Dragon’s Dogma 2, despite catastrophically bad optimization and very negative reviews, has already broken 200k concurrent players on Steam.
Horizon Forbidden West, a purportedly flawless port with very positive reviews, has so far topped out at just over 25k concurrent, roughly half the peak achieved by the first Horizon.
Things can certainly change. Also, Horizon is a two year old game at this point, although still one of the best looking games in existence.
But those numbers are anemic, especially in the wake of Sony’s last PC release (Helldivers 2) hitting almost half a million concurrent players.
Is it possible that the Sweet Baby Inc. story penetrated the mainstream far enough to influence consumer behavior? I’m not aware of any formal connection between HFW and SBI, but it does seem like gamers are becoming more conscious of both the woke taint on AAA and their own ability to avoid it.
Who knows. Maybe it’s just a mirage. A man can dream.
I’m sure there was passion put into Dragon’s Dogma 2, but the amount of black people in the game as NPCs makes it a straight-up no buy from me. I will wait until there is the possibility that someone mods out the black characters, though the anti-mod DRM makes me doubt it will be possible.
Anti-mod DRM in the game is already a deal breaker.
Its Capcom. Probably the wokest of the Japanese devs. What did anyone expect? The first one slipped under the radar, which is how it got to be as enjoyable as it did.
This one is a top shelf IP they are trying to make a mainstream hit. It will be hit with their full force wokeness.
Capcom is the worst of all with their wokeness , but a lot of the big Japanese game companies started randomly shoving black NPCs in their games everywhere all at once, you know its not natural . They are getting paid to do this. Whose paying them to do this?
its obvious devs need to tick off some woke checklist that management gave to them.
I think we can still draw a distinction between "the company is actually woke" and "the International/Western branch/publisher told them to do X" with some Japanese companies. Like, I don't think FromSoft is woke in the slightest, but they still did the Body Type nonsense with Elden Ring likely on command from Bandai.
Capcom is one of the few where you know the rot is actually internal.
that's exactly how i feel as well.
A lot of the time it's probably just Japanese people noticing that American media nowadays is full of blacks regardless of context so they just imitate the trend to appeal to American consumers without thinking about it too hard.
Of course this trend isn't actually indicative of organic consumer demand, but as a Japanese normie you have no idea what's going on and you don't care, so it's easy to make the mistake of seeing a trend and assuming that it's just what all the kids are up to these days.
Could be that, could be it's an older game but from what I remember Horizon was a bit more of a niche audience.
I might be misremembering but despite how hyped up it was, I swear it's audience wasn't as large as Killzone which they also made before this.
The first Horizon sold 20 million units.
It was also an “older game” when it launched on Steam, but it still hit 50k concurrent players. Time will tell with the sequel, but it looks like a big step back in terms of players.
Dragon’s Dogma 1 topped out at like 27-28k concurrent players on Steam.
If I totally throw out all of the woke-ism, Horizon would just be so far down the list for me. I played the first Horizon when I had my PS4 end-to-end including the expansion. The thing is, it's still just modern Assassin's Creed with mecha-dinos, and if I was itching for that gameplay loop, I could just buy Valhalla for $15. I think anyone who actually cared about the Horizon universe played it on PS5.
If it comes to Sony ports, I'm way more interested in Ghost of Tsushima, although there's no chance I will buy that at launch. I waited 4 years, what's another six months? I might even wait for it on GoG. I rarely believe devs have earned full price for their games, so I rarely pay it.
Maybe Dragon's Dogma 2 will get better, I'd buy it at some point for sure.
I mean, without the woke stuff, what is even left? It's a totally different game at that point.
I've heard some people complain that's more bland open world stuff, but it still looks fun and pretty, and I like the setting. Like you, though, there's no way I buy it at launch. Maybe somewhere down the line, though.
Yeah, I can see it getting fixed, or modders fixing it, if that's an option. It sounds kind of disastrous right now, but I can see it being potentially worth picking up down the line.
The performance issues put me off DD2 at launch, but the egregious mtx have placed it firmly in “no buy” territory. I’ll check again when it’s on discount and mods have nixed the mtx.
It’s a shame; DD2 is right up my alley, but Capcom have seemingly done everything they can to dissuade me from buying it.
Ah, so that's why they are so worried about the anti-hacking. One of the first thing I saw about it's issues was regarding anti-cheat. I couldn't help but think, "why even put anti-cheat in a single player game?" That's it, so you have to buy their presumably cosmetic shit.
It’s actually much worse than cosmetics. Fast travel and resurrections both cost in-game currency, but you can pay real money for both. Maybe the in-game prices end up being trivial, but the framework for predatory game design is definitely there.
Yeah, haphazardly slapping denuvo on your product because you're sneaking in mtx that not even reviewers knew about is prime go fuck yourself territory.
Between blacklisting Reuben Langdon, and that huge anti-mod move, I have no interest in ever paying for a Capcom game again.
It pretty much is, but the combat is engaging enough that wont really mind that the open world is meh.
And this is why I avoid these types of games. I hate the new takes on Assassins Creed nowadays. I liked 2 and brotherhood, 3 entirely lost me and I only ever looked in shortly. Black flag I feel I gotta play at some point for the pirate ships but other than that? I don't need yet another tower climbing open world with shitty tacked on rpg elements. I'm good and would rather mod skyrim again or something.
Really unlikely suggestion, try Unity. It was railed on because of launch bugs, but it was still traditional Assassin's Creed.
I'm legitimately thinking of double dipping on Ghosts of Tsushima to get to actually play the multiplayer this go around.
