The Surprising Downfall of Omega Strikers
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- čas přidán 8. 12. 2023
- Hey Strikers...Omega Strikers Nation here. In this video, we dive into the rise and fall of Omega Strikers, a highly anticipated game that sadly failed to meet expectations. From its promising trailers to its eventual demise, we delve into the factors that contributed to its downfall. Whether you're a gamer or just curious about the intricacies of game development, this analysis sheds light on valuable lessons to be learned from the fate of Omega Strikers.
- Hry
Omega Strikers was easily one of my favorite games of the year and it sucks to see how it ended. I'll be waiting for Odyssey's next venture, though!
One thing i found wrong with Omega strikers is that they fell into the same pit that Overwatch did. Both these games require absurd amounts of teamwork for a group of randoms, and this starts ruining the game if the team doesn't have synergy. Games such as league of legends, apex, and other games make it possible to carry solo, but games such as omega strikers and overwatch have limits on what a single person can do.
I agree. As a guy who only played randoms due to the lack of friends. I sucked at keeping up with other players. I can't compete against good players, I can't think fast, or deal with pressure. I'm never gonna push myself to get very good. I'm just a casual player, I don't play competitive modes in any game, and I don't think too much. I also never like the idea of making a team lose because of my lack of skill. I don't have the ability to think fast and I only rely on instinct with minimal thinking. I don't think I was ever going to enjoy the game as some others, but I loved the concept of it.
Oops I wrote a novel...
You're right on the money. The game has everything you'd ever want in a competitive game if you have a team around your level, especially if it's a team you compete in tournaments with. I look at the 4 conclusion points here and vehemently disagree with them, but mostly coming from a constructed 3s standpoint, not soloq.
-Tried to be both complex is simple:
OS is obviously easier to understand the gameplan, if you know the controls and have a brain you're good to go. We don't have a learning curve up front like LoL or Dota. The complexity comes to the players that understand and can execute long chains of sequences. It’s easy to execute your kit for the most part, but thinking ahead quickly turns into the wildest game of 3v3 chess at high level (which requires an equal skill team or premade 3s, that probably practices together). Even pros today say we barely scratched the surface of what’s possible for top gameplay in OS. Feels like casual players never get to appreciate that complexity and dismiss the game as no depth. OS dev team is crazy talented but I have no idea how they could have fixed that problem to make the complexity more approachable. Probably lots of practice modes, stuff rocket league has would have benefited OS but again, they’d have to spend a lot of dev time to make that happen. I can understand why they put the dev time elsewhere, unfortunate it didn’t work out.
-Lack of diverse content:
We got characters and maps at a rate comparable to most games, it wasn’t the amount. There definitely could have been more creative and interesting updates for casual players, but again they were a smaller studio, adding an autobattler mode or something wild or even switching out the entire awakening selection with new ones would be a pretty big effort, despite it likely keeping those player count spikes coming back. Ody has expressed that those spikes were never big enough though. (and they kind of did this with the next point…)
-First to 5 to Bo3 change
They’re change from the open beta quick first to 5* format to the bo3 awakening draft w/ goal barriers was their big attempt to see if switching up the game would save it, as with the old format the retention wasn’t good. After releasing in April they got a sizable spike but not big enough to pay the studio with profits from it. No matter how you look at this point the logic isn’t sound. They kept first to 5 and it exists as quick play. The time where this was the competitive mode it didn’t work, I wouldn’t suggest bringing it back as a point to help the game.
-Up to months between major patches “Lack of meaningful balance changes”
Video just says two different points here, uh, the first one i addressed already in the diverse content section. Balance changes did their job idk what this was supposed to mean.
I wrote so much more but this is way too big of a comment. But I’ll just highlight again that the game did capture a simple premise, and make it beautifully complex. It just took me 1000+ hours, studying and vod reviewing, so I can play 12+ characters at the highest level of NA play. Not everyone has time for that. It’s late to start, but I want so badly to show everyone how pros look at this game. I love OS but understand that the satisfaction couldn’t have been there for a lot of players, esp soloq when the game is very team dependent for satisfaction.
Thank you so much because you alone explain y i dislike overwatch lol and y i have mix feeling on omega striker's game was fun to me but my god solo quing was hel
There's no carrying in league of legends except maybe in ARAM but if one teammate is sabotaging the match it's GG
@@ihap5180 if you never played comp in OS, you must’ve had an awful time because the matchmaking simply wasn’t there (and still may not be). Even if you didn’t care to push for high ranks, comp at least put you with people who were around your skill level and was really the best mode for anyone from players emerging from the bot matches to pros.
This may possibly be a hot take, and I’ll take the fire for it if it is, but the design of competitive definitely hurt this game more than anything else imo. Drawn out matches, goalies who don't goalie, praying you get matched up with decent players in general, etc. It was of course not the only issue but I believe it was a major one. I love the game a bunch and I hope they learn from some of these mistakes in the future assuming they make a project of a similar variety (They might start making full-on visual novels who knows lol)
i agree so much... people need to be delusional so they keep coming back
look at what league is doing, you're doing PvE 90% of the time
Imo, the new players got put off real quickly because there isn’t any rank based matchmaking. Losing 3-0 once hurts, but losing 3-0 CONSTANTLY hurts too much. Those people are just gonna drop the game and move on.
They definitely tried to cram competitiveness into a few too many places. The fact that the casual modes allowed a pro team practicing for their next major to run into a Dubu’s first game on goalie made unranked a little frustrating at times as well.
I honestly feel like it was a huge amount of factor: many casual players struggled to adapt, many competitive players really hated the meta and the no queue after challenger update, the lack of certain qol features...
