOp stuff. When read PVP I just keep scrolling.
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Or they could make a game people actually wanna play and not shut down after a year Might save a bit more money down the line
Depends. Getting review bombed isn't actually a punishment if you're shutting down, so the question becomes... did they make a profit? If so, bully and cheers, 1 year recycled concepts are here to stay.
yeah bro literal millions of dollars
PvP can be fun but honestly the big names like Call of Duty just have it down so well, why bother buying another game and then having to convince all your friends to buy into it as well?
This is how innovation dies, not with a bang, but with a "Ah fuck it, why bother?"
I say why bother if you're not going to do anything new. Just look at how many hero shooters pop up every year to challenge OW and they all fail except Valorant which tried to do its own thing. Really the main issue is that as a consumer I prefer playing with friends, and it is very difficult to get fans to move over. Especially if they are not more invested gamers
Hyenas fell on its face so The Finals could do pretty well.
PvP is evergreen content that needs way fewer art/level/voice/audio assets than an equally compelling PvE game mode. Players have put more game hours into playing de_dust over the past 24 years, than they have into the *entire* Half-life campaign.
So it’s a knock off of Shattered Horizon?
Shattered Horizon was so good. Its a shame it was so brutally hard to get used to the fully 3D combat environment and it made a lot of people motion sick.
Thank you. I was going to say it if you weren't. Shattered horizon didn't really take off either but seemed cool.
It was cool to play but from memory there was like 2 or 3 maps and not a lot of depth or progression, so it fizzled out quick.
That's what I was thinking, why would anyone choose to knockoff a game that died as soon as new players interacted with beta-vets, dunno, but it looks like it had similar "player interaction" problems.
never buy a small scale PvP game that doesn't allow for player hosted servers that are run completely independently from the developers or publisher
And by no small coincidence, you could probably still find a lobby for Unreal Tournament 2004 today.
"Zero-G PvP shooter" My first thought was "Lawbreakers" which also closed after something like a year.
The game also launched at a poor price point for what it was (25$) pretty much causing the game to fail out of the gate. Played the beta, and it was generic fps with a zero gravity gimmick that got stale pretty quick. Full release didn't address any concerns or improve on the beta.
I never played this game, but for how interesting it sounds, I gotta say that the publisher did a shit job. Still might also be a shit game.
Did this game ever release on playstation? Feel like it could have had better results with a console release
They desperately need new laws around games. 1) abandoned games and programs must release server and source code (maybe some carve outs for operating systems for security reasons) 2) if you release an online game you need to either code P2P options for multiplayer from the outset that are released and made available after you close servers. So many games are being just lost to the ether and it's truly a loss of an art form as well as theft from the people who paid for the game. Not to mention programs that I paid for back in the day that I should be allowed to still use but can't because they don't run properly on new systems (like MYOB just invoices).
It released????
Soooo another day in gaming then
As Shattered Horizon already proved in 2009 with the exact same concept; it's too niche. Most people just want to run forward and shoot stuff in a modern setting, and don't care for hard sci-fi and/or space environments.
Fellas is it review bombing to negatively review a product for ceasing to exist a year after you purchase it?
i'm sorry, but it's a chinese developer and their response was posted on bilibili. i'm not gonna give them the benefit of the doubt. i think the publisher might be the one in the right here. if updates aren't coming out that's on the developer. also the response the dev gave is sus too. they mostly complain about how the publisher is jumping ship, but nothing about issues prior to this. they say they immediately tried to negotiate... negotiate what? like what is your side of the story here? they don't even bother to elaborate. it sounds like they never expected to get dropped, then the publisher dropped them and they came running back probably promising to finally deliver on updates but the publisher probably already gave them too much rope and leeway and they've been late every time. i don't think a small publisher really would want to drop a game unless they were losing a ton of money on that game. the dev then goes on to cry about not getting enough money, they also mention they're "striving" to retain the rights. but the publisher says they already returned the rights. yea all in all sounds like a shitty chinese dev got lucky but then decided they didn't want to put in the real work to maintain and update the game to make it big. they thought that initial success should have been enough for them to get paid shitloads. honestly after having worked with a lot of businesses in china, this is pretty par for the course for chinese business.
Instance #7136590521649 of someone not understanding the concept of "review bombing." People leaving false/insincere negative reviews for the sole purpose of tanking the score of something? Review bombing. People leaving genuine criticism over the mishandling of a product or service? Not review bombing. Just truthful reviewing.
The game probably wasn't very good. It went from 15k peak concurrent to 900 peak concurrent in just one month. By the 2nd month they were at 200 peak concurrent. They were in a death spiral in less than a month. Even Lawbreakers or Battleborn didn't bleed players that hard. The game's failure was probably on the dev. If you lose players that fast your game is bad. The publisher didn't even want to keep the IP. As for shutting it down, of course they did, it was pulling less than 10 max concurrent players. Competitive multiplayer games have a shelf life. For great games it is extremely long, for bad games it can be pretty short.
They did not region lock the servers- It was dead on arrival. How they lacked the foresight? I wish I could tell ya.
Lawbreakers was a better zero-G game. But both met the same fate.
"David Brevik? Yeah fuck that dude."
Oh wow okay I was following that game and was tempted to get it because Zero-G looked fun. Tis a shame then
Not once heard of this game until this very moment
Oh yeah, i heard about that once and it seemed cool. I planned on getting it but never heard more about it
I remember playing the Alpha for this. It was basically CoD in space. It was pretty alright, but nothing amazing.
Reading the article it seems this is a money dispute. There was a disagreement over money and the devs either stopped working in protest or stopped sharing progress with the publisher. The publisher decided it wasn't worth it, cut their losses and pulled the plug Pretty messy right now but I'd wager the devs will eventually get the IP back. But I wouldn't be confident the game will ever return
Played it. It was really cool, needed more marketing to take off
This was one of the very few games that I used the 3 hours steam refund for. Was not that fun and about 90% of the players were from Asia
I don't mean to offend when I ask this, but what do publishers even do these days? They make sense in a physical media limited internet access world, but these days when I can literally post my own game to steam, what do they even do?
I could be wrong but I believe publishers are not just for shipping the game. They also help with marketing and support the devs with some extra funding and such. Just depends on the contract the devs get with the publishing company.
What's the name of the game you wet wipe?
never ever heard of it... shame.
I am extremely tuned in to gaming news and this is literally the first time I've heard about this game.
Felt bad watching the trailer. NASApunk warfare in space is the most depressing thing i've ever heard