Insomniac Games' Fuse (formerly Overstrike) Catch-all

Anybody remember Overstrike from E3 2011?

Well it's been renamed "Fuse" and is apparently shaping up quite nicely. Sounds like they're optimistic about the 4-player co-op as well as the single-player. There are multiple articles popping up today.

EDIT: Insomniac has posted links to all the previews here.

New trailer is out:

Already missing the former art style, it really gave it a nice "pop."
The action looks insane, here's to hoping for competent [friendly] AI.
EDIT: At least I hope they leave some of the humor intact. Though it doesn't look like it will fit as well anymore :(.

Eldon_of_Azure wrote:

Already missing the former art style, it really gave it a nice "pop."
The action looks insane, here's to hoping for competent [friendly] AI.

Agreed. I really enjoyed the campy style of the Overstrike trailer. I hope this is just the rock-and-roll trailer for the action-only meatheads out there. But the art style has definitely changed, IMO, for the worse. Looks like any of a dozen other shooters now. Hopefully they retained some of the sass from the original. That was what made it stand out for me.

Looks like EA's fun-vampires have gotten their sticky claws into this and drained it of life, character and anything remotely interesting.

It's like what happened with Borderlands in reverse.

Yep. I was stoked when I saw the original trailer because Insomniac can make damn funny stuff. Now it looks like another generic, brown and gray shooter designed for "broad appeal" that happens to have wacky weapons. I'll wait to see more of course but my interest in this just tanked.

Hmmmm. Co-op good, new art style bad. Guess it's a wait-and-see now.

Echo all sentiments here. It was one of my favorite things at that year's E3. Now, they'll really have to sell it to me. There goes all that excitement.

Watching FUSE through Facebook. Each post gets fewer and fewer likes and more and more slanderous comments in the vein of "give me back Overstrike." Hopefully Insomniac gets the message.

Oh, I also forgot to comment on how bad that name change is. I wonder if there's an underground Insomniac pool for whether it will sell better than Haze, and/or Lair.

Apparently the humor will still be intact to a certain degree, abet more serious. This is according to Ted Price in a interview discussing the change of direction from Overstrike to Fuse plus fan feedback.

Wow, if you didn't tell me the chronology of those trailers in advance, I'd be guessing the second one was an early prototype trailer, with the first one being the more recent trailer after they've fleshed out the atmosphere and art style to a shine.

I'd never heard of this game before, that's got to be the quickest I've even gone from suddenly excited to suddenly deflated, I think I got whiplash as I recoiled back into my chair.

Reverse Borderlands indeed. What the crap?!

Eldon_of_Azure wrote:

Apparently the humor will still be intact to a certain degree, abet more serious. This is according to Ted Price in a interview discussing the change of direction from Overstrike to Fuse plus fan feedback.

I couldn't get the video to play. Let me guess though.

"Fan feedback couldn't be stronger for our new design!"

Yeah, because all gamers wanted was "Gears of Killzone: Bulletstorm of Duty--The Halo Battlefield"

I wonder if the pre-order bonus will be character skins in the original art style.

D-Man777 wrote:
Eldon_of_Azure wrote:

Apparently the humor will still be intact to a certain degree, abet more serious. This is according to Ted Price in a interview discussing the change of direction from Overstrike to Fuse plus fan feedback.

I couldn't get the video to play. Let me guess though.

"Fan feedback couldn't be stronger for our new design!"

Yeah, because all gamers wanted was "Gears of Killzone: Bulletstorm of Duty--The Halo Battlefield"

He did discuss that some of the fans didn't like the change in art direction, then explained that they wanted to get rid of the "...Super stylized, campy characters and let's just go for broke on the weapons..." Then he goes into how they realized that the original story style hadn't been tied to the weapons in any way and fixed that by tying the alien element prevalent in all the weapons to missions tracking it down (yeah...) in addition to using it to "level-up" so to speak. Actually, there was a lot of classic subject-changing and misdirection when it came to fan feedback. What's really funny is that they worded it in such a way to [nicely] throw it back into the faces of fans that disagreed with the new outlook.
Supposedly the dry humor will resemble that of Portal (or at least that's how I interpreted what was said).

cyrax wrote:

I wonder if the pre-order bonus will be character skins in the original art style.

If only we would be so lucky.

"Fan feedback couldn't be stronger for our new design!"

Weren't they just saying that focus testing was what caused the shift in design, that testers didn't want a game that looked like one their little brother would play?

I can't say I've done a study of the broader internet (or at least places that would be aware of a just-announced game), but my impression from here and other places was that the old style was well received.

New-ish Trailer:

One of these days I'll get over what Overstrike could've been, and focus on what FUSE will be (Other than the apparent "generic shooter" stuff :?).

I was thinking about this again, and wanted to see if they've somehow gone back on all the dumb decisions. That third trailer is better than the second one, but that first one had such promise! Arrrgh!

I'm usually pretty good and bending myself around a designers intentions and letting things fly (I'm a big ol' developer apologist), I generally see a game for what it's trying to be rather than what I want it to be... but that amazing first trailer is right there, and that game will never exist!

I think I know now why Malor is always so pissed at EA, this must be what he feels like all the time.

ARRGH in italics!

Edit: And way to shoot yourselves in the foot with the name change guys. Google "Overstrike"... then Google "Fuse". Yeah. That just speaks volumes.

