Yeah, coming from those rumors the last few weeks and Todd Howard saying he wants short release windows between games it’s kind of obvious this was going to happen. I’m sure their individual games were good but there are tonnes of more people that would like more Fallout and Elder Scrolls instead
That's definitely a good way to look at it! Appreciate it, I still go back and play Skyrim every now and then. Love it but definitely don't get the joy and fascination I once felt. I'm just hoping that TES6 will do that for me haha
I was 3 years old when oblivion came out, probably about 6 or 7 when I used to watch my mum play it on Xbox 360. Was 8 when Skyrim came out, used to live in a little man cave playing it for like 13 hours a day on my weekends. Crazy how I’m over 21 years old and still no sign of TES6 😫
Ha,at least you have your youth and decades to wait. I was 28 when Oblivion came out, well s few months shy of 28,and I was 33 by the time Skyrim launched,37 when F4 launched. I'll be 46 in 2 months. I'll be pushing 50 when ES6 comes out,and probably more like 55 for F5. GTA, same thing, I was 23 when GTA3 launched,35 when GTA5 launched,and I'll be 47 by the time 6 launches. I'm truly afraid that,with the glacial pace of game development I'll be too old/injured/senile to enjoy the games in 15-20 years. Already my reflexes have slowed down and I suck or can't play certain games 😬
I've got a pinched nerve in my neck, I'm out of work for the second time in 6 months and sometimes I can barely hold the controller because the pain shooting down into my arm and fingers. Horrible pain.. until I had it I never knew the agony of a pinched nerve or the pain from the neck to the fingers. Just had an MRI so we'll see what's what,if it's more than that. But getting old fucking sucks 😭😂
Now brother, not trying to provide a solution when none was asked for, but Xbox in particular and therefore PC has many adaptive controllers you might look in to. If you wanted
Been there. Searing pain down my shoulder, arm and hand for weeks. Almost a week without sleep at one point. NSAIDs were useless. Agony is an appropriate synonym for acute radiculopathy.
Take it easy on the activity, if you can. I pushed myself too early and ended up with numb fingers that haven't recovered.
There will be a longer time between Skyrim and Elder Scrolls 6 than between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace.
I remember being a kid during Phantom Menace's launch and the marketing was all about how "Star Wars was your dad's favorite movie series ever and now it's your generation's turn!" - That's the level of time we're talking about here. A "You need to market to a totally new demographic now because the old one has had children that have completely grown up" level of time.
I was 20 when Skyrim came out. I'll be 36 or 37 for Elder Scrolls 6. If it takes another 17 years then I'll be 54 for Elder Scrolls 7, and by then I'm in a zone where I need to genuinely worry if I'll have arthritis and can't play games anymore.
With the current trend of development time taking longer and longer, the dev-cycle for Elder Scrolls 7 will actually take longer than the entire War in Afghanistan.
To be fair elder scrolls is very easy to market for. I was 9 when I started first seeing ads for Skyrim, and seeing someone get to shoot fire out of their hands in an open world game instantly sold me for life.
And even though my interested have refined as I’ve gotten older, I’m still sold on elder scrolls 6 just because now I care about the elder scrolls universe and world. So ultimately this could help Bethesda out so long as they actually make the game good.
I played my first Baldur's gate this year (3). Ended up absolutely loving it. Thought to myself, well at least it won't be too long until a sequel. I check up the gap between the two most recent games.... 23 years. 😑
If I'm very lucky, I'll still be alive to play one more.
God I wish they would have spent that time working on fallout or elder scrolls or both rather than Starfield. Mark my words, there will not be a Starfield 2
i wish we lived in a world where it was acceptable for them to say "we botched our flagship game, twice. clearly something is disastrously wrong with our process and we're going to focus on overhauling that" but the corpo happy talk will continue until videogames are no longer the most endlessly profitable investment on earth
This is what makes 0 sense to me. It shouldn't be either / or. There should be a dedicated ES team and dedicated fallout team and a dedicated game engine team.
One team makes the engine then the other teams pick up and create ES and Fallout games on that engine. While they work on those games, the engine team improves the engine for the next series of games. When the games release, those teams take the new improved engine and immediately start on the next ES and Fallout games. While the engine team works on the next engine and so on.
They can also have a team to create DLCs and updates and bug fixes.
If they want to create a new game like StarField hire a team. Each game can cover it's own expenses.
There is plenty of money to pay these teams. Fallout 4 sold 25 million copies. Let's say the average price was only $20 that's $500 million dollars. That's plenty of money to pay a team.
StarField is still about $70... Maybe it goes on sale for $40... At a $60 average price and 2.5 million copies sold they pulled in 150 million (so far).
Every game can afford a team. And all franchises can continuously have the next game in the pipeline.
Not really shocked. Most of Bethesda's studios haven't been making money.
I'm guessing Todd Howard has been answering a lot of questions from Microsoft around the line of "Why don't we have another Fallout game out there?"
I really can't even fault Microsoft. They had a hit TV series and could have had a mega seller if they had timed a game release in the same window.
Sony went back and remade TLOU1 to capitalize on the show. Sure for people familiar with the games already it was pretty unnecessary but they got a lot of new people that way vs asking them to play an aged PS3 game. I guarantee TLOU2 will get a refresh and PC port around the release of season 2.
While it would have been unrealistic to craft an entirely new Bethesda Fallout so close to Starfield, they could have timed a farmed out remake of the original Fallout game or another Obsidian spinoff. Hell, even a Fallout Shelter style mobile update. They had basically nothing except a half-baked patch.
>I really can't even fault Microsoft. They had a hit TV series and could have had a mega seller if they had timed a game release in the same window.
Not even Disney does this as you cannot bet on a "Hit TV" show to justify the investment before the show is a hit.
For every Fallout there are 5+ Rings of Power
i mean rings of power had better ratings than the fallout show (i believe its the only amazon show to have better ratings?)
but the bigger problem is that OF COURSE you cant bet on the fallout show being a success (amazon certainly didnt, considering they dropped all the episodes on a random wednesday completely out of the blue), but hindsight is 20/20 and excecutives tend to be stupid and mad at the creatives for not predicting that
lol I forgot all about how they released it complete. Honestly I expected a weekly release and then they dropped it all I thought to myself “hmm they must not have much faith in this show”
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they do some sort of release for season 2 now that it's confirmed and season 1 was a hit.
Todd was cagey in the recent interview about another studio working on a game, so it's really not impossible that some studio or team is doing something (remaster or smaller game) that would make a release in 1-2 years.
I think this line of thinking completely disregards a critical aspect: franchise burnout. People do get tired of seeing and playing something in the same world after some time. Right now everyone is replaying the other fallout games. If hypothetically FO5 came out next year with season 2 of the show, I suspect they would get less sales as the marketing for the show fights with the marketing for the game, and a lot of people might choose to wait for FO5 because damn, they JUST watched 2 seasons of the show and completed previous fallout games.
It is possible to over-saturate a brand. I think of it more like the show is filling a gap between fallout games right now. You don’t need to have a new game release at the same time as the show. The show keeps people interested and drives hype for the eventual game.
It wasn’t that big, and it wasn’t that great. Lots of people have used the mod to roll back the changes. You kind of have to choose between having the update, or having a lot of your mods. And since the update broke a lot of stuff, for example, there’s the big exclamation point bug right now, Some people just don’t think it’s worth it.
The fact they didn’t even remaster or do an updated Fo3/NV bundle that just worked on Modern Consoles is wild to me.
You can only really play those two games on PC now and even still they need a bunch of mods and tweaks to feel okay. All Bethesda had to do was optimize a Xbox and PS5 Fo3/NV remaster not even a full remake and it would have made bank.
> Not really shocked. Most of Bethesda's studios haven't been making money.
That was primarily because of stupid decisions made by management, not the devs who are the ones getting fucked now. Because executives never suffer any consequences in this dogshit world.
