Their source is a reporter at Giant Bomb? GameSpot and Giant Bomb are owned by the same company.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have much faith in this remake, but citing the opinion of a guy who works for your sister company doesn’t seem like proper journalism.
It’s terrible journalism. If you skimmed past the first couple short paragraphs, the quotes from Jeff Grub (their “source”) read like he’s an insider at Aspyr or Embracer. In reality, the article is just linking to a 1.5 hour news podcast and quoting the host. The article doesn’t even try to summarize Jeff’s basis for his opinion, and the only quote they have from an actual insider is, essentially, “no comment.”
Look, gaming "scoops", such as they are, boil down to somebody having a friend somewhere that will break NDAs to you on the basis of being your buddy, being somewhat intoxicated, or both. The reason you get much, much looser attribution with people like Grubb or Schreier s that those connections would probably lose their jobs, and for the most part nobody wants that, often including the studios that employ those guys.
But on the flipside, it does mean that you have to take them at their word, and like any long game of telephone that also means you have to take things with a pinch of salt. Things may be lies, the source may just be mistaken, opinions may get passed as facts, things can change later. Rumors are rumors until they aren't rumors.
But that being said, will the vaporware huge triple-A remake that was explicitly struggling during development come out in the middle of the great 2023 game developer purge?
The reason you get much, much looser attribution with people like Grubb or Schreier s that those connections would probably lose their jobs, and for the most part nobody wants that, often including the studios that employ those guys.
Oh, I’m not criticizing Grubb. I’m criticizing the GameSpot article quoting Grubb. I have no opinion on whether Grubb is right, and I certainly don’t expect him to give up sources. I don’t even know whether he has a specific source, or if he was just giving his (no doubt well-informed) opinion on the situation, because I haven’t watched the podcast.
This felt like reading a New York Times article that links to a Washington Post article about some news event, and the NYT article is quoting the WaPo author in the same way that they would quote a witness. It’s just bizarre to me.
Yeah, it's a bit weirder when Gamespot repackages Grubb's take as news, in that it becomes harder to tell whether it's them being coy about "we know a guy who knows a guy" info or if they're just trying to manufacture a click out of something that's unverified.
But then again, we're rating them against Youtube "influencers" and whatnot, so I'm actively shocked that any standards would remain at all these days.
Are they? I know CBS used to own them both but GB got sold on a few years ago, around the time the Giant Bomb guys left (Vinny, Brad, Jeff Gerstmann, etc).
Either way, I’m confused as to how a simple guess from Grubb could be constituted as actual sourced news. What an odd article.
I honestly don’t get it. It’s Bethesda. We know them. We know what Bethesda does. Did people honestly expect something different? Did they delusion themselves into thinking it was going to be different?
The game is exactly as i expected it to be. And I think it great.
Once I changed my mindset to “this map of the solar system is really just like a flat plane in Fallout New Vegas, except with extra steps” then I was able to enjoy it more. I think games like No Mans Sky spoiled people in terms of an engaging space travel mechanic, even though Bethesda was honest from the beginning about there not being transitions into/out of planet atmospheres.
The opening story about joining Constellation was pretty weak though.
Yeah I figured it was going to be a Bethesda game, and those usually frustrate me. I didn’t buy it. Maybe in a couple years when the Ultimate Edition is on sale I’ll try it.
I’m over 100 hours into it and have enjoyed every minute. I had to use mods though to make some aspects manageable tho. Like the UI and some bat files to increase merchants money. Little personal tweaks. Well… A lot of personal tweaks lol
I didn’t expect the game to be the best thing since sliced bread. I expected it to be a Bethesda game in space. That’s exactly what I got and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.
Personally I think Bethesdas approach to their game design is EXTREMELY dated and frustrating. Also they made Fallout 76, one of the most dog shit games I ever played.
They need some new talent making decisions on their games to make them more modern. The problems they have in their games should be inexcusable from a “AAA” studio in 2023.
They’re still using the same engine they’ve used since Morrowind. That’s a big reason their games feel dated. As for Starfield itself it tries to do a lot of things but it doesn’t do anything perfect. Everything it does there are other games that do better.
Yep. I don’t play it either, but it looks great. UE5 can look amazing, but it’s built up from the engine they made for UT in '99. People don’t understand engines.
Apparently you’re not super mad about Skyrim having bugs in 2012 because that was just so unforgivable I’m still mad about it /s
Sadly while I’m sarcastic here this is literally the truth for a lot of people. PS I played Skyrim like 200 hours and saw irritating bugs maybe like 3 times. It didn’t really bother or deter me from playing in any way.
