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Discussion (40 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I seriously doubt that is going to happen. 343 Industries, now Halo Studios, has the dubious distinction of being the only AAA game studio that has somehow never made a universally acclaimed game over almost 20 years. Sure, there are some good parts of Haloes 4 and 5 and Infinite and MCC, but all of these games have a giant asterisk next to their quality.
You would think Campaign Evolved would have been a lay-up, but despite multiple studios working on the at a drastically smaller scope than even the original Halo, it still currently has a "Mixed" review on Steam.
"Make the greatest Halo game ever" is too high of a bar to cross, I think a slightly more realistic goal for would be "make a decent Halo game that majority of players like", which at this point, I'm not sure if it is achievable.
Nintendo has the worst hardware, but consistently delivers a small number of really great games you can't play anywhere else. Any game you can play on a Xbox you could also play on a real PC and have a vastly better experience and far more utility. Xbox is just a shitty, ad infested, crippled gaming PC. Playstation is heading in that direction as they lose more exclusives, but at least their hardware is better than Microsoft's so the games look/play better.
Microsoft might as well give up and just sell a bunch of low-mid range gaming PCs in console shaped cases, running windows, ship them with controllers and just brand them as Xboxes. At least for now. Eventually Microsoft wants games as a service, where you buy a dumb terminal/cheap thin client and they stream games you pay excessively high prices for but never actually own to your screen.
Xbox now is a game studio, not a console manufacturer. Look at them through that lens. Doom, Halo, Overwatch, Fallout, whatever else, whether you are into them or not, they own a lot of franchises and those are their core now.
I switched from PS to Xbox a few years ago, because my family and friends were playing there.
There's also some nice technical benefits, but compared to my friends, who cares?
They cannot make user and customer focused software. They cannot make user and customer focused hardware. They do not care about customers.
Although I guess they have proven to be okay at data centers.
What should the Xbox be if Microsoft was a competent organization, like half of what apple is? And I'm not an Apple fan by the way
- since they have a monopoly of PC gaming, much to the pain of PC gaming users, that should afford them the ability to effortlessly Port x86 base games to an x86 gaming console platform
- because of their extensive relationships with PC hardware manufacturers, it should afford them the ability to produce a very powerful but cost-effective gaming platform
- Maybe even since steam runs primarily on x86, Microsoft could have partnered with steam to get their games onto that platform relatively seamlessly
- The PC gaming has several decades of dos and windows games that could have been updated, remade, or the like, so there should have been a wealth of ip available to them
- and with good coordination, should have been able to bootstrap dozens of software gaming studios to make actual good games exclusive to their platform
Well Microsoft succeeded at some of this. They did not succeed to the necessary degree, especially with treating their own custom games
Because of this eco-system for kids, xbox has great multiplayer support (including locally for friends), and the software was a clearer focus with less bloat. I don't see xbox market going away any time soon unless people stop having kids
second, nintendo exists for "family friendly" market.
But, that's exactly what they're doing right now, and you're still not satisfied? What would be different compared to today? It very much is exactly what they're doing.
It cannot be understated the extent to which the console industry, including third party publishers and devs, needs Sony and Microsoft to both stay competitive. In that light the drastic moves being done at MS are long overdue, but maybe not sufficient. It's also an open question if consoles (outside of the Nintendo universe, which is a very different audience) have a future at all.
Or maybe they do realize this and are willing to sacrifice the IP at the altar of Moloch.
If they're under the same roof, my optimistic hope is that they'll try to focus on how to differentiate the IPs. But realistically we'll probably just end up with even more micro transactions
Halo Infinite from 343/Halo Studios stands out in particular. They thought that game was ready to ship in late 2020 and showed it off on their summer showcase, where it triggered such an intense backlash they delayed the game for a year and it still came out with minimal content.
Halo and Rare going under Activision could be a good thing. But if you want to be cynical, they are moving all of these studios out of "Microsoft Gaming Studios" and into Activision, Bethesda, King, etc. to make it easier to sell each of those individually or spin off the whole thing altogether.
I really would have liked Halo games based on idTech though. I can't see why idTech can't be a complete package for Halo, especially 7 and 8.
Firing a bunch of id staff probably crushes that idea more than it was previously though.
I remember people hated on Reach because it didn't follow Chief and they added all the gadgets, then people hated 4 because of the weird undersuit Chief wore and a bunch of other nitpicks. Infinite has been hated for a slew of other reasons, but now Reach is considered good and 4 has a rising reputation. It seems to me that PvP players and story players have two extremely different outlooks on where the games went wrong, but at least we agree on one thing - keeping 5/Guardians on Xbox only was stupid (I still haven't played it).
Are those opposing goals? Why say "while" as if they are in competition with each other?
Somehow I doubt merging once-competing-now-heavily-downsized studios will be a recipe for success (see also the merging of Bethesda and Obsidian Software). Not that managing an army of game developers among one of the world's largest armies of developers is an easy task... but it does seem like the key is smaller teams with more creative liberty (hopefully working without the burden of an existing IP with such lofty expectations)
The Fallout TV show probably had to be the final straw for how much independence Bethesda gets to have. Boy, to have been a fly on the wall in that conference room.
"The TV show is doing gangbusters and you're telling me you don't have any F*CKING RELEASES IN THE CAN?!?! Stick Starfield, Todd, you're done with your 'art'."