To be fair, the article makes it sound like Obsidian is going to be doing with Fallout 4 what they did with Fallout 3/NV - use the existing game engine to create an entirely new game - versus what Bethesda is doing, which is updating the whole system to Fallout 5, which presumably would be sharing some work with ESVI.
One of those things would actually be more difficult than the other, though I’d also suspect that Microsoft’s atitude here is driven by Bethesda’s largesse when it comes to ESVI. It’s been discussed to death but a single non-trailer on your biggest tentpole in 10 years in favor of your boss’ seriously mid space game is certainly a… decision.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
Well the last time Obsidian got their hands on the then current Creation Engine, they hot rodded it and got it to do things that Bethesda had stated they wanted to be able to do but couldn’t figure out how to do.
What would a wholly updated FO5 even… have be different? What are the systems that would be reworked?
No one has any idea because no one has mentioned anything at that level of detail, at all, that I’m aware of.
Also what, like, Bethesda is going to somehow make the Creation Engine not a giant pile of shit, with now 15 more years of acculumated technical debt from never doing a full ground up rebuild… ?
Anyway my suspicion is that MSFT is generally pissed at Bethesda for spending stupendous amounts of money over the last decade and a half, making basically one decent game that was a commercial success, one maybe commerical success that was a PR disaster, and then a combo PR+commercial disaster.
That, all in addition to FO5 and ES VI are as best we can tell literally just dreams, concepts of a plan.
Sharma’s job is to make Xbox as profitable as it can be, partially to stem the damage from Xbox itself’s fuckups over the last decade, Spencer’s ‘buy every IP’ plan only works if that leads to actually profitable games…
… but Sharma also has to make Xbox as profitable as it can be to cover for the incredible amounts of money MSFT has spent on AI/LLMs, Windows itself going to shit, mass abandonment of Windows and Windows enterprise software thats been going on in Europe since Trump Round 2 started.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
NV was also an incredibly unstable game, and worse at launch than it is today, which is still incredibly bad even with mods. NV was great, but let’s not pretend it was flawless.
Also, Obsidian isn’t the same studio it was back then. I don’t know how people still view things like this. Obsidian is a name. The people working there are the talent. The talent is mostly gone.
AgentSeven@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
We’ve been saying this since Morrowind: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout NV, Fallout 4 - Gamebryo sucks, what are they going to do to this wheezing trash heap etc etc - and every time they do the same thing: update the graphics and gameplay marginally, introduce new elements (dual wielding magic, radiant quests, settlement building, whatever) release it as the “new” version (outrageously buggy ofc) and largely let the mod community fix it. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that’s probably what FO5 and ESVI will also do, it’s the path of least resistance and nobody will be bringing out their surprised Pikachu faces.
I don’t really care all that much because I like the games, none more than FONV, so I’d be happy for Obsidian to hot rod FO4 into something equally interesting.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
Yeah I mean like… a full on conversion at the level of Fallout London or something like that, but with access to more ‘guts’ of the engine… done by pros?
Yeah, I’d bet Obsidian can do something like that, at the least, and it would be broadly better than FO4, again at the least.
Also my absolute random bet for FO5/ES6 will be radiant enemies along the line of Spore creatures, hahahah!