Embracer Group is the latest big player in the video game market, and it's hard to know what it stands for right now. It's currently buying up huge properties like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lord of the Rings, and making promises of five triple-A games in the next five years from just on🧸e of its🐼 many studios, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:four Lord of the Rings games too, which seems to suggest an ethos of IP reliance and smaller, more readily available titles, rather than the prestige, eight year development cycle process taken by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog and Rockstar. There's certainly a gap in the market for these double-A games, as the 'indie plus' titles from Annapurna and Devolver have shown. But now Embracer has said it will take fe🥃wer risks after Saints Row, and I'm not sure what that means if Saints Row constitutes a risk.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Saints Row is an established title with a substantial fan base and popular characters. Making a new Saints Row game should not have been a risk. The problem is the reboot threw out not only these beloved characters, but any understanding of what made them speꩵcial, replacing them with characters that seemed to be written not by human beings, but by a demographic-seeking algorithm. The edges of the series were sanded away into crude andꦿ ineffective humour, the stories were cliche, and the gameplay was dated.
None of this is a risk. Not one developer sat down and said, 'here's the pitch: we make Saints Row, but it's bad'. The characters are written in such banal fashion in the hopes of appealing to an audience it doesn't understand. The edges were sanded down in fear of being 'problematic', without any insight into why Saints Row worked and how it could satirise modern life. The stories were cliche because the line between cliche and cool is very small in gaming, and nobody at the studio could tell the difference. And the gameplay was dated because typically, gamers like what they have played before and are distrustful of new things. Saints Row was not a risk. It was safe. Unfortunately, it was also bad.
Saints Row has an important part of TheGamer lore - it was the reason 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:we redefined our r𓄧eview gꦬuide for clarity and to state what each review score meant, and how games earned each score. Under the new system we have used since then, Saints Row would have straddled a 2/5 and a 2.5/5. It was not a very good video game. But that wasn't the risk - no more than any creation is a risk. But how does Embracer move forward when it defines one of the safest games to date as a risk?
To be clear, I agree with Embracer's general stance. It says games will have to "earn the right to exist", and that it will not just make endless sequels to the biggest franchises it owns off the back of the name alone. Saints Row needs to be left alone for now. In a few years, the old gang can come back (honestly, I'd be happy with just Kinzie), or we can have another hard reboot that better understands the world. I'm not defending Saints Row here. I'm just wondering how you define it as a risk. Making a bad game is obviously a risky move, but you don't do that on purpose.
Embracer did allude to this, stating it would "increase efforts to put quality first even further", but all that means is it will only make good games now. That's the clear aim of every studio, and none of Saints Row's flaws are typical, either. If it was stuffed with grinding, microtransactions, or an unfair battle pass aimed at profiting from frustration, then there may be a conversation over focusing on quality more readily in future. Those games are bad on purpose, sacrificing the ideal player experience in order to generate cash. Saints Row was bad accidentally.
If you're making a game for Embracer right now (and given the dozens it plans to release in the next few years, thousands are), what is your take away from this? Often the best games come from taking risks, and if we're getting four Lord of the Rings games and five games from a studio only currently known to be working on Tomb Raider and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Perfect Dark, we're going to need some variety in the mix, and that means taking a risk. If a game so obviously designed to cater to a checklist of audience interest as Saints Row is defined as a risk, what does that mean for the rest of us?