Yeah. They used UE5. Which has insane AI tools. So, you know how you can walk around and see all the detail? Well if you think bathesda hand painted in new brush and details and redid ALL the character models etc etc you’re nuts. But what’s funny is, in the character models. You can literally see the AI used because nothing is significant. The motions are all exactly the same except the main character. The mouth movements are the exact same. Everything is exactly how it was but just overcoated with a new engine. And UE5 literally advertises their AI capabilities.
I want to respond in a rational, reasonable way, but this is so factually incorrect and utterly unhinged I am not sure where to even start. Ordinarily I’d be all about dumping on Bethesda, too.
Yeah with their “everything is an Xbox” nonsense it’s pretty clear they want to focus on the platform, marketplace where you buy games. Playing them is kind of second. I’m sure they’ll still have something, but it’s going to be more geared towards cloud streaming, pc, handhelds, and “play where you want” so they can just do the digital side. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get partners like Asus to build boxes now.
Xbox will still exist as a platform, just not the console. It’ll probably just be stuff like the Xbox ally x; Xbox partners with brands to sell hardware with cut down versions of windows that has access to 3rd party markets like steam and such, but a major emphasis on the Xbox/windows store.
Either way, I don’t think there has to be a third platform if Xbox went away. PC looked kinda shaky there for a moment in the '00s/'10s, but at this point it seems pretty well poised to become the dominant platform. Xbox and PlayStation already port games to steam and even GoG. Nintendo is the harder nut to crack, I’m not sure what’d it take for them to get out of the hardware business. I read somewhere they have enough cash on hand to operate at a loss for like a decade or something.
This is a couple days delayed response, apologies for that I’ve been pretty busy.
With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don’t expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it’s almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.
It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don’t lend themselves well to this, yet, but it’s blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.
We’ve already reached the end of “Console Exclusive” games and I think what comes next is “Streaming Platform Exclusive” games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.
This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there’s no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.
Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.
That would be a shakeup. If they released a Gaming veraion of Windows on a PC with quick resume that also played much of the Xbox library going back to the OG Xbox, that could appeal to a lot of people.
Its shocking to me that Xbox is run by the same company that has an operating system installed on 71% of the worlds computers, and they still haven’t figured out how to leverage that for Xbox gaming.
That’s my theory. They’ll pump out a few cookie cutter games on the existing IPs, but relatively little creativity is going to be allowed. It’s all for gamepass.
They’ve been touting Gamepass as the xbox seller for a long time now. Several years since they gave up on competing using exclusives if you ask me.
XBOX can’t be buried soon enough. It’s been dead in the casket for over a decade and it’s time to start throwing dirt on it.
I love the original and the 360. The people that had the passion and vision for what XBOX was and needed to be are long gone and this is what we’re left with. A bunch of suits making decisions who probably don’t even know how to play pong.
“Everything is an Xbox” now. Even the PlayStation is living on borrowed time. The way Xbox is run right now may not be very good, but the vision for what Xbox was had to change. They were just an earlier casualty of the way things are changing than their competition.
I don’t see it that way at all. Xbox took their foot off the gas when Kinect came out and has been dying from 1000 cuts. What was working for Xbox - they stopped doing. This isn’t the future, this is them throwing anything they can at the wall and see what sticks.
Yeah, but that’s something you do when times are changing and you need to adapt. Sony investors are already asking if there will be a new PlayStation or if they’ll just go to PC. (There will be at least a traditional PS6, but Microsoft doesn’t have the same luxury.)
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
None of it is. It is because of mismanagement that happened with Don Matrick and the OG Xbox one focusing on fucking cable hookups and banning their users from borrowing physical games.
That corporate garbage in Xbox NEVER fully disappeared and now they’re reaping what they sowed.
Also not releasing an exclusive game worth buying since before 2014 is a wild strategy.
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
Accepting other storefronts on their platform going forward, choosing to instead make their money via Game Pass and third party publishing. An Activision or Bethesda acquisition made great strategic sense when you needed to lock up exclusives for the way consoles used to work, but in the time it took for Activision to go through, they realized that strategy no longer makes sense. It’s a huge paradigm shift to decide to no longer take a cut of every “Xbox” game sold the way that Nintendo and Sony do, for now, but it’s in their best interest long term to be the first to do so.
