Intro #
“Love can make you act like a fool.”
A little phrase I heard in a video once and it’s very true, I’m not talking about messy love triangles or disaster breakups, that kind of love can be very foolish, but even more foolish is falling in love with something a lot more abstract: A brand, a name, an intellectual property, the kind of thing that goes alongside a trademark symbol or a copyright icon rather than a birth certificate.
I want to look at 3 examples of where brand loyalty took me from my experience in the gaming world over the years: Arkane - The creators of Dishonored, Running with Scissors - Creators of POSTAL and Starbreeze - Creators of PAYDAY.
Their games were expansive, they had longevity, they had freedom, each in their own ways. Dishonored and POSTAL 2 were singleplayer games with a very strong “play your way” design ethos behind them and buckets of replay value, while PAYDAY 2 was a game that received nearly a decade’s worth of updates, giving it thousands of hours worth of content.
My love for their work created a feeling of trust, of quality assurance, an expectation that a game with their names on would be worth my time and my money, but for their own reasons each of these studios ended up going against those expectations, leaving me with a bitter lesson that a name is no guarantee of a good product.
In this article I’m going to explore why that happened, and what can be learned from it.
Arkane #
Dishonored was one of the first, if not the first, games that I truly fell in love with, I had been captivated by its trailers depicting its Whale Oil powered Victorian style dystopian world but being a young kid at the time I wasn’t swimming in cash, I finally got my chance to try it when it turned free to play for a weekend, quickly blasting through the whole game on the last day of its free trial, it was a violent blitz, the time limit didn’t leave much time for stealth or niceties.
Only a few days later I bought a copy of the Game of The Year Edition that I could take my time with, opting for a more sneaky and peaceful run, and with how replayable the game was this turned into more and more playthroughs, as well as run throughs of the game’s 2 DLC expansions, Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches.
The game had so many tools to offer, starting with a flintlock style pistol and a crossbow (or wristbow in the DLC) for ranged options (with the crossbow coming complete with tranquiliser bolts for non lethal players), the sword for close quarters combat, the chokehold for non lethal takedowns, but the game truly excelled with its superpowers: The teleportation mode Blink, the time slowing (and eventually freezing) Bend Time, the Dark Vision power which allowed you to see through walls, then there was the ability to summon rats to devour foes, and Possession, which allowed you to occupy the body of other living creatures, humans and animals alike.
This combined with open ended level design that offered the player a myriad of ways to seek out their targets, as well as an impressive level of Developer’s Foresight, gave the game an immense amount of replay value despite its fairly short length and linear progression, this added up to 345 hours of playtime, plus more from a copy I got for my PS3.
So when Dishonored 2 was announced I was so confident it would be great that I pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition of the game for Xbox One, my faith was well placed, it was a worthy successor with a beautiful new setting, swapping out grotty grey Dunwall for sunlit Karnacka, adding a huge array of improvements: The option to choose between the original protagonist Corvo and his daughter Emily, who has a different set of powers, more weapons, more upgrades for those weapons, more developer’s foresight, extra tools to better support non lethal runs (like the stinging crossbow bolts, which make enemies flee and forget the player’s presence), a New Game + feature that allowed the player to carry over all of the Runes (used to unlock powers) used in their previous run to the start of the next as well as mix and match Corvo and Emily’s movesets, the option to reject the superpowers entirely and run the game with nothing but your flesh and your steel. In almost all areas it was a straight improvement, I ended up calling it my favourite game of all time, although I don’t like to pick favourites I can’t think of another game that beats it, so I think that title still stands.
Then I bought their next game, Prey, in 2018 about a year and a half after its release, it was a very different game to the Dishonored series, with an open ended Metroidvania style design for its levels as opposed to Dishonored’s linear progression, plus a setting change from Whalepunk and rats to Sci-Fi and aliens, but it kept to the core Arkane ethos of a reactive world of choice, in fact taking it even further.
The Dishonored games had certain constraints to keep the plot rolling, you couldn’t kill key allies who were necessary to the plot, not until you got to the end game anyway, Prey has no such constraints, one of the first characters you meet is your robot buddy January who guides you through much of the game, but you can just blow him up and he stays dead, you can kill your brother, you can murder and destroy all the humans and robots you meet and the game will react accordingly, you can also not do all of that, I actually did try to save people and get the best ending, because I’m caring like that.
It took me until 2019 to play through Prey and I only had one playthrough, but it was a long one, 24 hours long that is, and I had a lot of fun. It seemed like the Arkane formula of reactive play your way games was one on a neverending winning streak, but of course all good things have to come to an end, some less gracefully than others.
Where Arkane fell off the ladder for me was with their next big title, Deathloop, when it came out in 2021 Deathloop was criticised by a lot of friends of mine but I wanted to give it a shot for myself, the gameplay was actually quite fun in my book, its main gimmick of forcing you to find the perfect formula to eliminate the targets in through repeat playthroughs was interesting and I enjoyed the blend of Dishonored style gameplay with more complex gunplay: Rather than the simple flintlock of Dishonored now there LMGs, SMGs, Shotguns and so on, but what killed the game for me was a very simple issue, it was too crash happy.
The game had a habit of repeatedly crashing to the point where I could only get in maybe 10 minutes to half an hour of playtime before being randomly booted back to desktop, I put up with this for 11 hours but I eventually reached a point where the game would just crash every single time I loaded back in, making the game unplayable, this was despite the fact that the game ran on the same engine as Dishonored 2 (which I had been able to play with no issues) and the graphics while nice weren’t anything my system should’ve been stumped by, but it happened all the same.
That killed off my loyalty to Arkane’s brand and it turned out to be a good time for that to happen, their next game was 2023’s Redfall, an Always Online co-op game which was much more widely panned, with its playerbase rapidly dropping off, review scores at rock bottom, the same kind of issues with bad performance and crashes cropped up again as well as broken AI, poor level design and a dragged out repetitive gameplay loop, I haven’t played the game for myself so I’m in no place to say if this is all fair criticism or not, but I also don’t have any enthusiasm to try it either.
It later turned out that the co-op Always Online elements of the game weren’t Arkane’s own ideas but those of their owners at the gaming conglomerate ZeniMax, who were also pushing for the game to incorporate microtransactions and a “live service” model of continual updates, despite these kinds of formulas being totally alien to Arkane’s development ethos.
Behind the scenes many Arkane devs had chosen to quit during Redfall’s development rather than follow this new mandate, reportedly around 70% of the team that had worked on Prey left before Redfall’s release and a lot of those who stayed were hoping the game would be cancelled when ZeniMax was bought out by Microsoft, but Microsoft apparently gave ZeniMax free reign resulting in any potential the game had being run into the ground.