The haters of Bethesda games clearly have never written code. What they are doing in these games is honestly mind-blowing that it could be done so well that the games are actually playable
As a programmer, it isn’t mind blowing. Some of its neat, but pretty much all of it I’ve seen before at least as pieces. It’s also doing a lot worse and less than I’ve seen before too. Bethesda games are not known for their technical capabilities though, so I’m not too bothered by any of the technical stuff. A lot of the design is what bothers me. There’s so much friction for the player that you (or at least me) can never get immersed.
I have played every Bethesda game since Morrowind. Sure it’s a Bethesda game. That’s come in many forms though, and they will say they’ve learned lessons but continue to repeat them. For example, they said they learned their lesson with the “yes, no, sarcastic yes, more information” dialogue wheel. In Starfield it’s technically gone, but dialogue is functionally identical. No one complained because it was on a wheel, it’s because it didn’t provide options.
Bethesda has gone through many forms, so “a Bethesda game” means different things to different people. Starfield they advertised as a return to form (as in, back to the classic style of actually a role playing game), yet it’s probably the game with the fewest options for role play. If you are young (started with Skyrim and later), then I can see not having the experience to know better. For those who do remember them and saw all the marketing of them acting like they cared about that style, it falls flat. It doesn’t help it released after the best RPG of the past decade or more probably, but it comes short of my desires (but not expectations) regardless.
I’d argue that Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best RPG in at least 20 years. It’s been so long since we’ve had an RPG on its level that I had almost forgotten what it felt like. It makes me feel like the original Fallout games (from Black Isle Studios, not Bethesda) made me feel back in the day.
Yeah, it’s quite possibly the best ever. It takes what made classic CRPGs great but brings it into the modern era with everything we’ve learned. Compared to when it came out, it’s probably not the greatest, but comparing them all to each other directly it quite possibly is.
I would have played so many less games in my youth if I weren’t able to trade discs with friends. I would have missed Vice City, Morrowind and Final Fantasy VII to name a few memorable ones.
The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.
Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.
Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.
Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.
Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.
I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.
Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.
And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…
They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.
And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.
It’s been out longer and has improved over time. I’d wait until Starfield has been out for about the same length of time, see if things even out or continue to trend down.
What needs improvement in Starfield, though, isn’t likely to actually be improved. Can’t even think of a time where a game’s story was re-written over time to be better.
On a similar note, I find it strange that nowadays (voice) actors are cast as videogame characters in their own likeness. This practice was all over the trailers announced at the video game awards.
What happened to designing cool characters for the art of it like back in the day? Is using photorealistic graphics and celebrities the way forward for the big game development studios?
Do you think they should not hire a professional actor to act?
Is it hard to understand that a game with photorealistic visual can just use their paid actors likeness for the entire performance? It seems like an artistic choice that may be a good benefit for the actors to get future work.
If only that was what he was saying. He doesn’t care whether they’re dependent on servers. The vast majority of physical games sold today are already nothing more than an entitlement and some of the game files, with the rest being downloaded after you insert the disc. He’s only concerned with Gamestop getting their cut, both in new game sales and especially in their bread-and-butter trade-in market.
Of course making money is his motive, but that does that matter?
Digital distribution only means you can’t give (or sell) your games to someone else. So with digital only the copyright holders of the video games make more money. Once it’s all digital only, next step is to require a connection to a server for them to work, so then they can shut it down to force you to buy a new console and re-buy all the old games you want to play again. What are you going to do if the decide to go that way? It’s either stop playing video games altogether, or go along with whatever scheme they feel like coming up with when they enshittify themselves like every other company inevitably does.
A physical copy means more options for the consumer, why should we care how much of the pie this corporation or that corporation makes off of it? In fact corporations in general make even more money from non-transferable digital distribution.
Given that MS have put a lot of work into making your digital 360 titles work on Series s/x and even upgrading some of them, I don’t think that’s a concern with all publishers.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to convince me of the merits of physical media? I did not, and do not, disagree. It’s a more flexible option, and more options is always better for the consumer. But the reality is that physical media, in its current iteration, doesn’t offer all that much protection. The only universal benefit of physical media is the ability to regift or resell. It’s a great benefit, but it hardly liberates consumers from dependence on servers.
As for my original point, it simply read to me as if this person was giving the GameStop exec credit for something he did not say. I wanted to make sure his comments were seen in an accurate light.
So we should reject an ally that has a shared goal simply because their motives aren’t pure enough?
