@@DaemonPrince for me, the song is the biggest giveaway. I miss PSO. I used to play that game with my friends on the 360 every now and then. Had a blast for what we played.
@@dannywol5170 How?? it is a moba!!! which came after LOL and DOTA, On top of it the characters are just GODS from different religions. They did not even bother to create their own characters or lore. And now since they can't copy anymore gods they are doing these crossovers with shows like stranger things or what not.
personally i dont really care if they trend chase, what bugs me is they allways get in late on a fad with a compelling twist on it and then seek to undermine it in every way
@@dannywol5170 Dude, I am not talking about re-inventing the wheels. I have no problem that it is a MOBA or it has 3rd person view or whatever. Nobody is saying that generate new ideas on a daily basis, That is practically impossible. Everybody copies from each other and that is a fact. But tell me, does Smite actually have a story or any kind of lore?? because it's competitors certainly have. DOTA has it's huge lore and LOL has too, Hell even a dead MOBA like HON has ridiculous amount of lore. When you have story elements and lore you can create something out of nothing. Look how Dota and LOL constantly pump up new characters after new characters, yes obviously they are not perfect but at least they have their own character background and backstories. And also they do not have to rely on some other franchise to bring characters into their own universe. Smite does it to attract new players, which I have no problem with but when you have to bring characters from a tv show to your own hand-created universe you have already lost creativity. That is why most of HI-REZ projects fails miserably because they chase trends. The only reason SMITE and PALADINS are still alive because they are old games and have an ardent fanbase which is quite nice.
This is basically hi rez's way of working by now: create an interesting concept, get players, quickly milk the shit out of the game before its impending doom
More like "take something that's popular right now, make a game based on it, then claim that you started developing it before meteor killed the dinosaurs."
@@XZeroKPS I'm actually not touching anything HiRez related due to their launcher being a malvare, so cant say how creative were their games. I'm Just saying that they have a history of claiming that they come up with some concept before everyone else, with laughable evidence to back it up. Trying to pretend that "Overwatch" was reaping off "Global Agenda" was probably a peak of this.
I've gotten to the point where I refuse to put money into any of their games because you never know when they will just kill it. Am I still salty over Tribes Ascend? Damn right I am.
Basically, the game started dying as soon as they changed the crafting system... on the first patch. That's probably the fastest screw up I've ever seen, not counting games that were dead on arrival.
It's just the Hi-rez classic where they have a super cool game and then they see a more popular game of the same genre and ruin their own by trying to copy too much. Happened with Paladins aswell
Yep that's what happens when they let Erez actually do things, he kills the game because the genius doesn't actually know how to balance a game but wants to add changes anyways.
You could do an entire series based on Hi-Rez's failed games chasing trends. Aside from Smite remaining a viable & unique alternative to MOBA's, they have a tendency to be a bit late to a party, offer a unique spin on a trend, then try to quickly monetize it & drive it into the ground. Hell, they found success again this year with another game, but it's been so long since I've heard anything about it that I can't remember the name, and just assume it flamed out already.
My bitterness started before they even picked up Tribes. Global Agenda had so much potential and was even beginning to tap into it. And then they wanted to try and attract the e-sports crowd and drove the game into the ground. And then they got ahold of Tribes.
Man tribes and global agenda were games that legit could just get a graphic update and I'd be down to play them right now. Both games were ahead of their time
When I built my new PC my wife took my old one. We had been married for 10 years and she had never gamed with me. I got her to try this new game called Realm Royale with me, and she actually loved it. Thousands of hours later and we are still playing the game. I'm thankful for the times we had with the game. It will be a very sad day when it finally gets puts down for good.
Smite is still fun & will always have new characters from mythology to pull from, and it's basically the only viable 3rd person MOBA with a big community left. If Smite ever died, Hi-Rez would die.
Excellent work as always. A couple of things to add: *The engineer class never returned after being removed. *They tried to bring people back with a tournament hosted by Keemstar (he already had a bad online reputation). *Even with all the suggestions from the community, the core team did whatever using the excuse of being an Early Access project.
"Not another BR" Sounds like when Hearthstone was popular and I uttered "Another Card Game?" when more TCGs came out afterward. I wonder what genre will be next.
@@ridho39 on one hand unreal 17 was fun as heck on the other hand after what happened to every other area shooter that came out at the time compared to there changes with fortnite I can't really blame them.
Never played this but wow, i don't think ive seen a dev seemingly go out of their way to just murder everything that made their game unique and most importantly fun.
I did it was fun for a bit and all I agree the thing made Fortnite popular was building and most br has something special about it cod gulag but what realm had was forging and more of a fiction game but they tried to change everything for worse and what happed it flopped also apex did what realm was trying to in a way with special abilities and stuff
So, I had never played this, or even heard of it. But seeing Hi-Rez, and all of the games I supported from them otherwise, I kind of saw literally all of the story beats coming one after another. It's a real shame, because they seem to make the same mistakes over, and over, and over, and over again. I miss playing Tribes: Ascend...
Hi Rez always makes me sad bc all their games have such good concepts and ideas but then they shove it out on ass graphics with quadruple reused legacy code that gives it 1000 bugs. If their games were polished and they were a little more attentive to them they could 100% be a top studio
@@notimeforcreativenamesjust3034 well that's honestly a rather subjective idea. I personally think that too but like at least make it presentable. Other than that, I agree with you. I personally first discovered Hi-Rez seeing them as a good company with great potential and played a couple of their games. They were really good and fun and had lots of potential at first but as time went on they just fell apart somehow. Now I just don't care about them anymore. I thought there was hope when Rogue Company came out but people are starting to complain there as well, but it's still young so time will tell regarding that.
Man, that alpha was so good. I'm still baffled at how poorly this game was developed. How do you ignore your entire player base whilst slowly turning your game into a Fortnite clone that nobody asked for. Such a shame.
