I don’t see this being an issue of single player vs multi-player games but just of the $60 price point today. Games just seems such a bad business right now to be in because most games (by design) are ephemeral experiences and once you are done with it you are done with it. It costs so much money to make AAA games right now, the competition is extremely fierce, and it takes so long to produce these games that no matter how many previous games you have released (unless you are a really big dev house) you are still betting the farm with each release you put out (thus why Volition is having layoffs now because of Agents of Mayhem).
The only difference between single player games and multi player games in this is that multiplayer games are designed to (hopefully) be played for longer than your usual single player game is meant to be played for.
There are a lot of ways around the $60 “risk” though, so I don’t think this is a fair point.
Like mentioned above, you can do your homework and watch videos or streams. You can rent from Red Box for $3 to help make up your mind. And in a lot of cases there’s still good old fashioned refunds. I personally haven’t “lost” money on a bad game yet by using these methods.
In full disclosure, I did rent Agents of Mayhem from Red Box and liked it enough to keep it, which actually ended up costing me about $12 more, but that was just laziness cost :)
To be fair, I tried it out when Tom said it was a good idea, and it was pretty bad and confusing at first and I agreed with all the other people who didn’t like it, but other other people said it was worth sticking with and now I’m pretty happy with Discourse.
I think in my case the beef is that it was a 10/10 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ fuck yeah greatest game ever review from Tom. A must have, instant $60 buy for every gamer. That… is really not the case for Agents of Mayhem.
If it was a 4, 4.5 ⭐️ type of deal, we could chalk it up to differences of opinion, and that would be totally fine.
A delight of imaginative and intertwined characters and gameplay. The best superhero game since Freedom Force and among the best open-world games.
I don’t think anything about that last sentence is remotely correct. Most people describe the open world in AoM as “generic.” Among the best?
Anyway, when you point to single player $60 gaming deaths, I would definitely put Agents at the top of that list, personally. I am sure I have gratuitously wasted $60 on games I didn’t enjoy before (Doom comes to mind) but this is the most recent, and most recently egregious, example that comes to mind.
What aspect of the game’s world are they calling “generic”? This makes no sense to me as I haven’t seen another open world city with the level of verticality that AoM has since Sunset Overdrive. Most open worlds are wide, you walk a long distance across flat ground like a pleb and see a bunch of npcs who either stare directly at you while simultaneously pretending to not know who you are (skyrim) or try to kill you for no reason at all while calling you the n. word (gta v). AoM is not about this at all. Pointless npc behavior is not its focus. What is it exactly that these people are looking for in an open world?
edit- to clarify why i think the verticality is important: 1) it requires you to use all the traversal abilities the game gives you to fully explore the world. 2) it just looks cool. The ttx complex in the center of the city is a multitier multi tower futuristic looking marvel. Calling it generic is a willful act of dismissal.
I don’t think it’s about AoM specifically, just the idea that your $60 is a total crapshoot, one person’s OMG FIVE STARS ONE OF THE BEST OPEN WORLD GAMES EVAR is someone else’s total boredom fest, with a 70% score on metacritic.
Then don’t gamble is my response. If you don’t know whether your 60 bucks is gonna be worth it, and if it’s gonna be problem for you, then don’t spend it. Wait.
It is a crapshoot exactly as @wumpus is saying, I agree. To be clear… 60$ gaming without demos or rental is a failure to my mind. preorder? It’s only a matter of time before a person get burned enough that they stop buying 60 dollar games entirely. In this age of extreme devaluation of games, 60 dollars is a joke price for most. Its the fake price while they wait for the sale. I know people that are trying to make a living on indie dev, while at the same time refuse to pay for games that are not on “deep discount”.
Regardless of whatever issues you might have with whatever part of the world you saw in the tutorial, you’re not reading correctly what you quoted. Agents of Mayhem is among the best open world games. As for the world itself, I quite like it. The more time I spent in it, the more I appreciated the world-building, the layout, the distinct character of the different areas, and so forth.
But the larger point, as you quoted, is that I would include Agents of Mayhem among the best open-world games: GTAV, Far Cry 2, State of Decay, Xenoblade Chronicles, Crackdown, Bully, maybe Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V. And, of course, the Saints Row series. I would easily include Agents of Mayhem in there.
Besides, are there any other open-world games that embrace so completely that action RPG gameplay with different characters and character builds? I can’t think of any offhand. There certainly aren’t any that play so gleefully with the superhero concept.
It actually makes a hell of a lot more sense for you to pay proportionally to the amount you actually play the game, that correlates with enjoyment and also ongoing support.
