It seems like if what you’re showing is what you understand they find appealing and fun, then surely that’s what should be in the game. You give them that.
But instead, you give them something else that is unrelated to what they’ve seen on the ad? A gem matching candy crush clone they’ve seen a thousand times?
How is that model working? How is that holding up as a marketing technique???
As an old game dev, this is so depressing. All hooked up dopamine addicts needed to be bled their money as fast as possible.
Nice writeup though!
Yes, this seems to be the goal for most of the companies. That’s really awful, I don’t have enough words to comment on how much I hate that after playing one of those games for several months because I got addicted to it. Not a cent did I pay, though, let them fuck themselves
Yeah, I hate that this is the state of mobile gaming. And it’s seeped into other game spaces as well. I find it really sad and pathetic, but once big money crept in, it feels like that’s all most games are. It’s basically just pushed me harder towards indie games, and luckily that’s easier to find and discover these days.
Thank you!
An RTS with a backstory like red alert, even a rpg wirh a good story…
Last one I enjoyed was Knights of pen and paper :-)
Age of Empires Mobile (the real one, not a scam ad illegally using Microsoft’s assets) is probably going to release later this year! More info due to come out in a livestream on 23rd Feb.
You almost had me there ;-)
But let’s see how they might crapify it, and where’s the story in it, is it a good one in the original?
Not really sure what you mean. I wasn’t trying to get you at all, it’s completely sincere.
It’s an RTS, so not really a story-based genre. The community is mainly based around competitive multiplayer and fun casual multiplayer—either against AI or in vision scenarios. But the campaigns have generally been good, albeit very different from game to game.
AoE1 campaigns had almost no story to them, just a brief explanation of a period of time and set-up for the mission.
AoE2 campaigns focus on a particular notable figure from their respective culture, with voiced introductions and wrap-ups to each mission providing characterisation in addition to explaining the set-up.
Age of Mythology is in my opinion the best, as they took various myths from the 3 mythologies the game is based on and wove them into their own unique story with in-game cinematics and voice acting.
AoE3 does much the same, but it came across weird because of the ostensibly historical nature of the game not meshing so well with an entirely fictional story.
AoE4 came out very recently and is similar in scope to AoE1, jumping across centuries showing snapshots of a civilisation’s rise and fall. But it has incredible production value with narrated introductions superimposing historical details over real-life modern footage of the relevant sites, in addition to brief in-game narration of the type AoE2 also shares.
What will AoE Mobile’s campaigns be like? No idea. It was first announced in October 2022 at AoE4’s 1 year anniversary along side the Age of Mythology definitive edition game, but later this month will be the first time we’ve gotten anything official about it since then.