At this point, if you are playing a Hi-Rez game, you just know the game will die in a couple years usually, sometimes more. (Yes, Paladins, clock's ticking)
That's just what happens when you chase trends, you have no vision for what your games should look like on their own without the success of other games to back them up. Playing Paladins now vs its closed beta is like playing two different games, it never had a core to begin with, and with people moving away from the Hero Shooter genre, so too will they move away from Paladins.
I remember back when Realm Royale was first released there were many rumours about internal structure. Worst I heard was when the CEO got killed by a Mage on his Warrior he demanding Mage nerfed to the ground and Warriors throwing axe was buffed considerably. As you can imagine, the meta shifted heavily in favour of the new burning axe
During the first lockdown I played about 20+ battle royale games for a failed project. Realm Royale was easily the most fun I had of any of them. Something about it's systems mixed with the controls just made it so much more enjoyable than most of the hardcore serious competition
This one hits home One of the ONLY times I have EVER enjoyed a battle royale The current state of the game is perfectly enjoyable and imo the best that it ever has been, with a nice balance between RNG and class uniqueness, but hi-rez is just plain refusing to do anything about it.
And it's been facing similar issues. I miss the days of games having player servers. It sucks at a game's peak, but I can still play wheel of time and some other odd 90s and 00s titles in multiplayer. It'll take a lot of time and a dedicated, skilled community of people create a private / emu server, and then share that with the public, to ensure RR lives on.
Soviet jump game, maelstrom, Darwin project, king of crabs, and super animal royale are the only BRs I've really gotten into. 4 of those 5 are so far removed from Fortnite, PUbg, RR, and the "standard" 1st/3rd person action/shooter style game that they aren't really the same genre. Darwin project has the most overlap
@@Peasant_of_Pontus I badly wish Fallen Empire Legions (which I ended up preferring to Tribes) stayed longer than it did, and that MidAir (the successor from the FEL team) had any even remote success
I've never been into BR stuff, but wow... this story really makes you wonder how some people are keeping their jobs. These decisions were so obviously wrong (and were so at the time, too) that you are almost forced to believe some nepotism or similar force was at work to secure someone's position...
Its crazy. They were the first br(atleast before the all the current big brs) to really do a crafting station and yet they were so uncreative they reused assets and fumbled the bag
I don't think reusing assets to set the game in a cemented universe is what killed the game here. There's more pressing things that had nothing to do with art direction that killed this game.
@@Jestersage Hell, majority of the weapons from Apex are from Titanfall and it's honestly celebrated because they're good weapons, to the point TF fans want more TF weapons in Apex. Though both games share the same story and universe, but still. Even certain animations are re-used in Apex and never heard anyone say it's a bad thing.
Please cover Tribes Ascend, that game was incredible when it first arrived but got completely ruined by them. I don't trust Hi-Rez anymore because of that.
I was wondering if your research, for Hi-rez's ups and downs, brought you to the the past CEO at all. I remember hearing murmurs of odd changes and such being made at his requests.
It's 100% a thing. The thing to realize is that Hi Rez Studios is the personal vanity project of Erez Goren and if he personally doesn't like something, it changes. DO YOU GET THE SUBTLETY IN THE COMPANY'S NAME. IT'S LIKE HIS NAME BUT JUST A LITTLE DIFFERENT
Hi-Rez has to be one of the more frustrating studios out there... At least in terms of whenever their games tank due to their own actions... -When FFXIV had it's original disasterous launch, the devs came on stage apologizing, bowing to their audience and had legit tears in their eyes for failing their fans, then would go on to turn things around. -When Anthem was tanking HARD, Bioware at the very least acknowdledged that they blew it big time and made an honest effort to see if they could salvage the game, it may have been too little too late, but at the very least the devs showed that they knew they messed up... Hi-Rez? Just pretend nothing ever happened... Just... Dead silence... They are seriously lucky to have success in Smite and Paladins...
Hi-Rez is one of my least favorite devs simply because of what they did to Tribes, they had a solid community behind it and they just abandoned it for Smite, which to me personally is a pretty scuffed game.
Hi-Rez, to me, is the definition of "one and done." They churn something out, everyone goes "Hey that's neat I wonder how it'll go" and then it just vanishes off the face of the earth after a short while. It's impressive in a weird way.
This one personally stings, not only because I had some fun wrecking fools, bots and players alike as a warrior, but also because I was probably one of the few who purchased and completed all the Battle passes they released.
You could honestly do a DOAG on HI-REZ’s newest game Rogue Company. The more you look into this game, the more you see the similarities between the two, especially controversial changes that changes the game for the worse and dividing the player base. This one can be juicy
OB64. The update that almost destroyed Paladins by making it pay-to-win. No clue who's idea this was, but we can safely assume that they got kicked out since the update was reverted.
They had a success at the beginning for being different: and they threw it all in an attempt to become a Fortnite clone. Totally smells like a case of higher ups in suit pushing for it. I doubt the devs did this by free will. I remember how passionately they spoke about their game in Gamescom, back in 2018. I don't believe any of them would ruin this game by their own will.
I still play this game regularly. If you play during peak hours its actually quite fun and not dead. You can get a good amount of players in lobbies if its around peak times. If your playing at 4AM however you will be in bot lobbies fighting no actual players
Hey @nerdslayer I just wanted to say thank you for making these great videos. The insight and production quality are a huge motivator and inspiration for me. Much love!
i heard a company or studio idk that is known for saving dead games partnerd with realm royale and now realm royale is looking for people to work on it
Pretty crazy how hard they torpedoed their own game chasing that Fortnite audience, when they probably had a better shot sticking with the original design ideas.
This used to be separate game mode in Paladins called Survival. When they decided to remove the gamemode and release it as Realm Royale I knew it was doomed from the start, thus I never bothered to play it. Glad it died, hopefully we get the gamemode back.
I’m still glad that Paladins is still getting updated. I’m kinda bummed that the BR game mode wasn’t fleshed out more than the PTS build we got in 2017.
This was one of my favorite BRs out there. It dealt with some of my biggest issues of the genre (being too RNG heavy and being dropped being a death sentence) while also being fun.
