SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded

I wish this game could be remembered as an example of how not to do things but the truth is that it'll just go down unnoticed and quickly forgotten. I've been holding off writing a review for a long time now, not wanting to hinder a potential miraculous recovery. But that's it, they're pulling the plug for this and Empulse. The haters said they couldn't do it and they were right. Great call from the haters, honestly. More than sadness, what I feel is frustration. Frustration to watch a project fail when the studio had so many good cards in hand. I felt that if anyone had a chance to break the mold of AAA competitive shooters, it could have been 1047 Games. The original Splitgate might have been too hard to maintain technically, sure, but it was a popular albeit niche game. There was a small but dedicated fanbase, the game had a notoriety and the dev team had proven they were capable of doing something people liked and wanted to play. Making a PvP game doesn't come cheap, it's a sad truth. We can raise endless arguments about how 1047 got the funding for Splitgate 2 but I still decided to see a good sign in the fact that it wasn't tied to a board of shareholders whose greed and drive for profit at all cost would come to clash with the people who actually made the game. That money also allowed them to secure their own anti-cheat which they had already been using for the original Splitgate rather than resorting to the industry standard spyware. Reason for which I actually considered the game at all in the first place. 1047 had their own money, free reigns over every step of their project, an experienced team who knew what they wanted and how to get it, as well as a dedicated playerbase who was eager for more. What could possibly go wrong ? Turns out, pretty much everything. The elephant in the room, the "Make FPS Great Again" cap. That alone pretty much killed the game here and there. I don't think Splitgate 2 ever recovered from this, nor that it could. And the fumbles kept piling up. "Think bigger than a campaign" for what was ultimately just a Battle Royale mode nobody asked for. Insane and completely out of touch social media content. With all the money 1047 was spending on building their new game they seemingly couldn't afford a PR consultant to keep their CEO in check. The game being class-based before suddenly backpedaling hard as the problems tied to factions kept piling up. Entire gamemodes appearing and leaving. Bugs from the early alpha version still present as the CEO proudly announced a majority of the dev team had already switched projects to work on Empulse. The maddening frustration of this game, given so many good cards, so many means to succeed but where each step forward is followed by a "but". Beautiful level design [i]but some maps are a pure chore to play.[/i] Satisfying gunplay and plenty of weapons to choose from [i]but the Sprinter SMG still utterly dominates the weapon roster.[/i] Excellent character and weapon faction design [i]but it became completely ignored as time went on and factions recieved skins that did not fit their own aesthetic.[/i] It's not often that I give my trust to an upcoming game and Splitgate 2 let me down in the main cruel way possible. Not by being completely mediocre but by showing glimpses of its true potential as it kept sinking.