I'm glad they didn't shut it down completely, but i respect the decision they made, it must've been hard for them too.
By the way i really enjoyed your OS Nation content, really helped me understand the game better when i was just starting out
Always happy to hear from someone who enjoyed our content!
I love the game and will definitely keep playing even after updates stop. It’s unfortunate what happened to it but I’m hoping odyssey’s next game will go much farther, especially happy that they’re still keeping the omega striker characters in the next one.
They've done a great job at building a world. If they can just use that in their next game, they might be able to make something amazing.
@@Zornquadof I remember right, in the announcement video for the end of the content updates, they mentioned that they did want to use their characters in their future games. Which I am _really excited_ for, especially if they go for a more story-focused game - the amount of story they wrote for these characters deserves so much more than a couple of short visual novels and the paragraphs in the back of the character descriptions. Hell, they partnered with Studio Trigger before, I’d be so down for an animated series that threw out an episode or two for each character’s backstory.
I haven’t played this game but I wish the next game will be omega strikers characters in a dragon ball fighterz like game as I liked how the characters looked and would love these soundtracks in a fighting game
the "too complex and too simple" part is also so real. i truly had to FIGHT some of my friends to give this game a try because they thought it looked too much like a MOBA and thus would be too sweaty and competitive. match that with the awful new player experience with bad tutorials, no chat, and unbalanced matchmaking, and it really doesn't surprise me to know that the game had a problem holding players.
It’s genuinely heartbreaking seeing OS end like this. I do agree with a lot of the points made in this video, especially as someone who’s had their experience with MOBAs. This game definitely has a lot of passion and work put into it, and I especially love the soundtrack and characters. Such a shame.
I think the real problem is the onboarding process
You claim there is a lack of depth, but the truth is the majority of people literally cant comprehend the game
They dont know why they lost
They dont know how the enemy won a strike war
They dont know positioning
They dont know how the awakenings work.
I held weekly tourneys on my discord and the average person is really, really bad at the game.
I don't think this is even remotely why the game failed. The real problem was not getting new players over the learning the curve. The tutorial told you the controls, but not how to effectively play. League was very similar, but league had one key feature OS didn't. Chat. While it sucks to have someone rage at you when you are new to the game, it does do a good job of telling you "hey, people expect my character or my role to be doing this and I'm not".
This leads people to hate their teammates that autolose them the game and quit or on the other side you just keep losing and have no idea why and also quit. Taking weeks instead of minutes to add a surrender option exacerbated this issue as well.
The out of match UI is also very confusing. Like how did they think putting your icon and banner in the settings menu under a different tab was reasonable? They had the simplistic layout of a mobile game but without short intuitive menus to back it up.
Playing the game without friends leaves you with no way to know how to play effectively with very poor match quality and no social aspect. You know why most people play the same online game? It's because their friends play it. Now sometimes thats friends they made elsewhere they brought into the game, but many times it's friends they made IN the game. You can't really do that in OS. So a new player comes out frustrated and confused with no friends to keep them playing the game.
While you did see an uptick in players around patches, it's mostly going to be players wondering if the key issues have been fixed and just using the new content as an excuse to find out. They play for a few matches and have terribly unbalanced silent games and quit again hoping it'll be different in the future.
In their fervor to avoid toxicity, they instead embraced silence and few people want to play a silent game.
The game itself in a balanced lobby still is incredibly fun. The core mechanics do have enough strategy and skill expression to tryhard and focus on improving. It's genuinely not all mechanics. Keeping track of cooldowns and positioning and clearing/passing habits is a huge part of the game as well and I had plenty of matches where our initial strategy wasn't working and I had to do on the fly problem solving to figure out how to win (like marking a particular player or focusing on KOing the enemy goalie). The people that quit didn't quit because it was too simple. If anything, it was too complex and they failed to understand what to actually do to win.
I think a few of those things were touched on (or at least tangentially, like being slow to add a surrender button is related to them not patching for long periods). I think the point about people playing games their friends play is something slept on in so many games, but yeah, how do you talk in a game like this? There's basically no downtime or chance to meet new people like you could in something like League or WoW.
Great comment👍
it also helps that omega strikers is way much frustrating than other competitive games when you get useless teammates, like it somehow feels much worse so you end up quitting faster
I feel like the biggest place where this game fell flat was catering to its audiences. The game was pretty simple and had basic mechanics, so it was great to boot up with some friends or some casual quick matches. This simplicity also meant the extremely competitive players could be constantly innovating without the need to turn the meta on its head every other week. But the in between area - the point where you’re smoking the casual players, but not committed enough to join a team - that’s where Omega Strikers fell short. The larger content updates weren’t frequent enough to hold the attention of players who were only mildly interested in getting better at the game, but the micropatches were too small to make a difference or even notice unless they went out of their way to read the patch notes. Being part of this group myself, I couldn’t bring myself to play more than a few weeks after each new striker drop, and I wasn’t immediately booting up the game when I found out about a new update outside of the season changes.
I love what Omega Strikers did, and wish it was more popular, but I hope that Odyssey Interactive doesn’t go for the live service formula in their next title. Don’t get me wrong, I’d say they handled it pretty damn well (if something as big as Studio Trigger is willing to do an animation for your company’s first game, you definitely did something right) but I just don’t think the live-service formula can work in smaller studios in the level they were going for. The slow pace for new content was definitely a pretty big factor of the game’s decline, especially when the studio is too small to even guarantee new content more than a week or two in advance.
