I wouldn’t neccisarily describe it as hedging their bets. They’ve been talking about a lot of this stuff for years. Especially the “games as platform” stuff about unifying Xbox and PC where there have been several half assed or abandoned attempts. They even spent an entire generation pitching the Xbox as a generalized set top box rather than an explicit gaming console. And at base Microsoft got big as hell, never going away big as hell, on a baseline of not having to sell the hardware. They sold the platform, and got into hardware later.
They seem to be actually doing stuff this time instead of talking about it.
Technically the Games Pass already has streaming, though limited to phones ATM. They’ve been running Betas and test releases for around a year. Seems like it’s supposed to be a major part of it. But they’re building a subscriber base off downloads while it remains a bit impractical.
The sort of thing I’m talking about with entirely different approach. Streaming is a feature of a
subscription service for them. Not a product in it’s own right.
Media company consolidations make me nervous at best, but I understand why this happened - the cost of making AAA games is so high, you need a lot of money in the bank to even the failures out with the successes. Otherwise you hit one or two games with soft sales, and you go under.
Even if there was a “better” house-owned engine they could use for no extra costs (i.e. no licensing fees), there’s still an advantage to using the same engine they’ve been using - it’s familiar. No need to create a completely new workflow around a new engine and its requirements (some of which are only learned the hard way), no need to rework the new engine to do all the things you need it to do (that it wasn’t being asked to do by the previous developers who used it), and create a whole new set of issues in so doing… They’ve been using Gamebryo/Creation for so long, the productivity hit of changing engines would probably last for years. (And, of course, what constitutes a “better” engine is highly subjective. Plus, it’s easier to “fix” a familiar system than an unfamiliar one.)
Well, Microsoft spent 2.5 billion dollars for Mojang, a studio which only had one game (which, moreover, had already sold so many copies they had pretty much saturated their market). Bethesda (actually it’s technically ZeniMax Media that they bought) isn’t a studio - it’s a collection of eight (large) studios, with several thousand employees and at least nine successful AAA game franchises between them, that was already a consolidation of a number of powerhouse studios.
Man, I really hope they keep letting studios be themselves. There’s a really long, ugly history of large game companies buying studios and utterly destroying them, often for no discernible reason. (EA being rather infamous for it.)
Yeah, ZeniMax has a bunch of PS5 exclusives coming out, and Microsoft has said that won’t change. But of course, like most “exclusives,” they’re timed exclusives. It’s harder and harder to get enough sales on a single platform to pay for AAA game development.
IdTech, Arkane apparently has their own engine as well. I’ve been really confused by the seeming lack of influence Id seems to have had on Bethesda’s engine. They bought a company that specializes in engine tech. And specifically specializes in very efficient, stable engines. At least one of their subsidiaries have shifted to launching a new in-house engine.
The idea that Bethesda needs to replace their hoary old engine doesn’t seem to wash with how engines actually work these days. Neither is a single engine across all games always a great idea. There’s about a million stories of it taking longer to make an inappropriate engine work than developing one from scratch. Especially with big, open world RPGs.
But the frustrating thing is that there’s frustrating, familiar jank in each new Bethesda games, things that engine is clearly not capable of or good at. And known bugs that have been popping up since before Morrowind. They don’t seem to fix much there, just update it and add new stuff. And yet they have exactly the staff, with exactly the expertise to do so. Whether it’s fixing what they have or building something new. It’s a bit weird.
I guess we’ll see. It’s been interesting to see how grabbing those particular smaller studios has turned out to be specifically about game pass. A lot of what they’re doing seems like coming at the funding issues from other directions.
It’s the vertical integration that’s more concerning to me than the consolidation or worries about Microsoft chasing microtransations.
“Better” was a key (and subjective) word there - the engine doesn’t have to just be more stable, but have a feature set that’s fully capable (and already set up for) the things they need it to do. Having an engine with known idiosyncrasies can be valuable. It’s not just the engine, either - it’s the existing workflow and toolset, which don’t necessarily transfer over to a new engine.
