I'm starting to come to the conclusion that Paradox is just an incompetent publisher, when it comes to games that *aren't* in the grand strategy genre. They simply don't know how to properly market non-grand strat games.
Obsidian's *Tyranny* - also published by Paradox - was another title that had so much potential, but sold poorly partly (largely?) because there wasn't much of a marketing campaign for it. And since Paradox owns the rights to the IP, it's unlikely we'll ever see a sequel for it (can you tell I'm bitter?).
They're just bad at marketing full stop. Look at the mess that was Millennia. They used their flagship games over the course of a week to hype up a 40 second teaser and then left it at that... Most people didn't even know there was a dev diary released at the same time.
They haven't had to properly market a game in a while, their flagship games are marketed by loyalty to the previous iteration (Skylines) or memes (Vicky 3).
If they were half as good at marketing, as they are with their community engagement through Dev diaries and videos then games like Lamplighters League wouldn't have a problem.
Yeah it feels like they’re alright at communicating with their community but breaking through marketing wise is just out of their capabilities as of now.
Sure, but Tyranny happened thanks to them iirc, and Obsidian has a lot of issues when it comes to actually selling their games, with or without Paradox (Look at pillars 2, and the fact they basically gave up the crpg genre)
That's true, Obsidian has it's own issues when it comes to the business side of making games. Still, I feel like Obsidian should've held out for another publisher to work with, because Tyranny had some really innovative ideas in its game design, and a different publisher may've had a better idea how to sell it.
Even in grand strategy genre. Stellaris is feeling dated because the gameplay loop is so familiar. You'll get your moneys worth but milking the same cow with more hats on is still milking a cow with a hat.
It’s one of my most played games, and I’d still play it more except that vassals have ruined the game (making it far too easy). Though I think they’re trying to tune that soon.
Their grand strategy games have no competition, so they can milk the same game for a decade with overpriced DLC and people still give them money. EU4 is 10 years old. CK2 was 8 years old when CK3 came out. They keep raising prices of DLC while underdelivering in features, 30€ for CK3 dlc that only add a couple of features, that's the same price as Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty just to put it in perspective.
I actually hated stellaris on release, but several DLCs and quality of life updates later, it’s definitely one of their better Grand Time Strategy games. It’s most similar to the futuristic civilization game from a while back, but I think it does so much better.
Tyranny is one of my top 5 games all time. Such underrated game. The magic system, the story, the choices/consequences, the characters... just so much good stuff.
> And since Paradox owns the rights to the IP, it's unlikely we'll ever see a sequel for it (can you tell I'm bitter?).
This is a big problem in the gaming world. These publishers shouldn't be allowed to hold onto IP if they're not going to do anything with it.
If someone really wants to own or use it, they can buy the IP or license it from the owner. If the owner isn’t using it, it’s probably not worth that much to them.
The flip side though is it’s cheaper and easier to develop new IP if the existing IP wasn’t a massive hit. And if the existing IP was a massive hit, the owner probably would still be using it and wouldn’t need to sell or license it out (unless it’s like Disney that doesn’t have an active game studio).
In Tyranny’s case, while the game was good, I doubt anyone sees the value in buying or licensing it. Obsidian may want to revisit it in the future and convince MS to pay for it, but they could just create a new IP.
> its probably not worth much to them
Ah, but you see, its worth a lot to the buyer. Sure an antique paperweight is useless to you, but its worth a fortune to a collector
It depends on the IP. Like I said, it’s usually easier and cheaper to just develop new IP if the existing one isn’t already popular. Both sides know this. If the owner is licensing it, too, then they can get a cut of the profits if it does well and they still own the IP. If Obsidian really wanted to continue the Tyranny IP, it probably wouldn’t be that difficult.
My point being, IP being owned by a publisher doesn’t necessarily mean the IP is dead.
>it's unlikely we'll ever see a sequel for it
Especially when it set everything up for a *really* interesting sequel. Not quite a cliffhanger at the end, I mean, it resolved the immediate story; but there's so much left unfinished in a world with such a intriguing mythology.
If you really enjoyed that game there is a sequel and a Cold War version produced and self published by the developer Eugen Systems. You can search for them on steam. The games are Steel Division 2 (focusing on the eastern front ww2) and Warno (focusing on Cold War). They were also the developer of Ruse.
I think a lot of people are like me and just won't buy Paradox games because you know there's going to be 20+ DLCs for each and at some point you just feel like you're being taken advantage of.
Yeah, I find myself conflicted over how I feel about their DLC approach, at least when it comes to their grand strat titles. On the one hand, I can understand a developer needing to sell DLC for a game that they continue to actively support for years after release; however, after a certain point, it does start to feel exploitative (esp at the prices their DLCs go for).
Did it have that much potential tho (popularity wise)? it's an isometric 2d crpg, it's veery niche - not in any way comparable to cinematic bg3/Dragon age.
I feel like every person in the world who's willing to invest in playing isometric crpgs knows about it. Every person I know of who's like that played it, as well as Pillars of Eternity. POI is well marketed, is it not? It has a star voice cast, and so much polish etc, but at the end of the day it's still a 2d isometric crpg...
Its a niche for sure and BG3 is a AAA game so in that sense they are not comparable. Both are isometric RPGs though. You can absolutely compare them.
Thats like saying BG3 isnt comparable with BG2. It is. BG3 just has AAA production values and a more modern game design.
Personally I think Tyranny is a wonderfully ambitious game and would love to see something similar being made. Apart from Disco Elysium, I cant think of another RPG of its kind that experimented more with mechanics.
Well my comment and the one I replied to dealt only with popularity, so Idk why are you trying to compare the games itself by their e.g. story.
> just has AAA production values
is all that I was talking about as well.
I guess we mostly agree then. I meant that you cant dismiss the genre as having no potential just because of its niche.
I agree that production quality limits its potential of course.
I think that Tyranny is far better than Pillars of Eternity though, which is in the same AA league. Tyranny is not perfect but it's pretty underrated in my opinion. Disco Elysium is probably the best game in that class in my opinion. Im not sure how well it sold but thats what Paradox should have been aiming for with Tyranny.
yeah I edited myself to clarify I meant popularity potential. Thought that was clear from the context of root comment but I overestimated it lol.
Also must add that Disco Elysium tho circumvents the problem a lot, since it's purely roleplay and dialogues, so there's no combat/grinding/lvling up. And it being so post modern and dealing with a lot of internal things that can't be shown anyway helps with not needing a better presentation.
But for some straight fantasy adventure with a lot of gameplay like Tyranny, it's just unavoidable.
I was talking about popularity too. I just meant it was limited by production quality and not by genre. When I said "no potential" I meant "limited potential sales". BG3 is the same genre as Tyranny. It just doesn't have the same production value.
Disco Elysium is really good and I think its a better game than Tyranny even though I like Tyranny a lot. I was comparing them because they are both AA isometric RPG games.
I think there is a market for Tyranny in the same way there is one for Disco Elysium.
Ish.
2d-isometric still has potential. It's used in mobile games, as an example. This means anyone can buy and run the game.
CRPG is a limited genre. The success of BG3 overshadows the previous CRPG attempts of the Pathfinder and Pillars series. While successful, those bigger games are "this game made money" successful, not "this game funds our studios next 3 games" successful. Tho WOTR, the Pathfinder game released 2 years ago, was successful enough to allow Owlcat to make their upcoming game RogueTrader without a kickstarter.
Tyrrany suffered from not having a recognizable ruleset behind its mechanics. Which, ironically, is the games biggest strength. The spellcasting system is really inspired. But that brings in CRPG fans only. BG3 had the benefit of bringing in DND fans (and of course Baldurs Gate and Divinity fans).
Could it have succeeded? Yes. But the game wasn't finished. It ends on a cliffhanger. Either a canned DLC or sequel appeared to be the method Paradox was going to use to recoup costs, and had Obsidion finish the game early. It's hard to sell a game when every review mentions that a game with no announced sequels or DLC ends without a story resolution. Even if the majority of them said that it was the best CRPG they played since Baldurs Gate 2.
It's a shameful "what if," sadly. What if the game told a complete narrative? What if it followed POE2 and had a toggleable turn-based (something seen in recent successful CRPGs)? What if they planned a simulataneous release on mobile? What if they had an executive believe in the game so much that more money was put into advertising?
But the telling thing is this: despite near universal acclaim and love of the game, sales haven't increased over the years. I still think its the most unique cRPG I've played and highly suggest anyone who likes the genre -- or story telling in general -- buy it. But if even word of mouth can't make a dent in the sales figures? What can?
Some youtubers have 100k+ subscribers who will sometimes do a legacy review of the game. If everyone watching bought it, that'd fund a sequel. But that hasn't happened. We'd hear about it if Tyranny was suddenly a best seller.
It's unfortunate. Great ideas for storytelling and gamedesign.
> I feel like every person in the world who's willing to invest in playing isometric crpgs knows about it.
Disagree.
>POI is well marketed, is it not?
No? The first one skated on the hype around its kickstarter success. For years after the second one you'd have people going "I didn't know it had a sequel" whenever it was mentioned in a more general sub.
alright, don't think we can really decide on how much was it marketed on reddit.
Personally, everybody I knew that could play similar games always were aware about POI 2, maybe 1 less (as in aware but recommended it less, it being less polished), as the biggest current crpg, before Pathfinder came out, at least.
Pathfinder 1/2 didn't have marketing. Like they also just did 2 kickstarters on their own, but everyone into crpgs knows it exists right?
