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.
Sadly the only people they want to make happy are their shareholders while they rape the industry.
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.
I am surprised they actually didn’t see it. When gamepass was introduced, it seemed like insanity - how is $10 subscription with access to $60 titles is going to pay off, this makes no sense. Well… It didn’t.
Yep.
It’s also about control. Maybe it didn’t start that way, but Xbox absolutely wanted to get people into their ecosystem with gamepass and the deals, and then keep them there.
I’m so tired of these shitty underhanded practices.
I just want to buy a PC/console/handheld and then be able to go and purchase a game that I OWN. Whether physical or digital, the fact that ownership is even a question when we have hundreds of ways to verify digital ownership, is insane.
These companies built a shitty world and they’re finally paying a slight bit for it.
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.
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.
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 an FPS games that feels almost nothing like Call of Duty.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t worry: their CEO was answering support calls. I’m sure things will be fine.
(Doomed.)
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.
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.
well, R.I.P. Elder Scrolls 6.
“I wonder what will happen if we put all of our eggs in the same basket?” - Famous basket-dropper.
closing down the division. seems like the head of xbox is there to do just that.
I’m keeping this one
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.
Wow. This is what happens when you put someone without game industry experience in charge of your game division. Incredibly stupid decisions all around.
Activision in charge of Halo? That’s a deathblow if ever I heard one.
Post bungie halo has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion, the series has survived the last 16 years on reputation alone.
Post Halo Bungie hasn’t fared much better…
I enjoyed destiny and destiny 2 but you could definitely feel them slipping, especially the fumble where they straight up removed parts of destiny 2.
Tried marathon on a free weekend and it was fine but there are so many other games that are better than fine and doing similar things. The only thing it had going for it was the bungie gunplay which is still as solid as ever.
Them removing stuff from Destiny 2 is why I stopped playing… Took me awhile to get the expansion and by the time I did they removed the content that expansion added, making it impossible for me to catch up with the lore and wasting my money.
Halo infinite was pretty huge though, wasn’t it? Granted one being the only stand out isn’t saying much.
Infinite was a solid base that they just didn’t do anything with. The campaign felt incomplete and the multiplayer took years to get to the number of features that Halo 3 launched with, but the bones were good. If it had launched in a more complete state and the new campaigns were actually developed, it probably would have been great. However, Microsoft’s stubborn insistence on only using contractors and only for six months at a time made the whole concept untenable. For that matter, it’s driving the entire company into the ground.
This is what I was thinking. The short term contactor thing is also why the new Forza had the exact same issues during development and launch. Anyone with any real working knowledge is kicked to the curb as they are hitting their stride so no wonder why features are broken or missing and everything feels disconnected. The fact that they are managing ‘important’ IP with temps shows how much they care and if that isn’t changing, the corporate restructure is for nothing.
It was…ok. it had a good reception but no staying power because it was ok at best. They stopped working on updates too, i think a year into the 10 year project or whatever it was supposed to be.
I haven’t beat the story because a well-known bug with a door not opening near the end of a mission fucked me and my co-op friend, and we didn’t want to do the last 30 minutes all over again.
There are a lot of bugs in infinite - enemies not spawning (breaking missions), doors, the LOD being the minimum even though I am standing on the ground (so in addition to it looking like crayola ass, physical objects like walls don’t align with the visual representation… during a shootout… or a mission…)… and this was a year or so after launch. There are other issues too but it’s been a couple years and I’m just angry at this point. Half-assed if I’ve ever seen it.
I spent thousands of hours in CE and around a thousand in 2, on pc. MCC was exciting, since I finally got to play 3, ODST, and Reach. 4 is awful, and with the state of Infinite (and apparently 5), it’s no wonder they are recycling the good games. But it’s definitely over, like a washed-up rock band or a one-hit-wonder singer. And it’s all Microsoft’s fault.
the LOD being the minimum even though I am standing on the ground
This is why I didn’t finish it. Weirdest thing about this bug? It bakes into the save. Seems to be hardware dependent, too, I only saw a few other reports of it and they were all on AMD cards from what I could tell.
I looked it up and asked about it, and the community consensus? “It’s not a bug, your hardware is too weak!” Yeah, okay, I’ll just go play some fucking RoboCop Rogue City.
Interesting - my friend is on an amd card (don’t remember the model, want to say 6700/XT) and I’m on the 7900 XTX.
At this point a deathblow would be a kindness for the Halo franchise.
It literally doesnt matter. Halo died with Bungie and Bungie died with Halo.
On the bright side, Activision is quite capable of making the exact same game over and over again and consistently. Their knowledge of beating the dead horse is borderline necromancy. Can’t say the same for 343.
Tbf if you were to give Halo back to Bungie they too would fuck it up nowadays.
Yeah Bungie today is a shell of their former selves. They just did a whole video basically saying “We know we suck, we’re sorry. We’ll get better and make better games.” but I ain’t holding my breath.