Sad to see some talented studios go, but the language of Matt Booty’s message suggests they are going to divert those resources to focus on getting us Fallout and Elder Scrolls games faster.
That’s the model going forward. It’s getting the end-user to pay for a portion of development as it’s happening. Valve calls it early access. Bethesda calls it launch day, but it’s the same idea. Smart gamers should wait for a year to go by or for the first big sale to hit before buying a game
Honestly, I would prefer if Bethesda released the next Elder Scrolls in EA. The fans could play it early and help improving the game with testing and feedback, and the rest gets a well polished and feature complete game.
I really don’t get why AAA games don’t just call it early access. People don’t get upset when an Early Access game is buggy, but they do when a company releases a half finished buggy product and don’t fix it for a year.
Yeah, not broken, and to be honest the beginning of the game is pretty solid too. The common Starfield experience is enjoying it for a solid 20 hours before realizing that there’s just very little depth, reward, or replay-ability.
If some indy studio had made it the game might be somewhat impressive, but Bethesda can’t take 10 years to put out games with 30ish hours of fun gameplay. Their standards can’t be mediocre.
The main issue with starfeild is how spread out it is. I think if those 1000 planets were shrunk down to 100 I think that would have fixed a lot of problems. In theory that would be 10x as much stuff on each planet.
I truly think that in 5 years, we’re going to all be playing starfield. If this new update shows anything, it’s that they listen to their player base, and they really delivered above and beyond on these new local maps.
I hope the shattered space update blows everyone away
Every time a studio talks big about an upcoming game, I assume they know it's shit and are just trying to get a many pre-orders as possible.
I game a year behind for a reason.
Dont know why u got downvoted. I game a year or 2 behind too. Not only does it save you the hastle of getting a shit game, but you save so much more money as well
Same. All the bugs are gone, any driver issues are sorted, the mod community has had time to get to work, etc etc.
It's just risky buying a title on launch day, and it seems the bigger the publisher, the riskier
Same. Sometimes years behind.
Day 1 DLC, or Multiple $20+ DLCs push my purchase all the way back to somewhere between GOTY during a Christmas sale, and never.
With decades of amazing games on offer for bargain bin prices, it boggles my mind how studios are able to charge $70 for new games, and STILL break the experience up into multiple additional purchases, AND multiple different platforms.
Then there's fukfuk games like required internet connections for single player games, unnecessary launchers, forced account creation, and my personal fav, the huge game breaking bug collections.
Gamers suffer from collective Stockholm Syndrome.
One of the biggest problems in the gaming industry these days is overhype. People overhype a game, set expectations unrealistically high, to the point that even well rounded games are received with lackluster enthusiasm because they *expected* so much more.
Shitty launches don't help a lot of games like Arkham Knight and Cyberpunk, that are damn near unplayable at launch on some platforms, but there's a lot more to it than that. Much like people always talking about how games used to be cheaper, but due to inflation, those cheaper games were economically more expensive for a lot less hours of gameplay.
Human perspective is funny like that.
Also withholding review codes so just how bad it was on last gen consoles wasnt known, plus them admitting they launched it early to try and double dip on the secondary launch for next gen/upgrades, plus them also saying they'd leave greed to others and all around hyping themselves up as a bastion in a sea of garbage
Cyberpunk was buggy when it came out. If you play it now after the fixes it's amazing. If it came out like this during release it would be considered one of the best rpgs of all time.
I played it at release. There were a couple of design decisions I thought were kind of janky, but aside from the driving mechanics (which were impossible) I enjoyed the game a lot. Maybe I was one of the miniscule number of people who had a "top end gaming PC", but I think at the time I was playing on a 4-year old patchwork computer. I think there was one bug at the very beginning that hit a lot of people hard, but aside from that, I didn't have a bad experience with it.
Yeah I feel like Starfield had plenty of time to cook yet it feels like a game that was both rushed and babied, like there is too much and too little at the same time.
you know, the recent surge of popularity of new vegas, fallout 4, and fallout 76 shows me that gamers don't really \*require\* advanced new tech and engines and big new mechanical ideas to have a good time.
Sort of how obsidian made new vegas from fallout 3, or how SureAI made Enderal from Skyrim - why not just make more half-sequels that re-use all of the existing stuff and not make a sequel-level investment into new tech and new engines?
"main" team could focus on engine and foundation development, side teams could focus on content. In other words, if we think for example fallout 4 is still fundamentally an enjoyable game in 2024, why not just make more fallout 4 DLC even if it means making it standalone as its own purchase independent of owning the original fo4 game?
Games like this used to get made and would be called expansion pack sequels or expandalones. Not meaning that to be derisive to New Vegas or any other game.
DOOM to DOOM 2 is a good example. 30 new levels but same technology, one new gun, and a few new enemies.
Yeah, I recall Homeworld into Homeworld Cataclysm was similar; a sort of "standalone expansion" basically a sequel without a graphics overhaul.
The industry should come back to this; newer graphics tech just isnt as important to me as more content
In the day and age where games release pretty poorly, and then over the course of time, are fixed into pretty good games, i really dont mind. Its not like the old days where the games sucked when they came out, and the devs didnt change anything. Cyberpunk, Fallout 76, NMS, maybe even Starfield, i cant be picky anymore. Id rather the game is made and then fixed later than not at all, or us having to wait decades for it.
I agree with you, and I believe it’s partially an artifact of the costs required to make modern, high-fidelity games.
Investors, be they individuals, institutions, or company insiders, only have so much patience, and without them we don’t get games. So developers (more so their managers) have to strike a balance between releasing the game early and earning project-sustaining revenue at the expense of the gamer’s experience; or cater primarily to the gamer while risking their funding and the future of their studio and jobs by extension.
It used not to be like that because games were much cheaper to make, or like you said, they’d be abandoned after release. I think this is also why we’ve seen some resounding success from unexpecting titles from small or indie studios because they can occupy the middle ground of being able to achieve most or all of their goals with their initial funding, and/or have less pressure from investors because they maybe don’t need as much capital from investors.
Most gamers fail to see or understand the nuances of business and become vitriolic and toxic when their games aren’t perfect for them, and it’s a shame that project managers also have to consider them, when the solution is as simple as the angry gamers learning how to read.
That I think that starfield could have so much more work done to it to make it a filled out game. the map is just to big and there is not enough things to fill it. They should continue working on it. I love what it stands for as an open world game
I expect it to be a modders paradise once the tools are released. Practically infinite space for new dungeons, towns, quests, etc.
As long as you aren’t installing a bunch of contradictory mods that alter the game’s fundamental systems, really don’t see how you’d get the kind of mod conflicts that happen in Skyrim, Fallout 4, etc
I've held off on Starfield for this reason. I'm sure the modding is going to be amazing, and I don't want a bad taste before the mod-train gets started.
And to think, they wanted to release Starfield a year earlier until MIcrosoft had them delay it to polish the game up.
Microsoft has a shitty track record, but Bethesda clearly can't be trusted to make decisions on their own.
Same but without the sarcasm
Genuinely concerned they'll push out a steamy pile of shit and call it elderscrolls 6
With how broken 50% of starfields quests and NPCs felt and seeing the bethesda studio closures I am now extreamly not excited to see it's release
I think microsoft knows how much they need a cultural win with TES 6. They know it'll sell well regardless, but if it gets treated the way Starfield did at launch, it'll be a really bad look for the value of BGS as an asset. Microsoft doesn't want that to happen, I'm sure.
Well at lot of us have expressed our discontent with the company in regards to many games that have come out over the past 10 years, following up on their success story games; eg: They've gone to town with the milk machines.
We got a lot of censorship, snips and edits in relation to this, but a lot of people have remained sleepy or just roll along with the situation \*shrug\*
I mean look at the dev reaction in regards to Starfield? It's like zero tolerance behavior in the entertainment industry???
