Blades of Fire

[radiofloyd]

https://www.eurogamer.net/metroid-dread-studio-announces-new-action-adventure-blades-of-fire

 

New game from Mercury Steam. Unfortunately, you have to click the link to watch the video.

[Maf]

Saw the trailer for this yesterday and looks like it could be fun. The combat looks a bit souls-like, hard to tell exactly. But it’s got lots of set pieces, cinematic action and more varied gameplay ideas than typical souls-likes have so that’s good 

 

It’s almost like they’re going back to their Lords of Shadow roots which I really liked at the time. 

[Maryokutai]

Their independent efforts haven't been particularly good so far but this looks like they took the lessons learned from Castlevania and turned it into something of their own. With the exception of the main character there's some very appealing character design and art-direction here, as you'd expect from them. Comes out on my birthday, too, so I might actually get this on release.

[DANGERMAN]

They did a really good job with the art on Lords of Shadow, cool that they're doing that again. 

 

I hope it doesn't play like a Souls game, time to move on from that 

[DANGERMAN]

So this hasn't done very well 

 

https://www.eurogamer.net/metroid-dread-studios-recent-console-and-epic-exclusive-action-adventure-underperformed-due-to-increasingly-selective-consumers-says-publisher

 

Spoiler

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Blades of Fire, the dark fantasy action-adventure from Metroid Dread studio MercurySteam, has "underperformed" following its console and Epic Games Store-exclusive PC release in May, contributing to a €10m loss for publishing group Digital Bros. The company has blamed the game's failure on "an oversupply of new releases and increasingly selective consumers".

 

Ignore the spoiler box, I pressed the wrong thing. Can't help but think making it Epic exclusive had hurt them. They aren't even going to get a bump from dropping the price, it's too small a market 

[Maryokutai]

Every time a news topic for a small-ish game like this pops up after release I dread the click. Thankfully, this time around, Mercurysteam is still around.

 

Epic-only certainly didn't help, but at the same time I don't think Steam would have saved it. I think the reasons cited from the publisher are unusually realistic, there's really not that big of a market anymore for imperfect, but fun and unique 7/10 games. In this case I also think reviews misrepresent it quite a bit, getting annoyed about a very harmless forging minigame and losing patience due to its labyrinthine level design, probably because it limits progression when moving towards a deadline.

 

But it's also the usual budget thing, presumably. If a 1:1 version built around PS360 tech had come out in 2010 and sold roughly the same amount, maybe it would have been succesful, or at least recouped its costs.

 

Ultimately a bit depressing because news like this feed into the already overbearing homogenisation in the market. Plus I really like the game and it's always a bit shit to see a personal favourite do poorly.