[Derclaw]

No, srsly - its over folks. Pool is closed.

Remember when you started one of your videos with a question - "Does this world need another third person shooter" - and you said "Yes!"?

Well sure - you made great shooter as core of your game - it's hard, but it has no-nosence rules that you must follow to win. Your base gameplay is great - no questions here - it's just that you managed to completely negate all that with wast ammount or wrong assumptions and stubborness.

Let me explain.
Your track record on PC consists mostly of "disapointingly mediocre games with good ideas" - Blade of Darkness, Scraplands, Jericho, Castelvania Series and now Raiders - you jump all over the place with genres and styles, and most of time you see a potential for something great... but its just not there.

Blade of Darkness was imbalanced mess with kinda funny ideas, but breakable weapons and overall slugishness of combat was more anoying then "hardcore".

Scraplands - "Its GTA with graphics and with body-snatcher-posession system, and robots, and spaceships, and aerial combat!" - isnt it cool sounding premise? Too bad in reality it was as basic as it could be with all those systems - I mean it looked nice, but....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8oQXQRUdqg&list=PLs9a4C88ls7m2ct_4J8v29iir2FABqzPG&index=2
Just watch it and tell me you dont want to go deaf from the cringe as hell delivery and borderline "the dialog you can hear in first 5 minutes of low budget porn" final excahnge with fembot? And that was supposed to be your final blow at the player to leave lasting impression? 

Jerico - this right there is in my opinion is the pinacle of what you have achieved in terms of refining and distilling all the problems with how you made games. Its so much "style over substance" - no other game to date has managed to come close. Its the ultimate "high budget B-movie" style - leather-clad bunch of grumpy heroes - The Badass Soldier, The Badass Priest with Twin Pistols, The Badass Bloodmage with Katana, The Badass Brick-Shithouse with Gatling Gun etc, insane premise that lets you get into completely disconnected time periods - demon-nazi, demon-templars, demon-ancient romans, demon-shumerian, demon-prehistoric limbo or whatever.
I mean it looked nice but...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQKqVMEnSwo
Just watch it and tell me you dont want to go deaf from the cringe as hell delivery and fetishistic costumes that belong to some medium budget porn... wait a minute. Hm... anyway. I am still kinda angry that you failed to come up with final battle mechanics for all characters - so you just blew the "useless ones" into gibs at the very start  - way to go champs  !
And the final scene of "Sunset\rise in endless ocean" - you just don't get more pretentiouse then that in this half of the universe.

Haven't played your Castelvania - so I cant give my own opinion on that, but reviews were kinda uninspired overall, admitting that first Lord of shadows was better then the second. Not sure if First has any sort of cringe inducing scenes that look apropriate in some high budget (that seems to be increasing trend) porn, but Second part sure as hell has.


Then we have Raiders... God! I am still angry at you that you managed to bury whole thing.
Ehem... anyway. Raiders of Broken planet - highly stylized, 4-player coop cover-based shooter with funny, swearing, sort of diverse (we dont have any asians, black or any other people of color among raiders and mobs - everyone is some sort of caucasian - russians, americans, british, germans, prussians(?), etc - hell even Locals are more or less caucasian with oddly huge feets and weird body-stocking. Same for sexuality - so far we mostly have straight men and women or "defined by something else and upholds celebate" stoic types) cast, that is not F2P... wait what?

You need to buy mission DLCs to get into missions?

Ok, so it has single player mode so you can buy what you want and enjoy funtimes when playing alongside AI partners, right?

You need exactly 4 people even get into mission?

But what that "Single mode" is for?

One time Gold reward and once its done its just a waste of time to run those in single mode? Hm...



That first major mistake that will plague existance of Raiders. Developemnt team decided early on to work with episodic releases... in a multyplayer game. And not just any sort of episodic releases (you can kinda call Warframe's expansive developmet cycle with addition of new systems, levels and frames as episodic releases too), but the worst one possible - community splitting one. In a multyplayer game where you need 4 people to get into mission and single player mode is waste of time that gives no rewards. Yeah...