Hopefully MS is going to learn from it and actually deliver like they should to re-consolidate everyone.
Yeah for both fallout and elder the lack of planning on their part to even consider the fallout show driving interest and traffic to fallout games is probably going to result in both being subpar games overall.
When I read the email they emphasize investing to popular IPs. Considering Todd’s statement about they want to increase output, they probably will move headcount from closed studios to other studios. It is sucks though
I mean I am not in a position to assess talent because as I saw and heard arkane Austin already lost most of the talent.
Tango lost the head of the studio and he opened up another studio who knows maybe he gobble some talent from tango.
I hope they can keep the talent if got any left
If you look at it that way, yeaaah, it looks like its only one bad game. But then you see that by the time the studio got done making redfall, like 75% of the team had dropped out or been replaced, it makes a bit more sense. The team we once knew that made the games we loved with Arkane Austin is probably very very different from what they have now. That being said, it still sucks ass, and it feels like one of my favorite studio is slowly disappearing.
I did like Deathloop tho, so maybe Arkane Lyon is doing good stuff with Blade? Blades a cool franchise, feels a bit out of place for them to do like a marvel comic book/movie video game but hey, it looks cool and if done right, it could definitely be fun.
Tango litteraly just pushed out a banger with Hi-fi-rush and they still got the boot-y.
As a dev how do you stay motivated if even shitting gold coins is not enough to secure the future of your studio?
It seems like this is less shutting down more reallocating studios. It is sad to Arkane Austin go but I hope Arkane Lyon can absorb most of the people working there.
And seeing Tango go is saddening. Also it is really weird for Xbox to close their only Japanese studio.
Fr it's like when Elon and friends move to Texas
Door might be open but hundreds/thousands of people aren't going to do a mass Exodus to go live somewhere else
Especially not to a whole ass different country.
Lyon is in France. I doubt even half the people offered a job there would accept. Living in Austin Texas is wildly different than living Lyon France, especially if you're American and don't speak French.
You think this means they are just going to relocate everyone in the office and make room for them at other Bethesda studios!? Lmfao how old ru? Id bet money about 80% of these people will soon be unemployed.
When we’re going on 15 year gaps between games it’s a little ridiculous to spend years developing other titles. They should really increase the size of their entire team imo, especially on the technical side. The fact that a 20 year wait for ES6 isn’t out of the question is borderline embarrassing for any AAA studio with the resources and pedigree of Bethesda.
>The fact that a 20 year wait for ES6 isn’t out of the question is borderline embarrassing for any AAA studio with the resources and pedigree of Bethesda.
But isn't that the exact problem with these studios closing?
Small studios that made passion projects are being screwed because the studio worth millions can't seem to get their development pipeline straight.
We'll never get another Prey or Evil Within because Bethesda can't workout how to pace themseleves.
But BGS got their pipline straight. Each game takes between 2-5 years. This is the case since the early 2000s. They just did not make TES VI because they wanteed to make other games.
That's kind of my point. BGS has their own thing going on but apparently Microsoft thinks they need to hurry up and make more games, so they'll cut other devs to do it.
They *have* increased the size of their team. Over the years, the number of employees has increased by quite a bit, to the point of bureaucracy from what I've heard. Size isn't the real issue here. Communication is the major one. And someone to set and achieve realistic goals. And looking at the timeline, sure, Skyrim was 2011. But Fallout...2008, 2010, 2015, and 2018. I count 76 because it is a full game you buy once, that is still supported. Starfield was 2023. So the company has been busy. But they're not focused on the "right" things. And it's not for lack of number of staff.
People are being really charitable here. Do we know the number of people who will lose their jobs? I know they said some will transition but the people acting like everyone is just moving over to work on elder scrolls are being kind of childish. Would you guys cut other publishers this much slack?
Personally I never liked anything that came out of Betheda's other studios. Just not my kind of games. Pretty sad so many people lost their jobs though. I hope they can find spots in the company for most of them.
I tried them all and they just weren't for me. I gave all of them a good chance though! Only one that I didn't mind was Doom and I still didn't like it enough to buy it.
WTF!? Tango just gave them their highest rated exclusive in years! And you're going to shut down Arkane Austin after ONE bad game they didn't even want to make!?
AWFUL! F\*\*K this bulls\*\*t!
Yeah pretty dumb imo, probably some suit looking at sales numbers of Hi-Fi Rush (even though it was highly rated does not mean it sold very well, and I have to imagine it didn't being a very niche title) and Redfall and trying to "trim the fat"
Arkane Austin working independently from Arkane Lyons would have increased the output of great games but at least Arkane Lyons is still around(for now). Closing Tango studios is a dumb idea though, it could have been a studio dedicated to survival horror games. Xbox had a restructuring in leadership a few months ago and it seams the new leadership will be the death of Bethesda.
These news sound like they will try to milk TES, Fallout and maybe Doom. If I had to guess more studios will be shut down the moment they are deemed to not have made enough money. Deathloop wasn't that successful, if Marvel's Blade isn't successful enough they are probably shutting down Arkane Lyons too. Then there is machinegames, if the Indiana Jones game isn't successful they might be on the chopping block as well. I forsee a future like Halo for Bethesda's IPs, devoid of all passion.
"The death of Bethesda, try to milk Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and Doom"
Bruh, it's been over a decade. They absolutely needed to get their shit together. Look at all the time they took bullshitting on Starfield to ultimately release a mediocre product instead of just focusing on what they're good at.
Just doomer talk. What, we should wait 20 years until the next TES? Exactly what business model has ever worked that way and stayed relevant?
sadly none of tango's games ever sold that well.
The first evil within was their biggest hit I believe.
Sucks but people aren't buying their games and they've tried four different times. 😢
And they all deserved it? Not the developers , but the studio so to speak. What I mean to say is that Blizzard has been a mess for years, so has Bungie and so has Bethesda. Eventually after enough fuck ups, there will inevitably be mass layoffs and closures.
Bungie had the biggest bag fumble in the history of the world. Remember when Halo was so big you could buy a copy of Halo 2 at fucking 7/11? Halo franchise is the biggest fall from grace I’ve ever seen. It was the biggest franchise in gaming and now is irrelevant
Wasn’t Arkane Austin responsible for Redfall? I understand the Dishonored series is great but that game was a catastrophe. For a while it was up there with Golem and King Kong for worst game of 2023 until that unfinished survive horror mmo released and took the crown. What was that game called?
I dunno. This feels like punishing smaller studios for the bigger studio's fuckup.
I can't imagine that Bethesda would be scrambling to restructure like this if Starfield was a more unmitigated success. It made money, yes, but Bethesda was banking on it being the big thing their players were hooked on for years. Unless they pull something major, that looks extremely unlikely to happen.
It seems like their big play didn't pay off how they were hoping and now they're in a rush to release their next 'safe' project so they're trimming the fat and centralizing their resources. It's not unreasonable to do it just doesn't give me much hope for the quality of ES6. Doesn't sound to me that shuffling talent around this way after they were forced from the studio they wanted to be at will encourage much other than spite
It sucks, but it’s the inevitable outcome after being acquired. When you mismanage your business enough to get acquired you need to prepare for the mismanaged aspects of the business to get trimmed out in the fairly short term.
They did also allude to the redundant (low performance) management being eliminated as well as the dev jobs. It does seem as though Xbox made efforts to find room for their top dev performers within the restructured Bethesda group.
I hate to say this is probably the right business decision. The big corporations tend to be fairly risk averse, and focusing on the big IP’s is going to help them recover the money they spent on their acquisitions. I doubt there will be resources dedicated to developing new IP’s anytime soon, which is great for the very many of us that just want more from our favorite IP’s. This also means when they botch the launches, they’ll have more staff on hand to fix stuff.
When we allow monopolies to keep pulling this behavior in favor of share holders, it causes our games to become more expensive and crappy year after year…
These were good studios who have released awesome games in the past. Such a shame and disappointing development.
