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"

Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 383 points – 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"
gamesradar.com

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.

162

Big "no one understands my art" vibes coming off that dev. You made a mediocre game for an outrageous amount and released it in one of the heaviest gaming release years in recent memory. Sorry, this year a new IP with a 74% on metacritic doesn't cut it. They say EA dropped 40mil on the advertising for it, but this is litterally the first I've heard about it, and frankly I'm the target audience for this game. I bet this shit was shoved down the throats of Fortnight and Valorant players via tiktok.

I had never heard of it either until this post.

This is the first time for me as well, and it sounds likely to be the last.

Same. Those 40mil probably went into someones pocket, not surprising noone is playing the game

No one is playing it because it's very "meh", but it has absolutely been widely advertised and also talked about a lot (for being not so good).

I really doubt any of you who replied here saying you haven't heard about it ever interact with gaming journalism and community. It has been just as visible as most other AAA games.

I heard about it when Skill Up, whose YouTube channel I have notifications turned on for, posted his review of it. Before that, I'd seen absolutely nothing about it, and I heard very little about it after that, too. I was shocked to find out it was an EA game - partly because it didn't look (visually) polished enough to be an EA game, and partly because of the complete lack of marketing I'd seen for a major publisher game.

Finding out it was an expensive flop and not just a smaller AA game they decided to put out on the side is a surprise, too.

I'm not really the target audience and I've come across it what must be hundreds of times. It has been talked about a lot on anything gaming. Most of the big gaming journalism (good and bad) websites, youtube channels etc have made articles and videos about it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Fair enough, I'll retract that part heh

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.

The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution.

Apparently, $40 million doesn't buy you much in today's market, because I've literally never heard of this game until now.

Probably spent it all on cable TV ads, where their audience ain't at.

Or just blow and hookers.

"I'm telling you, the cocaine and hooker market is ripe for a AAA single player FPS game."

It was actually quite fun! I rented it off Gamefly and enjoyed it for about 30-40 hours. It's basically an action-adventure shooter like Metroid. It's a decent game, not groundbreaking, but definitely doesn't deserve the hate people give it.

It has Denuvo, and runs like crap even on $1500 hardware.

I don't know what kind of sales they expected when they don't test it on lower spec PCs.

We should expect more of that with the upcoming UE5 titles. The devs that have devoted to releasing those seem to have very hard time optimising - they'll likely expect us all to just own 4090s and still run their game with DLSS ultra performance or other fake frames.

STALKER 2 will have the janky soul we expect from the series, but this mostly, mostly due to engine choice and apparent attempts to visually impress the player. Or the investors.

but definitely doesn’t deserve the hate people give it.

I don't think it's getting hate. I think it's getting indifference because no one knows what it is.

Nah, I've seen hate. But mostly from people who hate Wesdon-Like quip writting and, well, women-haters who can't handle the characters being ugly (and they are ugly, admittedly), so I just dismissed the hate.

I saw one YouTuber that I follow play it. It looked kinda interesting from his video, but he also has the same criticisms.

The issue is not the genre "single player (shooter)" itself, but that these big companies just churn out the same generic bullshit and then act surprised when no-one plays it.

AAA studios just don't have the balls anymore to take a risk and develop something unique. And this is their downfall.

Titanfall 2, Metro Exodus, Ghostwire Tokyo, Doom (to name a few) are all excellent first person shooters. All of them have something unique about them that makes them worthwhile.

Goes to show that making a good game is still more art than science.

Hell, make a broken or buggy game, if it has the special something it'll still likely become a classic.

Eg. Fallout New Vegas or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

Titanfall 2

Titanfall 2 had one of the most acclaimed single-player campaigns, with it being only a few hours long and mostly a showcase to get people on multiplayer, and it was still enough.

Quite seriously I am actually looking to attempt to solo indie dev a sort of fps/tactics/management hybrid FPS that would at least start out as single player, and titanfall 2's gameplay is something I am drawing inspiration from.

