I believe it’s not about whether the game is actually any good or not. It’s about what Highguard represents.
Let’s be honest, hero shooter isn’t an oversaturated genre in any sense. Upon looking up what hero shooters are available right now I managed to find around five of them: Overwatch 2, Fragpunk, Valorant, Apex Legends, Paladins. If Highguard survives it will be the sixth.
That number is a joke compared to boomer shooters (which itself I’d argue isn’t oversaturated in the first place) and downright sad compared to metroidvanias or deckbuilders. Don’t even think about incrementals. But those releases don’t get this near unanimous levels of animosity from the community.
The fact is liveservice games completely lost any goodwill they once might have had. 90% of the time nobody is excited when a new one is announced because almost nobody respects this genre. It’s primarily seen as a soulless, corporate product made for maximum profit potential, and nine times out of ten that is true. Even if you give one a shot it can disappear a few years later (or two weeks in case of Concord), so all the money and time you’ve invested is down the drain. It’s no wonder people look at this game and immediately start thinking about the apology tweet and the end of service announcement.
I believe if hero shooter devs want to be taken seriously by the community they need to adopt the Xonotic model. Xonotic is a community developed open source arena shooter. In Xonotic hosting and moderating the servers is the community’s job. This immediately solves everything and is the reason a game with a playerbase measured in dozens can be sustained with effectively zero monetization. Translating this to a commerical title can be quite tricky but I think it has great potential.
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I love how you left out TF2.
TF2 was unplayable for many months because of a bot epidemic Valve didn’t feel like dealing with at the time. TF2 also introduced many monetization methods that made people hate this kind of game in the first place. It’s not exactly a role model for how a liveservice multiplayer FPS should be run.
Its over saturated because each of these games gate unlockables either under microtransactions or enough time that it effectively becomes the only game you play.
Boomer shooters welcome other boomer shooters, they only have a finite time worth of content before you’re replaying them for the sake of replaying them.
Are you serious? You think unlockables are what makes people only play these games?
Sweetie, these are competitive games that reward those who put the most amount of time into them.
We don’t “need” a lot of them because each one requires thousands of hours to get good at.
Are you serious? You think being competitive is what makes people only play these games?
Sweetie, there are plenty of other competitive games out there and usually they have transferable skills.
We don’t “need” the amount of fighting games we have but people rotate between them on a regular basis because they don’t have the same kind of predatory practices that keep people locked into a specific one where if they switch to another they’ll feel like they’ll lose out on their progress and the potential that they then wasted their time on the previous game.
Yikes, you’re beyond help.
Right back at ya
I don’t agree with that definition of “oversaturated”. Yes, hero shooters demand way too much time investment from the player but at the end of the day there are seven of them at most.
And that leads to a problem I forgot to mention in the main post: Even if a hero shooter starts out as a good game, it can still be ruined down the line. Combine that with a lack of alternatives and you are effectively stuck with the game you have picked years ago. You don’t like what Overwatch turned into? Too bad, take it or leave it.
Also the insane commitment demand isn’t fundemental to the genre, it’s a consequence of the blockbuster approach developers insist upon taking with this type of game.
How would you define oversaturated then? Since you counted them up and said seven isn’t a lot, is there a certain number that’s a cutoff?
Oversaturation should be relative to what the market will bear. They’re absolutely right that the time commitment is what really matters here. You might not think seven sounds like a lot, but no one’s committing to grinding battle passes in seven live services at once.
If we were talking about something like visual novels, seven isn’t a lot because you’ll finish one and move on to the next. But seven live services is a lot of live services, because it’s more than what people will play.
You’re not wrong about the state of live service games, but this definitely isn’t why they are getting review bombed. That’s happening because the gamer mob are a pack of fickle mush-heads that will randomly get outraged by total non-issues with no regard for the facts.
It works both ways.
Modern gamers are sheep, so they’ll buy/reject whatever their influencers tell them to.
I may be wrong as I don’t really play the genre, but I think Marvel Rivals is kinda the king of the hero shooter genre right now.
But that said I generally do agree that “another live service game that doesn’t clear a very high bar” is the issue. The recent success of ARC Raiders despite social media telling me people “don’t want extraction shooters and to give it up” really drives home the point of “if it’s good enough… It’ll probably do well.”
(And I realize those two are third person games, so not “first person shooters”, but I’d still consider them competition for them.)
And with the economy the way it is, yeah, money matters a lot more. People are more likely to dedicate their time to one big game, and sometimes a couple of smaller ones. It makes things an “all or nothing” proposition. And most games don’t look like “all”.