Side note: I do like the way OS did monetization and microtransactions, but I don’t think it was very health for the company. I’ve been strictly free-to-play in games with microtransactions my whole life, and was elated when I found out all I would be missing out on was cosmetics (though there were a few designs that made me _really_ wish they weren’t limited to the premium currency). I also enjoyed having to work to unlock the characters, getting a chance to get familiar with the cast and know if the most recent pickup fit my playstyle before picking up the next. But when you consider how many people would by pay for this premium currency when its usefulness is limited to an until of cosmetics per character, it’s pretty easy to see the issue. Especially with how few and far between these payed-only unlockables were, there was nothing to encourage players to continue spending money. A fixed amount of total income per player combined with a player base that usually only grew when old players returned… it’s kinda hard to make those numbers work. (Though I am SO glad they didn’t take the other route. So much better to let a game slowly die off and be fondly remembered than to try to get a few extra months of income by turning it into a microtransaction machine and have it ruined by paywalls and pay-to-win whales dominating the normal players.)
As a resident of the in-between area, I totally agree. I love the game, but with no friends to play with and no desire to devote my life to it, I pretty much lost interest, stopped playing regularly, and then quit logging in for dailies once I’d completed the launch pass and fulfilled my goal of getting the affinity pose for my main since I didn’t have any other incentives to keep playing and I felt I’d pretty much seen everything the game had to offer. Also, it’s unfortunate, but I feel the simplicity I really liked when I first got into the game is what kept me from coming back to it after since unlike Overwatch, for example, the maps and new characters never (IMO) changed the game so drastically that it felt like something new and exciting.
Note: I did have PS+ at the time, so maybe if I still had to grind for characters I would’ve stuck around and played for longer.
I had the unfortunate fate of getting into the game late October, one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. However I think what might have really done Omega strikers in was as you said map variety, I don’t quite understand why they would rotate out awakenings or maps, instead of just making new ones and seeing what happened. The game definitely isn’t very chaotic when it comes to the numbers game side of it, and the maps are also pretty basic, the exceptions being Clarion Corp. and Taiko, and I think Demon Dais. They have some interesting gimmicks that can alter a set if used properly. So yeah, I agree. And it’s sad to see a great game dying out.
To be fair the newer maps were pretty gimmicky, Gates of Obscura and Inky's Splash Zone as well. Although a lot of people dislike GoO and I find ISZ a bit boring, but they both can have a lot of fun plays, and GoO is hilarious if you master it
Omega Strikers is a great game and I wish they would continue development on it. Yes, I can absolutely blame Odyssey for this. It's obvious they want to be "The next big thing" rather than a studio that makes cool games, albeit niche. They wanted this goal so bad they were afraid of making big changes to the formula and played/updates too conservatively. Odyssey and their misguided aspirations are what killed Omega Strikers.
What killed it is the solo queue experience. You got teammates doing nothing, you got teammates shooting in on your own goal. If you aren’t playing comp you’re rolling the dice whether your team is brain dead or not, or the rolling the dice that the other team is a three man stacked with synergy characters.
Because that’s what kills the fun. A team of players that don’t know what they’re doing, or a comp team playing anything but comp and just rolling over solo queue teams since we aren’t even on comms to communicate a plan. It’s demoralizing especially when you face the same damn 3 man comp team on normal 3 times in a damn row.
Damn, i just knew this game like a weeks ago. But the playerbase is depleted nearly gone. I can't play quickplay or normal, nobody plays it in asia region.. damnit, i am too late seeing good design waifu playing tablehockey 😢
There was just also a lack of content overall aside from the basic form of content which is skins there isn’t much that appeals for most people as the game was very centred around emojis
such a good game, it's a shame the devs killed their own game then went surprise pikachu.
Just give us Omega Strikers 2 🥺
Honestly not a bad idea. FFXIV had a notoriously horrendous launch, but Square took it down, addressed the complaints, and now it's one of the most played and positively received MMO's ever. Yeah Odyssey isn't Square but they could do something similar. The big hurdle to overcome would be out reach and getting people to actually play the game...
I agree with some points, but i honestly feel like the length of games and 3/5 win condition post-beta was an improvement.
In my opinion, the downfall comes from:
1) Lack of marketing/visibility
2) Lack of a 'new player journey': new players are just thrown in with minimal tutorials and goals to strive for. If the matchmaking sucks (aka stomped in casual matches), the likelihood of dropping the game then and there is high.
3) lack of content: when players are burnt out from just playing the game, there needs to be a way to still keep them engaged. Not necessarily new game modes either. For example, League has mastery pages and profile shenanigans. It's not much, but it keeps people in the game.
4) The 3-player nature of it makes it so that having one bad player can bring the team down, but one good player may not necessarily be able to carry. It's actually elegant as a theory, teamwork is important and all--- but in reality this puts players off when they feel their hard work is diminished just by one underperforming player.
This, also they had set a goal of 20k daily players, that's a bit too much I think... If they had just gone a bit more conservative with expectations they could still have a running product while working on their next game instead of... this.
I really enjoyed the game in Beta, still played it on launch, but i didnt like that games were going up to 30 minutes, i really enjoyed the quick 5 minutes games and after every game i had that "just one more" feeling coming up so I've been playing for hours.
But on beta after 1 single game i was already stressed the f out and couldn't play more then 2-3 games in one session.
A lot of my friends tried out the game in beta aswell but most of them didnt wanna sweat 30 minutes straight.
Even if it was just a side chick game it still was my go to option if i was waiting for friends to come online to play stuff like rocket league or whenever i didnt know what to do i could just hopp into 1-2 games and perhaps even stick longer.