My basic idea is: What if you had the squad management and mission planning depth of basically Xenonauts, but you actually played out the missions in first person, with combat systems and load outs and player (and enemy) capabilities that resembled titanfall2's mix of athletecism and gunplay?

Im in very early stages, but yeah basically titanfall2/xenonauts hybrid with (this is likely the hard part) procedurally generated, 3d levels, strung together with a kind of narrative generation engine, something sort of like rimworld's system that simulates world conditions and then generates certain events based off of them, but also responds to certain specific things you do or do not do in mission, or what missions you choose to embark on over others.

Probably Im gonna focus on core gameplay systems and not really worry about graphics or assets at all until I can get any of this to an actual working concept level.

So like Rainbow Six 1-3's mission planning mode?

Probably similar in many ways, but ideally I would like to make it as or more in depth with other features from something like xenonauts.

Youve got resources such as vehicles of differing kinds you may choose to deploy or not, but you have to store them somewhere and also be able to repair them. All this comes from pools of funding from at first probably just completing a mission according to guidelines, but some things take maybe an R&D program or just outright raiding a rival faction or something.

Maybe you want to go a more special forces type route and have a few exceptionally well trained / equipped soldiers and leverage things like helicopters to do infil and exfil and leverage the element of surprise.

Maybe you want to act more like a conventional military and go with larger numbers with decent equipment and a wider array of possible vehicles and support systems.

Maybe you want to focus as much as possible on gathering intel before missions, maybe you want a more intelligent active battlefield info you can access in mission via various sensors.

So... what I am aiming for is something that eventually allows for a more broad array of mission profiles and sort of map archetypes, which, depending on many factors, will have surprises that may occur, like an enemy force having the ability to call for reinforcements that maybe you did not know about, and might force you to withdraw.

Or maybe some missions will take place with a relatively high number of civillian AI running around and your org you work for/run will suffer massively if you just go scorched earth.

I dunno, these are all ambitions at this point, and Im going to focus on at the very least getting a functional combat prototype done first, and then testing out how well that and what I can make combat AI actually do actually works.

Its possible I'll find some kind of thing that really works well, or really doesn't work, and change scope significantly.

So far all I have really figured out is that a near future setting would seem to work best with the scope of either my minimal working concept, or a more extended version of it.

???

Best of luck. But yes, there's a good chance your scope is too large, so definitely start small.

Oh hey Im surprised that all even posted, my connection crapped out right as I hit send.

But uh haha yeah.

My one saving grace is I have a lot of time on my hands.

But I expect it to take probably at least 6 months before I even have what Id consider a working combat prototype with a variety of different weapons and Ai routines, and maybe a barebones model of a procedural map generator.

Im guessing that me soloing a whole project like this could take 3 years, but if I can get a prototype working, I might have enough money to pay for some 3D assets to speed up dev time a bit.

Almost certainly not enough money to hire anyone lol, and I really really do not want to do kickstarter or early access and deal with the community and possible total failure.

Im the exact opposite of a PR person.

Titanfall 2 also bombed, even a good game can flop if your marketing sucks or if you release it next to other massive hits.

I would eat up a single player story driven fps no problem.

Doom (2016) and Wolfenstein TNO both proved that AAA single player story-driven fps can be hugely successful.

They just need to, y’know, not be shit.

Doom eternal was amazing.

I never even heard of this, but I wouldn't buy it anyways because EA.

exactly. maybe you guys just made a shitty game and can't accept that.

I'ma just go back and play through Mass Effect series again

I play a lot of games but Ive never heard of this game before this post

"Nobody bought our game we didn't market. Guess we'll stop making an entire genre of games."

I mean, it's my favorite genre, so if EA can stay the fuck away from it, that's not a bad outcome

I mean, it’s my favorite genre, so if EA can stay the fuck away from it, that’s not a bad outcome

Had you heard of it?

I've literally never heard of it, but not my genre.