The game’s poor performance meant that when Microsoft decided to cut jobs in their studios they put Arkane’s Austin branch on the chopping block, with the game’s planned updates and DLC being unceremoniously binned, although the devs did manage to push one last update which included an offline mode before bowing out, so the game at least is still playable even if it’s a victim of premature abandonment.
Running with Scissors #
Despite being in the middle of this list it’s probably the most personal of the 3 stories and the one I was most drawn to over the years, Running with Scissors are the developers of the POSTAL series, a series of games where you play as a guy known only as The POSTAL Dude, each game in the series is a shooter but beyond that they vary wildly.
The original POSTAL is a dark isometric linear shooter, you go from level to level killing enemies and once you’ve killed enough you can hit F1 and move on to the next area, although its gameplay is very basic it stuck out for the drawn artwork of its levels and its atmosphere, with diary entries between levels that showcased The Dude’s thoughts.
The game also got 2 expansions, Special Delivery and 2 levels set in Japan, exclusive to the Japanese version of the game (known as “Super POSTAL”).
POSTAL 2 is the best known game in the series and massively shifts the tone, becoming a black comedy, an open world first person shooter, rather than linear levels the game was set in a town split up by “load zones” you could move between, with the game’s story being split up across the days of the week: Each day you would get new errands to do, those errands would introduce more factions or “hate groups” and more of the town would unlock.
The joy of POSTAL 2 mostly came from its AI and all the secrets that were crammed across the town and the game’s difficulty system was more expansive than most games, with difficulties not just modifying surface level things like the damage you dished out and received but also changing how aggressive the NPCs would be and the weapons they would be equipped with, allowing for a ton of replayability. The game also received an expansion called Apocalypse Weekend, which was far more linear and scripted.
Then there was Postal 3, Postal 3 was a third person game that maintained the tone of POSTAL 2 but like Apocalypse Weekend ditched the open world, although the game’s setting, the town of Catharsis, was a fully interconnected city the open world was only accessible as a bonus for completing the game (with barely anything going on in it to make it worth playing).
The actual story had missions taking place in individual areas of the town with all of the exits blocked off by barricades or invisible walls, the weapons were also poorly implemented and so was the AI, making for a game that was essentially the black sheep of the franchise.
I don’t quite remember when I first heard of POSTAL but some early influences included a retrospective on the game from YouTuber Kim Justice (which might have been my introduction to the series) videos about the games from the YouTuber TehSnakerer, and a video essay by Noah Caldwell Gervais called “Postal, Hatred, and Weighing the Worth of Asshole Simulators”, I actually first played the games in 2015 when a friend gifted me POSTAL 1 after I’d mentioned it to him, I then bought and very briefly played POSTAL 2 before refunding it, then I bought it again the next year in a pack that came with a newly released DLC for the game, Paradise Lost.
Yes! Despite POSTAL 2 being a game that released in 2003 it was still getting new content at that time, essentially after Postal 3 turned out to be a reputational and financial disaster for RWS they admitted the game was shit, stopped selling it and pivoted back to POSTAL 2, running a Steam Greenlight campaign to get the game on Steam and releasing it as “POSTAL 2 Complete”, later renamed back to just “POSTAL 2”.
This new edition of the game, which was my introduction to POSTAL 2, had a bunch of new content compared to the original game like new weapons, difficulty options and so on, it also included Apocalypse Weekend free of charge.
Because of all this sprawling content POSTAL 2 managed to hold me despite my low attention span with many games at the time, I played it through to completion as well as Paradise Lost and kept coming back to it year after year, becoming a massive fan of the game, although I wasn’t much of a fan of Apocalypse Weekend due to its heavily scripted nature, or even Paradise Lost as it was pretty much a rehash of the base game without much to stand out on its own, but the base game was great fun and the addition of mods via the Steam Workshop meant even more could be done with it.
Then there’s Postal 3, that’s a game I also started playing in 2016 and I ended up buying it, refunding it and buying it again, you can see I was quite indecisive about my game purchases at the time.
This one really didn’t hold me, like most people who came across it I found Postal 3 to be a massive disappointment, as well as the problems I already mentioned the story was crap, portrayed through awful cutscenes with cringy jokes, it was a massive downgrade.
At the time I fancied myself as a would be game developer and thought I needed to right this wrong by making my own Postal 3 that would be a real sequel, the friend of mine who bought me the first POSTAL was a budding programmer and I tried to convince him to work with me on this grand project, I even had the bright idea to get textures for this project from POSTAL 2, not by just grabbing them from the files mind you, but walking up to them in-game and taking Steam screenshots with the HUD switched off, I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed back then, but in fairness I was about 13 at the time.
That friend didn’t bite and so my project was dead in the water before it had even begun to float, but it turned out that there was another team of developers who had the same ideas as me, they called themselves WhackJob Interactive and their Postal 3 revival project was called Catharsis Reborn, I applied to join initially as just a voice actor and started talking with the director of the project, Mark, over Skype of all things, later we moved over to Discord and despite being an annoying kid I managed to work my way up the team, branching out into running the social media, becoming a tester and then assisting with writing, when the lead writer for the project ended up leaving a few years later I took over that role as well and had a big influence over the creative direction of the mod, eventually Mark decided to move on and I became the director of the project in 2020, which is a role I’ve had since then.
But I’m getting ahead of myself there, let’s go back to 2016. My role working on CR and my general love of POSTAL 2 meant I was quite active in the POSTAL community and made many friends there, this was further bolstered by Running with Scissors releasing POSTAL Redux, a remake of the first game with updated controls, glossier visuals and better sound design; In updates Multiplayer (both co-op and deathmatch) was added as well as the Special Delivery and Super POSTAL levels, then a year later in 2017 a Community Patch for the original version of POSTAL 1 also released. adding the Super POSTAL maps to that edition of the game as well alongside numerous other improvements, POSTAL 2 also got another update adding subtitles and various other fixes later that year.
The dedication RWS had to revitalising their old games from the 90s and early 2000s impressed me and many others and earned them a lot of loyalty, cultivating a kind of underdog rebel image that had already been fuelled by the company’s battles with the moral guardians of the early 2000s - back when POSTAL 2 had first released (they proudly displayed a 0/10 review describing the game as the equivalent of “boxed syphilis” on their cover art and even trademarked the title of “Worst Game Ever”). They kept it going by mocking the dodgy trends growing in the game industry in the 2010s and frequently trashing Postal 3, seemingly being an indie bastion against the enshittification of the rest of the industry.
With a tight knit community and a series surrounding it that was receiving constant updates it was a great time to be a POSTAL fan, but then things started to change a bit. The hype train slowed down, it turned out that POSTAL Redux hadn’t made the kind of money RWS were expecting and another blow came when they announced POSTAL XX, a 20th Anniversary box set including all of the main POSTAL games and some extra goodies as a “while stocks last” limited edition, then they ended up having to discount it and it was still on sale years later, the company’s YouTube channel went pretty much radio silent except for some bizarre amateur ads for their merch.