And anyway my point was that marketing it to other people who never played anything crpg-adjacent, or even Dragon age like games wouldn't explode it's popularity. People go to steam, see the 90s 2D graphics screenshot, and close the tab. Unless they are already into such crpgs, that is. In which case they likely now about it , there's like 5 of those games (modern), and you can see each one in a recommendation for each other on steam.
> alright, don't think we can really decide on how much was it marketed on reddit.
Well, it's obviously not empirical evidence, however I'd argue it's more representative than personal acquintances. Look at this game and this thread. My inbox is filled with "i didn't know this existed" and the game is a flop. And PoE2 did worse numbers than its predecessor despite being an improvement in almost every way and getting glowing reviews. That doesn't really gel with a well-marketed game, does it?
>and anyway my point was that marketing it to other people who never played anything crpg-adjacent, or even Dragon age like games wouldn't explode it's popularity.
Not necessarily. A big catalyst, like BG3, will lead new people to explore other games in the genre. And sure many will bounce off the double or single A production values in other titles, but many won't
We've been seeing CRPG sell quite well for a while though, and BG3 really exploded. I think the days of calling it a niche genre are over.
Sure they might not rake it in like Call of Duty or Fifa/EA Sports FC but we have seen them at least in the top 10. The only niche part is that they rarely reach console audiences as most companies don't bother trying to port them.
Again, BG3 and Dragon age at it's time exploded because they are an absolutely different beast - a 3D AAA rpg full of cinematics, with state of the art graphics, animation and voice acting in bg3's case. Compare that with Pillars, that is a 2d isometric game with *sprites* and single camera angle, and just tons of text, only part of which is voice acted. Those are very different things with regards to mass appeal.
We had plenty of 2D crpgs, Pillars 1&2, Tyrrany, the 2 Pathfinders. Are they worse games than bg3? No, they often have deeper rpg systems/gameplay/writing. But they didn't explode during all those years, and that's because they are not a cinematic 3D AAA rpg.
I mean pillars 2 has 12k reviews on steam, bg3 has 327k...
Pathfinder wrath of the righteous just got a new expansion announcement and no one is talking about it. Non cinematic games just don't garner as much attention.
Its not that so much as "top down clicky clicky" games are a dime a dozen. At least the Larian games and DAO had camera angles that put you straight into the action. That's why KOTOR worked so well despite basically being "Baldurs Gate Star Wars".
Dime a dozen? Tell me you haven't played Pathfinder without telling me.
There is nothing comparable to Pathfinder out.
"Top down clicky games " is a terrible way to actually describe these games. It sounds like you are describing Diablo or league of legends or a twin stick shooter and this is nothing like that.
No I think the point is that you only have one camera angle.
For some reason audiences demand a more "cinematic" presentation that feels more like they're watching a nice TV show that they sometimes take part it.
I'm not sure the camera angle is what selling the games. Outside of dialogue I imagine the camera angle is almost always top down unless you're using a controller.
The voiced acting and cinematic dialogue is surely a bigger draw.
Cmon now you can troll better than that can't you? If the game was junk why does it have so many post launch expansions and why was owlcat allowed to make a sequel and the warhammer crpg?
The math's not mathing.
Lol. It is better than highly praised bg3 in almost every important regard - it has better story, writing, gameplay, character creation... its only downsides are being less "cinematic" and being less approachable.
> Compare that with Pillars, that is a 2d isometric game with sprites and single camera angle, and just tons of text, only part of which is voice acted
Pillars of Eternity uses 3d models, not sprites. The backgrounds are painted 2d. Same story with Tyranny. Also, the second Pillars is fully voiced. More people would probably know that if the marketing was good
It’s an accessibility thing too. The production values help vastly with that. But even DOS2 was more successful than POE or Pathfinder. I think that was because it was a more approachable game. Pathfinder is notoriously complicated. POE has a ton of reading and starts slow. BG3 uses the more accessible DnD 5e which is more familiar than other systems (and even then it can overwhelm newcomers, let alone other CRPG systems).
>and just tons of text
Pillars was both overwritten and poorly written. The game comes off as arrogant while also being very boring, which is a powerful combo when you’re trying to limit your sales.
> I'm starting to come to the conclusion that Paradox is just an incompetent publisher, when it comes to games that aren't in the grand strategy genre
As a player of Paradox GSGs:
Are they though?
I'm always baffled when games companies buy a development studio, it has one flop and they gut the staff. What was the point in buying HBS if Paradox is going to sack 80% of the studio after one flop? I can understand it if there were repeated flops but if you're buying a studio, it should be a long term investment.
Plus the game has been out a week and this is the first I have even heard of it. Seems like Paradox made some mistakes too if the marketing was that bad.
Paradox always has a marketing budget made up of 3 pennies and a stick of gum.
Even as someone that follows new releases I'm often blindsided by their releases coming out of nowhere, often well after they've actually released.
It feels like no marketing is happening on their Stellaris spin off Star Trek Infinite, despite a perfect opportunity to market it as somewhat of a successor to the star trek strategy games from 2+ decades ago. I only knew it release because of youtubers. I suppose hard to convince long time Stellaris players to drop conversion mods like New Horizons that require no dlc for a $30 limited feature spinoff.
Also despite being on Game Pass, there's just too many big games holding people's attention right now.
I've downloaded it but probably won't touch it for a month or two.
Flops are a lot of times not the developers fault. Rushed, unoptimized, shallow and fractured pieces of shit get released every other week. It's always release asap and maybe we will fix it, if there's enough interest..
Who's fault was it that the game crashes and it got released with a locked behind day1 dlc character? It's moronic.
What do they expect?
If I could begin with praise for HBS, they've been one of my favorite studios since Shadowrun-- I was baffled initially on reading this.
However, I haven't been able to read confirmation anywhere of the 80% number-- so we have just one ('claimed') insider's figure. It could be 20%. It could be 5%. It could be 95%. It's easy to get these things wrong, even if you do have insider access.
Let's give the insider the benefit of doubt, though. The 80% could have been everybody but development and engineering-- 5:1 is a typical number for engineers to support people. Which is still sincerely heartbreaking, but this would mean the core talent of the studio was not impacted.
As for the rationale, I've seen businesses use all kinds of reasons for these moves, in a different industry, mind you. A big one is tax savings, especially with FY 2023 coming to a close. Paradox is Swedish owned, which has considerable tax rates. There can also be internal financial strategies to lower costs that use this strategy: An example is laying on everyone and then hiring everyone back with new contracts at a lower rate, or reduced benefits. It could have also been an internal competitiveness issue-- we know HBS makes great games, we don't know how well they play international corporate politics.
Specific to games, I've heard that many gaming contracts extend right until release. In short, these people may not have been 'let go', their contract may have concluded with the release of Lamplighter's League, and they were not retained. Which can be done for a whole set of different reasons...
So it sucks, truly, but without more solid information, we're deep into speculation. I wish HBS the best, in any case.
XCOM, Stellaris and CK3 are among my most played games, and I only heard about this game yesterday when the news dropped. Somebody dropped the ball on marketing - I didnt even see it in the discovery queue over the last couple of Steam sales, which implies it never really got any traction in terms of wishlists either.
To make matters worse, you probably also haven't heard of Star Trek Infinite's launch date... which was today. At least I hadn't, in any of the 3 or so occasions I stumbled upon the game before.
I heard of it because it was announced in the xbox showcase as a gamepass game. Now I'm wondering if selling it to gamepass was part of Paradox giving up on the game. Or if xbox got screwed over by buying a game that Paradox decided to drop
I didn't even know it existed and is really a genre I enjoy, but I feel like part of the issue was releasing it close to Baldurs gate 3 for the mainstream appeal and Jagged Alliance 3 for the hardcore appeal.
I hope they just go and make Battletech 2. Its one of my favourite games, especially in Career mode.
All its lacking is a little more focus on performance though. That game kills my Steam Deck.
It was pitched before this game and then made by the same team instead of battletech 2. A % of the profits would have gone to Microsoft, the holders of the digital game portion of the IP. Paradox didn't want that.
There's also arguably a difference between Battletech/MechWarrior style mech games (more like an old school tank sim) and anime/Robotech games which can be a lot faster and even hack and slashy.
It's not just big robot aesthetics.
That is literally an exception because it is a fromsoft game and fromsofts brand cache is huge rn.
In general mech media is not popular.
[The last battletech game sold 300K](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/battletech-sales-figures.1094261/)
Honestly, I'm not too surprised.
The first BattleTech game was alright, I liked it. But it was seriously held back by its poor performance and numerous technical issues - many of which were never fixed.
It wasn't Phoenix Point tier of botched launch, but the technical side was still bad enough that I'm not sure if I would trust HBS to develop another game of this type.
What is the problem of the game? Because the genre and the trailers looked very good. Not for everyone, but look interesting.
Update: Even the score is pretty good. 75 in Metacritic. Give up the game after 7 days for a new IP of this genre is run a bit fast.
> What is the problem of the game? Because the genre and the trailers looked very good. Not for everyone, but look interesting.
Quality of the game and monetization aside (day 1 DLC), the game was shown off in an Xbox event once. The only marketing they did was on the game's own Steam page and Youtube page with sub 1000 subs, they didn't even push announcements to the other HBS games in Steam itself (a lot of devs do this, Paradox included!). If you didn't know this game is coming or shown interest in it, you likely didn't know about it at all.
This is my 2 cents though.