I think they mean single player shooter is their favorite genre, and would be happy for EA to stay away from them. Not the ‘game nobody heard of’

I’m not the person you replied to but I’ve been a first person shooter fan since Wolfenstein 3D and original doom. I had NEVER heard of it til today. First person and tower defense games are basically all I play.

They claim to have spent 40 million usd marketing it, I saw some people on twitch playing it when it first came out but it looked meh and was priced way too high so I didn’t watch much

They did market it. A lot.

It's just that the game's trailers were wildly forgettable.

I mean im on my ps5 every day, browse a ton of game related content on lemmy and such, and share a lot of game news with my friend group, and Ive literally never heard of or seen marketing for this game.

From the article:

"At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio's debut project," the former employee said. "The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution...

They must have done extremely bad marketing even though they spent so much on marketing because I've never heard of this game

There are many genres EA needs to stop making, but I doubt they'll take the right lesson from this

Same. This seems to be getting more common with various media and products. Too many choices which is a good thing for consumers but not good for publishers.

I think EA makes games like this to reinforce THEIR notion that single player games are dead so they can use that as leverage to make more "games as a service". If they made things people actually wanted to play, they'd find that single player (yes even shooter) games are still just as popular as they ever were and poorly thought out, poorly executed, and poorly marketed games still suck.

Case in point. Baldurs gate 3.

Single player (with optional co op multiplayer) but massively successful.

Not to beat a dead horse. Its just the first example that came to mind.

A huge amount of very successful indie games are single-player and even other AAA games.

They talk about the genre being dead but they forget that most games dont charge you to play them anymore. They make money through in game purchases selling cosmetics and battle pasees.

These game genres could be described as dead by the same criteria if they cost actual money.

Its just the first example that came to mind.

Uh, in this case it's a single-player, shooter, from a brand new IP. I'm probably just commenting just to argue but I don't think Baldur's Gate 3 is a good comparison at all.

The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though EA sucks because it is an example of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.

The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail from wildly incompetent leadership since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.

So yes in a very real way I think EA functions to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games. Just because these processes are twisted and rationalized under a story about the ruthless, noble pursuit of profit doesn’t make them have any real connection with efficiency or profit. One could perhaps say this all has much more to do with violence than it does profit.

That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all to the truly successful ones that permeate the way societies think about themselves.

Additionally, anything that can help massive corporations that are strip mining the gaming industry claim the gaming industry is sliding into a tough period where it’s hard to make games that turn enough of a profit to steadily employ game developers, is EXTREMELY useful to companies like EA because they see this whole AI thing as an opportunity to deal a permanent blow to the quality of life and general leverage workers have in the game development industry. Thank god the movie industry saw it coming a mile off, but video game culture is too full of toxic conservative little boys screaming at each other to understand what is about to happen (and is already happening).

It breaks my heart, but what is happening right now will likely deal a blow to the vibrancy of video games as an art form that will reverberate for decades. After all, once a worker exits the game development industry because they can't find a job it doesn't matter how passionate they were about video games, how special their talent is, how creative or unique their ideas are.... they sure as hell aren't coming back once they get that a job in an industry that doesn't hate its workers so much and besides a deep sense of burnout about something you love is truly one of the most awful experiences in the world... not many people are willing to revisit a place they experienced that.

That's why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It's insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.

Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.

When a company like this catastrophically fails and Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld do gangbusters, that signals to others who also want to make money what they should be making in order to make money. Where the money does go, like a Larian or a Pocket Pair, now has profit to spend on growing their studios and making more of what actually works. They end up hiring the talent that was let go. Not all of them; this is less efficient than if the first studio that imploded had instead made something that the market actually wanted, but this is not a situation so dire that the industry will feel it for decades like you say. New studios form all the time from mismanaged large companies that lay people off after making bad bets.

Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.

The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don't just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, catastrophically derail promising career trajectories for countless workers, structurally give themselves an impenetrable advantage with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn't work at the company.

