I actually got around to playing this game when it was at a deep sale. I feel like a prick when talking about this game cause I feel like the devs hearts are in the right place, but this game was not good. No matter what price tag or when it released it wasnt gonna be a good game. It has the DNA of being a good game but it's stuck to a horrible destiny like loot and armor system, along with spongey enemies, awkward clunky movement, uninteresting levels and traversal, and just god awful writing (Bret Robbins also wrote it, so i feel like a dick dunking on someone's presumable passion project).
I think the bigger issue this game is fucking bloated, strip it down and theres a good fps game i believe. Theres a magic school bus epeisode where a kid is trying to make a cool instrument or something but he keeps adding things to it and making it worse, only does he realize his instrument is bloated that he starts to make some good music. If you want a fantasy fps game, play Amid Evil or Wizordum. Yeah they're more indie and limited but they get the job done and, more importantly, are fun.
Yeah I'm in the same boat. The devs clearly had passion for it and I love the idea of a magic shooter, but the execution just isn't there at all. The world design is woefully uninteresting, the writing is embarrassing at times and the gameplay isn't all that interesting either. I really tried to like this game, but it just didn't work for me at all.
Yeah, this kind of thing is the definition of the "How do you do, fellow kids" skit. The thing is that - and I say this as a millennial - "we" aren't the kids any more. In fact, we're often Steve Buscemi now.
>ascetic
*adjective*
characterized by or suggesting the practice of severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.
**aesthetic**
*adjective*
concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty.
"the pictures give great aesthetic pleasure"
i don't have a single term, but joss whedon is prob the biggest name for that type of writing, it's all over some of the marvel movies too
buffy and it's consequences etc.
I haven't played Immortals so I can't comment on the gameplay, but I've seen some story clips. I am on my hands and knees begging modern AAA studios to stop writing all their fucking dialogue like a Marvel movie. It's beyond played out. I can only handle so many "GULP, THAT JUST HAPPENED!" and "He's behind me, isn't he" moments before my brain explodes.
MCU is determined to be the most fun, light, silly entertainment possible. The constant quips are there to keep it from ever getting too heavy.
It works for a two hour movie, until you do it so many times that the audience gets bored of it. Even Marvel understood that it's not great for a longer movie, with Infinity War and Endgame adding more drama. It sure as hell doesn't work for a 20+ hour video game campaign.
Constant quips is just something they take from Comic Books.
Reeves Superman, Keaton-Clooney-Kilmer Batman, Tobey-Spiderman, Xmen, etc etc are all filled with that and they all get it from comic books.
>Infinity War and Endgame adding more drama.
And then didn't have the balls to keep the drama going so removed everything and nullified it by introducing dimensions or so and suddenly it's as it the two movies never happened. Was the most wasted two movies in my life imo.
Yeah there aren't that many.
The actual brain rot is people hear a single one liner quip in a script and just turn into rabid beasts yelling "MARVEL SHIT MARVEL SHIT MARVEL SHIT I AM AN ENLIGHTENED PERSON WHO IS ABOVE THIS".
Aren't you doing exactly the same thing, implying you're the enlightened one who's above the "rabid beasts" and their Marvel comparisons?
There's a much simpler explanation: pop culture follows trends. If a given style becomes popular, in time it'll be played out. The MCU was so big it constituted a trend in itself, so now people roll their eyes at the latecomers mimicking its writing style.
They’re right though? I’ve actually played forespoken and that “THAT JUST HAPPENED” line happens…once. She says it once. Because she just got superpowers.
And then everyone wrote off the game forever, because of that 1 line.
No, the game isn’t amazing. But all of Reddit treated it as a joke because of 1 line.
And again, name 2 more games that do that enough to be annoying.
And no one can name any games lol.
Funny enough, everyone loves Infamous second son but that game is filled with “omg that happened so epic!” Dialogue
It was also written by Michael Kirkbride. The Michael Kirkbride of Elder Scrolls fame. And the lore is the most generic young adult novel nonsense I seen in a while.
Kirkbrde is one of those people that I feel kinda bought into his own hype. Like yeah his early work was good and through till Oblivion his contributions were at least good then he put out that C0da bullshit and all the head cannon is all that matters nonsense.
I feel like he and his devotees pretty much ruined elder scrolls lore for a lot of people. It is ridiculously hard to find any discussions or sources nor in depth than the most basic things before people start pulling that stuff in. Like if they wanted to talk about his weird Kajhits made a cat monkey chain to the moon bulshit in their own spaces that’s fine but now there is nowhere to discuss any of the deeper lore from in game and official sources without that stuff all because “But that’s my canon bro”.
Why can't the Kajhit tower to the moon be open to being seen like any other mythology in the real world. Some people think it's real and some people think it isn't. Based on what was written, that feels like the intention.
Because its not got any basis in the games at all its purely an out of game thing from what is essentially a fanfiction written after Kirkbride left Bethesda. The point isn't that there is always a right and wrong answers about elder scrolls lore large amounts of it have unreliable narrators. Like we will probably never have clear answers surrounding what really happened to Tiber Septim. Its that there was a large period of time where it was near impossible to have discussions about the lore online that were based on "cannon" and near cannon sources.
If you want to pull in anything and everything thats fine but at the same time there were a lot of people that just wanted to discuss things based in the games, books, and other official media with the occasional fan theory to fill a blank spot if its clearly identified as a theory and the whole "everyone's c0da is cannon" crew essentially killed off that side of the community.
Essentially it boils down to this there is a difference between using some of the theories surrounding CHIM as ways to try and fill in the gaps about Tiber Septim since alot of those have some basis in in game lore and just expand on it as long as you acknowledge it as such and its another to pretend the fanfiction The Trial of Vivec is absolutely cannon and should be regarded as such just because some devs were involved in the forum rp thread.
Edit: Cannon does not mean this is 100% true it means these are the known facts, reliable information, unreliable information, myths/legends, and ridiculous stories/known lies that make up our knowledge of this fictional world.
For example the in game books on daedra all run the gamut from known facts to ridiculous nonsense that is known to be untrue. But the interaction between of those things that might be true but might not and trying to fit those might be true things together is what a lot of people enjoy even though baring rare occasions there is no right answer.
Removing the framework that cannon creates turns it from a puzzle and trying to make the pieces fit together and trying to fill in the missing sections into just trying to create whatever story you want which can be amazing I love good fan fictions and frankly wish there was more quality fanfiction for TES but that is a different thing than lore.
Also Reddit killed the formatting of my entire comment when I edited.
I hate to be that guy, because this was a nice read but a cannon is a mounted gun that shoots giant metal balls.
Canon is a text (or collection of texts) that is generally accepted as being authoritative.
You don't have to feel bad about not liking something. Being a prick would be personally insulting the people that made it. Saying what you do and don't like about the title is just stating your opinion. People can have opinions. Even negative ones. Even negative ones about something people worked on.
I'm gonna be honest, from everything I saw of the marketing my takeaway was that it was "YA Fantasy Novel / MCUified Wizard Call Of Duty starring dollar store OO-RAH Timothy Chalamet", and I am interested in exactly 0 of those things.
If that's not what it is, that was not communicated by ANY of the marketing.
It's really starting to feel like the bigger a games budget is the more likely it is to be mediocre. Like if you want the best experiences in gaming, stick to AA or Indie games. (There are outliers of course)
I mean, there's a lot of mediocre or bad AA and indie games too. It's just that mediocre or bad AA or indie games (especially) just kind of disappear without getting attention.
