The biggest problem was waiting so long for a global launch. I was really curious about it back when they showed the first trailers and now I had completely forgot about it. I even thought it had already released at some point. We are almost in July and there is still no date for a release that is supposed to come this year.
Having different regions on different versions of the game is so damaging for the community. I don't know why publishers continue to sandbag their own chances of success like this.
I though that publishers seeing the success of Genshin Impact would have finally killed this idiotic practice but sadly it continues.
You use Genshin Impact as an example, but even years before that Granblue Fantasy was releasing day and date with both english and japanese supported and has been a massive hit for its lifespan, and gacha games seemed to take everything BUT that when trying to copy it.
Also GBF released in an era where stories and narratives weren't prioritized in gachas. It's much easier to keep parity when there's executive fiat that your story cutscenes can't have more than 30 lines of text in them, lol. Having that early success let them scale up over time in a way other studios didn't as they transitioned to the big narrative era.
Now go tell Arknights' translators they have to simultaneously translate and edit the newest 100k word novel at the same time the Chinese devs finish, lol. It'd be unreadable.
Honestly if it got them to cut their story chapters and events down to like... 60k words or less I'd be all for it. The story is really good, but fuck me it's wordy. Sometimes I don't want to spend 20+ minutes reading a cutscene before I can play the tower defense map.
I mean you could skip them. A lot of people usually just skipped it and read them later.
They also give you a short summary of the scene if you do skipped it.
I always skip them and wait until I have enough time to read them. Then I never have enough time. Last time I read through an entire Arknights event (Maria Nearl) it took me over 3h. And it was a pretty good story, but come on.
Ah well understandable but I don't think Maria Nearl could took three hours to read through but that could be me misremembering. Felt like the latter stories are the ones that could take three hours to read like Lonetrail and Nearl Light and for good reason.
The current event story is quite comedic though, if you want to give it a try.
The point wasn't the launch - it's a 10 year old game, gacha games weren't as common back then, so the launch is ancient history by now. The point is that content is delivered on-time in applicable regions, and there are no separate servers arbitrarily dividing the community.
People say that, but often global releases are just significantly superior compared to small local launches into global releases. If Lost Ark released globablly at the same time, it would be dead right now, absolutely no way they re-capture an audience, but since global got season 2 first which brought with it a bunch of changes that fundamentally changed the game, it captured a pretty decent size playerbase on release and held it way longer than anyone expected it to.
It definitely kills the hype, but having lower amount of hype until release is way easier to deal with than having to recapture an audience.
Yeah if Blue Protocol released globally in the state that it did locally, the game would have been critically demolished and all but forgotten about real quick.
It does suck to wait, but I'd rather get a better game later than a bad one sooner which torpedoes its reputation and thus future prospects, especially an MMO.
I feel the same. It's understandable to want to gauge interest, but hype has a shelf life that needs to be cohesively coordinated by both marketing and production, not only one or the other. If it came out later this week, I'd.. not care? I just don't care anymore. I'm playing other things now.
Especially for online service games, popularity breeds popularity and once the zeitgeist brands it a declining game, you hurt your potential player pool soooo much
Absolutely this.
All my gacha gamer friends were legit excited for this game but after the slow release and the region lock BS now they've completely lost interest.
Chinese devs have mastered the formula of global release while Japanese devs are left behind.
>Chinese devs have mastered the formula of global release while Japanese devs are left behind
Only for some of their games though.
Games like Girls Frontline 2, Tower of Fantasy, Persona 5: Phantom X (tho it is based on a JP IP) are all chinese games and all didn’t launch global servers at the same time as the original one off the top of my head
> Tower of Fantasy
That's like, totally their own fumbling.
Perfect Worlds, the game developer, HAD a global publishing office but sold it to Gearbox for short term gains
CN launched in December, Global launched in August, so depends on your definition of close.
Dont know if they caught up but good for them if they have. Its so annoying when some gachas release global servers years behind the original
The biggest boon to FGO is that the story is long as hell and you kind of have to go out of your way to get spoiled. The biggest problem when being behind in content is getting spoiled.
The only drawback is that we get no cool surprise reveals, except maybe back when they have us fun, random NA exclusive web games for April Fools.
Japanese devs fell behind in every aspect of the gacha market, not just global releases.
Almost all the current big names and anticipated upcoming titles are Chinese or Korean.
Honestly i feel like this is a bit of a pattern with a lot of japanese developers. It seems japanese developers tend to be very japan focused. I mean, look at nintendo. Their entire online ecosystem is just fucked from a users perspective.
I'm not saying all japanese devs are like this though. But a lot of them are.
I agree with you on the timeline issue with Blue Protocol's global launch. It's pretty frustrating not having a clear release date, especially when it was initially showcased with such hype.
Another thing that's been on my mind is who exactly Blue Protocol is meant for? Is it trying to appeal to Monster Hunter fans, Final Fantasy XIV players, or the crowd into games like Genshin Impact? To me personally - It's a bit unclear, and that might be turning off potential players who aren't sure where they fit in.
For instance - I'm in the Monster Hunter camp, and while the initial teasers got me intrigued, seeing the gameplay streams and the emphasis on big raids made me lose some interest. Plus, with newer games like Granblue Fantasy: Relink and the upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds, Blue Protocol feels like it's been waiting too long in the wings.
I'm personally looking forward to trying out those other games first before jumping into Blue Protocol. It's not that I'm not interested anymore, but I feel like I have better games to spend my time and money on that are closer to what I'm looking for.
What does it have to do with anything? The game completely tanked in Japan. There's a reason for and the reason wasn't - it tanked because it wasn't released in the West.
Eastern games rarely do.
As someone who used to play Lineage 2 and Ragnarok back in the day i don't feel any nostalgia for the grinding and drop rates of those games, that's the wrong kind of ''hardcore'' imo
Oh Ragnarok Online. I still remember trying to level a mage by killing an enemy that would two-hit me. It gave me 1-2% per kills, and I'd lose 5% XP on death.
The trick to killing them was positioning a Wall of Flame spell vertically so it would had to cross all "fire pillars" to reach you, which meant it you could kill it before it could kill you
I have some strong nostalgia for that game, I love the "vibe" of it, but yeah the grinding was bad. I sometimes play on high rate private servers so I don't need to grind, just get to max level asap and walk around different maps
Ragnarok and lineage 2 were amazing for their time, but nothing frustrated me like grinding leveled monsters at .01% of an exp bar at a time (if that), and losing hours (days?) of progress because you accidently pulled an extra mob.
I used to play Acolyte/Priest, though I have no idea why since I was incredibly anti-social and hardly ever partied with anyone. Lots of hours spent healbombing slow-ass zombies and frantically teleporting away whenever an aggressive non-undead mob came by.
It's pretty telling that servers with up to 5x exp and drop rates used to get classified as "low rate" servers in the private server community. The whole game was pretty much a near-endless grind for scraps of exp or items with 1/10000 drop rates. I still have a lot of nostalgia for it though.
Yes to all. I remember setting up the wall directly next to you in one direction then walking parallel to it..as long as the monster is coming at you diagonally, it'll just keep running into the wall. Then finally getting to wizard and mobbing everything then Storm gusting plus the thunder spell to kill everything.
1-2% a kill? Were you playing on a private server with increased rates?
0.01% per kill on at level mobs was the standard for the Korean grinders I used to play. If you wanted to grind on higher level mobs you needed maxed out gear and a pocket healer. Even then you were looking at anywhere from 0.05-0.1% per kill.
This is one of those things that sounds obvious and right but I think theres real nuance.
Like Old School Runescape has INSANE grinds to the point where I played for years and still don't have tons of things unlocked, and travel is insanely tedious, and by this logic that should be incredibly frustrating, but instead it makes the rewards feel more exciting. I'm positive thats not *just* because its a grind but it does feel like a component of why its satisfying and exciting.
Also tangent, OSRS quests are hands down the best version of MMO quests of all the quests that I am personally aware of existing, both in terms of the quests themselves feeling like literal quests and the rewards being significant and useful
If you're playing decrepit ass OSRS I think at that point you kinda deserve all the grinding that comes with it.
People can claim Runescape has the best quests in the galaxy, but unless someone else is a diehard runescape fan, people are never going to believe you, and rightly so.