It’s the old Stephen Fry quote “it’s more important to be effective than it is to be right.” We shouldn’t care so much about whether or not someone has the right reason for trying to affect a positive result. Gamestop’s motives are irrelevant, the effect of their actions are what matters.
Ok, but “It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing” is not an accurate summary either. Putting a CD drive on a console does not mean you have to buy physical media.
This is also true. With DRM, I feel like we’re missing out on a lot of property rights that should be remediated. I’m not sure what all could be done for zero day patches, though. Maybe we go back to the Windows XP days and distribute update packages via CD as well. TBH, though- if we have the ability to directly access the storage medium of a console and we are able to remove DRM, there’s no reason to make a disc drive mandatory
Even though I personally never used it I was astonished at how quickly so many people blindly trusted it. What I’m more astonished with is how quickly Microsoft has managed to destroy that brand trust.
I went to the game’s website to see how they portrayed the game as opposed to taking whatever cherry-picked similarities Sony chose to use as their argument.
Wow. It is fucking identical. Maybe the gameplay is different, but the art is indistinguishable.
The world needs to be fleshed out so an RPG would actually be pretty good. The problem is it’s a pretty world but it isn’t really very interesting. The humans who occupy the world are frankly boring and you can only fight so many robot elk before you want to do something else.
A prequel would be interesting, detailing what happened and maybe explaining how things ended up the way they now are.
Yeah I don’t have the greatest love for Sony but they have a really good point with this.
It’s basically the same game; Robot animals have taken over the world because reasons, Humans survive in small groups and have reverted to some kind of native american inspired spirituality for some bizarre never explained reason, you play as hyper athletic female warrior type who has to fight said robot animal things, your mission is to acquire some long lost secret technology from before the world was taken over by robot animals.
Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company would do if they’re interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo. Clearly Microsoft has thrown in the towel on XBOX. Only thing left for Microsoft to do is announce cancellation of next gen console altogether and do layoffs. I don’t know when that will happen but it’s inevitable at this point.
yup they’ll go the route of Sega. The writing has been on the wall with the Xbox Division for awhile now that I’m honestly surprised they’re still trying to “make it work”.
Xbox was a weird one. I haven’t used one since the 360 and honestly I couldn’t even begin to tell you what the next console in the line was after the 360. was it the series x? was it the one? I dont’ know. I mean after buying like 5 360s because of red ring or whatever why would I continue that idiocy?
Lol yeah the naming was incredibly bad. But I’m pretty sure it was 360 -> one -> series. I only owned the original one (not the One one) and a 360 which luckily was unaffected by RRoD.
I think the 360 was really good all things considered, it was a good console at the time and MS actually helped getting smaller studios their stuff into the store with summer of arcade. It also captured a lot of interest from third party studios. All in all pretty solid. Damn shame that the RRoD tainted the console so much.
Segmenting the market after into S and X was a really dumb move in my opinion. The other one was trying to turn it into an entertainment machine instead of a game console (TV, TV, TV, sports…)
Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company does if they’re interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo.
But when Sony and Nintendo are doing the same thing…?
Nintendo have also bumped their flagship game price up to 80 USD. I recall Sony doing the same (and see articles to that effect) but it looks like their games are still mostly at the 70 USD point?
Similarly, it is well worth noting that the Switch 2 announcement/deep dive videos specifically did NOT list the price or had vague reference to prices being announced regionally. This was primarily attributed to Liberation Day Tariffs but limited analyses do argue that the “base” price of the Switch 2 is higher than the Switch 1 which is consistent with increased engineering and overhead costs.
To my knowledge, Microsoft is the only platform ones who is bumping up their subscription fee cost. In large part because that seems to be all they have (in the gaming space). But all projections and leaks are that platform hardware costs are going to be significantly higher next generation (so like 2026/2027) and game prices are similarly expected to re-stabilize with “full” games being 80 USD as a baseline and all discount prices shifting accordingly.
Like, fuck Microsoft and this reeks of trying to grab the bag before closing (the xbox) shop considering how precarious everything is. But realize this is more bad optics and timing than anything else.
In large part because development is getting more and more expensive and game prices mostly have stagnated for decades (until semi-recently bumping up to 70 and now 80 USD).
They tried to push w11-xbox compatibility to push all consoles aside, and I can’t say if it works and if it means stonks, but I can see the current lead not being enthusiastic about R&Ding and producing new hardware, exclusive games. OEM software is a stable bird feeder, and AI integration is their next big king, so they just fixed their position in gaming market by buying several big companies and seemingly quit plans on console market. They are too big and to diverse to fall, but I think ditching a brand equal to sweaty Halo parties of the past and all these long-going console holywars wouldn’t bring much in the perspective of years, not several quarter past today.