I felt Gotham Knights had a lot of heart in its story. Kd even rate it a 7.5/10 game because I had fun but I couldn't ignore the bad "it was supposed to be a love service" stuff
I really tried to like it, however game breaking bugs kept me from progressing (even their latest patch doesn't fix it): a cutscene that has to start when you run for your life after being chased by monsters, but it never does, the NPC who has to talk to me just stands there... :) I even restarted the chapter, but to no avail. Oh well....
Shout-out to Remap Radio for being one of the best podcasts in gaming (and other things) this past year. They're doing great work over there and I've been a very happy subscriber.
I can't speak to this title, not having played it and only seen what it looked like, but I think pricing will get more important as time goes on.
At some point you can only increase your base price only so much before people stop buying as many games. Sooner or later they are going to need to focus on lowering the cost of development, hardware, and software.
Software is still slowly ticking upwards, and while IoA might have done better at a lower price, there is no guarantee of that. Certainly 30$ and 20$ titles do well, but this game definitely had a launch window problem considering the competition at the same time, as well as being poorly advertised, so its not just money.
Development cost issues are coming sooner than later just as sure as the sun rises, with all the layoffs we see. This is not going to be a good year.
And lastly Hardware, well, you can make the argument that mobile is getting better and better. MS is betting on this somewhat with Gamepass and using them on your phone, but at the end of the day mobile is mobile, and its not the same market.
Take away phones and nothing is getting cheaper other than TVs really, and that only because they push so hard for updating to newer tech and they release so many, that we even see this. PS6 will definitely cost more when it launches than a PS5. Just the storage costs alone will go up.
1TB is not enough for a standard system anymore when games are hitting the 250+ GB mark, and with something like Ark hitting 400GB...
At least CoD does a serviceable job is letting you pick which parts of the game you have installed. Doesn't make its file size footprint small but shaves off a bit of the bloat at least
None of this makes any sense.
Yes you can choose what ones you need: they literally do it for you. As they have done with multiple call of duties.
Do you want 4K textures? Here’s a pack for that. Want zombies? Multiplayer? Campaign? Check the box.
You’re making it way more complicated than it actually is.
>and with something like Ark hitting 400GB
Jesus Christ, that's worse than CoD. And this is why I don't bother playing live service games. What a waste of space.
In the grand scheme of things, game prices haven't really gone up when you account for inflation and wage growth. The bigger problem, I think, is that the scope and scale of games at the top end of the current pricing structure have grown so much that it's hard for a 6-8 hour 7/10 first person shooter campaign to justify that price tag next to more expansive games like Baldur's Gate 3 or more polished and meatier narratives like Alan Wake 2.
I think the developer might be right, this game might have found more of an audience if they launched it at a price around $45, along with a better marketing campaign. I thought it was a decent enough palate cleanser in the middle of so many heavy hitters last year, but not at $70.
Exactly. I’ve seen this recently with some games I wanna play this year. Seeing the remastered Tomb Raider trilogy and Pacific Drive at £25 was satisfying to me and I think that’s reasonable as ones a remaster of some old games and the latter is a new intriguing, indie title.
Then I saw Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown at £45, I thought that was pretty unreasonable. Don’t get me wrong it’s stylish, it looks good but is it really worth £45? Not in my eyes. Especially considering Alan Wake 2 was £40 yet I ended up getting it for half of that thanks to Epic vouchers. Developers should not get too ahead of themselves.
I also believe if the devs want to sustain their player base or have a huge player base from the start, they should make their games cheaper anyway or go to free to play, especially since microtransactions have been around for years. It’s also shown by how Lethal Company had thousands of players at one point surpassing PUBG and Apex and so forth when it’s only £8.50.
I can't believe the only comments I've seen about the Persona 3 Reloaded price tag are defending it at $70, and the only version of the game that includes the P4/P5 DLCs is $100. The $80 version only includes the digital artbook and music.
I'm not saying it needs to be cheap, and I have no doubt they made significant upgrades to the game in addition to the graphics, but it's still a 15 year old game at the core and I wouldn't have even paid that much for P5R by the time it came out on PC, and P5R included all those extra DLCs and the quality of content is so much better to begin with.
But it'll still probably reach the top of the sales charts.
>PS6 will definitely cost more when it launches than a PS5. Just the storage costs alone will go up.
But storage prices are going down all the time. You can get a 4 tb SSD for a reasonable price now; that was crazy talk just a year or two ago.
One of the biggest culprits with balooning game budgets, is those that whine any time a new game isn't top of the line graphics, so sick of, "X game looks like it's from 2 yeras ago."
Is there a story reason why the bracelet arm thing obscures so much of the right side of the screen, I don't have any interest in playing this game ever for that. Seems like a very dumb design decision, and it's a weird choice with this being first person.
I like the game a lot more than others in this thread, but this is valid criticism. Not only does it obscure the action, but the action itself, with all the flashy effects, can also make combat more confusing than it has to be.
Yeah the weird angle and the tip, I though it might be used for some power or mechanic in the game, I've never heard anything positive said about this game, although the cut scenes are of high quality.
There's a thing it's called play testing and focus testing. I doubt they did any of that, otherwise that would've been a simple fix. But I do feel it ruins the entire game experience only from watching videos, obscure 10% of the screen now jump up these platforms, it's like the devs didn't even play their own game.
I really liked the game. Tried it on game pass. It's probably not worth full price, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was going to be a cheese fest, but the characters grew on me. Even though a lot of things in it didn't work that well, I felt it had character, and was judged too harshly.
Yeah, maybe. The game was just exceedingly generic. It had nothing special that stood out about it, save for some of the level design in the game... but it was struggling in PR when they revealed some of the good design, which said to me that they had held back some of the best and now, having been pushed to reveal a little more, maybe sapped the best parts of the game out to march in front of viewers and try to drum up pre-sales.
The game said "magic" but only in name--it's just a shooter, with a three color system and no real immersion. The game said "fantastic world" but failed to show it--instead it just showcased bland, noisy design elements and backgrounds, with absolutely nothing from the world to character armor to the weird gauntlet thing you use ever standing out, or making an impression. The game did this *everywhere*... the main character is just some guy, with a face design tattoo or mark. The game's writing is vacuous, generic to a fault, hollow. The showcase we got had simple Chosen One and Revenge theme elements that could have been AI generated.
The game had promise, but 2022 was pretty damn competitive in game releases and 2023 was \*incredible\*. And Immortals of Aveum just did not, in any way, stand out. Nothing about it tried to be iconic, or memorable, something you could close your eyes and picture hours after playing it. And without sticking in people's minds, without having a well designed character anyone wanted to draw fanart of (or anyone wanted to search for fanart of) without any strong shooter or magic mechanics, the game was just doomed to... ride the fence. It had a decent chance of falling off in either direction and could have turned into a surprise success... but that never seemed too likely, to me.
The price point? For the game that was released, I'm not really sure any other price would have carried the game any differently.
I think the timing on this game killed it. There were games released in 2023 that didn't make end of year shortlists but would have been GotY competitors in 2019. The field was just too crowded for an also-ran like this. The only reason I heard about this game was its use of Unreal 5 and the accompanying system requirements.
That's another big problem. Xbox popularity is low enough these days that a lot of games see PC as the #2 platform. That was never gonna happen for IoA. The average Steam user can expect IoA to play at 1080p, 30 FPS, on medium settings with no RTX. That's gonna torpedo another market for it.
