Turn-Based Tactics The Lamplighters League - turn-based tactics in pulp 1930s setting from Harebrained Schemes

[Hobo Elf]

But the main issue wasn't writing or gameplay (which was lacking, too, but with mods you could make it adequate).

It was the tech.

Yes. Yes!

The game performed incredibly sluggish with frankly no looks to justify that even remotely.

O-oh. That, too, I guess. Thought you were gonna talk about the lack of Clan mechs.

 

[Cyberarmy]

They spent 30 million dollars on this.

WTF how? So much spend on marketing and wasted budget on foolish things. This game don't have much production values to justifiy that kind of money.

Double RIP for Harebrained I guess.

 

[toro]

New steamspy data:

Old userscore: 74%
Owners: 100,000 .. 200,000
Followers: 19,336
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 369

 

[koyota]

New steamspy data:

Old userscore: 74%
Owners: 100,000 .. 200,000
Followers: 19,336
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 369

Peak Daily Players is 737 on release date a week ago, yet they are estimating 100,000 - 200,000 owners?

 

[Roguey]

They spent 30 million dollars on this.

WTF how? So much spend on marketing and wasted budget on foolish things. This game don't have much production values to justifiy that kind of money.

Double RIP for Harebrained I guess.

Full-voice acting, cinematic trailer, around 40 or so devs working for 4-5 years (Battletech was released in early 2018).

 

[Cross]

They spent 30 million dollars on this.

30 million to produce a game that looks like dog vomit.

Does someone know games(any genre) that were successful with a similar setting? I have a hard time thinking of anything.

I don't think it was very successful, but Relic's Impossible Creatures has a very classic pulp adventure setting and story.

Naturally, it also looks better visually than The Lamplighters League despite being a 20 year old game.

 

[Modron]

Crimson Skies I guess.

GROM!

Spoiler

I don't think that it was a success I just wanted so say Grom.

 

[Deflowerer]

They spent 30 million dollars on this.

Seattle wages add up real quick.

 

[Roguey]

30 million to produce a game that looks like dog vomit.

It does have a lot more detail than the much lower budget Shadowrun Returns https://fionabrunerart.artstation.com/projects/GXv9OV

Which likely contributes to the problem, cartoony works better when it's low-poly.

 

[GhostCow]

I don't even think it was overly woke

Of course you don't think having stronk wahmen and pronouns is overly woke. You used to post on reset era. Your opinions on wokeness are 100% retarded.

 

[thesheeep]

I don't even think it was overly woke

Of course you don't think having stronk wahmen and pronouns is overly woke. You used to post on reset era. Your opinions on wokeness are 100% retarded.

Yeah, before they banned me for saying that whole SJW stuff of theirs is just stupid. At some point 2018 or so
Do not worry, though, I think they will soon develop a pill to reverse the culture war brain rot you are suffering from.
Maybe then, you will be able to not view everything through that distorted lens of yours.

Seriously, who in their right mind gives a flying fuck about the existence of pronoun choices in a game like Battletech?
Strong women? Have been in gaming since the first video games and media long before that. The writing in the game was generally bad, not only in badly written female characters.
Neither of which has any important bearing on the actual game and what you do in it 99% of the time.
I do not often say "touch grass", but I think you could really benefit from stepping back a little

 

[Sarathiour]

Seriously, who in their right mind gives a flying fuck about the existence of pronoun choices in a game like Battletech?

Sane people, it's out of place and only done to cater to mentally ill people.

"Who cares if there is a diaper option by default on the character creation, if you're not into scat just disactivate it bro". It's bad taste.

Anyway, shame to know that people who used to work on crimson skies end up on this pile of trash. Entropy and decline really is unavoidable.

 

[thesheeep]

Seriously, who in their right mind gives a flying fuck about the existence of pronoun choices in a game like Battletech?

Sane people, it's out of place and only done to cater to mentally ill people.
"Who cares if there is a diaper option by default on the character creation, if you're not into scat just disactivate it bro". It's bad taste.

