How many years of development has this game had? I wonder if it’s another case of Microsoft Mismanagement™ or if it’s actually so huge and detailed that it’s actually worth all of this time spent in the works.
Mumblings originally in 2017, job openings at the studio in 2018, officially announced in 2020. October 2022 Andrew Walsh, a senior writer from the Horizon Forbidden West team joined the Fable team. June of 2023 had an in-game trailer.
To be honest, that seems to be a reasonable timeframe, especially given the pandemic in the middle, if you aren’t following the “rush it out the door ASAP, fix it after release, if you ever do” approach.
To be fair, I don’t think any of the MS releases ever suffered from bugs at launch. At least from my experience, they always worked pretty consistently on release, aside from maybe a few exceptions - I remember ReCore having excruciatingly long respawn times, Redfall suffering from stuttering and inconsistent framerate, and Ori 2 not being as fluid as the predecessor on console when it released, but all these were still perfectly playable at launch.
I feel like their problem is always the quality and quantity of the content. I wonder if the middling reception of Avowed convinced them that the game requires a bit more work to compete in the crowded and very competitive landscape of open world RPGs.
The Master Chief Collection is the single reason that I will never ever preorder another game no matter what bonuses it comes with or how confident I am with the developer.
In general though, Microsoft Games is pretty good about not pushing bugs out the door.
I honestly don’t understand the middle reception to Avowed, it’s been truly fantastic so far, and completely rock solid.
Very likely mismanagement. We can look at recent releases like Avowed, 6y in development and extremely simple mechanically and with a very narrow breadth. The world is incredibly static. I truly hope that’s not the case for FABLE.
They pivoted after two unsuccessful prototypes, and they’re a multi project studio. In that time frame, they put out Grounded and Pentiment while assisting on State of Decay 3. That’s about as good as management gets.
It’s a 300 strong studio, Pentiment and Grounded are simple side projects (pentiment was great, grounded too) that have a minute scope and could well be developed by a handful of people (see Valheim, Stardew, etc) that leaves an entire studio to develop their overpromised and underdelivered AAA shovelware to boost the ranks of Gamepass while charging 70€ on steam to milk the fans of PoE. In 6y a 300 people strong studio backed by one of the richest companies on earth and charging AAA sales price, is manifestly little and woeful mismanagement. Luckily, most people didn’t fall for the culture war BS from the US and the game hasn’t sold (or was returned) for shit, which means they will likely do a better job with outer worlds 2, hopefully…
It’s a 300 person studio that is basically never all allocated to a single project. That’s extremely efficient with the resources they have. And remember that Outer Worlds 2 has also been in ongoing development for the better part of that same 6 years.
Can we please stop pretending Obsidian post acquisition is a dinghy independent studio rather that the real cog in the metastatic tumor that is the Microsoft machine? The game credits ~1.2k people, that’s 4x the studio size. There’s 0 excuses for how mediocre Avowed is, especially when they charge 70€ for it! BG3 in contrast has a bigger professional credit while costing the consumer less 10€ and being an excellent game. Good management is not churning out mediocre shovelware while charging AAA prices.
I’m not excusing Avowed for anything, because it’s excellent. BG3 is a better game, true, but it’s a better game than almost every other game ever made too, and it was built reusing a ton of work that the studio had already done over the decade that came before it. There’s a very, very good chance that lots of work on Avowed was done knowing that it would be used in Outer Worlds 2 also, reducing the risk of spending money on both projects. Making great games isn’t a function of how much money was spent on them, or Balatro wouldn’t have been nominated for game of the year. I’m not saying they’re some scrappy indie studio, but it sure seems like they know the answer to the question, “How much money can we spend making this relative to how much money it needs to make?” Spending more money on Avowed wouldn’t have made it more financially successful. It’s why there was that headline about wanting to make a Pillars tactics game and evaluating how big that game could feasibly be for that market. I got more value out of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that doesn’t make Avowed not worth $70 to me.
Good management is getting a working product out the door and keeping your people happy and employed. This game reviewed well; not phenomenally, but well. And Obsidian is spoken of in high regard when it comes to employee satisfaction. All that while getting several other projects moving along too. It’s impressive. And I’m sorry Avowed wasn’t what you wanted to play.
As for Fable, this is a genre that its developer hasn’t built before. Even in a best case scenario, it’s going to take a lot more time for them to build it than it is another racing game. If you want to claim potential mismanagement, it might be the possibility that Microsoft assigned this project to the wrong developer, but we don’t know how this Fable came to be, and maybe they do have the experience to make it work.