It was around this time I did some reflecting on the company’s self-made image and how it didn’t all seem to stack up, for example their reputation for doggedly sticking to supporting their games, while it was undeniable they were putting in an amount of time for the original 2 POSTAL games that most other developers wouldn’t have, many of the updates they had been pushing out (especially for POSTAL 2) weren’t actually their own original work, it was mostly content from fan modders (particularly the A Week in Paradise and Eternal Damnation mods for POSTAL 2) .
The company had done some work of their own like adding Steam achievements, Workshop support, the subtitles and translations, extra cheats and Enhanced Mode features and other Quality of Life improvements, but many of the things I really liked about the Steam edition of POSTAL 2, the substantial gameplay changes like the new weapons and the sprawling array of difficulty options, weren’t theirs, but they were seeming to take most of the credit for it.
Couple that realisation with the fact that the company hadn’t put out a fully new game since Postal 3 and hadn’t ever managed to venture beyond the confines of POSTAL and I was starting to wonder if RWS was doomed to decline.
But then POSTAL 4 was announced, this was something that a lot of us had been expecting for a long time, wondering when RWS was going to stop rehashing and tinkering with their old games and bring out an all new one, and here it was, after 8 years we finally had a new game in the series, or 16 if you don’t count Postal 3.
The game wasn’t actually finished, it was released through Steam’s Early Access platform in a rough state: It very much resembled the POSTAL 2 structure, an open world with errands split up between days of the week, although this time we were finally leaving Paradise for a new city, Edensin, the game launched with just the first day available as RWS explained they had wanted to find a way to fund the game without having to resort to a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter or doing a deal with a publisher that might impact their creative control over the project, essentially asking people to buy in with the pitch that the game might be rough now but it could get better with community support.
The loyalty the company had built up over the years paid off, it seemed like a second wind, fans from across the community bought the game and review scores surged to the high positive ratings. I ended up buying 3 copies, one for myself and 2 to friends as gifts, and in early 2020 when RWS appealed for people to join their testing team, I volunteered, becoming part of the game’s QA team.
The game was indeed very rough, the performance was awful, the game was buggy as hell and the gameplay was lacking, feeling like an underdeveloped copycat of POSTAL 2 with a dull world, RWS themselves even acknowledged this quite a few times, take for example this post from May 2020:
As those of you who bought the game (last October in order to support us) will remember, that it was released in a very barebones state. Basic normal fundamentals such as key rebinding and a save system were missing, and the performance was SHIT. The AI was undercooked and behind that of even POSTAL 2’s, and we didn’t even have a basic police system in place. The art style was incoherent and many buildings and models were placeholders or needed texture work. We had a lot of friggin work to do.
But I was confident that with the funding they needed RWS could turn this into a worthy successor to POSTAL 2, I wanted to have a part in that by providing feedback.
There was plenty of room for growth and while Edensin was underdeveloped I was very happy to finally be leaving Paradise, the town of both POSTAL 2 and Paradise Lost, much as I had enjoyed exploring it in the original game I was fed up with seeing it again and again and again, since until this point P2 and PL had been the only open world games in the series, it was like Serious Sam’s habit of constantly rehashing Egypt as a setting.
Things seemed to be going quite well for a while, updates were frequent with new features and bug fixes coming through and by August the next day, Tuesday, had been released to the public alongside a host of new content like new weapons and further bug fixes, although there were many rough elements still (much of Edensin was still empty and devoid of anything interesting to do, a problem that worsened as the map was expanded further) I felt the errands were much more engaging than those of the previous day, there was an errand with 2 branches on how to tackle it, an errand that split off into multiple sub errands where you played as a cat, it was quite creative, things seemed to be on the up.
But I got the impression that the cracks from earlier in development weren’t really being smoothed over, the Monday errands were still poor quality, the town was way too big and uninteresting to explore, a major failing for an open world game, the game was still very crash happy and had incredibly long load times, and this was an area where the game actually had gotten worse.
At launch the game had the option for level streaming where the entirety of Edensin could be crossed without a load screen, but when that caused performance issues the load zone system was added back in as an option that could be toggled on or off, then the option was removed and everyone had to put up with the zones.
The missions and the maps were ultimately the 2 key elements that I thought the game had to get right and were being ignored, my view was that no matter how many good things you add if you build them on a foundation of shit, the end product is still shit.
Around this time Massi put out his first video about POSTAL 4 raising many of the same issues, the lacking innovation in the mechanics, the “bigger is better” mentality in the levels, pointing out that the longer it took for these issues to addressed, the less likely it would be that they could actually be fixed.
He also criticised how RWS was handling Early Access, noting that the company seemed to be using the EA state of the game as a shield to dismiss criticism, a point I very much agreed with, and pointing to their pricing model of a price increase with each new day added to the game as problematic, this was a point I didn’t really agree with, I thought raising the price as the game got more complete was fair, but that the price had already been too high to begin with.
On my end I felt that RWS wasn’t listening to feedback on these things, my enthusiasm waned and I stopped contributing as much, eventually I was removed from the QA team in November 2020, by this point I didn’t really have any enthusiasm to carry on with it anyway, playing a game I just didn’t enjoy again and again for free.
From there my fears only seemed to be realised more and more, I had planned to simply hold off on playing the game until it released from Early Access but in January 2021 the Wednesday update released and those fundamental problems I had warned about only worsened.
More huge new areas were added with very little going for them and the missions were just rehashes of old material, they included a mission where you clean up piles of shit, another where you install bidets into toilets, recycled from POSTAL 4’s Monday sewer errand (except in that errand it was installing light bulbs instead of bidets), and a petition mission where you have to harass people to sign your petition, a copy from the exact same gimmick in POSTAL 2 (which had already been reused on Monday and twice in Paradise Lost).
Only the last of these 4 errands was somewhat original, where you had to go to an amusement park called Kunny Island to deal with its mascot, Kunny, although it was clearly inspired by a very similar mascot themed errand from POSTAL 2 involving the game’s mascot Krotchy, it was at least partly different.
Having seen a friend streaming this update I felt I had to try it for myself and see if it was as bad as it seemed, it was that bad, and I ended up dropping the game again.
Around this time Massi’s argument about the company using Early Access as a shield really started to hit home, in particular the company’s community manager Zeron had gotten into a habit of questioning why certain criticisms were being mentioned or labelling them as unfair or incorrect, not because the criticisms weren’t accurate but because they were criticisms of areas of the game RWS had promised to fix.
