Babylon’s fall came out earlier this month, and it already feels like it’s on life support. The only reason it even seemed to make a splash amid the current rush on the release calendar was how bad it is. Now publisher Square Enix is trying to reassure fans the new worst PS5 game is not dead and will continue to receive post-launch updates, including NieR: Automata costumes.
“Is the further service in danger?” began a very oddly worded all-caps statement from the game’s Twitter account (via Axios Gaming). “No, there are no plans to further reduce the scope of development Babylon’s fall.”
Hmm, my “Babylon’s fall is not dead” t-shirt surely has people asking many questions already answered by my t-shirt!
Developer PlatinumGames said all content for the game’s second season is “virtually complete” and is already preparing to work on season three “and beyond.” To prove it was committed to the long haul, the developers released a roadmap for the first season shows a major 1.1.0 update due to arrive on March 22nd, followed by a NieR: Automata Collaboration event on March 29th and additional story content in late April.
There certainly won’t be a shortage of things to come for the loot-based action RPG in the near future. Among other things, the game gets a new faction, a new weapon type and a “Gauntlet” mode. The game’s development team has also committed to fixing some of the graphical issues and further tuning the weapon balance. Will any of this change the overall experience? At least I’m skeptical.
Other live service debacles, like BioWare’s anthem and Bethesdas Fallout 76had some strong foundations to build on, so I felt like I had at least an idea of what a “set” version of these games might look like. I don’t get any of that Babylon’s fall.
Notably, BioWare had also said it was committed to manufacturing anthem The game originally promised it with an eventual anthem 2.0-like release. Instead, EA canned the whole thing only two years later.
Players on Steam don’t seem to be sticking with it either. While the game also runs on PS4 and PS5, its PC user base seems to have become negligible from an early age. The highest concurrent player count ever on Valve’s storefront was 1,166 at launch. It’s now a third of that. Live service games are attractive to publishers because they attract the most dedicated players to continuously spend big on microtransactions. I’m not sure how many players Babylon’s fall has to keep up its daily maintenance, let alone actually overhaul the game, but I don’t think 300 concurrent players on Steam will make it.