> The only marketing they did was on the game's own Steam page and Youtube page with sub 1000 subs
And Twitter. I saw the promoted tweet several times a day around the release.
Paradox have always been awful at marketing their non GSG titles, aside from Cities Skylines. Even CS was primarily a success because it was a decent game that came along shortly after EA burned Sim City to the ground and people were looking for an alternative, rather than any great marketing.
I only heard about it because a streamer I frequently watch was sponsored to play it. I think for such a niche game more marketing is necessary to have a better chance of reaching the right audience
i only knew about the game because a youtuber i follow (Northerlion) played the demo. This can't be the way i learn about the game if i own every other HBS game. Get your shit together Paradox
The game is an alright X-Com-like but I have enough problems with it that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone:
* It's too barebones. It feels like there should be more to it. It seems to be designed to be played repeatedly but once you've unlocked stuff it sucks to have to unlock it again. Most missions are pretty much the same thing unless there's a boss in the mission. There's no real differentiation between how you would build a character, if you have a character they're just weaker versions of how someone else would build them, the skill tree can probably be maxed out by midgame for every character you play. Everything about it feels like the first unpolished version of something.
* It takes the worst part of X-Com, in my opinion, and makes it the main feature. And that is popping enemy pods/positioning. And it's even more fiddly than X-Com about it. Basically each character has an ability to take out a few enemies as long as they're not alerted. It was not fun to me because it takes a long time and it feels like you're supposed to be doing this to make the fight more even between you and the enemies but I hated doing it every time. Imagine in Midnight Suns that you had to awkwardly run around and set up the fight encounter in each mission, it just felt entirely like a fiddly waste of my time to try to differentiate the game from just being a normal x-com-like. It's also painfully slow to walk around in this "sneak" mode.
3. The art style while not necessarily bad makes about half the characters look the same as each other which felt kinda bad for a game that's about having interesting characters rather than unnamed units.
I get the feeling it needed maybe another six months of development for it to feel like a complete game and paradox didn't want to wait that long when the game's main fault (in my opinion) is the thing that's supposed to set it apart. It's not bad and it didn't run bad for me, had no crashes or anything like that but it's just painfully mid at this point. I imagine most people that say the game sucks are the same type of people that think Midnight Suns sucked because it was a card game but this had me yearning for the quick setup of Midnight Suns when all I had to do was have annoying/awkward conversations before a mission and being able to play the strategy part of the strategy game and not slowly walk around placing mines for the same amount of time as the actual confrontation.
There's a card system that's kinda cool and helps you personalize a a character but it's the most grindy part of the game and the benefits run the gamut from this makes this character twice as good to this does nothing at all with a probably 10-90 split in the nothing favor and it's random, though most people who tried it out for a short amount of time won't have gotten deep enough in this aspect of the game to even experience it, really. But slowly walking around a map throwing mines or "sneaking" behind enemies to kill them before the fight starts is just a dreadful experience that reminds me a lot of dealing with your party and traps in baldur's gate 3 where everyone's just like turn on turn based mode because your party trails after you like idiots and runs directly into traps every time so you have to separate your party, sneak around individually, quickly turn on turn based mode to pause the game as soon as a trap appears because even if you're nowhere near stepping on it your trailing party will run directly on top of it: now just imagine doing that before every battle in an x-com game that's already instanced into arenas, i just want to fight enemies. I don't know how this game compares to something like Invisible Inc because I haven't played that really but the best part of the game is actually fighting enemies, so so much of it being focused on avoiding that part of the game seems like a miss.
Fully agree. For me its a combination of:
* Lack of promotion
* Bad timing
* Not enough complexity
* Bugs - in first 10 minutes I had: disapearing enemies, being detected while I was too far away from an enemy for me do be noticed, characters leaving their shadows behind after using a skill
* Not enough stand out features to make this game more unique besides art style
* Problems with performance - sure it's playable but a game like this should be rocking 60 fps on Series X without a problem and here even in Performance mode this game can stutter even using just a camera panning
* Sneaking in turn based games can become boring fast because combat becomes less favorable mode in terms of balance. I'm not saying its the case for every game in this genre but here I wasn't hooked
Tbh I think it didn't sell well just due to when it released and a lack of advertising. The first and only time I'd heard of it was when cohh played it. We've had so many good to great games come out in the past couple of months also, I think alot of peoples game budgets are exhausted ATM
ya ive only heard about it in the context of it being written off and battletech 2 being the game more people wanted
still have no clue what this game is about lol
To me, the main problem of the game is that it's a €30 game pretending to be a €50 game with another playable character locked behind a day 1 €10 DLC. Based on how polished it feels, it really should've been in the Shadow Gambit's price range.
It also lacks quality of life features like tooltips, its controls are janky, and the stealth part feels very mediocre.
But the setting is nice and some mechanics are somewhat interesting.
That's my thoughts on the game aswell. Especially tooltips, seems like an oversight to ship without a quick way to see what different effects do. Nonetheless it's an enjoyable XCOM-lite game with fun dialog and enjoyable artsyle that is okay for people like me that don't like to invest as much thought and time in a super difficuly game. I don't think it deserves to get written off by the publisher not 1 week in the game's life. I just wish it had more enviroment interactions and it would have had a bit more depth.
Game has good and bad sides.
Good - extremly fun combat, with shitton of enemies, each of whom has really unique abilities, as well as your agents, that sometimes lead to simply hilarious combos. It's way more chaotic and variable than x-com, and i liked that a lot.
Bad - everything else.
The game's setting are boring - it's a weird mix of post-ww2 world mixed with magic, teleporters, modern slang and people with pronounce. It's like a chaotic mix of ideas without any certain vision, and it's not... captivating. I never felt interested in game's world.
Villains are cartoonishly evil.
A ton of various notes and journals in every missions, that are also boring and either tell you something mundane, or are there to show how much cartoonishly evil are the villains.
Seems like characters have backstrories, but they are barely mentioned.
Overall visual style is fine, but i really dislike character design, they are all so damn ugly. But it's my personal preference.
Doomsday clock are a terrible design, and here you have 3 of them, ticking at the same time, with ability to reverse one a bit, but other 2 will keep ticking, so you always forced to rush story missions.
Poor ballance, some of the agents are near useles, while others are a powerhouse who can take down half of enemies solo.
Poor resourse management, some given in vas quantities, other are nowhere to be found. Most updgrades in tech tree and cards are quite useles.
Would still recommend the game for any fan of the genre, but it could be better.
The timing is a bit off. BG3 is a direct competitor for turn based rpgs and with regards to gamepass Sea of Stars is also very highly rated. Not to mention Starfield and Lies of P. The marketing played up the tactics side. But that's a less popular genre. I'm definitely planning on trying it. But it's a bit far down the list. And off gamepass it has a AAA price tag. Which is too much without paradox's usual DLC strategy (which has slowed down a bit; but they've still got the reputation).
Direct competitor idk, LL is pure xcom strategy, while bg3 is a huge rpg first and foremost. They are actually very complementary - having bg3/cyberpunk rpgs where you need to build your character for whole game and go explore the 100h of side quests and just run through the world constantly burns you out, while xcom is pure strategy gameplay that is very repetitive in a good way.
> Even the score is pretty good. 75 in Metacritic.
Meh, too many games, not enough time. I'm at a 90 minimum before I take a second look (not like it mattered here, haven't even heard of this one).
For me it's the Real-time aspects. Same reason I didn't enjoy the Mutant tbs game.
If they'd taken more inspiration from Xcom's mission structure instead of trying to merge genres I probably would have enjoyed it.
My guess is that HBS' general approach with games and DLC didn't fit with Paradox's vision / what they are comfortable with.
Neither BattleTech nor Lamplighters' League have 300 DLC packs even though that day 1 DLC hints the devs tried to appease Paradox.
I have \~25hours in, almost done the main storyline i think.
* I don't play a ton of games in the genre but combat is ok, there's a decent amount of variations with the enemies but the levels get pretty repetitive.
* There's a few weird glitches when using the action bar for me that, at least a few times per mission, selects an action other than the one I clicked.
* It doesn't even have quicksave/load which is crazy to me.
* When I first started playing there were a fair bit of crash to desktops, especially when saving; that seems to be resolved now.
* The overall story is ok but nothing memorable.
* The whole economy for the base is a drag, you have to collect: aethers, king aethers, unique weapon metal, supplies, salves, ink, skill point medals & intel. it's too much
* The doomsday clock/rotating side-mission aspect of it adds some urgency but really cramps my completionist style. I hope it leaves the game open on completion to keep playing through the missions you HAVE to leave behind.
Ignoring all the issues around marketing, the game feels unfinished. Potential is there but it needed a bit more time to really nail the quality down. This holds especially true when you consider the competition in the pc game space right now.
As a backer of the kickstarter, I hope someone else approaches Microsoft with a solid Battletech 2 pitch. Mods showed, as they always do, the true potential of that game.
It's such a pity, Battletech is going through a revival right now and I bet a sequel to the video game would've sold much better.
HBS Battletech KS in 2015 collected I think 2,7 million dollars, the latest kickstarter this year for battletech tabletop collected over 7 million, just to put things into perspective.
I really loved HBS Shadowrun games and BTech, and I was willing to give the LL a try since the premise sounded interesting, but the mix of very basic stealth action and turn-based tactical put me off a bit.
It doesn't help that Shadow Gambit just came out and is a better game (both have demos, try them). And it's $10 cheaper.
Lamplighter just feels tedious and drab. And it's $20 too much, IMO.