I hate this Microsoft cycle so much: buy gaming studios, do fuck all with them, fire all staff, close studios, rinse, repeat. So much talent and so many great IPs down the drain because MS can’t decide what the fuck are they doing
That narrative doesn’t make much sense. There’s far too much competition in the industry, and you’re not reducing competition by shutting down the likes of Tango Gameworks.
It’s how these large corporations operate though. Ignore, buy, or bury, that’s how they all operate. They may have ‘plans’ to use the studio, but for them if all they get are the assets and a less of a threat from the old ip, then that’s enough. I don’t think it makes any sense either, but it also absolutely something microsoft has done for years in their larger business model.
From past articles on why this is happening though, it’s that they had a growth strategy for years, with Game Pass, with Xbox consoles, with studios. Then what changed was the general state of the economy and Nadella’s goals. Game Pass plateaued, the old console model is clearly headed toward obsolescence, and they bought the world’s largest publisher by market cap. Suddenly Nadella decided that you can’t spend what you were spending, and it’s time to take profits.
Well, perhaps I’m just wrong then. But for me, I see twenty tears of MS buying up studios, sitting on them, and closing them with some sort of excuse about changed plans. It’s always the same though, studio performs well, gets bought, makes no games or games out of their genre, and closes. Call it whatever you want, I call it business as usual.
There was also COVID screwing up sales projections for the last few years. People were stuck at home for months and ended up buying a ton of digital media such as games to stay sane. Executives are stupid and were somehow shocked when numbers dropped after quarantine ended and people went back to their regular lives. Since then, a bunch of projects or even entire studios have been axed due to “underperforming” because they couldn’t compete sales-wise with a period where the entire world was a captive audience.
Games and media sales did indeed go down. But movie theatres (and a lot of live entertainment) never actually went back up. People didn’t “go back to their regular lives”. We got a new normal
Which is why trump et al are working so hard to trigger doom spending and likely another pandemic or three if rfk gets his way.
But the bigger factor is funding. Plenty of indie studios have talked about how hard it is to find funding. Because economic uncertainty means that even a 2-3 year investment is a LOT riskier than it used to be. And that is a death sentence for indie devs but also very alarming for the major publishers who have to answer to investors.
Fuck microsoft and all their bullshit. But this goes way beyond “they bought too many studios and mismanaged them”
It has also been the official reason for every illegal merger in the last 50 years.
And somehow almost every merged organization ran into tough financial times about 5 years later (or less), and had to reduce staff, disperse the previous competition’s staff, while filing away the dangerous intellectual property safely out of sight.
But sure, we could assume that Microsoft meant to do the right thing, and that it just went wrong this time.
It was the reporting from Jason Schreier, not the official reason. The official reason is something like “difficult economic conditions” and “we were about to topple over”. The behind-closed-doors reasons were that Nadella made a sweeping change across all of Microsoft that was antithetical to what Xbox had been working on for years, and that Xbox had a much larger spotlight on them after making an acquisition as large as Activision.
They had the Kinect which (ignoring all the negative press surrounding it) fucking slapped, and could easily have been integrated with a VR headset for full-body VR.
They have Blizzard which im pretty sure means they can put WoW on xbox but don’t even seem to have started.
They’re positioned to have the greatest console of all time and they’re just fucking around instead. It’s maddening.
I remember being the lone voice against GamePass and Microsoft buying up all these studios. These idiots kept saying “It’s pro consumer bro! The more studios they buy the better the GamePass value gets bro!” “So many games for one low monthly price! Let’s see greedy Sony do that!”
As if they didn’t live in the same world where Netflix exists. We’ve already seen this bro, it’s a classic. Yeah man it’s great deal now while they desperately need your buy-in. But a few short years later and very predictably we get nothing but layoffs, award winning studios shuttered for no reason, formerly third party games becoming exclusive etc.
I’m no corporate simp for Sony or any other corp out there by any means. But the Microsoft grift was so blatantly, obviously an unsustainable market grab that would inevitably go south and make the industry worse for all of us.
Yeah, it kind of what it was in the beginning, wasn’t it? I remember telling people that it was just like Netflix for games, both in the positive and in the negative sense. And Netflix was still viewed more positively at that point.
If you look at it critically, Dragon Age Origins and Awakening are really the only good games in the series.
