Man, Paradox really just burned every ounce of goodwill they had in mere months, huh? Skylines 2 being a disaster, and now cancelling this. Just unreal.
The game is a little too fast paced to be played on controller (for me, at least), but I'm glad they made the effort anyway. For folks who break out the mouse and keyboard with their Deck, it'll be a welcome help.
And guess what? They still had multiple versions! Ask any Link to the Past speedrunner. 1.0 is broken as hell!
Compatibility with Gollum? HELL YEAH LET'S GO SMEAGOL BOIS
I swear this company used to have its shit together.
I bought Forza Horizon 5 on sale, and then immediately fell into buying Sea of Stars. So splitting time between the two.
Edit: Oh! And Bomb Rush Cyberfunk! Forgot about that.
They actually remastered it for free in 2022. Like, if it's in your Steam Library, you can redownload it.
I'll give OWL this: they took big swings. Some of them were big hits: I think that first season was really something special. Holding every event live at the Blizzard Arena allowed an organic culture to grow around the league. They had a cast of broadcasters that knew the game, and a broadcast package that looked modern, yet was easy to follow. I'm still split on the regional team names, since the format was always going to be more or less a "travelling roadshow", but there were people who definitely bought in because "well it's Philadelphia".
And yeah, some of this can be laid at the feet of the pandemic, but there were also a lot of mistakes made as well: putting roster roles in place on the pro level makes some sense, but forcing it into the game proper via Role Queue killed off a lot of the casual player base, which meant killing off your pool of viewers. The move to YouTube Live may have meant guaranteed revenue, but the viewership numbers never came close to what they were on Twitch. And, yeah, the absolute fumbling of Overwatch 2 hasn't helped either.
Glad to hear Minuum is still up and running. I couldn't get super comfortable with it, but I love the concept... and I still remember that first, awful announcement video with the poorly mixed vocals that made it sound like the founder's name was Will Wompwomp.
Ohh, that one was a masterpiece. It even included the original script, so you could read some of the stuff that got cut/rewritten.
C'MON STEAK, COME GET YA SOME
Maaan, I remember the original Indigogo video that had the jacked up sound levels, so it sounded like the founder said his name was "Will Womwom".
But the tech was very cool, and I'm a little sad that it's been abandoned.