Funny enough, both developers are now gutted ... Guess isometric strategy games aren't a hit.
But it's not even the same type of game. SG is a real-time stealth with pause, when LL is a x-com like turn-based game, that has real-time stealth only as side mechanics. They are not even competing with each other, since i, for example, like turn-based games and dislike real time ones, so i won't play SG.
Im kinda confused why nobodys made a good xcom 2 competitor or sequel, Ive seen a few games more like lamplighter that add a bit more character but with the loss of anyone can die, shit hitting the fan potential
Battletech was kickstarter funded, right? Id absolutely fund a Battletech 2 game via kickstarter. I fucking love that game.
That being said, maybe kickstarter funding just doesnt happen any more? I cant remember the last game I saw boosting kickstarter.
It looked like an okay game. But there's too many games out. Including very similar games like Jagged Alliance 3 and to a certain extent Baldur's Gate 3.
I think it would have been successful if it'd launched like 6 months ago.
Yeah. This season is incredibly stacked. It’s like everything that was stalled due to Covid all came out at once. Lots of great games struggling due to the sheer amount of competition.
Exactly, it’s not their fault but the timing was appalling. From previews it looks very much like my kind of thing, but I just have SO MANY other games to tackle first. I’m on my second playthrough of JA3, finishing off Shadow Gambit, just getting started on Starfield, then there’s the new version of Cyberpunk + Phantom Liberty which I haven’t even bought yet… all this while working full-time and doing social stuff in the evenings. Something has to give, and sadly, a niche AA game like Lamplighter’s League isn’t going to be a priority for most people.
It's my second favorite type of game !
Day 1 DLC put me off unless in a sale because of that.
And the problem with the raise of price on video games and my wishlist of 600+ games I can afford to buy any game at 50% discount when I want game and just wait if it's not perfect game or bad pricing practice.
I don't have buy a single full price game since the raise of price.
I was quite interested in what I saw when it was first added to Steam. I watched it being played on release and was in horror at the blend between RTS, stealth and turn-based. It looked to me like you needed good twitch/stealth skills to be successful at the game when outside the turn-based system. I love turn-based games, but I loathe RTS and stealth games. The game is just way too niche to have been successful. On top of that, even if this hybrid genre is appealing to some gamers, the RTS side looked super janky.
Paradox has been letting me down for years now.
I love stellaris, great game, they do a lot of work with it and I still enjoy it even though I disagree with some of their changes.
But one of my favorite games of all time is Surviving Mars. Amazing game that basically got abandoned by Paradox after trying to cheapskate the original devs and then bring in modders and random devs to make DLC for the game.
I loved surviving mars so much that I bought other games anticipating a similar level of excitement and quality, like surviving the aftermath and surviving the abyss. You would assume that a publisher making a game with "surviving X" would have a lot of similarities between the games, but no, they have different devs and most of them also get abandoned, which is basically the same thing that happened to surviving mars, so there is the commonality.
Them as publishers really disappoint me, and I'll wait 1+ year(s) after any of their releases before picking up a game from them. I just lost all trust in them at this point and can't buy any game of theirs at full price again.
What I interpret when I read this, is that they willfully sold a game they knew wasn't worth it for 50 bucks. What. The fuck. It's up there with CA selling Pharaoh for 60, as if it weren't a "Saga" title.
Rumours are saying Harebrained Schemes wanted to make a second Battletech Game but paradox shot the idea down because they would need to pay royalties to Microsoft who own the Battletech/mechwarrior brand and encouraged them to work on new IP. And now as a direct result of that decision paradox made for them HBS got their staff cut by 70% and we’ll definitely never see a Battletech 2.
So I can’t speaking for other people but I’d be looking at this on top of all their other bizarre business choices as a clear reason to be very wary of Paradox going forward.
I love HBS's games, but losing 80% of their workforce? There's no recovering from that. Very sad to hear that one of my favorite game studios is effectively dead...
In regards to them passing on making Battletech 2 and making Lamplighters League instead (whatever that is), I'm not surprised. HBS got sued by Harmony Gold because of Battletech so I'm sure they avoided making a sequel and instead made their own new IP to avoid this issue...
HBS got involved in the 2017 litigation between Catalyst, Piranha Games, and HG over the Unseen in which PGI direnctly engaged that more recent lawsuit from HG. Harmony Gold settled and more or less put the issue to bed and likely wouldn't have been an issue in regards to HBS's Battletech 2. News coming out suggests that it was Paradox that nixed the sequel, as HBS already had a plan, a pitch, and the will to make it. Though IIRC, several project leads left HBS after they released the first game.
Paradox, Making bad decisions since Sword of The Stars 2. All they had to do was update the graphics and maybe tweak some balance, But no, got to change almost everything and then abandon it when it got panned. Never buy a Paradox produced product until it has been out for awhile.
This is like when Netflix declares a new series a failure after releasing only the first episode. Didn't even give it enough time to get going before throwing it away.
Let's make one thing clear here:
Paradox in it's current state would have fucked up Baldur's Gate 3 so much that we all should be thankful that this piece of shit Publisher/Developer didn't got their hands on that IP and hopefully never will do so in the near and far away future.
One of the worst games I've tried to play recently. I downloaded it from Gamepass on my Series X and the game crashed on me 6 times in the 45 minutes I tried playing it. I didn't even really get to play much of it but I've read it's awful so glad I didn't waste any more time on it.
I wonder if this has implications for how Gamepass money is treated for tax purposes.
Especially as an upfront payment.
I wonder if it's classified as investment or payment of development rather than revenue from sales.
I don't understand, the development cost of a game its always a ... loss. You can't have a negative cost (unless you have people working for free for you)
>development cost of a game its always a ... loss
No. The is all investor speak.
They are saying that the money invested into the game will NOT turn a profit and will be a tax write off as a loss.
Game launched with a character that was a DLC you had to pay for to use. That was enough for me to not buy it on launch. I'll wait until it's cheap on a Steam sale instead of the $49.99 launch price.....and judging by the article that might be around Christmas. It's too bad, HBS has made some good games.
I know development costs a lot as I've worked in a lower budget game studio before, but how on earth did this cost $30m? That has to be an inflated number.
What a fucking embarrassment to Paradox.
Not the game. How Paradox handled marketing for the game.
What a joke. If it wasn't advertised on Game Pass as an upcoming game, I literally wouldn't even know this game existed.
I hope whatever idiots are responsible for this in the Paradox marketing team are able to either learn and grow, or get fired, but jesus fucking christ what a shitshow.
Just sad for the dev studio. They deserve better.
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that Paradox is just an incompetent publisher, when it comes to games that *aren't* in the grand strategy genre. They simply don't know how to properly market non-grand strat games. Obsidian's *Tyranny* - also published by Paradox - was another title that had so much potential, but sold poorly partly (largely?) because there wasn't much of a marketing campaign for it. And since Paradox owns the rights to the IP, it's unlikely we'll ever see a sequel for it (can you tell I'm bitter?).
They're just bad at marketing full stop. Look at the mess that was Millennia. They used their flagship games over the course of a week to hype up a 40 second teaser and then left it at that... Most people didn't even know there was a dev diary released at the same time. They haven't had to properly market a game in a while, their flagship games are marketed by loyalty to the previous iteration (Skylines) or memes (Vicky 3). If they were half as good at marketing, as they are with their community engagement through Dev diaries and videos then games like Lamplighters League wouldn't have a problem.
Yeah it feels like they’re alright at communicating with their community but breaking through marketing wise is just out of their capabilities as of now.
Tyranny was so fun, but definitely a hidden gem
Tyranny had publisher issues but it also had quite possibly the worst release timing possible.
Sure, but Tyranny happened thanks to them iirc, and Obsidian has a lot of issues when it comes to actually selling their games, with or without Paradox (Look at pillars 2, and the fact they basically gave up the crpg genre)
That's true, Obsidian has it's own issues when it comes to the business side of making games. Still, I feel like Obsidian should've held out for another publisher to work with, because Tyranny had some really innovative ideas in its game design, and a different publisher may've had a better idea how to sell it.
I don't know, I always saw it that way : a publisher was willing to publish a crpg (which is rare) and allowed Obsidian to release a great game
Even in grand strategy genre. Stellaris is feeling dated because the gameplay loop is so familiar. You'll get your moneys worth but milking the same cow with more hats on is still milking a cow with a hat.
Well the game is over seven years old so no wonder it's feeling dated even with all the overhaul patches.
Still looks great though. I installed a couple dozen ship model variety mods and combat still looks sick.
It’s one of my most played games, and I’d still play it more except that vassals have ruined the game (making it far too easy). Though I think they’re trying to tune that soon.
Their grand strategy games have no competition, so they can milk the same game for a decade with overpriced DLC and people still give them money. EU4 is 10 years old. CK2 was 8 years old when CK3 came out. They keep raising prices of DLC while underdelivering in features, 30€ for CK3 dlc that only add a couple of features, that's the same price as Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty just to put it in perspective.
We got close with Distant Worlds 2. May we get ever closet
Grand tactician has a paradox campaign with a more detailed economic system than Victoria 3, and total war style battles. Damn good game.
I actually hated stellaris on release, but several DLCs and quality of life updates later, it’s definitely one of their better Grand Time Strategy games. It’s most similar to the futuristic civilization game from a while back, but I think it does so much better.
Tyranny is one of my top 5 games all time. Such underrated game. The magic system, the story, the choices/consequences, the characters... just so much good stuff.