Look at Uber, remember years ago when Uber keeled over and died once it became apparent that Uber wasn't profitable unless drivers are exploited to an extreme degree? Then all those workers went and worked for other ride sharing companies that ran more effective businesses and treated their employees more humanely (in retrospect the by now well documented extremely sexist and toxic culture of upper management at Uber alone doomed it from the start).... The market solved the problem by rewarding rideshare companies with better technology and business models than Uber. I remember in California, Uber could have blocked legislation that was going to improve the lives of rideshare/gig workers immensely but they realized that the consequences of drivers and riders seeing Uber openly shit on their face and spend massive amounts of money to keep drivers from getting a tiny, measly amount more money and control over their work environment would spell utter disaster so they refrained. The wisdom of the market!

Wait... the exact, precise opposite of all that happened while Uber ran for years at a massive loss as a venture capital superweapon ripping millions upon millions of dollars into a gaping black hole and completely devastating the taxi industry without providing a truly humane or long term viable alternative for most workers or cities?

sigh do you really not understand what is happening right in front of you?

No, this is the reality. The likes of Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Take Two rule the industry by market cap, but that's because their games notably sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year at most. If they utterly dominated the material reality of the industry, how on earth could Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld even happen? How could Hades or No Man's Sky, made by former EA devs, happen? Your view of reality is quite overly pessimistic. How can you even measure some of the claims you're making?

How can you even measure some of the claims you’re making?

I don't know, my ideas are so wild and I am pulling them totally out of thin air. It isn't like there is a massive amount of scholarly work on this topic, a pre-existing history of legal cases pertaining to these issues that have caused society defining laws to be passed in most major countries and many political movements that explicitly attempt to define and critique these processes at our fingertips on the internet waiting to educate and inform us.

And you know, the funny thing is I really for once was feeling a little optimistic about this kind of material existing for me to read and educate myself with but I guess in this case my pessimism was well founded.

You slipped in an edit while I was responding, and I think the gist of it is that you and I fundamentally don't agree, especially not the hyperbolic flourish you used. I think you'll continue to see plenty of great games come out in the next decades, because people still want to buy games and other people still want to make them.

If you are only concerned about this from the perspective of having enough good games to keep you personally occupied and not a step further to the experience of human beings working in the industry (beyond the narrow range of game companies you directly buy from) that makes the art you love, then yes you and I fundamentally disagree and I would never want to be misconstrued as making the kind of argument you are making.

Also thank you for complimenting my flourish :)

There will continue to be games to play because people will continue to make them. A bad experience in one place leads to a new studio designed not to repeat it.

No, AAA+ blockbuster games are dead. The 150 million budget is insane. Spending that much on a game, you end up having to minimize the risks and having to cater to the widest audience possible.

If you split that budget into maybe 2 larger and a few smaller games, you don't put all your eggs in the same basket. You can take more risk, experiment with new mechanics and ideas. You can target different types of players. You can give a chance to smaller, lesser known writers who might have potential.

Part of it is that modern games are getting too expensive to make, especially with all the assets to the fidelity given by current technology.

I doubt it, this kind of logic is the same as "medical costs are insane because modern medical tech is expensive."

It completely ignores the entire economy all functioning under advanced technology to create and produce advanced goods more cheaply with the technology that costs money. It's also mismanagement in the same way the movie and TV industry has seen, they don't want to hire writers cause they don't want to pay them, so instead they just spend hundreds of millions on reshoots because having a writer being paid 60k on staff 24/7 was too costly apparently and some suit got a promotion for "saving" that money.

Someone made a better version of "the day before" with a few grand in purchased assets and a couple months using UE5. If you were creating your own resources instead of buying them and you had an actual vision then you absolutely can make a game for less than hundreds of millions that will return that money back to you. How much did pal world take in? How much is helldivers 2 currently making? What were their production costs?

Just because some inept studio run by corporate bean counters can only churn out tech demos for millions of bucks doesn't mean that's the actual standard for cost and production of gaming.

