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Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

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Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#161

Post by wredue »

hbn wrote: post #103

Just yesterday there was a poll going around on Twitter of which of the big 3 gaming companies, Nintendo, Sony, and MS is the "least bad" or something like that, and I saw a lot of people saying Microsoft. I figured they'd do something stupid soon to remind everyone how Microsoft operates, but didn't think it would be so soon! I can't believe these studio acquisitions still aren't being blocked. At what point will th…

How on earth is MS the “least bad” in the wake of this massive anti-competitive practice of just buying up studios?

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#162

Post by Apocryphon »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #149
Apocryphon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bethesda is also notorious for taking forever to make Elder Scrolls games. Skyrim came out in 2011 and has not had a proper sequel since. First-person RPG also isn't exactly a glutted sub-genre. Neither of the examples fit the phenomenon they're talking about!

I wouldn't say notorious. It's only become that way with the latest games. Morrowind to Oblivion was ~5 years. Oblivion to Skyrim was ~5 years. Fallout New Vegas (Obsidian) to FO4 (BGS) was 5 years. It's really only since then that game development times have skyrocketed as much as they have.

That's fair. The ancestral post's claim of "every six months" is still ludicrous, just not as cartoonishly so. It's not like Bethesda RPGs are licensed pro sports games or Assassin's Creed.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#163

Post by Log_out_ »

maxrecursion wrote: post #81
DannyPage wrote: post #3

Hi-Fi Rush was a fantastic game, won major awards, showed off the promise of XBox Game Pass… and for their efforts their studio has been shut down. There have multiple instances of this in just the past few weeks; are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else? And those games either take a lot of rotating studios and a long development cycle to rele…

Game development is in a really weird place. Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics Indie games are awesome right now, but they don't have the budgets to produce AAA games. So there is a huge gap. Innovative indie games with cool, new gameplay concepts, but always simple or retro graphics, and AAA games with shiny graphics on the ot…

Everyone waits for AAAi to arrive so that indy gaming can have that polished shell.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#164

Post by schlauerfox »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #97
somenameforme wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to convert your TV to a PC console. Just grab a HDMI/DisplayPort cable and some USB cables for controllers. Wire your TV up, start Steam Big Picture mode, done. You now have a console with a zillion awesome games in the exact same place you had the console connected. Here's [1] the Steam page for split screen games. Currently there are 934. Can't go wrong with Earth Defense Force! And no you don't ne…

I'd really love cables from my office to my livingroom.

WiFi 6 reaches absurd speeds, no cables required.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#165

Post by masklinn »

ClimaxGravely wrote: post #144
masklinn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dave the diver is definitely not an "AA" game. It's so indie looking it was nominated for multiple indie awards (even if it's not an actual indie game). DRG is not AA either, according to its homepage GhostShip has 32 people 4 years after launching it . Same for Spiritfairer, it was built by a team of 16.

I personally would consider 10-40 person teams to potentially qualify as AA. Often we also outsource code/art so the team size can sometimes be misleading. I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO. It also kind of depends how they spend the money. EDIT : After some further reflection, From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA…

> I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO.

Which is not really useful, because we usually don't have budgets.

Team size x development time might be an approximation for it, but if you assume an average salary of 80k and a development time of 30 months, by your reckoning AA is a team of 50... which is basically the low end of what's normally considered an AA team size.

> From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA games get so large

Team Meat is just two people, four if you include the producer and the composer, I would very much assume they knew each other fairly well, but there's no meaningful interpretation of AA where Super Meat Boy is an AA game.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#166

Post by eropple »

utensil4778 wrote: post #84
vel0city wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Condition Zero and Source released in 2004. Global Offensive released in 2012, eight years later. Counterstrike 2 released in September 2023, eleven years later . Counterstrike isn't the game to point to for re-releasing the same thing over and over.

Counternite, fort of duty, whatever. I care so little for this class of game that I can't be bothered to spend the brain space to keep them separate. Not saying they're good or bad, I'm just not interested in the slightest.

