Firescout is a militaristic/sci-fi PvP FPS arena shooter made (badly) with the Unreal engine. While Unreal gives the game a fighting chance, questionable design decisions by the developers made this a fairly hard failure.
On the upsides, the game is still getting updates, and it has left Early Access (at least in name... this feels a lot like an Early Access game even today).
On a technical basis, while there are a few graphics tweaks, they don't seem to actually work. Setting resolution to 4K just makes everything look blurry, so either resolution doesn't actually change, or it changes only in so much as it upscales a low resolution render, either way, that's clearly broken. The UI looks like it was done by a high school student for a programming assignment, it's clunky.
While there is a somewhat sad botmatching ability, there's no actual content to the game, the game is intended to be a pure PvP arena shooter, which is something it failed at doing. What does that mean? It's video game autopsy time!
Apart from the rather poor technical implementation, something not even the well regarded Unreal Engine can solve, the developers made the fatal, lazy mistake of believing that PvP, other players, would be an acceptable substitute for doing the difficult job of adding single player level design, storytelling, NPCs and other rich aspects of designed game content to the game. As a result of this choice by the developers, the game has little to no actual interactive game content. It's a little considered fact that the vast majority of PvP only, multiplayer only games [b]fail[/b]. Developers must learn that other players are not an acceptable subsititue for doing the job of game developers and building a game filled with content. PvP only games must have a [b]huge[/b] player base for them to "go viral" and succeed. But with no single player experience to add lasting value to a game, the developers instead chose to bet against all odds that their game would "go viral" without any actual reason for players to want to play the game. Predictably, they lost this bet.
The developers made the terrible mistake of launching a multiplayer only game in Early Access. This is almost certain to kill the game. Most gamers will evaluate a game only once. If they do so when the game is incomplete, they will check it out, then abandon it. When the game eventually does get around to release, there will be no players, because the developers burned the first impressions through their faulty Early Access experience. Players who saw the game and didn't like it because it was incomplete [i]do not come back[/i]. Releasing a multiplayer only game into early access kills the game population, and thus the game, before the game even launches.
Just how badly did Firescout fail? SteamDB shows, I'm not kidding, a peak player count of 2 players at the same time, 11 months ago. Since then, every week or so, 1 player logs on, probably to wonder why the game is in thier library and then delete it (the game was dumped into cheap shovelware bundles as a cash grab). There's over 120,000,000 gamers on Steam... 120 million. To have a game that's so bad you can't get more than 2 people logged on at the same time, well... that's how games die.
There's a somewhat laughable $10 USD price tag for this dead game, which seems to be hopeless optimism if you ask me.