I really like your style. Often people do retrospective of dead games by mocking them (popularized by Matt Mc Muscle) but you respect the studio and stay objective. Great stuff and very detailed. Subbed
The amount of Devs that don't realise making money is directly tied to creativity is so stunning to me. So many companies care more about the cash than they do about the players, but still they think it's a bright idea to abandon their success to become a drop in the ocean and lose their game and revenue because of it. Just unbelievable
What? This game came out? And hasn't gotten an update in two years? I had no idea, and I looked into this game a long time ago. And they added hitscan weapons and people fucking hated it? Wow, it's almost as if Hirez learned absolutely nothing from Tribes. They did the exact same thing there.
Lets not forget that in late 2020 that they have had massive server issues and just recently that has began to become stable. Also I would like to point out that from all the games I have played from Hi Rez Studios is that they always have some massive balancing issues.
So wait... The last update of the game was Open Beta Patch 32, meaning the game never reached an actual release... but at the same time the game had _two_ Battle Passes and a console release fork for all major consoles? Bwuhhh? Hi-Rez, we need to talk about what "Beta" means
I've heard before that keeping a game in "beta" affects the process for rolling out patches and makes it easier for them to do with less red tape to go through each time they want to push out an update which is way so many games do that now
Honestly, this was probably one of the few Battle Royale games that I actually find to be unique with the concepts of having abilities and magic weapons, they even had mechanics that Fortnite happen to added for their own game later on at some point (crafting, upgrading.) I wouldn't really say this game is 10/10 in my book, but I can say that it's a really interesting game.
No video game exists in a vacuum. There is a reason why your playerbase chose to play your game over someone else's. As a developer you should never fall in the trap of copying what your competitors are doing because you think because it worked for them it'll work for you, it doesn't work like that. If your game is like a ripoff of Fortnite, why would players want to keep playing it when Fortnite exists, and does everything your game does but better?
"the tipical approach when something is broken or you need to fix it, you just completely remove it" *crys in removed top play and kill cam in paladins*
Hi-Rez has a talent for releasing games with huge potential but not managing to develop them further, till their games die. In fact, they even remove the good stuff (Engineer class in Realm Royale, Play of the Game and viable talents in Paladins).
This is why I never picked up Paladins, Realm Royale, or Rogue Company. I can't trust Hi Rez to take my money and not just disappear. It really feels like a scam in slow motion.
This game was awesome when it first launched, but then Hi-Rez, doing what they do best, messed with the crafting system not even a month after launch and instantly ruined the flow of the game. Unfortunate really as it was my favorite BR when it launched.
I remember loving and then hating what they did to this game. They had the perfect spin on the BR genre to make it way more fun than how every other BR is "run around like a jackass for 45 minutes before dying to a dot 30 miles in the distant". The battles for controls of furnaces (upgrading your abilities and guns at furnaces was 100% vital for having any chance to win the game, and there were only a few scattered around that would eventually get destroyed, so you HAD to go head-first into action at the furnace battles) were what really made the game fun for me.
When I saw Apex Legends I was like wait that's right apex is technically a hero shooter....... Loved the video and channel I can say I learned a lot from you my man
It's funny cause you play the game and don't even think of it, but then you actually deep dive into each Legends kits and you're like "wait a minute.."
Hi-rez Game cycle: 1) make a game similar to another game but put some unique mechanics 2) remove the unique mechanics and make it as similar as possible to the game it copied 3) fail to impress players because it's a shitty version of the other game 4) leave the game to die
I think you also hit the nail on the head in the end. Most gaming genres simply only have room for ~3 big players. RR was okayish at most on launch. Definitely better what they turned it into but it was nowhere near the quality of the 'main 3' and most likely would never reach this either, regardless of their changes.
You forgot one of the funniest and biggest playerbase killing updates. Where they temporarily (for weeks) disabled solos and duo queues and made it squad only. Not only did they make it squads only but they also changed squads to 6 players whereas you could only queue up with 4 players guaranteeing you 2 randoms. mindboggling. I loved this game on its original steam release
235 hours top10 global engineer class player here. (back when it was still in the game). For me it WAS the BEST BR GAME EVER MADE and i played many of them at high level. It was not hitscan weapons that killed this game but stupid changes to the FORGE and CLASSES. They managed to make forges less important while this game revolved around something i would call FORGE TEMPO. Your goal in this game was to go from forge to forge in order to craft best items to have best chances lategame. Of course at these forges people would fight cause crafting took time and it was fun as hell. But then EREZ started making DOGSHIT BALANCE CHANGES TO FORGE AND TO CLASS SYSTEM SO THERE WAS NOTHING UNIQUE ABOUT IT ANYMORE. THAT PLUS SHITTY SERVERS AND INTRODUCTION OF BOTS THAT NOBODY ASKED FOR. I HOPE THEY WILL ROLL BACK ALL THE GAMEPLAY CHANGES BACK TO ALPHA WHEN THE GAME STARTED AND BECAME BIG. IF PRODUCT IS GOOD STREAMERS WILL PLAY THE GAME AND IT WILL BE BACK ALIVE. ITS A SHAME THAT SUCH A GOOD GAME WAS DESTROYED BY RETARDED GAMEPLAY CHANGES/DECISIONS of EREZ.
This was the most enjoyable BR to watch on twitch. Forges and chicken trophies encouraged early fighting. And early fighting before everyone is kitted is high octane fun.
I put over 800 hours into this game in 2018-2019. It was fantastic, but turned to bots and long queues quickly. There was a solid "tournament" discord that helped, but the lack of custom matches sucked.
Next: Realm Royale IS COMING BACK :D! Hi-Rez as of October 5 2021 are hiring people for different positions for Realm! Survey also upp in game, i encourage everyone who is interested in Realm to answer the survey!
It's the same thing that's happening with Hi-Rez's newer title right now, Rogue Company, the game was in an awesome state a while back, now they focus on pushing more content and pissing off their player base with horrible updates instead of fixing the core issues with the game. (extreme lag, crashes, worst match making in the history of video games ever, etc. )
In the next 2 years we'll probably see Death of a Game: Paladins or Death of a Game: Rogue Company. The only thing really keeping Hi-Rez afloat is Smite, and even Smite is consistently in a bad state.
