WWMD is not good, but I'm not surprised

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Lex
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WWMD is not good, but I'm not surprised

Post by Lex » Wed Aug 24, 2016 2:54 pm

This is a cross-post from the TUS thread about Worms WMD, where it was revealed that WWMD is another overhyped disappointment compared to WA like all the previous overhyped but disappointing recent 2D Worms games: http://www.tus-wa.com/forums/other-worm ... wmd-27422/

Disclaimer: I am cynical and jaded at this point, so if there is negativity, remember that it's just me. None of this is meant to criticize any particular individual. It is just my observation and suspicion, and meant to be taken as pure guessing, because the fact is that I may not know enough about how this stuff happened, and there may have just not been friendlier alternatives to what happened.

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I am not surprised by any of this. Team17 will continue exploiting new players and other franchise developers as long as whoever is in charge decides it is in its best interest. Team17 abuses confidence tricks (cons) to get ahead, and these tricks work on most people.

List of obvious Team17 confidence tricks in hindsight (and sometimes foresight):

"Worms World Party" - Marketed as an entirely rewritten new game that had online multiplayer, which Worms 2 and Worms Armageddon both already had, Worms World Party brought a new Wormsong, new missions, a few regressions (especially rope input and map shifting on import), a nifty mission editor, and an awkward pre-game options system with some interesting new features that couldn't be saved into scheme files ("WormPot"; couldn't even randomize it as its name would suggest), but was otherwise the exact same game as Worms Armageddon. Even the weapons were exactly the same. This is the tamest confidence trick here though. WWP added some nice things and I would have bought it even if it was released as an expansion pack for WA. That would have been preferable, even. I guess they made it a new game to be able to sell it for more. I would have bought it for the same price, as an avid WA fan. The best marketing strategy would have been to re-sell WA with the WWP stuff for the price that WWP was sold. New World Computing did that with Heroes Of Might And Magic 3 with multiple expansion packs and that was wildly successful. Team17 just didn't understand the correct way to do it, and instead relied on confidence tricks.

"Worms Armageddon" - Considering the above, WA was also a con. It could have been an expansion for W2 and marketed as such beautifully. We could have had "Worms 2 Gold" in the end, with W2, WA, and WWP all in 1 beautiful game like so many successful game companies did in the 90s before there was DLC. All 3 would easily fit on 1 CD and players would have bought them just as much, if not more, than the three separate games. This marketing strategy seems to have set the precedent for future Worms releases.

"Worms Reloaded" and "Worms Revolutions" - Due to the popularity of The Matrix series, Team17 copied the exact subtitles in an attempt to make its series of games seem more legitimate. These games were also both marketed to be the "best" 2D worms game, despite obviously lacking much of what made Worms-2-engine games great.

game publishing - It seems to me that after Team17 realized how easy it is to push a game to various digital download stores like Steam, Team17 started making deals with naive development companies to publish their games and get a cut of the money and brand awareness. This brand awareness is being exploited in Worms WMD.

"Alien Breed: Impact", "Alien Breed 2: Assault", "Alien Breed 3: Descent" - All 3 games clearly use the exact same engine and the even the starting maps have the exact same setting. These were released as separate games to garner extra money, quite plainly. It is entirely unnecessary, as they should easily have been one game. This is not like Pokémon Red and Blue, with each game being the same with differences for multiplayer purposes. This is just three sets of maps for the same single-player game being sold as three games.

"Worms" - In an attempt to bury users in confusion and misdirection, Team17 named a new game just "Worms", long after "Worms" was released in 1995. This seems like a veiled setup for the following con.

"Worms 2: Armageddon" - Due to the popularity of both Worms 2 and Worms Armageddon, Team17 decided it should name its next game after those games to redirect searches for those games to that one, as they could set a new higher price and earn more money. Specifically using "Armageddon" as its subtitle was the ultimate goal, to redirect people who have heard of "Worms Armageddon" to their new, higher-priced, worse game which cost less for them to make due to the lack of features. This was a setup to lower general expectations for all future Worms games, which has clearly worked.

"Worms World Party Remastered" - This is the cheapest thing Team17 could have done to make money at the time, so it did it. I am not sure whether anyone who worked on any 2nd-generation Worms game engine was consulted. Its low quality and utter disregard for the WA >3.0 improvements seem to be yet more misdirection from the entire 2nd generation of Worms games. New players get it expecting to see the great second generation of Worms games they may have heard of, only to be disappointed.

Come to think of it, these last three seem to be direct attempts to devalue the contributions made by Deadcode and CyberShadow, as if Team17 regrets working with them, even though they are very good, friendly, and socially adept programmers who probably would have been enthusiastic to be brought in to a lucrative mutually-beneficial WA project. Team17 got the Steam release it wanted, then made a new mediocre game instead of working on Worms Armageddon to make it better. There are many ideas that require artists and designers working with Deadcode and CyberShadow that could have made WA sell extremely well to new players. It's a real shame Team17 has neglected this possibility for so long.

There are definitely more cons that I think Team17 pulled, but I'll stop here for now. I'm sad that the company that made such a great game engine in the 90s can't make as good an engine now. Deadcode and CyberShadow may have fixed many glitches and added many features, but there are still so many details that were great directly from the release of Worms 2. The quality showed then, and the quality of these new games has always been lacking. To me, a game should have a great game engine first, then cool graphics, sound, and features later.

Anyway, this is all just my opinion. I won't be buying Worms WMD, but I still have hope that there can be an even greater future for 2D Worms than Worms Armageddon 3.x is currently presenting, and Team17 can be involved if it's interested.
I am good at spleling.

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Thurbo
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Re: WWMD is not good, but I'm not surprised

Post by Thurbo » Mon Aug 29, 2016 3:22 pm

Not sure what this WWMD is you ended up not speaking of at all, but thanks for that link. Good to know that the little elitist bubble of Worma Rope players is still a mix of aggressive children with petty insults, unrealistic expectations and no sense of argument skills.

But hey, I'm not surprised.

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