Recently tried a few games with friends which all fit into the Live Service area. RB6:Siege, Disney Speedstorm and CoD:MW3 Zombies. Just looking for something new to play together online.
RB6:Siege - basically a non-starter as they removed the mode we wanted to play recently (Terrorist Hunt). However general impressions were a fantastical shitshow of a UI with microtransations and season passes taking precedence over any sort of clarity or useability.
Disney Speedstorm - a little better but still fairly in your face. The issue here is that playing friends and private games are locked behind ranking up. Not just a little bit locked. As far as I could see I would need to win 50 online races before I could set up a game with just my friends. “Friends” as a feature unlocked earlier than that but it wasn’t clear if that would allow us to play online together with randoms or just see each others stats.
CoD:MW3 Zombies - I already knew the CoD interface was abysmal, but the issue here was also complete lack of any cohesive help or introduction. I have DMZ experience and there is a lot of commonality there, so I had something of a an understanding of how the systems work, but the others I played with were completely bamboozled. Some games do learning through discovery really well, this was an attempt at learning by confusion and assumption. At least we actually managed a game together, but even that didn’t work properly. The three mission objectives didn’t register properly for everyone - even though we all did the same things.
We will not be revisiting any of the games. They just seem like fantastic examples of what is wrong with a lot of modern game design. The core gameplay can be as well executed as you like, but if you surround it with so much frippery and barriers to play then people will be turned off.