I don’t think Sawyer was “demoted”. I think he’s just on other projects. Pentiment’s entire development probably fit within Outer Worlds 2’s timeline. I don’t think Bethesda said, “invite everyone who worked on New Vegas” expecting there to be no change in staff in 15 years, but there are still plenty of people from that old project there.
Thanks! But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas, so this was definitely all a new perspective for me, lol. I also think there are a lot of people asking for a new Fallout game that haven’t tried 1 and 2, and I’d love to point more people that way when the topic comes up, or at least to the Wasteland games as a close enough proximity.
A casual look down the MobyGames lists on New Vegas and Outer Worlds 2 still shows a lot of overlap, so probably. It would be weird to invite people who didn’t work on New Vegas to see the realization of a thing they didn’t work on.
I’ve been on gaming forums for a long time, and I honestly can’t recall a single time I saw anything resembling an actual debate that people might like 3 more than New Vegas. I have seen debates of 3 vs. 4 and New Vegas vs. 1/2, but I’ve never come across a debate between people who’ve played more or less the entire series and preferred Bethesda’s games. Maybe that’s you, but this would be the first time.
Just about any game is someone’s favorite, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of debate. Fallout 4 and 76 appear to have reached an audience much larger than the rest of the series’ usual standards for copies sold, so the sense I get is that if you’re calling one of those your favorites, you most likely haven’t seen most of the rest of the series. I think 3 and 4 get a lot of criticism that may go too far, but the long and short of it is that the consensus is that Bethesda’s entries are not among the strongest in the series.
“I think fans debate what their favourite one is, which is understandable,” Howard says. “I think it’s great that you can have a lot of factions and the fans say, ‘Oh, I like one or two or three or four, or Vegas or 76’ now, and so I think that’s really healthy for a franchise where people can say which one is their favourite.”
I’m sure Todd’s head canon is that there’s more of a debate than there actually is.
No Avowed or Outer Worlds 2 either, which are high on my personal list. And before someone wants to tell me they were divisive, they both reviewed far better than the likes of To a T or Lost Records.
They did a lot of extra work on it without charging for it, and it’s been a long time since they put out a hit. California salaries and real estate are expensive.
I would ordinarily put my top-level thoughts in the “Body” part of the link submission, but I’ve found that a lot of people here only read that box without reading the article, so I’ll put them in a comment here.
“Your company is only as strong as your last game,” says Celia Schilling, marketing director at Yacht Club.
This is true when you’re a single project studio.
By 2024, Yacht Club finally acknowledged that the two-team structure wasn’t working. It laid off some employees to cut expenses and paused development on the Shovel Knight sequel so everyone could work on Mina the Hollower, with Velasco taking over as director. What was once considered a less ambitious side project is now the company’s largest game ever.
My read on this is that the the two-team structure wasn’t the problem, but scope creep was, not to mention the bad fit for initial project direction that they acknowledged elsewhere in the article. I’m quite sure Mina the Hollower will hit their sales target of 200k copies. Hopefully they scale back up responsibly after that.
But lead level designer Jacob Mikkelsen says he doesn’t regret anything they’ve done so far
Not even the online requirement for accessing most of the game’s features? It’s so needless. To my knowledge, the game doesn’t even have an in-game microtransaction shop to give them an incentive to have you online. At least there’s a community server project, so I feel good about our chances of preserving the game in the future, but it doesn’t make me okay with giving them my money in the present. And it’s a damn shame, because the sandbox they made for Hitman is fantastic.
I would call Avowed the best action game this year, yes. I think a lot of people were let down by the ways that it’s light on RPG systems, expecting it to be a Bethesda style game, but I’d say that, while it’s not 1:1, that game has a lot in common with FromSoft games but without the tense feeling of being against tough odds. If you haven’t played it yet, you’ll see what I mean. There’s also Eternal Strands, which I haven’t played just because there was so much else to play this year, but it’s got some buzz and interesting design ideas behind it.
What do you consider Obsidian? They put out two bangers this year. Does Split Fiction count? They’re at least an order of magnitude under the budget of a marquis Sony game, let alone the likes of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. How about Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves? The Alters? Dispatch? Have you heard of a little game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? I hear people like that one. (I’m joking. I’ve played it, too. Budget estimates are still in the tens of millions of dollars.) I’m strongly of the opinion that AA is back right now.