So yeah changing that was the biggest down for me personally.
I hope the same doesn't happen to Buckyball on launch since its basically omega strikers in 3D but we will see
As someone who couldn't stop playing beta due to how addictive it was, I just couldn't get into full launch release. I can't really put my finger onto why really, but there was just something about the release version that was different enough to make me want to play less.
One of the reasons are the awakenings. I don't want to compete just for the playstyle I want, I want to play the playstyle I want.
I couldn't have said it better myself about awakenings.
So if you performed the best, you get rewarded and punished if you performed the worst. So essentially, you HAVE to perform the best to keep getting the awakenings you want.
I feel like one of the main problems of the game other than the identity was the kind of bad new player experience, OS is prob my most played game this year and i was very sad when i got the news... hopefully i like the new Ody game. I also think that Ody wanting OS to be the new big game on the market was kind of a bad choise, now i don't know if they could manage to run the company on 1/1.5k players, but we had a good thing for sure
I always thought that tuning down the awakenings and allowing you to select 3 at the start of a match, while still having the mid game random ones, would allow you to build more depth into each character, and have control over how you wanted to play. Doing it after everyone selected a striker would let you counterpick characters with awakenings at the expense making your kit worse.
The main reason it failed is because they expected it to be massive immediately after release and when it didn't they immediately abandoned it which caused the majority of players to just dump it entirely, becoming an internet sensation overnight rarely if ever happens and them announcing that they're done with the game has actively harmed their companies reputation. Among Us took 2 years to become popular with streamers, it takes time for stuff to be added and for the core of the game to be polished to the point where it's a main-stay.
As much as I enjoyed the game and was addicted to it for like a month, I completely hated the battlepass system and bullshit phone game mechanics and also I hated that every match was best 3 out of 5 and then you played to 5 THREE TIMES which meant that a single match would be at minimum 25 minutes. It took forever which meant I wanted to play less.
My main problem with the game was the overcompetive nature of it all. It felt like it required an obscene skill level that commonly led to one side dominating the other (frequently the side I was on).
I agree, I tried playing for a few hours but there’s only so many one sided dominations someone can take before quitting the game
That's not true at all, when I played it it felt pretty easy to get into. You probably just got into the game at a point where there weren't many new player so you matched against experienced people. That sucks for any competitive game no matter what.
@@NihongoWakannai
...Your opinion isn't a statement, also my experiences came from when the game was relatively new and then about a month later
@@johnypeperwinkle6207see, THIS is one of the biggest problems
Honestly I feel like there weren’t enough advertisements and stuff to really put the game out there and have people aware of it’s existence. Like unless you watched a select group of twitch streamers or a friend told you about it, you’d likely never have even heard of the game. I feel like general youtube advertisements or something could’ve gone a long way but what do I know.
The thing is they did yt advertising (Idk how long they did it for but they had the discord vote on which ad versions to run), problem was I don't think youtube was giving it to people. I only got advertisements for the game if I watched a video on the game. I think the youtube ad algorithm is just messed up when it comes to video game ads because genshin impact has ads running on youtube too, never seen a single one unless I'm watching a genshin video. Should be any video game based video leads to video game ads more often but it doesnt
@@justsomeone1073 that’s odd because I’ve never played Genshin and I don’t watch Genshin but I get a shit ton of ads for it and honkai star rail… not sure how it works
Give us the next Omega Strikers more feature complete than the original, then the community will be more happy. I’ll be glad to see what Odyssey will do next.
Them removing the core speed gain from neutral strikes, changing the training system to awakenings, then forcing random awakenings for quick play.
The lack of a sustainable player base is due to the awakening system, for casual players going to normal matches losing a round then having to read a fucking wall of text with a fucking time limit on top of having people leave or just shit stomp you because they had previous beta knowledge is horrendous for player retention.
The game didn't need a major change/rework to the training system it just needed more options.
The game went from a quick solid match that really gets down to the wire CONSTANTLY to being a fucking dreg that you have to wait to be over, which makes more people want to just leave matches. On top of not having fun due to having to wait for awakenings to make your character a powerhouse or even having to wait to make your non meta character feasible in ranked/casual play, and not having a quick play with selectable awakenings(like how the game was initially.)
They took away player freedom, made the game slower, took fun elements out of the game, and did this all before simply adding what the game needed that would have shattered any random complaints about the meta, meta is going to be in every game, player retention for the casual player base does not reside within meta, its game fun factor.
The core flip and dodges were a great fucking addition, as well as the maps but all of that came alongside too much of a major change to the core of the games experience.
I remember trying to tell people this shit in the discord server when the full release dropped and I got flack for it, and that was before the games sharp decline.
also by sustainable player base I mean a player base that has enough people that players who know too much don't end up getting matched against people who just are starting.
You cristalized the game's problems. Devs overthought the gameplay and added shit that wasn't even necessary
Sometimes I wonder if it would have done better if the focus was less on competitive play and more on casual
I Think an issue a lot of people don't acknowledge is the lack of cinematics and/or comics to really expand on the charecters and lore in an easy to absorb away. If this game could have developed a Fandom, (and honestly a r34 following) based on the charecters, a lot of the games issues wouldn't have mattered.
