They haven’t owned Bethesda for very long so I think it’s fair that they haven’t released a F:NV successor yet. I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”
Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.
> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”
In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.
> Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.
Blizzard needs focus, though time will tell if Microsoft can help with that.
Overwatch is a mess right now. The release of Overwatch 2 has gone poorly. The balance is poor. They only do patches like twice a quarter, so it feels like they always have to make very conservative changes because who knows how this change interacts with the 30 other ones in the patch notes. It means heroes that are broken or unplayable tend to stay so for months on end. The pro league is in shambles in the best case, and dead in the worst and most likely. They've been losing players. PvE never really launched, and now they're charging extra for the shitty scraps that came out of it.
Diablo 4 is basically dead. 5 million players on launch, 300k last month. They're down to ~5% of the players they started with a year after launch. The core gameplay was not fun, and I can't believe no one noticed it forever ago.
WoW is WoW, but it's stale. The most exciting thing they've done in ages was re-releasing old versions of the game. They're basically just waiting to get upended by something actually innovative.
At this point, I love Blizzard's characters and worlds, but I think their games are D tier. They have the half-finished feel of a Bethesda game, but they don't have any of the fun. They don't resemble the same Blizzard that originally released SC2 and WoW.
> In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.
I've got friends that go deep into Bethesda releases on launch and they all agree that Starfield was much more polished than Skyrim or Fallout 4 (or Fallout 76) at launch. They are convinced that Microsoft must have actually attacked Bethesda with QA resources.
> > I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”
> In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.
Jedi Survivor has been out for 6 months and it's still got major problems. Imagine being in the middle of a saber battle and the game stops responding to your attack key/button. I've paused the game, gone into Control Panel, tested that my controller is still good, gone back to the game, it just won't respond to the command. And then suddenly it will start again. Same with any button, they randomly fail. And it's got to compile all the shaders EVERY time you launch the game, no caching. All AAA game studios push out broken games on launch.
> And it's got to compile all the shaders EVERY time you launch the game, no caching.
Man, I've never been happier to use Steam on Linux.
Since every game's shaders are transpiled to Vulkan, the Steam Vulkan shader cache works for games with this kind of BS problem even if they were written for DirectX
> Diablo 4 is basically dead. 5 million players on launch, 300k last month. They're down to ~5% of the players they started with a year after launch. The core gameplay was not fun, and I can't believe no one noticed it forever ago.
Diablo 4 was launched less than ~4 months ago. Feels much longer. lol.
As has been said, these companies are a shell of what they used to be. The real meat were the sublime developers and craftsmen that are no longer in those companies.
WoW oscillates. It gets stale, then becomes fun again, and repeats. It's been going and actively developed for 20 years, which is incredible; if that cycle keeps operating for another 10 years for any reason it would be incredible.
> They haven’t owned Bethesda for very long so I think it’s fair that they haven’t released a F:NV successor yet.
Word on the street is that the principals at the top of Obsidian and Bethesda still hate each other, Microsoft keeps them at arms distance, and Obsidian isn't in a rush to do a new Fallout game even if "Daddy Microsoft" forced Bethesda to share its toys with the other studios (just like "Daddy Interplay" used to do, which is part of what led to the mess of Obsidian, inXile, and Bethesda all having crazy drama with each other before Microsoft became the new Interplay of RPG company owners).
I think that Obsidian's Outer Worlds was a very good F:NV successor. It had most of the hallmarks of the Fallout universe, just tweaked with a bit more space sci-fi and a weirder sense of humor. One of the interesting things about Starfield to me is how often I'm comparing it to Outer Worlds (and how often it feels like Outer Worlds was the better more coherent story/RPG in a similar way to F:NV fans like to compare Fallout 3/4 on either side of F:NV).
See having completed Outer Worlds and also comparing it to Starfield, I’ve enjoyed both but Starfield feels much bigger while Outer Worlds feels smaller but deeper.
The sheer scale of planets on Starfield runs pretty well.
I’d love to have those two teams combined again for a great game.
Arguably the teams aren't combined since they have such disparate priorities/preferences. Obsidian wants to go deep and Bethesda wants to go wide and shallow, those are the kinds of games they both prefer to build. (Or at least that's how they seem from outside perspectives.) It certainly would be incredible to see some games try for more interesting compromises of "both", but it's also incredibly hard to project manage and budget and build if you are trying to go both deep and wide at the same time. Maybe Microsoft will find a way to do it at some point.
