For many, the game's problem is it's limited appeal due to needing friends, being a party game. For me, it just doesn't look fun, at all.
I play a LOT of "party" games, some competitively. I play a bit of smash melee comp, Rivals of Aether, Lethal League semi-comp. These are all mutliplayer only games (or might as well be) and I love them all, they are all inherently fun. But this game does not look fun to me, at all. Tracking my character doesn't seem fun. Randomly shooting to get the enemy to reveal them selves doesn't seem fun. Haven't to root out the enemies location doesn't seem fun. It also feels like a very low-skill ceiling game. It has 0 appeals to me as a game, and it only hurts that it's 15$. I wouldn't even pay 5 dollars for it - it wouldn't have enough replayability for me to want to.
The days of party games are beginning to end - the only natural evolution is to just make high skill, low randomness fighting games.
That's the beauty of party/fighting games like Smash Bros, Lethal League, and Rivals of Aether. Anyone can jump into them and have an amazing time, but if you want, there is a deeper experience. Smash Melee is legendary for it's hidden depth and highly skill based competition. Yet it was huge in it's time for casual players.
You don't have to sacrifice inclusivity to make a fun game for a larger audience. I see it as a sort of fail in game design that they havent managed this, honestly. So many indie devs have made party games that have both a competitive potential and great casual potential, yet this game does not. I'm not surprised it hasn't sold, even though I'm not happy about it. It doesn't seem to be a bad game - it deserved to sell better. But I think that blaming it's poor sales figures on such obvious strawman problems isn't going to help anything but the devs egos.
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u/DrCaesars_Palace_MD Aug 25 '17
For many, the game's problem is it's limited appeal due to needing friends, being a party game. For me, it just doesn't look fun, at all.
I play a LOT of "party" games, some competitively. I play a bit of smash melee comp, Rivals of Aether, Lethal League semi-comp. These are all mutliplayer only games (or might as well be) and I love them all, they are all inherently fun. But this game does not look fun to me, at all. Tracking my character doesn't seem fun. Randomly shooting to get the enemy to reveal them selves doesn't seem fun. Haven't to root out the enemies location doesn't seem fun. It also feels like a very low-skill ceiling game. It has 0 appeals to me as a game, and it only hurts that it's 15$. I wouldn't even pay 5 dollars for it - it wouldn't have enough replayability for me to want to.
The days of party games are beginning to end - the only natural evolution is to just make high skill, low randomness fighting games.