WW1 Game Series

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

This blockbuster franchise (the name is literally "WW1 Game") has come out with its new cash grab.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3065940/Gallipoli/

I'm both pleased and annoyed. Their strategy is to take one frontline - and that's defined pretty narrowly too - at a time, make a full game (like most multiplayer, free maps only, but rolled out piecemeal over a long time), make it extremely autistic (very specific guns and uniforms and picture perfect recreations of battlefields), but at the cost of giving up variety that gives the thing staying power. It's super historically grounded, which is cool in a museum piece way, but also bland and boring to hear the same German or Italian shouting a million times. Because there is a tiny player base for this shit (enough to fill one or two servers when everybody's on, sometimes a fraction of the server, but the bots are fairly functional) and it does not have the stamina to play Verdun (generic Western Front trench war No Man's Land Land), Tanneberg (Eastern Front), Isonzo (Italian Alps Hemingway Land) and now Gallipoli all at the same time.

I was hoping they'd parlay that success into making a Battlefield 1 ripoff that might have just a few maps for each of those fronts.

But at least, if they weren't going to do that it is, Gallipoli. And these games have only gotten better. Verdun is easy to pick up and play, but it's paced really weird. The lethality is through the roof (like most of these things, center mass kills) but shooting and moving is twitchy like a COD game, everything runs fast. Isonzo is weighty and feels better for serious play but I can't play it mindlessly. Isonzo is the closest thing to the feeling of playing old Call of Duty (as in Finest Hour, Big Red One, etc.) games thematically, it's not autistic like Hell Let Loose mechanically but as mentioned, if you shoot someone in the chest, they will die.

At least you will be able to remove turkroach as the Australians.

 

[Soso]

Any game that has The Great War interests me usually. Hopefully it turns out well.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

ah the people who made verdun and other games in that wwi series. now this makes more sense

 

[Lithuophile]

I'd like a mount-and-blade style game that has you micromanage frontlines hoi3 backice style, but also allows you to take control of units and vehicles like in battlefield 1

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Over the Top WW1 is a very nice competitor to this shit. It's having a rough launch in quality but they've improved it a lot now today with the shooting. In my ideal world they'd eventually do Cambrai as a return to the Western Front (if they didn't use all their progress to just make a Battlefield 1 killer with all the fronts) with a focus on real life tank tactics, but this game already has playable tanks, so.... it's not themed around it, it's not implemented that authentically (in a clusterfuck game nobody's going to actually use the tank properly), but still.

But if they do other stuff after Gallipoli, I'd really like to see them do the Russian Civil War. I think they hsot themselves in the foot doing Tannenberg, autistically thinking "well we gotta milk each one one-by-one." Nobody gives a fuck about Tannenberg. Nobody cares about the Eastern Front of WWI. It's one of those gotta-collect-em-all things where you learn about it because of its relevance to the rest of the war and to the Revolution, but I think it didn't leave a legacy like Verdun or Isonzo because there was nothing for general audiences to latch onto.

The multi-sided clusterfuck of the Russian Civil War - playing the Bolsheviks - would have driven a lot more sales, I think, and been essentially hte same gameplay.