I have a feeling that someone on development team who is calling shots has some sort of weird sense of pride inside of him - that he will boldly lead his team into unknown business strategy and will show everyone that you SHOULD INDEED invent the wheel and fix what was not broken.

I cant dial back time, but if Raiders at day one had:

- Global chat in addition to randomized matchmaking with ability to one-click team-invites.

- All content open for everyone at any time (after you finished previouse missions) with ability to one-time purchase "episode mastery" that would... oh I dont know - give you X2-X3 loot when running those missions, episode specific character (Shae, Loaht - who are now also can be purchased with gold! A reasonable ammount of gold too - not 360k insanity).

- 10$ Per skin max - its a SKIN for ONE char. Asking 40-60$ - is asking to someone to spend price of a full game on a SKIN for ONE char.

- Flexible matchmaking - aka, if during random matachmaking you can't find 4 people in ONE minute - you start mission with whoever you got (even if its only one person) AND BLOCK Antagonist invasions for games with less then 3 people. You scale mission down, BUT YOU KEEP REWARDS THE SAME, no matter how easy mission becomes.
Main thing here - if you play as premade team in non-random matchmaking (aka its only 2 or 3 of you and you dont want outsiders) - you still get a chance of being invaded by Antagonist.

- Single player mode - difficulty settings, scalable FULL REWARDS (at very hard being 90% of multyplayer rewards and Insane being more then multyplayer) including blueprints, repeatable as much as you want.

- Antagonist invasions -where you don't wait for misiion to start. You search for mission that is less then 2-4 minutes in progress that has 3+ people or is a premade game - and then you get a glimpse at their characters, chose yours and then you drop right into their mission Darksoul-style. And for doing so - you (yet again) get FULL MISSION REWARDS in addition to Stigmatas that are back to being just for High scores and PROBABLY for lore unlocks - but you remove need for Stigmatas in regular crafting - alternative reskined "corrupted" versions of same guns thou? Hell yeah, be my guest and do that.

That would be a realy good multyplayer game worth your time, ofc not even close to Warframe in terms of scale, but with drasticly different core gameplay that will attract its own audience and wont annoy the living hell of them with all the hiccups on the way to gameplay.

Basicly - all you had to do was to take a good REALLY CLOSE look at what Warframe did with everything that is NOT their core gameplay (you have your own - and its fine - its great even - keep it as is) and copy 85% of it.

Because "DE" and Warframe gad 4+ years on refining that thing and adding and removing what works and what not - its not perfect by any stretch - but it has everything you need for enjoyable online coop action:
- No 20+ minutes waiting for single mission
- Global chats with ability to invite people you dont have on your Steam freindlist for easy premade making
- Ability to play solo when you want to (your internet is crap, you dont feel like playing alongside others today, you dont like playing alongside others AT ALL - dozens of reasons why you would like to play solo)
- Trading that allows people to give their newcomers friends a headstart
- No community splitting with where you can and can't go
- etc.

Sadly you ignored all of it. And thats why this game will face the fate of Evolve, Battleborn, MxM and the likes. Again - core is great, characters are fun - lots of promise but plagued by volumes more of ill-though decisions for a multyplayer coop game.
And I guess the sadest part about all that - even if you implement most of that stuff like today- it won't save this game.

[Roronao]

 Well core gameplay and characters design is the reason why game did not die in October

[Adrian_123]

Single mode is for practicing, see the cinematics at your own peace and once you understand the missions go to play antagonist or coop mode in multiplayer. isn't that enough?

[Dr.Kuzie]

Single mode is for practicing, see the cinematics at your own peace and once you understand the missions go to play antagonist or coop mode in multiplayer. isn't that enough?

