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Xbox Game Studios + Bethesda + ABK |OT30| Why So Series X|S?
- Thread starter Andrei Rublev
- Start date
- Microsoft OT
It seems there are more titles than those on the list? Grounded and Sniper 5, for example.
These are newly addition ones. Those were added in the initial release.
help me, i've started Fallout 4!
Fallout 76 has doubled its previous peak at launch, damn this show is really pushing Fallout games lol. It's a free weekend for the game plus sales but it also had 6 free weekends before and never broke more than 17k players but it's currently sitting at 46k now.
Finished Harold Halibut, took me ~13 hours. A visual feast, but there are several things that drag down the overall pacing of the game.
First is the amount of fetch quests or exchanges of dialogue from person A -> B -> back to A. This is present throughout the game and it is front loaded heavily in the first few hours. If you've played Pentiment, it's comparable to running back and forth between Tassing and the Abbey to varying degrees depending on the task at hand. In a vacuum, this is to be expected with the type of game it is, but things take longer than they should when they compound with other issues.
Second is the bespoke animations for various things and pathfinding for interactions. The pathfinding is more of a minor issue comparitively, but it's always present. Since Harold needs to be in a specific spot whenever he does anything besides walking/jogging, it can take an extra moment to navigate to the correct position (similar to Disco Elysium). The animations are a bigger issue for certain things (like the Tube you use to travel between locations) simply because of how often they happen and how long they take.
Third is inconsistency of some decisions. Certain tasks or conversations advance an in-game day. Some days they will simply end it for you and transition into the next day, whereas others you are made to manually travel back and sleep in your bed yourself for seemingly no reason.
I played on PC and the game froze on me twice, and I softlocked once during an interaction (which reloading fixed).
On the positive side, obviously the visuals are the star of the show. There are several characters that have their own interesting story vignettes and the narrative is suitably weird. Overall I'm glad to have experienced the game despite the flaws.
First is the amount of fetch quests or exchanges of dialogue from person A -> B -> back to A. This is present throughout the game and it is front loaded heavily in the first few hours. If you've played Pentiment, it's comparable to running back and forth between Tassing and the Abbey to varying degrees depending on the task at hand. In a vacuum, this is to be expected with the type of game it is, but things take longer than they should when they compound with other issues.
Second is the bespoke animations for various things and pathfinding for interactions. The pathfinding is more of a minor issue comparitively, but it's always present. Since Harold needs to be in a specific spot whenever he does anything besides walking/jogging, it can take an extra moment to navigate to the correct position (similar to Disco Elysium). The animations are a bigger issue for certain things (like the Tube you use to travel between locations) simply because of how often they happen and how long they take.
Third is inconsistency of some decisions. Certain tasks or conversations advance an in-game day. Some days they will simply end it for you and transition into the next day, whereas others you are made to manually travel back and sleep in your bed yourself for seemingly no reason.
I played on PC and the game froze on me twice, and I softlocked once during an interaction (which reloading fixed).
On the positive side, obviously the visuals are the star of the show. There are several characters that have their own interesting story vignettes and the narrative is suitably weird. Overall I'm glad to have experienced the game despite the flaws.
AGREED.
Nowadays, everyone understands how pervasive corporate mismanagement can be but regardless, how can so many studios (industry-wide, really) have such fucked up timelines?
We acknowledge that game development is hard and unpredictable, isn't the ability to not be able to forecast into a 3 month window a direct consequence of that?
Sorry, I didn't see any reference to 3 month window in the thread- I might've commented out of turn.
Into a 3 month window? Sure, it's reasonable to assume that's tough to forecast given how difficult development is.
I'm more referring to all the non-technology related reasons for how difficult game development is- which, let's be honest, are bound to be mostly the result of corporate mismanagement.
imo it's the size of the games, basically. AAA game dev (and even indie/AA game dev sometimes, really) takes 5 to 6 years thanks to rising expectations in visuals, polish and more, and when you count so much stuff that can happen in between (layoffs, development hell, reboots, scope creep or changes), well... this is the result. in the case of xbox tho it's self inflicted since they release stuff rushed anyway in Q3/Q4 that could be delayed for Q1/Q2 of the next year sometimes. mostly talking about the focus on Q3/Q4 here :P
Yeah, I think the discussion came from them not being able to consistently release games at a quarterly cadence.
Definitely a lot of non-technical things that can go wrong in game development. As someone that has had the misfortune of being in management, I am probably a little more lenient on that stuff than most lol.
it's still funny to me that fallout 4 was criticized for the voiced protagonist, me style dialogue wheel, shot reverse shot direction, and then Starfield went back to the older style and then it got criticized for it as well lol.
Where do they go from here
Where do they go from here
I always liked Skyrim's the most with how it naturally blended in with gameplay, though I don't really mind the Starfield way either.
It was nice to talk to NPCs in Whiterun or some other city and clearly see everyone else around you moving around.
I don't have a problem with either voiced or voiceless protagonists. I would just change the camera angle during dialogue. The static close up is a little bland. This is one area I felt Starfield was a step down from Fallout 4.
Even something like KotOR on the original Xbox—which had a voiceless protagonist—using a shot-reverse-shot that was pretty effective.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Avowed appears to be doing something like this.
Even something like KotOR on the original Xbox—which had a voiceless protagonist—using a shot-reverse-shot that was pretty effective.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Avowed appears to be doing something like this.
Do they? I can't remember the last time Nintendo had a quarter go by without multiple new releases, even if it's a "slow period" for them.
Even in 2020, where their schedule was clearly negatively impacted by covid, they had multiple full-price releases in each quarter.
