Rare management wanted to make Kinect games. During that period, 4J released remasters of Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, and Perfect Dark. Then Rare was given total freedom to make whatever they wanted, and that was Sea of Thieves.
Yup. This is way past the point of getting ridiculous.
Rare's prototype team is around 5-6 people, it was lead by Louise O'Connor (Conker) not some big second team. SOT was still a very early unity prototype 7 months after Rivals shipped, they clearly had barely any pre-pro time on SOT before rivals shipped if any. That team was the Rare Replay team which was a small team working with outside teams.
We Happy Few is an incredible game everyone should play. I guess it depends on your definition of "must-play".
Rare did that to themselves. Again, it's the fault of Microsoft giving its studios too much freedom. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
Some blame can be placed at MS's door, but it was apathy more than meddling. Microsoft were very apathetic towards Perfect Dark: Core because they didn't see the value in any game that had any similarity to Halo whatsoever. MS gave Rare a great deal of freedom as the years went on, but there were tensions there around 2006-ish. Especially since PD: Zero was pushed out the door as a 360 launch title in 2005 and it simply wasn't ready. While they were letting PD: Core (intended as a hybrid of Perfect dark and Deus Ex) die of neglect, they were turning down Crytek's offer to give them Crysis as an exclusive. Crysis would have proven a far, far greater asset than Ryse did, but MS were too shortsighted to see that. MS's fixation on Halo resulted into the whole "Halo+Gears+Forza" problem.
The state of the game at launch doesn't really matter. STALKER is one of the greatest videogames ever made and THQ shipped it as soon as they were capable of speedrunning the main storyline with a crash. The responsibility of a publisher like MS is to ensure the games are polished at release. (The launch state of State of Decay 2 is definitely an area where MS deserve criticism, incidentally.) They didn't publish We Happy Few. We Happy Few has issues that stem from its constrained budget and ambition, but as an overall narrative-driven game it's simply incredible.
Cmon. Are the mods just going to turn a blind eye to the Microsoft shitposts? I sincerely hope this is a joke.
This post sums up how I feel. PS4 has been my primary platform this gen but I can't deny the moves MS have been making. Their first party output doesn't look as impressive as Sony's because there's just not as much volume as Sony, but I think they're going to get there with time.
This has always been untrue, considering you see four players in the unveil trailer. But here is Kamiya's second in command calling it false on this forum:
synaesthesiaJP said:
Well that's different from saying they were the best first party publisher but it's still incredibly hyperbolic
To be clear, that comment was my attempt at sarcasm.
This. It was a brutal transition akin to the shift between 2D and 3D in the 90s that many British game studios failed to survive. Rare's N64 games were made by small, intimate teams that focused on good chemistry with some rather harsh crunch at times. But once the HD era came along, it all began to buckle. I think the biggest problem was that developers simply didn't have the luxury of making games that looked "dated". The graphical arms race was so destructive. Nintendo sidestepped it with the Wii, but everyone else was left out in the cold.
GOTY incoming.
Phil Spencer was the head of MS 1st party from 2009 to 2014, he's had plenty of time to improve it, but it got worse. They are finally out of the "Mattrick (and his) Era" though, so guess we'll see, I doubt they'll have another Kinect type derailment.
