Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8814491" data-attributes="member: 18">Dark Alliance didn't fail because the market is hard.It failed because it's absolutely atrocious game on every level, particularly gameplay.[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/dungeons-dragons-dark-alliance[/URL]53% is shockingly bad. Most games that get called "bad" or "mediocre" are in the 65-75% range or even into the 80s. Very few professionally-designed games manage to score that low. And D&D games usually get a few free points just for being D&D.As for "other Hasbro franchises have failed too", absolutely true, yes! Hasbro and WotC have an astonishing record of manage to licence their products to exactly the wrong people. It's really genuinely been a horror show for like 20 years now. About smart licences WotC have ever done with D&D have involved the word Neverwinter (the MMO is very "mid" but it's not insultingly bad at least, and NWN1 & 2 were pretty decent), or I guess BG3 which is looking alright. Not a great record. There was a particularly sad period of about a decade when WotC sold the D&D licence to er... I forget if it was Interplay or Atari, but whoever it was then just essentially sat on the licence for a decade, until WotC had to actually sue them to get the licence back. And since then WotC's decision-making has not improved.WotC now owns two game studios:1) Archetype Entertainment, which has several Bioware veterans (particularly some senior Mass Effect guys), but who have existed since early 2019, still haven't got enough staff to even really make an AA game, let alone an AAA one, are still hiring, and whilst it looked like they were going into production last year, that doesn't seem to have happened. They've never released a game. I would be unsurprised if they shut down without ever releasing one in 3-5 years. I hope they release an awesome CRPG. It just seems a bit unlikely right now.Note that the US games industry right now is rife with companies like this - a few key/impressive senior employees who previously worked at Bioware, Bungie, Blizzard, or the like, who have hired like 30-70 Bright Young Things, who aren't as senior but have some experience or are new to the industry but well-qualified, and pretty much none of them have actually released any games, and most of them don't even seem to have an AAA game in development.2) Invoke, who used to be Tuque Games, a small Canada-based studio who have never made a good game, only a very mediocre one nobody played, and the truly awful Dark Alliance, and who claim to be working on an AAA game. They also don't appear to have enough employees for that to be true, but we shall see.</blockquote>

Verification