At least we will get another Fallout from the hands of Obsidian right? Right?
What exactly is their plan? Just collect IPs so they aren’t being released on other platforms?
It is a very old strategy for monopolies to buy up competition when there are no anti monopoly protections so they can kill the competition, it’s how Microsoft was founded.
Fuck 343 Hasn’t made one good game Even the mcc which is great they needed 10 year for it to be good and even now u still have issue
I will say Halo Infinite did have good gameplay even if the single player story and multiplayer launch was half baked.
Not the worse things to play but well known to have unfixable netcode issue
Why don’t they just get out of the industry, they clearly don’t want to be in it anymore. It’s just been stupid decision, after stupid decision, they basically have a license to print money and instead of creating the games that people want, and then selling them for people to play on their confusingly named consoles, they instead muck around with it by raise prices, closed studios and discontinuing IPs.
These fuckers won’t rest until there’s nothing good left to play and all that’s left are multiplayer only games that cost $100 up front and still need several microtransactions a day forever in order to be in any way playable 😮💨🤬
You’re missing one major step. It’ll be 100 up front plus a monthly fee to your cloud gaming access to be able to play the game until they decide you don’t get the license to play it anymore and they take it away. You will own nothing and like it.
I still think they should sell Rareware to Nintendo. The fact that so many of those excellent oldschool games are stuck in IP limbo is a tragedy. Can’t play them unless you emulate them, or are lucky enough to find original hardware.
Activision in charge of Halo? That’s a deathblow if ever I heard one.
Activision doesn’t only publish Call of Duty though. They publish all kinds of games: Sekiro, the Tony Hawk games, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, etc.
Way more potential than what 343 had. I mean, 343 was purposefully NOT hiring former Bungie-era Halo employees. The important ones, like Marcus Lehto, Marty ODonnell, heck they only brought Joe Staten to get Infinite “back on track” and then promptly kicked him to the curb too. 343 definitely deserved this earlier, I am gonna be honest.
The games you mentioned ring in my head as mid-2000s highlights, with nothing more than blatant money grabs published in the last decade. Not very indicative of a healthy studio imo. They may have once been capable of turning out good games, but that was roughly in the era
343 was turning out good games toogood Halo games were being released as wellMy point is that Activision isn’t a studio. It’s a publisher. I read Activision said they are forming a new studio for Halo.
I mean, I didn’t bring up all of Activisions classic games like Pitfall, just the most recent games they have published since those are most relevant to the topic.
“the era 343 was turning out good games too”
Ok but that never really happened. Ensemble made Halo Wars and Creative Assembly made the sequel which were decent IMO (the first being better IMO). Every other game with the Halo brand under 343 was garbage. Forget about Spartan Strike and Spartan Assault? 343s first game was Halo CE Anniversary, which was horrendously bad, so I suppose it is poetic in a way that Halo Studios, which only survived long enough to drop a single game, would die with yet another rehash of Halo CE.
Except for maybe Fireteam Raven, only because I never had the chance to play it, 343 never had an “era of making good games.” Halo 2A was pretty good but it launched in the very broken MCC which took them years to fix.
4,5, and Infinite were the absolute low points of Halo, with Infinite being the best of the three only because of the art direction. But they are all far below Bungie-era Halo games.
Post bungie halo has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion, the series has survived the last 16 years on reputation alone.
Post Halo Bungie hasn’t fared much better…
I enjoyed destiny and destiny 2 but you could definitely feel them slipping, especially the fumble where they straight up removed parts of destiny 2.
Tried marathon on a free weekend and it was fine but there are so many other games that are better than fine and doing similar things. The only thing it had going for it was the bungie gunplay which is still as solid as ever.
Them removing stuff from Destiny 2 is why I stopped playing… Took me awhile to get the expansion and by the time I did they removed the content that expansion added, making it impossible for me to catch up with the lore and wasting my money.
CODification here it comes. Couldn’t be worse than the current state of Halo though?
Halo became what it is now because they tried to turn it into CoD, so it couldn’t be better either
I would argue that it probably does give better odds for it at Activision. They already have CoD. They don’t need to turn Halo into CoD. They can just use Halo to do something new.
I think I remember that they made a CoD with like mech suits or something, and a lot more movement mechanics, and it wasn’t received well. That’s basically what Halo is. Now they can go fully into that without CoD players complaining that it isn’t CoD.
I don’t have much faith in this, but I do think there’s better odds for a better Halo with Activision probably. 343 didn’t get it. Activision may not, but doing something new has to be better than continuing to fuck things up over and over.
A good time to mention that Xbox (and boycotting Game Pass especially) is one of a dozen or so priority targets chosen by the Palestinian BDS Movement beecause they’re vulnerable and Microsoft’s cloud computing services are so vital for “Israel’s” military and prison system
Deck chairs on the Titanic.
I honestly believe that Xbox will stop existing as a company in a few years.