This would have been understandable if we were talking about criticisms directed at him or the company specifically, but he would also go out of his way to respond to general discussions of the game between fans, attempting to police conversations around the game and shut down criticism on the grounds that unless an element of the game was finished it wasn’t fair for people to bring it up as an issue, the excuse became so common that Massi, myself and others in our social circle came up with a special label for it - “its early access bro”, “its early access bro” seemed to be a way of avoiding accountability and dismissing legitimate complaints by treating them as if they were unfair, malicious or insults.
To a degree “its early access bro” had always been an argument from the company and the game’s fans, we had even used it ourselves initially as the whole premise of the game had been “buy now, we’ll fix it later”, but when the “later” seemed to not be coming even years after release the justification became more and more jarring and frustrating to hear, the studio management had seemingly lost sight of the fact that promising to fix a problem is not the same as it actually being fixed.
I finally returned to the game in April 2022 after the final 2 days had been added and it was announced that the game would be leaving Early Access, the day the game’s 1.0 update came out I decided to play it through to see if things had really changed for the better.
…It was an absolute trainwreck, the game wasn’t even completable at the 1.0 release because one of the errands on Thursday, where you go to test a VR game for a game company, was completely broken, when you went into the company office a cutscene was supposed to trigger that would start the mission, introducing you to the VR world, but that was broken, leaving the game impossible to complete, when that problem was patched a day later the mission was still broken, although you could start the mission now when you actually got into the VR world one of the doors wouldn’t open, leaving you stuck again, I ended up using console commands to complete the errand in order to get past this softlock, it was patched again later that evening, these weren’t the only occasions I got stuck either, more on that later.
Besides that the problem of the map being too bloated had only continued to get worse, most of the missions were still poorly designed and the finale was underwhelming, with an Apocalypse section that essentially copypasted the Apocalypse from Paradise Lost, where you had the choice to either kill the bosses of the game’s factions or leave town, except in POSTAL 4 the choice was removed, you had to kill the bosses, then leave, and the final boss was incredibly poorly designed.
You see, the game’s respawn mechanic works quite differently to the previous POSTAL games and most games in general, where dying means reloading a previous save or checkpoint, in POSTAL 4 when you die you simply respawn without anything being reset, this took a lot of the stakes out of the gameplay but I was mostly fine with it, except there was one exception to this mechanic, the final boss.
With the final boss the fight would reset if you died, but since you weren’t loading a save what this meant is the boss’ health would keep resetting but your supplies would not, for every time you died you would have to fight him with less and less ammo, health and other items, the game also placed an invisible wall behind the exit to trap you into the fight.
The “leave town” segment also blocked off all exits from the starting area except the one that led to the longest path around town to the finish, forcing you to circle round in a way that seemed purpose built to pad out the runtime in the most tedious way.
There were some elements I did like, the gunplay had been much improved and I enjoyed it, you had the choice of several voices for the POSTAL Dude (Rick Hunter, the voice for POSTAL 1 and 2, Corey Cruise, the voice for Postal 3 and Jon St John, the main voice for 4) to pick from, nice looking vending machines had been introduced that made buying items quicker, the game’s wanted system had been upgraded with police assaults, well designed fast travel booths had been installed in some areas to make getting across the world quicker and the world had been populated with some collectibles and time trials in places, meaning that although the space was still way too big and underutilised, there were some extra things to do in it.
So it’s not like those 3 years in development had gone nowhere, but the game was at its core still a technical mess and (more importantly to me) still plagued by uninspired repetitive design. The talent was there, the prioritisation and the responsiveness to criticism was not.
After years of Early Access being used as a cheap excuse to wave away the game’s glaring issues this was the last straw for me, “buy now, fix later” was understandable as a starting premise for the game but the fact that it was still the pitch after 3 years in development showed that the promises were falling flat.
My fanboyism for RWS had long drained by this point but this was where I realised the game was never going to go in a direction that appealed to me and there was just no point trying to like a game I didn’t enjoy out of some sense of leftover nostalgia, shortly after playing 1.0 I updated my review of the game on Steam:
The bottom line is that despite coming out of Early Access and having its 1.0 launch POSTAL 4 does not feel finished, not at all, the devs admitted on the release that the game wasn’t ready to come out but it was happening anyway because they needed the money, but that explanation doesn’t change the quality of the end product, releasing it in this state will likely do more harm than good, much as booting Postal 3 out the door early killed any chances it had of being a solid game.
In my experience P4 had a roughly 50/50 chance to crash on load screens (in a game where you are constantly going between maps), I got softlocked 4 times in my playthrough (twice due to a bug where I would constantly crash whenever I tried to leave a certain map, twice when an errand wouldn’t progress), some optional objectives didn’t work (not counting as completed when reloading a save from after completion, not activating at all), the world still had lots of empty and near empty buildings, load times were also incredibly long constantly. Some of these issues may be more or less prevalent for others, but I can only speak for my personal experience and that experience was riddled with these issues.
Comparing this build to the last one I played (the Wednesday update back in 2021) there are lots of clear improvements (sprinting, better fast travel, more weapon customisation and weapons, waypoint markers, more dude voices, etc etc) but currently the game is still borderline unplayable a lot of the time and that one con trumps any pros the game has, it’s not something that is worth a near AAA asking price by any means. Either come back in a year or so, when the game should be hopefully patched up, or skip this one entirely.
Since Zeron was still asking for community feedback I also decided to write a lengthy feedback document about the 1.0 release, listing out what I thought were the game’s strengths and what were its weaknesses, with specific suggestions for the weakness such as how to improve the open world, how to fix the shoddy mission design and how to address the Apocalypse segment and its boss fights, ending with some anecdotes about my experience with the game and suggestions for future games, I argued that with proper care the game could become not just on par with POSTAL 2 but the best game in the franchise. In truth I didn’t really believe these criticisms would be listened to, but I still put in an effort to make a point that I was trying to be constructive.
Massi ended up echoing many of these thoughts with his second video on the game, “Postal 4; Many Regerts”, criticising his own promotion of the game on release, blasting its poor quality in design and technical areas, going far more in depth on the poor response to criticism from RWS and also taking other reviewers to task for giving the game an easy ride.
And unlike the Early Access release, with the 1.0 release much of the community feedback was closer to our opinions, although RWS still maintained a lot of good will there was a roughly equal amount of people who were fed up with the broken promises and poor performance, dropping the game’s score down to “mixed”.
