Red Faction series put to sleep

[RockyRan]

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/07/27/red-faction-franchise-wont-continue-in-any-meaningful-way/

 

Is it just me or this just another case of publishers blaming everything but themselves? To me, at least, this seems to be a pretty big twisting of words. "Oh, I sold a very poor amount of copies. The series must be niche. Let's do something else" doesn't sound like a progressive way of making products. I mean, it's certainly a far cry from "Oh, I sold a very poor amount of copies. I'll be sure to take the most common complaints to heart and drive the game into a direction that more people want". How about examining why a game hasn't sold well instead of simply saying the entire franchise is jinxed and canning it all?

[Mercurial]

I don't think blowin shit up and breaking things with the hammer of thor is niche.

[toxicitizen]

I'm not surprised that Armageddon didn't sell. It seemed to have gotten very little promotion.

I knew of the game and that it was coming eventually, but I pretty much found out it was coming out less than a month before it did.

 

Not that it mattered, really. I wasn't going to buy it because I still haven't finished Guerilla. Just another title lost to the monster that is the Steam backlog.

[Hocking]

I picked up Red Faction: Armageddon on launch. It's a great game for what it is as long as you don't compare it to Guerilla. I picked it up after trying the demo, so I knew what I was letting myself in for in terms of the re-designed gameplay. I have to say, that I didn't like the monsters in the campaign, I felt it very much cheapened the idea of the franchise in what seemed like an attempt to sell more copies to fans of games like Dead Space. The multiplayer horde mode is fantastic in theory, but a lot of the people playing seem to like trying to hide and fight rather than keep moving - which results in very quick defeat in the early and otherwise very easy waves. I ended up soloing the horde mode for the achievements in offline mode because it was a lot faster and a lot more enjoyable than the alternative. The horde mode is also of course, no where near as fun as the multiplayer in Guerilla, it was a step backwards in my opinion.

 

Armageddon appealed to me because of the idea of being able use the Nanoforge to repair things, which in Guerilla was only possible in one of the multiplayer match types. If that had been possible in the Guerilla campaign, I think the game would've been a hell of a lot more enjoyable on top of the brilliance that is the campaign.

 

Armageddon destroyed what was brilliant about Guerilla though. It took out the sandbox and the sheer pleasure of belting a truck through the bottom of a building and having it come crashing down. Blowing shit up with the guns wasn't as fun to me as simply using the hammer, some demolition charges and the odd vehicle. Armageddon wasn't so much about man vs world was it was man vs aliens. It wasn't a good fit for the franchise in my mind. I think if they'd stuck to the Guerilla formula and added to it, think terrain deformation in Fracture, then they would've had something amazing that would've sold really well.

[Yantelope]

Mostly what Hocking said.

 

Also, the series has never had an identity. RF 1 was basically total recall with a pretty cool idea of being able to blow everything up. I liked it but it needed some polish. RF2 mostly killed the destruction idea completely and became some weird action squad shooter. It wasn't a bad game it just wasn't anything like RF1. Guerrilla came out and suddenly it was an open world sandbox game and destruction was back. It was probably the best in the series IMO and I really enjoyed it. Then there was Armageddon which was some cave shooter alien invasion. It's really hard to build any kind of fan base when every game is something almost completely different. I think we have a case of a game trying to reinvent itself every time instead of refining and making a better game. It's a shame really. RIP Red Faction.