It went to shit, fast. Now they’re just pandering to the wrong people expecting it to save their game when everyone who was interested in the original has long since moved on.
there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare… In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises… Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.
Ironically, EA grew out of Origin, one of the original grand-daddies of computer RPGs and the maker of the Ultima series in the 1980s-1990s.
This game felt like it was written by 2 different groups of writers, who also hated each other. The first group wrote about a world where everything was dying and dark.
The second group was a PR team, who wrote about “wouldn’t it be fun to go camping!” And “the pirates and assassins are unambiguously good”.
Veilguard was…okay. But coming out after Baldur’s Gate 3, the series that DA was inspired by, really showed the massive gap in storytelling and character quality. I pirated it and was glad I did, as it was NOT worth anything close to $70.
It’s on Bioware not EA. This is the third flop out of Bioware, and the post mortems for the past failures have all indicated that Bioware’s management has a dumpster fire for years, with EA often uncharacteristically serving as a voice of reason to protect them from their own mistakes. For example, it was EA that got them to include the flying in Anthem, the only fun part of the gameplay. Unfortunately, in the case of Andromeda and Dragon Age 4, EA’s mistake may have been giving Bioware’s management so much rope that they hung themselves.
I don’t get EA/Bioware. Fantasy is consistently more popular than scifi. Inquisition was their best selling game. Yet DA was never treated like a heavyweight like Mass Effect. My expectations tanked when David Gaider left
Looking through each series’ Wikipedia articles, it looks like Mass Effect sold about 50% more than Dragon Age 1 and 2. And that tracks with my experience. I know far more people who’ve played Mass Effect than Dragon Age, and I’ve never played Dragon Age myself.
I agree, Mass Effect was/is gaming pop culture at one point. Almost every gamer I know has played or at least very familiar with ME. That number is maybe 1/4th for DA.
Was it? Even if it was, you have to consider the cost and time that goes into making it.
Also, where’s the post-release monetization? Like it or not, fantasy games made for smart people unfortunately are held to the same standard as sports games made for morons.
One factor might be just that Mass Effect came out first and was also Bioware’s last game before EA bought them.
The rest is just my opinion, but I do believe that Mass Effect simply told a better story (multicolored endings aside) and had a better cast of characters. Not to mention the fact that it was a single narrative across the three installments helped keep engagement up. And shooters were incredibly popular at that time.
Search for the story of Anthem and David Gaider opinions about how they handle their writers, they fucked that up on their own.
And reading this article is basically: The DA team blames the ME team for diverting them to Andromeda. Then they blame Anthem. Then they blame EA. Then they blame the pandemic. Then they blame EA. Then they blame the ME team again.
The only moment that they actually put some blame on the DA team is with the tone of dialogue and they quickly blame EA for saying “you guys doesn’t have time to make changes”. The ME team made changes, it’s because of favouritism from EA or the ME team just has better management and know how to negotiate?
A good portion of that comes from how the teams are treated by EA and how many resources they’re granted though. I’m not about to assign a percentage to the blame, but of course the DA folks will be resentful of the ME folks if EA listens to one of them and gives them the time and money they ask for at the expense of the other. “Knowing how to negotiate” can often just come down to how much one game sold versus another, which isn’t really something the developers are responsible for.
But even that is a mess of causality for blame. EA wants to save money and mandates a nightmare of an engine for development; managers get incentives from EA to build a type of game that their studio doesn’t usually make; etc.
I could argue in favour of EA’s decision regarding the engine. Their previous engine was also a mess, but they mishandled the change. They didn’t give the studios the necessary time or support to implement it properly. But at the time of Veilguard they already had plenty of experience, the game performs really well and they release the game practically bug free.
The part of EA forcing them to build a type of game that they didn’t usually make I’m particularly not inclining to believe it’s was a problem. Bioware developed and maintain Star Wars Old Republic, an MMO, MMOs have many similarities to live services(it’s a type of live service), they already had experience with that. They also released Anthem, and looks like the idea of a multiplayer for Anthem came from Bioware.
The idea of a multiplayer Dragon age to finish the story is completely stupid but Bioware had the expertise to work on it. It’s a different case for Fallout 76 as Bethesda has never developed a multiplayer game before, TESO is a completely different studio with its own team, SWTOR is from a team within Bioware.
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