because it was superficially similar to Overwatch it absolutely bombed.
Sort of, the real issue was it had no advertising of its own, just Randy Pitchford synergising buzzwordsalad on twitter and trying to create a rivalry with Overwatch. Nobody really knew what it was supposed to be from advertising, because nobody thought to just say "FPS MOBA".
I remember seeing plenty of advertising for it and always saw it as a fundamentally different game with much more of a PvE focus. I didn't buy it until quite a while later but I remember being annoyed at the comparisons being made between them as they seemed so fundamentall different to me.
Oh I agree, what I mean is that the similarities were barely even superficial. They were both hero shooters, but so are Apex Legends and Rainbow Six Seige, and you'd never compare them to Overwatch.
I don't know if it's forgotten, but it's forgotten to me. There was this ant game where you had a colony of ants that would go collect food, or attack other colonies. There was this very pixelated top-down map view where you could see the brightly colored food disappear pixel by pixel as they ate.
I can't figure out what the game was but I loved it.
Nope, the other commenter got it. It was Microsoft Ants. Sim Ant is what most people guess when I have brought this one up before though. I'll have to try it sometime.
Sounds s lot more fair than the experience I had at home!
Three kids crammed in front of one computer. One on keyboard, one on mouse and one on joystick. The one on joystick was at the worst disadvantage. A small nudge was a good way to sabotage rebuilding your fortress.
Unreal Tournament, the one that was abandoned in favor of Fortnite (eugh). Like sure it would never be a big hit like Fortnite, Arena Shooters are out of fashion after all, but Epic didn't even give it a chance for starters, they basically just rushed it out the door with a skeleton crew, no budget whatsoever and were begging for community members to do free work on the game for them. In retrospect the game was doomed to fail from day one.
It STARTED from the work of community members. Then Epic jumped in and took over with the promise of their backing of the community team. Then once they had control over it they scuttled the ship.
These were godly at the time, but due to storytelling, modding community and mission editors. Flight model and combat mechanics were little too "Wing Commnder" even back then. Todays space pilots would need something more in line with Elite Dangerous, Helium Rain and Star Citizen.
Time to install FreeSpace Open again. 😄 For those who have managed to miss that project: it's a completely rebuilt engine for FS2. Together with the MediaVPs from The FreeSpace Upgrade Project it makes the game look pretty modern again. Take a look at https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Getting_started if you need instructions.
I believe even there is even a mod available which allows playing the first FreeSpace in FSO.
I own the remake, and I actually had a fan site for it...
And got to interview John Freaking Carpenter for that fan site, as he did the music for Sentinel Returns.
It was exactly as awesome as it sounds.