u/Mezurashii5

The combat's great - it's satisfying, enemies are not annoying and don't respawn until you activate a checkpoint, weapons are satisfying and fit the challenges the game sets before you well (think the exact opposite of every castlevania inspired game).

The exploration's great - you can move through the rooms quickly if you don't want to fight every enemy, there's tons of stuff to find, there are secrets, traversal puzzles, places to remember for later, and fast travel points everywhere, especially in the latter parts of the game.

The presentation's obviously fantastic as well.

The game hooked me like no other has in a long time, genuinely setting me back in life affairs because I felt so compelled to get through it, but then I got to the second to last boss and it felt like a slap to the face.

First, before even attempting the fight, I decided to finish up some of the quests I had almost completed - huge mistake. It's extremely tedious because you have to actually find every single instance of these collectibles without any indicators of which parts of the map you've already cleared out, and that effort is absolutely not appropriately rewarded.

I normally avoid stuff like this if it feels like an extra thing for completionists, but I had already done almost all of it through normal exploration, so I believed it was something meant to be worth my attention as a regular player.

So after I decided to cheat (and it still took a good while to find what I was missing) I got back to the fight, and oh my.

The biggest problem with the boss is that he has a long first phase that's there purely to waste your time - the attacks are easy to dodge, but the character himself can't be harmed most of the time, so you're guaranteed to waste a bunch of time every time you attempt the fight. Annoying as hell.

Then you get past it, and suddenly you face an enemy that seemingly appeared from a different game entirely. It's the only time in the entire game's runtime up to that point where you have to learn tight dodge timings for long strings of hard to read attacks, but that's what he's all about. You can't use a different strategy, use a certain weapon to exploit a weakness, play conservatively and deal damage with spells. It's the antithesis of the game's combat up to that point, and it's made infinitely worse by the fact that it's right near the end of it. Oh, and he deals a ton of damage without really giving you space to heal, so each mistake is that much more likely to send you back to phase 1.

It's probably the biggest fumble I've seen a good game make in its final hours. Pretty sad how it will forever define how I remember an otherwise great game.

This is basically a PSA to back up your GloSC/GlosSI/SISR installer if it works for you.

GloSC has been removed from github for no reason when the creator released their next version - GlosSI. I never switched to it because the previous tool worked well.

Now, the only surviving release of GlosSI is... Suspicious. Incomprehensible name instead of a number version and major bugs mentioned in the description.

That's because the same developer is onto their next project - SISR. This time, it uses some really weird sounding solutions to avoid vigem - the virtual gamepad driver that was the standard for remappers before, including the previous two tools. So instead of just making a virtual device, it's... snooping around your networking ports and listening in on steam's built in browser I think? It's odd and seems like kind of a security risk, but I'm no programmer.

What I am is a user and I can tell you this much - this thing doesn't work for me at all. The UI (which is completely unnecessary btw) kept breaking and the remapping didn't work.

So, if you have any version of these 3 that does work for you currently - back that up. The dev behind these is really weird and there's no telling when they'll delete the tool you rely on out of nowhere.

I imagine many of you will need one of these soon as you switch to the new sc, so it seems like a good time to mention this.

TL;DR: Multiplayer games drop like flies because they're not good enough. F2P games have even worse survival rates than premium titles, and people have always been sceptical about paying for online-only titles. Premium games fail faster and with more marketing due to how important release date pushes are for that model. Games with great reception generally still do well with a price tag.

First, let's remember that online-only games have never been as popular of a business strategy as they are now.

Before the 7th generation, many multiplayer-first titles shipped with bot support robust enough to entice players who knew they wouldn't spend much time online, if any - like Unreal Tournament or Battlefront.

During the X360/PS3 era, the big players - Halo, Gears of War, CoD and Battlefield - all shipped campaigns with each iteration.

It wasn't unheard of to see online only titles back then, but they never had the same expectations behind them - Counter-Strike may have found its audience, but Valve decided to bundle TF2 with the Orange Box in what seemed like an effort to ensure the game doesn't go unnoticed.

But many games managed to make it - CS, Dead by Deadlight, Sea of Thieves, Rust, DayZ, PUBG, Fall Guys, PayDay 2, Hunt Showdown, Escape from Tarkov, Hazelight's games, Among Us, R6 Siege, Rocket League, Deep Rock Galactic, Rogue Company, Helldivers 2, Arc Raiders and many more.

Many have also failed to pull it off - Evolve, Brink, Battleborn, PvZ: Garden Warfare 2, LawBreakers, Redfall, Concord, Friday the 13th, Crucible, Foamstars, Knockout City, Lemnis Gate, Overkill's The Walking Dead, PayDay 3, Concord, Last Flag, and obviously a ton more as well.

So there are a lot of successful premium online games, plenty failed ones as well. However, if you've ever paid attention to the F2P market, you'll know that more free online games die unnoticed than ever get the spotlight for even a moment. League and DOTA survive where Smite and HotS did not. Valorant lives, Spectre Divide dies. Apex Legends limps along, Hyper Scape is in the grave. Fortnite sees success that The Cycle couldn't replicate. XDefiant, Blacklight: Retribution and Ironsight couldn't hold onto the CoD audience, and no other game has managed to. Planetside 2 had a decent run, while Dirty Bomb fizzled out quickly.

In short, a business model does not determine the success of an online only title.

So why does it feel like the premium options in particular fail so much?

For one, it's because large publishers tend to be the ones developing them, and they can afford to spend a lot on marketing. Like I said, far more F2P games die than premium ones do, but they simply never get onto anyone's radar.

Secondly, a premium model requires you to make a big marketing push before release to create hype, more so than a F2P scheme. Since new players are harder to acquire, you need the numbers to be reassuring enough for people to feel like they're not buying something that's DOA. Players are willing to check out a free game without checking its steam player charts, but the same isn't true for something with a price tag.

Because of that volatility, premium games can often die instantly, while still in public consciousness.

It's also easy to forget that many free to play games - both successful and failed - are actually premium titles that decided to switch models. It basically never manages to truly turn a failed game around, but it does give a slight boost to games that have naturally lost players over time, and more importantly, allows the publisher/developer to justify adding/expanding microtransactions. And if a game is already on its way out, this is kind of a no-brainer - it probably won't help, but doesn't hurt to at least try. At worst, you'll get a few more months of life support as you figure out what to do next.

Why do these games fail then?

Same reasons a free to play game does - bad marketing, low quality, huge expectations for a niche product, chasing trends that are on their way out, trying to compete with a dominant player too directly.

Evolve was slow and confusing, LawBreakers looked unappealing and had an awful narrative around it, Redfall was trash, Concord was mediocre and unoptimised. None of these would be likely to survive long even without a price tag.

On the other hand, games like CSGO, Rocket League, Fall Guys, Starcraft 2, Overwatch and TF2 showed they can hold their own as premium titles before transitioning to a free to play model.

As for now vs before, you can see the same things happening - people are wary of online only titles, but are willing to make an exception for games with an excellent reputation. Customers used to feel like multiplayer didn't provide enough value by itself, now they lack confidence in the longevity of games, but the result is very similar.

A great game will do okay. A good game needs great marketing. Mediocre games are always going to struggle. Bad games will always fail unless they capture a brand new audience.