At least we will get another Fallout from the hands of Obsidian right? Right?
Holy moly.
That is basically the worst case scenario, no?
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The absolute last thing Obsidian needs is Bethesda presiding over them. Bethesda (the publisher) is pure toxicity, and don’t they hate Obsidian?
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They should have given Obsidian TES/Fallout, and folded Bethesda into Obsidian as a studio to farm work out to. BGS has some great level design teams, but the decision makers need to go.
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The absolute last thing Halo campaigns need is to be more like Call of Duty.
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They should have cut 343, and split the IP amongst specialized studios. Like an Arkane “special ops” stealth game, another Halo Wars, and/or a strictly multiplayer Activision game.
This is beyond even my worst expectations. It’s what I would have done if I was a corporate spy inside Microsoft, assigned to sabotage them.
Worst case but certainly expected. Microsoft paid a ransom for Bethesda and the Bethesda brand and their IP. Nothing was ever going to be rolled into a “lesser” brand like Obsidian. It’s naive to think otherwise, this is capitalism to a fucking T, decisions made by penny pinching sleezebags who assign value to names.
Is the Bethesda brand even valuable anymore? I feel like it might have been relevant 10 years ago but it’s kind of fallen by the wayside in recent years, mostly by their own hand.
Maybe. TES/Fallout still seem to have critical mass on YouTube and such, and people did buy Starfield.
I’m with you though. I am a shameless Oblivion shill, Starfield was theoretically my perfect game; yet I can’t find a reason why I should devote any attention to BGS these days…
Obsidian is doing fallout.
Halo needs ANYTHING. 343/Halo studios has never had a fucking clue.
Obsidian is doing fallout.
But under BGS now. To me, that is frightening.
It’s worse then that because studios aren’t names they are the people that make the games. All these studios are effectively dead The only good that may come of this are the devs that start their own indio studio and make the games they want. Not an easy path mind you.
Its not even close to the worst thing. The worst thing was letting 343 “Halo Studios” keep Halo.
At worst, we just get another bad Halo game. But with entirely different people working on it, at least there is a chance it could be better. Under 343 “Halo Studios” it had no chances of being good.
Activision is a publisher, they don’t only make Call of Duty. They have a large variety of games they publish, including Blizzard’s Overwatch, which while one can argue doesn’t fit the Halo gameplay, proves that Activision has the capacity to publish FPS games that feel almost nothing like Call of Duty.
Last good game by obsidian ? By Bethesda ? Commercial success now ? Obsidian dig their grave.
They made a bunch of good RPGs/RPG-ish games, and a bunch of “mid” ones.
My personal favorite is Grounded. It does sorta feel like classic Obsidian/BGS game, with its heavy implicit environmental storytelling, audio logs and such, and the survival aspect is great for coop.
No, none of them sold a zillion copies like Fallout 76 or Starfield, but I had more fun in them than either of those, by a long shot.
So one niche game 10 year ago… I know obsidian for being the studio with the art director proudly claiming he would not recruit withe ppl. Wich except the legal side is utterly retard since they are the majority of your audience. Go woke go broke
Since 2016, Obsidian has released 10 games. BGS released 2: Fallout 76 and Starfield.
Grounded 2 is out in EA, seems to be close to release, and by all accounts it is excellent.
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What exactly is their plan? Just collect IPs so they aren’t being released on other platforms?
It is a very old strategy for monopolies to buy up competition when there are no anti monopoly protections so they can kill the competition, it’s how Microsoft was founded.
Founded? I know they did this as they grew, but founded?
Not quite. The founding is actually worse.
Bill Gates was shown, in good faith, a tech demo by, I think IBM but I may be wrong with that, for a new graphical user interface they were planning on releasing soon, and he just stole it and released windows, before they could get their product to market.
I looked it up as I was curious.
Apple and Microsoft both licensed some interface stuff from Xerox and they were both working on a windows like OS.
Apple was ahead, and gave them a sneak preview.
Then I guess MS wanted to do something like that and told Apple they’d give them time a frame they wouldn’t release anything in (like a year or two later after apple released it) and then they said fuck it and released it early.
Then Apple sued MS.
So MS stole good parts of windows from Apple.
I think it was Kodak they stole from, dos they bought
You can make good games to make people buy your games or you can destroy competition to make people buy mor games.
You can’t destroy competition in gaming though. Even if Doom is owned by Xbox, a Norwegian kid in his basement will reinvent the boomer shooter with an idea that sells hundreds of thousands. And even if they’re bought out, they care too much about the idea and their supporters to enshittify immediately, and another dev is just around the corner.
