Your opinion is your opinion, but I don’t think the scale of the company or its resources matter one iota. Games made by a single person have been better than those made by thousands of people, and that’s without putting my thumb on the scale in either direction. I don’t even agree that Starfield is linear, but even if it was, that doesn’t make a game bad. If you’re calling Starfield a 1 out of 10, there’s no room to go down from there on that scale, which is absurd to me, because that means you’d have to cram Superman 64 and Bubsy 3D on the same part of that scale.
Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (an L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.
A 1 out of 10 for Starfield is ridiculous; either hyperbole, or you haven’t played many video games before to see what a 1 out of 10 would truly be. I was very disappointed by it too, but level set a bit here.
And I’m saying that if you throw in a quick deathmatch mode, it’s playable with only one friend. And when a game has LAN, that means that you can play with a gaming VPN regardless of the presence of official servers.
One of these days, it’s going to teach them to stop making games designed to destroy themselves. Preservation needs to be good for business, and the lack of it needs to be bad for business.
Any game works as a LAN game. That’s the advantage of being a LAN game. Of course, when you build a game like that, you know not to assume that you’ll always have 10 players in a match, and you build it to scale to that. If they released it with LAN and a deathmatch mode for any number of players, even if they did no rebalancing on the character designs to account for it and the there were obvious top tiers and low tiers, I’d still buy it.
The game was alive for about 1.5 days for each year of development that they put into Concord.
Let’s acknowledge for a second that well over 100 developers are about to lose their livelihoods. Now let’s acknowledge that they were building a product from the start that disrespects consumer rights and preservation of the medium, and I’m still glad it failed.
A monopolistic practice is one that enforces a monopoly unfairly. Just having market share means they’re approaching a monopoly, but it doesn’t mean they’re getting there by monopolistic practices.
Then it arguably isn’t that either. They give you full instructions on how to repair and upgrade it, and they partnered with iFixIt. People have modded in more storage, battery life, and better screens. Personally, I think I draw the line at the part where it runs the same executables as any other PC, so I’ll call it a PC.
There’s so much Baldur’s Gate 3 there already. If you never cut anything, the game is never “finished”. I think they made the right call. I’d like to see what they’ve got in them next. Perhaps a CRPG with a Starfield-esque setting. Most CRPGs lean on the post-apocalypse sorts of settings.
Now we’re in philosophical territory with questions like, “What is a console?” It runs PC games, but you can navigate it with a controller. It has most console features but is malleable enough to have most PC features.