If you can't be bothered to understand the differences, then criticizing consumers for perceiving those differences and being willing to buy them is a real interesting spot to land on.

I don't play those games, either, but I at least understand the proposition that they present.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#167

Post by anonbanker »

chownie wrote: post #139
utensil4778 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counternite, fort of duty, whatever. I care so little for this class of game that I can't be bothered to spend the brain space to keep them separate. Not saying they're good or bad, I'm just not interested in the slightest.

The classic description for this is "being out of touch" with the given media. Not sure if it's something to be proud of.

There is nothing more freeing than being "out of touch" with media. I got rid of my TV in 2000, and my life improved dramatically. I stopped playing AAA in 2009, and my life improved dramatically. Indie games, specifically the Godot dev scene, is where the real innovation in gaming is happening. When AAA implodes, you'll learn what you were missing all along.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#168

Post by glenstein »

Dystakruul wrote: post #129
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside of this discussion: I do not get people who like Outer Worlds. I am a huge fan of New Vegas, I was so pumped for that game, and it was so, so bland. The combat damn near put me to sleep, the writing was atrociously heavy-handed and made me think the authors thought I was a complete fucking idiot (and I agree with them!), and the moment-to-moment gameplay was just thoroughly, thoroughly unsatisfying. I kno…

just a note for inattentive readers: Outer Wilds from GP's comment is a very different game compared to Outer Worlds which the parent comment mentions. (it doesn't help that they were both released in the same year, 2019) Outer Wilds: action-adventure, open world mystery game with puzzles Outer Worlds: action role-playing game, open world first-person-shooter (similar to the Fallout games)

I mentioned both in my comment. I spaced them out in my list on purpose although perhaps that contributed to confusion.

There indeed entirely distinct games, but you can make a case that both fall into the AA category.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#169

Post by jerf »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #102
jerf wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immersive Sim + "I have to keep up with the latest AAA game standards for graphics" probably is doomed. We really need to give them permission to not have to be up to that graphics standard. Permission to not have to be fully voiced would be nice too. Right now they're in an ugly place where they're still awfully large for an indie or AA studio, but an AAA studio still largely won't make anything that doesn't drive t…

There is no doubt AI won't be used to fix the fully voiced issue. That is such a no-brainer. As to graphics, my favorite games of the past 5 years were average graphics at best. (Subnautica, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Hades... Red Dead 2 ok not that one)

I'm holding out on that one until I see it work. AI voices have certainly reached the point where I don't mind listening to them for a good period of time, and they can match the basic contours of someone's voice, but at the moment they are still missing precisely the fine details a game needs from a voice actor. And I don't know if this is just a matter of a few last tweaks or if it's a case of the last 10% taking 90% of the work. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I'm waiting until I see it before I declare that it's here.

Personally I've nearly entirely bowed out of AAA gaming. The harder they push the graphics the more everything else ends up trashed. It isn't even a lack of effort per se. It's just that if literally everything has to have pristine animations and perfect voice acting and physics-based interactions with its environments, you get less than when all you needed was a 5 frame pixel animation and a funny sound effect for some particular interaction. AI can only cut into the problem there but not solve it until it is essentially not only human-capable, but human-capable in realtime, which is literally getting to holodeck levels of computation.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#170

Post by Xirgil »

jarsin wrote: post #110
bogwog wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. Hardware gives them the ability to create a monopoly on game publishing/distribution, which is why console games have always been so expensive. The platform holder can charge high fees to developers and demand high prices from consumers. That's nothing unique to the game industry. Microsoft has said they're trying to focus more on software, but that focus is on gamepass not games themselves. They wan…

360 + Gears of War was the best time in gaming. Look what they have done to Gears as well. Nobody even knows or hears anything about it anymore.

Microsoft didn't kill Gears of War out of ineptitude or malice. It's just that consumers don't want to play cover shooters anymore. There's no market for the game's core identity. People's tastes have swung hard in the opposite direction, they want movement shooters.
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