Highguard - Concord 2.0?

[AN/ALR56]

I'm amazed that Concord will spawn a 2 year stream of failed games that are exactly like it because they were all pitched at the same time, to the same executives, funded by the same investors and developed by the friends of the concord devs, who saw firsthand what they were doing and said "damn, that is cool, we need to copy it ASAP!".
Imagine if the entirety of hollywood in the past 2 years was a string of failed avengers and star wars movies and their spin offs, and everyone tried to copy them at the same time and failed.
Oh.

 

[clickbait]

And once again, the comebacks of No Man's Sky, Final Fantasy XIV, and Cyberpunk 2077 are used as cope for how "insert shitty ass game here can come back". And never mind the time and money wasted with all of their outsourcing because they couldn't make the game themselves.

Didn't cp2077 launch the way it did because the qa company they hired fucked around rather than doing actual work?

NMS didn't they have a flood fuck everything and had a deadline to release or else they'd have to give back the investor monies?

Im not aware of ff14.

But isn't the moral of it all that you have faith in your product you do everything you can to deliver it. They just pretty much released it early access (cp2077 nms) and delayed the real release. A bad game is always bad, a delayed game has a chance to be good. Highguard is a bad game. It'll always be a bad game and now it's a dead game.

 

[NerdShamer]

Highguard Game Director Chad Grenier now claims that the game was released as it because "they ran out of time and money". / Archive

View attachment 8659837 View attachment 8659839

And once again, the comebacks of No Man's Sky, Final Fantasy XIV, and Cyberpunk 2077 are used as cope for how "insert shitty ass game here can come back". And never mind the time and money wasted with all of their outsourcing because they couldn't make the game themselves.

The hardest part that I find it to believe is that it took 4 1/2 years that can make this slop. I've seen people who can design way better shit in half an day if they really put their minds to it.

Ok, it's kind of cheating since these Brazilians are using prefabricated props, but that's why most companies have an team for making that shit

And this isn't even counting the other stuff that goes with game development

 

[Kane Lives]

Im not aware of ff14.

short tl;dr of ffxiv: Released initially in 2010, was widely panned because the engine ran like dogshit and the MMO was barely disguised XI in a shinier package, except in an even emptier copy-pasted world. Widely mocked as a failed WoW killer. It got so bad that SEnix axed the original main two directors for the game, and brought in the man known as Yoshi-P. They then did a very expensive rebuild in the background, while also giving out free perks like lifetime subs for those who had stayed with the game (I believe this is still in effect even now). FFXIV: ARR (or 2.0) was then (re)launched in 2013, and this time, was a moderate success, probably also saving the franchise in the process. The FFXIV you see now is built on ARR, and until the most recent xpac, has been growing steadily enough to be SEnix cash cow for a decade or so.

 

[AN/ALR56]

Ok, it's kind of cheating since these Brazilians are using prefabricated props, but that's why most companies have an team for making that shit

No shame in using asset store shit if you can actually custom it enough to pull off a natural look if you don't really have the time or the experienced team to waste time on it on making every prop.

Better than to make something like the crysis 2 concrete barriers with 4 million triangles or their unseen water:

Keep in mind this was done in 2010, where the flagships had 480 cuda cores (a 4060 has 3096).

 

[NerdShamer]

No shame in using asset store shit if you can actually custom it enough to pull off a natural look if you don't really have the time or the experienced team to waste time on it on making every prop.

Yeah, but it starts getting mildly entertaining when I see something that was temporarily free being used in a low budget horror game.

 

[LiquidKid]

Im not aware of ff14.

FF14 is not the same.
The game actually was very polished, but too much so, the graphics made it impossible to run well on contemporary PCs at the time, but it wasn’t buggy. The issue with FF14 was that it was a 2010 MMO designed to be a 2002 MMO.
The UI was ancient by that point, progression was tediously slow, it had XP caps so you could only gain so much per day, combat was archaic, and there was just a lot of early MMO jank that you wouldn’t expect from a post WoW game:

It’s also not a true comeback story. When Yoshida was brought on to fix the game, he split the team in two. One to update and fix the original game as much as possible and one to remake the game from scratch using as much of the old assets as possible. Current FF14 is a different game from 1.0 which was indeed a failure and was shut down relatively quickly.

I feel like most people just assume they updated the game and suddenly it was good, but that’s far from what actually happened. and there are aspects of 1.0 that were better. World designs was better and the maps had a labyrinth style to them and were just plan bigger , modern FF14 is wide open spaces and straight lines for instance.

 

[The Last Stand]

You know, when I hear “death of a game,” I would think that a game isn’t playable online due to low population or server closures. However, the game would still accessible in some way for local usage.

Now, thanks to live service models, games can die and vanish at any time. No archive anywhere aside from videos or passing memories before people just move on to something else.

Lawbreakers, Battleborn, The Culling II, The Crew 1, Evolve, whatever that Amazon based game was, Concord, now Highguard. They used to “exist,” now they’re only remembered for being failures of a risky, anti consumer model that creates more problems than they’re worth. Highguard died before it even launched; hell, I’d argue that it was just in life support at best.

 

[Smithfield Ham]

You know, when I hear “death of a game,” I would think that a game isn’t playable online due to low population or server closures. However, the game would still accessible in some way for local usage.

Now, thanks to live service models, games can die and vanish at any time. No archive anywhere aside from videos or passing memories before people just move on to something else.

Lawbreakers, Battleborn, The Culling II, The Crew 1, Evolve, whatever that Amazon based game was, Concord, now Highguard. They used to “exist,” now they’re only remembered for being failures of a risky, anti consumer model that creates more problems than they’re worth. Highguard died before it even launched; hell, I’d argue that it was just in life support at best.