It's only expensive to make if studios decide to make them incredibly expensive. There are plenty of high quality indie games made by a single person.

The problem here is they went all in on "THE BEST GRAPHICS EVAR!!!" And it flopped because of the lack of story and gameplay. The lesson here is to not make it incredibly expensive to develop by focusing all efforts on graphics, and instead focus on gameplay and story and people will tolerate much less flashy visuals.

Games are getting too expensive to make because they're adding extra shit that no one cares about, not because of the cost it takes to make a decent game. Too many admin managers in charge at companies and not enough artists or engineers at the management level.

The what of what now?

Literally the first I've heard about it as well. Maybe should have tossed a bit of that money at the marketing department.

Disagree. The fact that I'm only hearing about it now that it's flopped is a good thing because I might have given it attention before. Well, probably not because it's EA.

I just hope that companies that aren't EA don't take what they say about single player games at face value. EA games probably need friend group hype to succeed at this point. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking that there are many others like me who want to avoid anything from that company and thus would only play when pressured by friends.

But if EA does fail, there likely will be a period where they try to talk about it like experts and will just say, "oh, gamers must not like x genre anymore", when gamers really just don't like overproduced garbage games that are clearly tuned to sell MTX rather than be fun.

Peak player count was less than 800 players on steam... Flop is an understatement.

Those 100 workers EA laid off dont deserve to be thrown in the trash; why dont the execs take a nice paycut instead?

I think companies that make profits should not be allowed to lay off people. You‘re welcome.

Edit: without cause

Single player shooter's aren't bad or even unpopular right now. But I think people are beginning to realize that anything that has EA's name attached to it is trash and just avoid it on principal.

Jup, even new iterations of their older IP seem to be devolving instead of taking that which was fun and expanding on it.

Maybe they should use all these behaviour experts to investigate why people keep playing games instead of figuring out how to maximally predate on your customer base.

Ubi does the same. I found the last farcy so Uninteresting that I stopped playing somewhere mid game. And the first signals from their pirate game are also not encouraging, while I know many people that looked forward to it.

Everyone in the single player fps demo is replaying the old good games, or seeking out like custom doom wads or the occasional actually good indie fps single player game, having at this point long given up on large studios being able to make a compelling single player fps.

Sure, a lot of us enjoy lots of other kinds of games too, but good lord is there an unscratchable itch for a new, compelling FPS campaign thats actually interesting and challenging.

It's boomer shooters or nothing in that space right now. We're starving out here. On my radar in the coming year or two are Mouse, Core Decay, and Agent 64, but no one knows what kind of quality we'll get out of those. Also, is it a crime to just throw in some competitive multiplayer that's meant to be played a handful of times with friends instead of being the next e-sport?

Orrrr it was a mid game with almost no marketing.

"a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2009100/Immortals_of_Aveum/

1.1k reviews 75% positive

https://store.steampowered.com/app/379720/DOOM/ (2016)

125k reviews 95%

Git gud, EA, and make an actually competing product.

Yeah exactly, my first thought was "Doom is still in the public discourse."

Not to mention, oh what's that game that broke earnings numbers on steam, oh yeah, Cyberpunk 2077? Rough launch aside, the game literally printed money, and is a great RPG and a great FPS.

Of course, Doom doesn't exist right

Yeah, but you see... Doom was a rare unicorn. It came with refreshing ideas, looked visually attractive, played good, and was fun.

That's a tall ask from EA.

It was also an established IP with name recognition.

Is this a single player shooter? I thought it was multi player? And theres nothing wrong with single player shooters “in todays market” look at jedi fallen order great game and singlr player. But a shit game is a shit game single or multi.

It's worse than shit, it's mediocre.

At least people talk about shit games, which means some people buy a copy just because they're curious.

Mediocre stuff? No one's interested.

I'll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I'd say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I'm honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.

Yeah I will say, it's painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it's not a bad game per se. It's just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.

The worst offense to me though is how there's no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That's the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.