Because adding a wierd, super hard multi mode 6 months after release to a single player game just guaranteed it was dead in weeks unless you had a group of friends to bring. Which sucked because it was really fun.
But its easily a 40$ game. The open world is tacked on and repetitive, but it also offers you basically nothing you need after a bit short of achievements. The combat and story is top tier and if you cut the padding its a solid 15 hour single player experience (no idea about the expansion, didn't get it).
DD2 is fucking horrendous optimization-wise. I just don't fucking believe them. Their excuse is "hurk durk npc CPU der derr" but I've seen a dozen games that run better with more NPCs and bigger worlds.
This is just another in a long line of incompetent, shitbrained devs who can't figure anything out.
I'd be less inclined to rail them over mtx if the fucking game was mint. nobody has said anything about Helldivers 2 because its basically flawless and the only problem was suffering from success and nothing having enough servers.
The RE engine is great but it seems they don’t know how to utilize it for a big open-world game.
And it's an honest to God shame. The game is fun, I enjoy it quite a lot but performance is ass².
DD2 will probably be great in like, 6 months to a year. Or whenever the inevitable Capcom Goty Super-Turbo Dualshock re-release comes out.
Hopefully it will be good once they patch out Denuvo after it gets cracked.
🤞🏻 Come on, Fitgirl.
Fitgirl doesn't crack anything though, she only repacks scene releases. The only one who had any luck with Denuvo was Empress but she disappeared as far as I know.
A lot of recent Denuvo games haven't been touched.
Wasn't that one a tranny?
Nah. I've been in the scene for a long time and FitGirl is a biological woman. The tranny accusations were actually started by Empress when both of them got into a catfight over FitGirl taking donations for her repacking. They might be autistic and crazy but they're women.
Pirate lore does run deep.
Thank you for the lore update then, I'll remember!
They'll inevitably remove it eventually, since it is a recurring cost and of diminishing returns outside of the initial release window.
I have mixed feelings on this one. I like Hideaki Itsuno's games but don't want to endorse Capcom's forays into ESG. Since no-one is actively cracking Denuvo, I'll likely watch for sales once performance improves, as to not endorse more things I disagree with.
Manjaws?
Not interested.
Horizon Forbidden West -- and by proxy, the Horizon series -- would have been right up my alley had it not been woke trash. Open-world, post-apoc survival game with robo-dinos? Count me in!
But then Insomniac decided they didn't want to promote guns in their game, so they removed all the pistols, rifles, and handheld projectiles other than the bow and a heavy machine gun you could lift off of downed dinos, because "we already did that in Killzone".
Then they made their lead female look like a tranny, and removed the more welcoming aesthetic she was originally supposed to have.
Then they made all the NPCs hideous, added in a bunch of "diversity", turned their lead female gay, made the over-arching female characters who drove the story forward girl-bosses who were also gay, and made almost all the straight White males evil, stupid, weak or fodder.
Everything about that game other than the combat and graphics are off-putting and disgusting. If anyone remotely has as much disdain for those kind of DEI-influenced products as I do, then it's no wonder why people have opted out of supporting them.
It's a real shame, too, because if Horizon was made honestly and authentically for its audience, I would probably dip back in every once in a while just to do meaningless side-quests for fun, sort of like how I occasionally go back to playing Death's Stranding because it has such an engaging gameplay loop and none of the ESG-nonsense that other AAA titles are riddled with.
I played HFW on PS5 when it came out. I was excited for it, because I really enjoyed HZD.
Forbidden West just lacked a sort of je-ne-sais-quoi the original had. Also, the story, which was amazing and interesting in the first one, was pretty flat and predictable in the second. Not to mention the Woke elements added to the storytelling.
I didn't even finish Forbidden West, and I platted Zero Dawn. At one point it just seemed to turn into yet another Sony Walking Simulator. I put it down, and never picked it back up again.
I am not surprised the Steam port numbers are so bad.
Horizon 1 was alright, albeit generic and too girl-boss for my liking. Horizon 2 seems to have gone full sweet baby, with chipmunk alloy to boot.
I haven't played DD2, but I loved the original. It was an interesting take on the ARPG format, with a lot of mechanics not found elsewhere. Relative to its peers at the time of release, it had considerably better combat - unsurprising coming from the designer behind Devil May Cry. DD2, by all accounts, seems to have expanded substantially on all of the successful mechanics of the first, and people seem to be having legitimate fun with it. Despite investment in ESG (black NPCs in a early Mediterranean setting despite being almost entirely absent in the previous game), it seems surprisingly unscathed in other regards - like female characters, which are pretty much what you'd expect from a Japanese game.
To be clear, I haven't purchased it and won't until, at the very least, performance improves. At which point, I'll mod the ESG out myself if I have to. With that said, most of the complaints levelled against it are embellished or outright fabricated. The steam score, despite the misunderstanding and poor performance, has already partly recovered as a result. To clarify:
The DRM does not prevent modding in DD or other Capcom games. Being REengine, fairly advanced modding tools are already available (including model swaps and custom scripting in LUA). A mod manager is already out, and as of one day after launch, 57 mods are already available.
You don't pay for a new game. It's locked to a single playthrough, and given the response, this will likely be patched out. For the time being, there is a save manager.
MTX exist, but all items are easily acquirable in the first city. No extensive farming required. The purchase window for MTX items even explicitly states this. If you have played DD1, released 12 years ago, you'll know that this is exactly the same as in the first. I don't like it, but it is typical Capcom. You're also especially retarded if you actually chose to part with real money, since it represents close to no advantage.