Battleborn cries.
No joke, I think Paladins is a perfectly competent game, but Battleborn was much better. Shot in the foot by their marketing department and timing with Overwatch imo.
Battleborn failed because three reasons
a) bad marketing (don’t go saying your campaign is hobby-grade!)
b) off-putting art for a good % of players (I kind of liked it, but I’ve see for lots of people it was ugly/ridiculous, unlike the universal appeal of the Pixar-like aesthetics of Overwatch).
c) fairly hardcore main game mode without a tutorial, making lots of people judge it harshly when they did an open beta.
I disagree. The reason Battleborn failed was because it was $60, IMO. Paladins seems to be having some success, but slap a $60 price of entry onto it and I bet it’d be in the same situation Battleborn has been.
Well, obviously if they would have done a f2p game instead of a $60 game, people’s standard would have been much lower!
I don’t think it has to do with F2P standards, it has to do with multiplayer numbers reaching a critical mass. That’s a tough feat as it is, but putting a $60 barrier in front of anyone curious to try your game is pretty much guaranteeing failure.
Unless you’re Blizzard, you just can’t charge $60 up front for a multiplayer-centric game anymore.
Or EA/DICE. Battlefield 1 is still primarily a multiplayer game. Anyone who bought it for SP is going to be severely disappointed.
I think there’s something to this. I saw the display at Pax East this year. They had a huge floor presence with giant statues of the characters. I fucking hated them. They looked awful. That guy with the tiny head, like I get the joke, and it’s stupid, and it looks dumb and you should be ashamed.
That’s a really good point, I should clarify what I meant. I was referring to new or unknown franchises breaking in. Games like Battlefield and Call of Duty already have a massive fanbase that is on board for the next iteration. But for something like Battleborn, good luck. Didn’t even Titanfall struggle to maintain MP numbers?
No one really knows because EA/Respawn hasn’t given any solid figures, and there’s no way to check the population. We know sales were relatively (compared to the first game) low during Titanfall 2’s initial release weeks, but that may grow over the holiday.
The nice thing about DICE games is that you can datamine for player population.
6,3 million players in Steamspy already, 1,4 million players in the last two weeks.
They plan to introduce a good amount of content this year: they released a new map yesterday, have three more in test phase, they are planning a PvE mode, and they want to release 15 new champions this year (next week they should release the first, Torvald, a front liner who can steal opponents shields and give shields to teammates).
Though in the last days I had problem with lag, they have to fix their infrastructure.
At least they communicate content and timeline plans with their players, as opposed to blizzard who are comparitivley vague about such things.
I downloaded this today and gave it a spin. Seems it has come quite a ways since its launch. Its actually pretty fun. The menus could use a bit of polish, but the core game is a blast. Of course, I haven’t played Overwatch, so maybe I’m a poor judge.
I like it a bit better than Overwatch, in fact.
Overwatch has higher end graphics, and better animations, sounds, and better art, and more polish in general. But it’s a bit too much spam/kill friendly: you kill fast, you die fast, you respawn fast. Not a much as say, CoD, but enough for the gameplay to be bland-ish, imo. Paladins has a lower TTK, and a bit higher spawn time, this means more fun 1vs1 encounters when people avoid fire and beat the opponent, or gets to run away using an ability, etc. The idea of the horse to reach fast the action is pretty nifty, other games should copy it. In Overwatch there are a few times where the time walking to the point kill the otherwise good pace of the game.
The other differentiating factor is how the heroes work: in Overwatch they are pretty specialized, you can switch hero when you die, and in fact you are supposed to use that feature, switching as your team needs more defense or offense, or a healer or whatever. In fact I would say it’s the most novel gameplay feature of the game.
In Paladins the heroes are a bit more rounded, even if there four different roles, each one has 5 abilities (lmb, rmb, skill 1, skill 2, ult), while that isn’t the case always for Overwatch. The balance is also preferable, Ults for example are good abilities but not game changing, they can feel a bit too cheap in Overwatch, where they are like “go, do this huge damage in this area, and have 3-4 free kills”.
Customization is also an interesting factor, you can select some cards (at the start of the game) and boosting items (through the match) to change your style of play. There is nothing like that in Overwatch, heroes are more… static in their design.
I like Paladins significantly more than Overwatch as well. I like it’s less spam/kill and it really bothers me in Overwatch how you can switch classes on the fly. Half the fun in these games (IMO) is having a team composition and how to utilize your strengths vs the other team’s composition.
Some footage of the new champion, Torvald
Change log
I also enjoy it more than OW. I especially like the ability to customize the loadout of the hero. Not huge on the during match purchases but it’s ok. I just wish they would hurry up with the console version.
Yeah, the in-game shop would be a negative for me, but it is much, much simpler than something like LoL and really doesn’t take long to get used to.
Torvald looks cool.
To me, the biggest issue with Paladins was lack of game mode variety.
I’ve been playing this daily for the last week or so. I even bought the founders pack with all the heroes. I’m still surprised how much I’m enjoying it. My biggest complaint would be crap players picking only damage or (even worse) flank characters. Its funny, because in the majority of games I play, the team with the better frontline hero usually wins.
As for lack of variety in gamemodes, I’m actually really happy with the modes included. I’m almost exclusively played Payload in TF2, and I still think its one of the best FPS modes out there.
I’m curious, having not read any of the forums about the game, does anyone know if any of the characters are unbalanced? I know that there are a couple that are pretty weak (i.e. the shotgun flank dude), but I haven’t seen anything too ridiculous.
Actually, last I heard, Buck was considered quite strong, but that was a while ago, so things might have changed.