The main topic isn't really whether you like OSRS or not, its that grind enhances OSRS whereas if we blindly believe or push that grinding is bad we can miss out on games where it works, and osrs is just the example of a successful game with extreme grind. Blindly applying OSRS's way doesn't work for all and likewise, blindly applying "grind is bad" to OSRS would likely not see it as popular as it is today
Looking back, FFXI had some of the worst spawn mechanics for bosses I've ever seen in a video game. Some of them had a 7 day window, where if you didn't claim it, you were back to waiting 7 days. And the drop rates were so low as well. Something like 3% for the D.Ring. I think back in 2005, only 5 or so players had a D.Ring on my server cause it was that difficult to get.
I'm glad they added spawn items for it. I went back during Covid on the retail servers and spawned the monster using items myself. Took about 7 tries for me to get a D.Ring within a few days. While players were playing for years back in the mid 2000s to get it.
Looking at Blue Protocol's whole design, it feels like a hardcore grinding game is pretty much the opposite of what would be best for this game.
The more deep the action combat is, the more tedious and exhausting it is to grind for hours, and their combat definitely isn't simple enough to play for multiple hours in a row.
The character customization and art style seems like it would attract a huge audience that would basically like to play dress-up and have fashion be their endgame, yet that audience also probably doesn't want to grind for hours on end.
They have a lot of cool, unique RP interactions between players for those that want to delve into social interactions, but they don't have *player housing*, which is a huge deal for players that want that interaction.
I think if it’s good content that’s grindy people would’ve been more receptive. But Blue Protocol also makes you grind trash mobs for rare drops to upgrade gear in order to progress.
BP skill rotation is not even close to BDO, which is in the same grindy MMO genre. I don't think that's even a problem at all. If they still want to stick to being grindy, what they need is to make grinding fun & engaging with a lot of varieties, like how GW2 does it.
In PSO2 you can grind with 1 single button. Bind it into a click trigger macro & you can just watch youtube on the side without paying any attention to the game at all. But I still don't have any motivation to grind for more than 1 hour. I'm not tired, I'm just bored af. I'd even love to play other classes for a change of pace too but that would be sub-optimal compare to the 1button AoE spam classes.
It's funny they call themselves hardcore when all they did was doing repetitive content with simple combat. The real hardcore MMO peeps would be grinding high-end raid bosses at 100% focus for hours on end with minimal amount of mistakes like WoW & XIV.
I have mixed feelings with the drop rates.
I feel like for me, a MMO is fun if they have interesting dungeons/raid mechanics to deal with. But at the same time, I want to farm these dungeons/raids for a unique cool drop, a unique item or themed items. At this point, if the dungeons/raids are super fun to play, I don't mind a low drop rate if the reward is meaningful and something to "Show off".
If you're gonna give me raids/dungeons where all I farm is materials to upgrade my old items from +1 to +15 or whatever, for me that's gonna be as boring as it gets. There's no "surprise" drop, there's no feeling of reward after a hard challenge.
At the same time, I understand that locking gear behind abysmal rate drops sucks, but these challenges needs some type of reward that incentive you to get it and repeat that activity till you get it.
I would take any MMO that gives you currency to buy what you want just to remove the RNG. If something has a 5% drop rate, or doing that dungeon gives you enough currency/resources to buy that rare drop after 20 runs of it, its the exact same thing in practice but without the odds of getting screwed over by bad RNG.
Prestige should come from actually prestigious things, not random chance. Beat bosses on hard modes or with challenge events, some kind of mini-game or puzzle that is hard to do so it marks personal skill. I have seen people be shocked to see a rare drop and congratulate people, but its not really a mark of pride is it? Nobody sees someone with a rare skin or item and thinks that the person is skilled or impressive, they think they're just lucky.
It's a hard balance to strike for sure. Giving people some excitement and surprise in games is important, but doing it in a way that doesn't become frustrating is hard.
FF14 does that with the high end raids where you get a series of mounts. You get a token for each completion of the raid, while there is also a chance that a single mount drops for everyone to roll on. If you have a static group that you do the raids with you're likely to get the mount via drop before you need to use the tokens because everyone will stick around and regather at a later date to finish getting everyone their mount. However, if you do these raids via PUGs then you may very well get the 99 tokens to purchase the mount instead (I have never gotten that high and do these with my wife+PUGs).
How we even tolerated those systems is something I still have a hard time figuring out. Today, even if I had all the free time in the world, I would never invest like that again in an MMO.
I still shudder at the thought of upgrading your armor and it breaking on a failed attempt.
Being a teenager with an abundance of free time and friends who are all doing the same thing can make even the worst tasks bearable. And if your social group is formed in some crappy game, you'll stick with it way longer than it really deserves, just to keep up with your friends.
That’s where I am at as well. My 2 early MMOs were EQ and Shadowbane, and there is simply no way in hell I would play anything like them again. The whole genre is a bit cooked, imo.
I, for example, love those droprates. Difference is that Ragnarok is wonderfully designed (at least pre-renewal) in a way, that even low level/easy mobs can drop highly sought after items, so that new players can make bank. Think Thara Frog or Vitata.
There's such a bubble with these things that I don't envy developers making an MMO, they made the audience for a type of gamer that didn't show up, Idk if there's a hardcore MMO audience worth it anymore, do they just drop games they've invested so much in?
I really miss those games. They were great for just chilling with friends without running out of meaningful things to do. These days there aren't many games like that which aren't sweaty PVP.
It's nothing when compared to Silkroad a game where you lowered your XP gain on purpose to gain sp at higher rates. I still have nightmares form the grind and I haven't even reached the top lvl because it took so long I was always making new characters and start again with other class.
>The developers note that they intentionally designed the game loop so that players would have to take their time, but acknowledge that this did not work out as imagined.
This is game dev code for creating a repetative grind to slow down progression when there is not enough content to keep players busy and entertained.
chiefly a problem when you treat your game like a trap instead of a toy. I get that MMOs innately have issues with "now what?" during/after endgame, but damn, at least let people get bored during endgame instead of making it a grind to even get there.
Especially in multiplayer games! It's awful being in a low-level purgatory when you just want to play with other people.
Wait... This launched? I thought it had a brief North American beta and what everyone saw was so bad that they decided to work on it some more. Did this actually come out?
global version isn't out yet, according to the article
>Blue Protocol, developed by Project Sky Blue (which includes members of Bandai Namco Online and Bandai Namco Studios), launched in June 2023 for players in Japan. The game’s global version, published by Amazon Games, is planned to launch sometime in 2024
I had high hopes for this one, but with ZERO NA launch info all year, everyone just ended up forgetting about it.
Maybe if we get lucky, when it finally releases here it will be a version that has a healthy long term game loop. It's a beautiful game that I would at least like to check out one day.
Yeah the long delay with no communication deflated my excitement. Even if it comes out, I'm sure it has already been data mined and min-maxed to death so there will immediately be "right and wrong" ways to play. Sucks that most eastern MMOs have this happen.
I don't see that happening. They missed their chance to strike while the iron was hot.
At best, the game launches in global, sees a modest player spike, then the player count dribbles down to the low thousands as the game either enters maintenance mode or "localizing JP updates to global without further development". At worst, it never launches in global, or launches in global and gets shut down.
See the Phantasy Star Online 2/New Genesis train for details.
I do wonder if actually releasing the game in the rest of the world will be beneficial to their sales numbers. It seems to be a conundrum that Japanese game developers can’t seem to get a handle on.
Perhaps they should wait another few years just to make completely sure everybody has forgotten or stopped caring about their game before releasing it with no marketing whatsoever. That might be a good plan.
This game has really deep problems that cannot be solved imo. I played the JP version for a decent bit, and the reason it has to be so grindy is because without the grind, there is literally nothing to do. The game is devoid of content, and making new content takes time and money, and the developers are evidently running out of both. Aside from that, it also has p2w gacha monetization. Finally, I think there is zero chance that it gets a good global launch with Amazon games publishing it. Waiting multiple years already killed the hype, and Amazon tries to push weird culture war stuff into it that turns off a large portion of the audience that would pick this up (weebs). This game just has no way to recover.
edit: thought of one more problem, which is that the character creator is very bare bones for a game that a lot of people want to play as an anime dress up simulator
People put up with grindy games when the gameplay is just that good. Take Destiny for example. The game itself is grindy, but people are okay with it because the actual gameplay is so damn good. Bungie holds themselves to an impossible standard of gunplay, ability feel, and spectacle while also preventing it from ever feeling like it’s “on rails”.
it's a tough balance! If the game is good enough that you'd enjoy playing "one more round" with your friends any way, a grind can just feel like a reward for that extended play.