Yeah so historically PlayStation has had a lot of exclusives (Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, The Last of Us) that would be the deciding factor for a lot of players. So Microsoft wanted to ensure that Xbox/PC could synergize and compete against Sony by buying a stake in a ton of game studios, either to have their own exlusives or at least delayed release for PlayStation. But between bitcoin, AI and enshittification the gaming industry is in shambles so they’re cutting overhead.
Don’t worry: their CEO was answering support calls. I’m sure things will be fine.
(Doomed.)
These fuckers won’t rest until there’s nothing good left to play and all that’s left are multiplayer only games that cost $100 up front and still need several microtransactions a day forever in order to be in any way playable 😮💨🤬
You’re missing one major step. It’ll be 100 up front plus a monthly fee to your cloud gaming access to be able to play the game until they decide you don’t get the license to play it anymore and they take it away. You will own nothing and like it.
Why don’t they just get out of the industry, they clearly don’t want to be in it anymore. It’s just been stupid decision, after stupid decision, they basically have a license to print money and instead of creating the games that people want, and then selling them for people to play on their confusingly named consoles, they instead muck around with it by raise prices, closed studios and discontinuing IPs.
Sadly the only people they want to make happy are their shareholders while they rape the industry.
As I remember, back in the 90s, the CEO of Activision hated video games.
So of course that zombie of a company is still fucking up gaming.
This is on MS not Activision.
Absolutely, I was just giving historical background about Activision.
Halo to become Call of Duty In Space in 3…
Where have you been for the last 14 years? Halo has been call of duty in space since 343 took over.
No, no, Halo has been Call Of Titanfall Strike: Global Offensive Theft Auto 2: Yet Another An Ancient Evil Awakens Worse Than The One Before in space since 343 took over
The only people in the world left that understand the lineage of Halo, and that Halo is all about the combat dance, and elaborate encounters, and that every enemy in the level is a chess piece that needs to be placed with utmost care, is Id Software.
Id, freshly equipped with everything they learned from resurrecting DOOM, is the only studio skilled enough to possibly save the Halo franchise.
Too bad Microsoft obliterated them last month, too.
Oops!
Wait until they give Doom to Activision, to create Call of Doom - UAC Mercenaries, a game where the hellspawn are replaced with striking UAC workers gone too far and dressing up as imps and such.
Halo of Duty?
Can’t wait for Halo Infinite 2
Implying it wasn’t already that
Halo was an attempt at a better direction, compared to 5.
That is a very low bar though.
They all ready did that 14 years ago when Halo 4 came out. It had kill streaks and creat-a-class with custom skins.
A good time to mention that Xbox (and boycotting Game Pass especially) is one of a dozen or so priority targets chosen by the Palestinian BDS Movement beecause they’re vulnerable and Microsoft’s cloud computing services are so vital for “Israel’s” military and prison system
Wow. This is what happens when you put someone without game industry experience in charge of your game division. Incredibly stupid decisions all around.
Nah, they’ll still somehow limp their way into the next generation because Sony is trying to one up MSFT in bad decisions.
If they just sat back and did nothing, then it’d would definitely be over lol.
Sony will announce the anti-piracy barbed rectal probe to fuck you in real time.
The next generation is the problem. With the component pricing being stupid up they’re having to put off releasing the new consoles. They’re raising the prices on existing hardware just to match the component crunch, so they’re not getting the mid-late generation bump of people buying the hardware once it’s come down in price, and the people willing to buy new hardware an a high price already bought this generation’s comsole.
Xbox bled money buying studios for gamepass, then failed to get casual people subscribed to gamepass, but the hardware people who bought new $70 games a couple times a month started spending way less money on Xbox due to Gamepass because of all the day 1 releases. And the Series S held back everything by being wildly underpowered.
Meanwhile Sony burned billions betting on live service failures back to back to back (Microsoft did this too, but to a lesser degree).
And now their “new console generation” parachute/reset is fucked due to hardware costs. They know they can’t make an even halfway decent “next-gen” console under $1000, so now they’ve burned mountains of money and don’t really have a plan going forward. And now they’re amputating limbs to create the illusion of cost-cutting.
Imagine your job being making games, and finding a way to ruin that. Both of the big console teams have shit the bed simultaneously. Truly awe inspiring, the collective dipshettery we get to witness.
Good thing popcorn is cheap as I need more of it to watch them constantly doing stupid things.
None of it really matters to be because I am never going to buy a console anyway, largely because of shit like this. I’ll just enjoy watching.