(As something of an aside/tangent, as a failed game developer I've always wished for the ability to "scout" locations in other people's games. Hollywood keeps a number of backlots of standing sets that just about anyone can rent to use. Plus real world cities can be shot by anyone looking to fill out the right permits. But games still rarely to never "share backlots" and game players and reviewers/critics still generally "punish" games that do [compare reviews of Saints Row 3 and Saints Row 4, for instance]. Imagine if movies got bad reviews every time they were set in New York. "Can you believe yet another movie set in New York? How uncreative," said no one ever. It could be incredible if as a game story writer I could "shoot" a deep story somewhere in Starfield. Sure mods exist and sort of fill that role some of the time, but mods still have that too strongly bound association with the parent game [can't sell it standalone] and monetization for mods is still complicated and players/reviewers/critics still look down on their noses for mods. "Imagine if this modder had built their own game for this story how much better it could have been?" That story might not exist to be told without "sets and costumes" to easily borrow as a foundation. I don't have any easy solutions to this conflict between wide and deep games, but I do think more access and better reviews for people trying to write deep stories in someone else's wide sandbox could be a start.)
> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”
The rumor mill suggests the opposite is true. Bethesda intended to ship the game over a year ago and Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk.
>Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk.
I wish it was the next Cyberpunk. I've gone back and forth between Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 / Phantom Liberty and Starfield, and I like Cyberpunk 2077 so much better. It looks better, it has a way more captivating story, it has so much more interesting characters and it just plays much nicer.
On release, CyberPunk 2077 was so bad that CD Projekt issued an apology and offered refunds. The previous poster's entire point was delaying Starfield to make sure it didn't end up like CyberPunk 1.0. I don't get the comparison between Starfield 1.0 and CyberPunk 2.0.
To be clear, you don't find it interesting, which is fine, but it certainly was released in a better state than CyberPunk 1.0, which was the only point made. Are you just telling us you don't like Starfield?
You forget that Cyberpunk was absolutely lambasted at launch. The blow back was aggressive enough that Sony/MS/Valve allowed no-questions-asked refunds well after the normal period. The game was even pulled from PSN after launch completely until it was in a betters state. It was a shitshow.
Starfield launch has been bug-free and majestic in comparison.
No, I remember the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 pretty well. Been playing since day one after all. But no matter how bug-free the Starfield launch has been, it still hasn't been a great launch. On Steam, Starfield was only sitting at 84k concurrent players a month after its release. Cyberpunk 2077, despite being lambasted heavily, was sitting at 145k players a month into its release. Starfield is also now the lowest-rated Bethesda game available on Steam [1]. The waning player count and mediocre scores would suggest that no matter how few bugs your game has, if the game isn't interesting, people just aren't going to be interested in it.
Re: user review score - user reviews on Metacritic/etc are honestly almost meaningless now for any game that does anything to annoy anyone. Starfield pissed off the legion of sony loyalists and has been getting review bombed continuously since well before launch. Dog piles gain traction.
I'm not saying Starfield is the perfect game or has no problems, just that 'worst launch than cyberpunk' is simply insane and revisionist.
Yeah, it wasn't. It was split between Steam, GOG, Stadia, PlayStation 4 (one of the best-selling consoles of all times), Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (the best-selling console of its generation) and Xbox Series. Starfield on the other hand is split between Steam and PC Xbox and Xbox Series (which has like half the unit sales of the PS5). I don't get why you would argue that Starfield is "more split up" when it's a console exclusive and Cyberpunk 2077 was as multi-platform as it could be.
The best argument you can make is that it's more popular than the numbers would suggest because it was available for "free" – but there's no numbers to back that up since Microsoft doesn't publish them, and usually companies don't publish numbers that make them look bad (look up when they stopped publishing Xbox console sales).
What, six months after release? How many players did Starfield have six months after release?
>user reviews on Metacritic/etc are honestly almost meaningless now for any game that does anything to annoy anyone. Starfield pissed off the legion of sony loyalists and has been getting review bombed continuously since well before launch. Dog piles gain traction.
Do you have any data to back that up or is this just something that you feel deep up in your ass?
I'll stop replying after this because it's gone outside the realm of a sane conversation, but...
> Yeah, it wasn't. It was split between Steam, GOG, Stadia, PlayStation 4 (one of the best-selling consoles of all times), Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (the best-selling console of its generation) and Xbox Series. Starfield on the other hand is split between Steam and PC Xbox and Xbox Series (which has like half the unit sales of the PS5). I don't get why you would argue that Starfield is "more split up" when it's a console exclusive and Cyberpunk 2077 was as multi-platform as it could be.
You're conflating irrelevances. You're talking specifically about Steam player count. Cyberpunk on PC was Steam and Epic. Both at same price. At launch, Starfield on PC at launch was split between Steam (70usd) and XBox App (0usd for ~30m GP subs, or ~16/mo). Of course GP will take a bigger chunk sales from Starfield as if you don't expect to play a game forever, it's cheaper to buy GamePass and play it for 4 months than to buy it on Steam.
Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.