Avowed is a success in which planet? Grounded, which is a pretty good game for what it costs, has a 33% higher player peak and gigantic tail compared to avowed’s player drop off… This is a game, from the same studio, that cost a fraction of what avowed cost (1/4 people credited) to make. MS pulled all the stops for people to engage with avowed but ultimately failed because the game is just mediocre.
Regarding management, MS are the paragons of good management and would never put a team on a game they don’t want to make, resulting in several delays and ultimately a poor quality product. This never happened at Microsoft… EVER!
Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful. Grounded has a 33% higher peak and also cost 57% of what Avowed cost for the audience to buy; they may have sold more copies and made less revenue. A more repetitive multiplayer focused game will retain players longer than a single player game with an ending. But ultimately, we have no idea if the game was successful outside of the team saying publicly that they’re happy with its performance. That will never mean raw sales anymore, since they are a part of Game Pass. Game Pass pulls in, in all likelihood, 3-4x Avowed’s budget in revenue every month. Even with the overhead they have of running the service and licensing third party games for it, they can probably afford at least one Avowed on their books every month and justify it as long as they feel like the presence of a flashy new game is what’s keeping people subscribed. No one knows how many people on Game Pass need to play a given game for Microsoft to consider it a success, but perhaps the worst way to evaluate the game’s success is to look at Steam charts and compare it to some other game arbitrarily, much like what’s happening with Assassin’s Creed right now. The Steam forums are full of armchair quarterbacks that are sure that Shadows has flopped by doing the same nonsense comparisons to Steam charts even though this is a series that handily sold tens of millions copies on non-Steam platforms for years.
Mismanagement has and will continue to happen at Microsoft. The first iteration of Avowed was aiming at being “Microsoft’s Elder Scrolls”…but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no need for that design anymore once they bought Elder Scrolls itself in the next couple of years after that. I’m not too concerned about how long Fable has taken to develop thus far considering when their last Forza Horizon game came out and that full development on Fable probably didn’t start until that game shipped. What I did hear was that when Microsoft originally announced it for 2025, the development team laughed at the idea.
Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful.
This premise is flat out wrong. A cheaper game, from the same studio, captured more return customers than a flagship with a massive ad campaign and significantly more effort behind it. That’s an epic blunder, so much so, Patel had to do the rounds in the press to appeal to the stock holders and paint a pretty picture, lest MS dissolve the studio before Outer worlds 2 is done.
This level of reality distortion field is almost as the one from the people (and some subhuman racists) saying AC Shadows flopped. AC Shadows delivered (according to reviews) exactly what was promised to its customers, an AC game in Japan with shinobi. I haven’t touched AC since Black Flag, but if I were a fan of Ubisoft open worlds, I’d be ecstatic right now. A Ubisoft game delivering on what was promised without game breaking bugs is actually remarkable. It’s still a mediocre game, but for its niche, it’s a solid release. It’s diametrically opposite to Avowed, which advertised a deep RPG and sold a fantasy action game with no depth or interactivity.
If someone would have told me, a year ago, Avowed would review worse and, have lower user score than AC Shadows, I would have laughed in their face. That game has suffered controversy over controversy just because they decided to have an afro samurai and the conservative anglophones lost their shit.
A cheaper game captures more customers, yes. It doesn’t mean that Avowed didn’t make its money back. Retention as a metric doesn’t matter at all for an offline game you play and finish, and depending on how Grounded is monetized, it might not matter for that game either, if the intention is that you just play with your friends. The profit or loss of Avowed, next to the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Microsoft brings in in a year, hardly matters to investors, and I don’t know where you got it in your head that these media appearances are a plea to investors. Microsoft is an enormous behemoth operating at much larger scales than any one video game. Their strategy is Game Pass. They’re all in on that strategy. If Avowed seems to provide value for Game Pass and keep people subscribed, then they and their investors are happy. For everyone who isn’t interested in Game Pass, they’re happy to sell it to you for $70. You’re just making shit up as you go instead of admitting what you do and do not know.
The profit or loss of Avowed, next to the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Microsoft brings in in a year, hardly matters to investors
*Looks at tango, arkane and the rest of the cemetery.
Yes, every time anyone at MS said the engagement and GP users was amazing it was totally true. Lets believe that and appreciate how normal it is to give interviews to bloomberg saying, “we totally didn’t fail our objectives with this mediocre piece of media”.
