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EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea" (www.gamesradar.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅

And I mean, that's maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except "OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!!". Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:

Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn't lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.

Can't really say I'm surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.

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[–] [email protected] 180 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Trying to act like it flopped because it's single player... What a joke.

[–] [email protected] 88 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think BG3 showed conclusively that no one will ever play single player games no matter how great they are. /s

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago

but that was like 6 whole months ago. the market is totally different now. /s

[–] [email protected] -5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I get what you're saying ~~but FPS specifically are mostly played competitively, so a single player game in THAT specific genre in 2023 sounds like a very bad idea.~~

Every ~~other~~ genre ~~than FPS~~ needs more games where you're allowed to only play single player and use tons of mods if you want to without risking being locked out of playing, though.

Fallout New Vegas, Baldurs Gate 3, Skyrim, The Outer Worlds and the older Bioware games are where it's at for my favorite genre, to name a few examples.

Edit: crossed out mistaken assumption

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yep, nobody enjoyed playing through Half Life 1/2, or FEAR or Deus Ex, or the early Medal of Honor or Call of Duty campaigns, or the Doom series or Battlefield Bad Company or the Wolfenstein Series.

Just because most modern popular FPSs are basically cartoony tf2/overwatch clones/derivatives and there are a lot of highly competitive multiplayer FPSs filled with screaming, racist misosynist babies and manbabies alike doesnt mean theres no market for a single player FPS.

It means that making a single player FPS game these days is apparently too hard for modern game devs to figure out how to do.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure that's really true what you're saying about single player FPS games being mostly competitive or that it's a bad idea. See: Doom, Metro, Ghostwire, Dying Light, System Shock, people seem stoked for Space Marine, etc.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Fair enough, I'll retract that part heh

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Props to you for using strikethrough instead of deleting in your edit so the context still makes sense. I think you bring up an interesting point about competitive fps games. I imagine companies structure their development similar to games-as-a-service because they are essentially two flavors of the same thing, right? I had never really considered whether the growth of the competitive scene was part of the drive towards GaaS and away from tight single player experiences.

I think underlying all of this is that publishers want a guaranteed profit margin. That doesn't exist in art, of course, but they still want it. And if that means choosing what they think is a safe bet, they'll choose it. I think Bungie made GaaS look way easier than it actually is, and maybe the competitive scene contributed to that too. "Look at all the money these hero shooters are making, let's get a piece of that pie." Formulas just never quite work out that simply in real life.