You forgot to mention their CEO 'Erez' who is a notorious baby and forces updates into the game to make it easier. You also forgot the infamous 'oh you're so right' meme that they replied with when Ninja called them out for making dumb ass updates.
Sigh, I love Hi-Rez games, they always come up with something that shakes up the formula in a fun unique way. That being said, Hi-Rez always seems to make some baffling decisions that end up killing their own games. Automatic weapons in Realm royale is just one of the few examples. Another one that comes to mind is the cursed OB64 update for Paladins, which I still believe hampered that game's growth. Don't even get me started on the Mixer and Facebook streaming fiasco, absolutely horrible decision that poisoned the growth of the Smite (and Paladins to a lesser extent) esports scene. Here's hoping nothing worse happens to Smite, which has always stood as one of Hi-Rez' better accomplishment.
every time I watch one of these videos I think “man, I’d love to play this game it sounds like so much fun” and then they start updating the game and I remember what channel I’m watching
"Gambled on audiences" and "Lost what made the game unique" remind me of the infamous quote from BioWare when Dragon Age 2(!?) was about to drop... "We want Call of Duty's audience." There's one problem with that: _Call of Duty already has Call of Duty's audience._ We've seen this before with countless games and genres (remember when everyone tried to make their own Mortal Kombat or mascot platformer?) - you'd think people would learn at this point considering it's been happening for _25 years._
It seems like one of the best ways to lose your audience is always to try and chase an audience other than the one you have. It's something that seems to keep happening in videos on this channel, and it's always sad to see a game destroy its uniqueness to try and be like the market leader, and moreover it never seems to work out anyway - the company ruins the game for their existing fans, and fail to find new ones.
Next on Death of a Game: Phantasy Star Online!
well done detective!
how you figure that out
@@DaemonPrince for me, the song is the biggest giveaway. I miss PSO. I used to play that game with my friends on the 360 every now and then. Had a blast for what we played.
@@Moostar95 literally all ot needs is meaningful content once capped, but sega is weirdly allergic to said thing
SEGA be like "lets release NGS then put out no good content and fuck over f2p players as much as possible"
its insane that hirez always manages to catch lightning with a game and then slowly strip away everything that made it fun.
That's what happens when all you want to do is trend chase.
They always copy some other game. they do not have original ideas.
@@dannywol5170 How?? it is a moba!!! which came after LOL and DOTA, On top of it the characters are just GODS from different religions. They did not even bother to create their own characters or lore.
And now since they can't copy anymore gods they are doing these crossovers with shows like stranger things or what not.
personally i dont really care if they trend chase, what bugs me is they allways get in late on a fad with a compelling twist on it and then seek to undermine it in every way
@@dannywol5170 Dude, I am not talking about re-inventing the wheels. I have no problem that it is a MOBA or it has 3rd person view or whatever. Nobody is saying that generate new ideas on a daily basis, That is practically impossible. Everybody copies from each other and that is a fact. But tell me, does Smite actually have a story or any kind of lore?? because it's competitors certainly have. DOTA has it's huge lore and LOL has too, Hell even a dead MOBA like HON has ridiculous amount of lore.
When you have story elements and lore you can create something out of nothing. Look how Dota and LOL constantly pump up new characters after new characters, yes obviously they are not perfect but at least they have their own character background and backstories. And also they do not have to rely on some other franchise to bring characters into their own universe. Smite does it to attract new players, which I have no problem with but when you have to bring characters from a tv show to your own hand-created universe you have already lost creativity.
That is why most of HI-REZ projects fails miserably because they chase trends. The only reason SMITE and PALADINS are still alive because they are old games and have an ardent fanbase which is quite nice.
This is basically hi rez's way of working by now: create an interesting concept, get players, quickly milk the shit out of the game before its impending doom
I hate that this is so accurate
More like "take something that's popular right now, make a game based on it, then claim that you started developing it before meteor killed the dinosaurs."
@@DrNiradino I'm just a little bitter that they did global agenda how they did is all
@@XZeroKPS I'm actually not touching anything HiRez related due to their launcher being a malvare, so cant say how creative were their games. I'm Just saying that they have a history of claiming that they come up with some concept before everyone else, with laughable evidence to back it up. Trying to pretend that "Overwatch" was reaping off "Global Agenda" was probably a peak of this.
I've gotten to the point where I refuse to put money into any of their games because you never know when they will just kill it. Am I still salty over Tribes Ascend? Damn right I am.
Basically, the game started dying as soon as they changed the crafting system... on the first patch.
That's probably the fastest screw up I've ever seen, not counting games that were dead on arrival.
It's just the Hi-rez classic where they have a super cool game and then they see a more popular game of the same genre and ruin their own by trying to copy too much. Happened with Paladins aswell
the first time i noticed a drop was the SMG patch, that thing was so broken it was insane
Yep that's what happens when they let Erez actually do things, he kills the game because the genius doesn't actually know how to balance a game but wants to add changes anyways.
You could do an entire series based on Hi-Rez's failed games chasing trends. Aside from Smite remaining a viable & unique alternative to MOBA's, they have a tendency to be a bit late to a party, offer a unique spin on a trend, then try to quickly monetize it & drive it into the ground.
Hell, they found success again this year with another game, but it's been so long since I've heard anything about it that I can't remember the name, and just assume it flamed out already.
You mean Rogue Company?
@@dootmarine1140 that's the one
I think I should just avoid any game with the Hi-Rez name attached to it
@@acewolfgang276 this^
Tbh, rogue company is pretty good
This company invents new things for people to miss. I'm still bitter about Tribes Ascend.
VERY bitter...
Absurdly bitter. . . .
Yeah, fuck hi-rez for canceling tribes. Never had that much fun in a mp-shooter since. :(
My bitterness started before they even picked up Tribes. Global Agenda had so much potential and was even beginning to tap into it.
