Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/24/is-an-updated-star-wars-knigh.html
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I know this meat bag would eat up a new version of KotOR.
I got Fallen Order for Christmas and have only scratched its surface. I do think it looks great, not 100% sure I am in love with it yet. But I am still rather early in the game.
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Oh, cool. Maybe I can also want to buy it but not badly enough to install Origin when that comes out, too.
I have a feeling that D is going to go all in on a SW old republic. A lot of new movies, TV show and games now that the the original trilogy in 9 parts is over.
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Don’t get too excited until you see what platform it’s being built for. EA is leaning hard into remaking old IPs as free-to-play mobile games. Just look at Dungeon Keeper to see what horrific form that will take on. Prepare for digital currencies, energy mechanics, timers, video ads, and psychological tricks to take your money.
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It’s a little finicky at first but it really gets there as you unlock force powers and skills. I’ve got all the force powers unlocked, most of the basic skills, and I’ve explored the first 3 planets fully so I got almost maxed out health and force meters.
Probably the biggest short coming in the thing is the unlocks are paced out weirdly, a double jump is the last thing you unlock force power wise. And if you follow the regular order of planets you’ll have a bit of a problem. The double light saber is fairly key and it unlocks pretty damn late if you don’t explore Dathomir first, and the game pushes you not to. And if you don’t reexplore planets pretty agressively as you unlock new abilities character advancement will lag.
But right around when I had most of it unlocked, getting all set up for the last chunk of it I was definitely thinking it’d work real well for KOTOR.
Dungeon Keeper Mobile was 6 years ago. And while a lot of big publishers have been doing a lot of that for a couple of years it doesn’t seem to have worked too well. Apparently that was all targeted at a bit of a gold rush for that sort of thing in China. But there seem to a bunch of prominent attempts shutting down lately and there have been rumors that EA is looking to move away from mobile and everything has micro transactions models. Disney certainly doesn’t seem very happy with the EA deal given how few games have come out, and how poorly Battlefront was received.
So just seems less likely than it would have 5 years ago. I’d be more cautious because Star Wars seems to be on a delay/cancel everything kick since Solo came out. Like they just shut down shooting on the Obi Wan show, sent it back into pre-production.
I’m holding out for Star Wars: Nights of Cabiria
Yeah I have a feeling that part of it is the game easing me into the world and getting me acclimated to the Force powers. I am VERY early in still.
I also get anxiety with these games about “missing” something, and backtracking and trying to not forget something. Though their map system does a decent job of showing what is left to explore. Like I know there is something that one of the frog monsters keeps killing me when I go after, so I guess wait until I get what I need to kill it easier. Or just get gud and kill it…
I really hope you’re right. I must be old, it doesn’t seem like the Dungeon Keeper debacle was so long ago. I work in the F2P industry and was recently employed by EA, and from what I can tell they are still as bullish as everyone else on F2P. With good reason- that’s where the big money is right now, and the old “buy a game and you own it” model is dying. Slowly, but it is dying. Those games are too expensive to make, and shareholders want the predictable quarter-over-quarter revenue that only F2P games can deliver. It won’t be long before indie games are the only source of gameplay that’s actually about, well, gameplay (rather than fake mechanics designed to incentivize spending fake/not-fake currency).
It does a very good job teaching you how to play. But the pacing out of the powers is more about restricting and pacing out explortation. A lot of the game is exploration and platforming focused. So it makes sense, but it seems a little bit like padding. Basically the when and how fast these things show up seems more connected to unlocking portions of levels than to introducing things to the player. And they get more out of the small number of levels that way.
I’ve never been good at or much liked the sort of timing and combos combat the game uses, but after getting this far in it’s started to make a lot more sense to me, and how these thing work has clicked a lot better for me than they ever have. So the way its broken up and how simple and straight forward it all is is really nice.
I dunno that it is. There’s been a lot of high profile failures on that front from big companies recently. And EA has had some problems growing out of their obsession with it. I mean the last Mass Effect game utterly failed and it was put together by one of their mobile teams that had been turned into a Bioware studio. There’s been a lot of regulatory and political attention payed to micro-transactions, and pulled straight from slot machines mechanics, loot boxes and shit the last few years.
I don’t remember anything specific or official from EA. But other companies are starting to make noise. Ubisoft just made a big to do about making less samey, grindy games and what have.
I don’t think that F2P is going away. But recently it seems like companies like EA that try to cram this shit in everywhere are actually fucking themselves over.
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Gotta respectfully disagree with you there. I was in AAA console/gaming development for 20 years, and have been in F2P mobile development for the past 11 years. All the big money is being made on the F2P side of the fence, absolutely no question about that. There have been some failures (Zynga and Facebook struggled for a while, for example) because it’s a finicky business that changes fast and has razor thin margins. But the monster successes of companies like Tencent, King, Supercell, and many others keep piling up. F2P is absolutely the future because people will not pay for content anymore as soon as you offer them an alternative.
Companies like EA, Riot, and Blizzard keep failing spectacularly in this space because they have no idea how to operate in it. It’s a completely different business model that requires a completely different corporate structure to succeed. Half our company is data scientists and we have almost no game designers. We have more live operations managers than Blizzard has engineers. It’s a completely different type of product. That doesn’t stop them from trying though, because they see that Tencent and King can’t find places to park their dumptrucks full of money (on games that cost $1M to make), meanwhile EA spends $200M on another Madden or Sims game just to squeak by.
That’s not neccisarily what I’m saying. Obviously the successful ones are big money.
But what seems to not be working is large video game publishers applying that model to every sort of game. Or shifting the base payment model to a micro-transaction based one for the full industry.
To take an example from another massive media conglomerate. Disney does not attempt to monetize their $500m movies via ads. And they don’t attempt to get a billion dollar box office out of whatever their latest kids show or network reality show is. They have multiple models and the different projects and layers of their business offset each other. If a movie fails there’s another movie, and another division that covers the loss.
A healthy, stable portfolio for the sort of companies these big publishers are has multiple approaches. Cheaper smaller projects, subscription stuff, F2P/mobile style stuff, big expensive event releases and so forth. And recent events seem to have them realizing that.
It’s also just that I’ve been hearing that subscriptions, mobile, F2P, online only, multiplayer was going to replace all of gaming for like 20 years now. And it still hasn’t happened. 5 years ago narrative was dead, ten years ago single player was dead, 15 years ago large finished releases were dead, 20 PC gaming was dead. At all points it was some variation of what defines F2P that was doing the killing. And it just never happens.
On top of that there’s a major push to regulate, and even straight up ban a lot of this stuff or reclassify it as gambling. If nothing else these companies have to be accounting for that. As that comes down, not only will it shrink the profitability. Especially because a lot of the biggest money makers are the sketchiest tactics. But it’s also going to make it a lot harder to sell other sorts of games when they include elements drawn from the model.
Fallen Order is tough (in a Dark Souls kind of way), but I loved every minute of it.
It made me want to play Sekiro which I will never regret. Another amazing game.
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