Marvel's Anthem (The Jimquisition)

[Music] i think i've made it quite clear over the course of this show that i'm just about ready sick of it i'm sick of the injustice i'm sick of the disparity i'm sick of the abuse that goes on in the industry and the wider socioeconomic systems that we're all trapped in as a whole and i know what some of you are thinking well jim it's all very well you being fed up but what are you gonna do about it well i have a plan the time is ready and i think some of the more revolutionary among you know what i'm talking about oh yeah that eager to receive my friend the world's tree we find out the hallowed ground wherever that ship be growing right we go over there with axes we chop it down we take iggedra seal the world tree to my cousin's house he's got a lock up sorted gosh get it in there get some circular saws going i know someone called lloyd he and his friends live down by the river they find circular all sorts of things some of them are light some of them rusty the rusty ones are what we want to look at bring them back to the lock up here's where things get juicy we strip that thing down for parts branches gone leave bye bye we take the trunk we turn that into logs now here's where the billionaires fund their own demise we sell authentic eager seal the world tree logs to billionaires they will pay top dollar and then we take that money we use it to fund our own company a media empire we buy advertising time i run public service announcements reminding jeff bezos he owes me a million pounds that's right jeffrey time to pay the paper i want them queen quits so justin where's yggdrasil the world tree is it in valhalla or midgard what are those maybe norway what are you [ __ ] talking marvel's avengers delivers a narrative over multiple years with exciting new content released at a regular basis welp how's that working out for you oh oh yes when marvel's the marvel avengers by marvel was announced at e3 2019 we were told it would last years but very much like anthem before it and destiny before that marvel's avengers would be a perpetual service that we would want to keep playing forever and like anthem before it as well as destiny before that the claim was complete [ __ ] of course it was [ __ ] and i'm not just talking about the frankly embarrassing number of people who are still playing the game it was [ __ ] because it's always [ __ ] it was always gonna be [ __ ] it's always been [ __ ] every time a studio promises their game has a decade-long plan or as content designed to be unveiled over several years they're either lying or they're so incredibly naive as to be [ __ ] idiotic a handful of games that incidentally blew up and became online powerhouses have actually lasted years and of them very few have run to an entire [ __ ] decade i mean 10 years in an industry obsessed with annual sequels in an industry with the attention span of a magpie in an industry that cancels projects or lays off stuff and simply gives up on things at the drop of a hat we're supposed to believe so-called aaa publishers can make a worthy product built to last 10 years if this industry could actually tell the truth and or keep its promises we'd still be playing the first destiny right now and we still wouldn't be particularly close to finishing it we were supposed to all still really be into anthem by now it was meant to have big chapter updates but they never came it was supposed to be getting a big overhaul still but we've heard nothing in months and it'll be far too late to drag players back into it now do you want to play on your new ps5 no mum shut the [ __ ] up i've got anthem to play as for the adventures it released in september a few weeks ago at the time of talking and it's already a wasteland not wasteland the game people play that people want that right now players of marvel's the james cameron's avengers are struggling to find multiplayer matches because there aren't enough players and you kind of need players for multiplayer you need multiples of them at the very least that is the reality of what crystal dynamics told us was a years-long experience a couple weeks after launch and fewer than a thousand concurrent players can be found on pc which is a problem for a game that contrived a sense of false longevity entirely off the back of its desperately tacked on online features for indeed you can't have a live service if the player base is dead and that's something these companies continue to fail to consider when they cobble together a half-baked a bug-ridden content poor thoroughly shoddy product with the intent to fix it after everybody's bought it it turns out that when you sell garbage people treat it like garbage and throw it in the [ __ ] bin somehow despite the industry being littered with the corpses of live services that failed to live it's a lesson developers and publishers obstinately refuse to learn you can't keep putting out trash and expecting everyone to stick around until you clean it up we'll move on with our lives and you'll be stuck trying to fix your product for a dwindling audience throwing good money after bad and fallaciously sinking in your costs see anthem see evolve see some of the games that came out this year that you don't even know a thing about like bleeding edge or rogue company messy road company came in not too long ago i don't know if it's doing well it's rubbish or the latest attempt to make the culling a thing and some of those aren't even terrible but they're not inspiring they're not standout and none