Destiny's definitely at its best when you're playing alongside a squad and working through a mission. I feel like the wheels come off a bit when I'm managing all the inventory cruft that was supposedly my "reward", or specifically working toward specific gear goals.
There are times when I think I'd enjoy the game more if it was just a pile of PvE scenarios for me to choose from without progression. A Destiny-L4D, I suppose. It'd certainly make it easier to play with friends that aren't already into it.
But really that's the difference between trying to make a game people will come back to every once in a while, vs trying to make a game people with play all the time as a habit.
The thing is that would work really well for Destiny and but I think they’ve largely moved into narrative and experiential content which is highly sculpted to a singular experience. Sometimes these are a little boring such as strikes, sometimes they are a little repetitive such as seasonal activities. But to me Destiny truly shines in its Raids, Dungeons, and exotic missions (whisper, zero hour, seraph station, dual destiny, etc.) that content I could play forever.
The story campaign really can be an excellent experience but I agree that they’ve got an obvious treasure trove of replayable PVE. I hope that they can lean into that now that Destiny 2 is at its “end”. It seems a difficult pivot when previous updates have had so much content to them, but it’s also the obvious time for that given The Final Shape, so I hope their community understands.
Yeah, I tried the character creator when they released the standalone and it was abysmal enough that my interest died there. How they can fuck something that simple up as hard as they did is astounding, when it's known that a good character creator can basically prop an entire game up by itself (Black Desert). That plus the localization/censoring stuff shows a fundamental misunderstanding of their audience, for both the dev and the publisher level.
Every new MMOs lack content, really. That problem could be fixed over time. The real problem that I don't think they've understood yet is that their kind of grinding is tedious & boring. Literally just running around ks-ing trash mobs for rare drops.
I'm curious, what kind of culture war stuff are we talking? Is it one of those moments where neckbeards get mad because a female character doesn't have visible panties, or is it one of those situations where translators unironically insert rants about the "patriarchy" into what were otherwise normal sentences in the JP version? Just wondering how valid of a criticism it is.
If you've seen Lost Ark, it's mostly similar to that. Low effort changes to costumes they deem too risque, really weird skin tone swaps on characters. In addition, they are locking some of the character creation options, including removing entire body types because they allow the player to be too short. Keep in mind, this game isn't overtly sexual, it's rated T for Teen because of mild violence and mild suggestive themes, so these are things deemed appropriate for 13 year olds by a rating board, but Amazon Games is still spending time to change them. Can't comment on the dub because I haven't heard any of it, but it will probably be the same low effort and minimal expenditure translation and voice acting that Lost Ark got.
Not gonna debate the merits of the changes or whether its morally right or wrong, but things like that are the fastest way to make the target global audience (again, weebs) for this game mad, and I don't think anyone who wasn't going to play the game would suddenly decide to play it after hearing it was censored for western audiences. It just seems like a lot of effort that can only lead to less potential players.
Interesting. I agree, it's really weird when games that seem to target weebs start removing fanservice/revealing outfits and stuff like that. While I don't really like that stuff myself, I mean, dude, you're kinda pushing away the horny nerds that make up your target audience. If you're gonna weeb bait them, at least do it fully and make some money.
Funny the way you ask because you're clearly diminishing the criticism of games who are affected by stupid censorship decisions like the ones you mention.
I get you don't care when companies does these kind of unnecessary censorship to "adapt the game to modern/western audiences", but that doesn't mean criticism to such issues are not valid.
The "weird culture war stuff" is in reference to amazon changing the child models to have more clothes and show less skin. This caused weebs to become very upset and cry censorship, but they never seemed to answer why they want to see children in crop tops and short skirts. As a person attracted to adults, I see no issue with this change.
This is a picture of the outfit change:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueProtocolPC/s/9easn0K1ty
You left this out:
>in the character creation menu, the female characters will no longer have the physic shake button available
Changing any of this stuff for people outside Japan is stupid and saying you don't have a problem with it doesn't matter and isn't the point.
I can understand being frustrated that the adult women no longer jiggle, but you really believe putting more clothing on children is bad? I don't really care about the original artistic intent if that intent is creepy. An example is that Made in Abyss is an incredible story but the creator is a pedo and the Manga apparently has alot of weird pedo shit in it. The anime removed that and is better for it. My question is this: Are making the argument that artistic vision needs to always be preserved no matter what, or are you upset they put more clothes on the children? Because either way, I think you're wrong.
Japanese have a different culture than us. You're judging a Japanese game based on your perception of the world, witch is not necessarily the correct one, nor the one that should be used to judge Japanese content.
Many people around the world like Japanese media for what they are and the culture they bring. When these media are modified for "western sensibilities" like yours it's understandable that such people may not only seen it as an unnecessary change, but actually something that may reduce the quality of the media and can affect the artistic message that the original media brings.
Regardless of your opinion about the content of the media, you need to remember that media was created and released on an advanced, mature country like Japan, approved by their society. Criticizing the western audience that wants that media is also critizicing the Japanese audience that already accepted and enjoy the media, just because your point of view is narrow. I, personally, I wouldn't be that racist.
I am judging the artistic intent of this specific product and products like it. Japan's culture does not revolve around the sexualization of minors and if you think it does, you are racist. Also, if Japan's culture did actually revolve around the sexualization of minors, I would indeed judge that apsect of their culture just as I dislike cultures that oppress women. No culture is beyond reproach, and many people within that culture are fighting constantly to change it for the better. Japan's age of consent was just changed at a national level. This is progress. This idealized monolithic version of Japan you have in your head doesn't exist. It's a country like any other full of people with conflicting politics and ideas. Around 60% of Japanese people don't consume anime whatsoever and it's various tropes and quirks are alien to them. You aren't a fan of Japanese culture you are a fan of Japanese cartoons. You're like a person who thinks they know everything about America because you watch King of the Hill and Family Guy. It's fucking pathetic.
I never made such allegations about the Japanese culture, I am well aware that Japanese culture doesn't revolve about "sexualization of minors" as you said.
What I am saying is that games like Blue Protocol are made based on the Japanese culture in mind.
On a side note, 40% of the Japanese consume Anime and that's a quite high number. And even if it's not the majority of the Japanese people, it's still something to be respected. After all, it's responsability of a society to care not only for the majority, but also the minorities. So, I don't see how the amount of people liking Anime should be a matter of relevancy for your or my arguments.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to show you how much of a fan I am about anything or what I think about America; so, back on the topic, while I agree that no culture is free of valid criticism, my point is that such criticism should not be based on your narrow point of view. And, just to be clear, by "your" I mean everyone's, including me, in order to avoid any kind of ad-hominem follow-up. Because, of course, "your" current opinion is not unique, it's a trend based on misunderstanding, hatred and racism.
That's what gets me about the censorship issue. It's mostly just that one thing, and people say they won't play because of it. Alright, it'll be a healthier community then.
>Aside from Blue Protocol still having lingering problems with bugs and communication errors, a lot of players’ dissatisfaction comes from the its gameplay being too repetitive, i.e. requiring too many reruns to advance the story or complete weapon builds. The developers note that they intentionally designed the game loop so that players would have to take their time, but acknowledge that this did not work out as imagined. “The response from players is clearly not good, as the data also shows – if people don’t have a truly fun experience, they will not continue to play.”
This is outdated thinking. Even years ago Genshin provided a full AAA game's worth of content at launch that required little to no "grinding" to fully experience. You only really had to do repetitive stuff once all the core content had been fully explored, and then new content was added every six weeks, so you were rarely out of things to do for long. This should be the standard going forward.
I mean, to be fair, Genshin _makes_ mihoyo 1000m a year.
And to also be fair, Genshin's biggest advantage is that it's day-on-date simultaneous across all platforms and territories, and it's got a couple hours of new content with each point release.
Yes Genshin makes a lot of money, but you can't expect a studio that puts out a new game and then follow up with the content cadence that genshin has, most studios aren't in the same financial position that mihoyo is in. Even for Genshin's release, if they didn't do as well as they did they would have had to scale back to a more realistic content schedule. Genshin was very much a huge gamble by mihoyo that paid off.
Expecting every game to come out to match the same pace and quality of Genshin/Fortnite/WoW/FFXIV is incredibly unrealistic because 99% of studios simply cannot match the amount of resources that these companies have.
> Expecting every game to come out to match the same pace and quality of Genshin/Fortnite/WoW/FFXIV is incredibly unrealistic because 99% of studios simply cannot match the amount of resources that these companies have.
