Just think they got caught in a really bad wedge between a few different places.
People who want a really hardcore MOBA have already picked their poison and having to adapt just from patch to patch can drive those folk insane (Please subscribe to my IRRD2 [Infused Raindrops Ruined Dota 2] Newsletter)
People who want a colourful team-based shooter are having their eyes doused in Overwatch any time they look at their game box of choice, and it's a straight up better shooter because it isn't beholden to the rhythms of the MOBA genre.
And for people right up in the audience niche of wanting a much more Moba tinged multiplayer action game Paragon honestly just seems way more focused, and I'm interested to check it out more fully when the Beta goes open (without a buy-in)
Just listening to the guys on the podcast and reading Dan and Danny's tweets, they all seemed to be drawn right to the co-op which I barely touched, and away from the incursion and meltdown modes that I could really feel myself getting decently sucked into.
And I get that they've ostensibly got more #content than some of those more focused games but it's still 90 Australian Dollarydoos.
The core of the multiplayer progression, with the entire Moba build process being stripped down to a series of 2 (eventually 3 if you like a hero) option choices is really smart. With still a lot of room for fun variation and depth. I fell like if they'd sanded down a lot of the other stuff, focused right down on that nugget, and honestly cut the co-op, they'd be better off.
It's been a rough market for years and they've just landed in the roughest patch I've seen in a while. I hope there are enough slightly more well-off versions of me out there to keep this thing going, because there's a lot of cool stuff in there.
My only recurring nightmare involves me being shot into the air and falling back to earth at basically like 90% Slow-mo so this episode was juuuuuuuuust great for that.
Austin is my Spirit Proxy for this feature. The voice that cries out even before I get a chance to. The outlet for every ounce of anxiety that this series is going to yank out of me.
@foo44: Don't really want to start an argument because I should be asleep already, but there's practically mountains of research indicating that this is not even remotely accurate. The most cursory of googles pulled up this, and there's plenty of research that's been done on a similar effect along the racial axis as well. STEM fields in general have a huge problem with hiring alone. Not to even touch on the myriad of other problems.
Rad article Austin and I'll be looking forward to seeing more on the reg!
My submission for a largely forgotten game in maybe a slightly less forgotten Genre is Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood, which for all intents and purposes is as the wiki puts it "A Commandos Clone"
Me and my brother were at our first Game Convention ever, and on the way out grabbed a Strategy First 6-pack each from the discount table, knowing basically nothing about any of the games except that 6 for 1 was probably a pretty sweet deal.
The highlight from his pack was Jagged Alliance 2 (A pretty high highlight as it turns out) whereas mine was basically half Disciples II Expansions and then this weird Robin Hood game.
For those who've never played a Commandos game or one of the handful of similar titles out there, it's basically a real-time, isometric, small-squad-based stealth/tactics game. And I played the shit out of it.
Later in life I discovered the niche genre established by 1998's Commandos, but I'm still convinced that of the mini-genre this bizarre Robin Hood spin off game has aged the best of all of them. The older Commandos games by modern standards are a little obtuse, kind of ugly, and hard to get running reliably.
But Robin Hood still has beautifully detailed and pretty expansive pixel art environments, with pretty great ability variety among your squad members letting you get really creative in how you tackle situations. And it's pretty foolproof to get running to boot (barring occasional resolution weirdness)!
And that's especially true if you're looking to as much as possible take the non-lethal approach to your enemies. Playing Metal Gear I'm still really strangely reminded about and drawn back to this game.
You're slowly building up a cadre of merry men who will hang out at your base and produce useful resources which you can take into missions with you, you're slowly through the story assembling more and more unique squad members with different sets of abilities that will complement each other differently. The non-lethal approach is often harder but way more tactically rewarding as well as being beneficial for the metagame, as the more enemies you kill, the harder it is for you to recruit followers. And sometimes you get into a bad situation and have to smoke a bunch of goons with your more lethal abilities. Those men not working to build up your resources can train while you're away and later in the game can be sent on missions to aid in defending friendly areas or just gathering resources.
The more and more I think about it there's just so much going on in this strange package and it's all pulled off so surprisingly effectively. And it's all resting on a foundation of a gameplay style that you just don't see any more, and barely saw back then, dressed up in an aesthetic and setting that's pretty much unlike anything else.
And one of the loveliest parts is that it's like 8 bucks on Steam.
I was 10 when it came out (Fuuuuuck) so maybe it made a bigger splash than I was aware, but it's certainly a gem that's been buried over the years. So once this crazy end of the year has cooled down or if like me you're looking for something to distract from the fact that you're too poor to afford the software let alone the hardware for the year's bigger releases, I urge you to seek out this strange little nugget of innovation and value!
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