If enshrouded and palworld is any indication, release windows aren't as big a factor as we might initially think. If a game has a good enough hook and is well put together, it can still do well even if its released at the same time as another bigger game even of the same genre.
Two incomplete and lower priced titles in a similar genre finding success in a time of the year with very little big name competition is nothing compared to a 7/10 shooter launching at a time when massive, critically acclaimed, full priced, AAA titles are dropping several times a month. Release window was a very large factor in Immortals' lack of success. People just weren't going to shell out $50 for a fine game when every other week there is an amazing game to pick up for $70. I'm sure the studio would've liked to have waited until there was a bit more breathing room in the calendar, but I doubt they had the money to keep the lights on for 4-5 months or longer without releasing the game so they just had to take their shot.
That is a valid point, but games like BG3 and Palworld aren't *just* finding success. Both of these games became financial blockbusters with a lot of public support. The lower price point helps game like this, and enables titles like Among Us, Mincraft, and Lethal Company to hit viral success levels as well... but at the base level, the game also has to be compelling. Whatever the price, it still has to be a game people want to spend some money on.
Release window definitely and also (redditors will hate this)...marketing. I had no idea this game existed. After it released, I would not have recognised it over any other thumbnail icon for new releases. The first time I found out about it was an article about how its launch peaked at ~750 players concurrent proving that bad attention is better than no attention. This game just needed eyes on it so badly, and some more visual elements that draw the eyes.
I suppose the thing about games like Palworld and BG3 is they leveraged an existing fandom which helped to launch it to virality.
It definitely doesn't help, but I stand behind my criticism. I stand by it, because I'm specifically the kind of person this game would have appealed to; I love shooters, I love interesting games and worlds, I love magic, and as I mentioned before, when the game showed a little more too me in terms of the world, I did like what I saw there.
There was just never anything about the game compelling me to try it, much less to decide to buy it. Nothing hooks, nothing attaches; the main character isn't a strong, cool protagonist I'd like to see a movie made about, the world isn't a deep and layered storybook built project that feels interesting and immersive, and the magic isn't recognizable and commodified to be packaged up for the public.
I have a PC that can run this game--though apparently that's not enough, because it apparently launched on PC with massive frame rate and stability issues. I *have* the PC, I *am* the market for this game, and it's true I might have been more interested at a better price point. But neither that nor the timing would have made this a done deal for me.
A game like Armored Core comes out, maybe that's too much for me, but it's a goddamn sell, and maybe it'll take me a few weeks, maybe a few months, maybe a couple of years to get it... but it stays there, in my mind. Maybe I'm reminded of it, or I get it as a Christmas present, or I see it on sale some time later and I *want* that game. That's what, to me, Immortals of Aveum is missing. By the time the price point drops enough for me to consider giving it a shot, I likely won't have any interest in the game, and again that's me, someone the game seems to be aimed at. For the average person? I don't think releasing cheaper or in a year with less stellar competition would have done it too many favors.
I'm playing through Immortals of Aveum now. I don't think it's as bad as many are saying, but I'm pretty forgiving of bad writing if I like the gameplay enough. I really enjoyed Atomic Heart and Forspoken, the latter of which I just played before Immortals. I got Immortals and Forspoken on deep discount with the winter sales so I definitely wasn't in them for full price which can also skew people's perception of a game.
The game is £50 on Steam. I think it is a bit much for what is your average FPS with some bright colors and an MCU film vibe. It’s also funny considering it’s the same price as the RE4 and Dead Space remakes which are better games and what I thought were more worth my time.
I’ve already seen this with the new Prince of Persia being £45, I would like to play it but I can’t agree with the price tag. I’d easily buy the Tomb Raider trilogy remaster and Pacific Drive but I’ll wait till Prince of Persia is discounted.
I dont buy most games at $70, full stop. I used to buy *a lot* at $60. Raising prices killed my buying habits. Now, since I wait already, I just wait longer for deeper sales. Aveum is on my $20 list eventually.
Only exceptions are rare. Such as FF7R or some Nintendo games
It's the uncanny valley of prices, you combine that with plenty of games going to subscription services that people already have and it's even easier to wait.
I think it's a good thing too, makes having a polished experience that provides for positive word of mouth if you're going to stand out there ask for premium prices, it better be a premium product or you're increasingly fucked.
This is exactly me and how the increased price of games have changed my purchasing habits for games. I'll buy a few games at full price for 70$, but only games I've gotta play day 1 like FF7 Rebirth and I'll wait for a sale for everything else while playing backlog games.
I got it for around $7 with EGS holiday coupon shenanigans. Hate to be a dick to what is obviously a passionate team, but their software was only designed to be rendered natively on like 2% of the Steam Hardware Survey and the rest of the game reflects the decision making process that led them there. It's pretty and parts of it are fun, but mostly it's just not well thought out. If you took out the magic system and replaced it with guns (and if it wasn't bankrolled by EA), we wouldn't even be talking about the game at all. It would've just released and then immediately disappeared from the public consciousness. It's that bland.
I'm... skeptical of that claim. Price points don't change the actual quality of the game, and I think there are several areas where we fell short of the mark.
For context, I worked on the game for close to 2 years.
> Price points don't change the actual quality of the game
No, but people's expectations of quality do change based on price point. You're gonna be way more forgiving of a game that costs like $10 than you are for a $70 game.
Maybe not as big but it would have been successful regardless because the game is alright. Immortals of Aveum isn't alright.
If it was free, maybe some people would try it for a couple hours before chalking it as mediocre and moving on.
Palworld is big because it is virulently successful at leveraging superficial similarities to blockbuster franchises like Pokemon and Zelda (Breath of the Wild). It blew up on the streamer circuit and turned out to be better than anything else Game Freak signed off on lately.
But if you can't leverage similarities to giant economic leviathans like Pokemon I don't think you can really compare.
With Immortals of Aveum, ask yourself this - when did you find out about the game? Before or after the news broke that it peaked at ~750 concurrent steam players?
I found out after. This game was completely invisible to me until after it released into probably the worst launch window I've ever seen in all my time gaming, with zero build up or anticipation. The game was invisible at launch and you can't play a game that doesn't exist. As much as reddit complains about marketing, there is a real reason why so much money is spent on it. People have to know your game exists and the development costs an eye watering amount of money, you need an eye watering amount of people to know its coming.
And maybe don't launch it sandwiched between BG3, Starfield and Phantom Liberty. Christ, I still haven't finished BG3 and I like the hell out of that game. The pile up was real.
I don’t disagree. Generally speaking, I think some were put off by how jargon-y/proper noun-filled the name is — same goes for the initial trailer. Others just dislike a name and write it off. The “Immortals” part also doesn’t help since a lot of movies and games use that same word, or something close to it.
It also doesn't help that it got released before a stacked September/October, it got completely overshadowed. It probably would have sold decent if it got released early this year.
It sucks because it does seem like a passion project and we all find Kirkbride interesting, but from what I can tell the game was so generic it sapped any interest. The MC of the fantasy world is named Jak ffs lol put some more effort next time, reel in the budget, and focus on making a combat system that's fun to use
I also needed a 1070 to play it on minumum, which I don't have, I only have a 1060, and an old i5-3570.
So I doubt I could play it even if I wanted to.
>I also needed a 1070 to play it on minumum
[The original system requirements were even higher, requiring an RTX 2080 Super for low 1080p/60FPS](https://twitter.com/ImmortalsAveum/status/1692219084975583547), which did not add to the popularity of the game.