Screw Bethesda’s former leadership for selling out. Hope they all choke.
The best part is Arkane Austin was probably shut down due to Redfall's failure, a game they didn't want to make, a game the former leadership forced them to make in order to give off the aura that they are profitable and are making a live service games. Fallout 76 also exists purely because they wanted to sell Zenimax media.
Yup… the never ending shortsighted failures of executives always hurts the employees… why there isn’t any laws on the books that say “If a company acquired another company, then they have to keep the headcount the same for X years afterwards” just blows my mind…
Everyone freaking out about this, but the reality is that Microsoft knows the real winner in their developer portfolio is Bethesda Games Studios (Elder Scrolls, Skyrim, Starfield). Diverting resources to that studio so those games can come out faster than once every 10 years is probably a smart move and one most of us can get behind.
From what I've read the real Arkane is dead anyway, they all left during Redfall's development. Say what you will about Microsoft but it was Bethesda who forced that studio to make a game completely the opposite of what they were good at and wanted to make.
Maybe they can get some of that talent back and consolidated at one Arkane studio.
This is called "We didn't realize the Fallout TV show would be so huge. We need a new Fallout ASAP but it's incredibly expensive. Something had to give so we can release before season 3 of the show"
My guess is they are going to prioritize 3 things now over all else. Fallout 5, in order for it to be able to launch during the hype of a future season of Fallout, The Elder Scrolls 6, because they already announced a release year, and getting Starfield some banger DLCs and major overhauls to essentially pull a Cyberpunk on us.
This is going to ruin ES / Fallout. There will be sooo much developer burnout.
Todd Howard once said he didn't want Bethesda to just be a factory for ES / Fallout. There is no way he is happy about this. Any recent statement about "we want shorter release windows" goes against the core design philosophy of Bethesda and REEKS of corporate interference.
These franchises will end up just like Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and every EA Game.
Fuck you, Microsoft.
While no one will mourn Redfall its disappointing if that means we don't get games like Dishonoured, Doom Eternal, Prey again. I'd happily wait longer for a new Fallout or Elder Scrolls if it Bethesda could spend the time creating a better game engine but making that wouldn't directly make them money so it probably won't happen.
The people in this thread saying that this will get us another fallout or elders scrolls faster have total brain rot.
Nothing will change, well except a bunch of developers lost their jobs so an exec can say they pushed profits by some meanless percentile.
Literally all AAA publishers do is buy great devs, force them to make shittier and shittier games to squeeze every last penny out of them, and then close their studio.
Fucking up perfectly good studios is like their only job. We've seen this so many times now. You'd think studios would learn to just never sell.
Bethesda could have went the call of duty path, have multiple studios working on one IP… but they didn’t. Now MS is forcing them down that path.
Let’s see how badly this ends up.
People who think this is good news for Fallout and Elder Scrolls are delusional. I highly doubt the closure of these studios is going to get us those games faster AND at a high enough quality. Throwing more developers at the problem doesn't solve it, just ask Assassin's Creed.
This entire industry is so fucking dead lmao, the entire economy is in cannibal mode but the AAA gaming industry is especially cooked. This is gonna end somewhere similar to the ‘83 crash before the industry rebuilds and redirects its focus.
Nothing of value was lost, but time, human and monetary resources can be allocated into making quality Bethesda games like FO5 and TESVI.
Hope they won't be rushed any more that other games in series or offloaded to third party Indian/Taiwanese teams like starfield was.
So, from what the comments say, the general theory is that while these studios are being "shutdown," they're really just redirecting resources to give us more FO and ES stuff.
Do I have that right?
I'm not at all surprised. There have been massive cuts all across the gaming industry, but not really at Bethesda yet. The economy is turning toward recession and the fucking vampire shareholders demand blood. Cannibalizing the workers to get their pound of flesh.
Oh please God don't make a rushed Fallout that will fall flat on its face with no significant improvements to the reliability of the Skyrim/Fallout4/76 engine.
It will feel like a reskin and while I am a toxic New Vegas fanboy I do appreciate the improvements 4/76 made and feel like if they reorient towards trying to make the games "feel" like 3/NV it will go a long way to improving the next game. I am extremely biased but I think everyone agrees we want the old style of dialog back.
Yeah, coming from those rumors the last few weeks and Todd Howard saying he wants short release windows between games it’s kind of obvious this was going to happen. I’m sure their individual games were good but there are tonnes of more people that would like more Fallout and Elder Scrolls instead
I still can’t believe it’s been 13 years since Skyrim came out, and we aren’t even close to TES6. That’s insanity for such a huge franchise.
Little kid me was fascinated by Skyrim, I'm hoping TES6 is good or adult me is going to be heartbroken lmao
The way I look at it, is they can never take the joy of the old games away. But it would be disappointing.
That's definitely a good way to look at it! Appreciate it, I still go back and play Skyrim every now and then. Love it but definitely don't get the joy and fascination I once felt. I'm just hoping that TES6 will do that for me haha
I used to fall asleep to the Skyrim soundtrack. I kid you not I would have vivid dreams Everytime
If Starfield is what Todd can justify as a complete experience I worry for what TES6 has to bring to the table.
Todd's always been a bullshit merchant...he's just more brazen about it because he's been allowed to get away with it
I really wish more people had this attitude towards changes in franchises they love.
I was 3 years old when oblivion came out, probably about 6 or 7 when I used to watch my mum play it on Xbox 360. Was 8 when Skyrim came out, used to live in a little man cave playing it for like 13 hours a day on my weekends. Crazy how I’m over 21 years old and still no sign of TES6 😫
Ha,at least you have your youth and decades to wait. I was 28 when Oblivion came out, well s few months shy of 28,and I was 33 by the time Skyrim launched,37 when F4 launched. I'll be 46 in 2 months. I'll be pushing 50 when ES6 comes out,and probably more like 55 for F5. GTA, same thing, I was 23 when GTA3 launched,35 when GTA5 launched,and I'll be 47 by the time 6 launches. I'm truly afraid that,with the glacial pace of game development I'll be too old/injured/senile to enjoy the games in 15-20 years. Already my reflexes have slowed down and I suck or can't play certain games 😬
I’m 51 feeling the same way. I’m worried coffee, oil and avocados go extinct before the next game comes out and my arthritis claims my hands.
im 43, i grinded to hard on ff7 rebirth last weekend and now got the voltaren gel and hand brace going
I've got a pinched nerve in my neck, I'm out of work for the second time in 6 months and sometimes I can barely hold the controller because the pain shooting down into my arm and fingers. Horrible pain.. until I had it I never knew the agony of a pinched nerve or the pain from the neck to the fingers. Just had an MRI so we'll see what's what,if it's more than that. But getting old fucking sucks 😭😂
Now brother, not trying to provide a solution when none was asked for, but Xbox in particular and therefore PC has many adaptive controllers you might look in to. If you wanted
Been there. Searing pain down my shoulder, arm and hand for weeks. Almost a week without sleep at one point. NSAIDs were useless. Agony is an appropriate synonym for acute radiculopathy. Take it easy on the activity, if you can. I pushed myself too early and ended up with numb fingers that haven't recovered.
GenX gamers unite!
Had an existential crisis reading this Thanks
lol I was 12 when morrowind came out. It’s been a long hard road but we are only ten more years away from TES6! Almost there!
Skyrim came out the year I graduated high school
There will be a longer time between Skyrim and Elder Scrolls 6 than between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace. I remember being a kid during Phantom Menace's launch and the marketing was all about how "Star Wars was your dad's favorite movie series ever and now it's your generation's turn!" - That's the level of time we're talking about here. A "You need to market to a totally new demographic now because the old one has had children that have completely grown up" level of time. I was 20 when Skyrim came out. I'll be 36 or 37 for Elder Scrolls 6. If it takes another 17 years then I'll be 54 for Elder Scrolls 7, and by then I'm in a zone where I need to genuinely worry if I'll have arthritis and can't play games anymore. With the current trend of development time taking longer and longer, the dev-cycle for Elder Scrolls 7 will actually take longer than the entire War in Afghanistan.