Just FYI, the term triple-A doesn't refer directly to the quality of the game. It simply means it was made by a larger, well-established company.

The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally "AAA" now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that's "AA".

Much like "alpha" and "beta", the meanings are changing so quickly it's hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.

I'm so old when I started in games "alpha" meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.

Now it's basically "alpha" means a demo, and "beta" means they're buying time for GM release.

Regarding the alpha/beta point, increase in internet availability and rolling updates probably made all the work in that shift. In the old days if you published a raw product it would take a hell of an effort to amend it. Now it's just a matter of a user not plugging the internet off for some time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This started happening when studios got bigger and marketing controlled release dates. By the 2010s or so, the actual devs had zero say. So some idiot owner would promise a game in 18 months, half the ideas would be removed due to time, and a rushed product went out.

"Games as a service" was just corporate speak for how to streamline putting out a game with less components and then adding them over time.

Unfortunately it worked, and players bought in.

I agree 100%. The magic was not magic. It was just different looking guns. Which made the game seem more dull to me. Even if it was an okay shooter.

Is there "ammo"? I know there's like a reload/recharge system isn't there?

I tried the demo, it has a lot of problems outside of it being a AAA single player shooter. The "magic" system is just reskinned guns, the story is nonsensical at times, and the movement is stiff and slow. It's like they never play tested the game and just said it was done one day. That's not even mentioning the almost ten minute walk around the city at the beginning doing nothing but following what I will assume is a non critical character to the plot.

They cleaned a lot of that up, at least on the console version I played. And that character ends up being quite critical to the plot. You also revisit that city later in the game, so that intro serves to establish the setting and starts the plot.

My God they cleaned it up?! I can't imagine it being a longer intro. The fact that you revisit the city later is just disappointing, that city was terrible in it's design.

I remember Half-Life 2 opening with a walk around a city, and it was so memorable to me. I guess in part because it was reliant on its own atmosphere, and still let the player be an interactive part of it rather than bound to a tight track.

Someone stole $40 million of EA's money and didn't advertise another horrible cashgrab?

"I'm not even mad, I'm.. impressed!"

I'm very into shooters and this was a hard pass because it looked like a generic and boring Call of Duty re-skin and I'm not into that game.

Maybe the problem is not the current AAA or shooters landscape. Maybe it is more about the quality and the fun your games are.

Because EA games is weak. It’s all retreads of ancient franchises or bloated games with no risks taken.

All dictated by management with zero input from anyone else. I get sad for developer's working for EA. Having zero influence on the games they make. I believe that everyone can have a great idea or a solution to a problem no matter what department they're in.

Lots of developers have overlapping skills from making they're own games that aren't being utilised.

Working under EA is probably alot like working for McDonald's, yeah if they did it 'this way' they would sell more burgers but good luck getting your voice heard.

What part of this game fits your statement here?

Did you read the post? I think the well formatted and easy to read bullet pointed list explains it

Because EA games is weak. It’s all retreads of ancient franchises or bloated games with no risks taken.

Which part of this sentence fits this game.

I play a lot of single player shooters. One thing they all have in common is that I know they exist, which I'm thinking could potentially be part of the problem with this one. Based on reactions in this thread it seems like a lot of people are in the same position I'm in, where the first they hear of the game is when it's being pronounced a flop. I'm getting big The Producers vibes.

Not at that price point, of course. Ultrakill has a sub 2 million USD budget, its one of the most critically praised games on Steam, and its not even finished yet. I can't look up Steamcharts at work but I have good reason to believe its more than made back its production budget.

Live service games are starting to turn into a very expensive scam and if you can't make a good single player game, you need to cut costs somewhere. AAA production budgets are just too huge and the product isn't good.

But that's a problem with a lot of AAA developers. You can't make a AAA game that isn't a Skinner box for a price that players will pay.

God of War? Elder Ring? Baldur's Gate? Spiderman? Last of Us? Super Mario? Zelda? Red Dead Redemption? Cyberpunk?