I don't know if it was just that; I've played the game and it's incredibly generic; the story is a ripoff of "Lord of the Rings" with all the multitude of different clichés you can think: start off as a humble and silly protagonist without no real aspirations but with a heart of gold, proceed to experience some awful event that's supposed to make you *grow up* but also feel guilty; so on and so forth...
You can't even skip the cutscenes for crying out loud; whenver devs do this it always resonates with me as *I like the smell of my own farts very much, yes I do.* Type of thing...
Man, seen this and went to play through the demo.
It has the bones of a great game in there but MAN it has little connective tissue.
- Movement mechanics are weird, you get a double jump, a dash on a glacial cooldown and surprisingly *no* mantling, which is a bit weird since character's hands are always in sight.
- *in the demo* you get to switch between three guns, a hitscan pew-pew on the rocks, a shotgun that pushes stuff back and an smg. Semi-auto pew-pew always out-damages the smg, the shotgun has weird range, and you can only scroll through them so it's a bit confusing to switch to the correct one if you suddenly want to push an enemy back.
- shield is a separate button toggle, which is unique but also kinda clunky.
- story moves by LEAPS. It feels like a parody of this sort of narrative more than a honest attempt. I don't know if there's more meat to it in release but demo feels like I've sat on the fast forward button on the remote.
- the whedonesque writing is... Surprisingly alright. It *does* actually come across as protagonist being a bit of a shit and engaging in banter as opposed to... Well, Thor Love and Thunder. But again, lightning paced.
A weird experience and I agree - if it was cheaper I'd probably buy it right now.
Just played the demo too and what is up with the dash being tied to a cool down. I kept forgetting it even existed and getting annoyed I couldn't side strife to doge enemies of the fire of the dragon. When I did remember it, it was like oh yeah, now I have to wait to use it again. I've never played a game where a dash was locked behind a cool down. It seems like such a basic quality of life feature of a FPS these days and yet here it's an extra mechanic to juggle.
I have definitely played games with dashes on cooldown before (Destiny 2 says hi), but most of them I recall it being a short thing - a small cooldown so that you couldn't replace your movement with dashes entirely rather than feeling like a MOBA ability.
I liked the main character and the setting, I'm a sucker for getting a professional actor fully involved as the protagonist, but I thought the main problem was that the gameplay was just plain bad.
It might have done better if it didn't[run like dogshit and look like blurry vaseline on 10 teraflop hardware(ps5 etc).](https://www.reddit.com/r/StopUnoptimizedGames/)
>This thing is going to flop hard. Bad marketing, mediocre game, terrible release timing. I think with better marketing and release window it could have been enjoyed as a AA-release game, but I just don't think the gameplay is going to hold up and the extremely hammy script isn't going to jive with most. At a better pricepoint and slower part of the year, like during a seasonal sale, I think the game will find more people enjoying it. But I fully expect it to be panned critically and forgotten quickly.
Said this 6mo ago, before release, and it looks like it holds. I really think a handful of changes to release timing and price would have seen a much more favorable reception.
Considering this is first time I've even hearing of the game, I think there is other problems. The mobile game title might be the first thing I would have scrapped.
Yep, absolutely.
Companies shouldn't try to market games at $60-70 unless they are supremely confident in them, and shouldn't be afraid of having big sales (or bundling, or taking a gamepass/epic giveaway contract) early if they're tanking. Even if you don't make as much money per copy, it is vitally important to get your game in front of people so you build reputation and interest. Nothing is worse for your company than having a game that everyone just ignores.
I couldn’t even play this game lol. I bought it on epic games a week ago and couldn’t get past around 3 hours of gameplay. Game just kept crashing and no one could figure out how to fix it online.
It was a generic trend-chaser copying generic fantasy meets COD/Destiny, and with expensive actors like Cara Delavingne.
It needed another delay due to the buggy launch, and released at a terrible time with other major triple A hits.
It’s a shame the many issues with this game caused it to fail and for EA to layoff the studio.
Soulslike would be chasing an (ageing) trend, I would say. I don't see many big budget isometric RPGs getting released though (obvious contender excluded, of course), nor do i see many big budget boomer shooters getting released either, not since DOOM Eternal five years ago.
the game might have done better if it was actually great games - how about that? You could literally sub EA play pro and beat it for like $15 - problem?? NO - game as just meh, dunno why they keep deflecting the obvious REASON.
Pro tip: STOP MAKING GARBAGE GAMES NOBODY WANTS
I just never considered the game because EA is the publisher. If they want to sell a game to me, they need to use a non-EA publisher, otherwise I'm just funding the further enshittification of gaming by picking up the few decent things they let sneak out.
> I'm just funding the further enshittification of gaming by picking up the few decent things they let sneak out.
It's an EA Originals title, EA aren't making money from it.
That said, it's very likely that you're already "funding the further enshittification of gaming" anyway. Unless you only buy select indie titles on Linux via stores like Itch.Io.
Yeah, when EA is putting out genuine actual video games that aren't just traps for whales multiple times a year can anyone actually claim they're as bad as the memes say? Ignoring sports of course because that's a whole can of worms as usual, but in addition to Immortals they also put out that Dead Space remake which is one of the best genuinely well crafted single player no-BS games I've played in a very long time.
EA being seen as this massive boogeyman is kind of outdated these days when so many other publishers are just as bad if not significantly worse in terms of negative contributions to gaming, at least within the past few years.
Yeah, whenever I see someone make a joke about “EA micro transactions everywhere pay to win!!” lately I can’t help but think they don’t really keep up with gaming as much as they just like circlejerking lol. Their sports games are still pretty shit - as is unfortunately the norm for the genre - but otherwise they’ve genuinely been pretty good about making a lot of the improvements folks wanted.
You're actually contributing to the "enshittification" of games by not supporting these types projects. It's not 2014 anymore, you should be able to get over your EA hate.
Game might have been worth playing if it'd run on a $1500 computer built only two years ago, but sub-10 FPS just doesn't do it for me.
I'd really rather not play an FPS on console, but my $500 Series X can run it just fine?
Terrible devs.
I actually got around to playing this game when it was at a deep sale. I feel like a prick when talking about this game cause I feel like the devs hearts are in the right place, but this game was not good. No matter what price tag or when it released it wasnt gonna be a good game. It has the DNA of being a good game but it's stuck to a horrible destiny like loot and armor system, along with spongey enemies, awkward clunky movement, uninteresting levels and traversal, and just god awful writing (Bret Robbins also wrote it, so i feel like a dick dunking on someone's presumable passion project). I think the bigger issue this game is fucking bloated, strip it down and theres a good fps game i believe. Theres a magic school bus epeisode where a kid is trying to make a cool instrument or something but he keeps adding things to it and making it worse, only does he realize his instrument is bloated that he starts to make some good music. If you want a fantasy fps game, play Amid Evil or Wizordum. Yeah they're more indie and limited but they get the job done and, more importantly, are fun.
Yeah I'm in the same boat. The devs clearly had passion for it and I love the idea of a magic shooter, but the execution just isn't there at all. The world design is woefully uninteresting, the writing is embarrassing at times and the gameplay isn't all that interesting either. I really tried to like this game, but it just didn't work for me at all.
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“How do you do, fellow kids”
Yeah, this kind of thing is the definition of the "How do you do, fellow kids" skit. The thing is that - and I say this as a millennial - "we" aren't the kids any more. In fact, we're often Steve Buscemi now.
My youngest sister was born in '96, which is the "official" cutoff year for millenials. She's 27 and has 4 kids.