The response from the studio was once again disappointing but unsurprising, the lead designer of the game, Marphy Black, responded to Massi’s video with a comment once again dismissing the criticisms on the grounds that the game was still in development and still incomplete, arguing that POSTAL 2 had been a similarly poor quality game on its initial release:
You’ve made the claim that there was the claim that the game is complete, but I don’t see where that was ever stated. The news release says, and I quote, “we know it needs more time in the oven.” Everything I said is still true. The issues are known. They’re being worked on. The team isn’t done. Work has never stopped on any of RWS’ games, including which POSTAL 2 is currently on its 19th year of receiving major free updates. In comparison, POSTAL 4 has been “released” (but never said to be completed) for a little over two weeks now. Chances are, you don’t remember what POSTAL 2 was like two weeks after release. Most people nowadays don’t, but it’s clear to me since I bought it day one. It was a game that had to be rushed out the door unfinished (there’s an entire expansion pack dedicated to this), and it received low reviews on launch. I could barely play it due to the horrendous load time performance and crashes. But then RWS spent ages updating it for free. Their hand was forced into a terrible position, but they didn’t stop working to finish developing the game they knew they weren’t done with yet. That’s what’s happening now. I’m not happy with it, but again, that’s why work continues on.
The company now is maybe only twice the size of the company then, but that isn’t very comparable since standards have risen greatly since 2003. You can’t just take a photo in a market and call it your store shelves texture anymore (You can see a lot of P2 is just made up of obvious placeholders they never had a chance to replace). […] The reason for leaving Early Access was already stated: Games in Early Access get no exposure, so quoting the release announcement again, it’s “to help raise more funds to put the finishing touches on the game, see our vision through, and get it onto console.” Nowhere has it been stated that POSTAL 4 is finished. It’s been the opposite, in fact.
Rather than the end of Early Access leading to any substantial change in attitude from the company, the “its early access bro” excuse simply became what Massi called the “it is unfinished bro” excuse:
This is not how consumers see the Early Access model, neither is it the intended use case of Early Access to release an unfinished product as a marketing stunt to make more money to finish the product. You violated the Early Access model by leaving it preemptively to get more sales out of a 1.0 release. Also, Postal 4 must have gotten quite a few sales as fans of RWS got the impression that the studio found itself in dire straights. How did RWS manage to exist for 2 whole years if Postal 4 failed to attract enough attention for people to purchase the game?
Also, Early Access games do get exposure, hell Running With Scissors was really good at marketing Postal 4. How many games are massively successful yet are still in Early Access or were in Early Access for an eternity? PUBG? Ark Survival Evolved? DayZ? A bunch of Early Access VR games like H3VR and Blade and Sorcery? So many many people buy Early Access games all the time and if the marketing budget is great, any game can sell well. Even bigger budget games like Baldurs Gate 3 get put on Early Access now and it’s successful.
The “it is unfinished bro” excuse is getting quite old now. You keep saying that you will fix things and make the game better, yet it doesn’t happen. This has been going on for years. The sewer map? Still a bought asset. The overworld? Still barren of life. Optimization? I don’t wanna get into that and you know yourself it’s bad. If you want to convince people that you are actually in the process of finishing the game, put your money where your mouth is and get to work. What you did throughout Early Access was mostly just adding content. Adding content alone doesn’t make a game great or complete. If you were honest about your ambitions to finish the game, you wouldn’t have left Early Access. You must know that leaving Early Access has a lot of symbolic power which implies to everyone on Steam that you have just wrapped development on the game. Also, why is Zack recording voicelines right now which have to be implemented into the game in the coming weeks, if you have so much more important optimization and polishing and game finishing work left to do? Again put your money where your mouth is.
So about 2 years ago you hid behind the Early Access label to dismiss critiques entirely due to the game being unfinished and it’s unfair to critizise a game that is still in development. Now after leaving Early Access you are still discounting dissenting opinion about the product you know is broken and incomplete by stating - just as if it was 2 years ago - that the product is unfinished. I will not let you get away with that, especially if your vertical slice has a pricetag which is half as expensive as a AAA game. Incredible!
That cultivated image of RWS being the indie rebel calling out bad practices in the industry now looked as hypocritical as it could possibly get.
I still haven’t gone back to the game since and even though it does receive updates to this day I don’t think I ever will.
I definitely owe a lot to POSTAL, it was what introduced me to many of the people I’m still close friends and collaborators with today (hi Massi!), but the quality nosedive of official POSTAL definitely took a toll on us and our romanticism for the series waned over time, I tried to fend it off for quite a while, imagining that you could separate the brand from its owner and enjoy the possibilities POSTAL brings for emergent gameplay, with Catharsis Reborn being the vehicle I imagined for that, but even I have to admit now that POSTAL isn’t my thing anymore.
I’m still in my role on the development team for the mod, but with an understanding that it’s kind of a leftover of my childhood rather than a series I’m still a fanatic for, I still do think the POSTAL formula presents lots of interesting gameplay opportunities with its wild variety of weapons, items and AI behaviours, but that doesn’t translate to brand appeal for me anymore, mostly because the alternatives to the current official POSTAL have dried up for me.
Nostalgia? That’s over with, I’ve played POSTAL 1 and 2 to death, I have 100% of the achievements in both games, I’ve done pretty much everything there is to do there.
Mods? While mods did extend the longevity of the game a lot, especially larger scale ones like Happy Night, that only extended the lifespan for me, it didn’t make it infinite, and ironically for the director of a mod project myself I mostly play games vanilla.
There’s also the official POSTAL spinoff game POSTAL: Brain Damaged which came out in 2022, developed by 2 outside studios called Hyperstrange and CreativeForge. That was a very fun game, taking POSTAL’s themes and putting them into a linear retro style shooter, but as a linear game it didn’t have any replay value for me personally, I spent 12 hours on a single run of the game and didn’t go back since, fun but lacking longevity, so that’s kind of dried up too.
And this is fine, it’s not all doom and gloom, it just means I’ve found other projects and other games that give me more enthusiasm these days. Did it hurt to see a franchise that had such a big role in kid me’s life go down the shitter? Sure, but I’ve had plenty of time to get over it and find other passions like my documentary projects, writing articles like these or going to lots and lots of concerts.
Starbreeze #
The last of our big 3 is Starbreeze, the developers of the PAYDAY game series, they used to be 2 different studios, Overkill Software and Starbreeze Studios, but in 2012 Starbreeze acquired Overkill and at some point in the 2020s (I don’t remember exactly) the Overkill name was phased out completely.
For those who don’t know PAYDAY is essentially a horde shooter franchise like Left 4 Dead except instead of zombies you’re fighting off swarms of Cops, you play through levels called “Heists” with multi stage objectives that usually involve stealing stuff, piles of cash, drugs, gold, jewels, nuclear warheads (yes, really), all sorts, although there are some other kinds of missions too like ones where you just have to kill a certain target to leave.