If you don't have a vision, don't try to turn money into more money by making a game. Everyone loses. Dumping money on assets doesn't make your trope copy/paste any better than the other million cheap Chinese clones on an app store.

Also EA has to understand more and more people have experienced their garbage launches and will skip their gold plated launch prices because of the risk you end up buying a lemon that is subsequently abandoned.

Making sure the gameplay loop is interesting and the game performs properly is important. Focussing on all the latest engine features that requires people to have top tier hardware is only good for marketing. Marketing then eats up a tremendous amount of budget without adding anything to the offer they make.

The last EA game I bought was Jedi: Fallen Order for $4, and I still felt ripped off, because EA adds a mandatory online connection check to every game they release now, including Immortals.

I would love an AAA single player shooter. If it is done well and fun. So no chance EA could do it

"a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"

Fucking what? Why? What in the actual fuck?

You have to remember that they mentally block out the idea that their game was a bag of wank.

Most notable thing about this game was it was one of the first to launch with FSR3 frame generation. Other than that I think I’d have completely forgotten about it.

Or maybe EA is just a garbage corporation that aren't actually good at making video games?

Why does a game cost that much to make? I'm not saying every game should be an indie, but given what indies can accomplish it's a little ridiculous to spend $125 million.

Well you see managers need to be paid more than everyone else and theirs lots of managers. Plus headcount is in the hundreds to pump out all the features and art assets within a few years

If I had to guess, texture quality and graphical fidelity is really high, plus this was one of the first games to run in UE5. A mix of extreme amounts of manhours invested into graphics coupled with slow progress due to having to get used to everything.

And rampant corruption at EA, I bet. 40 million marketing my ass, the game barely had any marketing!

Wait, didn't EA had their in-house engine Frostbite? They botched Mass Effect Andromeda because they moved from UE to frostbite (not the only reason) .

Yeah and for a while it was mandated to be used for ~everything IIRC but after years of struggling to retain programmers and designers they finally relented on that mandate.

You're right about all that.

Marketing and payroll are always the two biggest, and yes they can get to those numbers easily at AAA scale. AAA games are as big of productions as big budget movies these days. Hundreds of people involved. Graphics of that level are also extremely expensive and time consuming. Everything has to be motion captured, and the fidelity just takes a long time. Every single piece of trash on the ground has to have a full PBR material stack.

With graphics it's kind of an exponential thing. The closer you get to absolute realism the more time it takes exponentially. That's why so many indies are embracing retro graphics these days. It lets you spend a lot more time on the gameplay and content. AAAs are expected to look this good as a baseline, and that already pigeon holes a lot of design choices with the deadlines they're working with. A truly innovative game that looks AAA quality would take more years to make than these studios are willing to devote to them.

And finally there's the marketing. Mainstream casual gamers, which are who these companies are usually targeting, is the most expensive group to market to by a long shot. They can really only be reached by huge marketing campaigns on TV, social media, and physical signage. Those types of campaigns can easily get into the millions. They're also probably spending a large amount on having influencers play the game on stream. The big guys I'm sure cost hundreds of thousands, though I have no idea the actual numbers.

Also Unreal Engine has 24/7 support from the engineers at epic through Unreal Development Network which costs quite a bit of money.

A GENERIC AAA (visual only) single player shooter was a bad idea.

Aveum was literally mid. It just looked good since it was the first game to use UE5.

Yeah, AAA for quite a while now has really only had any impact on graphics, and maybe on how playtested it was. That is one hell of a load bearing maybe. No correlation to quality on any other metrics.

This game was the most AA shit I've ever seen. In the PS2 days it would have got a 7.5 average from most reviewers then it would have had a not-insignificant number of people pick it up.

They are delusional for thinking a UE5 asset flip is a AAA game.

Wait for the "Body Cam" games to flood the market with their UE5 asset flips. Its all shit.