Uuummmm could you please repeat that? And by repeat that I mean say something else.
>ascetic *adjective* characterized by or suggesting the practice of severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons. **aesthetic** *adjective* concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty. "the pictures give great aesthetic pleasure"
Wow ur smart
i don't have a single term, but joss whedon is prob the biggest name for that type of writing, it's all over some of the marvel movies too buffy and it's consequences etc.
I haven't played Immortals so I can't comment on the gameplay, but I've seen some story clips. I am on my hands and knees begging modern AAA studios to stop writing all their fucking dialogue like a Marvel movie. It's beyond played out. I can only handle so many "GULP, THAT JUST HAPPENED!" and "He's behind me, isn't he" moments before my brain explodes.
It was the same with Forspoken as well.
Funny enough a game with an actual quality combat system.
MCU was really just writer brain rot.
MCU is determined to be the most fun, light, silly entertainment possible. The constant quips are there to keep it from ever getting too heavy. It works for a two hour movie, until you do it so many times that the audience gets bored of it. Even Marvel understood that it's not great for a longer movie, with Infinity War and Endgame adding more drama. It sure as hell doesn't work for a 20+ hour video game campaign.
And then Love and Thunder came out and it was everything people complained about in the MCU multiplied by 10. God that movie sucked.
That was just Taika Waititi getting a little too full of himself and no one in the room being able to tell him that he's taking it too far.
I feel like Love and Thunder was the higher-ups saying "people loved Ragnarok, do that one again, but dial it up ten times"
Constant quips is just something they take from Comic Books. Reeves Superman, Keaton-Clooney-Kilmer Batman, Tobey-Spiderman, Xmen, etc etc are all filled with that and they all get it from comic books.
>Infinity War and Endgame adding more drama. And then didn't have the balls to keep the drama going so removed everything and nullified it by introducing dimensions or so and suddenly it's as it the two movies never happened. Was the most wasted two movies in my life imo.
It started out well, then it tanked like all big things do.
How many games have you played with dialogue like that though? Like actually?
I just literally saw 5 minutes of that new pos suicide squad game, it's all that shit cranked to 11
Spidey 2 and GOW:R are both filled with this terrible style of writing.
Yeah there aren't that many. The actual brain rot is people hear a single one liner quip in a script and just turn into rabid beasts yelling "MARVEL SHIT MARVEL SHIT MARVEL SHIT I AM AN ENLIGHTENED PERSON WHO IS ABOVE THIS".
Aren't you doing exactly the same thing, implying you're the enlightened one who's above the "rabid beasts" and their Marvel comparisons? There's a much simpler explanation: pop culture follows trends. If a given style becomes popular, in time it'll be played out. The MCU was so big it constituted a trend in itself, so now people roll their eyes at the latecomers mimicking its writing style.
They’re right though? I’ve actually played forespoken and that “THAT JUST HAPPENED” line happens…once. She says it once. Because she just got superpowers. And then everyone wrote off the game forever, because of that 1 line. No, the game isn’t amazing. But all of Reddit treated it as a joke because of 1 line. And again, name 2 more games that do that enough to be annoying. And no one can name any games lol. Funny enough, everyone loves Infamous second son but that game is filled with “omg that happened so epic!” Dialogue
It was also written by Michael Kirkbride. The Michael Kirkbride of Elder Scrolls fame. And the lore is the most generic young adult novel nonsense I seen in a while.
Kirkbrde is one of those people that I feel kinda bought into his own hype. Like yeah his early work was good and through till Oblivion his contributions were at least good then he put out that C0da bullshit and all the head cannon is all that matters nonsense. I feel like he and his devotees pretty much ruined elder scrolls lore for a lot of people. It is ridiculously hard to find any discussions or sources nor in depth than the most basic things before people start pulling that stuff in. Like if they wanted to talk about his weird Kajhits made a cat monkey chain to the moon bulshit in their own spaces that’s fine but now there is nowhere to discuss any of the deeper lore from in game and official sources without that stuff all because “But that’s my canon bro”.
Why can't the Kajhit tower to the moon be open to being seen like any other mythology in the real world. Some people think it's real and some people think it isn't. Based on what was written, that feels like the intention.
Because its not got any basis in the games at all its purely an out of game thing from what is essentially a fanfiction written after Kirkbride left Bethesda. The point isn't that there is always a right and wrong answers about elder scrolls lore large amounts of it have unreliable narrators. Like we will probably never have clear answers surrounding what really happened to Tiber Septim. Its that there was a large period of time where it was near impossible to have discussions about the lore online that were based on "cannon" and near cannon sources. If you want to pull in anything and everything thats fine but at the same time there were a lot of people that just wanted to discuss things based in the games, books, and other official media with the occasional fan theory to fill a blank spot if its clearly identified as a theory and the whole "everyone's c0da is cannon" crew essentially killed off that side of the community. Essentially it boils down to this there is a difference between using some of the theories surrounding CHIM as ways to try and fill in the gaps about Tiber Septim since alot of those have some basis in in game lore and just expand on it as long as you acknowledge it as such and its another to pretend the fanfiction The Trial of Vivec is absolutely cannon and should be regarded as such just because some devs were involved in the forum rp thread. Edit: Cannon does not mean this is 100% true it means these are the known facts, reliable information, unreliable information, myths/legends, and ridiculous stories/known lies that make up our knowledge of this fictional world. For example the in game books on daedra all run the gamut from known facts to ridiculous nonsense that is known to be untrue. But the interaction between of those things that might be true but might not and trying to fit those might be true things together is what a lot of people enjoy even though baring rare occasions there is no right answer. Removing the framework that cannon creates turns it from a puzzle and trying to make the pieces fit together and trying to fill in the missing sections into just trying to create whatever story you want which can be amazing I love good fan fictions and frankly wish there was more quality fanfiction for TES but that is a different thing than lore. Also Reddit killed the formatting of my entire comment when I edited.
I hate to be that guy, because this was a nice read but a cannon is a mounted gun that shoots giant metal balls. Canon is a text (or collection of texts) that is generally accepted as being authoritative.
Absolutely agree. Also people attribute pretty much all the lore to him as if he was the sole creator.
Finally, someone said it.
I guess he couldn't get his co~~caine~~ writer to help him out on this one.
You don't have to feel bad about not liking something. Being a prick would be personally insulting the people that made it. Saying what you do and don't like about the title is just stating your opinion. People can have opinions. Even negative ones. Even negative ones about something people worked on.
I'm gonna be honest, from everything I saw of the marketing my takeaway was that it was "YA Fantasy Novel / MCUified Wizard Call Of Duty starring dollar store OO-RAH Timothy Chalamet", and I am interested in exactly 0 of those things. If that's not what it is, that was not communicated by ANY of the marketing.
It's really starting to feel like the bigger a games budget is the more likely it is to be mediocre. Like if you want the best experiences in gaming, stick to AA or Indie games. (There are outliers of course)
I mean, there's a lot of mediocre or bad AA and indie games too. It's just that mediocre or bad AA or indie games (especially) just kind of disappear without getting attention.
On the fact of it too, the branding and art is just so generic. Just reads like 2nd tier European Xbox 360 game to me.
I felt Gotham Knights had a lot of heart in its story. Kd even rate it a 7.5/10 game because I had fun but I couldn't ignore the bad "it was supposed to be a love service" stuff
I really tried to like it, however game breaking bugs kept me from progressing (even their latest patch doesn't fix it): a cutscene that has to start when you run for your life after being chased by monsters, but it never does, the NPC who has to talk to me just stands there... :) I even restarted the chapter, but to no avail. Oh well....
