I think you’re right. See the news in the Crytek in trouble thread.
Delayed to 2016.
Dambuster Studios are an extraordinarily talented group. We are giving the team every opportunity to turn Homefront: The Revolution into a best-selling title, and have set a 2016 release date to provide them the time they need to achieve this. You can expect to hear more about the game later this year.
Homeworld has Hooters in it? I know they remastered the game but still . . .
PC Gamer got some hands-on time with Homefront: The Revolution.
Before I get to play it, Deep Silver Dambuster describes a shooter that attempts to capture life as a guerilla fighter.
It, they say, is a world where you are outgunned; where you’re nipping at the heels of a more powerful force. It, they say, is a shooter where you’ll need to know when to withdraw. Soon after, I get to play a section of its open world. Once, during a scripted sequence, my panicked squadmates tell me to retreat from a fight. I do, but only because there’s an objective marker. Outside of this mission, the sense of being the underdog dissipates completely. I can wipe out patrols without fear of retribution, and capture Strike Points with relative ease.
Getting a bit cocky, I decide to throw myself at a heavily defended outpost, and, fair enough, I am swiftly killed. But the rest of the time, I seem to be a one-man army able to kill every KPA oppressor foolish enough to have a go. Based on what I played, Homefront: The Revolution doesn’t feel like a game about resistance fighters in a desperate struggle for freedom. It feels like an urban Far Cry, or a military Watch Dogs. It’s main inspiration is not guerilla fighters, it’s the Ubisoft school of open world design.
Sounds exactly how I feared it would.
So… another game with towers and busy map design? I hoped more for something like Far Cry 1/Crysis 1 (the good levels only!). Open and tactical, but not being a single big map sandbox.
About the guerilla theme, I was thinking right now in one of my favorite games, Red Faction Guerrilla. The game’s difficulty was tight, and it was good because of it, because it really forced you to adapt more hit & run tactics, think imaginative ways to use explosives, etc.
RFG was awesome, and yeah, that what was I hoping for as well. I do hope that Ubisoft gets into their heads soon that they can’t apply they standard open world tactics to any game anymore (see Assassins Creed Unity) and hope to get away with it. Those days are hopefully over!
That would be an awesome model for them to follow, though perhaps not as spread out as RFG’s version of Mars (which allowed for basically no vertcality). I’ve been wondering for a while if any of the Volition staff that has worked on RFG and Saints Row has been consulting with Dambuster on open world design. I prefer Volition’s design sense over any other company currently making open world games.
AC Syndicate is pulling back from that a bit.
Sweet! Cant wait. Really liked the first one :-)
Co-op multiplayer with persistent levels and unlocks. No season pass will be offered, but microtransactions are a go!
Game designer Fasahat Salim was asked whether the game’s microtransactions, which let players spend real money to buy crates containing loot, would result in a pay-to-win environment.
Salim responded by emphasising the in-game monetisation of content was simply a shortcut, and added the team has no plans to lock content away behind a paywall.
“It’s absolutely not a pay-to-win system because everything we’re providing in these resistance crates is available for free in the game through normal play,” he said. "All we’re offering is, for those players that don’t necessarily have the time to invest in the game, to unlock those cool things. It’s basically just a time saver for them; a shortcut to unlocking these things.
He added: “They pay a little bit of money but they’re not getting anything that’s exclusive to them.”
“Everything that’s available in the game is available for free, and even after release we’re going to continue to be delivering missions, drip-feeding them into the community for at least a year,” he explained. "There’s always going to be new content delivered for free, players are going to have lots of stuff to dig their teeth into.
“We’re not doing any sort of packs. We’re not making map packs or anything like that. As we’re done with a mission, we’re going to release it, the community can go ahead and play it, and we’re going to keep doing that for at least a year after release.”
Yeah. That kind of shit means I’m out. Voting with my wallet and all that. A shame, because the game looked fun, but there is no way I’m going to support that.
Co-op Campaign == Win!
Unless it is “coop single maps” and the campaign is totally different.
It’s not a co-op campaign. It’s co-op missions in the open world setting. It’s like the co-op stuff in Assassin’s Creed Unity, except it looks like it has a lot less variety.
I love how they use the fact that items are technically eventually free in game to justify describing micro transactions as not being P2W.
No, it’s P2W, for 1 month, or 3 months, or 6 months, or however long it takes a non-microtransacting customer to catch up with those that pony up for advantage.
It’s no different from what Ubisoft, Valve, or EA have been doing in their shooters and multiplayer games (I was surprised to see them pop up in AC Unity, but I don’t seem to be harmed by not throwing money at them). I’m not going to trash a game simply because it’s implementing what appears to be the industry standard micro-transaction policy.
It’s hard to say to what degree the microtransaction stuff impacted the design of AC: Unity. You can play through the whole game without buying a single Helix credit, but I doubt Ubisoft put the option there without tweaking the player’s rate of progression.
One of the well-known and tested methods of getting players to pony up for these optional in-game purchases is to adjust progression so it’s optimally right on the cusp of being a slog. Keep the player balanced on the razor edge of frustration and he is more likely to buy whatever “shortcut” you offer.
In AC: Unity, there’s a mid-point right after you hit four pips on the character stats when the money required to buy the next better equipment skyrockets. All the missions start to hit a difficulty level balanced somewhere between the character and the next level, so the Helix option starts to look pretty attractive. That’s not an accident and I doubt that mid-point progression lull would exist without the mandate to offer a real money shortcut.
That might explain it, I’m still at 3 pips. Money doesn’t seem that hard to get – yet.
Thats my take on it as well - The game will obviously be designed with it in mind, since they want to entice players to actually spend money in-game. Otherwise, its wasted man-hours adding it at all. That kind of shit needs to die in a fire in full-price games.