I enjoyed it*, but like you said, I enjoyed it very much as a ‘one and done’; played and beat it over a week or two, and then pretty much stopped thinking about it entirely the instant I started something else. The sort of thing I might replay in a couple years if I’m bored, but not something I’d want to keep coming…

Yeah, I kind of feel like ‘Live Service’ or ‘Games as Service’ kind of gets a bad reputation, primarily based on some high-profile failures - and, to be fair, those failures have been pretty egregious. I don’t think those failures are inherently baked into the model, though; I remember saying when Star Wars: Squadrons…

Fair enough; as you say, I’m not in the target demographic for that type of game, so I wouldn’t have thought of those at all. Out of curiosity: how closely would you say those hew to the more traditional ‘live service’ approach? I tend to think of ‘live service’ as primarily being focused around a drip-feed of new…

Yeah, but Outriders also doesn’t actually do any ‘Live Service’ stuff either, right? I mean, outside of ‘always-on servers’ (which are a terrible idea, admittedly, but not a terrible idea exclusive to Live Service games), it hasn’t done any sort of regular content drops or season passes or any of the other things we…

I’m pretty sure ‘multiplayer Assassin’s Creed Spec Ops game’ is exactly what that new  ‘Hood: Legends and Outlaws’ game is trying to be, complete with Live Service elements. (No idea if it’s any fun or not, or if that formula could be successfully applied back to Assassin’s Creed - I haven’t actually played it - I…

I seem to recall ‘People Can Fly’ doing a big song and dance about how it wasn’t Live Service, though. And as far as I know, they haven’t announced any plans to monetize the game by adding content in that kind of ‘drip-feed’ Live Service manner. (I think you’re absolutely right that some of the game’s issues were very…

I think you’re absolutely right; I’m just not sure that model would work for Assassin’s Creed*. I feel like Destiny’s designed from the ground-up for co-op, which you can then approach single-player if you choose (which, admittedly, leads to some of the other issues you pointed out in the endgame content), whereas an…

It’s definitely one of those that kind of blurs the line, for sure. (I’m also not sure whether to put it in the ‘success’ camp or not: I bounced off of it pretty hard at launch, and I’d say that was fairly typical of its general reception, but as I understand it, it’s been significantly improved since then.)

You’re absolutely right; well noted! (And as I understand it, that model’s been pretty well received by the fans, though I’m not sure how successful it’s been financially.)

I tend to have the same question. Like, if we assume ‘Live Service’ inherently means ‘multiplayer’, then the only concrete ‘difference’ I can see between the two models is the rate at which content arrives: I feel like your traditional MMOs tend to do Big Deal expansions on something like an annual, or even bi-annual…

I get where you’re coming from - and I’m more or less in the same camp, honestly, in that Vice City’s probably my favorite of the series - but is GTA Online really the culprit, there? It felt to me like that tonal shift really started in GTA IV (and was probably helped along by all the plaudits Rockstar got for the…

Yeah, Destiny definitely can be enjoyed single-player (for the most part - there are definitely endgame avenues that you wouldn’t want to attempt single-player, but I don’t attempt most of those either, and I primarily play it co-op). But it’s not necessarily designed for that approach. I feel like an Assassin’s Creed…

Yeah, that’s why I added the ‘financially’ addendum, for sure. I’ve always found GTA V to be a kind of fascinating case, in that I feel like if they had managed to keep their single-player plans on track, it’d be almost the best example of ‘how to do Live Service right’... but, well, they didn’t. So the best example…

That’s an interesting question: has anyone done the ‘GAAS’ model with something that’s primarily single-player? (Successfully or otherwise?) We tend to associate it with primarily multiplayer games, but that doesn’t mean the model inherently has to be that.

I don’t have any real interest in Assassin’s Creed one way or the other; I just want to applaud Ash for using ‘Anthem’ and ‘GTA V’ as the two benchmarks of Live Service, which feels like a nicely succinct way to sum up ‘how Live Service can fail’ versus ‘how Live Service can succeed’ (financially, at least). The…

I do really wish they (Microsoft) would just go ahead and announce everything at the beginning of the month and be done with it. Like, I get wanting to save something ‘big’ every once in a while, so you can do that ‘and it’s on GamePass right now’ thing... but mostly, not announcing stuff more than a couple weeks…

I think I played about the first hour or so, said ‘well, this is... definitely a homage to 16bit RPGs, all right; I’ll get back to it when I have more time’, and then just never did. It’s not that it was bad, at all; I’d just encountered a fair bit of excitement over it, and the genesis of that excitement wasn’t…

Or possibly ‘more Elden Ring’. (Though it’s not out of the realm of possibility we could get more of that, I suppose.)

Such an awkward mechanic. (At least the DLC made it more or less irrelevant, since you could raise your Galactic Readiness to ‘full’ without touching the multiplayer.)

Honestly, not super-surprised by this; it feels like both of those games are in (different) stages of ‘they’ve been announced; we don’t really have anything to add, yet’. I am a little surprised (and heartened!) by the support Sony’s showing Deathloop, though; after the Microsoft purchase, I was a little concerned…