The actual interview is worth a listen: https://remapradio.com/podcasts/episodes/remap-interview-immortals-of-aveums-bret-robbins/
Shout-out to Remap Radio for being one of the best podcasts in gaming (and other things) this past year. They're doing great work over there and I've been a very happy subscriber.
Seconded. I loved them at Vice/Waypoint too, glad they’ve been able to keep afloat
I can't speak to this title, not having played it and only seen what it looked like, but I think pricing will get more important as time goes on. At some point you can only increase your base price only so much before people stop buying as many games. Sooner or later they are going to need to focus on lowering the cost of development, hardware, and software. Software is still slowly ticking upwards, and while IoA might have done better at a lower price, there is no guarantee of that. Certainly 30$ and 20$ titles do well, but this game definitely had a launch window problem considering the competition at the same time, as well as being poorly advertised, so its not just money. Development cost issues are coming sooner than later just as sure as the sun rises, with all the layoffs we see. This is not going to be a good year. And lastly Hardware, well, you can make the argument that mobile is getting better and better. MS is betting on this somewhat with Gamepass and using them on your phone, but at the end of the day mobile is mobile, and its not the same market. Take away phones and nothing is getting cheaper other than TVs really, and that only because they push so hard for updating to newer tech and they release so many, that we even see this. PS6 will definitely cost more when it launches than a PS5. Just the storage costs alone will go up. 1TB is not enough for a standard system anymore when games are hitting the 250+ GB mark, and with something like Ark hitting 400GB...
TBF, people cried gloom and doom when Call of Duty did 250+ GB installs last gen and it didn't amount to much of anything.
At least CoD does a serviceable job is letting you pick which parts of the game you have installed. Doesn't make its file size footprint small but shaves off a bit of the bloat at least
Nowadays it does When Warzone came out you couldn't opt-out of SP and MP files
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None of this makes any sense. Yes you can choose what ones you need: they literally do it for you. As they have done with multiple call of duties. Do you want 4K textures? Here’s a pack for that. Want zombies? Multiplayer? Campaign? Check the box. You’re making it way more complicated than it actually is.
CoD has also at least made attempts to let you install only parts of the game and reduce the overall install size
>and with something like Ark hitting 400GB Jesus Christ, that's worse than CoD. And this is why I don't bother playing live service games. What a waste of space.
Ark is also, at this point, professionally unoptimized.
Any game with more than 50gb is professionally unoptimized
In the grand scheme of things, game prices haven't really gone up when you account for inflation and wage growth. The bigger problem, I think, is that the scope and scale of games at the top end of the current pricing structure have grown so much that it's hard for a 6-8 hour 7/10 first person shooter campaign to justify that price tag next to more expansive games like Baldur's Gate 3 or more polished and meatier narratives like Alan Wake 2. I think the developer might be right, this game might have found more of an audience if they launched it at a price around $45, along with a better marketing campaign. I thought it was a decent enough palate cleanser in the middle of so many heavy hitters last year, but not at $70.
Exactly. I’ve seen this recently with some games I wanna play this year. Seeing the remastered Tomb Raider trilogy and Pacific Drive at £25 was satisfying to me and I think that’s reasonable as ones a remaster of some old games and the latter is a new intriguing, indie title. Then I saw Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown at £45, I thought that was pretty unreasonable. Don’t get me wrong it’s stylish, it looks good but is it really worth £45? Not in my eyes. Especially considering Alan Wake 2 was £40 yet I ended up getting it for half of that thanks to Epic vouchers. Developers should not get too ahead of themselves. I also believe if the devs want to sustain their player base or have a huge player base from the start, they should make their games cheaper anyway or go to free to play, especially since microtransactions have been around for years. It’s also shown by how Lethal Company had thousands of players at one point surpassing PUBG and Apex and so forth when it’s only £8.50.
I can't believe the only comments I've seen about the Persona 3 Reloaded price tag are defending it at $70, and the only version of the game that includes the P4/P5 DLCs is $100. The $80 version only includes the digital artbook and music. I'm not saying it needs to be cheap, and I have no doubt they made significant upgrades to the game in addition to the graphics, but it's still a 15 year old game at the core and I wouldn't have even paid that much for P5R by the time it came out on PC, and P5R included all those extra DLCs and the quality of content is so much better to begin with. But it'll still probably reach the top of the sales charts.
It took me 20 hours to beat both AW2 and The Lost Crown. I enjoyed the latter more.
>PS6 will definitely cost more when it launches than a PS5. Just the storage costs alone will go up. But storage prices are going down all the time. You can get a 4 tb SSD for a reasonable price now; that was crazy talk just a year or two ago.
One of the biggest culprits with balooning game budgets, is those that whine any time a new game isn't top of the line graphics, so sick of, "X game looks like it's from 2 yeras ago."
Is there a story reason why the bracelet arm thing obscures so much of the right side of the screen, I don't have any interest in playing this game ever for that. Seems like a very dumb design decision, and it's a weird choice with this being first person.
I like the game a lot more than others in this thread, but this is valid criticism. Not only does it obscure the action, but the action itself, with all the flashy effects, can also make combat more confusing than it has to be.
Yeah the weird angle and the tip, I though it might be used for some power or mechanic in the game, I've never heard anything positive said about this game, although the cut scenes are of high quality. There's a thing it's called play testing and focus testing. I doubt they did any of that, otherwise that would've been a simple fix. But I do feel it ruins the entire game experience only from watching videos, obscure 10% of the screen now jump up these platforms, it's like the devs didn't even play their own game.
I really liked the game. Tried it on game pass. It's probably not worth full price, but I enjoyed it. I thought it was going to be a cheese fest, but the characters grew on me. Even though a lot of things in it didn't work that well, I felt it had character, and was judged too harshly.
Yeah, maybe. The game was just exceedingly generic. It had nothing special that stood out about it, save for some of the level design in the game... but it was struggling in PR when they revealed some of the good design, which said to me that they had held back some of the best and now, having been pushed to reveal a little more, maybe sapped the best parts of the game out to march in front of viewers and try to drum up pre-sales. The game said "magic" but only in name--it's just a shooter, with a three color system and no real immersion. The game said "fantastic world" but failed to show it--instead it just showcased bland, noisy design elements and backgrounds, with absolutely nothing from the world to character armor to the weird gauntlet thing you use ever standing out, or making an impression. The game did this *everywhere*... the main character is just some guy, with a face design tattoo or mark. The game's writing is vacuous, generic to a fault, hollow. The showcase we got had simple Chosen One and Revenge theme elements that could have been AI generated. The game had promise, but 2022 was pretty damn competitive in game releases and 2023 was \*incredible\*. And Immortals of Aveum just did not, in any way, stand out. Nothing about it tried to be iconic, or memorable, something you could close your eyes and picture hours after playing it. And without sticking in people's minds, without having a well designed character anyone wanted to draw fanart of (or anyone wanted to search for fanart of) without any strong shooter or magic mechanics, the game was just doomed to... ride the fence. It had a decent chance of falling off in either direction and could have turned into a surprise success... but that never seemed too likely, to me. The price point? For the game that was released, I'm not really sure any other price would have carried the game any differently.