Am sorry for Ody but ngl with friends we could see the downfall since month 2-3
You can make strong game being simple and complexes which is in my opinion very well made in this game (except how easy it is to KO, it is braindead and it isn't that hard for me despite i am not trained to kill as i prefere core controle gameplay, also stopped to count how many players i KOed while i just wanted to strike the core and opponent ended, full stagger or almost, if the trajectory of my ability, and get somehiw KOed without being that close to edge, especially goalies, my god, poor goalies, it is so much the worse role to get in this game), OS simple side was not an issue imo, and if you want Bo5, it is there in quick mode
But the game had and still has a ton of lacking important features we informed Ody about and it seemed like they did not cared, at least te silence made it look like this. Not even a "we heard that a majority wanted [this], we might check what we can do about it in the future"
At some point it even felt like they just went for the contrary of what almost everyone wanted (a lot in the discord asked to either stop map rotation or at least add more maps inside active rotation, and what we get was to see rotation getting reduced, going from 6 maps to 5...)
Matchmaking been wack for so long because it was "prioritizing fast matchmaking over quality" for MONTHS until recently in which rank slightly count too now but due to the ranked rule change of season 2 start normal is mostly filled with diamond + stacks because they don't want to play ranked as if they get too high they will become unable to play with friends here so what's the point of ranked with friends when you soon won't be able to...
It's been since season 2 start i can't have balanced normals, even after the matchmaking fix try, because i always get agaisnt diamond and challengers, I even get agaisnt different omega multiple times in normal while it was extremely rare in quick, meanwhile at season 1 i stopped at gold because it wasn't caring enough about rank that i just grabbed the reward and went back unranked (i have like 100 ranked matches, and ~1000 normal and probably more than 3times this amount on quick)
The new player experience is also awful, bad tutorial, and the game throw new players agaisnt Platinum +, and it wasn't a player count issue as it was before Finii release, so there was a bunch of players
Ody saw player count dropping, we told them why the players don't renew and just drop and what we get as an answer (only after the big announcement) is that they never planned to do a good tutorial because it wasn't important to them, and that their matchmaking is good and the only issue is player count
(Meanwhile i OFTEN seen different new players, but basically they were agaisnt me, two random diamond, and the new players was like, getting destroyed after starting the game 1h ago. Or i was teammed with teo new players and been agaisnt plat-diamond +, no matter the OS playercount, it never changed, OS is most of the time, at least from my personal experience, stomp or be stomped, the result of the game is a lot of times already determined before the match start and balanced games in which we can't predict the result fast are rare)
There was also no try at reducing smurf issue, if anything, the matchmaking fix try actually made them stronger as now ranked as a bit of impact on matchmaking, so a brend new account to smurf is even more likely to come bother new players actually
The matchmaking fix try was nice for normal players assuming everyone plays their real account but sadly made smurf easier and stronger at the same time
Huge lack if content did not help
One character per month is good
But the rest was lacking
One """big""" event per month if we are lucky and most of them was "take 15min to do 3-5 easy missions and then just play the game like you usually do lol"
Waiting a month minimum for this... it really don't make you feel the will to come back
A mini event of 3-5 easy missions each week with best price being a emote and a big event each months with 5 easy mission and 3-5 hard ones with unused goal explosion from game codes (and they work) and more nameplate would have been nice
Community emotes are also a wasted opportunity to make effortless mini event
The communication from Ody other than CM meme, and the little bits of knowledge of the game development CM knew was terrible
Other than 1 feedback to feedback from a CM with limited knowledge about the game development stuff (and things like "i don't want sorry callout because sorry tilted me in another game") we had zero communication
From the devs, it was a complet dry desert until the big announcement, and it is only AFTER that they started to talk
And a lot of their answers were just "we didn't do this important things because we had players the first 7days" even if we told them that months after the thing would have helped to kept current players, noz the answer kept being "nah, this was good the first 7days bro" despite... like.. if players quitted so fast it is because there was issues but let's pass this, am tired, this announcement and these answers still haunts my mind and makes me incredibly sad to see all our love and all our help tries felt like it was useless
I loved this game so much, i adore air hockey, i made close friends thanks to this game that was our only game in commun to gather us
OS was a gem, i wish it could have gone far for years because the core game is absolutely great, there are sadly a bunch of stuff there and there to ruin the experience
The story could probably be rebranded as a fighting game with how colorful the cast is. That, or have the majority of it be single player with more emphasis on dynamic gameplay.
Your making points that contradict each other
This game was so good, it's had a little bit of a revival with the new season but still struggling
I loved Omega Strikers in Beta but hated the full release because matches went on waaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. The short match length was a HUGE strength to the game and I never got around to checking back to see if it improved since launch.
I personally still love this game and personally think it can make it in esports if people truly spread word and big streamers made content
Omega Strikers was (still is I guess) my main game that I play with friends and the lack of players is also killing it for me, because there's just no balanced matchmaking anymore... It was a good run, I will miss this game a lot
I know nothing about this game except for the banger OST and these fire character designs.
Sucks if this game supposedly fell off. From the outside looking in, it feels they had a ton of passion put into this property.
I'd love to see them rework this series into a anime fighter like DnF Duel or GranBlue Versus. By looks alone it'd right into the genre.
I think they made a great foundation with omega strikers, with the characters and fan base. I will definitely still be playing OS to me it's just fun whether you win or lose. I have no idea what they will come up with next but I sure will be getting it. There's clearly fan favorite characters and if they bring them into the next game it might even be enuf to get people to stay.
Something that didn't help was how Oddy was spending lots of money and earnings cut to the two Creator Clashs, where most creators only promoted it once and that's about it. When the Critikal skin for Asher came out, he didn't even tweet or retweet it
I just hope they take all the characters and put them in new stuff it'd be a shame to let such amazing designs go to waste, like slap them in an adventure fighter or even a Mario party style game, let them be mascots for their new company instead of 1 and done designs
I have a dream that someday, Omega Strikers will come back. So sad to hear about this interesting person you want hang around only to find that said person is in a coma.
