Lesson learned by game execs: all games from today onwards should be extraction shooters, always and forever, even when it makes no sense and will objectively and obviously make the game worse.
Hell yeah, Mario extraction shooter, can’t wait!
Honestly though, the extraction shooter part of this isn’t even the most compelling component for me in a vacuum. For me it’s how the extraction element contributes to the larger galactic war story. It reminds me of why I liked Hades so much but otherwise don’t like many roguelikes in general. The run-die-repeat mechanic of Hades only worked for me because it made sense in the story, with each time you die the House of Hades changes bit by bit and the story progresses.
Devs should come up with a story they want to tell or a work they want to build first, and then from there walk it back to find the gameplay loop, rather than say, “Extraction shooters or so hot right now, how can we shoehorn this loop/mechanic into a game that otherwise has no soul.”
What sold my friends on this game was me saying, “it’s starship troopers DnD with the Devs as the dungeon master and the aggregate of players making the story decisions.”
“Despite our best efforts to increase server capacity to accommodate all of you who want to dive for Freedom, we are experiencing capacity issues,” read a statement on the game’s X account.
Ruh roh, somebody didn’t design the backend to scale horizontally. Might not be an easy thing to fix depending on what the problem is exactly
It really is crazy that this game is 100x more successful than HD1 (and growing). This is the definition of Suffering From Success. I hope they can continue to fix issues quickly. It’s already much better than at launch. I’ll take a queue over constant crashes and disconnects. There are still crashes and disconnects for some people, but for me I am experiencing it much less.
this is a sequel to a 10 year old game that had a peak concurrent user of 6.5K and sold about 2M copies over that time. helldivers2 has sold between 2-8M in a week.
Doesn’t change the fact that the backend apparently doesn’t scale; I was just pointing out that it might not be an easy fix to do post hoc
Yeah people love to trash on them “just add more servers duh 4head” but don’t understand how complex it can be
Exactly! Designing a truly horizontally scalable system for something like this is damn hard and requires pretty specialized knowledge. It’s often the case that it simply isn’t possible to scale up the first version of some system you come up with since you may need to eg. completely rethink how clients communicate, or how you manage state updates and propagation, or need to rethink the consistency model you use to store the state over multiple nodes etc.
I wonder what Spider-Man numbers would have been like if it had launched at the same time as PC. Would a single player game like that be able to reach a high player count on steam?
Hopefully this release makes Sony attempt it in the future so we can see.