This is probably why the industry is panicking so much about the "Stop Killing Games" movement. They're currently sitting on 10 or 20 shitty megagames that have no offline component and don't want to allocate the extra resources to setting up a dedicated server system or single player mode.

 

[moocow]

Keep in mind this was done in 2010, where the flagships had 480 cuda cores (a 4060 has 3096).

Wasn't one of CryTek's big boasts that the engine could automatically cull/optimize this crap (dynamically at runtime) so that even though it was defined to that utter absurdity in the game data, it didn't actually skull-fuck the rendering hardware with unnecessary detail?

I say that because I cranked up Crysis 2 for shits & grins a few week ago on a modern "mini PC" (AMD Ryzen, but with an on-die GPU, so a shitty APU Radeon), and it ran at like 60+ FPS and had no business running as smoothly as it was, and I was reminded why those games had the reputation of astonishing graphics & performance back in the day.

 

[Fred Fuckstone]

Wasn't one of CryTek's big boasts that the engine could automatically cull/optimize this crap (dynamically at runtime) so that even though it was defined to that utter absurdity in the game data, it didn't actually skull-fuck the rendering hardware with unnecessary detail?

I say that because I cranked up Crysis 2 for shits & grins a few week ago on a modern "mini PC" (AMD Ryzen, but with an on-die GPU, so a shitty APU Radeon), and it ran at like 60+ FPS and had no business running as smoothly as it was, and I was reminded why those games had the reputation of astonishing graphics & performance back in the day.

If I recall correctly, it's essentially simple geometry that's being subdivided in real time as you get closer to it rather than being a form of LOD, I remember Bungie had a system like it for Halo Reach that went both ways.

 

[frozen_runner]

No shame in using asset store shit if you can actually custom it enough to pull off a natural look if you don't really have the time or the experienced team to waste time on it on making every prop.

I don't know. This is the same mindset behind a flood of trash indie games being at least partially made with algos.

"Just because I don't have artistic skills doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to realize my great idea for a game." That sounds right, but I'm starting to think the reality of the situation is people with no-so-great ideas can now shit out crummy products in the hope of a quick buck, and they don't even have to have a good enough concept to convince other people with talent to collaborate with them. That's actually worse than asset flips.

 

[Disc]

This is probably why the industry is panicking so much about the "Stop Killing Games" movement. They're currently sitting on 10 or 20 shitty megagames that have no offline component and don't want to allocate the extra resources to setting up a dedicated server system or single player mode.

worth noting that stop killing games is future-scoped for exactly this reason. the game devs who've already committed to a project are safe from having to modify it.

I think I'd prefer to have Concordverse Megathread instead, I get confused running between Highguard and Marathon ones, might as well be the same thing lmao

I might try drafting something up. We’ll see what happens.

Progress report on that, I've got about 7 pages/2.9k words. So far covers the story of concord at a high level, elaborating on the conditions for what is a concordlike (using the most up to date version of my four conditions), and has a section on Highguard. Marathon and Hamburgers Gathering sections will be a tomorrow project. Anything important i'm missing/you want to make sure I should mention?

 

[Asian tech support]

Progress report on that, I've got about 7 pages/2.9k words. So far covers the story of concord at a high level, elaborating on the conditions for what is a concordlike (using the most up to date version of my four conditions), and has a section on Highguard. Marathon and Hamburgers Gathering sections will be a tomorrow project. Anything important i'm missing/you want to make sure I should mention?

Hyenas.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

Progress report on that, I've got about 7 pages/2.9k words. So far covers the story of concord at a high level, elaborating on the conditions for what is a concordlike (using the most up to date version of my four conditions), and has a section on Highguard. Marathon and Hamburgers Gathering sections will be a tomorrow project. Anything important i'm missing/you want to make sure I should mention?

You're the man, didn't expect someone to actually spend their time on this
I think you've got it nailed with the 4 conditions so far.

 

[Smithfield Ham]

Remember Hyenas? It was fucking insane seeing such a massive project shut down before it even came out, but in hindsight it seems like the studio made a brilliant decision.

 

[Forgotten Beast]

Anything important i'm missing/you want to make sure I should mention?

Maybe a list of games that aren't technically Concord-likes despite general perception, like Dustborn.
If you need help with something I can lend you a hand.

 

[Slimpacks]

I'd like to see dustbornlikes included as well (dustborn, 1348 ex voto, and relooted). No need to go in-depth on them because they lack the massive shilling force of blast havers, but they still share the culture war aspect of concordlikes.

 

[The Ugly One]

I'm amazed that Concord will spawn a 2 year stream of failed games that are exactly like it because they were all pitched at the same time, to the same executives, funded by the same investors and developed by the friends of the concord devs, who saw firsthand what they were doing and said "damn, that is cool, we need to copy it ASAP!".
Imagine if the entirety of hollywood in the past 2 years was a string of failed avengers and star wars movies and their spin offs, and everyone tried to copy them at the same time and failed.
Oh.

I'm gonna say the same thing I always say.

They tell us that they need to shit up games with ugly characters to be inclusive and attract a Modern Audience. Yet they never answer the question raised by their own claims:



Why didn't black women like this game? Have they talked to a single black woman to understand why she had no interest in Highguard?

 

[Smithfield Ham]

I'd like to see dustbornlikes included as well (dustborn, 1348 ex voto, and relooted). No need to go in-depth on them because they lack the massive shilling force of blast havers, but they still share the culture war aspect of concordlikes.

Those have an advantage over Concordlikes in that they're usually made much cheaper and partially government subsidized, so when they fail its embarrassing but not a crippling blow.

Doesn't make them any less cringe, though. Dustborn is so bad it comes off like a stealth parody.