Time is on my side, I’ll just save this interaction.
Then if and when you revisit it, you can see a reminder here that the problem here all along is that you’re assuming you know it failed off of bonkers reasoning, not that you may have guessed right. You just criticized those dummies over AC Shadows, and here you are doing the same thing.
You calling something bonkers doesn’t void the fact that a demonstrably cheaper game from the same developer was far more reaching and generated more engagement than the halo product from the same stable that got a 3D ad in times square. Everything else is cope.
I find it amusing that you’re using the Conway “alternative facts” defense in the same breath you compare me to the AC shadows detractors. Projection for the win I guess.
I think Kojima said it best in the Resetera review, and I think it applies here too. Avowed is basically a shooter with fantasy trappings and it does appeal to a certain demographic. I’m not it.
Of course you have. If you mean picking the mobs one by one from a distance because they reset after x amount of m from origin just like in an MMO (mobs are leashed), I have bad news for you. Already in Far Cry 4’s release that was rightfully pointed out as shit design, several years later is just unacceptable. Again, Kojima was right, pearls to pigs.
Sounds like the author has a skill issue with Stealth.
Mobs are leashed? Cool, that doesn’t matter cause I play the game like a high fantasy battle mage, and don’t run from fights.
Also, mobs are leashed in most games to some extent or another. Avowed is well written, well voice acted, tells an interesting story, and is fun to play through.
Really just feels like people were expecting Skyrim and are upset they got something more focused.
I’d be willing to give Grounded a try, but last I checked, you can’t host your own server offline, which is my line in the sand. I haven’t gotten around to Pentiment yet, but I just rolled credits on Avowed this afternoon, and it was awesome.
100%, had they spent the money on the game that they wasted on marketing they may have released something good.
Instead they prefer to feed a bunch of sock puppets on reddit and here to show up every time one of the MS studios games are mentioned. The cope is real. I can’t believe that Avowed cost as much as BG3 to make, it’s insane the mammoth gap between the quality of both games in every aspect. And BG3 was sold on PC for 10€ less than Avowed on launch…
Plus $95 for a “physical edition” with no disc. :(
I was willing to buy the game… for $60. But not a digital code. I get that they want to push people to Gamepass, but $60 is 3 months and at the end I actually own nothing?
The whole piece is worth a read but to me this paragraph sums it all up:
“Who even knows what would please these people? They say they’re focusing their resources on bigger games, then they say they need smaller games. They say they love your games, then they shut your studio down. They make more money than they’ve ever made before, then they cut costs repeatedly, drastically, and cruelly. They buy more studios than they can manage, so the answer is not to use that aforementioned money to hire more (or perhaps better) managers, but to have fewer studios so management’s job can be easier.”
And I am saying that even though I have zero love for the mobile gaming market, while I do own and like consoles. There is just no reason to consider they’re doing things any differently on this matter.
30% seems quite a lot, no matter the platform, especially for small indie studios. I’d care more about these than whatever the Fortnite machine has to pay.
Honest question: how is it possibly “complete” bullshit, when we know for a fact that console makers are taking like a hundred dollar wash on every console sold whereas Apple and Google make substantial profit on every device sold?
I mean I would love to see consoles forced to allow sideloading and alternate app stores too, but I can’t fathom how you cant see the difference in business models…
I’ve been developing mobile apps since before the iPhone was a thing. I remember when the App Store was announced, including the 30% cut for Apple. There was a lot of excitement around the fact that developers could keep 70%.
Before app stores, this is how you distributed and charged for a mobile app: customers would send a text message with a keyword to a so called shortcode, depending on country this was a 4 or 5 digit phone number. For example, you would send ‘NAMEOFGAME’ to 12345. The user would then get a text message back with a link to download the game. The message they got back was a so called reverse-billing SMS (also known as premium SMS). This message would be billed to the customer, at a certain rate that you as the sender of the SMS could configure. This basically meant customers paid for games through their phone bill.
How this worked from the developer’s side:
You generally didn’t own the short code, it was shared with many users, you had to pay a monthly fee for the use of that keyword. Companies who owned a ‘nice’ shortcode (like e.g. 12345) would charge more for it than those who owned a more difficult to remember one. This would cost you at least €100 a month per keyword (the same as you pay for an app store account per year, for an unlimited number of apps)
For this amount all the operator did was forward the message to you, you had to have your own server to process the messages. Your server then had to call an API at the telco to send an premium SMS back with the link. (a so called WAP push message). The telco would usually keep 50% of the total cost to the customer. Send a €3.00 SMS , you get €1.50, the telco gets €1.50. For sending 140 bytes to a phone.