I played the demo today and pre-ordered it from Amazon. Maybe it's just a product of the release drought, but I'm interested. Anyone with me?

I'm on 360.

Wow first time seeing this. Watches first trailer, this sounds awesome. Watches second trailer, never mind. Read a few impressions of the demo, and I kept seeing gears of war and average in the same sentence. Too bad.

I liked the demo but I think I'll wait for it to go on sale.

Shouldn't take too long.

master0 wrote:

Wow first time seeing this. Watches first trailer, this sounds awesome. Watches second trailer, never mind. Read a few impressions of the demo, and I kept seeing gears of war and average in the same sentence. Too bad.

That seems to be the general consensus of most people who go through that process. The beginning of this thread is such a painful bait and switch.

I'm going to keep an eye our for reviews on this, there's still some interesting flavour left after it was gutted, but it'd take some glowing reviews at this point to get me back on board.

About what I felt since they changed the game, and then played the demo. Moving on and pretending this never happened. Next gen Insomniac, go!

This really does seem like an example of one of the things that's wrong with games, not really AAA in general, but I guess it's higher profile than a load of other budget/indie generic games that fade into the background.

As the reviewer says, it's a competent game, there's nothing really wrong with it, but it doesn't really have any high points to, you know, sell it. It's not good enough to be competent, or for a game be a collection of competent parts, especially for a AAA game where the stakes are higher. It might do well enough and make a bit of money, but I really can't see it being a success.

The big thing that seems to be lacking is flavour. I rewatched the old Overstrike trailer a while ago, and even if it was the same game mechanically it had something that drew my interest, but that spark just seems to have been snubbed out by their focus groups. Lets face it, shooters are ten-a-penny and mostly interchangeable unless the developer really messes up, so they need to be distinct and interesting.

Such a shame this had to happen.

UPS brought mine a day earlier than schedule, and I put in a few hours last night. I did two missions from the campaign and maybe 2 hours of Echelon (their Horde mode), and I really, really enjoyed it. It looks good (for a console game at this stage), the controls are polished and responsive, and the guns and powers are a bit off the beaten path (although probably not quite far enough). There is some humor and style to it, too. I don't really see the "generic, brown shooter" complaints above (except for the tattooed, "heavy" guy, who seems like he's supposed to be the lead character). It feels like someone goofing on Gears of War (possibly because someone in marketing told them they had to copy it).

The main attraction is Echelon. It's five maps, with (seemingly, to me at this point) random chosen objectives from the usual pool of kill the boss, protect the magic box, kill the scrubs. It's hard, and my guess is that if you want to beat it you need to have people at high levels and syncing their powers well. I think that Echelon has/had the potential to be something with real legs and a large base, but they just didn't go quite far enough in diversifying the powers, guns, and unlocks.

I have played close to 700 hours of Mass Effect 3's MP mode, and Echelon reminds me of that mode when the game first launched, not what ME3 has turned into now. Fuse just won't have the sales/name recognition/etc. to get the post-release support ME3 has, and my guess is that in a few months it's going to be 200 players just running Echelon over and over.

I see myself playing this a lot until The Last of Us releases, and then I'll set aside and keep telling myself that I need to go back to it and never do.

I noticed that there seem to be few people online, even just a few days after release. So to get at least some idea of how many people are playing, I looked on TrueAchievements and found the first achievement you would get in the SP for four games I most recently got achievements for.

Fuse, about 350 people
Call of Juarez Gunslinger, about 1500
Max Payne 3, about 27,000
Dishonored, about 33,000

Ouch.

Edit: Before the usual thing happens and certain people here start misreading what I have written, or claiming I said things I didn't, I am not equating all of these games, nor am I forgetting that Fuse has only been out 3 days while MP3 and Dishonored have been out for many months to a year, or that Call of Juarez is a $15 download. I am trying to get a sense of what the sales numbers might look like for "disappointing" or low-number games. And 350 people on a large website for an EA-published game is staggeringly low.

I wonder what the threshold is for meeting sales expectations on this one is. Wasn't a guy from Insomniac saying they had plans for the future of this game/series?

I was pretty interested in this when it was announced, but the lack of hype/community buzz on any of the sites I frequent put me off. I see exactly the point you are making Glanton, and I think it reinforces my decision to not pick it up. I will still likely pick this up, but not until it goes on sale.

Scratched wrote:

I wonder what the threshold is for meeting sales expectations on this one is. Wasn't a guy from Insomniac saying they had plans for the future of this game/series?

I'm sure we'll find out at the next earnings report. Given the drubbing it's getting in the reviews, I can't imagine it's going to reach whatever expectations they had.

@Sally

I see why people wouldn't want to pay full price for a co-op oriented game with 350 players on TA, but in this case it might make sense to come at it the other way. I don't think anyone will be online with this in, say, July. I'm still playing, and last night Dr. Jekl said he wanted to run through the campaign me with me (and yes, I am liking it enough that I want to run through the campaign again even though I'm near the end).

The other problem with its longevity is that Echelon doesn't seem to be hard enough. I'm nearing the top of the leveling with one of my characters, and I finished 3 games of Echelon in a row last night. As of now, they don't have any difficulty settings for it, and they don't have enough powers and unlocks to sustain an ecosystem for it over the long haul.

Again, :(. There's a lot of good stuff here.