Looking at the reviews, good chance Babylon's Fall will be the worst reviewed game of 2022 from a non-indie studio. You don't see games getting 1/5s that often.
Between this and Avengers it's kind of amazing how much this is a story of a greedy corporation that wanted to get in on that GAAS $$$ but had no idea how to do it and didn't care about making a good game first and adding GAAS second, and now they are bombing one after another.
With any luck this will scare SE enough to stop all future attempts at GAAS games.
But why would it? They have a very successful GAAS game with Final Fantasy XIV.
And why I think the very premise of the Avengers does not lend itself to GAAS in the quasi Diablo loot mold that GAAS seems to take. It's not like they were the most greedy company. They did want the new characters and story content to be free. Which was a good idea.
Square is just a bizarre company. I honestly think they are probably the best they have been in years. The FF series is in a better place. A good online installment that people love. A AAA Remake that I think really kind of proved FF still has it. And a promising new installment. DQ is in a good place and has an exciting future. They seem to care about their catalog and are bringing back a lot of old games. Either through remasters or remakes, and plenty of them seem to be of quality. They are also putting out some decent smaller titles. I mean everyone trusts and likes Yoshi P, but how long until Tomoya Asano produces a mainline FF? It can't be much longer, I say 17 is their game.
But then they make choices that everyone can see are going to be failures a mile away.
Yeah, a Diablo Loot game for pre-established Marvel characters seemed pretty dumb to me. People really just wanted honestly the AAA "real" version of those Marvel Lego games.
A GAAS game from the people who made Anarchy Reigns and whose fans crave strong mechanic-focused single-player games wrapped in Japanese aesthetic that appeal to older fans. Yeah, who could have seen that failing?
Next up to join the failures is the very western-looking and targeted AAA PS5 "RPG" that seems to be connecting to no one. Again, I'm sorry Square people want you to make JAPANESE RPGs. And I bet a decently budgeted AAA very Japanese-looking jrpg would do better than whatever Forspoken will do.
But Square seems to like having at least one failure every year.
I think when they got booted from that Granblue Fantasy game and their work was scrubbed was the most telling thing. Like that isn't normal at all.
Honestly, I don't know about that. I feel like Cygames is a bunch of hot air in the console space. They've talked big. They've hired all this "talent" and what do they have to show for it? A port of Zone of the Enders 2 that I'm sure Konami was like "we don't have to do anything for this right?". Another anime fighter from Ark? Platnium may have some problems, but I'm willing to bet something is up with Cygames. I don't think their big jump into the console space has worked at all. I'm waiting for that to all fall apart.
But Babylon's Fail is such a bizarre game. Announced early and took forever to be shown off. When it finally was it failed to gain any traction at all. Again, this is not the type of game that any Platnium fan or Japanese game fan was asking for. Yet it's also a Playstation exclusive so clearly, Sony probably exchanged some money for it, and yet they don't seem to have any real interests in it. On top of that Square is releasing it the same day as their niche turn based strategy game that has been way better marketed and gained actual hype since its announcement.
I'm with you, I have no idea why they just didn't have Platnium go directly into Nier 3 or have them make some other action RPG. This is really what Platnium should have been working on. "Oh our flashy combat is hard to grasp, whatever just level up".
Hell, I've said that Scalebound should have been repurposed into a Drakengard game. Even if it sucked, it would still probably better than any other Drakengard game.