The link you sent pointed to your own server, where you had to host the files for the game for the user to download.
Note that there was no store, no way for users to discover your game, so you had to advertise it as well. The telco’s took 50% for billing the customer, while you had to everything else. Of course the development tools for mobile apps were absolute shit as well.
So when Apple announced that they would let you keep 70%, would take care of hosting, payments, would provide a nice user friendly app store where people could actually find your app and provide decent development tools for you to build apps in, that was a fucking huge win.
Were all phones this way? I was thinking on Windows CE phones (like the iPAQ) you could just get paid via Paypal or similar and then send the customer an installer file / unlock key.
Was there a rule that you had to bill through the Telco?
There was no rule, but it was basically the only convenient way. Receiving e-mail on a phone was not at all common, typing a long URL on phone was a PITA and paying for stuff online was not something a lot of people were familiar with.
WIndows CE phones and the like were so niche there was no point in even developing apps specifically for them.
Also note that the above would usually only work in one country, if you wanted to sell internationally you’d have to make arrangements for a shortcode and RB-SMS for each country you wanted to sell in. Never mind the advertising campaigns. Apple taking care of that, with basically global reach and different kinds of payment methods without you having to worry about any of it was quite revolutionary.
Ahh, you must be talking about dumb / feature phones, I guess? I remember a lot of people who had smartphones early on getting / sending emails on their Symbian devices or Windows Mobile devices. In around 2003 (years prior to the iPhone launch), Windows Mobile actually had something like a quarter of the smartphone market. So, in terms of smartphones, it was sizable. But, a lot of people didn’t have smartphones at the time, so that whole market was niche in a way. Most of the smartphone market at that time was Symbian, but Windows was big, and then there was also PalmOS.
I still kinda wish smartphones now had the option to work more like those old ones. They were much less locked down. It’s fine for the vendor to offer a store, but the early phones would just let me install apps any way I wanted. Hell, you could buy some PalmOS apps at physical retailers!
The more I read about this the more baffling the move seems. It's not going to end cheating. It might inconvenience cheaters, if even that and it's only going to create negative PR for Microsoft, especially since this is impacting people who use modified controllers for accessibility issues. It's especially weird given how carefully Microsoft has tried to craft an image of being "pro-consumer" this console generation. Then again I imagine the executives who make these decisions rarely think these things through. At the very least it is a good reminder that there is no such thing as a pro-consumer for-profit corporation.
At first, I was somewhat surprised that this was even a question - then I reminded myself that they’re asking how the merger will affect the industry, not the players.
I don’t care how it affects the industry. I’m not a high-level executive with a gaming company. Are you?
For the players, I don’t think it’ll be that great. Whatever savings are made due to the merger won’t be passed on to us. They never are. What’s good for players is competition between many companies, all doing their best to attract customers. An enormous, monolithic conglomerate will do us no favors.
There are too many articles posted in gaming communities which are actually just business articles which happen to be about companies involved in making games. Obviously it affects everything, but like you I don’t care about business bullshit!
Yeah, that’s what the last two sentences are about.
A big company will take fewer creative risks and be more likely to limit investments to proven formulas. They’d rather just churn out sequels to huge moneymakers. On the other hand, more competition means more incentive to try something new and interesting in the hope of hitting it big.
Yeah, but the big company that the bigger company just bought refused to make smaller games and constrained their catalogue over the past 20 years to make fewer and fewer games. This bigger company, via Game Pass, has an incentive to put out more games than Activision has been. Microsoft has an incentive to try to compete with Sony in a way that Activision hasn't had competition for Call of Duty since...when was the last good Battlefield game?
The most aggravating thing for me personally as a PC gamer with an obsession with fidelity/graphics, is any Microsoft acquisition becomes focused on console first (to sell Xbox) which leaves every game as a neutered PC port that had to be made shitty enough to run on consoles… It’s very irritating.
…for now. This is actually why I don’t like that this merger has gone through. My guess is the strategy will be spending the next few years making GamePass such a value that it’s basically a must-have and dominates the market. Then they start jacking prices up and ruining the service.
We’re literally watching that happen to just about every tech company right now. My Lemmy front page right now is “YouTube/amazon/netflix/disney+ are all jacking prices and ruining the services.” Although modern MS has a lot going for it, they have a long, long history of this exact behavior. And aside from that, it’s just a feature of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism. All consolidation eventually leads to negative outcomes for consumers.
