Hacker News Reader

Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

SWAT 4 didn't sell that well tbh, Tribes Vengeance was pretty bad and Vivendi stopped supporting the game 6 months after it's release, it was primarily a multiplayer only game and received only 1 patch, and Freedom Force was a joke.

It's also should be noted that Ken Levine is somewhat known to be hard to work with, there was a fall out with Vivendi/Sierra and there were issues with employees leaving Irrational after having fights with him (you can find various posts on industry forums) which also lead to Nate Wells (Executive Art Director) leaving Irrational for Naughty Dog.

View on HN

and Freedom Force was a joke

What was wrong with Freedom Force? City of Heroes, it was not, but it was a fun little game. It also had a great modding community before the cease-and-desist orders from Marvel started.

Scored well critically, too: http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/340353-freedom-force/index.ht...

Scored well yes, so did tribe vengeance (was 80-85%) and SWAT 4 doesn't mean they were a success.

P.S.

The link is for the original game, FF vs the 3rd Reich was released in 2005.

It doesn't meant they were a success, but you said Freedom Force was a joke, and it wasn't. The scores don't prove anything, but support that is wasn't a joke.

A joke in that almost no one bought it and it's utterly forgotten, look at the Wikipedia entries for those titles vs other games ;)

Any game that diesn't sell well and make a lot of money for the studio is a joke.

I think this isn't necessarily true, especially in an era where returning to underground/cult IPs that didn't sell well is becoming a more common strategy. Shenmue 2 and Nier were both games that didn't make back nearly enough to support the developers, and yet they both have anticipated sequels on the horizon that devs/fans/news outlets are taking seriously.

Tribes: Vengeance was awful. Irrational/Vivendi destroyed the franchise and back-stabbed an amazing modding community.

Amen. They could have phoned in a re-skinned/graphically updated Tribes 2 and it would have been an improvement.

Scored well, but of the few people I know who owned it no one finished more than a few levels. It lacked a compelling goo, for me.

I played through the entire game in 2004 (the original, not Third Reich.) The ending works pretty well emotionally. There were a few levels that almost got me to quit, though, particularly the underground/ant levels.

I played through the whole original Freedom Force when it was originally released. Loved it. Didn't go for the "Third Reich" expansion because I was not super interested in more WW2 sounding stuff at that point and as a youth my gaming budget was quite restrained.

I agree. It was a great VIDEOGAME. Bleeding edge graphics -- nope, but it made up for it in spades with good, fun gameplay. Reminded me (in substance rather than style) of a PC-equivalent to a first-party Nintendo game -- not everything needs to be a sweeping epic of action movie sizzle, or super dramatic story telling. Call me old fashioned, but sometimes I like playing videogames that are games.

I agree about Tribes:Vengeance; a pox on whoever decided the game needed a "prequel" that focused on a single-player mode and ignored all the aspects of the previous two games that made them so great. That entire franchise has suffered since it left the hands of Dynamix.

I can't get on board with you regarding Freedom Force, though. While some of the levels were a bit tedious, the character customization and feel of the game was superb. I can't think of another superhero game since (at least, outside of the MMO realm) that allows you that degree of freedom (no pun intended).

FF was a decade too early; had it come out in 2012 it could have ridden the Avengers wave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com