of them have ever felt like complete high quality content rich experiences i quite liked bleeding edge played it for a couple days i haven't touched it since never will now you look at full guys that's a live service the developers there keep having to apologize because the servers can't handle the amount of players they're not having to keep on apologizing for the game being [ __ ] as for marvel's avengers well that game is frankly just [ __ ] avengers is in my humble opinion one of this year's very worst games and i still scarcely believe it got any critical praise i mean there are people who do like this game for some [ __ ] up reason but i don't know how it's combat is a sloppy visually unpleasant mess with a cluttered ui and more physics bugs than the university of chicago's cockroach training program that just about works visually it's washed out lifeless drab the character models are the most boring and insipid takes on marvel's characters perhaps ever the writing is banal the mic transactions and battle pass staff is a total [ __ ] con and everything's wrapped up in the trappings of a bottom feeding looter shooter service game where the loot is meaningless menu filling rubbish and you spend most of your time fighting generic robots even for boss fights because that's what you want in a marvel game [ __ ] the super villains you want robots and aim scientists and aim robots and robots sign robots and scientists elites it's the consumers triple a game a pathetically safe corporate back to rush to market product directive personality and stuffed with monetization basically if you want to play an even more boring dynasty warriors game with a thoroughly uncharismatic splash of comic book paint marvel's avengers is exactly what you want once you're done with the game's milk toast narrative campaign you have an entire service to look forward to which is really just the exact same [ __ ] with slightly less narrative and let me tell you after just a day playing this repetitive grinding unsatisfying so long of a time waster i didn't want any more of it let alone years of the [ __ ] apparently only less than a thousand people have more patience for it than i did which is the exact same story we had with anthem last year because this [ __ ] industry just doesn't learn and just like anthem marvel's avengers developers are now kidding themselves into thinking this cadaver's heart can be jump started we are listening we are making fixes improvements and additions as fast as we safely can to make marvel's avengers the game we all aspire it to be said crystal dynamics is scott amos saying the usual carbon copy execs speak we've heard a million [ __ ] times you're listening are you you're always listening we are confident that we'll see pc players as well as those on xbox one and playstation 4 return to the game as we add exciting new late game content and demonstrate that we continue to be focused on improving the game uh-huh scott sure sure sure yeah all you need to do is add your aim cloning lab mission and the players will come flocking back to you oh yeah that'll bring the boys back to the yard won't it the juicy milkshake of the own cloning facility what even is that the entire [ __ ] game is an aim cloning facility it's all you [ __ ] fight yes scott i used to tell myself i could turn this youtube channel around but sometimes you just need to face reality follow me on twitch twitch tv jim sterling also one common thread with a lot of these are live service games when you see follow-up interviews post-launch interviews with developers they're never talking about how great things are they're never talking about how brilliant the product is it's all going forwards we'll improve things we're listening we're gonna fix stuff brilliant pr i wonder why people haven't flooded your servers i'm not the only ones who have noticed that we've all heard this song before forbes started its story on the avengers player base woes by copying and pasting an article it wrote about anthem last year and changing some names it's almost frightening how identical the two stories are up to and including mentioning that people are hacked off with the loot not just the same basic situation the same style of game made for the same cynical motives facing the same criticisms and suffering the exact same problems it's almost as if these triple a companies with no substantial experience in service games or loop to shoot style products just barrel into a medium without bothering to learn how things work or whether the market has room for another [ __ ] one of these things then they just crap out something unbalanced and unfinished that they have to spend their time apologizing for and fixing instead of building upon almost as if people running these studios bioware haven't got a [ __ ] clue and when their clueless [ __ ] [ __ ] things up that just creates more work and crunch for the people on the lower rungs of the ladder bioware slapping the marvel logo on something might be a good way to sucker people into an initial purchase but it's clearly not enough to keep those suckers sucked no to keep a player base you actually need a game worth playing and you need one when the actual game launches ideally you can't keep [ __ ] taking sixty dollars a price you all wanna raise to seventy dollars this year for games that will be worth spending money on twelve months down the line especially when your unfinished game invariably has a perfectly polished micro transaction store that keeps asking for more