Honestly hope they can use these characters in some other game someday they're too good to leave behind
Hello, ex omega content creator here lol. I made videos for Aerial Snack and they definitely hit a sweet spot with the community when the game was coming out of beta and in its relaunch. I was very excited to move onto character guides but I also soon realized the patches coming out every week would not sustain the content or at least I saw it myself. I make character guides and then what? The player count was also dropping which also leads to even less viewer count. This game also did suffer from not having any way to change its core design for other modes. We first had RGM and then high tea jinx which are fun but split the community playerbase and arent really fun either. If there was someway they could do 2v2 or 1v1 modes it would have been great but I dont see that happening at all with the design of the game. This left players only playing normals or comp and noobs playing qp which are all basically the same thing just the length of the game or skill of the players change. I also realized that stopping collabs with Aerial lead me to see there is basically no way to make regular content for this game. I think the only way is to be insanely good or a very like able personality for the viewer since the game itself is so simple and doesnt allow many things like "can you get to gold without any forwards?" Challenge videos like those just arent possible. I moved onto modding the game since I still like it and make content about that but regular content seems impossible unless its guides on how to play this game in the first place lol.
I was planning on getting to the game but does it mean that the game will still be up and running after 2023 or is it going to close it's servers at some point?
Well it's free to play. The servers will still be up, just no updates. Maybe they'll pull a heroes of the storm and leave a small team on it to keep working on it to update it? 🤔
Everybody who played OS downright loves the game, but I will say it because I played a bunch of futuristic/fantasy sports games since the old Jet Moto series, including Jet Set Radio, an anime Parkour game called Freerunner and an old 3D flashgame called RocketLeague. It never lasts long, but nobody was expecting 1 year.
There's an older game called ACE arena which is oddly similar to OS and by the time I knew what it was the game was completely dead. (as in completely, not like OS right now where you can still get a game)
I don't know if it's just the simplicity of the base mechanics. After all the complexity and volatility of OS stems from playing the core at weird angles and the geometry. It seems to me that games in the futuristic/fantasy sports genre need to have a right balance between sports and fantasy. Too much fantasy and you don't get people who play NHL, FIFA etc. Too much sports and you don't get moba, rpg players.
But that's my take on it.
Surprisedly, I dont care as long as the game remain open and my friends still play with me
I only know omega Strikers because Spotify started recommending me it's soundtrack which is really good
This is the first video I saw when I wanted to look it up and give it a try xD
Haha, never lucky
I dont think the problem was the lack of balance changes or the simplicity. They werent ideal but didnt really detract from the experience much at all. The reason the game died is because the devs tried too hard to fix those problems between the beta and full release and everything that made the game good was either worse or gone altogether. Over the course of the beta I convinced 14 people to play the game and 12 of them loved it and played very consistently, even people who didnt generally play video games. After the full release , none of them enjoyed the game any more with all but one quitting within 3 days of full release, and the last one quitting before a week. The devs went too long without a beta and when the players gave feedback showing that they overwhelmingly preferred the old version the devs ignored it. It was the greatest game of all time and they killed it because they were trying to make the game something else
I hope they change their minds or sell to the right people who will manage it
Its time for Sparkball (in few months)
They need to make new game modes and add more content. Something like a story mode or even an anime series would help. It's no good to have characters you love and have no story to them outside of the short bio given to them. We want to see more story!
I got back into the game like a month ago, it's fun, but at this point, queue times can take a while for competitive, which I play since if I do a quickplay queue, either the players are so bad, or I chance upon a god who can't be beat, and one thing that I have noticed being juggled in plat is that even across multiple days, I have seen a few names appear that I've seen before, meaning that there are some games where I have played against most of the team before already, which is kinda fun, but not exactly a good sign for the game currently, especially when my rank is like 10k, you'd think there would be a bit more variety in people to play against, but yeah, since that month ago, I've gotten used to the current state of the game and it's more going through the motions more than anything else, no real spice in the game which is a shame since even when I played this the nearly a year ago, I genuinely enjoyed the game and the new content that did arrive was fun to play against.
Think the biggest killer was the lack of learning ressources and environment for new players to learn the game without getting stomped, there's been quite a big influx of new players during the games livesspan but the complex nature of the game + the bad matchmaking made it impossible for any new player to enjoy their first 5 hours in the game
I think this is just an example of ody biting off more than they can chew by making the game for so many different platforms. This no doubt slowed development and hurt the game.
I honestly forgot that it came out on literally everything. OS really should've just stayed a low spec PC title. I mean just look at League, it's stayed a PC only game, you can run it on basically anything you want as long as you can run windows 10, and its stayed one of the most popular games ever for well over a decade now.
As someone who plays and streams a smaller game as well this video was a fun watch, nice video
I hope one day that omega strikers become more popular. Its a fun game with really nice music and Art Design. i like this game even if i bad at it. ❤
Is it surprising though, I could smell blood in the water before launch. Good for you to enjoy it though
I literally don't understand what you're even trying to say in this video. Here are the main points you make in your video for why OS failed:
1. Too simplistic of a game to be someone's "main game": At 6:26 you literally talk about all of the complexity Odyssey added to the game on launch and you made it seem like this was a bad thing they did this. At 4:45 you explain yourself WHY Odyssey made the changes they did to add complexity. You're saying this is a big reason why the game failed, but when they sought to fix that you're like nah, keep this a party game???