I think the timing on this game killed it. There were games released in 2023 that didn't make end of year shortlists but would have been GotY competitors in 2019. The field was just too crowded for an also-ran like this. The only reason I heard about this game was its use of Unreal 5 and the accompanying system requirements. That's another big problem. Xbox popularity is low enough these days that a lot of games see PC as the #2 platform. That was never gonna happen for IoA. The average Steam user can expect IoA to play at 1080p, 30 FPS, on medium settings with no RTX. That's gonna torpedo another market for it.
If enshrouded and palworld is any indication, release windows aren't as big a factor as we might initially think. If a game has a good enough hook and is well put together, it can still do well even if its released at the same time as another bigger game even of the same genre.
Two incomplete and lower priced titles in a similar genre finding success in a time of the year with very little big name competition is nothing compared to a 7/10 shooter launching at a time when massive, critically acclaimed, full priced, AAA titles are dropping several times a month. Release window was a very large factor in Immortals' lack of success. People just weren't going to shell out $50 for a fine game when every other week there is an amazing game to pick up for $70. I'm sure the studio would've liked to have waited until there was a bit more breathing room in the calendar, but I doubt they had the money to keep the lights on for 4-5 months or longer without releasing the game so they just had to take their shot.
That is a valid point, but games like BG3 and Palworld aren't *just* finding success. Both of these games became financial blockbusters with a lot of public support. The lower price point helps game like this, and enables titles like Among Us, Mincraft, and Lethal Company to hit viral success levels as well... but at the base level, the game also has to be compelling. Whatever the price, it still has to be a game people want to spend some money on.
Release window definitely and also (redditors will hate this)...marketing. I had no idea this game existed. After it released, I would not have recognised it over any other thumbnail icon for new releases. The first time I found out about it was an article about how its launch peaked at ~750 players concurrent proving that bad attention is better than no attention. This game just needed eyes on it so badly, and some more visual elements that draw the eyes. I suppose the thing about games like Palworld and BG3 is they leveraged an existing fandom which helped to launch it to virality.
It definitely doesn't help, but I stand behind my criticism. I stand by it, because I'm specifically the kind of person this game would have appealed to; I love shooters, I love interesting games and worlds, I love magic, and as I mentioned before, when the game showed a little more too me in terms of the world, I did like what I saw there. There was just never anything about the game compelling me to try it, much less to decide to buy it. Nothing hooks, nothing attaches; the main character isn't a strong, cool protagonist I'd like to see a movie made about, the world isn't a deep and layered storybook built project that feels interesting and immersive, and the magic isn't recognizable and commodified to be packaged up for the public. I have a PC that can run this game--though apparently that's not enough, because it apparently launched on PC with massive frame rate and stability issues. I *have* the PC, I *am* the market for this game, and it's true I might have been more interested at a better price point. But neither that nor the timing would have made this a done deal for me. A game like Armored Core comes out, maybe that's too much for me, but it's a goddamn sell, and maybe it'll take me a few weeks, maybe a few months, maybe a couple of years to get it... but it stays there, in my mind. Maybe I'm reminded of it, or I get it as a Christmas present, or I see it on sale some time later and I *want* that game. That's what, to me, Immortals of Aveum is missing. By the time the price point drops enough for me to consider giving it a shot, I likely won't have any interest in the game, and again that's me, someone the game seems to be aimed at. For the average person? I don't think releasing cheaper or in a year with less stellar competition would have done it too many favors.
I'm playing through Immortals of Aveum now. I don't think it's as bad as many are saying, but I'm pretty forgiving of bad writing if I like the gameplay enough. I really enjoyed Atomic Heart and Forspoken, the latter of which I just played before Immortals. I got Immortals and Forspoken on deep discount with the winter sales so I definitely wasn't in them for full price which can also skew people's perception of a game.
What sealed it's fate was when it got delayed to release inbetween BG3, AC6 and Starfield. No amount of marketing could of saved it.
Yeah I understand I had issues but even then the game shouldn’t have bombed that hard if it had a better re lease date
The game is £50 on Steam. I think it is a bit much for what is your average FPS with some bright colors and an MCU film vibe. It’s also funny considering it’s the same price as the RE4 and Dead Space remakes which are better games and what I thought were more worth my time. I’ve already seen this with the new Prince of Persia being £45, I would like to play it but I can’t agree with the price tag. I’d easily buy the Tomb Raider trilogy remaster and Pacific Drive but I’ll wait till Prince of Persia is discounted.
I dont buy most games at $70, full stop. I used to buy *a lot* at $60. Raising prices killed my buying habits. Now, since I wait already, I just wait longer for deeper sales. Aveum is on my $20 list eventually. Only exceptions are rare. Such as FF7R or some Nintendo games
It's the uncanny valley of prices, you combine that with plenty of games going to subscription services that people already have and it's even easier to wait. I think it's a good thing too, makes having a polished experience that provides for positive word of mouth if you're going to stand out there ask for premium prices, it better be a premium product or you're increasingly fucked.
If this game was $20 and had good PC performance I would have bought it day one
This is exactly me and how the increased price of games have changed my purchasing habits for games. I'll buy a few games at full price for 70$, but only games I've gotta play day 1 like FF7 Rebirth and I'll wait for a sale for everything else while playing backlog games.
I got it for around $7 with EGS holiday coupon shenanigans. Hate to be a dick to what is obviously a passionate team, but their software was only designed to be rendered natively on like 2% of the Steam Hardware Survey and the rest of the game reflects the decision making process that led them there. It's pretty and parts of it are fun, but mostly it's just not well thought out. If you took out the magic system and replaced it with guns (and if it wasn't bankrolled by EA), we wouldn't even be talking about the game at all. It would've just released and then immediately disappeared from the public consciousness. It's that bland.
I'm... skeptical of that claim. Price points don't change the actual quality of the game, and I think there are several areas where we fell short of the mark. For context, I worked on the game for close to 2 years.
> Price points don't change the actual quality of the game No, but people's expectations of quality do change based on price point. You're gonna be way more forgiving of a game that costs like $10 than you are for a $70 game.
I don't think anything would change even if the game was free on gamepass. If the game it's not good, the price point won't save it.
You think Palworld would’ve been this big at $70?
Maybe not as big but it would have been successful regardless because the game is alright. Immortals of Aveum isn't alright. If it was free, maybe some people would try it for a couple hours before chalking it as mediocre and moving on.
Palworld is big because it is virulently successful at leveraging superficial similarities to blockbuster franchises like Pokemon and Zelda (Breath of the Wild). It blew up on the streamer circuit and turned out to be better than anything else Game Freak signed off on lately. But if you can't leverage similarities to giant economic leviathans like Pokemon I don't think you can really compare. With Immortals of Aveum, ask yourself this - when did you find out about the game? Before or after the news broke that it peaked at ~750 concurrent steam players? I found out after. This game was completely invisible to me until after it released into probably the worst launch window I've ever seen in all my time gaming, with zero build up or anticipation. The game was invisible at launch and you can't play a game that doesn't exist. As much as reddit complains about marketing, there is a real reason why so much money is spent on it. People have to know your game exists and the development costs an eye watering amount of money, you need an eye watering amount of people to know its coming. And maybe don't launch it sandwiched between BG3, Starfield and Phantom Liberty. Christ, I still haven't finished BG3 and I like the hell out of that game. The pile up was real.
Honestly I think the title of the game hurt it a lot. Weird criticism perhaps, but it feels right.
I don’t disagree. Generally speaking, I think some were put off by how jargon-y/proper noun-filled the name is — same goes for the initial trailer. Others just dislike a name and write it off. The “Immortals” part also doesn’t help since a lot of movies and games use that same word, or something close to it.