Oh it is straight up necromancy and Black Ops might be necrophilia.
“what if we did halo [iteration], but with zombies? what do you mean they already have that? they did it when?! great, how the fuck do we innovate now? can’t we just add shooting some brown people and call it halo: space black ops?” -Activision ceo, tomorrow
If you already done zombie, what left is really alien, simple as that.
Mummies. They’re zombies and brown people rolled into one.
Halo Black Ops
That was ODST
ODST Black Ops
Activision doesn’t only publish Call of Duty though. They publish all kinds of games: Sekiro, the Tony Hawk games, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, etc.
Way more potential than what 343 had. I mean, 343 was purposefully NOT hiring former Bungie-era Halo employees. The important ones, like Marcus Lehto, Marty ODonnell, heck they only brought Joe Staten to get Infinite “back on track” and then promptly kicked him to the curb too. 343 definitely deserved this earlier, I am gonna be honest.
This isn’t publishing. This is development. Halo will be an Activision developed game.
The games you mentioned ring in my head as mid-2000s highlights, with nothing more than blatant money grabs published in the last decade. Not very indicative of a healthy studio imo. They may have once been capable of turning out good games, but that was roughly in the era
343 was turning out good games toogood Halo games were being released as wellbut that was roughly in the era 343 was turning out good games too
What, HALO 4?
Halo 1-3 were 2001-2007, which counts as early- to mid-2000s. Halo 4 was 2012, in the early 2010s
Bungie made 1 2 3 ODST Reach, 343 made 4 5 Infinite. 343 is established to handle the IP when bungie separated from microsoft.
Appreciate the correction; I got lost in the publisher shell game. Updated my original statement to the intent behind it, not me being wrong about who published the games lol
Sekiro is the exception to that, but that’s more on FromSoft than it is on Activision, to the extent that it actually hadn’t registered in my mind that Activision was involved with that game at all.
Yeah exactly FromSoft is turning out bangers, and somehow Activision is involved? Maybe just to the extent that they aren’t involved so can’t fuck anything up?
My point is that Activision isn’t a studio. It’s a publisher. I read Activision said they are forming a new studio for Halo.
I mean, I didn’t bring up all of Activisions classic games like Pitfall, just the most recent games they have published since those are most relevant to the topic.
“the era 343 was turning out good games too”
Ok but that never really happened. Ensemble made Halo Wars and Creative Assembly made the sequel which were decent IMO (the first being better IMO). Every other game with the Halo brand under 343 was garbage. Forget about Spartan Strike and Spartan Assault? 343s first game was Halo CE Anniversary, which was horrendously bad, so I suppose it is poetic in a way that Halo Studios, which only survived long enough to drop a single game, would die with yet another rehash of Halo CE.
Except for maybe Fireteam Raven, only because I never had the chance to play it, 343 never had an “era of making good games.” Halo 2A was pretty good but it launched in the very broken MCC which took them years to fix.
4,5, and Infinite were the absolute low points of Halo, with Infinite being the best of the three only because of the art direction. But they are all far below Bungie-era Halo games.
CODification here it comes. Couldn’t be worse than the current state of Halo though?
Halo became what it is now because they tried to turn it into CoD, so it couldn’t be better either
I would argue that it probably does give better odds for it at Activision. They already have CoD. They don’t need to turn Halo into CoD. They can just use Halo to do something new.
I think I remember that they made a CoD with like mech suits or something, and a lot more movement mechanics, and it wasn’t received well. That’s basically what Halo is. Now they can go fully into that without CoD players complaining that it isn’t CoD.
I don’t have much faith in this, but I do think there’s better odds for a better Halo with Activision probably. 343 didn’t get it. Activision may not, but doing something new has to be better than continuing to fuck things up over and over.
343 has been trying to do “something new” (chasing trends, mostly) every time they didn’t remaster an existing game, it’s not necesssarily going to work out.
At this point Halo is just a brand, a franchise, a trademark to be slapped onto whatever the IP owners want to do with a popularity boost - the story (/ lore / narrative) has been brought to hell and back and to hell again, and the gameplay has been bent so much with each title that it doesn’t really have an identity anymore either.
CoD players won’t like it because it’s not CoD, Halo players will play it for a few hours because At Least It’s Kinda Fun I Guess™, everyone else will be like “Halo? Like, the one Jesus had?”, and whatever contractors Microsoft/Activision will hire won’t be given enough time, space or resources to cook something that is more than mediocre.
I mean something new as in let someone else have a try. 343 has been failing constantly. Letting them keep trying probably isn’t going to solve the issue. It’s worth trying literally anything else than having them keep at it.
I may be in the minority, but I think Halo should just be allowed to die.
shrek_not_gonna_happen.gif
Probably, but that’s not happening anytime soon.
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.
Meanwhile black isle /interplay reborn
Obsidian, we hardly knew ye. 🫡