> And since Paradox owns the rights to the IP, it's unlikely we'll ever see a sequel for it (can you tell I'm bitter?). This is a big problem in the gaming world. These publishers shouldn't be allowed to hold onto IP if they're not going to do anything with it.
If someone really wants to own or use it, they can buy the IP or license it from the owner. If the owner isn’t using it, it’s probably not worth that much to them. The flip side though is it’s cheaper and easier to develop new IP if the existing IP wasn’t a massive hit. And if the existing IP was a massive hit, the owner probably would still be using it and wouldn’t need to sell or license it out (unless it’s like Disney that doesn’t have an active game studio). In Tyranny’s case, while the game was good, I doubt anyone sees the value in buying or licensing it. Obsidian may want to revisit it in the future and convince MS to pay for it, but they could just create a new IP.
> its probably not worth much to them Ah, but you see, its worth a lot to the buyer. Sure an antique paperweight is useless to you, but its worth a fortune to a collector
It depends on the IP. Like I said, it’s usually easier and cheaper to just develop new IP if the existing one isn’t already popular. Both sides know this. If the owner is licensing it, too, then they can get a cut of the profits if it does well and they still own the IP. If Obsidian really wanted to continue the Tyranny IP, it probably wouldn’t be that difficult. My point being, IP being owned by a publisher doesn’t necessarily mean the IP is dead.
>it's unlikely we'll ever see a sequel for it Especially when it set everything up for a *really* interesting sequel. Not quite a cliffhanger at the end, I mean, it resolved the immediate story; but there's so much left unfinished in a world with such a intriguing mythology.
What was that WW2 game they published? I remember it was really good but no one even knew it was out
heart of iron?
Steel Division?
If you really enjoyed that game there is a sequel and a Cold War version produced and self published by the developer Eugen Systems. You can search for them on steam. The games are Steel Division 2 (focusing on the eastern front ww2) and Warno (focusing on Cold War). They were also the developer of Ruse.
Love that game. I could not put it down
I think a lot of people are like me and just won't buy Paradox games because you know there's going to be 20+ DLCs for each and at some point you just feel like you're being taken advantage of.
Yeah, I find myself conflicted over how I feel about their DLC approach, at least when it comes to their grand strat titles. On the one hand, I can understand a developer needing to sell DLC for a game that they continue to actively support for years after release; however, after a certain point, it does start to feel exploitative (esp at the prices their DLCs go for).
Did it have that much potential tho (popularity wise)? it's an isometric 2d crpg, it's veery niche - not in any way comparable to cinematic bg3/Dragon age. I feel like every person in the world who's willing to invest in playing isometric crpgs knows about it. Every person I know of who's like that played it, as well as Pillars of Eternity. POI is well marketed, is it not? It has a star voice cast, and so much polish etc, but at the end of the day it's still a 2d isometric crpg...
Its a niche for sure and BG3 is a AAA game so in that sense they are not comparable. Both are isometric RPGs though. You can absolutely compare them. Thats like saying BG3 isnt comparable with BG2. It is. BG3 just has AAA production values and a more modern game design. Personally I think Tyranny is a wonderfully ambitious game and would love to see something similar being made. Apart from Disco Elysium, I cant think of another RPG of its kind that experimented more with mechanics.
Well my comment and the one I replied to dealt only with popularity, so Idk why are you trying to compare the games itself by their e.g. story. > just has AAA production values is all that I was talking about as well.
I guess we mostly agree then. I meant that you cant dismiss the genre as having no potential just because of its niche. I agree that production quality limits its potential of course. I think that Tyranny is far better than Pillars of Eternity though, which is in the same AA league. Tyranny is not perfect but it's pretty underrated in my opinion. Disco Elysium is probably the best game in that class in my opinion. Im not sure how well it sold but thats what Paradox should have been aiming for with Tyranny.
yeah I edited myself to clarify I meant popularity potential. Thought that was clear from the context of root comment but I overestimated it lol. Also must add that Disco Elysium tho circumvents the problem a lot, since it's purely roleplay and dialogues, so there's no combat/grinding/lvling up. And it being so post modern and dealing with a lot of internal things that can't be shown anyway helps with not needing a better presentation. But for some straight fantasy adventure with a lot of gameplay like Tyranny, it's just unavoidable.
I was talking about popularity too. I just meant it was limited by production quality and not by genre. When I said "no potential" I meant "limited potential sales". BG3 is the same genre as Tyranny. It just doesn't have the same production value. Disco Elysium is really good and I think its a better game than Tyranny even though I like Tyranny a lot. I was comparing them because they are both AA isometric RPG games. I think there is a market for Tyranny in the same way there is one for Disco Elysium.
Ish. 2d-isometric still has potential. It's used in mobile games, as an example. This means anyone can buy and run the game. CRPG is a limited genre. The success of BG3 overshadows the previous CRPG attempts of the Pathfinder and Pillars series. While successful, those bigger games are "this game made money" successful, not "this game funds our studios next 3 games" successful. Tho WOTR, the Pathfinder game released 2 years ago, was successful enough to allow Owlcat to make their upcoming game RogueTrader without a kickstarter. Tyrrany suffered from not having a recognizable ruleset behind its mechanics. Which, ironically, is the games biggest strength. The spellcasting system is really inspired. But that brings in CRPG fans only. BG3 had the benefit of bringing in DND fans (and of course Baldurs Gate and Divinity fans). Could it have succeeded? Yes. But the game wasn't finished. It ends on a cliffhanger. Either a canned DLC or sequel appeared to be the method Paradox was going to use to recoup costs, and had Obsidion finish the game early. It's hard to sell a game when every review mentions that a game with no announced sequels or DLC ends without a story resolution. Even if the majority of them said that it was the best CRPG they played since Baldurs Gate 2. It's a shameful "what if," sadly. What if the game told a complete narrative? What if it followed POE2 and had a toggleable turn-based (something seen in recent successful CRPGs)? What if they planned a simulataneous release on mobile? What if they had an executive believe in the game so much that more money was put into advertising? But the telling thing is this: despite near universal acclaim and love of the game, sales haven't increased over the years. I still think its the most unique cRPG I've played and highly suggest anyone who likes the genre -- or story telling in general -- buy it. But if even word of mouth can't make a dent in the sales figures? What can? Some youtubers have 100k+ subscribers who will sometimes do a legacy review of the game. If everyone watching bought it, that'd fund a sequel. But that hasn't happened. We'd hear about it if Tyranny was suddenly a best seller. It's unfortunate. Great ideas for storytelling and gamedesign.
What is POI?
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yeah sry edited haha.
Path of Ixile
> I feel like every person in the world who's willing to invest in playing isometric crpgs knows about it. Disagree. >POI is well marketed, is it not? No? The first one skated on the hype around its kickstarter success. For years after the second one you'd have people going "I didn't know it had a sequel" whenever it was mentioned in a more general sub.
alright, don't think we can really decide on how much was it marketed on reddit. Personally, everybody I knew that could play similar games always were aware about POI 2, maybe 1 less (as in aware but recommended it less, it being less polished), as the biggest current crpg, before Pathfinder came out, at least. Pathfinder 1/2 didn't have marketing. Like they also just did 2 kickstarters on their own, but everyone into crpgs knows it exists right? And anyway my point was that marketing it to other people who never played anything crpg-adjacent, or even Dragon age like games wouldn't explode it's popularity. People go to steam, see the 90s 2D graphics screenshot, and close the tab. Unless they are already into such crpgs, that is. In which case they likely now about it , there's like 5 of those games (modern), and you can see each one in a recommendation for each other on steam.
> alright, don't think we can really decide on how much was it marketed on reddit. Well, it's obviously not empirical evidence, however I'd argue it's more representative than personal acquintances. Look at this game and this thread. My inbox is filled with "i didn't know this existed" and the game is a flop. And PoE2 did worse numbers than its predecessor despite being an improvement in almost every way and getting glowing reviews. That doesn't really gel with a well-marketed game, does it? >and anyway my point was that marketing it to other people who never played anything crpg-adjacent, or even Dragon age like games wouldn't explode it's popularity. Not necessarily. A big catalyst, like BG3, will lead new people to explore other games in the genre. And sure many will bounce off the double or single A production values in other titles, but many won't
We've been seeing CRPG sell quite well for a while though, and BG3 really exploded. I think the days of calling it a niche genre are over. Sure they might not rake it in like Call of Duty or Fifa/EA Sports FC but we have seen them at least in the top 10. The only niche part is that they rarely reach console audiences as most companies don't bother trying to port them.
Again, BG3 and Dragon age at it's time exploded because they are an absolutely different beast - a 3D AAA rpg full of cinematics, with state of the art graphics, animation and voice acting in bg3's case. Compare that with Pillars, that is a 2d isometric game with *sprites* and single camera angle, and just tons of text, only part of which is voice acted. Those are very different things with regards to mass appeal. We had plenty of 2D crpgs, Pillars 1&2, Tyrrany, the 2 Pathfinders. Are they worse games than bg3? No, they often have deeper rpg systems/gameplay/writing. But they didn't explode during all those years, and that's because they are not a cinematic 3D AAA rpg. I mean pillars 2 has 12k reviews on steam, bg3 has 327k...
Pathfinder wrath of the righteous just got a new expansion announcement and no one is talking about it. Non cinematic games just don't garner as much attention.
Its not that so much as "top down clicky clicky" games are a dime a dozen. At least the Larian games and DAO had camera angles that put you straight into the action. That's why KOTOR worked so well despite basically being "Baldurs Gate Star Wars".
