Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”. Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:
- Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
- Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
- The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
- The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn’t lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.
Can’t really say I’m surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.
The issue is not the genre “single player (shooter)” itself, but that these big companies just churn out the same generic bullshit and then act surprised when no-one plays it.
AAA studios just don’t have the balls anymore to take a risk and develop something unique. And this is their downfall.
Titanfall 2, Metro Exodus, Ghostwire Tokyo, Doom (to name a few) are all excellent first person shooters. All of them have something unique about them that makes them worthwhile.
Goes to show that making a good game is still more art than science.
Hell, make a broken or buggy game, if it has the special something it’ll still likely become a classic.
Eg. Fallout New Vegas or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
Titanfall 2 had one of the most acclaimed single-player campaigns, with it being only a few hours long and mostly a showcase to get people on multiplayer, and it was still enough.
Quite seriously I am actually looking to attempt to solo indie dev a sort of fps/tactics/management hybrid FPS that would at least start out as single player, and titanfall 2’s gameplay is something I am drawing inspiration from.
My basic idea is: What if you had the squad management and mission planning depth of basically Xenonauts, but you actually played out the missions in first person, with combat systems and load outs and player (and enemy) capabilities that resembled titanfall2’s mix of athletecism and gunplay?
Im in very early stages, but yeah basically titanfall2/xenonauts hybrid with (this is likely the hard part) procedurally generated, 3d levels, strung together with a kind of narrative generation engine, something sort of like rimworld’s system that simulates world conditions and then generates certain events based off of them, but also responds to certain specific things you do or do not do in mission, or what missions you choose to embark on over others.
Probably Im gonna focus on core gameplay systems and not really worry about graphics or assets at all until I can get any of this to an actual working concept level.
So like Rainbow Six 1-3’s mission planning mode?
Probably similar in many ways, but ideally I would like to make it as or more in depth with other features from something like xenonauts.
Youve got resources such as vehicles of differing kinds you may choose to deploy or not, but you have to store them somewhere and also be able to repair them. All this comes from pools of funding from at first probably just completing a mission according to guidelines, but some things take maybe an R&D program or just outright raiding a rival faction or something.
Maybe you want to go a more special forces type route and have a few exceptionally well trained / equipped soldiers and leverage things like helicopters to do infil and exfil and leverage the element of surprise.
Maybe you want to act more like a conventional military and go with larger numbers with decent equipment and a wider array of possible vehicles and support systems.
Maybe you want to focus as much as possible on gathering intel before missions, maybe you want a more intelligent active battlefield info you can access in mission via various sensors.
So… what I am aiming for is something that eventually allows for a more broad array of mission profiles and sort of map archetypes, which, depending on many factors, will have surprises that may occur, like an enemy force having the ability to call for reinforcements that maybe you did not know about, and might force you to withdraw.
Or maybe some missions will take place with a relatively high number of civillian AI running around and your org you work for/run will suffer massively if you just go scorched earth.
I dunno, these are all ambitions at this point, and Im going to focus on at the very least getting a functional combat prototype done first, and then testing out how well that and what I can make combat AI actually do actually works.
Its possible I’ll find some kind of thing that really works well, or really doesn’t work, and change scope significantly.
So far all I have really figured out is that a near future setting would seem to work best with the scope of either my minimal working concept, or a more extended version of it.
???
Best of luck. But yes, there’s a good chance your scope is too large, so definitely start small.
Oh hey Im surprised that all even posted, my connection crapped out right as I hit send.
But uh haha yeah.
My one saving grace is I have a lot of time on my hands.
But I expect it to take probably at least 6 months before I even have what Id consider a working combat prototype with a variety of different weapons and Ai routines, and maybe a barebones model of a procedural map generator.
Im guessing that me soloing a whole project like this could take 3 years, but if I can get a prototype working, I might have enough money to pay for some 3D assets to speed up dev time a bit.
Almost certainly not enough money to hire anyone lol, and I really really do not want to do kickstarter or early access and deal with the community and possible total failure.
Im the exact opposite of a PR person.
Titanfall 2 also bombed, even a good game can flop if your marketing sucks or if you release it next to other massive hits.