The merging of xbox and windows is actually a REALLY REALLY good idea.
But I think it is less about being enthusiastic about R&D and more about… consoles are increasingly just computers. And mostly the R&D boils down to asking AMD (because Jensen is too busy burning benjies to soften his latest jacket) what APU they have in the pipes. And I would be shocked if the PS7 generation isn’t basically “here is a NUC with egpu support and a nice plastic case”… assuming we still have home computing then (that is a different and much darker conversation).
So it really does make perfect sense for MS to try and merge their Windows and XBOX OSes and, were they in a better position, I could see basically “just” selling Steam Machine style HTPCs as early as 2027.
Whereas Sony and Nintendo kind of ARE stuck still making actual consoles. Maybe Sony could bundle “Playstation” streaming and even light local gaming into a Bravia TV but… why would they?
But yeah. I will be amazed if the XBOX Brand/division exists (meaningfully) by as early as 2029.
I’d say I’m not a fan of their main monopoly getting bigger. Hardware lock or not, I want MS competing on par with PS, Nintendo, even though I cringe at buying a console for a game. This field got a bit leveled due to Sony giving up on some past exclusives (with a tasty price, nonetheless), but I just don’t trust a personal PC monopolist to be the one to dismantle the current dumbness and taking the higher ground from the very start.
Btw, I now recall some future Rouge Alley handheld version on Windows got announced as xbox-branded, with a probable verification status. It’s not a bad decision at their part, but I feel like that’s not only sneaking into another niche-move, but also a move to bite Valve, still-irrelevant on general console market, before they take some ground with their, ugh, Leenix or something.
We obviously can only infer based on PR and past actions, but I don’t consider the ASUS whatever the fucks to be a threat to Valve.
Valve are not XBOX. They are Windows. They have their own branded hardware that sets a baseline but it is very much not in their interests to be the only source for that hardware. We have already see the Steam Deck take a very niche market (that was basically just Win GPD and Aya Neo) and turn it into one where you have a wide range of specs and very standardized interfaces and capabilities.
And, much like how Microsoft gets money from running Windows on a Surface or a Thinkpad, so too does Valve get money from buying Steam games on a Steam Deck or an Aya Neo or a MSI Claw or whatever.
But yes. As consumers, I am deeply worried about what happens when Sony has no actual competition other than “you can build your own PC but that is so very very hard so just give us money instead”. Especially since people can never stop glazing Nintendo and insisting they “aren’t competing with anyone” even as the exact same games run at significantly lower resolution and frame rate (and even their first party games run like trash).
To be clear. I am also increasingly queasy as more and more “normies” think “Linux is SteamOS” and am afraid we might have an Android or Mac level fork in a decade. But, at least short term, I love that I can actually be “a gamer” and still spend 100% of my personal PC time in Linux.
Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 1 and most of their accessory products in the US and Canada in May for Canada and August for the US.
This was following price increases for Nintendo Switch Online in Latin American countries which started in January. Nintendo has not raised prices of the subscription globally, but in their press releases about increased costs of hardware, they state that “price adjustments may be necessary in the future” for NSO, presumably after evaluating trends when the free trial period of GameChat ends for Switch 2 early adopters in March 2026.
And I know you said you don’t care about Sony, but just to share sources, Sony has already increased the price of their hardware in Japan in August 2024; Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in March; and the US in August of this year.
So all of this is just to illustrate that what Microsoft is doing isn’t really anything new—it’s just the latest development in a continuing industry-wide trend.
I the US it’s mostly due to the fascist tariffs, no? Latin America has a similar issue, tho that’s because of the tax system in for example Brazil. Considering the financial situation in Argentina, hyperinflation may make price increases necessary.
Sony, on the other hand, is known to raise prices, and may have been the pioneer of raising prices for their games and consoles. That’s why I didn’t care for them.
Why do we continue to give Nintendo excuses for their shitty anti-consumer practices?
If these are just because of US tariffs, why increase the price of Switch 1 consoles that are already in Canada and don’t need to be shipped through the US? Why increase digital games that aren’t being shipped at all? Not to mention, they opened the floodgates for the price increase in games.
I think you’re right that they don’t need to be shipped through the US, but they most probably are and will be, and using other suppliers or logistics firms that don’t isn’t always cheaper, especially with large volume shipments. Otherwise, even if there are consoles in storage, the increase has to be targeted at a whole market to also partially stave off the tariff costs and to unify a market on its conditions.
Also, Sony were the first to raise the prices for games beyond 60€.
gamespot.com
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