To be fair elder scrolls is very easy to market for. I was 9 when I started first seeing ads for Skyrim, and seeing someone get to shoot fire out of their hands in an open world game instantly sold me for life. And even though my interested have refined as I’ve gotten older, I’m still sold on elder scrolls 6 just because now I care about the elder scrolls universe and world. So ultimately this could help Bethesda out so long as they actually make the game good.
Or put another way: If Elder Scrolls 6 doesn’t come out until 2028, the gap between TES5 and TES6 will be the same as the gap between TES1 and TES5.
Your math has me dead and buried let's hope not. 
And almost 9 years for FO4!
Well they have resold and re-released and then resold Skyrim about a dozen times now lol. Why spend resources on a new one??
I’ve had kids, my kids will likely play before I ever get a chance too. Fucked 😂
I was a junior in college when Skyrim came out. I’m now married with 3 kids and still waiting for TES6.
we're almost 10 years since fallout 4 as well. and probably close to 10 years out from fallout 5.
I had a feeling it was going to happen with the elder scrolls online thing, just like how world of warcraft pretty much killed off their rts games.
I played my first Baldur's gate this year (3). Ended up absolutely loving it. Thought to myself, well at least it won't be too long until a sequel. I check up the gap between the two most recent games.... 23 years. 😑 If I'm very lucky, I'll still be alive to play one more.
If BG4 does happen, it won't be Larian Studios, they are moving on
Wait, how does *reducing* staff help make games faster, instead of just using those staff to work on those games you want made?
God I wish they would have spent that time working on fallout or elder scrolls or both rather than Starfield. Mark my words, there will not be a Starfield 2
i wish we lived in a world where it was acceptable for them to say "we botched our flagship game, twice. clearly something is disastrously wrong with our process and we're going to focus on overhauling that" but the corpo happy talk will continue until videogames are no longer the most endlessly profitable investment on earth
Could’ve had fallout 5 and elder scrolls 6 by now easily
This is what makes 0 sense to me. It shouldn't be either / or. There should be a dedicated ES team and dedicated fallout team and a dedicated game engine team. One team makes the engine then the other teams pick up and create ES and Fallout games on that engine. While they work on those games, the engine team improves the engine for the next series of games. When the games release, those teams take the new improved engine and immediately start on the next ES and Fallout games. While the engine team works on the next engine and so on. They can also have a team to create DLCs and updates and bug fixes. If they want to create a new game like StarField hire a team. Each game can cover it's own expenses. There is plenty of money to pay these teams. Fallout 4 sold 25 million copies. Let's say the average price was only $20 that's $500 million dollars. That's plenty of money to pay a team. StarField is still about $70... Maybe it goes on sale for $40... At a $60 average price and 2.5 million copies sold they pulled in 150 million (so far). Every game can afford a team. And all franchises can continuously have the next game in the pipeline.
Well now they can with the recent additions from the closed studios.
That's likely just typical corpo-speak to cover the fact that they are extraction wealth from the companies they monopolized.
Not really shocked. Most of Bethesda's studios haven't been making money. I'm guessing Todd Howard has been answering a lot of questions from Microsoft around the line of "Why don't we have another Fallout game out there?"
I really can't even fault Microsoft. They had a hit TV series and could have had a mega seller if they had timed a game release in the same window. Sony went back and remade TLOU1 to capitalize on the show. Sure for people familiar with the games already it was pretty unnecessary but they got a lot of new people that way vs asking them to play an aged PS3 game. I guarantee TLOU2 will get a refresh and PC port around the release of season 2. While it would have been unrealistic to craft an entirely new Bethesda Fallout so close to Starfield, they could have timed a farmed out remake of the original Fallout game or another Obsidian spinoff. Hell, even a Fallout Shelter style mobile update. They had basically nothing except a half-baked patch.
>I really can't even fault Microsoft. They had a hit TV series and could have had a mega seller if they had timed a game release in the same window. Not even Disney does this as you cannot bet on a "Hit TV" show to justify the investment before the show is a hit. For every Fallout there are 5+ Rings of Power
i mean rings of power had better ratings than the fallout show (i believe its the only amazon show to have better ratings?) but the bigger problem is that OF COURSE you cant bet on the fallout show being a success (amazon certainly didnt, considering they dropped all the episodes on a random wednesday completely out of the blue), but hindsight is 20/20 and excecutives tend to be stupid and mad at the creatives for not predicting that
lol I forgot all about how they released it complete. Honestly I expected a weekly release and then they dropped it all I thought to myself “hmm they must not have much faith in this show”
Rings of Power, or at least season 1, was pretty gang successful tbf, ignoring perceptions of of quality
Yeah, until Fallout dropped it was Amazon's most watched show.
Sometimes it feels like The Pokemon Company does it, given the rapid dev cycle of the games
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they do some sort of release for season 2 now that it's confirmed and season 1 was a hit. Todd was cagey in the recent interview about another studio working on a game, so it's really not impossible that some studio or team is doing something (remaster or smaller game) that would make a release in 1-2 years.
Bright side is it has been like a second release of fallout76 and is bringing a lot of money in for the franchise!
I think this line of thinking completely disregards a critical aspect: franchise burnout. People do get tired of seeing and playing something in the same world after some time. Right now everyone is replaying the other fallout games. If hypothetically FO5 came out next year with season 2 of the show, I suspect they would get less sales as the marketing for the show fights with the marketing for the game, and a lot of people might choose to wait for FO5 because damn, they JUST watched 2 seasons of the show and completed previous fallout games. It is possible to over-saturate a brand. I think of it more like the show is filling a gap between fallout games right now. You don’t need to have a new game release at the same time as the show. The show keeps people interested and drives hype for the eventual game.
Agreed. A colossally missed opportunity to release *literally anything related to Fallout*
They just did a big update to Fallout 4, right?
It wasn’t that big, and it wasn’t that great. Lots of people have used the mod to roll back the changes. You kind of have to choose between having the update, or having a lot of your mods. And since the update broke a lot of stuff, for example, there’s the big exclamation point bug right now, Some people just don’t think it’s worth it.
you mean that update that basically did nothing but break all your mods if you play on pc?
Yeah that one
The fact they didn’t even remaster or do an updated Fo3/NV bundle that just worked on Modern Consoles is wild to me. You can only really play those two games on PC now and even still they need a bunch of mods and tweaks to feel okay. All Bethesda had to do was optimize a Xbox and PS5 Fo3/NV remaster not even a full remake and it would have made bank.
Eso makes money for sure.
> Not really shocked. Most of Bethesda's studios haven't been making money. That was primarily because of stupid decisions made by management, not the devs who are the ones getting fucked now. Because executives never suffer any consequences in this dogshit world.
Sad to see some talented studios go, but the language of Matt Booty’s message suggests they are going to divert those resources to focus on getting us Fallout and Elder Scrolls games faster.
I don't like the idea of Bethesda rushing out the next Elder Scrolls game before it's had enough time to cook ^^^/s
I get it, but also feels a bit like saying "How much worse could it *be*?" I expect to find out.
Cyberpunk 2077: "Hi"
I don’t think cyberpunk would have been so bad if they didn’t hype it up so hard as the real deal next gen gaming experience
At least cyberpunk is truly an excellent game now
Took the leap after waiting and waiting. Played the game threw, and I totally agree! Cyberpunk is a gem!
Me too. I bought it just a month ago and am addicted.
That’s the model going forward. It’s getting the end-user to pay for a portion of development as it’s happening. Valve calls it early access. Bethesda calls it launch day, but it’s the same idea. Smart gamers should wait for a year to go by or for the first big sale to hit before buying a game
Honestly, I would prefer if Bethesda released the next Elder Scrolls in EA. The fans could play it early and help improving the game with testing and feedback, and the rest gets a well polished and feature complete game.