But yeah, it’s not like Bethesda aren’t updating/rewriting their engine as time goes by. Game engines are kind of weird - “old” engines get completely rewritten, “new” engines get based on existing engines - either moving code over, or because it’s based on work programmers previously did (and thus unnecessarily carries over some legacy cruft or outdated approaches that doesn’t need to be there). It’s like the philosophical question of, “If, over time, you replace every part of a tool, is it the same tool?” Except that sometimes nothing about it is changed but it’s given a new name, and sometimes the parts are all replaced by something radically different and everyone pretends it’s the same tool.
Given the consistency of the jank with Creation engine games, I wonder if the problem is not that they can’t get “engine experts” to come in and rework it, but they’re afraid that fixing it requires breaking other things - especially as it’s a cross-platform engine. Though also the game industry runs on a “good enough” attitude (born of necessity, granted), a certain amount of territoriality over projects and inertia.
Well aware. I think technically IdTech couldn’t do it. Apparently a part of the reason it’s so well optimized is it does Doom stuff, but nothing else. This is supposedly why they’ve had so little luck licensing it, it’s limited. Arkane’s system seems to cover a lot of the sort of non-Doom stuff you’d be doing with an open world RPG. As it’s already sort of that anyway. But hub based and stealthy. And the end results on all three are remarkably similar. 1st person games, similar control schemes, very similar approach to interacting with the world, and so forth.
Thing is that they own this stuff and the people who built it. You don’t need to swap to a whole new engine. You can apply all that to your iteratively built, complex, multipiece engine in piece meal fashion. Getting the thing correct over time. But they don’t? I guess, it’s possible they’ve just failed to execute. Maybe they do that for the sake of layering new shiny over the top but won’t touch the foundations?
It very much makes me wonder why the hell they bought Id in the first place. There’s valuable IP there, but ID weren’t exactly setting the world on fire at the time. And they’ve always been primarily an engine and tech company. If you aren’t trying to get at that, why do you need Id itself instead of just gutting it for the license. Wolfenstein shows you can hand this stuff off to good results, and they haven’t exactly touched too much else.
I might buy that if they didn’t keep breaking it by adding new things. Or really just adding broken things. And given the number of crazy balls work arounds people seem to discover in their games I have problems believing it’s a work flow issue. At a certain point it takes more work to stick the spit and glue back together over and over than it does to just fix it properly. Accounts from former employees describe a lot of time wasted just to getting basic things to work again, or faking things it can’t cope with.
Yeah, apparently Arkane’s house-made engine is based on IdTech, but supposedly they’ve rewritten 90% of the engine. So… not sure what they actually kept.
Assuming: you don’t have to completely change the architecture of the engine to fix the problem (I could see this being the case even with seemingly small issues), that the people currently tasked with working on the guts of the engine understand what’s required and are comfortable executing it, that the solution isn’t seen as more trouble than it’s worth (or causing more trouble than it fixes), that the problems are even seen as significant enough to divert programmers to work on rather than adding cool new features.
(And all of that assumes that politics aren’t involved. I worked on MMOs for a while and got a peek at the remains of one company that couldn’t make their network tech work; someone had come along with a good solution and they actually got scapegoated for the problems everyone else created and their solutions rejected.)
I remember when I first saw the train-head example, my response was to laugh and then think, “Yeah, that sound about right.” That’s game development. I’ve never worked on a game that didn’t have some totally crazy shit going on that functioned as a work-around for a lack of a (properly implemented) feature. My favorite part of game development Twitter is people being asked how they did something cool and having to sheepishly admit what totally insane thing they actually did. If it works, it works. I suspect at this point, what they were asking that particular work-around to do got complicated enough that they implemented a real solution (which they’ve also subsequently pushed to breaking point).
I’ve heard a lot of stories like that. Egos at play. Fear of breaking things. Not wanting to spend development resources on fixing/improving something - and then spending ten times longer dealing with it being broken (though sometimes, when it’s “just” the artist and designers wasting their time, that’s seen as acceptable). Also, I know a fair number of game programmers who aren’t, well, great programmers - they’ve been in the industry for a while, getting their start doing seat-of-the-pants game programming in the '80s and '90s that wasn’t all that complex. But they survived in the industry, and as games got more complicated, they ended up in management rather than evolving their skills. Their tolerance for shit being broken can be quite high - because that seems normal to them.