And then they wanted to try and attract the e-sports crowd and drove the game into the ground.
And then they got ahold of Tribes.
Man tribes and global agenda were games that legit could just get a graphic update and I'd be down to play them right now. Both games were ahead of their time
When I built my new PC my wife took my old one. We had been married for 10 years and she had never gamed with me. I got her to try this new game called Realm Royale with me, and she actually loved it. Thousands of hours later and we are still playing the game. I'm thankful for the times we had with the game. It will be a very sad day when it finally gets puts down for good.
Yo man I’m loving the game right now. There’s still some competition and the game feels balanced with the map
This and apex legends are the best battle royales
It won't shut down anytime soon they will continue to have the servers up as long as people play they said
Yep i play with my friends some times too when i have too many updates
Why would you put your wife down??is she that annoying?
I forgot this game ever existed
u forgor 💀
I always thought it's some cheap mobile port of a Clash of Clans knockoff quickly pushed out on Steam considering the name and all. 😮
I never knew it existed
It was like a fever dream
It's an really good game
How Hi Rez is still in business genuinely baffles me
Smite whales
Smite is still fun & will always have new characters from mythology to pull from, and it's basically the only viable 3rd person MOBA with a big community left. If Smite ever died, Hi-Rez would die.
Because their games on the core are good
Whales in Smite and Paladins. They monetize their games egregiously with skins. The horny market is strong with them.
@@12370david I used to buy a lotta crystals for Paladins, probably not enough to be considered a whale though.
HiRez has some amazingly fun ideas when they launch a game, that they constantly ditch "because".
Every single good title HiRez have released have been quicky ditched :( Global Agenda, Tribes Ascend and Realm Royal and all victims of HiRez bs
As if the entire game studio has ADHD
will we see Rogue Company on DoaG one day?
Hirez is a trash company. Id love to play smite again but I hate hirez's decision making so i'll never go back.
@@ItzClobert I feel like the dev team behind Rogue actually cares, though not sure how well it is going with their players.
Excellent work as always.
A couple of things to add:
*The engineer class never returned after being removed.
*They tried to bring people back with a tournament hosted by Keemstar (he already had a bad online reputation).
*Even with all the suggestions from the community, the core team did whatever using the excuse of being an Early Access project.
"Not another BR" Sounds like when Hearthstone was popular and I uttered "Another Card Game?" when more TCGs came out afterward. I wonder what genre will be next.
What genre is "it" now?
Tactical shooter like valorant I guess, I'm hoping for arena fps like quake and ut become popular again
@@ridho39 it almost did then BR curbstomped it to the ground.
@@richardpatterson1694 I still can't forgive epic games for abandoning Unreal Tournament 4 for Fortnite
@@ridho39 on one hand unreal 17 was fun as heck on the other hand after what happened to every other area shooter that came out at the time compared to there changes with fortnite I can't really blame them.
Never played this but wow, i don't think ive seen a dev seemingly go out of their way to just murder everything that made their game unique and most importantly fun.
I did it was fun for a bit and all I agree the thing made Fortnite popular was building and most br has something special about it cod gulag but what realm had was forging and more of a fiction game but they tried to change everything for worse and what happed it flopped also apex did what realm was trying to in a way with special abilities and stuff
So, I had never played this, or even heard of it. But seeing Hi-Rez, and all of the games I supported from them otherwise, I kind of saw literally all of the story beats coming one after another. It's a real shame, because they seem to make the same mistakes over, and over, and over, and over again. I miss playing Tribes: Ascend...
Game was a lotta fun
Hi Rez always makes me sad bc all their games have such good concepts and ideas but then they shove it out on ass graphics with quadruple reused legacy code that gives it 1000 bugs. If their games were polished and they were a little more attentive to them they could 100% be a top studio
"mistakes"
@@battlebots1 graphics dont matter, gameplay does and their gameplay is good at the beginning but as time goes on they start stripping he fun away
@@notimeforcreativenamesjust3034 well that's honestly a rather subjective idea. I personally think that too but like at least make it presentable. Other than that, I agree with you. I personally first discovered Hi-Rez seeing them as a good company with great potential and played a couple of their games.
They were really good and fun and had lots of potential at first but as time went on they just fell apart somehow. Now I just don't care about them anymore. I thought there was hope when Rogue Company came out but people are starting to complain there as well, but it's still young so time will tell regarding that.
Man, that alpha was so good. I'm still baffled at how poorly this game was developed. How do you ignore your entire player base whilst slowly turning your game into a Fortnite clone that nobody asked for. Such a shame.
At this point, if you are playing a Hi-Rez game, you just know the game will die in a couple years usually, sometimes more. (Yes, Paladins, clock's ticking)
Smite is the only game that has quite the potential to survive for a loooong time
Even if Paladins dies, it has already survived 5 years as an initial competitor to big bad Overwatch. I'd call this a success
@@FeedMeSalt It did?? Paladins regularly gets content updates? Also it still has a solid player base, idk about twitch views tbh
That's just what happens when you chase trends, you have no vision for what your games should look like on their own without the success of other games to back them up. Playing Paladins now vs its closed beta is like playing two different games, it never had a core to begin with, and with people moving away from the Hero Shooter genre, so too will they move away from Paladins.
@@hxsjdbdjavs paladins pretty damn good tbh
I remember back when Realm Royale was first released there were many rumours about internal structure. Worst I heard was when the CEO got killed by a Mage on his Warrior he demanding Mage nerfed to the ground and Warriors throwing axe was buffed considerably.
As you can imagine, the meta shifted heavily in favour of the new burning axe
During the first lockdown I played about 20+ battle royale games for a failed project. Realm Royale was easily the most fun I had of any of them. Something about it's systems mixed with the controls just made it so much more enjoyable than most of the hardcore serious competition
This one hits home
One of the ONLY times I have EVER enjoyed a battle royale
The current state of the game is perfectly enjoyable and imo the best that it ever has been, with a nice balance between RNG and class uniqueness, but hi-rez is just plain refusing to do anything about it.