cash on top and that's just [ __ ] insulting you know that right you do know that developers and publishers it's downright offensive for these rapid skeletal products to beg for more money while you're still trying to make them worth the original entry fee and you really you really think you deserve to maintain a player base when you do that no no you don't [ __ ] deserve to keep players marvel's avengers is [ __ ] poison it's a corporate buffet table which has already seen one of its best characters sectioned off as a playstation exclusive it offers tacky and sickening sponsored skins that turn captain america into a verizon billboard and it features a premium battle pass per character complete with obligatory mind-numbing grind if you don't want to keep spending money on it and the skins are [ __ ] that's perhaps the worst part you take these generic dulles [ __ ] stump double marvel characters and then you sell cosmetics that mostly look worse than the mcu ripoff costumes they start with marvel characters are good like they're like comic book characters they're cool they're colorful they're wild they're you made [ __ ] and then you offered us ways to buy clothes that looked like [ __ ] so we could dress your [ __ ] characters up like [ __ ] and about that playstation exclusive we brought up [ __ ] spider-man as a ps exclusive i mean how can we pretend avengers deserves more than a thousand pc players when pc players were told up front that their copy of the game while costing the same would inherently have less content than the playstation version not just less content but lacking perhaps the most iconic marvel character of all time like being told you couldn't be batman in a dc game but others could that's explicitly what pc and xbox players learned if i were them i wouldn't have bought the game either not unless it was a used copy crystal dynamics [ __ ] the pumpkin the very day this game was announced when it said they were planning years of content only an imbecile at that moment could have believed that was true and only someone unfamiliar with the mainstream game industry could have heard that and not dreaded the [ __ ] that was to follow and [ __ ] surely followed every bit of news we heard about this game before launch made it sound like a worse and worse deal and when it came out it was exactly what i dreaded it would be yet more to ripple a live service glute i'm not a game developer look i know that but i know a thing or two about a thing or two so i have some advice for crystal dynamics just a thing just a little outsider bit of wisdom you need to do more than just say your game won't have [ __ ] loot boxes in it so our promise to the community is that we won't have random loot boxes or pay-to-win scenarios yeah at e3 in front of an audience full of [ __ ] sycophants you can say your game won't have loot boxes and get a ton of applause and cheering easy applause easy cheering at e3 2019 you got the biggest round of applause this game has ever gotten and will ever get and you earn that applause by doing the absolute bare minimum maybe that response let you believe that's all you ever had to do but as you have just learned the bare minimum is only good for a cheap crowd pop it's not going to keep that crowd sticking around now is it this year full guys came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest games in the world this year among us came out of obscurity to become one of the biggest games in the world they didn't have massive e3 press conferences dedicated to them they didn't have heady promises of years-long plans they also didn't have your budgets and resources and team numbers and marketing no one thing they do have that you don't know is players what they've had is good replayable entertaining polished content they have content that's actually been fun that's actually been trying to entertain players rather than draw them in to an addictive gameplay loop it's the subtle difference between a game designed to provide fun and a game designed to form habits they didn't even have to try to become huge live games they just came out and people loved them and here we are you can't just decide a game will be a mega smash hit and a household name and then try to make a game that lives up to the decision you just made about a game that doesn't exist that's what bioware tried to do with anthem it's what crystal dynamics has tried to do with avengers and it doesn't work you can't just decide your game is beloved you have to do something people will actually you know love do you remember when i showed you those street sharks animation cells the other week well i was so impressed with them i got some masters of the universe ones and i think i think i made a mistake getting a popular show because yeah what the [ __ ] is this little trumpet boy it's just a little trumpet boy this isn't a master of the universe it doesn't even look like a master of that trumpet it's [ __ ] prince adam's eyes and hair how in the what the [ __ ] this is literally the best one i got taylor doing nothing which brings us to this [ __ ] sad roger sad roger the wizard who i don't know who the [ __ ] it is it's not skeletor it's not merman it's not even [ __ ] try co-ops it's sad roger everyone it's sad roger he's just looking what does that is not an that is an expression of nothing that is just an expression of sad roger [Music] thank god for me and [ __ ] sad roger the wizard do you think they'll like that video [Music] yeah why not let us know if you did [Music] you