Even if you agree with that take and think like that:
It's a tiny thing compared to the game as a whole. It's like saying all fruit are shit because you don't like one variety of apple. It is the exact opposite of sane.
And more importantly, the game has so many, actually gameplay-relevant issues that something like that can at best be considered the rotten cherry on the turd cake.

 

[Mortmal]

Wjat happens to the shadowrun ip anyway? In microsoft purgatory because they are owned by paradox now?

Rotting like so many other IPs, it doesn't even make any sense. If I were Microsoft, I'd finance a big Shadowrun game. It could be a GTA-like cyberpunk with supernatural and fantasy elements or turn-based like BG3; anything could work. The setting is even perfect for ESG rating; you can go as woke as you want and add any "modern sensibilities" you want. It won't matter, and no one will notice it as long as it's not caricatural. With 200 million dollars, a decent team, and, above all, good writers, it's a guaranteed success. But no, they want to deliver low-budget shovelware on Game Pass.

 

[Roguey]

Rotting like so many other IPs, it doesn't even make any sense. If I were Microsoft, I'd finance a big Shadowrun game. It could be a GTA-like cyberpunk with supernatural and fantasy elements or turn-based like BG3; anything could work. The setting is even perfect for ESG rating; you can go as woke as you want and add any "modern sensibilities" you want. It won't matter, and no one will notice it as long as it's not caricatural. With 200 million dollars, a decent team, and, above all, good writers, it's a guaranteed success. But no, they want to deliver low-budget shovelware on Game Pass.

They're forcing Forza people to work on a Fable game, best to see how that turns out before thinking they should force another studio to make a game they don't necessarily want to make.

 

[Sarathiour]

Seriously, who in their right mind gives a flying fuck about the existence of pronoun choices in a game like Battletech?

Sane people, it's out of place and only done to cater to mentally ill people.
"Who cares if there is a diaper option by default on the character creation, if you're not into scat just disactivate it bro". It's bad taste.

Even if you agree with that take and think like that:
It's a tiny thing compared to the game as a whole. It's like saying all fruit are shit because you don't like one variety of apple. It is the exact opposite of sane.
And more importantly, the game has so many, actually gameplay-relevant issues that something like that can at best be considered the rotten cherry on the turd cake.

It's more like letting the dog piss on the bag of apple before you sell it. Yeah, it's probably salvageable and doesn't matter too much for the quality of the product itself, but it certainly does not make me want to buy it, and should certainly not being normalized either.
Coincidentally, it might also be a sign for bigger than just a bit of dog piss, because issue rarely come alone.

 

[Axioms]

I know this is unpopular of an opinion, but I liked their Battletech.

I agree with this. The writing was woke trash, but the gameplay was fine.

I don't even think it was overly woke, but it sure was weak. Then again, writing in that setting always seems to be rather weak and needs some wonderful B-tier acting to make interesting.
But the main issue wasn't writing or gameplay (which was lacking, too, but with mods you could make it adequate).

It was the tech. The game performed incredibly sluggish with frankly no looks to justify that even remotely.
Add to that absurdly long loading times, no way to speed up the sloooooooooow gameplay, bugs of course and you got yourself a very shaky foundation for any game.
Which AFAIK all of their games have shown - they just don't seem to have the best coders to put it nicely, or they don't give them the time needed.
Blame Unity? Nah, other devs manage to do much better with Unity.

Why they decided to go with a setting for their new game that lost its appeal 20-30 years ago is a mystery to me.
Even with a less divisive look, this wouldn't have attracted massive amounts of people.
It works for horror games, but that's really about it.
And then the asking price, of course - if you don't have anything to really lure people in, you can't put such a price on your product.

I mean Battletech had fairly standard Unity performance, quite similar to Thea 2 for instance. Although the Thea 2 menus eat shit more often actually.

 

[Axioms]

New steamspy data:

Old userscore: 74%
Owners: 100,000 .. 200,000
Followers: 19,336
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 369

Peak Daily Players is 737 on release date a week ago, yet they are estimating 100,000 - 200,000 owners?