It was flawed from the start, clearly people that love COD and magic aren't that big of an intersection, also like people said already the magic acted more like guns and they had a pretty dumb system of calling it by their colors.

Still looked fun though, but I would never pay the asking price for it.

I had to look up a video to realise this wasn't the "I guess that's something I do now" game.

Looks like a confusing mess of a game tbh. When a game's failure is blamed on it being released close to fucking Starfield, you know it never had much going for it.

Unlike many people in this thread, I actually have heard of the game. The makers of a podcast I follow loved it, and had the head of the studio on their show for a pretty frank interview, too. When I learned that there was a free demo, I decided I would give the game a try some time.

And in light of the overwhelming negativity in this thread, I did so last night. And what can I say? I spent an hour and change going through the prologue, the training and the first battle sequence, and I really enjoyed it. Movement and shooting slinging magic are great fun, with a diversity of spells available pretty much from the get-go. Just shoot, or throw a massive armor-breaking spell at a wave of enemies, or use a lash to pull a remote enemy close and whack them. I wouldn't have know what to expect from the 'CoD with magic' premise but it's really enjoyable so far.

The voice acting is very good, and while the facial animations are a bit uncanny valley, I am enjoying the snarky dialogues and matching facial expressions. Gina Torres has presence, and the rest of the cast so far blends in fine.

I will definitely spend some more time with the demo, and if it doesn't annoy me too much, I might just buy this. And that seems to be the feedback the devs got from many people - once players actually get their hands on it, they actually enjoy it. According ton the studio head, sales have picked up towards Christmas, and they've been getting a lot of conversions from the free demo.

I think the problem is just that, the game is... okay, not bad or good, just okay, unremarkable and forgettable.

If you want good sales you need to do something innovative and interesting, or something cliché but really well done.

Taking a look at Doom 2016 (also a single player shooter) we can see the core gameplay: Shoot demons, Pick up ammo, Shoot more demons. But it's crafted so masterfully that you spend dozens or hundreds of hours doing just that.

Now with this game that I actually forgot the name mid comment, It's... well you get the ideia.

If you want good sales you need to do something innovative and interesting, or something cliché but really well done.

Or a recognisable brand. Starfield got panned and still sold oodles.

Taking a look at Doom 2016 (also a single player shooter)

Case in point. Doom has a lot riding on its name and legacy, and many people will buy it just because of that.

This guy's a tool, Atomic Heart was fantastic and I'd love getting more games of that calibur every year

do you reccomend atomic heart? I haven't played it due to the supposed russian propaganda (about the war)

There's no propaganda, the studio is in Russia and the game was released shortly before the special military operation by coincidence. They wanted to release it on Defender of the Fatherland day since that's a pretty patriotic day which fits the game pretty well but Putin also wanted to release revenge on that day so now it's all muddled.

I've played it and the game feels more like a parady similar to Fallout so if you count fallout as propaganda then Atomic Heart is also propaganda

Sounds kinda up my alley then, I am gonna give it a look

Only bad thing really about it is Denuvo (properly implemented it doesn't make the game run like garbage, but I still like to run my game whenever I want without online verification and excessive load times). I might buy it when it's DRM free on GOG and discounted.

Oof it that is a dealbreaker, I am politically against dwnuvo. I will either check for a crack or wait for GOG aswell

Without any spoilers, i thought the overall message of the game was VERY anti-russia. But you really need both ends to get the full picture.

EA is a truly awful idea. I'm curious if their sports games are the only thing keeping them in business.

Whenever I saw that game it looked like a generic, soulless, made-by-committee shooter… All footage had strong tech demo vibes. The only thing I can remember about it is „the guns looked kinda weird.“

Maybe if you market it at all so that I've actually fucking heard of it that'll help?

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!!!!".

This is exactly what AAA gaming is. Some guys in suits dictate projects to make money. There's no passion behind them. They can't do anything unique or interesting because it may not make money. They just make safe games, and they're generic and boring as hell.

a streamer i enjoy played it and it wasn’t even fun to watch honestly