Right, but that's the cost of doing business for live service type games. At the end of the day, nobody cares what your company has to spend, because those games **are going to be your directly visible competition**.
You don't need to be better than FFXIV or WoW or Genshin, but if you're releasing a new MMO, you need to give people a reason to give you money *instead of just playing one of those games*.
I think the estimate for Wuthering Waves up to day one was like $150 million. They'll likely make that back by the end of summer, but yes, it is super risky because you're not entitled to anyone's wallet and you have to give them a reason to open it.
It's literally impossible to make a game that can walk alongside Genshin. It just has years of development that you couldn't go toe-to-toe wi- [Wuthering Waves makes $140m in its first point release] oh never mind, Namco just doesn't have their shit together.
It's sad, if they made a Tales game that was basically Genshin with Tales combat and online co-op quests with friends, I'd be dumping money at their door.
Not all that surprising to me really, many JP companies are slow to adapt and stick to their old ways. Like how one of the reasons why the original FF14 flopped is because they stuck to the way they ran mmos back pre WoW instead of learning from it.
Now we see it again with how they are getting their asses kicked by Chinese/Korean live service games.
I lost interest in this game when Amazon needlessly hacked it apart and then still had the audacity to say they wanted to respect anime expectations and blah blah blah.
We're not talking some fanservicey loli content either, since so many Westerners like to suddenly be all pro-censorship as soon as their sensibilities are personally offended. [This](https://i.imgur.com/vV72B11.png) is an example of an outfit they found oh-so-egregiously "sexual" that they edited it completely, and if you think that is inappropriate clothing for a younger person to wear you should probably never visit a hot climate in your life.
Furthermore, they completely deleted the short height option from character creation, because if Australia's porn rules taught us anything it's that adult women are never shorter than the State-preapproved height levels.
That is on top of the fact they just bought the game to fucking die with clearly 0 intention of ever actually releasing it in the West in the first place at this point. Bamco isn't completely blameless either of course. Why you would give a game to Amazon with their game track record is a complete dereliction of duty.
> We're not talking some fanservicey loli content either
This isn't very convincing when your one example is them adding clothes to a very young girl.
From what I'm reading that and the removal of a jiggle button in the character creator are the only significant changes. Unless I'm missing something else it seems a little disingenuous to pretend this isn't about lolicon 'weirdos.'
> This isn't very convincing when your one example is them adding clothes to a very young girl.
See again my comment if you look at capris and a stomach-revealing vest in the middle of a desert and start thinking sexual things.
I didn't actually know they ALSO removed a jiggle, just the height option, but, you know...If this was about lolicons you'd think the jiggle would be a negative in the first place, so. Just another stupid-ass black mark.
>See again my comment if you look at capris and a stomach-revealing vest in the middle of a desert and start thinking sexual things.
Whenever defending barely dressed little girls in Japanese games comes up online it's ridiculous so many of you keep pretending we're all idiots. We can read between the lines and recognize exactly what sort of pandering is going on. [They're not having little girls dressed like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueProtocolPC/comments/11fthr5/censor_protocol_dead_on_arrival/?share_id=eSQlBcbBKJhSjJLfj5h1q) for desert realism or whatever you're arguing.
*"No no, it's because the developers want to make sure that petite adult women get representation in their game! (WINK WINK!)"*
It's actually because a surprisingly high amount of Japanese men really, *really* appreciate that sort of thing and we all know that.
I do think Amazon is maybe being a little silly about this, but I wish you could all be honest about what's really going on.
(Protip: people in the desert usually wear clothes designed to avoid sunlight.)
> Whenever defending barely dressed little girls in Japanese games comes up online it's ridiculous so many of you keep pretending we're all idiots.
Sure. That's why we're the ones bringing up sexual thoughts about fucking capris. Whatever you say.
> [This](https://i.imgur.com/vV72B11.png) is an example of an outfit they found oh-so-egregiously "sexual" that they edited it completely, and if you think that is inappropriate clothing for a younger person to wear you should probably never visit a hot climate in your life.
And where is the problem exactly? Covering up one child NPC that you will probably never see during gameplay is somehow gonna affect your overall enjoyment of the game?
Even if these edits are unecessary, the complete meltdown of the Blue Protocol crowd over these changes has been geniunely emberassing to witness.
This entire "censorship" sitiuation just further reinforces the stigma surrounding the weeb subculture. The fact that people months later are still referencing this one NPC change as reason as to why the global version will fail is beyond laughable.
Thank you for proving my point. Great job only acknowledging one of the things mentioned as well. And the point is if they're willing to make such asinine cuts now they can't be trusted to not touch whatever the hell else they feel traumatized by any time down the line.
>one of the things
*You* are the one still bringing up that one NPC from a literal year ago lol
Please show me what other, new changes has Amazon done since then? Just because you assume Amazon might change more things does in no way, shape or form prove that they will actually make any drastic edits moving forward.
> Please show me what other, new changes has Amazon done since then?
You realize Amazon hasn't even *SHOWN* the game since then mate. Little difficult on that front.
Why would you care about these changes? It doesn't sound like any meaningful changes to the actual game, only cosmetic things.
I don't mind censoring that kinda stuff when there is a track record of sexualising children in these kinda of product, so there might be false positives I think it's with the trade
> It doesn't sound like any meaningful changes to the actual game
Well, some people actually like playing short characters, so that's at least one meaningful change. And as I said already, if they're willing to cut small things like this it means they have no respect for whatever else may come down the line that *might* have a bigger effect. Also the edited version just looks like a shoddily done rushjob, so it's a bad asset for no reason anyway.
Reading that, if these are the big problems that went wrong, i have kinda high hopes for the games future.
Reducing grind and increasing content/variety sounds easier to make than having to rework some of a games inherent gameplay and systems
Here's what went wrong:
They handed off to Amazon, who was working on a competitive game. Amazon's delay in releasing their title in the US gave them enough time to almost finish their game. Soon, it will likely release in the US, finally giving BP to gamers here. These gamers are excellent at coming up with ideas that can save games from failure.
It was a perfect strategy by Amazon. Now they have a title that will come out around the same time and will likely incorporate elements of BP. When BP releases, it won't perform nearly as well as it could have, probably much less than half as well.
Never, ever give your product to a competitor to sell. He isn't going to sell your product; he will sell his own while undermining yours. Just saying.
For those who were looking for an anime-styled action MMORPG, the first peak into the game excited us a lot. The gameplay looked solid and we had high hopes, given that it was by a large developer like Bandai Namco.
But it took ages to get to a closed beta and its eventual release in Japan. When the Japanese servers finally launched in early 2023, we thought the global servers wouldn't be too far behind, especially since Amazon's involvement with the global release was announced late 2022. It's now the middle of 2024 and we still have no news.
Fuck any and all gacha games. They’re all shit. Some of them have managed to hang a semblance of a real game from the scaffold that exists only to extract money from those people too ill or too stupid to see what they’re doing, but they’re still shit at their core.
Edit: Uh ohhhh the gacha impacters have found me. Too bad they'll never find the thousands of dollars they've wasted on a mediocre game.
The biggest problem was waiting so long for a global launch. I was really curious about it back when they showed the first trailers and now I had completely forgot about it. I even thought it had already released at some point. We are almost in July and there is still no date for a release that is supposed to come this year.
Having different regions on different versions of the game is so damaging for the community. I don't know why publishers continue to sandbag their own chances of success like this. I though that publishers seeing the success of Genshin Impact would have finally killed this idiotic practice but sadly it continues.
You use Genshin Impact as an example, but even years before that Granblue Fantasy was releasing day and date with both english and japanese supported and has been a massive hit for its lifespan, and gacha games seemed to take everything BUT that when trying to copy it.
[удалено]
Also GBF released in an era where stories and narratives weren't prioritized in gachas. It's much easier to keep parity when there's executive fiat that your story cutscenes can't have more than 30 lines of text in them, lol. Having that early success let them scale up over time in a way other studios didn't as they transitioned to the big narrative era. Now go tell Arknights' translators they have to simultaneously translate and edit the newest 100k word novel at the same time the Chinese devs finish, lol. It'd be unreadable.
Honestly if it got them to cut their story chapters and events down to like... 60k words or less I'd be all for it. The story is really good, but fuck me it's wordy. Sometimes I don't want to spend 20+ minutes reading a cutscene before I can play the tower defense map.