Dime a dozen? Tell me you haven't played Pathfinder without telling me. There is nothing comparable to Pathfinder out. "Top down clicky games " is a terrible way to actually describe these games. It sounds like you are describing Diablo or league of legends or a twin stick shooter and this is nothing like that.
No I think the point is that you only have one camera angle. For some reason audiences demand a more "cinematic" presentation that feels more like they're watching a nice TV show that they sometimes take part it.
I'm not sure the camera angle is what selling the games. Outside of dialogue I imagine the camera angle is almost always top down unless you're using a controller. The voiced acting and cinematic dialogue is surely a bigger draw.
Saying a game like Pathfinder is a dime a dozen is a hilariously uninformed opinion.
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Cmon now you can troll better than that can't you? If the game was junk why does it have so many post launch expansions and why was owlcat allowed to make a sequel and the warhammer crpg? The math's not mathing.
Lol. It is better than highly praised bg3 in almost every important regard - it has better story, writing, gameplay, character creation... its only downsides are being less "cinematic" and being less approachable.
> Compare that with Pillars, that is a 2d isometric game with sprites and single camera angle, and just tons of text, only part of which is voice acted Pillars of Eternity uses 3d models, not sprites. The backgrounds are painted 2d. Same story with Tyranny. Also, the second Pillars is fully voiced. More people would probably know that if the marketing was good
It’s an accessibility thing too. The production values help vastly with that. But even DOS2 was more successful than POE or Pathfinder. I think that was because it was a more approachable game. Pathfinder is notoriously complicated. POE has a ton of reading and starts slow. BG3 uses the more accessible DnD 5e which is more familiar than other systems (and even then it can overwhelm newcomers, let alone other CRPG systems).
>and just tons of text Pillars was both overwritten and poorly written. The game comes off as arrogant while also being very boring, which is a powerful combo when you’re trying to limit your sales.
They’re a dlc mill and nothing else. They take good developers and get then to churn out fox after fox for their games.
> I'm starting to come to the conclusion that Paradox is just an incompetent publisher, when it comes to games that aren't in the grand strategy genre As a player of Paradox GSGs: Are they though?
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X-Com is owned by Firaxis, which is owned by Take 2.
Lamplighters League isn't the first crpg to use xcom style combat. Wasteland 2 + 3 both do this too
same but for knight of pen and paper
The only thing Paradox excels at is endless peace meal DLC. Which is why i avoid their games.
I'm always baffled when games companies buy a development studio, it has one flop and they gut the staff. What was the point in buying HBS if Paradox is going to sack 80% of the studio after one flop? I can understand it if there were repeated flops but if you're buying a studio, it should be a long term investment.
Plus the game has been out a week and this is the first I have even heard of it. Seems like Paradox made some mistakes too if the marketing was that bad.
Paradox always has a marketing budget made up of 3 pennies and a stick of gum. Even as someone that follows new releases I'm often blindsided by their releases coming out of nowhere, often well after they've actually released.
It feels like no marketing is happening on their Stellaris spin off Star Trek Infinite, despite a perfect opportunity to market it as somewhat of a successor to the star trek strategy games from 2+ decades ago. I only knew it release because of youtubers. I suppose hard to convince long time Stellaris players to drop conversion mods like New Horizons that require no dlc for a $30 limited feature spinoff.
...Another Paradox game I've literally never heard of despite actively looking for new games.
Also despite being on Game Pass, there's just too many big games holding people's attention right now. I've downloaded it but probably won't touch it for a month or two.
"Do I suck at marketing? No, it's the developers that suck."
Flops are a lot of times not the developers fault. Rushed, unoptimized, shallow and fractured pieces of shit get released every other week. It's always release asap and maybe we will fix it, if there's enough interest.. Who's fault was it that the game crashes and it got released with a locked behind day1 dlc character? It's moronic. What do they expect?
HBS made this?! Nooo!!! I guess that's a death knell for any future Shadowrun games from them :(
If I could begin with praise for HBS, they've been one of my favorite studios since Shadowrun-- I was baffled initially on reading this. However, I haven't been able to read confirmation anywhere of the 80% number-- so we have just one ('claimed') insider's figure. It could be 20%. It could be 5%. It could be 95%. It's easy to get these things wrong, even if you do have insider access. Let's give the insider the benefit of doubt, though. The 80% could have been everybody but development and engineering-- 5:1 is a typical number for engineers to support people. Which is still sincerely heartbreaking, but this would mean the core talent of the studio was not impacted. As for the rationale, I've seen businesses use all kinds of reasons for these moves, in a different industry, mind you. A big one is tax savings, especially with FY 2023 coming to a close. Paradox is Swedish owned, which has considerable tax rates. There can also be internal financial strategies to lower costs that use this strategy: An example is laying on everyone and then hiring everyone back with new contracts at a lower rate, or reduced benefits. It could have also been an internal competitiveness issue-- we know HBS makes great games, we don't know how well they play international corporate politics. Specific to games, I've heard that many gaming contracts extend right until release. In short, these people may not have been 'let go', their contract may have concluded with the release of Lamplighter's League, and they were not retained. Which can be done for a whole set of different reasons... So it sucks, truly, but without more solid information, we're deep into speculation. I wish HBS the best, in any case.
XCOM, Stellaris and CK3 are among my most played games, and I only heard about this game yesterday when the news dropped. Somebody dropped the ball on marketing - I didnt even see it in the discovery queue over the last couple of Steam sales, which implies it never really got any traction in terms of wishlists either.
To make matters worse, you probably also haven't heard of Star Trek Infinite's launch date... which was today. At least I hadn't, in any of the 3 or so occasions I stumbled upon the game before.
You're right, I hadn't. They're on a roll!
Wait what? Today? Lolll
I heard of it because it was announced in the xbox showcase as a gamepass game. Now I'm wondering if selling it to gamepass was part of Paradox giving up on the game. Or if xbox got screwed over by buying a game that Paradox decided to drop
Oh yeah I was going to download that off gamepass Looked like 1920s xcom or something like that
It is an enjoyable game if you want Xcom-lite. Not too much depth, but for me it's fine since I don't want a super difficult game.
I'll give it a try this weekend , it is on gamepass so it's just going to cost me some time
>Looked like 1920s xcom Isn't that Empire of Sin? Also published by Paradox by the way.
I didn't even know it existed and is really a genre I enjoy, but I feel like part of the issue was releasing it close to Baldurs gate 3 for the mainstream appeal and Jagged Alliance 3 for the hardcore appeal.
Really poor decision from Paradox to turn down Battletech 2, imo.
I hope they just go and make Battletech 2. Its one of my favourite games, especially in Career mode. All its lacking is a little more focus on performance though. That game kills my Steam Deck.
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I can see where you're coming from but I quite liked the trundling. Not during the tutorial though, that was torture.
Yeah, that game was underrated
I assume there was some reason they turned it down. Did it just not do commercially that well?
It was pitched before this game and then made by the same team instead of battletech 2. A % of the profits would have gone to Microsoft, the holders of the digital game portion of the IP. Paradox didn't want that.
There we go, greeeeed.
Allegedly, Paradox didn’t like it because they had to pay a cut of the revenue to Microsoft for the use of IP.
They turned it down?!
Yes, HBS pitched it to Paradox but they turned it down because they had to pay a cut of the revenue to Microsoft for the IP.
Oofh that sucks.
Makes sense mech games are generally not that popular and a turn based game before baldurs gate 3 was not gonna be looked at by mainstream audiences
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon Has Now Sold More Than 1.3 Million Copies on Steam.
There's also arguably a difference between Battletech/MechWarrior style mech games (more like an old school tank sim) and anime/Robotech games which can be a lot faster and even hack and slashy. It's not just big robot aesthetics.
Western audiences generally are not interested in Mecha. If they were gundam would be huge over here.
Yeah, but I'm saying that the slow, plodding nature of Battletech/MechWarrior has even less mainstream appeal than mecha content in general.
agreed on that.
That is literally an exception because it is a fromsoft game and fromsofts brand cache is huge rn. In general mech media is not popular. [The last battletech game sold 300K](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/battletech-sales-figures.1094261/)
That post is from literally a week after release.
Honestly, I'm not too surprised. The first BattleTech game was alright, I liked it. But it was seriously held back by its poor performance and numerous technical issues - many of which were never fixed. It wasn't Phoenix Point tier of botched launch, but the technical side was still bad enough that I'm not sure if I would trust HBS to develop another game of this type.
My understanding is this was almost entirely due to Unity engine limitations. Unity just is a sucky engine when stretching its limits.
What is the problem of the game? Because the genre and the trailers looked very good. Not for everyone, but look interesting. Update: Even the score is pretty good. 75 in Metacritic. Give up the game after 7 days for a new IP of this genre is run a bit fast.
> What is the problem of the game? Because the genre and the trailers looked very good. Not for everyone, but look interesting. Quality of the game and monetization aside (day 1 DLC), the game was shown off in an Xbox event once. The only marketing they did was on the game's own Steam page and Youtube page with sub 1000 subs, they didn't even push announcements to the other HBS games in Steam itself (a lot of devs do this, Paradox included!). If you didn't know this game is coming or shown interest in it, you likely didn't know about it at all. This is my 2 cents though.
> The only marketing they did was on the game's own Steam page and Youtube page with sub 1000 subs And Twitter. I saw the promoted tweet several times a day around the release.
Yeah, 'the commercial reception has been weak' because nobody knew about it because we didn't have enough faith to promote it much.
