The Brain Dump

8-6-24

New Game Hype

It's that time of year again: when I hear about some new thing that looks cool and begin the wait to see the end result once it releases. I'm not really a big hype kind of person, so it's pretty uncommon for me to be interested enough in an up-and-coming release enough to follow it. This time the target of my fancy is a game called The Forever Winter by the brand new and unproven developer Fun Dog Studios.

Doesn't this look cool?

The reason why I feel like this is worth my time to ramble about is I have gotten caught up in the hype of games like this before. That is to say, games made by a new indie studio with veteran devs from other more well-known studios. The first time was Flagship Games back in 2007 with Hellgate London. At the time it sounded Like everything I could want. They even had a beta that I was able to get into so I had a first-hand experience with the game. While it was very grindy, it was meant to be; it was an ARPG like Diablo but in 3rd person. The kicker? Flagship was formed by Bill Roper & remnants of the Blizzard North team (i.e. the studio that made the Diablo games).

What could possibly go wrong?

The Fall

Everything in the beta seemed to be fine and me (along with other beta testers) seemed fairly optimistic that the game would do well. Needless to say, the story didn't quite end like that. Upon release, the game had a paid subscription option on top of the game, which wasn't received very well. What really made it odd was that they offered a "lifetime subscription" for $250. A lifetime of playing a game I was hyped up for months to play? Sign me up! Well, not really. I tried the standard monthly sub for a few months and it was fine, but $250 was just a little too much commitment for a relationship that was so new.

As the weeks went on, the problems became clear. WTF was wrong with me? I played tens of hours of the beta; how could I miss all these reported flaws? Was it rose-tinted glasses or was I subjected to subliminal messaging? Surely the retail release was in a better state than the beta, right? Well, sort of. In the end, the game services ceased in about 9 months; a real killer for a game that needed always online servers for multiplayer. It had a significant number of problems that eventually killed it, but for some reason those flaws never really revealed themselves to me. I did actually enjoy the game (at least that I remember), so its failure really sucked.

Lesson Learned(?)

Now that I'm older and wiser, I'm more careful, right? Sure. That still doesn't stop me from being giddy when I see the next thing that makes me think "Damn, that looks cool." Let's just hope Fun Dog has better luck than Flagship.

Nothing this cool could fail... Right?