At least we will get another Fallout from the hands of Obsidian right? Right?
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.
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.
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.
Fucking hysterical how everyone was celebrating Asha Sharma and Xbox a month or two ago, even though SHE LITERALLY SAID 1,600 CUTS ARE ON THE WAY.
This is because their AI bet fucking failed, and so did gamepass.
Yet the only ones hurt are Devs, the gamers, and potentially IPs people adore.
What a shit timeline this is.
There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the game pass idea. But that there was never anything good in it, and they kept raising the price. Sometimes they had so much filler content in there that if you discounted the games you didn’t want and only looked at the games you did want, it would have actually been cheaper to just buy the game directly. Which is in what people did.
Nah gamepass is fundamentally flawed and it capped out well below their projections for a very simple reason they didn’t consider.
Games are long, you can’t binge 3 games a day. You might finish one a month, hell most people will finish one game every 2 months.
A subscription service for things where one of said things can take 20-100 hours doesn’t make any sense.
That’s letting alone the cannibalization of their own sales, a total lack of ownership for anyone exclusively on gamepass so they’re never really committed, and you have a recipe for complete and utter mediocrity.
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.
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.
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
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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.
You can make good games to make people buy your games or you can destroy competition to make people buy mor games.
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.)
Meanwhile black isle /interplay reborn
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.
I still think they should sell Rareware to Nintendo. The fact that so many of those excellent oldschool games are stuck in IP limbo is a tragedy. Can’t play them unless you emulate them, or are lucky enough to find original hardware.
Rare collection exists and is fantastic.
Tons of rare games are also in Nintendo’s online subscription especially N64 including Goldeneye.At least they gave us a teaser for what Conker 2 would be like.
well, R.I.P. Elder Scrolls 6.
I swear if she also mess up with Mojang…
Mojang must have a pretty strong contract, given how little they messed with Minecraft Java Edition.
Yeah, either that or noticed that Mojang is one of the biggest cows and the community can be pretty harsh if java gets ruined especially considering that most of the youtubers use Java and Minecraft is alive just because of community content
It probably helps that Minecraft prints money; no one wants to be the one that breaks the infinite money machine. I bet though if Minecraft sales slowed then you’d start to see more interference.
Fuck 343 Hasn’t made one good game Even the mcc which is great they needed 10 year for it to be good and even now u still have issue
I will say Halo Infinite did have good gameplay even if the single player story and multiplayer launch was half baked.
Not the worse things to play but well known to have unfixable netcode issue
To be fair though, all the halo games had shit net code but infinite’s was horrible
Wow. This is what happens when you put someone without game industry experience in charge of your game division. Incredibly stupid decisions all around.
Obsidian, we hardly knew ye. 🫡
Bethesda should’ve been merged with obsidian, in my mind that name has way more prestige than Bethesda nowadays