And it's been facing similar issues.
I miss the days of games having player servers. It sucks at a game's peak, but I can still play wheel of time and some other odd 90s and 00s titles in multiplayer. It'll take a lot of time and a dedicated, skilled community of people create a private / emu server, and then share that with the public, to ensure RR lives on.
Soviet jump game, maelstrom, Darwin project, king of crabs, and super animal royale are the only BRs I've really gotten into. 4 of those 5 are so far removed from Fortnite, PUbg, RR, and the "standard" 1st/3rd person action/shooter style game that they aren't really the same genre.
Darwin project has the most overlap
@@AunCollective sadly none of those strike my fancy. Something about Realm's semi-fantasy style and the talent loadouts really set it far apart
Tribes players: first time?
@@Peasant_of_Pontus I badly wish Fallen Empire Legions (which I ended up preferring to Tribes) stayed longer than it did, and that MidAir (the successor from the FEL team) had any even remote success
I've never been into BR stuff, but wow... this story really makes you wonder how some people are keeping their jobs.
These decisions were so obviously wrong (and were so at the time, too) that you are almost forced to believe some nepotism or similar force was at work to secure someone's position...
Hirez shot for the stars
While aiming at their heads
I will never invest in any more Hi-Rez games after The way they handled the venerable legacy of Starsiege Tribes with Tribes Ascend.
Its crazy. They were the first br(atleast before the all the current big brs) to really do a crafting station and yet they were so uncreative they reused assets and fumbled the bag
It was probably just a cheap effort, Paladins is another one where they heavily reused graphical assets from SMITE to make a new game cheap.
I don't think reusing assets to set the game in a cemented universe is what killed the game here. There's more pressing things that had nothing to do with art direction that killed this game.
And reviving
@@Jestersage Hell, majority of the weapons from Apex are from Titanfall and it's honestly celebrated because they're good weapons, to the point TF fans want more TF weapons in Apex.
Though both games share the same story and universe, but still. Even certain animations are re-used in Apex and never heard anyone say it's a bad thing.
Please cover Tribes Ascend, that game was incredible when it first arrived but got completely ruined by them. I don't trust Hi-Rez anymore because of that.
I was wondering if he already did tribes. That game deserves one.
I was wondering if your research, for Hi-rez's ups and downs, brought you to the the past CEO at all. I remember hearing murmurs of odd changes and such being made at his requests.
I heard about the higher up balancing smite and paladins because they were losing or sucked using certain characters, and then breaking them
@@trollscream8607 I can believe that one for sure.
can you link an article? am interested
Remember OB64
It's 100% a thing. The thing to realize is that Hi Rez Studios is the personal vanity project of Erez Goren and if he personally doesn't like something, it changes.
DO YOU GET THE SUBTLETY IN THE COMPANY'S NAME. IT'S LIKE HIS NAME BUT JUST A LITTLE DIFFERENT
I just love the amount of genuine laughs in this one. Like you actually couldn't believe how Hi Rez strategically aimed at it's foot and shot away.
Hi-Rez has to be one of the more frustrating studios out there... At least in terms of whenever their games tank due to their own actions...
-When FFXIV had it's original disasterous launch, the devs came on stage apologizing, bowing to their audience and had legit tears in their eyes for failing their fans, then would go on to turn things around.
-When Anthem was tanking HARD, Bioware at the very least acknowdledged that they blew it big time and made an honest effort to see if they could salvage the game, it may have been too little too late, but at the very least the devs showed that they knew they messed up...
Hi-Rez? Just pretend nothing ever happened... Just... Dead silence... They are seriously lucky to have success in Smite and Paladins...
And Paladins is loosing its players and i cant even find a conquest game on Smite any more
Hi-Rez is one of my least favorite devs simply because of what they did to Tribes, they had a solid community behind it and they just abandoned it for Smite, which to me personally is a pretty scuffed game.
There needs to be a Death Of a Game: Dota Underlords. The first one to go in a very, very young genre
Hi-Rez, to me, is the definition of "one and done." They churn something out, everyone goes "Hey that's neat I wonder how it'll go" and then it just vanishes off the face of the earth after a short while.
It's impressive in a weird way.
This one personally stings, not only because I had some fun wrecking fools, bots and players alike as a warrior, but also because I was probably one of the few who purchased and completed all the Battle passes they released.
Do you still play the game if not send me your account credentials so I can have it
You could honestly do a DOAG on HI-REZ’s newest game Rogue Company. The more you look into this game, the more you see the similarities between the two, especially controversial changes that changes the game for the worse and dividing the player base. This one can be juicy
The "Ah, the OB64 update of Realm Royale comment" explains it very succinctly. If you know, you know.
OB64 still scares me at night
Ob64….I cry
OB64. The update that almost destroyed Paladins by making it pay-to-win. No clue who's idea this was, but we can safely assume that they got kicked out since the update was reverted.
They had a success at the beginning for being different: and they threw it all in an attempt to become a Fortnite clone.
Totally smells like a case of higher ups in suit pushing for it. I doubt the devs did this by free will. I remember how passionately they spoke about their game in Gamescom, back in 2018. I don't believe any of them would ruin this game by their own will.
Hi-Rez is fantastic at making a great game and then screwing it up.
Then fixing it but doing nothing else to win back players😂
I still play this game regularly. If you play during peak hours its actually quite fun and not dead. You can get a good amount of players in lobbies if its around peak times. If your playing at 4AM however you will be in bot lobbies fighting no actual players
Hey @nerdslayer I just wanted to say thank you for making these great videos. The insight and production quality are a huge motivator and inspiration for me. Much love!
Thanks buddy
As an aspiring game developer, these videos are so helpful teaching me what NOT to do if I ever create an online game. Great video as usual! 👌
I would LOVE to see a Death of a Game for Tribes Ascend; it was such a fun game. I'll never forgive Hi-Rez for abandoning it.
i heard a company or studio idk that is known for saving dead games partnerd with realm royale and now realm royale is looking for people to work on it
Pretty crazy how hard they torpedoed their own game chasing that Fortnite audience, when they probably had a better shot sticking with the original design ideas.