Everything I hear about whatever Bethesda is calling their engine now reminds me of working in institutional settings with in house proprietary systems for things like content management. Or time spent working for streaming companies early on in web streaming with the same. In several cases things could not be fixed or updated properly because no one around actually knew how they worked. There was no documentation. Replacement meant paying a vendor (institutional) or completely discarding the core product that made that video company distinct.
It seems like Bethesda’s engine wasn’t really built. It was sort of assembled ad hoc, with things added or rebuilt as needed with each major release. With an occasional smoothing over. Given how long they’ve been doing that, supposedly this thing dates to Daggerfall or Morrowind, I really doubt there’s any people around who know how the whole shebang is assembled.
If that’s the case it’d be less worry about fixing it without borking something else. Than fixing it properly would involve basically doing an autopsy on the thing. Tearing it apart and documenting it first. That’s likely more expensive and time consuming than just starting over. Just starting over has all the downsides you mentioned.
So bit of a catch-22. Thing is as a certain point the thing will just break or become outdated enough in core ways to impact the business. Ubisoft in part ran into this with Assassin’s Creed. Though the culprit was rushed dev cycles rather than the hurdles associated with 25 years of engine jank.
Unity came out broken, even in the aftermath the game and the following entry were baldly outdated on base things. And it took the wind out of the series after what had been a high point for sales and critical acclaim.
Bethesda is already on the cusp of that. Their games are throw backs in many ways, the bugs and the engine are now a huge part of the conversation. Fallout 76 seems to be in a fairly constant state of collapse, and it certainly seems to be a financial failure.
That may be a factor in why they were interested in selling. Expensive looming problem for the tent poles. Their online and mobile efforts are lagging and include at least one very expensive mistake. Doom and Wolfenstein are successful but not the blockbusters that TES and Fallout are. Dishonored and Prey apparently don’t do what they need sales wise. That’s a precarious situation to be in. If the next TES game shits the bed in anyway they could end up very stuck. And it also means they probably can’t accept enough delay to prevent shitting the bed if it starts to go that way.
I also wonder how much mainstreaming will be involved, now. The ability to play morally ambiguous characters, or downright evil monsters, was a big thing in TES and Fallout.
I fear we may no longer be able to call upon the Night Mother to solve those pesky problems.
Bethesda is widely accused of bleaching that sort of thing out of Fallout. And TES hasn’t really done moral ambiguity (or subtle character driven narrative) in a very long time. There are bad things and there are good things. And you can do either or both and it won’t have much impact.
Both series have already been loaded up with auto-generating mainstream open world stuff. And TES went from the high weird of Morrowind to stock fantasy back with Oblivion. I forget the exact details but the original descriptions and settings for much of TES world were much stranger and less surrogates for real world places than what we have. The setting Oblivion ended up in was apparently tropical with far more off the wall animal life and ecology in the original lore. The whole setting was more giant bug busses and mushroom forests than dragons and medieval castles up to that point.
It’s after these things happened that these series became two of the most mainstream popular and financially successful AAA series going.
That’s kind of a ship that sailed long ago. I am hoping this will lead to an injection of new talent or a new impetus to make these games interesting again. Along with some serious modernization.
But past moves along these lines that i would have expected to do that haven’t. The excellent critical reputation for New Vegas didn’t convince them to go down that path. Dishonored has done far, far more with atypical fantasy settings, twisty turny moral ambiguity, and just density over raw size. But they basically tossed that series out instead of building on it.
I hear that so often it makes my ears bleed. Fallout 4 forces you to be a good guy what with having no choice about the Minute Men. Yet it is a lie that is repeated so often and stated so fervently that I really wonder if those guys played the game. You can completely not get involved with the Minute Men and finish the game without them by doing what a selfish character most likely would do. Ignore the please for help from the balcony of that museum. Also there are various different endings that definitely make a lot of difference both for your character and for the area. Or the fact that your character either has a backstory as a veteran or a law degree with a prewar child… when New Vegas forces you either into the role of a very diligent or very vengeful delivery guy.