2. Lack of Diverse Content: At 3:34 you have a massive scene showing month after month after month of weekly balance updates, and you're a bit disingenuous in the fact that you claim none of these were "big changes", when there absolutely were several meta defining patches in that grouping. At 5:40 you compliment the amount of new strikers coming in at 1 per month. You also fail to mention how there were multiple new awakenings created, new maps created, and entirely new modes added to the game.
3. Up to months between major patches: This is just factually incorrect? I feel like you just sort of snuck this in and didn't prove it at all.
4. Changing the Bo5 to best 3/5 rounds win: I assume what you actually meant was going from first to 5, win by 2, to bo5 rounds. This was literally done to add depth to the game, which is exactly to the point of round 1. What's funny is I also disliked this change, but you literally didn't explain anything about why this is actually bad other than "it now fits into the same category of big games", which, again, is literally their goal so yeah, the change makes complete sense.
You mention not making new content because you ran out of content, but what is funny is that there is a massive competitive scene that you're just flat out ignoring that was filled with content. This game also had a ton of activity with live streaming on twitch that you could EASILY have utilized for collaborations. The fact of the matter is that you had given up on the game awhile ago and you're now just posting this video for clickbait. At least be consistent within your points and ACTUALLY correct with them all.
I'm gonna try to clarify some points.
1.Too simplistic: We're saying the original format was a lot funner, if not better, than the new format. The game was a lot of fun in beta and we played way too much during this time. The complexity they added to the game made it stop being a game that had short rounds of high octane fun, to longer rounds that turned into a chore. The short rounds made it fun.
2&3. Lack of Diverse Content/Up to months between major patches: OS launched April 27th. Their major patches were May 16th, July 6th, August 24th, October 19th, and November 30th.
That's 19 days, 51 days, 49 days, 56 days, and 42 days apart.
Not quite "months" but when the playerbase was nosediving there needs to be major changes sooner than every 50 days or so.
4. Changing Bo5 to best 3/5: I don't think I can reiterate this in a way that is different than how we did in the video but I'll try. When it was the first to 5, win by 2 the games were a lot shorter as games lasted around 3-5 minutes. Shorter games meant it wasn't really competiting against another game as OS was its own style of game that fit its own niche. You could play a game of OS during queue times for other games and finish before you got into a game. There is a reason why, if you watch/watched pro League streamers, they play games like OSU during queue times to kill time. I myself did this a couple times while waiting for friends to finish their games with OS during beta.
The change to best 3/5 rounds now made it so that instead of games maybe lasting 8 minute max, games would be 10 minutes minimum. Now you have to commit a fair amount of time just to play 1 full game of OS.
About the competitive scene: We originally wanted to make competitive content ourselves. All 3 of us were/are very competitive gamers and have put countless hours into getting higher ratings in the various games we played over the years. But the viewer base for competitive videos just didn't exsist. We toyed with ideas for highlights/following the scene, but the effort to views ratio just wouldn't have made any sense at all. We've seen the analytics.
We didn't give up because we wanted to, and this isn't clickbait. We could have just left it be after it was announced that OS was shutting down. We just wanted to give our 2 cents on why we thought it was.
We're sorry that our video might have come off as disingenuous as the video came from our hearts❤️❤️❤️
Imo there are 2 big reasons why this game never took off:
1/ Lack of long term marketing: like u said, u want to make content for this game. But there is just none. Aside from patch notes, there are nothing to make about this game at all. This hurt both the newcomer who watch media to get expose to the game and the veteran who got nothing beside the competitive mode
2/ The game dont have enough content. The game did bring excitement with new character release, but aside from that, i think they need more. The 2 demon sister event is so so bad. They have a contest between 2 sides and thats it, no story, reward is lacking, no fun mode or anything,… Then there is Finii. Imo, Finii is the most fun with such a cool little gamemode… the story still go no where though. Summer event is… cute, it has a visual novel thats cute but i think players just skim though it anw. No real story but a pretty ok reward (the emotes and tittle are alot and pretty gud). There are more picking side event… I dont think that they are all bad, but if they want more players, they should either invest more to the event and make it long term too (like battlepass, i already finish it 1/3 though the season, wat else can i do @@), idk why they want to make limited event at all. If they pour less money on other stuffs (like JP VAs, the demon sóng,…) and take it slow with the game like an indie dev team, i think the game would have succeed.
Compared this game to LoL is a bit unfair imo, i would compare this to Dead by Daylight or Battlerite or other recent online games (i dont know any, dont keep up good enough @@). The reason they stop the game i think is just they run out of money, and this game is not making the profit that they want to (not that the game is not making money at all, just not enough for how much they invest in it)
Im so sad, i downloaded the game today and there are 0 rookie lobbies. I can't ever play it.
Honestly, it isn’t dead lol.people just don’t rlly make vids on them
On new characters being balanced from the get go being a bad thing... imho it's always true, but League players always screamed otherwise and devs learned the wrong lesson
And even in league it's a bad thing, but when you have a giant roster having a new champ not being picked or fade into obscurity the next patch because they got insta nerfed is not a big deal, especially when the game balance changes every 2 weeks anyway
The game is a ton of fun. The biggest issue I seen was the new player experience. Normals and quick play have some pros against noobs in almost every game, and they never addresed this issue. The game requires alot of practice to get good but no one wants to stick around to learn when they get stomped constantly. Also having no way to communicate just because your worried about people being toxic hurt the game. The game relies on having a team but you have no way to talk to other people which makes absolutely no sense.
sad...
