Guest Post: Can poor company policy ruin a good game concept? Hax Monster certainly thinks so as he reviews Overkills choices for Payday 2
Posted by: Jason Silverain / Category: Guest, Review, Video, Video games
In
our brave new fast, technology-fuelled world, sometimes questions may
arise on what should be considered normal. Should businesses be
allowed to break explicit promise they made? Should an enterprise be
allowed to openly ask for donations? The games industry in particular
is an area where norms and values are quite unclear which also raises
very poignant dilemmas. Should consumers be instructed to buy an X
amount of content to be given trivial rewards? Should a business with
75 employees, a mother company and a publisher be allowed to call
itself an ‘independent’ developer? Should you add the vast
majority of your game’s content years after release and should you
create downloadable content that is worth five times more than the
base game?
Don't forget that day 1 DLC
Perhaps
I’m a simple man. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned and should have been
born around the 1950’s when it was impossible to sell someone an
oven and later on bring out a ‘chicken frying’ add-on for the
oven which would only be available if I would have bought the oven
again two times. I might just be so simple, but yet I firmly believe
the answer to all of those questions above should be an absolute no.
However, all of that seems to be happening today.
4 men and bags of stolen money.
This
time, my vague review introduction alludes to Payday 2, a game that
is about bank robbing, but apparently the title also refers to the
only thing the developer has in mind. I probably wouldn’t have
deemed this possible ten years ago but this game has been made
horrible retroactively. It was launched 2013 by Overkill software as
a sequel to Payday: The Heist. The Heist was a simple, cheap
four-player co-op shooter game about doing a bunch of linear, fairly
cinematic missions to nick the arbitrary pile of valuables du
jour.
Shooting was all you did and missions barely changed inbetween
playthroughs. It’s total runtime, without repetition, wouldn’t
even outlast a long movie but the teamplay involved was enough to
come back for if you had others to play with.
Essentially,
it’s baby boy Payday 2 is usually pretty open, giving you an entire
area to freely use in the mission and only an objective. In most
situations you can go in guns blazing and fight off the cops until
you’ve got the loot and then transport the loot to your van while
under fire. Alternatively you can try to stealth it up and sneak in,
shoot every civilian because you’ve found out you can’t tie down
ten people at once, then find out that one guard’s boss called him
to see if that noise he heard was him devastating the bathroom with
diarrhea again. Then boss man calls the cops and THEN you can go in
guns blazing and fight off the cops until etcetera etcetera etcetera.
I hope you are near the escape when these guys turn up.
Gunplay is pretty fun; it is smooth in the Call of Duty kind of way
and there are enough special enemies to liven up the violence buffet,
unless all special enemies are disabled because you’re playing on
‘normal’ difficulty, you coward! I’ve got to mention that I
just hate it when a game names it’s easy difficulty setting
‘normal’, just to flatter the player. I can just picture the
developer’s thoughts when they chose to do that: ‘Amazing job,
player! Most ‘normal’ people would struggle through this but for
you it’s a breeze, please feel so badass about yourself that you’re
going to leave a positive review for us on Steam, mwah mwah mwah’
etcetera. But yeah, the gunplay’s solid. Actually it is even more
solid than it seems, because it shares the problem with Call of Duty
that enemy hitboxes are like half a meter bigger in every direction
than the enemy themselves, making every enemy a big solid partially
invisible fridge that you can hit from kilometres away. One little
feature I did like was that the soundtrack’s bass drops when the
enemies go and rush for your sorry arses, which legitimately makes
you feel like a badarse. Afterwards you use the money you… ehrm…
‘earned’ to buy a bunch of useless gizmos for your gun and all
that other standard upgrading nonsense and you just do all the same
missions again. This really is a rinse and repeat kind of game where
you do all the missions ten times, usually just on one difficulty too
once you’ve found the one for you.
Repetition
is not what gets this game down though, I found the community to be
relatively twelve-year-old free and most players are ok with making a
little heisting scheme beforehand. The community is actually so good
that I’ve met the vast majority of my Steam friends, including
Silverain, in this game. A lot of the fun comes from the teamplay,
but also from the hoarding sensation of shamelessly grabbing a big
pile of bank money that probably belongs to some poor pensioner that
needs it to feed her cat, you monster! There’s some weird
fundamental joy to just grabbing a load of things to take for
yourself, which shows that Payday 2 probably gives you the same rush
as the rush that starts off a career in shoplifting.
Of
course, robbing a bank is best done as sneakily as shoplifting and on
that note I’d like to get into stealth a little more. Remember my
shoot everyone-radio call-diarrhea-police scenario? Once you get to a
slightly higher level and actually know your way around the game a
bit (unlike yours truly, who didn’t know the button for grenades at
level 90) there’s a possibility to turn this scenario around and
when you manage that it’s a smoking gun barrel of fun. Of course
there are your ‘standard’ stealth missions where you just wander
through the big building avoiding guards and crouching all the time,
but if the map is just one relatively small building filled with
people you have to use proper coordination and teamwork to run into
the building, throw electronic jammers on the floor that block
cellphones, shoot all cameras in the vicinity, tie down the civilians
and reassure the big boss man on the radio that it was indeed
diarrhea and not homicide that just took place. All of that takes
about 30 seconds so a proper division of tasks is imperative. The fun
in that coordinated blitzkrieg robbery style really is the fun that
seals the deal.