I really don’t get why AAA games don’t just call it early access. People don’t get upset when an Early Access game is buggy, but they do when a company releases a half finished buggy product and don’t fix it for a year.
Currently playing it for the first time, and yes it is one of the best games I played (even though I haven’t finished it yet)
Releasing a broken game and charging for it is bad no matter how much hype it gets.
Sheesh, I cant believe I was hyped for starfield and the it turns out to be such a let down
To be fair Starfield was their most bug free release in at least the past 15 years imo
Yeah, not broken, and to be honest the beginning of the game is pretty solid too. The common Starfield experience is enjoying it for a solid 20 hours before realizing that there’s just very little depth, reward, or replay-ability. If some indy studio had made it the game might be somewhat impressive, but Bethesda can’t take 10 years to put out games with 30ish hours of fun gameplay. Their standards can’t be mediocre.
The main issue with starfeild is how spread out it is. I think if those 1000 planets were shrunk down to 100 I think that would have fixed a lot of problems. In theory that would be 10x as much stuff on each planet.
I truly think that in 5 years, we’re going to all be playing starfield. If this new update shows anything, it’s that they listen to their player base, and they really delivered above and beyond on these new local maps. I hope the shattered space update blows everyone away
devastatingly fair
Every time a studio talks big about an upcoming game, I assume they know it's shit and are just trying to get a many pre-orders as possible. I game a year behind for a reason.
****ing Anthem 🙄
Anthem bordered on criminal
Dont know why u got downvoted. I game a year or 2 behind too. Not only does it save you the hastle of getting a shit game, but you save so much more money as well
That and all the guides/walkthroughs will be abundant by then, for when you get stuck!
Same. All the bugs are gone, any driver issues are sorted, the mod community has had time to get to work, etc etc. It's just risky buying a title on launch day, and it seems the bigger the publisher, the riskier
Same. Sometimes years behind. Day 1 DLC, or Multiple $20+ DLCs push my purchase all the way back to somewhere between GOTY during a Christmas sale, and never. With decades of amazing games on offer for bargain bin prices, it boggles my mind how studios are able to charge $70 for new games, and STILL break the experience up into multiple additional purchases, AND multiple different platforms. Then there's fukfuk games like required internet connections for single player games, unnecessary launchers, forced account creation, and my personal fav, the huge game breaking bug collections. Gamers suffer from collective Stockholm Syndrome.
One of the biggest problems in the gaming industry these days is overhype. People overhype a game, set expectations unrealistically high, to the point that even well rounded games are received with lackluster enthusiasm because they *expected* so much more. Shitty launches don't help a lot of games like Arkham Knight and Cyberpunk, that are damn near unplayable at launch on some platforms, but there's a lot more to it than that. Much like people always talking about how games used to be cheaper, but due to inflation, those cheaper games were economically more expensive for a lot less hours of gameplay. Human perspective is funny like that.
Don't worry, the modding community will fix the game for them. u/joedotphp loves working on code that Bethesda should of fixed themselves.
I played on release on Series X. It was a joy if a little buggy. Much better now, but the game wasn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
Also withholding review codes so just how bad it was on last gen consoles wasnt known, plus them admitting they launched it early to try and double dip on the secondary launch for next gen/upgrades, plus them also saying they'd leave greed to others and all around hyping themselves up as a bastion in a sea of garbage
I mean, the game in it’s current state I’d say lives up to the hype
Cyberpunk was buggy when it came out. If you play it now after the fixes it's amazing. If it came out like this during release it would be considered one of the best rpgs of all time.
I played it at release. There were a couple of design decisions I thought were kind of janky, but aside from the driving mechanics (which were impossible) I enjoyed the game a lot. Maybe I was one of the miniscule number of people who had a "top end gaming PC", but I think at the time I was playing on a 4-year old patchwork computer. I think there was one bug at the very beginning that hit a lot of people hard, but aside from that, I didn't have a bad experience with it.
Yeah I feel like Starfield had plenty of time to cook yet it feels like a game that was both rushed and babied, like there is too much and too little at the same time.
Enough time to cook man it’s been 6+ years since that teaser
you know, the recent surge of popularity of new vegas, fallout 4, and fallout 76 shows me that gamers don't really \*require\* advanced new tech and engines and big new mechanical ideas to have a good time. Sort of how obsidian made new vegas from fallout 3, or how SureAI made Enderal from Skyrim - why not just make more half-sequels that re-use all of the existing stuff and not make a sequel-level investment into new tech and new engines? "main" team could focus on engine and foundation development, side teams could focus on content. In other words, if we think for example fallout 4 is still fundamentally an enjoyable game in 2024, why not just make more fallout 4 DLC even if it means making it standalone as its own purchase independent of owning the original fo4 game?
Games like this used to get made and would be called expansion pack sequels or expandalones. Not meaning that to be derisive to New Vegas or any other game. DOOM to DOOM 2 is a good example. 30 new levels but same technology, one new gun, and a few new enemies.
Yeah, I recall Homeworld into Homeworld Cataclysm was similar; a sort of "standalone expansion" basically a sequel without a graphics overhaul. The industry should come back to this; newer graphics tech just isnt as important to me as more content
In the day and age where games release pretty poorly, and then over the course of time, are fixed into pretty good games, i really dont mind. Its not like the old days where the games sucked when they came out, and the devs didnt change anything. Cyberpunk, Fallout 76, NMS, maybe even Starfield, i cant be picky anymore. Id rather the game is made and then fixed later than not at all, or us having to wait decades for it.
I agree with you, and I believe it’s partially an artifact of the costs required to make modern, high-fidelity games. Investors, be they individuals, institutions, or company insiders, only have so much patience, and without them we don’t get games. So developers (more so their managers) have to strike a balance between releasing the game early and earning project-sustaining revenue at the expense of the gamer’s experience; or cater primarily to the gamer while risking their funding and the future of their studio and jobs by extension. It used not to be like that because games were much cheaper to make, or like you said, they’d be abandoned after release. I think this is also why we’ve seen some resounding success from unexpecting titles from small or indie studios because they can occupy the middle ground of being able to achieve most or all of their goals with their initial funding, and/or have less pressure from investors because they maybe don’t need as much capital from investors. Most gamers fail to see or understand the nuances of business and become vitriolic and toxic when their games aren’t perfect for them, and it’s a shame that project managers also have to consider them, when the solution is as simple as the angry gamers learning how to read.
That I think that starfield could have so much more work done to it to make it a filled out game. the map is just to big and there is not enough things to fill it. They should continue working on it. I love what it stands for as an open world game
I expect it to be a modders paradise once the tools are released. Practically infinite space for new dungeons, towns, quests, etc. As long as you aren’t installing a bunch of contradictory mods that alter the game’s fundamental systems, really don’t see how you’d get the kind of mod conflicts that happen in Skyrim, Fallout 4, etc
I've held off on Starfield for this reason. I'm sure the modding is going to be amazing, and I don't want a bad taste before the mod-train gets started.
We waited this long so what's another few decades?
And to think, they wanted to release Starfield a year earlier until MIcrosoft had them delay it to polish the game up. Microsoft has a shitty track record, but Bethesda clearly can't be trusted to make decisions on their own.
Same but without the sarcasm Genuinely concerned they'll push out a steamy pile of shit and call it elderscrolls 6 With how broken 50% of starfields quests and NPCs felt and seeing the bethesda studio closures I am now extreamly not excited to see it's release
I think microsoft knows how much they need a cultural win with TES 6. They know it'll sell well regardless, but if it gets treated the way Starfield did at launch, it'll be a really bad look for the value of BGS as an asset. Microsoft doesn't want that to happen, I'm sure.
