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.
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.