New Game Plus (November 11-17)
Best of October
Waiting for the sales from October, there weren’t many big question marks. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released and you would assume that it be the best selling game of the month.Also where would some of the other big new releases of the month end up including Luigis Mansion 3, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Ring Fit Adventure, The Outer Worlds, and WWE2K20. Many of these games come with their own baggage.
Ring Fit Adventure is an exercise peripheral that combines RPG elements which might be enough to scare of a casual gamer looking for a fun way to get active. Keeping with Nintendo, Luigis Mansion 3 was released on October 31st, which gives it one day to make the charts and granted day one sales are the biggest. WWE2K20 and Ghost Recon Breakpoint have been maligned by critics for being filled with bugs and technical problems. Ubisoft has even stated that Breakpoint failed to perform to their standards, so how far will that place it on the charts. Finally, The Outer Worlds, an RPG from a recently independent studio with a great track record but how would being on GamePass affect sales.
Overall, for the month of October game sales were down year on year including hardware, software and accessories. The silver lining is this was the second highest revenue October in the past decade with just over a billion is sales. The highest was last year and that is the reason that sales are down vs the same time last year. All of this information is from the NPD group and you can find all this information on Mat Piscatellas YouTube channel.
Without brand new, next generation consoles on the horizon from Sony and Microsoft, customers had a little more security in their purchase not becoming irrelevant within months. Nintendo Switch has been selling very strongly but Xbox and PlayStation Sales declining slow the overall growth of the sector this year. The second factor for things being down is that this time last year there was some massive games released in October or right before including Red Dead Redemption 2, assassins creed odyssey, Black ops 4, super Mario party, forza horizon 4, FIFA 19 and Spider Man. Many of these games broke records immediately or went on to.
As expected Modern Warfare came out on the top of the charts and for the 12th year in a row has become the best selling game of the month. Unsurprisingly, modern warfare has also immediately become the best selling game of the year. This game had a lot of hype heading into release with new engine, infinity ward developing and going back to the roots of what catapulted the series to where it is now.
Obsidian entertainments The Outer Worlds came in second overall for the month which is great news for Microsoft who recently acquired the studio as they should be feeling good about the future of the studio after the critical and commercial success this game has received. The Outer Worlds was already well in development when Microsoft acquired the studio but moving forward the potential looks bright.
Another great story is Luigis Mansion 3 coming in at third for the month which is impressive considering the game is Switch exclusive and it released on the last day of the month. Luigis Mansion isn’t exactly in the same tier as a Mario, Zelda or Pokémon game but Nintendo finding this level of success with the green plumber might open up some possibilities for this series becoming a mainstay with more releases than three every twenty years. The other new bright spot for Nintendo was that Ring Fit Adventure placed 10th on the list which is great for a premium priced peripheral that’s focused on exercise. Ring fit adventure has received great reviews and currently sits above 80 on Metacritic. The success these two games have seen is great news for gamers as it will continue to encourage Nintendo to try fun and interesting things knowing that the customers will support them if they are done well.
The critically maligned games of the month were Breakpoint and WWE2K20 and although they didn’t flop, they did place in the top 10. Breakpoint at six and WWE at seven. As opposed to Nintendo delivering quality, innovative experiences these are closer to broken facsimiles of their previous iteration. I am always strongly in the camp of speak with your wallet. There is nothing that hurts a company more than a product not selling. I was somewhat hopeful when the PlayStation Blog released their top digital games for October and WWE was 17th which made me think that possibly fans have spoken up with word of mouth and critics with negative reviews that this game wasn’t going to sell and that it would send a message to TTWO. Unfortunately with both of these games ranking in the top ten, the message might not make it through that the quality is not where it should be. At least Ubisoft has acknowledged that Breakpoint was a “massive failure”
As of right now the best selling games of the year are Modern Warfare, NBA2K20, and Madden rounding out the top three.
Anthem 2.0
It was just a few short weeks ago that things seemed very dire for BioWare and EA. Although still the seventh best selling game of the year, Anthem was plagued with issues since it launch. Back in August lead producer of Anthem, Ben Irving, parted ways with the studio after 8 years. A few short weeks ago, Chad Robertson who was head of live service, announced that after 14 years he would be moving on from BioWare as well.
These are just two of the many that have either moved on to other projects within the studio such as Dragon Age 4 or have completely left the studio. These are too many changes not to be related to Anthem and the tumultuous development the game had as well as its reception. Add up all of the departures and changes within BioWare compounded with the announcement recently of how future DLC that was promised for the game will never be coming and it certainly seemed like it was the end. It seemed like EA and BioWare had decided that it would make the most sense to forget the game and focus on other projects.
It’s possible that assumption might have come too soon as this week there was a story on Kotaku from Jason Schreier about BioWare planning a complete overhaul of the game. Fittingly according to the article some of the monikers used within the studio are Anthem 2.0 or Anthem Next. The latter name clearly harkens back to No Mans Sky which was a PR problem earlier this generation when it first launched.
According to the article there is still a lot of work to be done before any of this comes to fruition including how the update will be rolled out. One of the few bright spots for a game like Anthem is that there have been games that have made case studies on releasing content post launch for a negatively received game. Destiny 1, for example launched with great success but the overall consensus switched quite quickly when it was realized just how sparse the story was and what little lore was to be found in the world without digging deep through the descriptions. The team rebounded with a major expansion update called The Taken King which featured completely new enemies (arguably) and featured a involved story line. This expansion was critically well received and without a doubt restored faith within the fanbase which helped immensely when Destiny 2 launched.