Yeah, Asha Sharma seems to be set up as an example of the glass cliff. She’s clearly trying to bail out a sinking ship rather than revitalize a stale brand. Giving Halo to Activision shows a misunderstanding of what Halo players want, but the other things she’s doing are things that probably could have helped five or more years ago, but are just too late now. We’re probably heading toward a repeat of the 1983 crash. Xbox and PlayStation might still be around after, but they’ll be in the position that Atari and Sega were after the crash, with their remaining market share evaporating the instant a new competitor arrives.
Meanwhile, so long as Nintendo just keeps doing what they’ve been doing they should be fine. I could see them phasing out game key cards as an option for devs if the digital only backlash on the next generation is bad enough, but they might not have to given that the publishers that have been using them are the ones most likely to implode.
Honestly, Nintendo is in such a good position to pick up serious market share from Sony and Xbox. It’s insane that just making actual games that aren’t riddled with crap and not insta firing everyone who works for you is enough to be the clear front runner.
I wonder if, like Sega and Atari, there will be someone to swoop in and take market share here. I worry it’s a Meta or someone with a terrible spyware product.
Can’t wait for Fallout 5: Skyrim Crossover Edition.
Turns out Heimskr was working with the Thalmor the whole time and after Ulfric captured Hoover Dam, the Khajit Commonwealth just said “fuck it” and nuked everyone.
Well, it was skooma spiked with Nuka Cola.
The Radskeevers are everywhere and are a pain to kill.
Ok that description kinda makes me want to play a more fantasy themed post apocalypse. I guess The Witcher sort of counts, IIRC that story started with a magical apocalypse destroying the modern Earth
Nooo not Obsidian! Fuck off, Microsoft.
how many times do they have to be destroyed, when all they make is gold 😭
There is a 100% chance playground/turn 10 are getting downsized within the next year
Given that they keep printing money… You’re probably right
Halo to become Call of Duty In Space in 3…
They all ready did that 14 years ago when Halo 4 came out. It had kill streaks and creat-a-class with custom skins.
The only people in the world left that understand the lineage of Halo, and that Halo is all about the combat dance, and elaborate encounters, and that every enemy in the level is a chess piece that needs to be placed with utmost care, is Id Software.
Id, freshly equipped with everything they learned from resurrecting DOOM, is the only studio skilled enough to possibly save the Halo franchise.
Too bad Microsoft obliterated them last month, too.
Oops!
Wait until they give Doom to Activision, to create Call of Doom - UAC Mercenaries, a game where the hellspawn are replaced with striking UAC workers gone too far and dressing up as imps and such.
Holy moly.
That is basically the worst case scenario, no?
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The absolute last thing Obsidian needs is Bethesda presiding over them. Bethesda (the publisher) is pure toxicity, and don’t they hate Obsidian?
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They should have given Obsidian TES/Fallout, and folded Bethesda into Obsidian as a studio to farm work out to. BGS has some great level design teams, but the decision makers need to go.
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The absolute last thing Halo campaigns need is to be more like Call of Duty.
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They should have cut 343, and split the IP amongst specialized studios. Like an Arkane “special ops” stealth game, another Halo Wars, and/or a strictly multiplayer Activision game.
This is beyond even my worst expectations. It’s what I would have done if I was a corporate spy inside Microsoft, assigned to sabotage them.
Worst case but certainly expected. Microsoft paid a ransom for Bethesda and the Bethesda brand and their IP. Nothing was ever going to be rolled into a “lesser” brand like Obsidian. It’s naive to think otherwise, this is capitalism to a fucking T, decisions made by penny pinching sleezebags who assign value to names.
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“I wonder what will happen if we put all of our eggs in the same basket?” - Famous basket-dropper.
Nah, they’ll still somehow limp their way into the next generation because Sony is trying to one up MSFT in bad decisions.
If they just sat back and did nothing, then it’d would definitely be over lol.
Sony will announce the anti-piracy barbed rectal probe to fuck you in real time.
Imagine your job being making games, and finding a way to ruin that. Both of the big console teams have shit the bed simultaneously. Truly awe inspiring, the collective dipshettery we get to witness.
Good thing popcorn is cheap as I need more of it to watch them constantly doing stupid things.
None of it really matters to be because I am never going to buy a console anyway, largely because of shit like this. I’ll just enjoy watching.
The next generation is the problem. With the component pricing being stupid up they’re having to put off releasing the new consoles. They’re raising the prices on existing hardware just to match the component crunch, so they’re not getting the mid-late generation bump of people buying the hardware once it’s come down in price, and the people willing to buy new hardware an a high price already bought this generation’s comsole.
Xbox bled money buying studios for gamepass, then failed to get casual people subscribed to gamepass, but the hardware people who bought new $70 games a couple times a month started spending way less money on Xbox due to Gamepass because of all the day 1 releases. And the Series S held back everything by being wildly underpowered.
Meanwhile Sony burned billions betting on live service failures back to back to back (Microsoft did this too, but to a lesser degree).
And now their “new console generation” parachute/reset is fucked due to hardware costs. They know they can’t make an even halfway decent “next-gen” console under $1000, so now they’ve burned mountains of money and don’t really have a plan going forward. And now they’re amputating limbs to create the illusion of cost-cutting.