Can’t wait for Fallout 5: Skyrim Crossover Edition.
Turns out Heimskr was working with the Thalmor the whole time and after Ulfric captured Hoover Dam, the Khajit Commonwealth just said “fuck it” and nuked everyone.
Well, it was skooma spiked with Nuka Cola.
The Radskeevers are everywhere and are a pain to kill.
Ok that description kinda makes me want to play a more fantasy themed post apocalypse. I guess The Witcher sort of counts, IIRC that story started with a magical apocalypse destroying the modern Earth
well, R.I.P. Elder Scrolls 6.
Rip obsidian, I enjoyed pillars, avowed, and pentiment
Pentiment surprised me by being one of my favourite games I have played in years. There have no doubt been better, or more engaging, or more thought provoking games that I have played, but I struggle to think of many with as much care woven throughout it.
It made total sense to me when I later learned that Pentiment was Josh Sawyer’s pet project, one that he had been hoping to make for years. Apparently he basically said “let me make this game, or I walk”, and because of how Xbox gamepass affected funding stuff, he was allowed to make this cute, quirky game. Apparently they even had an on-call historian to ensure maximum authenticity.
Yeah that game was great a lot of people slept on, there’s another adventure game coming out soon “slime in the ice machine” that looks like it might be good too and I think Josh Sawyer is working on a fallout game hopefully they get the time to make it what they want.
Deck chairs on the Titanic.
I honestly believe that Xbox will stop existing as a company in a few years.
Yeah, Asha Sharma seems to be set up as an example of the glass cliff. She’s clearly trying to bail out a sinking ship rather than revitalize a stale brand. Giving Halo to Activision shows a misunderstanding of what Halo players want, but the other things she’s doing are things that probably could have helped five or more years ago, but are just too late now. We’re probably heading toward a repeat of the 1983 crash. Xbox and PlayStation might still be around after, but they’ll be in the position that Atari and Sega were after the crash, with their remaining market share evaporating the instant a new competitor arrives.
Meanwhile, so long as Nintendo just keeps doing what they’ve been doing they should be fine. I could see them phasing out game key cards as an option for devs if the digital only backlash on the next generation is bad enough, but they might not have to given that the publishers that have been using them are the ones most likely to implode.
Honestly, Nintendo is in such a good position to pick up serious market share from Sony and Xbox. It’s insane that just making actual games that aren’t riddled with crap and not insta firing everyone who works for you is enough to be the clear front runner.
I wonder if, like Sega and Atari, there will be someone to swoop in and take market share here. I worry it’s a Meta or someone with a terrible spyware product.
meanwhile Valve just building platform after platform that in long term will draw people into Steam
Yeah, I mean I’m waitlisted on both the machine and the frame. I love valve’s hardware and ecosystem. It’s not perfect of course, but it’s infinitely better than what Xbox or playstation has going on
I think what makes everyone look so stupid isn’t the hardware Valve is making, it’s the translation layer they help improve and OS they forked. Proton allow Linux to play windows based game, SteamOS allow people to build their own console-like experience, FEX(used on steam frame) allow translation between x86 and ARM which mean pc gaming on mobile phone, and Lepton allow translation between android and linux. And all of those for free! Meanwhile every console maker is crawling back to their own cave.
Gonna still be steam.
I’m honestly astonished they haven’t even attempted being decent yet
Unless Nintendo starts to make new kinds of games i don’t see how they will pick up market share, everyone interested in a switch already has a switch.
They have solid “family” games but I don’t see them making the next Arc Raiders or League, they have their segment and are good at selling products to it.
This might change with The Duskbloods. They have an actual capable piece of hardware to run things on now.
they make simple games , as its mostly for children, they will be fine as long as the children can convince thier parents to buy thier slop. as long as they can produce pokemon games they wont lose a cent.
they often hire women to take the PR nightmare, and flak from the public when a company is failing, and looks like the plan is to close down xbox eventually.
Yeah that’s what the glass cliff is
Sony still has good IPs to fall back on, despite all the goodwill they’ve lost lately. The PS6 will sell just fine as long they launch it with a couple recognizeable titles.
Xbox is in deep shit because first of all, they’re competing with themselves. There’s no reason to get an Xbox if you have a PC. Secondly their IPs are trash. They ruined Halo and people don’t trust Bethesda anymore. Although I do think a new ES game would still print money.
Xbox is dead
The red ring of death wasn’t your final straw, lmao?
I never had an Xbox lol. I’ve always been on PC. I loved my PS2 as a kid tho.