The other method of updating your game is more along the lines of what No Mans Sky did with smaller but still significant updates and then eventually draw back a much bigger crowd on top of the fans that stayed while you added meaningful changes. No Man Sky was touted by Sony as this thing that it just wasn’t at the start. While it eventually became something closer to how it was marketed, it was always misrepresented by Sony who needed a AAA exclusive at the time. The problem was that Hello Games was not a AAA studio. After the initial negative backlash that descended upon the game, Hello Games went silent and put their heads down and got back to working hard at bringing No Mans Sky to something much closer to what was advertised.
This is what brings us back to Anthem and how poorly this game was received. BioWare had created a name for itself as a studio that delivers a quality products in the millennium including Knights of the Old Republic, The Dragon Age series and Mass Effect. The shine seemed to be wearing off with the release of Mass Effect Andromeda in 2017. Andromeda was a very troubled game including the new engine the game utilized, Frostbite, and changing the game from a more focused RPG to something of a hybrid open world RPG. Some parts were considered a success including the combat but too many bugs held this game back, most stemming from the new engine. Earlier in the year we covered the in depth piece about how working with Frostbite was considered the major reason for Anthems failure.
As the vitriol towards EA is always at a record high, it was easy to pile on the train that it wouldn’t be long before the pulled the plug on it. For what its worth, what I have read regarding the troubled Anthem development, it seems that it was BioWare that decided what direction the studio would take with Anthem. It wasn’t EA that forced the studio to create a live service game in the vein of Destiny.
Sources from the article inside BioWare say that the team has far from abandoned the game despite what the internet, departures from the studio may have you believe. “Right now, dozens if not hundreds of developers at both of BioWare’s offices are quietly working on plans to overhaul the game. We spent a few months just tearing it down and figuring out what needed to change fundamentally and we’ve been rebuilding for another few months since” sources said
Being in a situation that Anthem is currently in, almost seems like a no win. If you abandon the game, it leaves a stain on the developer and the publisher and almost all but eliminates any chance of the IP becoming more than just one game but you do save resources. On the other hand, if you try to fix the game it will cost a lot more resources, and you can never really be sure that you will be able to win back the fans or even fix the game. However you do have the chance that it will improve, it will win back consumers and at the very least vastly improves the chances of the sequel being accepted.
It doesn’t sound like BioWare is anywhere close to having the fixes ready for the game, especially considering that most of the employees at BioWare are working on the next Dragon Age as they announced last year at The Game Awards. It also seems that the next Dragon Age game isn’t the only new project in the works at BioWare as there is also “ a new Mass Effect game is in very early development under director Mike Gamble”
XO19
Microsofts Xbox fan event took place in London, England this week with what seemed like a a fair amount of hype from Microsoft itself. Although I don’t think it lived top to the hype levels they were generating, there were still many announcements, as it seemed like they were going for quantity over quality. In case you missed the live episode of Inside Xbox, you can also go and find all of the information on the Xbox Wire. Teasing new game info as well as Project xCloud information fell somewhat flat as most of the features aren’t coming until next year. Project xCloud is still in a very limited preview program and it seemed like it was going to be a little more mainstream by possibly putting it into beta. Instead they announced that in 2020 the service will be coming to new devices including windows PC’s as well as new markets including Canada, India, Japan and Western Europe. The preview program has also seen a boost in gaming titles with over 50 new titles, including some big third party titles that require fast twitch response with no lag including Madden NFL 20, Devil May Cry 5 and Tekken 7. Microsoft is also adding new devices which you can use to control the game including the DualShock 4. 2020 is less than a few months away so its possible that some of these features could be early on in the year but without Microsoft saying early 2020, it seems most likely that a lot of these features are still farther off.
In terms of games announced, everything is far off from release or even very early in development. Sea of Thieves developer came out to talk about their new game Everwild. It’s hard to explain it but it seems in the vein of Breath of The Wild or Horizon Zero Dawn with the atmosphere of Ori and The Blind Forest and an art style similar to The Witness. “Everwild will give you memorable, engaging and meaningful experiences for players everywhere to share”
It looks interesting but it is a long ways off and it was made clear that the Sea of Thieves team will continue to update and support that game for a long time. Craig Duncan, studio head at rare said “While Everwild and the team building it will get everything they need, we are still fully committed to Sea of Thieves — Joe, Mike, Shelley and the team still have plenty of creative ideas and plans to bring to Sea of Thieves for a long time to come and we have a number of central teams that support both games”
Bundling up the rest of the gaming news from the event, it was announced that halo reach will be coming to the MCC on December 3. A new trailer was shown off that featured gameplay from Age of Empires 4. No release date was given or platforms but Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition launched on GamePass on PC and Xbox on Thursday so it’s safe to assume that Age 4 will also be coming to Xbox. Wasteland 3 from inxile studios received a release date and will be available on May 19, 2020 and will be day 1 on GamePass. Square announced that nine final fantasy games will be coming to GamePass and the kingdom hearts series will finally be coming to Xbox. Although not to game pass. Finally, obsidian announced their next project, grounded which is survival game that looks to have open world and rpg elements where you have been shrunk down smaller than an ant. This sounds like another title that was in development before Microsoft acquired the studio.