This happened to one of my favorite game studios recently. Starbreeze/Overkill makes the Payday series, along with a lot of shitty pop culture IP games (The Walking Dead, a Raid WWII game, I'm forgetting any others).
Turns out between Payday 2 and Payday 3, they fired most of the original staff, hired out all the art to third party companies (including some that used AI generation, which got Steam pissed at them), hired out the AI for enemies, and used a lot of upsampled voice work from the second game for the third. The game's community is pissed.
And then you realize that this is the new hotness, the new "it" thing. The developers of Kerbal Space Program did it, the devs of Alan Wake are doing it, the devs of Cities Skylines are doing it.
I remember when getting into Payday 2 that the general design of the game would have been perfect for a Stargate reskin.
Multiple orders/factions of Jaffa to account for harder mobs: normal Apophis Jaffa, Sokar Jaffa, Kul Warriors as Dozers.
Archeology digs as an alternative time sink to hacking/drilling, and even then retrieving some Ancient, Asgardian, or whatever piece of tech would still work perfectly.
Multiple weapons, including the possibility of energy weapons and ranged weapons with melee attacks since a Jaffa staff weapon is still a staff.
And then nothing actually happened with Payday 2. It just kept releasing the bare minimum in terms of DLC but charging a premium. Guns, mods, clothes, sometimes even a mission! 😮
So much time and money grabbing I'm kind of glad now a franchise reskin didn't happen because it would have been a dancing skin suit at best.
Still, it could be used as a working concept for such a thing in the future.
I'm not sure whether I should be experiencing grim satisfaction or vitriolic hatred that the 'sequel' to KSP is an absolute clusterfuck that every fan of KSP is calling out.
By this point, I may just have to settle for 'both'.
KSP2 could have been a great game. Take the first one and the most popular mods, code it from the beginning so it didn't stutter like Lieden, boom, instant classic. Instead they made all of the same errors as the first one, with none of the programmers to back up their claims.
This happened to one of my favorite game studios recently. Starbreeze/Overkill makes the Payday series, along with a lot of shitty pop culture IP games (The Walking Dead, a Raid WWII game, I'm forgetting any others).
Turns out between Payday 2 and Payday 3, they fired most of the original staff, hired out all the art to third party companies (including some that used AI generation, which got Steam pissed at them), hired out the AI for enemies, and used a lot of upsampled voice work from the second game for the third. The game's community is pissed.
And then you realize that this is the new hotness, the new "it" thing. The developers of Kerbal Space Program did it, the devs of Alan Wake are doing it, the devs of Cities Skylines are doing it.
Kind of glad PD3 took so fucking long to come out I lost all interest in playing PD2. The long list of overpriced DLC didn't help matters.
I remember when getting into Payday 2 that the general design of the game would have been perfect for a Stargate reskin.
Multiple orders/factions of Jaffa to account for harder mobs: normal Apophis Jaffa, Sokar Jaffa, Kul Warriors as Dozers.
Archeology digs as an alternative time sink to hacking/drilling, and even then retrieving some Ancient, Asgardian, or whatever piece of tech would still work perfectly.
Multiple weapons, including the possibility of energy weapons and ranged weapons with melee attacks since a Jaffa staff weapon is still a staff.
And then nothing actually happened with Payday 2. It just kept releasing the bare minimum in terms of DLC but charging a premium. Guns, mods, clothes, sometimes even a mission! 😮
So much time and money grabbing I'm kind of glad now a franchise reskin didn't happen because it would have been a dancing skin suit at best.
Still, it could be used as a working concept for such a thing in the future.
my kingdom for a good stargate game while all the actors are still alive.
I'm not sure whether I should be experiencing grim satisfaction or vitriolic hatred that the 'sequel' to KSP is an absolute clusterfuck that every fan of KSP is calling out.
By this point, I may just have to settle for 'both'.
KSP2 could have been a great game. Take the first one and the most popular mods, code it from the beginning so it didn't stutter like Lieden, boom, instant classic. Instead they made all of the same errors as the first one, with none of the programmers to back up their claims.