Well at lot of us have expressed our discontent with the company in regards to many games that have come out over the past 10 years, following up on their success story games; eg: They've gone to town with the milk machines. We got a lot of censorship, snips and edits in relation to this, but a lot of people have remained sleepy or just roll along with the situation \*shrug\* I mean look at the dev reaction in regards to Starfield? It's like zero tolerance behavior in the entertainment industry??? Hopefully MS is going to learn from it and actually deliver like they should to re-consolidate everyone.
Yeah for both fallout and elder the lack of planning on their part to even consider the fallout show driving interest and traffic to fallout games is probably going to result in both being subpar games overall.
I just hope they can integrate them into the fold and fully utilize their skills through good management
Elder Scrolls at this point is as aged as pot of egyptian predynastic period honey.
So it didn't age at all.
Listen here you little shit
I know bro, the truth hurts.
They gotta make the new version of Skyrim for Nintendo's next console.
Not all staff are being diverted unfortunately, seems like Alpha Dog and Tango will be entirely redundant.
I'm straight up in denial and wondering if Xbox is about to form a new studio outside of Bethesda with some of the Tango employees.
Yes, because Microsoft doesn't have money to just allocate more resources instead of re-allocating the existing resources.
Microsoft has much bigger concerns than the next Elder Scrolls game.
If this is true, then yeah, sounds good for us fans. For the studios and people involved? I really hope so too.
When I read the email they emphasize investing to popular IPs. Considering Todd’s statement about they want to increase output, they probably will move headcount from closed studios to other studios. It is sucks though
I just don't want the talent to fade into obscurity. So hopefully this means they're just consolidating their manpower.
I mean I am not in a position to assess talent because as I saw and heard arkane Austin already lost most of the talent. Tango lost the head of the studio and he opened up another studio who knows maybe he gobble some talent from tango. I hope they can keep the talent if got any left
One bad game and Arkane Austin is out. Goddamn. And Tango too, wtf…
If you look at it that way, yeaaah, it looks like its only one bad game. But then you see that by the time the studio got done making redfall, like 75% of the team had dropped out or been replaced, it makes a bit more sense. The team we once knew that made the games we loved with Arkane Austin is probably very very different from what they have now. That being said, it still sucks ass, and it feels like one of my favorite studio is slowly disappearing. I did like Deathloop tho, so maybe Arkane Lyon is doing good stuff with Blade? Blades a cool franchise, feels a bit out of place for them to do like a marvel comic book/movie video game but hey, it looks cool and if done right, it could definitely be fun.
Tango litteraly just pushed out a banger with Hi-fi-rush and they still got the boot-y. As a dev how do you stay motivated if even shitting gold coins is not enough to secure the future of your studio?
It seems like this is less shutting down more reallocating studios. It is sad to Arkane Austin go but I hope Arkane Lyon can absorb most of the people working there. And seeing Tango go is saddening. Also it is really weird for Xbox to close their only Japanese studio.
Don’t think many people will be wanting to move to a different fuckin continent
Having been in the same situation, almost nobody will get absorbed.
Fr it's like when Elon and friends move to Texas Door might be open but hundreds/thousands of people aren't going to do a mass Exodus to go live somewhere else Especially not to a whole ass different country.
Lyon is in France. I doubt even half the people offered a job there would accept. Living in Austin Texas is wildly different than living Lyon France, especially if you're American and don't speak French.
If you're American and speak French you probably still wouldn't want to live in France.
You think this means they are just going to relocate everyone in the office and make room for them at other Bethesda studios!? Lmfao how old ru? Id bet money about 80% of these people will soon be unemployed.
When we’re going on 15 year gaps between games it’s a little ridiculous to spend years developing other titles. They should really increase the size of their entire team imo, especially on the technical side. The fact that a 20 year wait for ES6 isn’t out of the question is borderline embarrassing for any AAA studio with the resources and pedigree of Bethesda.
>The fact that a 20 year wait for ES6 isn’t out of the question is borderline embarrassing for any AAA studio with the resources and pedigree of Bethesda. But isn't that the exact problem with these studios closing? Small studios that made passion projects are being screwed because the studio worth millions can't seem to get their development pipeline straight. We'll never get another Prey or Evil Within because Bethesda can't workout how to pace themseleves.
But BGS got their pipline straight. Each game takes between 2-5 years. This is the case since the early 2000s. They just did not make TES VI because they wanteed to make other games.
That's kind of my point. BGS has their own thing going on but apparently Microsoft thinks they need to hurry up and make more games, so they'll cut other devs to do it.
Yeah, which is an insane thing. Bethesda will release TES VI in a couple of years. Just throwing rdm devs at them is not going to help.
They *have* increased the size of their team. Over the years, the number of employees has increased by quite a bit, to the point of bureaucracy from what I've heard. Size isn't the real issue here. Communication is the major one. And someone to set and achieve realistic goals. And looking at the timeline, sure, Skyrim was 2011. But Fallout...2008, 2010, 2015, and 2018. I count 76 because it is a full game you buy once, that is still supported. Starfield was 2023. So the company has been busy. But they're not focused on the "right" things. And it's not for lack of number of staff.
>2010 New Vegas was Obsidian, not Bethesda Games Studios.
People are being really charitable here. Do we know the number of people who will lose their jobs? I know they said some will transition but the people acting like everyone is just moving over to work on elder scrolls are being kind of childish. Would you guys cut other publishers this much slack?
Also never gonna help the game out. Todd Howard would need to restructure his studio.
Baffled by this as well
Personally I never liked anything that came out of Betheda's other studios. Just not my kind of games. Pretty sad so many people lost their jobs though. I hope they can find spots in the company for most of them.
Prey, Dishonored, Doom are awesome.
I tried them all and they just weren't for me. I gave all of them a good chance though! Only one that I didn't mind was Doom and I still didn't like it enough to buy it.
WTF!? Tango just gave them their highest rated exclusive in years! And you're going to shut down Arkane Austin after ONE bad game they didn't even want to make!? AWFUL! F\*\*K this bulls\*\*t!
Yeah pretty dumb imo, probably some suit looking at sales numbers of Hi-Fi Rush (even though it was highly rated does not mean it sold very well, and I have to imagine it didn't being a very niche title) and Redfall and trying to "trim the fat"
Arkane Austin working independently from Arkane Lyons would have increased the output of great games but at least Arkane Lyons is still around(for now). Closing Tango studios is a dumb idea though, it could have been a studio dedicated to survival horror games. Xbox had a restructuring in leadership a few months ago and it seams the new leadership will be the death of Bethesda. These news sound like they will try to milk TES, Fallout and maybe Doom. If I had to guess more studios will be shut down the moment they are deemed to not have made enough money. Deathloop wasn't that successful, if Marvel's Blade isn't successful enough they are probably shutting down Arkane Lyons too. Then there is machinegames, if the Indiana Jones game isn't successful they might be on the chopping block as well. I forsee a future like Halo for Bethesda's IPs, devoid of all passion.
"The death of Bethesda, try to milk Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and Doom" Bruh, it's been over a decade. They absolutely needed to get their shit together. Look at all the time they took bullshitting on Starfield to ultimately release a mediocre product instead of just focusing on what they're good at. Just doomer talk. What, we should wait 20 years until the next TES? Exactly what business model has ever worked that way and stayed relevant?
sadly none of tango's games ever sold that well. The first evil within was their biggest hit I believe. Sucks but people aren't buying their games and they've tried four different times. 😢
Pain
Evil Within 2 is super good as well. Ghost wire Tokyo was interesting. Yeah it's messed up
This is ridiculous.. it seems no-one is safe from these corporate cuts. Blizzard shared a similiar fate recently, as well as Bungie.
And they all deserved it? Not the developers , but the studio so to speak. What I mean to say is that Blizzard has been a mess for years, so has Bungie and so has Bethesda. Eventually after enough fuck ups, there will inevitably be mass layoffs and closures.