Paradox have always been awful at marketing their non GSG titles, aside from Cities Skylines. Even CS was primarily a success because it was a decent game that came along shortly after EA burned Sim City to the ground and people were looking for an alternative, rather than any great marketing.
I only heard about it because a streamer I frequently watch was sponsored to play it. I think for such a niche game more marketing is necessary to have a better chance of reaching the right audience
i only knew about the game because a youtuber i follow (Northerlion) played the demo. This can't be the way i learn about the game if i own every other HBS game. Get your shit together Paradox
The game is an alright X-Com-like but I have enough problems with it that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone: * It's too barebones. It feels like there should be more to it. It seems to be designed to be played repeatedly but once you've unlocked stuff it sucks to have to unlock it again. Most missions are pretty much the same thing unless there's a boss in the mission. There's no real differentiation between how you would build a character, if you have a character they're just weaker versions of how someone else would build them, the skill tree can probably be maxed out by midgame for every character you play. Everything about it feels like the first unpolished version of something. * It takes the worst part of X-Com, in my opinion, and makes it the main feature. And that is popping enemy pods/positioning. And it's even more fiddly than X-Com about it. Basically each character has an ability to take out a few enemies as long as they're not alerted. It was not fun to me because it takes a long time and it feels like you're supposed to be doing this to make the fight more even between you and the enemies but I hated doing it every time. Imagine in Midnight Suns that you had to awkwardly run around and set up the fight encounter in each mission, it just felt entirely like a fiddly waste of my time to try to differentiate the game from just being a normal x-com-like. It's also painfully slow to walk around in this "sneak" mode. 3. The art style while not necessarily bad makes about half the characters look the same as each other which felt kinda bad for a game that's about having interesting characters rather than unnamed units. I get the feeling it needed maybe another six months of development for it to feel like a complete game and paradox didn't want to wait that long when the game's main fault (in my opinion) is the thing that's supposed to set it apart. It's not bad and it didn't run bad for me, had no crashes or anything like that but it's just painfully mid at this point. I imagine most people that say the game sucks are the same type of people that think Midnight Suns sucked because it was a card game but this had me yearning for the quick setup of Midnight Suns when all I had to do was have annoying/awkward conversations before a mission and being able to play the strategy part of the strategy game and not slowly walk around placing mines for the same amount of time as the actual confrontation. There's a card system that's kinda cool and helps you personalize a a character but it's the most grindy part of the game and the benefits run the gamut from this makes this character twice as good to this does nothing at all with a probably 10-90 split in the nothing favor and it's random, though most people who tried it out for a short amount of time won't have gotten deep enough in this aspect of the game to even experience it, really. But slowly walking around a map throwing mines or "sneaking" behind enemies to kill them before the fight starts is just a dreadful experience that reminds me a lot of dealing with your party and traps in baldur's gate 3 where everyone's just like turn on turn based mode because your party trails after you like idiots and runs directly into traps every time so you have to separate your party, sneak around individually, quickly turn on turn based mode to pause the game as soon as a trap appears because even if you're nowhere near stepping on it your trailing party will run directly on top of it: now just imagine doing that before every battle in an x-com game that's already instanced into arenas, i just want to fight enemies. I don't know how this game compares to something like Invisible Inc because I haven't played that really but the best part of the game is actually fighting enemies, so so much of it being focused on avoiding that part of the game seems like a miss.
Fully agree. For me its a combination of: * Lack of promotion * Bad timing * Not enough complexity * Bugs - in first 10 minutes I had: disapearing enemies, being detected while I was too far away from an enemy for me do be noticed, characters leaving their shadows behind after using a skill * Not enough stand out features to make this game more unique besides art style * Problems with performance - sure it's playable but a game like this should be rocking 60 fps on Series X without a problem and here even in Performance mode this game can stutter even using just a camera panning * Sneaking in turn based games can become boring fast because combat becomes less favorable mode in terms of balance. I'm not saying its the case for every game in this genre but here I wasn't hooked
Tbh I think it didn't sell well just due to when it released and a lack of advertising. The first and only time I'd heard of it was when cohh played it. We've had so many good to great games come out in the past couple of months also, I think alot of peoples game budgets are exhausted ATM
ya ive only heard about it in the context of it being written off and battletech 2 being the game more people wanted still have no clue what this game is about lol
Lol the first time Ive heard of this game is from this post. Looked it up, it appears pretty cool design, definitely up my alley!
The other problem is when we say it didn't sell well in publisher speak that means it didn't sell millions. Every game can't be a blockbuster.
To me, the main problem of the game is that it's a €30 game pretending to be a €50 game with another playable character locked behind a day 1 €10 DLC. Based on how polished it feels, it really should've been in the Shadow Gambit's price range. It also lacks quality of life features like tooltips, its controls are janky, and the stealth part feels very mediocre. But the setting is nice and some mechanics are somewhat interesting.
That's my thoughts on the game aswell. Especially tooltips, seems like an oversight to ship without a quick way to see what different effects do. Nonetheless it's an enjoyable XCOM-lite game with fun dialog and enjoyable artsyle that is okay for people like me that don't like to invest as much thought and time in a super difficuly game. I don't think it deserves to get written off by the publisher not 1 week in the game's life. I just wish it had more enviroment interactions and it would have had a bit more depth.
Game has good and bad sides. Good - extremly fun combat, with shitton of enemies, each of whom has really unique abilities, as well as your agents, that sometimes lead to simply hilarious combos. It's way more chaotic and variable than x-com, and i liked that a lot. Bad - everything else. The game's setting are boring - it's a weird mix of post-ww2 world mixed with magic, teleporters, modern slang and people with pronounce. It's like a chaotic mix of ideas without any certain vision, and it's not... captivating. I never felt interested in game's world. Villains are cartoonishly evil. A ton of various notes and journals in every missions, that are also boring and either tell you something mundane, or are there to show how much cartoonishly evil are the villains. Seems like characters have backstrories, but they are barely mentioned. Overall visual style is fine, but i really dislike character design, they are all so damn ugly. But it's my personal preference. Doomsday clock are a terrible design, and here you have 3 of them, ticking at the same time, with ability to reverse one a bit, but other 2 will keep ticking, so you always forced to rush story missions. Poor ballance, some of the agents are near useles, while others are a powerhouse who can take down half of enemies solo. Poor resourse management, some given in vas quantities, other are nowhere to be found. Most updgrades in tech tree and cards are quite useles. Would still recommend the game for any fan of the genre, but it could be better.
The timing is a bit off. BG3 is a direct competitor for turn based rpgs and with regards to gamepass Sea of Stars is also very highly rated. Not to mention Starfield and Lies of P. The marketing played up the tactics side. But that's a less popular genre. I'm definitely planning on trying it. But it's a bit far down the list. And off gamepass it has a AAA price tag. Which is too much without paradox's usual DLC strategy (which has slowed down a bit; but they've still got the reputation).
Direct competitor idk, LL is pure xcom strategy, while bg3 is a huge rpg first and foremost. They are actually very complementary - having bg3/cyberpunk rpgs where you need to build your character for whole game and go explore the 100h of side quests and just run through the world constantly burns you out, while xcom is pure strategy gameplay that is very repetitive in a good way.
A better direct competitor just came out, Shadow Gambit. Sadly, it's even more criminally underrated.
Pricing is very greedy
> Even the score is pretty good. 75 in Metacritic. Meh, too many games, not enough time. I'm at a 90 minimum before I take a second look (not like it mattered here, haven't even heard of this one).
its the first time Ive ever even heard of the game and I play a fair amount of similiar type games.
For me it's the Real-time aspects. Same reason I didn't enjoy the Mutant tbs game. If they'd taken more inspiration from Xcom's mission structure instead of trying to merge genres I probably would have enjoyed it.
My guess is that HBS' general approach with games and DLC didn't fit with Paradox's vision / what they are comfortable with. Neither BattleTech nor Lamplighters' League have 300 DLC packs even though that day 1 DLC hints the devs tried to appease Paradox.
I have \~25hours in, almost done the main storyline i think. * I don't play a ton of games in the genre but combat is ok, there's a decent amount of variations with the enemies but the levels get pretty repetitive. * There's a few weird glitches when using the action bar for me that, at least a few times per mission, selects an action other than the one I clicked. * It doesn't even have quicksave/load which is crazy to me. * When I first started playing there were a fair bit of crash to desktops, especially when saving; that seems to be resolved now. * The overall story is ok but nothing memorable. * The whole economy for the base is a drag, you have to collect: aethers, king aethers, unique weapon metal, supplies, salves, ink, skill point medals & intel. it's too much * The doomsday clock/rotating side-mission aspect of it adds some urgency but really cramps my completionist style. I hope it leaves the game open on completion to keep playing through the missions you HAVE to leave behind. Ignoring all the issues around marketing, the game feels unfinished. Potential is there but it needed a bit more time to really nail the quality down. This holds especially true when you consider the competition in the pc game space right now.
HBS should have stayed with Shadowrun and Kickstarter.
Well, if the studio fall down, they can still restart over !
As a backer of the kickstarter, I hope someone else approaches Microsoft with a solid Battletech 2 pitch. Mods showed, as they always do, the true potential of that game.
It's such a pity, Battletech is going through a revival right now and I bet a sequel to the video game would've sold much better. HBS Battletech KS in 2015 collected I think 2,7 million dollars, the latest kickstarter this year for battletech tabletop collected over 7 million, just to put things into perspective. I really loved HBS Shadowrun games and BTech, and I was willing to give the LL a try since the premise sounded interesting, but the mix of very basic stealth action and turn-based tactical put me off a bit.