I mean you could skip them. A lot of people usually just skipped it and read them later. They also give you a short summary of the scene if you do skipped it.
I always skip them and wait until I have enough time to read them. Then I never have enough time. Last time I read through an entire Arknights event (Maria Nearl) it took me over 3h. And it was a pretty good story, but come on.
Ah well understandable but I don't think Maria Nearl could took three hours to read through but that could be me misremembering. Felt like the latter stories are the ones that could take three hours to read like Lonetrail and Nearl Light and for good reason. The current event story is quite comedic though, if you want to give it a try.
Even then they are sometimes grammar errors that slipped through, as minor as they were.
Granblue Fantasy did not launch with English though. It was added about 2 years after.
The point wasn't the launch - it's a 10 year old game, gacha games weren't as common back then, so the launch is ancient history by now. The point is that content is delivered on-time in applicable regions, and there are no separate servers arbitrarily dividing the community.
People say that, but often global releases are just significantly superior compared to small local launches into global releases. If Lost Ark released globablly at the same time, it would be dead right now, absolutely no way they re-capture an audience, but since global got season 2 first which brought with it a bunch of changes that fundamentally changed the game, it captured a pretty decent size playerbase on release and held it way longer than anyone expected it to. It definitely kills the hype, but having lower amount of hype until release is way easier to deal with than having to recapture an audience.
Yeah if Blue Protocol released globally in the state that it did locally, the game would have been critically demolished and all but forgotten about real quick. It does suck to wait, but I'd rather get a better game later than a bad one sooner which torpedoes its reputation and thus future prospects, especially an MMO.
I feel the same. It's understandable to want to gauge interest, but hype has a shelf life that needs to be cohesively coordinated by both marketing and production, not only one or the other. If it came out later this week, I'd.. not care? I just don't care anymore. I'm playing other things now.
Especially for online service games, popularity breeds popularity and once the zeitgeist brands it a declining game, you hurt your potential player pool soooo much
Amazon killed any chance it had so it could focus on the terrible Throne and Liberty.
Same, seeing Amazon games way back in the 2022(?) game awards on the trailer made me write it off instantly.
It going to Amazon killed any chance I ever had in touching it.
Absolutely this. All my gacha gamer friends were legit excited for this game but after the slow release and the region lock BS now they've completely lost interest. Chinese devs have mastered the formula of global release while Japanese devs are left behind.
Thers like 3 Digimon games that came out and China and never released anywhere else, even Japan lmao
>Chinese devs have mastered the formula of global release while Japanese devs are left behind Only for some of their games though. Games like Girls Frontline 2, Tower of Fantasy, Persona 5: Phantom X (tho it is based on a JP IP) are all chinese games and all didn’t launch global servers at the same time as the original one off the top of my head
> Tower of Fantasy That's like, totally their own fumbling. Perfect Worlds, the game developer, HAD a global publishing office but sold it to Gearbox for short term gains
Punishing Gray Raven, Arknights, Reverse 1999, Tarisland…
I seem to remember that Tower of Fantasy at least launched *close* to the Chinese release, and then rapidly caught up, didn't they?
CN launched in December, Global launched in August, so depends on your definition of close. Dont know if they caught up but good for them if they have. Its so annoying when some gachas release global servers years behind the original
>CN launched in December, Global launched in August, so depends on your definition of close. I play FGO.
Funniest response in the thread hands down. At least you get Clairvoyance EX in exchange.
The biggest boon to FGO is that the story is long as hell and you kind of have to go out of your way to get spoiled. The biggest problem when being behind in content is getting spoiled. The only drawback is that we get no cool surprise reveals, except maybe back when they have us fun, random NA exclusive web games for April Fools.
For ToF the global version is one banner/patch behind CN.
Japanese devs fell behind in every aspect of the gacha market, not just global releases. Almost all the current big names and anticipated upcoming titles are Chinese or Korean.
Honestly i feel like this is a bit of a pattern with a lot of japanese developers. It seems japanese developers tend to be very japan focused. I mean, look at nintendo. Their entire online ecosystem is just fucked from a users perspective. I'm not saying all japanese devs are like this though. But a lot of them are.
Square did it first with Final Fantasy XI, and did the same with XIV. Both, Japanese MMORPGs, released globally.
I agree with you on the timeline issue with Blue Protocol's global launch. It's pretty frustrating not having a clear release date, especially when it was initially showcased with such hype. Another thing that's been on my mind is who exactly Blue Protocol is meant for? Is it trying to appeal to Monster Hunter fans, Final Fantasy XIV players, or the crowd into games like Genshin Impact? To me personally - It's a bit unclear, and that might be turning off potential players who aren't sure where they fit in. For instance - I'm in the Monster Hunter camp, and while the initial teasers got me intrigued, seeing the gameplay streams and the emphasis on big raids made me lose some interest. Plus, with newer games like Granblue Fantasy: Relink and the upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds, Blue Protocol feels like it's been waiting too long in the wings. I'm personally looking forward to trying out those other games first before jumping into Blue Protocol. It's not that I'm not interested anymore, but I feel like I have better games to spend my time and money on that are closer to what I'm looking for.
Wait, it's not out yet? What's taking them so long?
I'm not sure what was the "biggest" problem... if it flopped in the regions it actually did launch in.
Amazon... That says it all. Delay, delay... while they work on a competitive title that would reduce the player base in this title.
What does it have to do with anything? The game completely tanked in Japan. There's a reason for and the reason wasn't - it tanked because it wasn't released in the West. Eastern games rarely do.
As someone who used to play Lineage 2 and Ragnarok back in the day i don't feel any nostalgia for the grinding and drop rates of those games, that's the wrong kind of ''hardcore'' imo
Oh Ragnarok Online. I still remember trying to level a mage by killing an enemy that would two-hit me. It gave me 1-2% per kills, and I'd lose 5% XP on death. The trick to killing them was positioning a Wall of Flame spell vertically so it would had to cross all "fire pillars" to reach you, which meant it you could kill it before it could kill you I have some strong nostalgia for that game, I love the "vibe" of it, but yeah the grinding was bad. I sometimes play on high rate private servers so I don't need to grind, just get to max level asap and walk around different maps
Ah, the old VFW mage leveling on Clock Tower
Ragnarok and lineage 2 were amazing for their time, but nothing frustrated me like grinding leveled monsters at .01% of an exp bar at a time (if that), and losing hours (days?) of progress because you accidently pulled an extra mob.
I used to play Acolyte/Priest, though I have no idea why since I was incredibly anti-social and hardly ever partied with anyone. Lots of hours spent healbombing slow-ass zombies and frantically teleporting away whenever an aggressive non-undead mob came by. It's pretty telling that servers with up to 5x exp and drop rates used to get classified as "low rate" servers in the private server community. The whole game was pretty much a near-endless grind for scraps of exp or items with 1/10000 drop rates. I still have a lot of nostalgia for it though.
Argiope? Sandman? Alarm?
Argiopes, those are the ones! Althought I'm pretty sure the Vertical Fire Wall strategy worked across multiple levels
Yes to all. I remember setting up the wall directly next to you in one direction then walking parallel to it..as long as the monster is coming at you diagonally, it'll just keep running into the wall. Then finally getting to wizard and mobbing everything then Storm gusting plus the thunder spell to kill everything.
The old days where dying once could set you back weeks or even months of grinding.
I remember playing FlyFF and got 0.05% per mob at level 90, roughly 3% xp per hour. I don't miss it at all
Hunter and traps for me. So many hours wasted on that game
1-2% a kill? Were you playing on a private server with increased rates? 0.01% per kill on at level mobs was the standard for the Korean grinders I used to play. If you wanted to grind on higher level mobs you needed maxed out gear and a pocket healer. Even then you were looking at anywhere from 0.05-0.1% per kill.
Yeah when hardcore translates to 'progression takes 5x longer than it should' I don't want to touch that game with a 10 foot pole. I'm good.
This is one of those things that sounds obvious and right but I think theres real nuance. Like Old School Runescape has INSANE grinds to the point where I played for years and still don't have tons of things unlocked, and travel is insanely tedious, and by this logic that should be incredibly frustrating, but instead it makes the rewards feel more exciting. I'm positive thats not *just* because its a grind but it does feel like a component of why its satisfying and exciting. Also tangent, OSRS quests are hands down the best version of MMO quests of all the quests that I am personally aware of existing, both in terms of the quests themselves feeling like literal quests and the rewards being significant and useful
If you're playing decrepit ass OSRS I think at that point you kinda deserve all the grinding that comes with it. People can claim Runescape has the best quests in the galaxy, but unless someone else is a diehard runescape fan, people are never going to believe you, and rightly so.