This used to be separate game mode in Paladins called Survival. When they decided to remove the gamemode and release it as Realm Royale I knew it was doomed from the start, thus I never bothered to play it. Glad it died, hopefully we get the gamemode back.
I actually genuinely enjoyed this game until I found out majority of my lobby was AI 😂🤦♂️
i remember this really blowing up on Twitch... for about 2 weeks, then I never saw anyone discuss or mention it ever again
I’m still glad that Paladins is still getting updated. I’m kinda bummed that the BR game mode wasn’t fleshed out more than the PTS build we got in 2017.
Paladuns is kinda dead as well.
@@mortis3732 paladins is getting updates every 2-3 months and got it's first crossover with roster teeth, not dead
Paladins is slowly bleeding to death, it still has a sizeable community though.
@@mortis3732 lol no
@@Dauniverse paladins won't die anytime soon, his console community is big, that's a fact.
Servers are going to shut down on February 17, 2025 12:00 PM EDT - RIP Realm Royale - you had all the possibilities but failed in the end.
i got an idea. lets make a hero br looter shooter. then remove, the hero, the loot, and the shoot. BRILLIANT!
Hi-Rez has the magical ability to make failure after failure and not die.
Hell, Realm Royale GAINED players at one point and HR just.. ignored it.
Not gonna lie, this game was lowkey fun!
It still is really fun, just way to less players unfortunatly😐
I'm not a BR guy but it was pretty enjoyable. My brother doesn't really play games but he loved this one
Next on Death of a Game: World of Warcraft: Classic.
classic servers are implied to die, I don't really see the point
Am still missing Tribes Ascend, honestly at this point they're just the "Smite" company to me.
This was one of my favorite BRs out there. It dealt with some of my biggest issues of the genre (being too RNG heavy and being dropped being a death sentence) while also being fun.
Can't believe this game got revived
I really like your style. Often people do retrospective of dead games by mocking them (popularized by Matt Mc Muscle) but you respect the studio and stay objective.
Great stuff and very detailed. Subbed
Such a shame, I actually liked this game before they started messing it up.
The amount of Devs that don't realise making money is directly tied to creativity is so stunning to me. So many companies care more about the cash than they do about the players, but still they think it's a bright idea to abandon their success to become a drop in the ocean and lose their game and revenue because of it. Just unbelievable
I really liked this game but then they removed the class system and the rest was history.
That's typical Hi Rez behavior right there. Game and devs are alright at launch, then it just goes wrong and Hi Rez doesn't give a damn.
What? This game came out? And hasn't gotten an update in two years? I had no idea, and I looked into this game a long time ago. And they added hitscan weapons and people fucking hated it? Wow, it's almost as if Hirez learned absolutely nothing from Tribes. They did the exact same thing there.
The guys genuinely perplex me. I've never seen devs make literally the same mistakes project to project. Has to be leadership
As of the time of the writing of this video ,servers are to be going to shut down on February 17, 2025 at 12:00 PM.
Ah yes, the game where you can ride horses up walls
Lets not forget that in late 2020 that they have had massive server issues and just recently that has began to become stable. Also I would like to point out that from all the games I have played from Hi Rez Studios is that they always have some massive balancing issues.
So wait... The last update of the game was Open Beta Patch 32, meaning the game never reached an actual release... but at the same time the game had _two_ Battle Passes and a console release fork for all major consoles? Bwuhhh?
Hi-Rez, we need to talk about what "Beta" means
If I remember properly... They sort of did the same thing with Paladins.
I've heard before that keeping a game in "beta" affects the process for rolling out patches and makes it easier for them to do with less red tape to go through each time they want to push out an update which is way so many games do that now
I play it sometimes when I get bored in other BRs it's a nice refresher.
Honestly, this was probably one of the few Battle Royale games that I actually find to be unique with the concepts of having abilities and magic weapons, they even had mechanics that Fortnite happen to added for their own game later on at some point (crafting, upgrading.)
I wouldn't really say this game is 10/10 in my book, but I can say that it's a really interesting game.
No video game exists in a vacuum. There is a reason why your playerbase chose to play your game over someone else's. As a developer you should never fall in the trap of copying what your competitors are doing because you think because it worked for them it'll work for you, it doesn't work like that. If your game is like a ripoff of Fortnite, why would players want to keep playing it when Fortnite exists, and does everything your game does but better?
Yes, do Tribes Ascend.
They killed it dead. F' em.
"the tipical approach when something is broken or you need to fix it, you just completely remove it"
*crys in removed top play and kill cam in paladins*
please make Death of a Game: GUNZ THE DUEL!
awesome vid ty
Man, GUNZ really sting. Especially since most private servers made by fans are kinda scummy and dead themselves.
Hi-Rez has a talent for releasing games with huge potential but not managing to develop them further, till their games die. In fact, they even remove the good stuff (Engineer class in Realm Royale, Play of the Game and viable talents in Paladins).
15:35 "prove *THEMSELVES* after *EA* ruined..."
I came here to learn a few things and maybe have a laugh, not to be angry and depressed :(
This is why I never picked up Paladins, Realm Royale, or Rogue Company. I can't trust Hi Rez to take my money and not just disappear. It really feels like a scam in slow motion.
This game was awesome when it first launched, but then Hi-Rez, doing what they do best, messed with the crafting system not even a month after launch and instantly ruined the flow of the game. Unfortunate really as it was my favorite BR when it launched.
I remember loving and then hating what they did to this game. They had the perfect spin on the BR genre to make it way more fun than how every other BR is "run around like a jackass for 45 minutes before dying to a dot 30 miles in the distant". The battles for controls of furnaces (upgrading your abilities and guns at furnaces was 100% vital for having any chance to win the game, and there were only a few scattered around that would eventually get destroyed, so you HAD to go head-first into action at the furnace battles) were what really made the game fun for me.