Gameplay is split between “Loud” and “Stealth”, in Loud you have to fend off escalating waves of Cops augmented by occasional Special Units or “Specials”, the staples being the self-explanatory Shield (he has a big riot shield), the Taser who true to his name will zap you locking you in place and making you shoot randomly if you get too close, the Splinter Cell knockoff called the Cloaker who can knock you down instantly with a kick, a tanky shotgunner/machinegunner called the Bulldozer and then the Snipers, oh so many fucking snipers…
In stealth you have to dodge various security systems like cameras, lasers and alarms as well as patrolling guards, who are very easy to kill but for each one you kill (or capture) you have to answer their pager, you have a fixed number of times you can do this and after that any pager that goes off will cause an alarm.
Some heists only allow Loud playstyles, others are Stealth only, many of them accommodate both styles, although once you go Loud you can’t go back to Stealth for the rest of the Heist.
The first PAYDAY game, PAYDAY: The Heist, I didn’t play too much, it was PAYDAY 2 that grabbed me. I bought PAYDAY 2 back in 2015, 2 years after its release, and over time became more and more gripped and in love with it.
I didn’t like the Stealth gameplay at all but Loud was very engaging and fun to me, what really helped was that PAYDAY 2 was an early pioneer of the “live service” model, the idea being that you would buy in with the base game and then new content would be released as DLC packs from there: There were new weapons and weapon attachments, masks, playable characters, perk decks and heists and so on, some of this content was also released for free to all players as well.
This meant that the game had a consistent stream of new content and expanded over time, giving a freshness to the gameplay loop, although the core mechanics always remained the same you could always try new gear and perks and the new heists gave you more settings to do that in.
At launch the game had 12 heists, now in 2024 after support for the game has ended the final count is 82, 2 of these are very basic tutorials, 9 of them are Classic Heists (Heists from the first PAYDAY remade for PD2) and some Heists are very similar to others, so the count of truly unique heists is a little bit less, but this is still a staggering amount of content.
The game also has a total of 1328 achievements (of which I’ve gotten 950), hundreds of weapons each with countless attachments that modify them from stocks to optics to grips to magazine types to some more creative additions here and there (like an underbarrel flamethrower), 9 different deployables (ranging from ammo, grenade and health packs to sentry guns to electronic jammers) 22 perk decks, 5 skill trees (each with 3 subtrees) and a Prestige system called Infamy with 500 levels.
This is a game you can easily lose thousands of hours to if you want to experience all or even most of what it has to offer, at the time of writing my playtime on Steam is 952 hours, that adds up to just under 40 days of my life spent on this game, it’s by far my most played game on Steam.
That doesn’t mean everything was smooth sailing, not by a long shot, over the years Overkill courted controversy with various changes to weapon balancing and difficulty, the addition of CS-GO/TF2 style microtransactions in the Black Market update, and the game actually “ending” twice.
After initially being wrapped up in late 2018 after the addition of the final Heist in the story - The White House, and its associated secret ending that neatly wrapped up the narrative with conclusions for all the Heisters, but development resumed in 2019 with the Silk Road Campaign and continued until 2023 with the release of the Crude Awakening Heist, the reason being that Overkill’s other projects like Overkill’s The Walking Dead and Raid World War 2 (essentially a PAYDAY game in a World War 2 setting) had failed miserably, massively underselling and failing to capture public attention and support in the way PAYDAY 2 had, this forced Starbreeze to go through corporate restructuring to survive and pivot back to PAYDAY 2 to keep the cash flow rolling.
Despite all these problems the fundamental of PAYDAY 2 being a great, well supported game kept my loyalty to Overkill alive, and so when PAYDAY 3 was announced I was very excited. PAYDAY 3 had been confirmed as in the works as far back as 2016, with publishing conglomerate Plaion (itself owned by gaming conglomerate Embracer Group) committing a large investment into the game in 2021 to help plug the funding gaps alongside the continued PAYDAY 2 releases, in January 2023 the game had its Steam page uploaded alongside a very brief trailer showing a cityscape and a logo:
For months content was slowly drip fed until the proper announcements surrounding the game emerged, it turned out there was going to be 3 editions of the game:
- Standard, which was the base game
- Silver, which came with a Season Pass for the first 2 DLC packs
- And Gold, which included a pass for the first 4.
It wasn’t perfect for me, the original 4 heisters from the first 2 PAYDAY games were coming back as the lead characters while I would have preferred an all new cast (so the conclusion of the last game wasn’t spoiled), but seeing the game’s Dev Diaries, which included developer interviews, more footage and more discussion around the content, convinced me this was a game to look forward to; I not only bought the Gold Edition for myself but for 2 other friends as well, we would get access to the game early on September 18th 2023 while the official release would be on September 21st.
As the release got closer worrying news started to leak out, the game was going to be Always Online, meaning you needed to have an internet connection to play even if you were playing a Heist on your own and on top of that the game would include Denuvo DRM, a very unpopular Anti-Piracy software that many in the past have blamed for technical problems, in an FAQ on the leadup to a Beta test of the game Starbreeze described the “benefits” of Denuvo as stopping piracy while insisting it wouldn’t cause technical issues, this made me especially angry, as I said to a friend at the time:
the argument for why its good for the player is nothing to do with the player, its to do with them
“it stops piracy”
even though that’s not true
this is the same stock excuse denuvo themselves trot out too
even though games using denvuo have been pirated and i have no doubt it will happen to pd3 as well at some point
There was also the rumour of microtransactions being included in the game and this was eventually confirmed to be true, this made me even more frustrated considering the PAYDAY funding model of constant DLC releases. PAYDAY 2 with all DLC is now a very affordable, fair price that’s well worth it considering the massive volume of content you get, since you can get everything from before the 2019 revival with the Legacy Collection, and everything after it with the Infamous Collection, but as someone who got the game fairly early and bought the DLCs individually as they came out it cost a lot of money; The price of all the game’s DLCs bought on their own with no discounts is now £215, the prospect of being asked to buy in with that kind of amount again (presuming PAYDAY 3 lasted as long as 2 or something close to it) AND have more penny pinching from microtransactions was especially insulting.
Ultimately just days before the release Starbreeze quickly announced that Denuvo had been dropped from the game, which calmed some nerves even though the other 2 big elephants in the room, Always Online and Microtransactions, still loomed over our heads, the Microtransactions weren’t included at release and were planned to be added later in development, leaving Always Online as the key issue.
Having jumped in at the early release my choice to set my frustrations and concerns aside seemed to pay off, the game was genuinely really fun, I noticed a number of key improvements.
The stealth mechanics had been massively improved compared to PAYDAY 2, now it was possible to complete many actions without wearing your mask (before you put your mask on enemies won’t be suspicious just from looking at you), restricted areas were now split between “Private” and “Secure”, with players caught in private areas only being escorted out instead of the alarm going off, which only happened in secure areas, (in PAYDAY 2 getting caught in any restricted area caused an alarm, with you failing stealth straight away), you could also move bodies without having body bags (in PAYDAY 2 you needed them and only had a finite amount), cameras also did not instantly set off an alarm if you were spotted, instead a guard would go to check the area you were spotted at.