Nintendo hasn't had a gap since the launch of the Switch. They've consistently had a first party release nearly every single month for the past 7 years (and sometimes multiple games a month), which is insane to think about. And there's no indication of that slowing down any time soon.
It's not like neither of those can be done well. Both methods have in fact been done well, many, many times.
The problem with the "they release games when they're ready, they can't predict when" thing as an excuse here is that that would actually suggest a world where Microsoft does have a consistent stream of output throughout the year, with huge games like Halo and Forza sometimes randomly dropping in Q2. If the release dates are being assigned simply based on when each individual project happens to be ready, Microsoft shouldn't have a glut of games in Q4 and a spartan rest of the year, but time and time again, that's what they do.
So either Microsoft can forecast games and plan for a holiday release window for them, or (and this might be more likely) they're much more likely to decide that a game is "ready" when it's going to release in the holiday season. I think it's probably a little of column A, a little of column B.
Nah lol
I still think it's possible they find a way to make traveling to planets within the same system more seamless/less menu and loading screen-y. We'll see.
I really hope we go to the Va'ruun home world in Shattered Space or future expansions. Actually, I wonder if when they talk about Shattered Space if they will do a roadmap for future expansions like they did for Fallout 4 (maybe with a season pass?).
Oh, space is already shattered, alright. With all the load times and whatnot. 👀
Excited to get back into Starfield at some point. I stopped maybe 60 hours in and beat the main story once. Not a huge fan of the way the exploration works compared to their previous games. I feel like there are tons of quest I have not done simply because I haven't found them.
I want to see Va'runn city so much in a dlc pls give it to us
I'm stoked to go back to Starfield. I've purposefully saved some achievements to do when there's more content.
I'm weirdly excited to level up planet scanning and just map/explore every star system to rank up.
I'm weirdly excited to level up planet scanning and just map/explore every star system to rank up.
As I understood it, Bethesda said that there would be more expansions besides Shattered Space , right? They're really going to have to do them if they want Starfield to last so many years.
if Dragon Age hits this year i'll be in RPG heaven, along with Avowed
Yes that sounds like my relationship with Destiny. We all have that game.
They called Shattered Space "the first story expansion" so you can extrapolate from there, but they've never explicitly said "there will be more after Shattered Space."
I suppose plans could have changed post-launch but I doubt it. More is very likely.
Finished Harold Halibut, took me ~13 hours. A visual feast, but there are several things that drag down the overall pacing of the game.
First is the amount of fetch quests or exchanges of dialogue from person A -> B -> back to A. This is present throughout the game and it is front loaded heavily in the first few hours. If you've played Pentiment, it's comparable to running back and forth between Tassing and the Abbey to varying degrees depending on the task at hand. In a vacuum, this is to be expected with the type of game it is, but things take longer than they should when they compound with other issues.
Second is the bespoke animations for various things and pathfinding for interactions. The pathfinding is more of a minor issue comparitively, but it's always present. Since Harold needs to be in a specific spot whenever he does anything besides walking/jogging, it can take an extra moment to navigate to the correct position (similar to Disco Elysium). The animations are a bigger issue for certain things (like the Tube you use to travel between locations) simply because of how often they happen and how long they take.
Third is inconsistency of some decisions. Certain tasks or conversations advance an in-game day. Some days they will simply end it for you and transition into the next day, whereas others you are made to manually travel back and sleep in your bed yourself for seemingly no reason.
I played on PC and the game froze on me twice, and I softlocked once during an interaction (which reloading fixed).
On the positive side, obviously the visuals are the star of the show. There are several characters that have their own interesting story vignettes and the narrative is suitably weird. Overall I'm glad to have experienced the game despite the flaws.
Thanks for the notes, might give it a shot at some point.
Yeah, I'd wager we get at least two chunky expansions, and possibly three.
An expansion in 2024, 2025, and 2026 would take us to a 2027 release for Elder Scrolls VI quite nicely, no? :D
I feel like they'll go the Fallout 4 route and have like two big expansions and then 2-3 smaller things in between.
I don't think they're gonna go ham (at least, any more ham than they have before) with DLC because they gotta get to TES VI.
We just came off of a year where they announced a bunch of games forecasted to hit in H1 2023 that didn't make it so it definitely isn't that they planned for a holiday window for those games. I do think they might be more inclined to ship something 'good enough' in the holidays like you imply and there are some games that actually target and hit that window like Forza Horizon (which always launches around the same time).
I think it might make sense for big games that you can use to push hardware/bundles but even games like AoE, Pentiment, Flight Simulator, Battletoads (and so on) have hit in the back half and I have a hard time thinking these games see any sizeable boost from that period.
Yeah, I could see that. I wonder if they feel like doing the "smaller things" gives them the same pull that it used to, though? They're clearly not feeling like they need to have a new content drop for the game every three or six months or we'd have one already. If the shift is to bigger, perhaps annual content drops, maybe they'll do a third big expansion instead of the smaller things. Even if that expansion is a bit of a grab bag.
Right. There's really no reason to release a game like Pentiment during the holiday season, even though as a huge Pentiment fan I did like that they released it on Xbox Day. It probably would have gotten more attention if it released during a less busy time.
Yeah I dunno. Maybe what would have been "small DLCs" (like the workshop stuff for Fallout 4) will just be free updates and they'll stick to the big story DLCs for paid stuff.
I think they probably thought that Grounded + Pentiment would at least give them something in that fall. But yeah, not ideal for Pentiment (worked out for Grounded though).
The only thing i wish they would add or experiment with is adding proper cutscenes, i know it's not their style but i would love it to be added some day.