When I saw Apex Legends I was like wait that's right apex is technically a hero shooter.......
Loved the video and channel I can say I learned a lot from you my man
It's funny cause you play the game and don't even think of it, but then you actually deep dive into each Legends kits and you're like "wait a minute.."
Hi-rez Game cycle:
1) make a game similar to another game but put some unique mechanics
2) remove the unique mechanics and make it as similar as possible to the game it copied
3) fail to impress players because it's a shitty version of the other game
4) leave the game to die
God I really really loved this game... Makes me sad to see it here 😔
I still cant believe they threw away the exact thing people played it for in the first month. Then again that is typical hi rez
I think you also hit the nail on the head in the end. Most gaming genres simply only have room for ~3 big players. RR was okayish at most on launch. Definitely better what they turned it into but it was nowhere near the quality of the 'main 3' and most likely would never reach this either, regardless of their changes.
You forgot one of the funniest and biggest playerbase killing updates. Where they temporarily (for weeks) disabled solos and duo queues and made it squad only. Not only did they make it squads only but they also changed squads to 6 players whereas you could only queue up with 4 players guaranteeing you 2 randoms. mindboggling. I loved this game on its original steam release
I find these videos great even if I never even heard of the game
235 hours top10 global engineer class player here. (back when it was still in the game).
For me it WAS the BEST BR GAME EVER MADE and i played many of them at high level.
It was not hitscan weapons that killed this game but stupid changes to the FORGE and CLASSES.
They managed to make forges less important while this game revolved around something i would call FORGE TEMPO.
Your goal in this game was to go from forge to forge in order to craft best items to have best chances lategame. Of course at these forges people would fight cause crafting took time and it was fun as hell.
But then EREZ started making DOGSHIT BALANCE CHANGES TO FORGE AND TO CLASS SYSTEM SO THERE WAS NOTHING UNIQUE ABOUT IT ANYMORE. THAT PLUS SHITTY SERVERS AND INTRODUCTION OF BOTS THAT NOBODY ASKED FOR.
I HOPE THEY WILL ROLL BACK ALL THE GAMEPLAY CHANGES BACK TO ALPHA WHEN THE GAME STARTED AND BECAME BIG.
IF PRODUCT IS GOOD STREAMERS WILL PLAY THE GAME AND IT WILL BE BACK ALIVE.
ITS A SHAME THAT SUCH A GOOD GAME WAS DESTROYED BY RETARDED GAMEPLAY CHANGES/DECISIONS of EREZ.
Please do make a video on Tribes Ascend, it's one of my favorite games and i never see it talked about nowadays.
This was the most enjoyable BR to watch on twitch. Forges and chicken trophies encouraged early fighting. And early fighting before everyone is kitted is high octane fun.
cant wait for the Rogue Company episode.
I put over 800 hours into this game in 2018-2019. It was fantastic, but turned to bots and long queues quickly. There was a solid "tournament" discord that helped, but the lack of custom matches sucked.
Next: Realm Royale IS COMING BACK :D! Hi-Rez as of October 5 2021 are hiring people for different positions for Realm! Survey also upp in game, i encourage everyone who is interested in Realm to answer the survey!
Is it actually? 👀
Are u serius? Actually love this game
It's the same thing that's happening with Hi-Rez's newer title right now, Rogue Company, the game was in an awesome state a while back, now they focus on pushing more content and pissing off their player base with horrible updates instead of fixing the core issues with the game. (extreme lag, crashes, worst match making in the history of video games ever, etc. )
this game was so damn good on release
And now it's also good
I remember that forge update. It sucks, long range weapons used to need skills to do a good amount of damage then it became point and shoot.
was literally just talking to my friend about re-installing this last night, we loved this game.
Do it! If you get involved in the community there are still quite a few active players.
Don’t games shit
Games super fun now. Try playing it, and there are still a lot of active players
@@audi.6106 No it's not😂 it's really fun.
This game is amazing
In the next 2 years we'll probably see Death of a Game: Paladins or Death of a Game: Rogue Company. The only thing really keeping Hi-Rez afloat is Smite, and even Smite is consistently in a bad state.
THERES GONNA BE AN UPDATE FOR IT VERY VERY SOON😎
You forgot to mention their CEO 'Erez' who is a notorious baby and forces updates into the game to make it easier.
You also forgot the infamous 'oh you're so right' meme that they replied with when Ninja called them out for making dumb ass updates.
Sigh, I love Hi-Rez games, they always come up with something that shakes up the formula in a fun unique way.
That being said, Hi-Rez always seems to make some baffling decisions that end up killing their own games. Automatic weapons in Realm royale is just one of the few examples. Another one that comes to mind is the cursed OB64 update for Paladins, which I still believe hampered that game's growth. Don't even get me started on the Mixer and Facebook streaming fiasco, absolutely horrible decision that poisoned the growth of the Smite (and Paladins to a lesser extent) esports scene.
Here's hoping nothing worse happens to Smite, which has always stood as one of Hi-Rez' better accomplishment.
every time I watch one of these videos I think “man, I’d love to play this game it sounds like so much fun” and then they start updating the game and I remember what channel I’m watching
"Gambled on audiences" and "Lost what made the game unique" remind me of the infamous quote from BioWare when Dragon Age 2(!?) was about to drop...
"We want Call of Duty's audience."
There's one problem with that: _Call of Duty already has Call of Duty's audience._ We've seen this before with countless games and genres (remember when everyone tried to make their own Mortal Kombat or mascot platformer?) - you'd think people would learn at this point considering it's been happening for _25 years._
It seems like one of the best ways to lose your audience is always to try and chase an audience other than the one you have. It's something that seems to keep happening in videos on this channel, and it's always sad to see a game destroy its uniqueness to try and be like the market leader, and moreover it never seems to work out anyway - the company ruins the game for their existing fans, and fail to find new ones.
So in the typical greedy corporate quest to make ALL the money they end up making no money. 👏👏👏👍
300k views - Realm Royale not died - Update is Coming