These changes heavily reduced the number of instant fail states Stealth had and made it feel much more fair and manageable, turning that playstyle from something I wouldn’t touch with a 10ft barge pole into a playstyle I willingly tried and enjoyed many times.
Then there was the negotiation phase, a middle ground between Stealth and Loud, after getting caught and the Cops arriving you wouldn’t be raided straight away, instead you would have a timer counting down until the first assault which could be delayed by releasing hostages, allowing you extra time to set up or complete objectives before everything kicked off, hostages also had more value in Loud as well as between assault waves you could trade them for health packs (in PAYDAY 2 you could only use them to revive dead players).
The game’s balancing also seemed to restore some challenge, Special enemies actually felt threatening again, in PAYDAY 2 I had gotten used to treating them as just any other enemy after snapping the balance in two for the most part thanks to making strong character builds, fearing Bulldozers again was great.
And lastly, a key one, Heists had more objective variety, many of PAYDAY 2’s objectives were exactly the same and extremely tedious, you would move forward a short distance and come up against an obstacle that required a really long timer to remove, whether that’s a safe or door that needs to be drilled, a floor to burn through with thermite, a computer to hack, whatever it may be, it felt like the game was just constantly stalling to compensate for small map sizes. PAYDAY 3 didn’t totally eliminate this but severely lessened it, making Heists feel much more enjoyable to progress through.
There were some bugs like music cutting out, certain buttons not working and items unlocking in the wrong order or not at all, and the Always Online system was causing input lag problems even in solo matches, but the gameplay on the whole was really strong.
I was optimistic, if they fixed these issues we would be set for a golden successor towards one of my favourite games.
But then the game released publicly and chaos followed, almost straight away the massive influx of new players on multiple platforms caused the servers to crash, because the game was Always Online that meant the entire game was completely unplayable. The servers were down for over a day at launch and after that were constantly dropping in and out either due to technical problems or because Starbreeze was taking them down for maintenance, it was a complete disaster that proved what I and many others in the community had been saying exactly right, at the time I pointed out just how much of a terrible idea Always Online was:
You got it spot on and said what needed to be said, this makes no sense as anti-piracy because piracy will still happen and the countermeasures are not proportionate at all, punishing paying customers, nor as anti-cheat because this isn't a competitive game, its co-op
— Elwood (@l_wood03) September 22, 2023
Because server problems are an existential crisis for the game, since there's no offline mode at all except the tutorial, they really need to do a u-turn like with Denuvo otherwise it will be a growing problem dragging down a game that is genuinely great and really fun to play
— Elwood (@l_wood03) September 22, 2023
The worst of the server problems were under control within a month or so but the issues of lag spikes remained, making the game tedious and at times extremely frustrating to play. It exhausted my patience and after completing all of the game’s launch heists with friends and playing the game through a few times over I dropped it and uninstalled, briefly playing again to play the first DLC, Syntax Error when it launched in December 2023.
This whole time the overwhelming unambiguous call from the community was for the game to be given an Offline Mode but Starbreeze constantly stalled on this rather than committing to it, the game’s community manager Almir constantly repeated the phrase “it’s on the table” when asked or some other variation of promising it would be considered, rather than pledging that it would actually happen, all while the game’s player numbers and review scores continued to tank, for some reference on how bad this was at the time of writing the current player count for PAYDAY 3 is 315, the count for PAYDAY 2 is 30,576, PAYDAY 2’s review scores on Steam both recent and overall are “Very Positive”, PAYDAY 3’s are “Mostly Negative”.
Only in February 2024, 5 months after launch, did Starbreeze finally commit to adding an Offline Mode along with a host of other proposed fixes as part of an announcement called “Operation Medic Bag”, but looking at the fine print this was only a partial offline mode, not a full one: The Offline Mode addition was split into 2 phases and even in Phase 2 the player would still need to periodically connect to the internet to upload progression data, it took until June 2024, 9 months after release, for Phase 1 to begin.
Part of this is because Starbreeze stalled on committing to an Offline Mode for an outrageously long amount of time post-release, but another part of it is the fact that Always Online is so rooted into the core of the game.
In PAYDAY 2 more or less everything was local, your online connections were peer to peer meaning you only relied on the connection of whoever was hosting the lobby and your own connection, progress data was saved locally on a save file that you could easily copy and paste to back up. This wasn’t a perfect system by any means, there were quite a few times where the server host lost connection mid Heist and that could potentially cause hours of progress to be lost, it didn’t happen that often but was very frustrating when it did.
With PAYDAY 3, all of this is rooted into the central servers at Starbreeze, everything including your ability to play the matches, their performance, your ability to save your progress, make any progress at all, or even do something as basic as buy a new weapon, is all rooted through these servers, they are a single failure point for everything, if they don’t work or don’t work properly it doesn’t matter if you have the best computer or internet speed in the world, the game becomes a 51 Gigabyte waste of space on your drive.
This is a terrible idea even when it works well as inevitably at some point the developers will end support and shut down the servers, giving PAYDAY 3 a seriously shortened lifespan that PAYDAY 2 doesn’t have.
But this wasn’t just a problem for the long term, it was an immediate and persistent problem because the servers just didn’t perform well, the fact that Starbreeze has tangled so much of the game into them means that this may be an unsolvable problem that dooms the game, or at the least a very hard to solve problem, even if they can fix it it might be too late for there to be much of a community left to rejoin the game.
Nonetheless, for months now Starbreeze have been changing and adding gameplay mechanics in various updates with little to no effect on the playerbase, that’s not to say they should single mindedly focus on offline mode, not everyone at the company works on the server structure and is able to contribute to fixing it, but once again whatever value these additions may have is diminished when they’re built on a foundation of shit, and the community response indicates that.
We don’t know what caused things to play out this way, some have speculated that these unpopular decisions like Always Online were forced on Starbreeze, maybe as a condition of receiving that massively needed investment from Plaion they were forced to include things like AO and Denuvo as “Anti-Piracy” measures, maybe Starbreeze were behind the scenes fighting these investors for the right to be able to undo these terrible decisions just like the struggle between Arkane and ZeniMax over Redfall.
But we don’t know that, there’s no reason to excuse Starbreeze of all wrongdoing based on just speculation and what I’ve seen is a company asking for a lot of money from its customers only to make several massive missteps and stubbornly resist making things right until the pressure from the community was at bursting point, it’s even more frustrating to see this happen to a game that genuinely is fun and well made.
But I decided I wasn’t going to play PAYDAY 3 again (if ever) until they added the promised Offline Mode, I kept to that and haven’t played the game since December 2023, since Phase 1 still involves progression being tied to online connection I think I’ll be keeping it that way for the time being, even the release of the second DLC, Boys in Blue, hasn’t been enough to tempt me back.