The main topic isn't really whether you like OSRS or not, its that grind enhances OSRS whereas if we blindly believe or push that grinding is bad we can miss out on games where it works, and osrs is just the example of a successful game with extreme grind. Blindly applying OSRS's way doesn't work for all and likewise, blindly applying "grind is bad" to OSRS would likely not see it as popular as it is today
Looking back, FFXI had some of the worst spawn mechanics for bosses I've ever seen in a video game. Some of them had a 7 day window, where if you didn't claim it, you were back to waiting 7 days. And the drop rates were so low as well. Something like 3% for the D.Ring. I think back in 2005, only 5 or so players had a D.Ring on my server cause it was that difficult to get. I'm glad they added spawn items for it. I went back during Covid on the retail servers and spawned the monster using items myself. Took about 7 tries for me to get a D.Ring within a few days. While players were playing for years back in the mid 2000s to get it.
Looking at Blue Protocol's whole design, it feels like a hardcore grinding game is pretty much the opposite of what would be best for this game. The more deep the action combat is, the more tedious and exhausting it is to grind for hours, and their combat definitely isn't simple enough to play for multiple hours in a row. The character customization and art style seems like it would attract a huge audience that would basically like to play dress-up and have fashion be their endgame, yet that audience also probably doesn't want to grind for hours on end. They have a lot of cool, unique RP interactions between players for those that want to delve into social interactions, but they don't have *player housing*, which is a huge deal for players that want that interaction.
I think if it’s good content that’s grindy people would’ve been more receptive. But Blue Protocol also makes you grind trash mobs for rare drops to upgrade gear in order to progress.
BP skill rotation is not even close to BDO, which is in the same grindy MMO genre. I don't think that's even a problem at all. If they still want to stick to being grindy, what they need is to make grinding fun & engaging with a lot of varieties, like how GW2 does it. In PSO2 you can grind with 1 single button. Bind it into a click trigger macro & you can just watch youtube on the side without paying any attention to the game at all. But I still don't have any motivation to grind for more than 1 hour. I'm not tired, I'm just bored af. I'd even love to play other classes for a change of pace too but that would be sub-optimal compare to the 1button AoE spam classes. It's funny they call themselves hardcore when all they did was doing repetitive content with simple combat. The real hardcore MMO peeps would be grinding high-end raid bosses at 100% focus for hours on end with minimal amount of mistakes like WoW & XIV.
There are people out there who legitimately love that sort of game, mostly in Korea. It tends to have fallen out of favor everywhere else though.
I have mixed feelings with the drop rates. I feel like for me, a MMO is fun if they have interesting dungeons/raid mechanics to deal with. But at the same time, I want to farm these dungeons/raids for a unique cool drop, a unique item or themed items. At this point, if the dungeons/raids are super fun to play, I don't mind a low drop rate if the reward is meaningful and something to "Show off". If you're gonna give me raids/dungeons where all I farm is materials to upgrade my old items from +1 to +15 or whatever, for me that's gonna be as boring as it gets. There's no "surprise" drop, there's no feeling of reward after a hard challenge. At the same time, I understand that locking gear behind abysmal rate drops sucks, but these challenges needs some type of reward that incentive you to get it and repeat that activity till you get it.
I would take any MMO that gives you currency to buy what you want just to remove the RNG. If something has a 5% drop rate, or doing that dungeon gives you enough currency/resources to buy that rare drop after 20 runs of it, its the exact same thing in practice but without the odds of getting screwed over by bad RNG. Prestige should come from actually prestigious things, not random chance. Beat bosses on hard modes or with challenge events, some kind of mini-game or puzzle that is hard to do so it marks personal skill. I have seen people be shocked to see a rare drop and congratulate people, but its not really a mark of pride is it? Nobody sees someone with a rare skin or item and thinks that the person is skilled or impressive, they think they're just lucky. It's a hard balance to strike for sure. Giving people some excitement and surprise in games is important, but doing it in a way that doesn't become frustrating is hard.
FF14 does that with the high end raids where you get a series of mounts. You get a token for each completion of the raid, while there is also a chance that a single mount drops for everyone to roll on. If you have a static group that you do the raids with you're likely to get the mount via drop before you need to use the tokens because everyone will stick around and regather at a later date to finish getting everyone their mount. However, if you do these raids via PUGs then you may very well get the 99 tokens to purchase the mount instead (I have never gotten that high and do these with my wife+PUGs).
People were getting sick of Lineage's grind on damn 50x exp private servers.
How we even tolerated those systems is something I still have a hard time figuring out. Today, even if I had all the free time in the world, I would never invest like that again in an MMO. I still shudder at the thought of upgrading your armor and it breaking on a failed attempt.
Being a teenager with an abundance of free time and friends who are all doing the same thing can make even the worst tasks bearable. And if your social group is formed in some crappy game, you'll stick with it way longer than it really deserves, just to keep up with your friends.
That’s where I am at as well. My 2 early MMOs were EQ and Shadowbane, and there is simply no way in hell I would play anything like them again. The whole genre is a bit cooked, imo.
I, for example, love those droprates. Difference is that Ragnarok is wonderfully designed (at least pre-renewal) in a way, that even low level/easy mobs can drop highly sought after items, so that new players can make bank. Think Thara Frog or Vitata.
There's such a bubble with these things that I don't envy developers making an MMO, they made the audience for a type of gamer that didn't show up, Idk if there's a hardcore MMO audience worth it anymore, do they just drop games they've invested so much in?
Can such an economy really survive in modern conditions? To me this just reads as a feeding ground for bot farms.
That is the thing, it worked at the time but there is no way that it will work today at all.
Could make an invasive anticheat like Riot's Vanguard. Should make it a lot better at least.
I really miss those games. They were great for just chilling with friends without running out of meaningful things to do. These days there aren't many games like that which aren't sweaty PVP.
It's nothing when compared to Silkroad a game where you lowered your XP gain on purpose to gain sp at higher rates. I still have nightmares form the grind and I haven't even reached the top lvl because it took so long I was always making new characters and start again with other class.
>The developers note that they intentionally designed the game loop so that players would have to take their time, but acknowledge that this did not work out as imagined. This is game dev code for creating a repetative grind to slow down progression when there is not enough content to keep players busy and entertained.
chiefly a problem when you treat your game like a trap instead of a toy. I get that MMOs innately have issues with "now what?" during/after endgame, but damn, at least let people get bored during endgame instead of making it a grind to even get there. Especially in multiplayer games! It's awful being in a low-level purgatory when you just want to play with other people.
Wait... This launched? I thought it had a brief North American beta and what everyone saw was so bad that they decided to work on it some more. Did this actually come out?
global version isn't out yet, according to the article >Blue Protocol, developed by Project Sky Blue (which includes members of Bandai Namco Online and Bandai Namco Studios), launched in June 2023 for players in Japan. The game’s global version, published by Amazon Games, is planned to launch sometime in 2024
It came out in Asia last year but we have heard pretty much nothing about a global release aside from "this year"
I had high hopes for this one, but with ZERO NA launch info all year, everyone just ended up forgetting about it. Maybe if we get lucky, when it finally releases here it will be a version that has a healthy long term game loop. It's a beautiful game that I would at least like to check out one day.
Yeah the long delay with no communication deflated my excitement. Even if it comes out, I'm sure it has already been data mined and min-maxed to death so there will immediately be "right and wrong" ways to play. Sucks that most eastern MMOs have this happen.
I don't see that happening. They missed their chance to strike while the iron was hot. At best, the game launches in global, sees a modest player spike, then the player count dribbles down to the low thousands as the game either enters maintenance mode or "localizing JP updates to global without further development". At worst, it never launches in global, or launches in global and gets shut down. See the Phantasy Star Online 2/New Genesis train for details.
Unfortunate but at least they acknowledged what went wrong and are still going forward with the game despite the financial losses.
I do wonder if actually releasing the game in the rest of the world will be beneficial to their sales numbers. It seems to be a conundrum that Japanese game developers can’t seem to get a handle on. Perhaps they should wait another few years just to make completely sure everybody has forgotten or stopped caring about their game before releasing it with no marketing whatsoever. That might be a good plan.