A
shame it is then that some years after launch Overkill decided to
tear the seal right off again to start padding their title like
they’ve got ambitions to be a cushion producer. Mission after
mission was released after launch to make people forget that Payday 2
had way less heists on launch than the devs promised. The new
missions were either really stupid, like the Christmas heist, or were
just record attempts at the most obnoxious product placement in
gaming history, a record probably now held by the Alesso heist. What
was even worse was that some of the useless padding, some Hotline
Miami content to be precise, was not only product placement padding,
but product placement padding with a sense of entitlement because you
as a player weren’t good enough for it if you hadn’t bought
Hotline Miami ‘What Was The Pizza Guy’s Number Again’ 2. That’s
right, they are making you buy an entirely different game to get
content in Payday. And then they repeated it recently with a straight
face, demanding that you obtain an achievement in Payday: The Heist
before you get certain Payday 2 content!
Before Alesso there was Wick..
Besides
the neurotic level of padding, Payday 2 has head-butted quite a few
promises to bits. Besides a lower number of heists on launch before
the game’s launch, Overkill also recently broke the promise that
Payday 2 would never have microtransactions. Then there was the
‘Completely Overkill Pack’, a purely cosmetic DLC that was sold
for a ridiculously high price and which openly admitted to being not
DLC but a possibility to ‘donate’ to Overkill and to ‘support’
them. I literally had to read that three times before I saw they were
serious. Last time I checked the World Nature Fund did not change its
name to ‘Overkill Software’ so what gives a company the cheek to
ask for money for nothing? It’s just insane, I can’t put it any
other way.
Then
there is the cartoonishly silly idea of the so-called ‘hypetrain’.
The idea is that players have to buy a certain amount of paid DLC and
if the value of all bought DLC in a certain time period reaches a
specific level, Overkill adds ‘free’ content to the game. You
can’t really call it free if you ask people to pay money for it,
even if you make them do it indirectly.
Now,
because of my laziness and me preferring to play video games instead
of writing ( what a surprise, right? ) this review took me ages to
compose and in the meantime, for the first time in recorded history,
the game’s community has embraced the same anger towards the game
as I have. On the time of writing, the 15th
of November 2015, Payday 2’s Metacritic user rating is 3.5 out of
10. For comparison, the critic reviews, which all came in around
launch, are still at 79 out of 100. This low user rating is of course
partly because of that anyone who slightly dislikes a game votes ‘0’
to influence the ratings as much as possible, but the fact that so
many people decided to go nuts on it still says something. The Steam
community page is no different and it is no longer a rare sight to
see a player who spent over a thousand hours in-game write a negative
review because of the game’s recent developments. Overkill’s
reaction did little to improve things for me, especially when the
company’s face, Almir, called Overkill an ‘independent
developer’. According to Wikipedia, Overkill has a publisher, some
70 employees and a mother company. I think then you’ve gotten a bit
too big to still try and be in the same category as bedroom
programmers that really are indies and that genuinely try to do a
good job.
Payday
2 had the right idea at the start. It’s predecessor let you do
nothing but shooting down so many SWAT officers that you could
probably earn more money by selling their radios than what your score
was worth, but Payday 2 offers a bit more than that. This time around
you are actually busy stealing things rather than just committing
genocide. Like a pleasant park it was filled with openness,
freshness, joy and dead bodies, but because Overkill decided to apply
it’s namesake to their financial policies It is now like a park in
Tsjernobyl: but a ghost of it’s former glory.
A
ghost with loads of money, I hope that makes it up for them.
If
you want to know more about recent developments between Payday 2 and
the community, in the video below I and Silverain explain it to you
Jason
Silverain here, I just want to expand on this since the video
OverKill released the rewards for the Completely Overkill Pack which
turned out to be a limited edition safe and drill with a random
weapon skin out of a possible 25. These skins could not be traded,
sold or gifted making it quite likely to get a skin you would never
use and not be able to get rid of it or obtain one you want. You also
got 7 free previously released DLC but if you had bought them already
you didn't get an additional copy and in fact you didn't get anything
other than the skin so they were punishing people for purchasing the
DLC before this was announced. In addition this gets even worse as
by doing this if people attempt to refund the Completely Overkill
Pack would have the DLC removed from the game also even if they had
bought them separately and these would not be refunded. Remember the
Completely Overkill Pack was sold for £20 and the existing drills
cost £2.60 so you can imagine people felt pretty left ripped off.
The
volunteer steam form moderators tired of taking the brunt of the
community anger for Overkill while understanding and in some cases
agreeing with the community went on strike.
All
of this has finally gotten through to Overkill and they have issued a
public apology
with
some explanations to some concerns. However it should be considered
that Overkill have proven themselves untrustworthy to a degree so the
community are seeing if they will actually take actions to back up
their words as to many this just seems like a hollow Public Relations
statement since nothing will be done about the micro-transactions..if
you want more information I recommend keeping up to date with
TuffCookies
post on the issue.
It
should also be mentioned that Overkill has been attempting to improve
relations through some of the free heists and the new free character
and perk deck, it seems they are listening to some of the community
feedback but it maybe some time until we can determine if they are
actually genuine about trying to make amends or if they are trying to
repair their reputation just enough that it won't damage the release
of their next title.
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