Channel: Jim Sterling

Views: 473,381

Rating: 4.9171309 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: bRN00Xg3HyI

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DiogoSN]

Well Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sequel died for this, I hope it was worth it....

I'm so astranged to their expectation of the game doing well as a guarantee. Rainbow Six Siege is doing great but unique and good gameplay kept the hook. I'm quite sure if ti wasn't doing well, it wouldn't get the updates. Why are these companies always expecting that players will glue onto their game just like that?

Support should be guaranteed but you can't expect games to do well by gurantee. You need to see how people react to it and if there's actual player retention. Problem is, companies want to steal you from other game that have that retention. I don't think GaaS are working because there are already others that exist, reminds me of the MMO craze back in the day.

I really wished that the game was mroe akin to a normal singleplayer, acted more like the Arkham games instead of a generic looter shooter.

[u/Klondeikbar]

I still can't get over how bad this game looks. I don't mean in general, I mean the aesthetic is just so painfully boring my eyes glaze over just looking at the game footage in this video. I can't imagine staring at that on my TV or monitor for multiple hours at a time.

I just don't understand how they took comic book characters, known for over the top costumes and blindingly bright colors, and turned them into...mud.

I'm not convinced that it would be a success even if the gameplay loop was good. It's just so offputting.

[u/SteampunkJester]

Just think, in an alternate timeline this game was made to be similar to Spiderman PS4. A good open world with a great single player story and no microtransactions...

sigh

[u/GhostSht]

Some more stats about the Avengers flop:

• Before the Forbes story, more people were playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Steam than Avengers. Don’t forget, Square Enix shelved a new Deus Ex game indefinitely to rush into the live service craze.

• I’ve heard that UK sales numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt, but in the month of September, Super Mario 3D All-Stars outsold Avengers. Never mind that it’s a collection of three previously released games that came out in the middle of the month.

• Hawkeye was supposed to be released “within weeks of launch” (Crystal Dynamics’s words, not mine). It’s been about a month and a half and we still have no word on a firm release date.

I don’t know why Jim hasn’t been using the term “early AAAccess” as of late. That’s exactly what the live service business model is. Square Enix, EA, etc will never put these games on true early access because that’s too much time and money on their end. Just rush it out the door, buggy as all get out, with monetization as the only fully fleshed system, and let the saps play test it for you. To my knowledge, the only AAA live service game that was successful this gen was Monster Hunter World, and that had no paid costumes and came out as a fully fleshed game.

[u/shasofaiz]

So...that intro...

Jim confirmed for Tales Of series villain? Chopping down Yggdrasil and all?

[u/mrhelmand]

The fact that a game based on one of the hottest properties of the now ended up so disposable shows how the industry is fucking clueless.

Don't suppose there's any chance of them ripping out all the marketplace BS down the road like Shadow of War did when peak sales were done?

[u/TheeHeadAche]

We need to big up Sad Roger.

Hear me out...

[u/khjuu12]

My theory for why developers can't learn that you can't vomit out a pile of garbage, get a huge player base, and fix it later is that they ARE learning it, but slowly.

First we have PokemonGo. It's basically a Pokemon-themed skin slapped on top of Ingress or w/e it was called. You couldn't trade, battle, breed, level up, EV train, change movesets, or do fuck all. But if you squinted and tilted your head juuuuuust right, it was Pokemon. It breaks mobile gaming.

Then, Anthem and Destiny. Brand new IPs. Why? That's not why PoGo worked. No one gives a shit.

FO 76. Much loved IP, and ESO is doing okay, right? We don't have to try. Niantic didn't try. Doesn't work. No one gives a shit.

If I'm right, I think Marvel's Avengers might be the last one they try for a while. The MCU has a fucking huge fanbase. Sure, within gaming Fallout has a big fan base. And gaming is a bigger and bigger part of the entertainment market. But it's not Marvel movies. So we target a fan base that knows less about games (so they can't tell it's garbage), which is way bigger than the fan base for any particular gaming IP. I bet we can do a PokemonGo, only without letting people download it for free. Nope, no one cares, DOA.

I think that's as far as you can go to try to squeeze another PoGo into the market. Biggest franchise anyone's tried yet, least gaming-savvy fan base (excluding whoever the fuck is still buying FIFA games), and it failed spectacularly. I think the 'shovel shit out and promise it'll work later' was only ever going to work on mobile with Pokemon, and I think this was the best possible attempt at doing it for PC and console.

But we'll see if I'm right!

In any case, I can make this comment half-right by adding: Thank God for Jim.

[u/DarkThespian]

When the pitch for your game starts off as "Anthem, but with the Avengers," it might be worth thinking, for a moment, if Anthem was successful. I guess they didn't do that part.

In all seriousness, I don't think anyone is surprised by this outcome. Did anyone actually want this game?