Maybe we should have two ratings? Saying its a flop is vague, yes it mostly means it didn't sell, but why? In this case, I didn't even hear about it there are so many millions of games. But is it a good game regardless? Is it fun to play? These types of headlines don't really answer that and just push negative press.
It reviewed pretty poorly, but that's no guarantee.
I have to say, even with a good game it would suck to release something kinda niche this year, and the Warhammer brand means so little these days, games under that release through a firehose at this point, it's hard to know what's coming up, let alone if it's any good.
Well with Warhammer games, its 90% RTS, 8% one-offs like Boltgun, and the other 2% is the Tide games. They don't like to take risks or move to far away from the table top and mostly leave that up to brave studios who get a license. The market is prime for a WH40K soulslike right now.
There's a bunch more than that, and many just... come and go and often people don't even notice.
I mean, come on, how many people on this thread wouldn't even have known this game existed if Frontier wasn't slightly higher profile than most devs working on these?
The 40K soulslike idea is... probably gonna happen eventually, I dunno. I'm not a big soulslike guy. Hey, maybe Space Marine 2 is good. Looks nice, anyway.
For what it's worth, what I really would like to see is a 40K game that is not about the space theocratic fascists for once. I should go back to play the Dawn of War sequel that nobody remembers happened, either, since that was the last time you got Eldar as a faction. And even then only because it was a throwback game to the first Dawn of War.
An open-world game where you are the target of the Imperium's xenophobia and hatred would probably be pretty hot right now considering world events. But GW would be way too scared to make the Imperium the actual antagonists of a piece of media because space marines are their cash cow.
If that entire franchise's fanbase needs a sanity check for a reason, it's for that.
I know they look cool and they're easy to paint because of all the flat surfaces, but come on.
It's fine for your dark fantasy setting to have no good guys. It's EXTREMELY not fine for your dark fantasy theocratic racists to become the good guys and for you to do nothing to stop it from happening.
Honestly, the Orks may be the most intellectually honest faction in that whole mess. They mostly just like to fight and think everybody else is a dick. And they're right.
But nah, when teenage me came to the idea of haughty, elitist space elves in hoverbikes there was never any other option. But they're not the good guys. Nobody should be the good guys in that. ESPECIALLY not the human factions.
That might be where most people have a problem. This may be completely anecdotal, but it seems a majority of people want things to be black and white. They want their villians easily identifiable, they want their heroes as pure as the first oxygen molecule. That may be why a lot of fans seem to choose the Space Marines as the "good guys" in a galaxy where there are none. I'll never understand it cause its boring, put that yin in my yang and vice versa. I want stained heroes and misguided antagonists. I want a pain in my heart as it tries to decide who to root for.
Those are even after my time. From the outside it looked like them starting to step away from "fantasy races in space", but it didn't intrigue me enough to pay attention and they never really became the core of the videogames because space marines everywhere, so...