18
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Remedy's multiplayer Control spinoff ‘Condor’ won't be free to play – expect a 'lower initial price' followed by live service updates
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- Authors
- Andy Chalk
- Published
- Mar 25 2024
Lots of mixed feelings about this. It's good it's not free to play, but hearing "live service" instantly brings to mind low quality content.
This is also a single player game studio making a live service spinoff game. Twice in recent memory that's not went well... The Last of Us Factions took up a lot of resources and dev time from Naughty Dog for years only to get cancelled, and Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was a hot mess.
What could also happen is the game is fantastic, but it undersells, causing support to be pulled early, leaving us with a game we can't play anymore and microtransaction money wasted.
The truth is that there's only so many hours in the day, so there can only really be so many live service titles demanding your attention on the market at a time.
Do I think Remedy can't pull this off? No. There's just a lot of ways similar projects go wrong. Let's hope for a Deep Rock Galactic or Helldivers 2 instead of a Suicide Squad or Factions.
I love everything Remedy has ever done including Quantum Break but I don't really play multiplayer games anymore. I would prefer a Control 2 but I guess I will at least check this out
You're right they could make something good, but the odds are not in their favour. I think what I hope for the most is that it doesn't kill the studio or force them to sell to someone.
Good news, they are also doing a Control 2. They've been working on both games.
Facts, I should have clarified that I would prefer they put their full attention on Control 2 but I guess everyone needs to try and make a live service game these days.
I’m somewhat surprised you didn’t mention Babylon’s Fall from PlatinumGames. Though I guess you can consider it Square Enix’s second failure at a live service game as well, after they also worked with Crystal Dynamics to make Marvel’s Avengers.
I know there are plenty of these games that are making money hand over fist, but personally I don’t get the appeal. I vastly prefer to have games that are always the same where I don’t have to worry about not liking it anymore because they changed something in a way I don’t like. It’s one of the reasons why I really dislike multiplayer-only games as well; even if I do like it, it might just disappear one day.
I think "live service" suits multiplayer pretty well. Multiplayer games live and die by their community. As such, they are inherently ephemeral, as that community inevitably dies out. Many of my favorite games from 25 years ago are still technically playable, but without active communities they may as well not exist anymore.
When a "live service" multiplayer game succeeds, it usually sees both developer support and community interest for far longer than your typical multiplayer game would in 2001.
To be fair, my other problems with multiplayer games largely amount to me just not enjoying multiplayer all that much. They only work for me when they are either turn-based or are built primarily around narrative-building or role-playing (which, oddly enough, excludes most MMORPGs).