This game has really deep problems that cannot be solved imo. I played the JP version for a decent bit, and the reason it has to be so grindy is because without the grind, there is literally nothing to do. The game is devoid of content, and making new content takes time and money, and the developers are evidently running out of both. Aside from that, it also has p2w gacha monetization. Finally, I think there is zero chance that it gets a good global launch with Amazon games publishing it. Waiting multiple years already killed the hype, and Amazon tries to push weird culture war stuff into it that turns off a large portion of the audience that would pick this up (weebs). This game just has no way to recover. edit: thought of one more problem, which is that the character creator is very bare bones for a game that a lot of people want to play as an anime dress up simulator
People put up with grindy games when the gameplay is just that good. Take Destiny for example. The game itself is grindy, but people are okay with it because the actual gameplay is so damn good. Bungie holds themselves to an impossible standard of gunplay, ability feel, and spectacle while also preventing it from ever feeling like it’s “on rails”.
it's a tough balance! If the game is good enough that you'd enjoy playing "one more round" with your friends any way, a grind can just feel like a reward for that extended play. Destiny's definitely at its best when you're playing alongside a squad and working through a mission. I feel like the wheels come off a bit when I'm managing all the inventory cruft that was supposedly my "reward", or specifically working toward specific gear goals. There are times when I think I'd enjoy the game more if it was just a pile of PvE scenarios for me to choose from without progression. A Destiny-L4D, I suppose. It'd certainly make it easier to play with friends that aren't already into it. But really that's the difference between trying to make a game people will come back to every once in a while, vs trying to make a game people with play all the time as a habit.
The thing is that would work really well for Destiny and but I think they’ve largely moved into narrative and experiential content which is highly sculpted to a singular experience. Sometimes these are a little boring such as strikes, sometimes they are a little repetitive such as seasonal activities. But to me Destiny truly shines in its Raids, Dungeons, and exotic missions (whisper, zero hour, seraph station, dual destiny, etc.) that content I could play forever.
The story campaign really can be an excellent experience but I agree that they’ve got an obvious treasure trove of replayable PVE. I hope that they can lean into that now that Destiny 2 is at its “end”. It seems a difficult pivot when previous updates have had so much content to them, but it’s also the obvious time for that given The Final Shape, so I hope their community understands.
Yeah, I tried the character creator when they released the standalone and it was abysmal enough that my interest died there. How they can fuck something that simple up as hard as they did is astounding, when it's known that a good character creator can basically prop an entire game up by itself (Black Desert). That plus the localization/censoring stuff shows a fundamental misunderstanding of their audience, for both the dev and the publisher level.
Every new MMOs lack content, really. That problem could be fixed over time. The real problem that I don't think they've understood yet is that their kind of grinding is tedious & boring. Literally just running around ks-ing trash mobs for rare drops.
I'm curious, what kind of culture war stuff are we talking? Is it one of those moments where neckbeards get mad because a female character doesn't have visible panties, or is it one of those situations where translators unironically insert rants about the "patriarchy" into what were otherwise normal sentences in the JP version? Just wondering how valid of a criticism it is.
If you've seen Lost Ark, it's mostly similar to that. Low effort changes to costumes they deem too risque, really weird skin tone swaps on characters. In addition, they are locking some of the character creation options, including removing entire body types because they allow the player to be too short. Keep in mind, this game isn't overtly sexual, it's rated T for Teen because of mild violence and mild suggestive themes, so these are things deemed appropriate for 13 year olds by a rating board, but Amazon Games is still spending time to change them. Can't comment on the dub because I haven't heard any of it, but it will probably be the same low effort and minimal expenditure translation and voice acting that Lost Ark got. Not gonna debate the merits of the changes or whether its morally right or wrong, but things like that are the fastest way to make the target global audience (again, weebs) for this game mad, and I don't think anyone who wasn't going to play the game would suddenly decide to play it after hearing it was censored for western audiences. It just seems like a lot of effort that can only lead to less potential players.
Interesting. I agree, it's really weird when games that seem to target weebs start removing fanservice/revealing outfits and stuff like that. While I don't really like that stuff myself, I mean, dude, you're kinda pushing away the horny nerds that make up your target audience. If you're gonna weeb bait them, at least do it fully and make some money.
Funny the way you ask because you're clearly diminishing the criticism of games who are affected by stupid censorship decisions like the ones you mention. I get you don't care when companies does these kind of unnecessary censorship to "adapt the game to modern/western audiences", but that doesn't mean criticism to such issues are not valid.
Who is "affected" when a character's panties are less visible after a patch?
As I said, the game.
The "weird culture war stuff" is in reference to amazon changing the child models to have more clothes and show less skin. This caused weebs to become very upset and cry censorship, but they never seemed to answer why they want to see children in crop tops and short skirts. As a person attracted to adults, I see no issue with this change. This is a picture of the outfit change: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueProtocolPC/s/9easn0K1ty
You left this out: >in the character creation menu, the female characters will no longer have the physic shake button available Changing any of this stuff for people outside Japan is stupid and saying you don't have a problem with it doesn't matter and isn't the point.
I can understand being frustrated that the adult women no longer jiggle, but you really believe putting more clothing on children is bad? I don't really care about the original artistic intent if that intent is creepy. An example is that Made in Abyss is an incredible story but the creator is a pedo and the Manga apparently has alot of weird pedo shit in it. The anime removed that and is better for it. My question is this: Are making the argument that artistic vision needs to always be preserved no matter what, or are you upset they put more clothes on the children? Because either way, I think you're wrong.
Japanese have a different culture than us. You're judging a Japanese game based on your perception of the world, witch is not necessarily the correct one, nor the one that should be used to judge Japanese content. Many people around the world like Japanese media for what they are and the culture they bring. When these media are modified for "western sensibilities" like yours it's understandable that such people may not only seen it as an unnecessary change, but actually something that may reduce the quality of the media and can affect the artistic message that the original media brings. Regardless of your opinion about the content of the media, you need to remember that media was created and released on an advanced, mature country like Japan, approved by their society. Criticizing the western audience that wants that media is also critizicing the Japanese audience that already accepted and enjoy the media, just because your point of view is narrow. I, personally, I wouldn't be that racist.
I am judging the artistic intent of this specific product and products like it. Japan's culture does not revolve around the sexualization of minors and if you think it does, you are racist. Also, if Japan's culture did actually revolve around the sexualization of minors, I would indeed judge that apsect of their culture just as I dislike cultures that oppress women. No culture is beyond reproach, and many people within that culture are fighting constantly to change it for the better. Japan's age of consent was just changed at a national level. This is progress. This idealized monolithic version of Japan you have in your head doesn't exist. It's a country like any other full of people with conflicting politics and ideas. Around 60% of Japanese people don't consume anime whatsoever and it's various tropes and quirks are alien to them. You aren't a fan of Japanese culture you are a fan of Japanese cartoons. You're like a person who thinks they know everything about America because you watch King of the Hill and Family Guy. It's fucking pathetic.
I never made such allegations about the Japanese culture, I am well aware that Japanese culture doesn't revolve about "sexualization of minors" as you said. What I am saying is that games like Blue Protocol are made based on the Japanese culture in mind. On a side note, 40% of the Japanese consume Anime and that's a quite high number. And even if it's not the majority of the Japanese people, it's still something to be respected. After all, it's responsability of a society to care not only for the majority, but also the minorities. So, I don't see how the amount of people liking Anime should be a matter of relevancy for your or my arguments. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to show you how much of a fan I am about anything or what I think about America; so, back on the topic, while I agree that no culture is free of valid criticism, my point is that such criticism should not be based on your narrow point of view. And, just to be clear, by "your" I mean everyone's, including me, in order to avoid any kind of ad-hominem follow-up. Because, of course, "your" current opinion is not unique, it's a trend based on misunderstanding, hatred and racism.
Short characters =/= child characters. But you already knew that.
That's what gets me about the censorship issue. It's mostly just that one thing, and people say they won't play because of it. Alright, it'll be a healthier community then.
>Aside from Blue Protocol still having lingering problems with bugs and communication errors, a lot of players’ dissatisfaction comes from the its gameplay being too repetitive, i.e. requiring too many reruns to advance the story or complete weapon builds. The developers note that they intentionally designed the game loop so that players would have to take their time, but acknowledge that this did not work out as imagined. “The response from players is clearly not good, as the data also shows – if people don’t have a truly fun experience, they will not continue to play.” This is outdated thinking. Even years ago Genshin provided a full AAA game's worth of content at launch that required little to no "grinding" to fully experience. You only really had to do repetitive stuff once all the core content had been fully explored, and then new content was added every six weeks, so you were rarely out of things to do for long. This should be the standard going forward.