LL sold like 350k copies in the first week or so as far as I understand it.

 

[StrongBelwas]

It's ResetEra, so a very heavy grain of salt, but make of this what you will:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231011155851/https://www.resetera.com/threads/paradox-writes-down-entire-cost-of-the-lamplighters-league-320m-sek-citing-weak-commercial-success-“cautiously-positive”-subscription-players.773480/
The 'AngryMobofSteve' account.

80% or so of the studio was let go in July ( I was one of them!). There'll likely be some press about it eventually, but otherwise nothing's been reported/released yet, but you can find several ex-HBS people looking for work over LinkedIn the last couple months.

Thanks, honestly that'd be some pretty big shoes to fill. I'd been there since Shadowrun Returns, I was at HBS for like, a quarter of my life. Part of the reason I never looked elsewhere was I wasn't sure I'd find a place I enjoyed as much. But, we'll see how it goes. With the success of Baldur's Gate 3 I hope maybe we'll see people spinning up more CRPG studios with some kind of budget, as I'd love to go back to that space.

Pretty much a done thing. Again I'd prefer people wait for whatever statement ends up coming out, I was a day into vacation when this all went down so I missed the all hands and found out after the fact, mostly because I don't want to maybe color things too much or be inaccurate.

If there had been desire for more BT, it likely would have happened. There was the pipeline in place from BT, there were pitches. PDX's desire was for IP they owned/controlled. People have to keep in mind that HBS didn't OWN Shadowrun or Battletech. That stuff was licensed from Microsoft, so that's another person taking their cut after Steam, etc.

 

[Roguey]

PDX's desire was for IP they owned/controlled.

Why didn't you go all-in on the World of Darkness you

 

[Axioms]

We already had a tweet from the other guy who said HBS staff was laid off so this second guy is probably legit. And yeah Paradox clearly targeting in-house IP. Dumbasses forget that new IP are super risky especially when you have no reason to think your studio or company generally have any idea what contemporary gamers are looking for IP wise.

Could be worse, this game didn't bomb as hard as Forspoken.

 

[Mortmal]

Rotting like so many other IPs, it doesn't even make any sense. If I were Microsoft, I'd finance a big Shadowrun game. It could be a GTA-like cyberpunk with supernatural and fantasy elements or turn-based like BG3; anything could work. The setting is even perfect for ESG rating; you can go as woke as you want and add any "modern sensibilities" you want. It won't matter, and no one will notice it as long as it's not caricatural. With 200 million dollars, a decent team, and, above all, good writers, it's a guaranteed success. But no, they want to deliver low-budget shovelware on Game Pass.

They're forcing Forza people to work on a Fable game, best to see how that turns out before thinking they should force another studio to make a game they don't necessarily want to make.

Forcing people who don't like that genre into working on a game that obviously no one asked for, given the lukewarm reception to the trailer. Another ongoing success story for sure. I remember Harebrained Schemes was not interested in doing Shadowrun anymore. Well, that's the point of working for most people; you are forced to do something you don't like for money. If they had released another similar Shadowrun sequel, I would have bought it. But sadly, they don't come here to discuss and don't ask us what we want to buy. It's just karma and a balance of things.

 

[lycanwarrior]

Paradox says The Lamplighters League sales were 'a big disappointment,' confirms recent layoffs at developer Harebrained Schemes:​

https://www.pcgamer.com/paradox-say...ent-layoffs-at-developer-harebrained-schemes/

The layoffs at Harebrained Schemes actually occurred a few months before The Lamplighters League was released.

 

[Zombra]

Did anyone here actually try this? Try the demo? PCG seems to be saying "good but repetitive so bad" which is a confusing message.

 

[PanteraNera]

Did anyone here actually try this? Try the demo? PCG seems to be saying "good but repetitive so bad" which is a confusing message.

Usually I at least try out every (tactical) shit.
But nah, not this one, the setting is just not for me, which I could overlook if anything else actually interested me.