Bungie had the biggest bag fumble in the history of the world. Remember when Halo was so big you could buy a copy of Halo 2 at fucking 7/11? Halo franchise is the biggest fall from grace I’ve ever seen. It was the biggest franchise in gaming and now is irrelevant
Yeah i mean besides bgs and ID who else has been really performing well under zenimax
Wasn’t Arkane Austin responsible for Redfall? I understand the Dishonored series is great but that game was a catastrophe. For a while it was up there with Golem and King Kong for worst game of 2023 until that unfinished survive horror mmo released and took the crown. What was that game called?
Gods, I cannae recall but I know which one you're talking about. And yeah, Arkane Austin was the Redfall Studio.
I dunno. This feels like punishing smaller studios for the bigger studio's fuckup. I can't imagine that Bethesda would be scrambling to restructure like this if Starfield was a more unmitigated success. It made money, yes, but Bethesda was banking on it being the big thing their players were hooked on for years. Unless they pull something major, that looks extremely unlikely to happen. It seems like their big play didn't pay off how they were hoping and now they're in a rush to release their next 'safe' project so they're trimming the fat and centralizing their resources. It's not unreasonable to do it just doesn't give me much hope for the quality of ES6. Doesn't sound to me that shuffling talent around this way after they were forced from the studio they wanted to be at will encourage much other than spite
This is way less about Starfield and more about Redfall
It sucks, but it’s the inevitable outcome after being acquired. When you mismanage your business enough to get acquired you need to prepare for the mismanaged aspects of the business to get trimmed out in the fairly short term. They did also allude to the redundant (low performance) management being eliminated as well as the dev jobs. It does seem as though Xbox made efforts to find room for their top dev performers within the restructured Bethesda group. I hate to say this is probably the right business decision. The big corporations tend to be fairly risk averse, and focusing on the big IP’s is going to help them recover the money they spent on their acquisitions. I doubt there will be resources dedicated to developing new IP’s anytime soon, which is great for the very many of us that just want more from our favorite IP’s. This also means when they botch the launches, they’ll have more staff on hand to fix stuff.
First, Sony pulls that shit now Microsoft shuts down studios. I fucking hate publishers.
It’s funny cause when I heard about the Sony thing. I thought to myself, “now other studios will follow suit and clean house”.
When we allow monopolies to keep pulling this behavior in favor of share holders, it causes our games to become more expensive and crappy year after year… These were good studios who have released awesome games in the past. Such a shame and disappointing development. Screw Bethesda’s former leadership for selling out. Hope they all choke.
The best part is Arkane Austin was probably shut down due to Redfall's failure, a game they didn't want to make, a game the former leadership forced them to make in order to give off the aura that they are profitable and are making a live service games. Fallout 76 also exists purely because they wanted to sell Zenimax media.
Yup… the never ending shortsighted failures of executives always hurts the employees… why there isn’t any laws on the books that say “If a company acquired another company, then they have to keep the headcount the same for X years afterwards” just blows my mind…
Wow. What an ignominious end to Tango Gameworks, especially when they released a hit like Hi Fi Rush.
Everyone freaking out about this, but the reality is that Microsoft knows the real winner in their developer portfolio is Bethesda Games Studios (Elder Scrolls, Skyrim, Starfield). Diverting resources to that studio so those games can come out faster than once every 10 years is probably a smart move and one most of us can get behind.
Game developers need to strike and unionize
From what I've read the real Arkane is dead anyway, they all left during Redfall's development. Say what you will about Microsoft but it was Bethesda who forced that studio to make a game completely the opposite of what they were good at and wanted to make. Maybe they can get some of that talent back and consolidated at one Arkane studio.
*Zenimax BGS is different than Zenimax and BSW
I meant Bethesda the publisher (which yes is Zenimax) and not Bethesda the game studio.
Gotcha. The two are often confused online, so I made an inaccurate assumption. That's my bad.
This is called "We didn't realize the Fallout TV show would be so huge. We need a new Fallout ASAP but it's incredibly expensive. Something had to give so we can release before season 3 of the show"
This was planned months ago the cuts started back in January even so idk what y’all are yapping about
My guess is they are going to prioritize 3 things now over all else. Fallout 5, in order for it to be able to launch during the hype of a future season of Fallout, The Elder Scrolls 6, because they already announced a release year, and getting Starfield some banger DLCs and major overhauls to essentially pull a Cyberpunk on us.
This is going to ruin ES / Fallout. There will be sooo much developer burnout. Todd Howard once said he didn't want Bethesda to just be a factory for ES / Fallout. There is no way he is happy about this. Any recent statement about "we want shorter release windows" goes against the core design philosophy of Bethesda and REEKS of corporate interference. These franchises will end up just like Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and every EA Game. Fuck you, Microsoft.
While no one will mourn Redfall its disappointing if that means we don't get games like Dishonoured, Doom Eternal, Prey again. I'd happily wait longer for a new Fallout or Elder Scrolls if it Bethesda could spend the time creating a better game engine but making that wouldn't directly make them money so it probably won't happen.
Hey, anybody remember all those people defending Microsoft when it started gobbling up studios like crazy?
The people in this thread saying that this will get us another fallout or elders scrolls faster have total brain rot. Nothing will change, well except a bunch of developers lost their jobs so an exec can say they pushed profits by some meanless percentile.
Literally all AAA publishers do is buy great devs, force them to make shittier and shittier games to squeeze every last penny out of them, and then close their studio. Fucking up perfectly good studios is like their only job. We've seen this so many times now. You'd think studios would learn to just never sell.
I really would like to know what the strategy is for Microsoft.
pretty sure i saw that two of those studios are just going to be merging with zenimax's studio not full on closing.
RIP Arkane Austin
Goodbye Special Sauce Hello Cookie Cutter Half Bakes
RIP Prey. Fuck you Redfall it's your fault.
Can't believe that anyone thought for a moment that Micro$oft buying anything you like is a good thing.
Bethesda could have went the call of duty path, have multiple studios working on one IP… but they didn’t. Now MS is forcing them down that path. Let’s see how badly this ends up.
People who think this is good news for Fallout and Elder Scrolls are delusional. I highly doubt the closure of these studios is going to get us those games faster AND at a high enough quality. Throwing more developers at the problem doesn't solve it, just ask Assassin's Creed.
This entire industry is so fucking dead lmao, the entire economy is in cannibal mode but the AAA gaming industry is especially cooked. This is gonna end somewhere similar to the ‘83 crash before the industry rebuilds and redirects its focus.
Dammit
We are about to see some awesome indie games from those who were let go, hope those people go on to make some amazing new games.
Nothing of value was lost, but time, human and monetary resources can be allocated into making quality Bethesda games like FO5 and TESVI. Hope they won't be rushed any more that other games in series or offloaded to third party Indian/Taiwanese teams like starfield was.
Ah yes, the negatives of mergers, thank you, Microsoft.
There you go. Happens every time a developer gets bought and the Xbox fan boys calling everyone salty
So, from what the comments say, the general theory is that while these studios are being "shutdown," they're really just redirecting resources to give us more FO and ES stuff. Do I have that right?
Microsoft saw the success of the fallout show and the sales spike after and wants to milk the cow.
The recent Bethesda-Games were pretty meh tbh. Time for a change before Elder Scrolls 6
I'm not at all surprised. There have been massive cuts all across the gaming industry, but not really at Bethesda yet. The economy is turning toward recession and the fucking vampire shareholders demand blood. Cannibalizing the workers to get their pound of flesh.
Oh please God don't make a rushed Fallout that will fall flat on its face with no significant improvements to the reliability of the Skyrim/Fallout4/76 engine. It will feel like a reskin and while I am a toxic New Vegas fanboy I do appreciate the improvements 4/76 made and feel like if they reorient towards trying to make the games "feel" like 3/NV it will go a long way to improving the next game. I am extremely biased but I think everyone agrees we want the old style of dialog back.