I could understand putting this kind of time in for a passion project of your own, but for like, a job for somebody else? Worse, a salaried job? That’s way too much.
When it comes to movies and audience scores, sure, look at the rotten tomatoes score or whatever. But everyone should realize that the average score of EVERY CRITIC is just going to be a useless number.
Not only that but reviewers who represent entire companies like the people at IGN and elsewhere aren’t giving an honest opinion. I know this because a few of them have given their honest opinion before. They got fired for low scores.
This is the reason that I enjoy watching reviews from people like ACG or SkillUp. They don’t need to give a score because their opinion isn’t a number. Enjoyability isn’t a number. Both of those reviewers enjoy games slightly different than I do, but when I watch their reviews I get a sense of if I will enjoy them.
Seriously if you go to outlets who give scores on games commonly, stop. Very little time is put into choosing these numbers and they reflect nothing about enjoying a game for you personally. Go watch a review from ACG or SkillUp. Outlets like IGN or PCGamer can’t hold a candle to these guys.
They could easily all be giving their honest opinion at IGN: if the reviewers who tend to like everything are the ones who don’t get fired, the output of mostly positive (or sometimes groupthink negative) reviews would be the same, even if individual reviewers never lied.
Take a read of this summary (by IGN) of their Madden 22 review:
“ Madden NFL 22 is a grab bag of decent – if frequently underwhelming – ideas hurt by poor execution. Face of the Franchise, to put it mildly, is a mess. Homefield advantage is a solid addition, but it doesn’t quite capture the true extent of real on-field momentum swings. The new interface is an eyesore, and the new presentation is cast in a strange and unflattering shade of sickly green. It’s smoother and marginally more refined, but in so many ways it’s the same old Madden. In short, if you’re hoping for a massive leap forward for the series on the new generation of consoles (or on the old ones), you’re apt to be disappointed”
Now, I want you to read that and ask what you’d rate it based on this info (or the whole review).
IGN has a scale approximately this: 10. Masterpiece 9. Excellent 8. Great 7. Good 6. Okay 5. Mediocre
I don’t think I need to tell you that the user reviews for this game don’t even reach mediocre. Not to mention the gambling inclusion that IGN doesn’t take seriously in any sports game it reviews. But IGN still called Madden 22 a 6 or an “okay” game.
I’m not saying they’re lying necessarily but the result is the same. The honest critiques are ignored to keep receiving review codes. That score should be left out entirely but they refuse because it drives clicks. It’s a joke.
This is just one example of how boiling down a review to a number is flawed. My favorite reviewers of games in general have been Matthewmatosis and Mandalore Gaming. IIRC neither of them provides a final score of any sort. Even whether a game is “recommended” or not may come with some caveats depending on what you’re looking for in a game.
Wouldn’t that make McDonald’s happy meals also gambling? If not explain the franchises that will absolutely refuse to swap toys during certain promotions (Bionics and TY I can think of off the top of my head).
I don’t think people buy happy meals for the toys. You know what you’re getting to eat, which is the purpose of the chain. It is a food service company, not a toy manufacturing company and the toys are only tokens of appreciation for the customer.
EA is a video game company and your experience and ability to play the game basically depends on these loot boxes. In fact, you play or pay to increase the chances to get a good deck, but nothing is guaranteed. It is random or perhaps even more perverse, it is programmed to deny or condition good players on your decks to keep you playing for the next loot box.
The only way this is not gambling, is that you don’t win money at the end of the day. Just satisfaction.
Fifa loot boxes contain different players, so you could either get Messi or a 3rd grade soccer player, with the 3rd grader being weighted more heavily in terms of being acquired.
Those cards still hold value and the game is made to be played with multiple of the same cards. But you’re right, trading cards are a gamble.
You pay for a mystery pack
You either get good or bad cards
You’ll keep buying to get better stuff
It has all the checks.
But I think it’s important you don’t need to buy booster packs to enjoy the game. I can buy multiple pre-made decks and I know exactly what I get and still can enjoy the game.
Some games (now not talking about FIFA) even rely on loot boxes to make the game more enjoyable. You even can get timed stuff you can only use an X amount of days and poof… it’s gone.
Also digital purchases might be considered “too easy”. With cards you at least get something physical.
Not sure though… all I personally think is that micro transactions and loot boxes are killing the fun and quality of games.
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