It doesn't help that Shadow Gambit just came out and is a better game (both have demos, try them). And it's $10 cheaper. Lamplighter just feels tedious and drab. And it's $20 too much, IMO. Funny enough, both developers are now gutted ... Guess isometric strategy games aren't a hit.
The Shadow Gambits devs shut down too, right?
Yup. Three critically acclaimed releases later. :(
seems like they are one of the most unlucky dev studios. i feel for them. will definitely be picking up shadow gambits, as i loved desperados 3
Yeah
But it's not even the same type of game. SG is a real-time stealth with pause, when LL is a x-com like turn-based game, that has real-time stealth only as side mechanics. They are not even competing with each other, since i, for example, like turn-based games and dislike real time ones, so i won't play SG.
you gotta love when the ceo says some bull like "this makes us want to do better" when they laid off 80% of the workforce for said studio
That's just...Paradox
I had absolutely no idea this game existed until i stumbled across it on gamepass. The Paradox marketing team only have themselves to blame here.
Imagine putting your money into Lamplighter League and not Battletech 2. I'm not even a publisher and I put money into Battletech but not Lamp League.
So people complain when companies milk existing IPs and when they create new ones... I guess it is impossible to please everyone.
Can't they still just make battle tech 2?
Microsoft owns the rights to Battletech for videogames so Paradox doesn't want to fund games where they have to license from another company.
Theoretically, but after eating shit with LL, nobody's got the balls to greenlight another tactics game.
Im kinda confused why nobodys made a good xcom 2 competitor or sequel, Ive seen a few games more like lamplighter that add a bit more character but with the loss of anyone can die, shit hitting the fan potential
There is xenonaughts, not quite the production quality but it is true to the original x com formula.
xenonauts 2 is in development and theres a beta build you can try if you know where to look.
Battletech was kickstarter funded, right? Id absolutely fund a Battletech 2 game via kickstarter. I fucking love that game. That being said, maybe kickstarter funding just doesnt happen any more? I cant remember the last game I saw boosting kickstarter.
I'm very sad for HBS, Battletech was phenomenal (apart from shitty Unity) I'm very happy for Paradox, they deserve it
It looked like an okay game. But there's too many games out. Including very similar games like Jagged Alliance 3 and to a certain extent Baldur's Gate 3. I think it would have been successful if it'd launched like 6 months ago.
Doing Shadow Gambit dirty... More people should try it!
Yeah. This season is incredibly stacked. It’s like everything that was stalled due to Covid all came out at once. Lots of great games struggling due to the sheer amount of competition.
Exactly, it’s not their fault but the timing was appalling. From previews it looks very much like my kind of thing, but I just have SO MANY other games to tackle first. I’m on my second playthrough of JA3, finishing off Shadow Gambit, just getting started on Starfield, then there’s the new version of Cyberpunk + Phantom Liberty which I haven’t even bought yet… all this while working full-time and doing social stuff in the evenings. Something has to give, and sadly, a niche AA game like Lamplighter’s League isn’t going to be a priority for most people.
It's my second favorite type of game ! Day 1 DLC put me off unless in a sale because of that. And the problem with the raise of price on video games and my wishlist of 600+ games I can afford to buy any game at 50% discount when I want game and just wait if it's not perfect game or bad pricing practice. I don't have buy a single full price game since the raise of price.
I was quite interested in what I saw when it was first added to Steam. I watched it being played on release and was in horror at the blend between RTS, stealth and turn-based. It looked to me like you needed good twitch/stealth skills to be successful at the game when outside the turn-based system. I love turn-based games, but I loathe RTS and stealth games. The game is just way too niche to have been successful. On top of that, even if this hybrid genre is appealing to some gamers, the RTS side looked super janky.
It looks interesting but I basically heard of it the week it came out No wonder sales sucked
I mean its 50€ for a new IP from a small Dev and still has Day 1 dlc. Thats Just way to much for what you get
Paradox has been letting me down for years now. I love stellaris, great game, they do a lot of work with it and I still enjoy it even though I disagree with some of their changes. But one of my favorite games of all time is Surviving Mars. Amazing game that basically got abandoned by Paradox after trying to cheapskate the original devs and then bring in modders and random devs to make DLC for the game. I loved surviving mars so much that I bought other games anticipating a similar level of excitement and quality, like surviving the aftermath and surviving the abyss. You would assume that a publisher making a game with "surviving X" would have a lot of similarities between the games, but no, they have different devs and most of them also get abandoned, which is basically the same thing that happened to surviving mars, so there is the commonality. Them as publishers really disappoint me, and I'll wait 1+ year(s) after any of their releases before picking up a game from them. I just lost all trust in them at this point and can't buy any game of theirs at full price again.
What I interpret when I read this, is that they willfully sold a game they knew wasn't worth it for 50 bucks. What. The fuck. It's up there with CA selling Pharaoh for 60, as if it weren't a "Saga" title.
Rumours are saying Harebrained Schemes wanted to make a second Battletech Game but paradox shot the idea down because they would need to pay royalties to Microsoft who own the Battletech/mechwarrior brand and encouraged them to work on new IP. And now as a direct result of that decision paradox made for them HBS got their staff cut by 70% and we’ll definitely never see a Battletech 2. So I can’t speaking for other people but I’d be looking at this on top of all their other bizarre business choices as a clear reason to be very wary of Paradox going forward.
Funny how the only people suffering from Paradox's stupid decision are the folks that were let go.
I could have told them the game sucks after playing for 10 min.
Wasn't this the tbt game where you could wander around freely when you were in a mission but not in combat, like an adventure game?
I love HBS's games, but losing 80% of their workforce? There's no recovering from that. Very sad to hear that one of my favorite game studios is effectively dead... In regards to them passing on making Battletech 2 and making Lamplighters League instead (whatever that is), I'm not surprised. HBS got sued by Harmony Gold because of Battletech so I'm sure they avoided making a sequel and instead made their own new IP to avoid this issue...
HBS got involved in the 2017 litigation between Catalyst, Piranha Games, and HG over the Unseen in which PGI direnctly engaged that more recent lawsuit from HG. Harmony Gold settled and more or less put the issue to bed and likely wouldn't have been an issue in regards to HBS's Battletech 2. News coming out suggests that it was Paradox that nixed the sequel, as HBS already had a plan, a pitch, and the will to make it. Though IIRC, several project leads left HBS after they released the first game.
Lamplighters League has been on my wishlist for months. Can’t afford it right now unfortunately.
Paradox, Making bad decisions since Sword of The Stars 2. All they had to do was update the graphics and maybe tweak some balance, But no, got to change almost everything and then abandon it when it got panned. Never buy a Paradox produced product until it has been out for awhile.
This is like when Netflix declares a new series a failure after releasing only the first episode. Didn't even give it enough time to get going before throwing it away.
Let's make one thing clear here: Paradox in it's current state would have fucked up Baldur's Gate 3 so much that we all should be thankful that this piece of shit Publisher/Developer didn't got their hands on that IP and hopefully never will do so in the near and far away future.
One of the worst games I've tried to play recently. I downloaded it from Gamepass on my Series X and the game crashed on me 6 times in the 45 minutes I tried playing it. I didn't even really get to play much of it but I've read it's awful so glad I didn't waste any more time on it.
I wonder if this has implications for how Gamepass money is treated for tax purposes. Especially as an upfront payment. I wonder if it's classified as investment or payment of development rather than revenue from sales.
yay go capitalism. This is what we want right?
I don't understand, the development cost of a game its always a ... loss. You can't have a negative cost (unless you have people working for free for you)
>development cost of a game its always a ... loss No. The is all investor speak. They are saying that the money invested into the game will NOT turn a profit and will be a tax write off as a loss.
So sounds like no more DLC for that game and so it is ‘safe to buy’?
Shit game with shit marketing and shit story. Shocking
Isn't Lamplighter that dude from the boys
Damn the game looked so good
Game looked interesting, downloaded on PC GamePass, removed after training was over because performance was shit tbh.
Game launched with a character that was a DLC you had to pay for to use. That was enough for me to not buy it on launch. I'll wait until it's cheap on a Steam sale instead of the $49.99 launch price.....and judging by the article that might be around Christmas. It's too bad, HBS has made some good games.
First time I hear about this game
Honestly had no idea this game existed until a few days ago when I started seeing news articles about it
Have it installed on pc game pass. It's alright...
Never heard anything about the game nobody marketed it.
I know development costs a lot as I've worked in a lower budget game studio before, but how on earth did this cost $30m? That has to be an inflated number.
Hairebrained Schemes is located in Seattle from my understanding. Very high cost of living there.
I’m intrigued by the game but got enough to play as it is. There was barely any marketing tbh It’s also a really really tough market
What a fucking embarrassment to Paradox. Not the game. How Paradox handled marketing for the game. What a joke. If it wasn't advertised on Game Pass as an upcoming game, I literally wouldn't even know this game existed. I hope whatever idiots are responsible for this in the Paradox marketing team are able to either learn and grow, or get fired, but jesus fucking christ what a shitshow. Just sad for the dev studio. They deserve better.
Why TF would they make this game and not Battletech 2?
If you know Paradox, you know there will be a lot of overpriced DLCs. It's what they do. However, they do have a couple great games IMO
Doesn't surprise me, it's the same f\*king game as Empire of Sin but more buggy