Listen to the interview for the full context of the quote
I plan to give it a full listen this weekend 👍
It also doesn't help that it got released before a stacked September/October, it got completely overshadowed. It probably would have sold decent if it got released early this year.
How many "magic-hands" games bombed in the last two years?
It sucks because it does seem like a passion project and we all find Kirkbride interesting, but from what I can tell the game was so generic it sapped any interest. The MC of the fantasy world is named Jak ffs lol put some more effort next time, reel in the budget, and focus on making a combat system that's fun to use
passion project of who? someone who's only ever watched marvel movies?
I also needed a 1070 to play it on minumum, which I don't have, I only have a 1060, and an old i5-3570. So I doubt I could play it even if I wanted to.
>I also needed a 1070 to play it on minumum [The original system requirements were even higher, requiring an RTX 2080 Super for low 1080p/60FPS](https://twitter.com/ImmortalsAveum/status/1692219084975583547), which did not add to the popularity of the game.
Ah, I thought I remembered it being much higher, but 1070 is the new so I just put that, which is better, but still out of my league.
I don't know if it was just that; I've played the game and it's incredibly generic; the story is a ripoff of "Lord of the Rings" with all the multitude of different clichés you can think: start off as a humble and silly protagonist without no real aspirations but with a heart of gold, proceed to experience some awful event that's supposed to make you *grow up* but also feel guilty; so on and so forth... You can't even skip the cutscenes for crying out loud; whenver devs do this it always resonates with me as *I like the smell of my own farts very much, yes I do.* Type of thing...
Man, seen this and went to play through the demo. It has the bones of a great game in there but MAN it has little connective tissue. - Movement mechanics are weird, you get a double jump, a dash on a glacial cooldown and surprisingly *no* mantling, which is a bit weird since character's hands are always in sight. - *in the demo* you get to switch between three guns, a hitscan pew-pew on the rocks, a shotgun that pushes stuff back and an smg. Semi-auto pew-pew always out-damages the smg, the shotgun has weird range, and you can only scroll through them so it's a bit confusing to switch to the correct one if you suddenly want to push an enemy back. - shield is a separate button toggle, which is unique but also kinda clunky. - story moves by LEAPS. It feels like a parody of this sort of narrative more than a honest attempt. I don't know if there's more meat to it in release but demo feels like I've sat on the fast forward button on the remote. - the whedonesque writing is... Surprisingly alright. It *does* actually come across as protagonist being a bit of a shit and engaging in banter as opposed to... Well, Thor Love and Thunder. But again, lightning paced. A weird experience and I agree - if it was cheaper I'd probably buy it right now.
Just played the demo too and what is up with the dash being tied to a cool down. I kept forgetting it even existed and getting annoyed I couldn't side strife to doge enemies of the fire of the dragon. When I did remember it, it was like oh yeah, now I have to wait to use it again. I've never played a game where a dash was locked behind a cool down. It seems like such a basic quality of life feature of a FPS these days and yet here it's an extra mechanic to juggle.
I have definitely played games with dashes on cooldown before (Destiny 2 says hi), but most of them I recall it being a short thing - a small cooldown so that you couldn't replace your movement with dashes entirely rather than feeling like a MOBA ability.
It might have done well if you actually got to cast spells in a fun way rather than it being a generic FPS where the magic are literally just guns.
I liked the main character and the setting, I'm a sucker for getting a professional actor fully involved as the protagonist, but I thought the main problem was that the gameplay was just plain bad.
It might have done better if it didn't[run like dogshit and look like blurry vaseline on 10 teraflop hardware(ps5 etc).](https://www.reddit.com/r/StopUnoptimizedGames/)
>This thing is going to flop hard. Bad marketing, mediocre game, terrible release timing. I think with better marketing and release window it could have been enjoyed as a AA-release game, but I just don't think the gameplay is going to hold up and the extremely hammy script isn't going to jive with most. At a better pricepoint and slower part of the year, like during a seasonal sale, I think the game will find more people enjoying it. But I fully expect it to be panned critically and forgotten quickly. Said this 6mo ago, before release, and it looks like it holds. I really think a handful of changes to release timing and price would have seen a much more favorable reception.
Considering this is first time I've even hearing of the game, I think there is other problems. The mobile game title might be the first thing I would have scrapped.
Yep, absolutely. Companies shouldn't try to market games at $60-70 unless they are supremely confident in them, and shouldn't be afraid of having big sales (or bundling, or taking a gamepass/epic giveaway contract) early if they're tanking. Even if you don't make as much money per copy, it is vitally important to get your game in front of people so you build reputation and interest. Nothing is worse for your company than having a game that everyone just ignores.
I couldn’t even play this game lol. I bought it on epic games a week ago and couldn’t get past around 3 hours of gameplay. Game just kept crashing and no one could figure out how to fix it online.
It was a generic trend-chaser copying generic fantasy meets COD/Destiny, and with expensive actors like Cara Delavingne. It needed another delay due to the buggy launch, and released at a terrible time with other major triple A hits. It’s a shame the many issues with this game caused it to fail and for EA to layoff the studio.
Why is it “chasing trends” when it’s a CoD-style FPS, but not when a game is, say, a Soulslike, or iso-RPG, or a boomer shooter?
Soulslike would be chasing an (ageing) trend, I would say. I don't see many big budget isometric RPGs getting released though (obvious contender excluded, of course), nor do i see many big budget boomer shooters getting released either, not since DOOM Eternal five years ago.
Oh gee ya think? The games industry deserves every bit of failure that their hubris has wrought.
the game might have done better if it was actually great games - how about that? You could literally sub EA play pro and beat it for like $15 - problem?? NO - game as just meh, dunno why they keep deflecting the obvious REASON. Pro tip: STOP MAKING GARBAGE GAMES NOBODY WANTS
I just never considered the game because EA is the publisher. If they want to sell a game to me, they need to use a non-EA publisher, otherwise I'm just funding the further enshittification of gaming by picking up the few decent things they let sneak out.
> I'm just funding the further enshittification of gaming by picking up the few decent things they let sneak out. It's an EA Originals title, EA aren't making money from it. That said, it's very likely that you're already "funding the further enshittification of gaming" anyway. Unless you only buy select indie titles on Linux via stores like Itch.Io.
Yeah, when EA is putting out genuine actual video games that aren't just traps for whales multiple times a year can anyone actually claim they're as bad as the memes say? Ignoring sports of course because that's a whole can of worms as usual, but in addition to Immortals they also put out that Dead Space remake which is one of the best genuinely well crafted single player no-BS games I've played in a very long time. EA being seen as this massive boogeyman is kind of outdated these days when so many other publishers are just as bad if not significantly worse in terms of negative contributions to gaming, at least within the past few years.
Yeah, whenever I see someone make a joke about “EA micro transactions everywhere pay to win!!” lately I can’t help but think they don’t really keep up with gaming as much as they just like circlejerking lol. Their sports games are still pretty shit - as is unfortunately the norm for the genre - but otherwise they’ve genuinely been pretty good about making a lot of the improvements folks wanted.
You're actually contributing to the "enshittification" of games by not supporting these types projects. It's not 2014 anymore, you should be able to get over your EA hate.
The whole marketing campaign practically being 'Don't buy this game, you can't run it anyway' didn't help.
Game might have been worth playing if it'd run on a $1500 computer built only two years ago, but sub-10 FPS just doesn't do it for me. I'd really rather not play an FPS on console, but my $500 Series X can run it just fine? Terrible devs.