Are people hating on the game because it is Amazon or are there legit previews showing the game is thrash?
Interested since it seems to be free.
I was among the invited press who checked it out ahead of launch, my article went live earlier today:
Can Amazon’s uneven gaming track record put the “service” in “game as a service?”
arstechnica.com
If Amazon Game Studios had a deeper track record of launching and supporting Games as a Service, I would've had an easier time accepting their pitch and pledge for long-term support. This definitely skews more towards the MOBA side than the impactful shooter side, meaning, you're not going to have a great time jumping in blind and not understand the map and every possible strategy. It didn't lend itself well to a two-hour hands-on session, at least in terms of anyone making solid proclamations about what kind of experience to expect when it's a live product. (Might be why I've barely seen any sites talk about it today, in spite of Amazon hosting a *ton* of preview testing sessions. My Discord lit up all month with notifications of other tests, beyond the one I'd been invited to, since their PR group failed to boot me from that channel after my session concluded, lol.)
I will say, they're launching with three distinct modes, which seems a bit foolish to do in the game's early launch period—since each character type has VERY different impact between "eight squads of two face off against each other in battle royale" and "two squads of four face off in a MOBA-style control battle." And we all ran into some bugs in the early May test, remains to be seen how polished those will be once this goes live tomorrow.
But I'm definitely gonna log in and test it out. There's some talented folks working on this, including some ArenaNET veterans. Is that enough to make this a bonafide quality game worth recommending, though? We'll see.