I’m less bitter towards Starbreeze than the other examples of broken brand loyalty, and I think there is maybe still a chance for them to earn some of that faith back if they commit to making things right with Offline functionality and then further developing the game from there, but this is still an instance of a company that massively abused trust and good will, proving that that trust and will wasn’t deserved.
Conclusion #
So, what’s the end point of all this? Well, it’s a pretty simple one, despite the legal fiction corporations are not people, unless they have a severe mental illness people don’t tend to change personalities every few years and unless you live in a very fucked up country or a criminal underworld they can’t be bought and sold and completely redesigned at the whim of their owners.
Companies are different, even though the names and brands may stay the same the owners, stakeholders and personnel of companies can change over time and often do, the current Running with Scissors has almost no one left on staff from the old days of POSTAL 2 or POSTAL 1, the Arkane that made Redfall has very little resemblance to the Arkane that made Dishonored.
Similarly the id Software that released DOOM Eternal in 2020 has nothing to do with the id Software that released the original DOOM in 1993, beyond the brand, the current 3D Realms has nothing to do with the old 3D Realms, a point the founder of the original 3D Realms is keen for people to know, the current Atari has next to nothing to do with the Atari that pioneered with the first gaming consoles and personal computers back in the 1980s.
To look at even more examples beyond the gaming world try Apple, that company was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, Wayne dropped his stake in the company almost immediately while Jobs and Wozniak quit in 1985, with Jobs forming his own company, NeXT, and creating the NeXTSTEP operating system.
Apple did later rehire Steve in 1997, where from then on he remained CEO until 2011, integrating NeXTSTEP into the Apple ecosystem, but he and his works only got the chance to come back into the fold because the company bosses realised they were going broke and needed to do something drastic.
Or how about KFC? Colonel Sanders is still the face of their products, literally, to this day, even though he sold the company in 1964 and later went on record trashing its offerings, something they threatened to sue him for, and he had to go to court just for the right to set up his own franchise again after KFC had repeatedly blocked him.
When people treat us right and commit themselves to us it builds up a debt of loyalty over time that deserves to be repaid, because we learn what kind of person they are and what they mean to us and we remember what they’ve done for us, brands don’t have that debt, if someone you knew completely transformed into a different person and all that remained of the old them was their name and maybe their face you wouldn’t still feel that connection with them, would you? If this new person tried to exploit your memory of the old person to maintain your trust, you would find it pretty creepy, right?
It sounds like the plot of a horror movie or an eldritch horror story, yet this is what happens in real life, we let ourselves get taken in by nostalgia and built up good will and as a result we tolerate things that absolutely aren’t tolerable.
Whatever you might think of POSTAL 4 it’s pretty clear that without the brand identity of POSTAL and RWS players would not have put up with the shambolic state the game released in and remained in for years, the game most likely would have been dead on arrival; The game and its creators survived because the good will Running with Scissors built up meant that fans accepted the “buy now, it’ll be fixed later” premise when they otherwise wouldn’t have, and many of them continued to do so even when that premise fell short.
That doesn’t mean that it’s all purely for profit, I have no doubt that there are people in these companies that aren’t soulless and care about their communities, but at the end of the day a company is almost always a moneymaking enterprise first and foremost, workers work for them to pay the bills, owners own them to make profits, the customer is the revenue generator, it’s a transactional relationship. They know this so you should know it too, when you buy a game you should have only one question on your mind: Is this game worth my money?
Deathloop, POSTAL 4 and PAYDAY 3 were not worth my money, they were games that were either of poor quality or that simply didn’t work, but I bought them without checking for that because I felt Arkane, RWS and Overkill had done right by me in the past, so I trusted that they would again and thought they deserved my support, the result was bitterness, wasted time, energy and money.
Don’t do this, I’m not saying you should view every developer as a soulless husk, but when you’re dealing with a company just remember that transactional nature of the relationship, you give them your money and they owe you a quality product, if they don’t hold up their end of that bargain you owe them nothing, looking at this differently is to set yourself up to be mugged.
The love, commitment and quality that you see from good games doesn’t come from a company or a brand, it comes from the developers, the workers who put it together, and while those workers may stay with the company for a long time they may also move on, either because they decided to jump or were pushed.
DOOM wasn’t such an iconic game because of “id Software”, it was an iconic game because of the work of people like John Carmack, who put the DOOM engine together, a giant technical leap from past game engines, John Romero, who implemented many of the level design elements and created the maps for Episode 1, Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud who sculpted the monsters from clay and digitised pictures of toys, picture books and sketches to create the game’s arsenal and environments, Bobby Prince who put together the soundtrack of ambience and heavy metal and brought monsters, guns and places to life with mixes of samples and his own recordings, then there’s Sandy Petersen who put all of Episodes 2 and 3 together in just 10 weeks, there are many more people who made DOOM what it was but for the sake of brevity these are the ones that stuck out to me.
DOOM was born from all the wider ranging influences these people came across in their lives from films like Colour of Money and Aliens to games of Dungeons and Dragons and HR Giger’s Necronomicon art book, these people are what made DOOM, not “id”. id had a purpose, it was the roof all of these people worked under, but the roof remained while the people changed and those who came after were different people with different ideas and different influences, even if some of that was an imitation of what came before.
The attempts of any given company to associate that kind of hard work with their brand name rather than the people who actually deserve that respect are just a cheap trick to gain consumer loyalty and enthusiasm without having to earn it, the same way so many ads will present feel good stories that have little or nothing to do with the product and then stick their brand at the end, tricking you into associating the good story with their products and becoming positive towards them even when they haven’t actually explained anything that’s good about the product.
That doesn’t mean companies are inherently evil or anything, they’re value neutral, a company is just an organisation and it changes in ways people don’t, it can be a force for good when good managers are at the helm and a force for bad when the management is malicious or incompetent, not exactly groundbreaking stuff but it still needs to be pointed out, companies are not your family, they are not your friends, they are just a structure, a structure for money-making first and foremost.
So when the new version of the brand doesn’t stack up with the old, find a substitute or move on. I haven’t found a good replacement for Dishonored or POSTAL yet, but recently I’ve found a great substitute for PAYDAY: Crime Boss Rockay City, a game which mixes PAYDAY’s heisting gameplay with roguelike mechanics and a gang warfare strategy element, it’s a game that from what I’ve heard also released in a pretty shambolic state, but unlike PAYDAY 3 has managed to make a genuine recovery in its year of post-launch updates, it has its own flaws but they’re not enough to spoil the game and it feels like things are very much on the right track.
Put simply, reward continued good practice and good quality products, rather than nostalgic memories of them, because a consumer that doesn’t insist on accountability will usually get a drop in quality in exchange.