Im so sad, i downloaded the game today and there are 0 rookie lobbies. I can't ever play itm
And here I am redownloading the game on xbox
Difficulty and farming...
As a low masta league player, ranked in this game felt pretty boring, the higher you climbed as players realised the basics of core control, the game became very simplistic, with goalies beeing mostly aoe entity spawners and best fowards beeing chars who could smoothly combo core tap with abilities (looking at you juliette tap secondary primary combos). Couple this meta with a low skill ceiling main mechanic, and you end up with a game that's decided on team work purely and very low room for self improvement and mastery.
Imo this game should've been a 4v4 with 1 goalie 2 side/fowards and a addition of a "disruptor" role, a player who has limited core control (say only the core flip) who would focus on disrupting enemy team and gather buffs or idk the energy orbs in the maps sort of a jgler role if you're familiar with mobas. The idea would be to create a mini game within the match outside of just the core, whether you just want to punch players in the face or maybe gather things so that your fowards gain an advantage. With a better map/objective design you achieve "choice" should a foward help the disuptor contest a buff/poweup advantage or try to score on a 2v3 etc, these decision making in addition to character knowledge, powerup knowledge give player agency. Which i think is propably the most important thing in an pvp game. You need a faker. You need a Zen. You need a s1mple. The right balance of solo player agency and teamwork is what makes a pvp game good.
I think they failed because it's a team game.
Other team focused games have more opportunity for you to impact the outcome as a single member of the team. Unfortunately for Omega Strikers, if your goalie sucked it was doomed. If one of the attackers sucked, it was doomed.
Not much room for doing cool plays without coordinating before the match (which you couldn't because lobby lasted like 20 seconds).
Maybe I'm just over games that require me to play together with randoms but that's the main reason I abandoned the game early.
Nothing wrong with playing with randoms on your team. At a certain point though you do become progressively more reliant on them at least being decent for their ranking or there will be games you simply cannot win
Should've tried a Soccer Moba instead of air hockey moba.
You were a legend
We're glad you liked our videos!
@deejayd7220 I honestly just want them to change the rank system. Make quick play the new rank. Because I don't want to sit in a 3 round game anymore.
you didn't "run out of content", you didn't try. plus, the comp scene is SO MUCH content, and it's still running for the foreseeable future.
we don't need tier lists, we don't need patch reviews. did you even review new strikers? why are you even making this video NOW, months after making zero content? clickbait?
this video seems incredibly disingenuous.
My $2: The game looked mega boring, required so many hours to learn, hours that you could spend elsewhere like in League, no map variation, no great deal freedom of movement because you're always having to counter position so that means people are either stuck moving wherever or they're trolling because of it, people wanna slap each other and punch each other, not wait for a puck to do things, add to that you have to work with your team where it can be oh so easily sabotaged for the rest? It ain't pickin' up.
It was a formula made to be DOA, made for a very niche audience that was expected to come but could never hop over from League and other games. I tried the beta for a few hours, some friends told me it was going to be the next thing, I said it was "truthfully and without bias, dead in two years, optimistically".
I like the video but I can't help but feel like there's a bit of cognitive dissonance in what you're saying
You say League added new characters and that was good but OS added new characters and that was bad
Also you compare shitty early league champs where they could just pump out garbage since there was no competition.
It's a very strange argument to me
Also you seem to be glossing over the retention problem. the majority of people (casual) don't care about balance and micropatches at all, they just want to play a fun game.
they definitely had something in the beta but soooo many people stopped playing so quickly. it felt like a minigame. people played it for a couple days and then stopped. there was no depth
at the end of the day, the fact is that the game had
- fun core loop with good breadth of gameplay but not enough depth (which is somewhat of your 'complex and simple' point but more nuanced) This runs perpendicular to the bo5 -> 3 argument since i remember people stop playing even earlier back then
- no "curb appeal" where you would watch on stream or YT as a new player and don't see why its fun (I liken this to a knockout city type issue but does align a bit with the lack of identity point)
either way, I really liked the video!!! i just personally would've liked to see you hit a couple more accurate points. a lot of these come entirely from the perspective of "high elo content creator" which is fair as that is what you are, but it misrepresents the game as a whole
7:41 You couldn't be more real for the last 3 points, the games being so long honestly made the game insuffurable and doesn't fit the fast pace of the game. However the simplicity of the game not a relevant argument. What's even a simplistic game bru? LoL is both simplistic and complex, and so is Smash, and Rocket League. Those are all games extremely simple to understand but hard to master, exactly like Omega Strikers.
It feels like you're trying to say RL and LoL are chess whereas OS is a Tic Tac Toe : Vaguely similar in the concept but with a much more limited depth. But you couldn't be any further from the truth. Take for exemple. The game is super simplistic, never changed in years and yet the community has never been that big
releasing a balanced character is ALWAYS NOT A GOOD THING
the first impression should always be "broken" or "OP" regardless of it
if you released it on very balanced character on it's day 1 release then a week later they would mellow out and that "new character" would just be "another character"
that's why league can still release new champs because they release it too broken or too unplay-able then riot fix it (fixing it also opens up other bugs and opportunities for players to give their attention to)
If u have played this, im sure no way u said new released characters are balanced at all. The demon sisters are cracked, kazan is cracked. Finii is a bit weird cause she is hard to used, but her special was just click and win when she was released. Only the two newest characters are pretty okay, Nao being more supportive so you didnt get to see her shine alot, and Mako is alot like Finii, without an op special
wrong
comparing Omega Strikers to the launch of League of legends is an unfair comparison and completely off base, LOL has it's success due to HON dropping the ball and that's a whole other story but it proves my point