You can have a peek on why it's not.  And I know I'm talking on Steam only, but I don't see PS4 or XBOXone having better numbers, ¿maybe between 200~1000? A lot of people is complaining about the long waits, based on that, I asume is less than 400. 

The thing is that I agree on Derclaw's words. With those numbers, a more flexive game is needed. Raiders is just like Evolve, Lawbreakers or Battleborn, but just worse. Jesus, even it's all time peek is the lowest of them, no even 2000 player. (Still talking on Steam numbers, I really can't talk about PS4 or XBOXone, maybe I'm wrong!)

Thing is, they had a "high" peek of 80 players before the new campaign was released. After that goes to 20~70 people playing again, when they released the new missions. I'm no game developer but I think those are pretty bad numbers for a new release. Maybe they have scared the players already. Atleast the PC ones.

And again, the game is pretty good, ¡hell, I wouldn't be so mad about it if it wasn't!, but the Devs screw up everything with very poorly decisions and the player base has been always the hurted one. So, probably, yeah, its over.

[Adrian_123]

I was unaware of this game until I came to mercurysteam website just to post on the forums a non related MercurySteam issue.

(Bohemia Interactive - Have openend the chance to third party developers to release DLC's for their game Arma 3. Just in case MercurySteam is Interested.)

So when I came to their website I saw they had released "Raiders of the Broken Planet". So I gave it a Try.

My first impresion was... Where the hell should I change my screen resolution and game controls!.

No matter this anoying start I did the tutorial and started the mision on "Very Hard" difficulty settings, The same that I did with the last game I played "Prey" (Games are by default extremely easy this days...) and I got beaten in seconds... I though to my self... Don't tell me that I am going to have to play this in "easy mode". So I did, Played the prologue in easy mode and notice the diference. Enemies respawned in fewer quantity and dind't came to me sprinting and shooting, just walking, givin me plenty of time to see them coming.

With this I realized that this game philosophy was more about "Old School" Arcades from the 90's (Sega Genesis / Megadrive - Super Nintendo) Those games where you had to repeat again and again, memorize where the enemies respawned, the best places and methods to finish the levels, and the weak points of every final boss.

So for me, the Single Player is more a "Training Mode" than actually a story driven game. From there, I did the prologue in single player from easy to very hard, and then started with coop-mode.

Very anoyed to see people that didn't knew how to acomplish the mission... That is the fault of the misleading "Free To Play" and "Episodic Game" both together, most of the people handle the game in wrong way.

If I had to describe what is "Raiders of the Broken Planet", for me is a

Beat'em up / Fighting game with guns!

(Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Street fighter 2, Mortal Kombat...)

When I managed to understand the game I liked it, wanted to start beating people and showing in an exhibitionist way how good I am with the game.

For me, this is the "Key Point". Manage to be really good at the game, and then showing everybody that you rule the game to the top number one.

[GoldenGoji]

TBH I honestly liked Jerico as a game, it wasn't pretty nor my cup of tea, but it was an enjoyable game if you didn't mind a little grit. Castlevania was awesome, too, through and through (last boss ehhh)

I had high hopes for this game. It's fun and fresh but you're right, they have a blind leader promising returns on a doomed episodic multiplayer game. Any foresight into this would've turned up red flags, but fast forward a few months and here we are, matchmaking is a ghost town. Players who paid for campaigns can't even play them (don't get me started on Xbox Ones founder pack), and they can't get anybody to buy new campaigns, especially after the handout to the free players.

I would've gladly donated to a kickstarter to see a full game released as whole but it seems like they're trying to make their money on the way. I guess they expect to make returns by having a few whales buy $60 skins, but they won't last long.

The devs really need to reconsider their business format because the game is on a crash course for the pits right now. Devs, if you read any of these or my posts, I doubt any of us mean ill. This IS a fun game and we are all hoping this fantastic burning boat can stay afloat, despite our frustrations. Its a shame to see a good game doomed by so many aspects. We want Raiders to succeeeeed  <3