I tried my hand on several Obsidian titles and could not find that supposed freedom, only arbitrary fights every few inches along your way (worst offender Pillars of Eternity) and totally meh story (Outer Worlds) .
It is ok for me if you didn’t like the game or the creator, but the amount of bad faith arguments and outright lies people deliver to supposedly give it some kind of objectivity and the praise of infallible Obsidian boggle my mind.
That said, no one can deny that Bethesda’s marketing (and in that, monetization) is horribly misguided.
There is very little moral ambiguity or narrative complexity in “this is the good side narrative, and that is the bad narrative”. Neither is particularly consequential if you can skip both, or as is traditional with Bethesda’s games do both with little conflict between them. Likewise multiple endings isn’t evidence of anything. Bethesda’s games including their Fallouts have relatively clear, blunt paths to expected outcomes. In aggregate it’s surprisingly linear.
There are hosts of other paths through New Vegas that aren’t either the best or the worst. But more importantly that “good” pathway comes with consequences of it’s own. Reveals that the good isn’t always actually good. Bad guys who kind of have a point and good guys who are kind of assholes. To the extent that it sends you into something specific, it’s because it’s telling a specific story.
Bethesda’s recent games present pretty damn stock save the world plots without really much to say or much complexity. You can play that as evil or good, or whatever shades of that you can massage out of the limited responses and options given to you (primarily go here shoot that in 4).
You may have misunderstood what’s meant there. Bethesda mostly seems to make sand boxes. Obsidian comes out of the same long chain of narratively drive western RPGs as Bioware. The freedom people are talking about is the ability to find a broad number of solutions and approaches to a given situation. Rooted in your character progression. Not neccisarily the freedom to fuck off and build a fort instead of following the plot. And in the context of a defined narrative where those approaches carry weight.
Obsidian’s cult status largely comes out of the fact that they’ve pretty much never had the resources and support to finish a game properly. You have to go back fairly far to find the period where the core team there (and what would become inExile) were in their prime. Basically to the original Fallouts and Arcanum. After that it’s a lot of very promising, interesting, but under-executed games.
If you wanna talk about bad faith arguments maybe taking my opinions of Bethesda’s games in general (widely held ones) and attacking them as a lie about one specific feature of a specific game is not the best way to go about it.
I choose this because it is a pretty big thing that occurs in the beginning of the game, has immense influence on how things develop differently and is not just ignored but it’s supposed impossibility to play evil because of it is at the core of many arguments I heard why Fallout 4 is such a worse game than NV.
And as I explained I have the exact same experience with Obsidian games that are so often criticized about the Bethesda Fallouts.
Yeah, that’s how that tends to happen (except with engines that are being built for licensing to third parties, where development is more methodical). I always assumed their favored engine Gamebryo was an updated version of the in-house engine they used for Daggerfall, but apparently they abandoned that on Morrowind for Gamebryo, which was was made by someone else. It was, at heart, a '90s game engine, and all the development they did on the engine for Skyrim and Fallout 4 sounds like was focused entirely on adding features to bring it into the present. (E.g. modern graphics rendering, integrating id’s netcode, etc.) So probably no one fully knew how it worked to begin with.
Fixing game engines certainly is a headache. I worked on some game expansions for a game with a custom-built engine after the original company collapsed. We had no (usable) documentation, but we did have the full code and a few junior programmers from the original team, and even with a programmer-heavy group, most of the programmers were still devoted to fixing the known, glaring issues in the engine after a couple of years. We could have spent at least a couple more years making the engine less of a pain in the butt to develop for, had we not been shut down.
AAA development is increasingly precarious to be in, in general. I don’t think there’s anything special about their situation. In the old days, before “AAA” was a thing, a studio could crank out a number of games and if one of them was a hit, it would not only pay for the failures it could pay for future development of multiple games as well. Now, a single game whose sales are simply soft is enough to screw up a company because the financial investment in each game and its marketing is so huge. It takes an increasingly enormous company to balance it all out. We’ve been seeing AAA studio consolidations going on for years, with a decreasing number of studios/publishers that got increasingly large. We’ve just hit the end-point of that trend.
The service will stream games running on Amazon Web Services servers to Fire TV, Windows, Mac, and iOS devices initially (with Android support coming weeks later).
