Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has launched Episode 2 of its first season which, as you might expect, has not exactly burned the barn down in terms of playercount
I still don’t think the enemy is “all live service games” exactly. A lot of us have a style of gameplay we enjoy that makes us go “That was fun! I want some more of it.”
Just that Rocksteady made singleplayer games well, and their poor shift just informs us that not all games need to be live service, especially when the gameplay shifts to something no one likes in order to achieve Number Go Up (similar situation with Gotham Knights)
Number can go up without being tied to a server you don’t and can’t control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating “single player” and “live service”, as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn’t have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it’s tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?
There is some hope for these games. For example Shadow of War works perfectly fine now and doesn’t have any of it’s “battle pass” stuff in it anymore. It can happen.
Rarely.
I still don’t think the enemy is “all live service games” exactly. A lot of us have a style of gameplay we enjoy that makes us go “That was fun! I want some more of it.”
Just that Rocksteady made singleplayer games well, and their poor shift just informs us that not all games need to be live service, especially when the gameplay shifts to something no one likes in order to achieve Number Go Up (similar situation with Gotham Knights)
Number can go up without being tied to a server you don’t and can’t control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating “single player” and “live service”, as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn’t have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it’s tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?
There is some hope for these games. For example Shadow of War works perfectly fine now and doesn’t have any of it’s “battle pass” stuff in it anymore. It can happen.
Rarely.
If Helldivers 2 gets updated to work offline, including multiplayer, I will no longer wish for its death. I just don’t think that’s at all likely.