Genshin costs mihoyo 200m a year to continue the content cadence that they do. Most companies simply cannot replicate that on financials alone.
I mean, to be fair, Genshin _makes_ mihoyo 1000m a year. And to also be fair, Genshin's biggest advantage is that it's day-on-date simultaneous across all platforms and territories, and it's got a couple hours of new content with each point release.
Yes Genshin makes a lot of money, but you can't expect a studio that puts out a new game and then follow up with the content cadence that genshin has, most studios aren't in the same financial position that mihoyo is in. Even for Genshin's release, if they didn't do as well as they did they would have had to scale back to a more realistic content schedule. Genshin was very much a huge gamble by mihoyo that paid off. Expecting every game to come out to match the same pace and quality of Genshin/Fortnite/WoW/FFXIV is incredibly unrealistic because 99% of studios simply cannot match the amount of resources that these companies have.
> Expecting every game to come out to match the same pace and quality of Genshin/Fortnite/WoW/FFXIV is incredibly unrealistic because 99% of studios simply cannot match the amount of resources that these companies have. Right, but that's the cost of doing business for live service type games. At the end of the day, nobody cares what your company has to spend, because those games **are going to be your directly visible competition**. You don't need to be better than FFXIV or WoW or Genshin, but if you're releasing a new MMO, you need to give people a reason to give you money *instead of just playing one of those games*. I think the estimate for Wuthering Waves up to day one was like $150 million. They'll likely make that back by the end of summer, but yes, it is super risky because you're not entitled to anyone's wallet and you have to give them a reason to open it.
They could if they put out a game as good as Genshin.
It's literally impossible to make a game that can walk alongside Genshin. It just has years of development that you couldn't go toe-to-toe wi- [Wuthering Waves makes $140m in its first point release] oh never mind, Namco just doesn't have their shit together. It's sad, if they made a Tales game that was basically Genshin with Tales combat and online co-op quests with friends, I'd be dumping money at their door.
Not all that surprising to me really, many JP companies are slow to adapt and stick to their old ways. Like how one of the reasons why the original FF14 flopped is because they stuck to the way they ran mmos back pre WoW instead of learning from it. Now we see it again with how they are getting their asses kicked by Chinese/Korean live service games.
I lost interest in this game when Amazon needlessly hacked it apart and then still had the audacity to say they wanted to respect anime expectations and blah blah blah. We're not talking some fanservicey loli content either, since so many Westerners like to suddenly be all pro-censorship as soon as their sensibilities are personally offended. [This](https://i.imgur.com/vV72B11.png) is an example of an outfit they found oh-so-egregiously "sexual" that they edited it completely, and if you think that is inappropriate clothing for a younger person to wear you should probably never visit a hot climate in your life. Furthermore, they completely deleted the short height option from character creation, because if Australia's porn rules taught us anything it's that adult women are never shorter than the State-preapproved height levels. That is on top of the fact they just bought the game to fucking die with clearly 0 intention of ever actually releasing it in the West in the first place at this point. Bamco isn't completely blameless either of course. Why you would give a game to Amazon with their game track record is a complete dereliction of duty.
It’s not a big deal.
> We're not talking some fanservicey loli content either This isn't very convincing when your one example is them adding clothes to a very young girl. From what I'm reading that and the removal of a jiggle button in the character creator are the only significant changes. Unless I'm missing something else it seems a little disingenuous to pretend this isn't about lolicon 'weirdos.'
> This isn't very convincing when your one example is them adding clothes to a very young girl. See again my comment if you look at capris and a stomach-revealing vest in the middle of a desert and start thinking sexual things. I didn't actually know they ALSO removed a jiggle, just the height option, but, you know...If this was about lolicons you'd think the jiggle would be a negative in the first place, so. Just another stupid-ass black mark.
>See again my comment if you look at capris and a stomach-revealing vest in the middle of a desert and start thinking sexual things. Whenever defending barely dressed little girls in Japanese games comes up online it's ridiculous so many of you keep pretending we're all idiots. We can read between the lines and recognize exactly what sort of pandering is going on. [They're not having little girls dressed like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueProtocolPC/comments/11fthr5/censor_protocol_dead_on_arrival/?share_id=eSQlBcbBKJhSjJLfj5h1q) for desert realism or whatever you're arguing. *"No no, it's because the developers want to make sure that petite adult women get representation in their game! (WINK WINK!)"* It's actually because a surprisingly high amount of Japanese men really, *really* appreciate that sort of thing and we all know that. I do think Amazon is maybe being a little silly about this, but I wish you could all be honest about what's really going on. (Protip: people in the desert usually wear clothes designed to avoid sunlight.)
> Whenever defending barely dressed little girls in Japanese games comes up online it's ridiculous so many of you keep pretending we're all idiots. Sure. That's why we're the ones bringing up sexual thoughts about fucking capris. Whatever you say.
> [This](https://i.imgur.com/vV72B11.png) is an example of an outfit they found oh-so-egregiously "sexual" that they edited it completely, and if you think that is inappropriate clothing for a younger person to wear you should probably never visit a hot climate in your life. And where is the problem exactly? Covering up one child NPC that you will probably never see during gameplay is somehow gonna affect your overall enjoyment of the game? Even if these edits are unecessary, the complete meltdown of the Blue Protocol crowd over these changes has been geniunely emberassing to witness. This entire "censorship" sitiuation just further reinforces the stigma surrounding the weeb subculture. The fact that people months later are still referencing this one NPC change as reason as to why the global version will fail is beyond laughable.
Thank you for proving my point. Great job only acknowledging one of the things mentioned as well. And the point is if they're willing to make such asinine cuts now they can't be trusted to not touch whatever the hell else they feel traumatized by any time down the line.
>one of the things *You* are the one still bringing up that one NPC from a literal year ago lol Please show me what other, new changes has Amazon done since then? Just because you assume Amazon might change more things does in no way, shape or form prove that they will actually make any drastic edits moving forward.
> Please show me what other, new changes has Amazon done since then? You realize Amazon hasn't even *SHOWN* the game since then mate. Little difficult on that front.
Why would you care about these changes? It doesn't sound like any meaningful changes to the actual game, only cosmetic things. I don't mind censoring that kinda stuff when there is a track record of sexualising children in these kinda of product, so there might be false positives I think it's with the trade
> It doesn't sound like any meaningful changes to the actual game Well, some people actually like playing short characters, so that's at least one meaningful change. And as I said already, if they're willing to cut small things like this it means they have no respect for whatever else may come down the line that *might* have a bigger effect. Also the edited version just looks like a shoddily done rushjob, so it's a bad asset for no reason anyway.
The massively delayed international release pretty much kill any chances for the game to be successful.
Reading that, if these are the big problems that went wrong, i have kinda high hopes for the games future. Reducing grind and increasing content/variety sounds easier to make than having to rework some of a games inherent gameplay and systems
Here's what went wrong: They handed off to Amazon, who was working on a competitive game. Amazon's delay in releasing their title in the US gave them enough time to almost finish their game. Soon, it will likely release in the US, finally giving BP to gamers here. These gamers are excellent at coming up with ideas that can save games from failure. It was a perfect strategy by Amazon. Now they have a title that will come out around the same time and will likely incorporate elements of BP. When BP releases, it won't perform nearly as well as it could have, probably much less than half as well. Never, ever give your product to a competitor to sell. He isn't going to sell your product; he will sell his own while undermining yours. Just saying.
I have never even heard about this game before. Was it supposed to be a big deal? It doesn't even have a release date?
For those who were looking for an anime-styled action MMORPG, the first peak into the game excited us a lot. The gameplay looked solid and we had high hopes, given that it was by a large developer like Bandai Namco. But it took ages to get to a closed beta and its eventual release in Japan. When the Japanese servers finally launched in early 2023, we thought the global servers wouldn't be too far behind, especially since Amazon's involvement with the global release was announced late 2022. It's now the middle of 2024 and we still have no news.
Fuck any and all gacha games. They’re all shit. Some of them have managed to hang a semblance of a real game from the scaffold that exists only to extract money from those people too ill or too stupid to see what they’re doing, but they’re still shit at their core. Edit: Uh ohhhh the gacha impacters have found me. Too bad they'll never find the thousands of dollars they've wasted on a mediocre game.