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The access media is gushing about this game as much as they can at this time as they’re all under embargo.

I don’t really trust them most of the time but there is nothing really political about this game or any other angle that would provide alternate motives for praising the game.

I’m guessing it ends up with a high 80s meta score like 88% but if it actually has a good story to go along with what appears to be very strong gameplay I could see it hitting into the low 90s.

My hype for it is definitely building.

Definite buy for me. A lot of those mechanics and descriptions sounds right up my alley. Game looks beautiful as well. Also only 60$ so that is worth supporting.

The Mass Effect trilogy is a big one for me.

I bought the remastered edition that has all 3 games in one like two years ago but just still have never gotten around to starting it.

All of that is 100% true but more than anything I think it’s what I said

When you’re a studio playing at the level where you are responsible for creating and then having to further make games in the universe of some of the greatest IPs ever the magic number really does seem to be two with all that goes into making games now,

Attempt to go for 3 or higher and you will dilute quality and it’s how you end up with main main entrees in franchise being nearly 20 years apart,


Seriously look around and try to find studios who handle more than 2 successfully and what you’ll find instead is that 2 is what all the successful ones settle on and build out from there,

The only possible exception to this is Capcom but I would argue they aren’t an exception they’re just incredibly efficient at pumping out game after game while having only one true pillar franchise as things stand currently, resident evil.


Examples;

CDPR- the Witcher and cyberpunk
SQE- Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest
Prior to their implosion BioWare- Mass Effect and Dragon Age
Insomniac- Spider Man and Wolverine
Blizzard and Activision are a bit of an exception to prove the rule but primarily blizzard is concerned with overwatch and Wow (two franchises) and Activision is concerned with black ops and modern warfare (two franchises)


You can literally do this for days

Remakes and remasters exist on a scale that’s extremely wide so I don’t like it I paint broad strokes saying Remakes bad or Remakes good.

There’s also the issues of what constitutes each and when does the line cross from remaster to remake. Sometimes this is very obvious like The ff7 retrilogy is about as far on the remake scale as you can get.

Bethesda and virtuous literally just taking the obsidian game code they had lying around collecting dust and running that through unreal engine to give it a better visuall style and support more texture quality is about as far in the other direction you go can on the remaster side


What is interesting imo is the last few years a sort of middle option has started to appear for some games where it really does straddle the line right in the middle and are truly both remasters and remakes. I’m not sure if these have a name but some of the best examples of this are the moves Atlus has been making.

P5 Royal was the most tepid version of this as imo they were finding their footing. It doesn’t remaster the vanilla experience of persona 5 but neither does it totally overhaul it and remake it, however it does in a sense “remake” the game because of just how much different so many things work in royal from the biggest things like adding an entire new third act,‘new final boss, 2 new confidants, 3 super bosses not vanilla as well ad an entire challenge battle system with its own super bosses to fight, down to the smallest things like your guns refilling ammo every new fight.

This is further built on in persona 3 reloaded where they focused entirely on gameplay and presentation. The story of that game isn’t touched one inch, however the combat is by all accounts and meanings of the word; a remake. They also remade; not remastered, the entire OST, all of the character models, turned all the confident scenes into hand drawn animations with full voice acting.


And now we have p4 revival which all signs indicate they are going to do the exact same as hint again, upping their game to where large swaths of it are truly remade even if its base just like with 3 is the same code from the ps2 original

More studious need to be adopting this approach in bringing back their old games

quote:

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- Fallout 5 is in pre-production

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This means 4 guys are sitting in a room just now beginning to create a scenario outline. If Elder Scrolls 6 is coming in 2028 which I think is the consensus most likely year for it but it could easily slip into 2029 then Fall Out 5 wont arrive before 2035 if you want to be optimistic. I dont say any of this out of glee this is just the reality of the situation based on a a confluence of factors including but not only issues with Bethesda's workflow, since the launch of starfield but really even before that it just kicked into high gear after Starfield was out the door one of bethesdas biggest historical strengths slowly morphed into a massive weakness; their bleeding of long time staff and institutional knowledge. A third reason is fall out 76 and its demand for ongoing support. Bethesda game studious has 750 employees assuming they stay totally clean from the pending layoffs inside xbox. Until Elder Scrollls goes gold which we as above we can safely guess is somewhere between 1.5-2 years from now almost the entire 750 manpower they can muster will be on Elder Scroll and those that arent will be on 76 feeding the demands of live service games, which they will need to do because 76 is actually very popular now and makes them a lot of money and xbox from the outside doesnt look like theyre in the mood to float bethesda cash so 76 will be funding Elder Scrolls, whatever small team they have on fall out 5 which right now again will be at most 10-15 people and theyll scale up as they finish segments of Elder Scrolls and those teams can be moved over.

All of that said there is something that can push these timelines up dramatically especially fall out 5. Outsourcing. However that is very very expensive and again, xbox doesnt project theyre in the mood for jacking up the burn rate for an expensive studio even higher.

One option I could see them doing is rather than paying for outsourcing from studious that specialize in it and cost enormous amounts of money is tasking studios already under their umbrella who arent working on anything and are maybe currently in the limbo stage of if they survive.

It would be a lot cheaper to task teams who have had a shot at making their own thing and totally failed like compulsion games and assigning them as 100 extra bodies to throw at ensuring ES6 meets a window of early 2028.

You could do the same thing with other studios theyre considering shuttering for Fall out 5 and instead of the game basically not being able to do anything of substance until ES6 goes gold which is what is going to eventually give us the 2035 launch year, find someone actually very competent who is chosen on merit to lead this group to build Fall out 5 until Besthesda game studios ships ES6 then you can shutter those studios, allowing BGS to pick up a project very much in full production and we could mayve mercifully get a timeline that looks like

ES6 2028
Fall out 76 ongoing support maintaining whatever its current cadence now is
Fall out 5 2031

This whole plan I am proposing here is a pretty simple equation for Xbox and Microsoft. How badly do you want to get out these big IPs as soon as possible to capitalize on them and are you willing to pay for immense outsourcing to push these timelines up dramatically, or repurpose the 5-6 studios youre rumored to be in negotions with currnelty as merely BGS support studio?

Either way itll be exciting to see what happens and even if we have to wait forever I am confident Fall out 5 will be good on one condition; Emil Pagliano is finally told he cant write fall out anymore. OR any video game really

They dont care how evil their actions are or how many people they piss off.

Their calculation is pretty simple here actually.

The more they can create an entirely walled in garden their profit margins would increase to such a significant degree on a per user basis theyre ok with losing millions and millions of their current users if that comes to pass.

Sony is already doing variable pricing and has been for over a year now.

Think of it like this

Everytime a copy of God of War or Last of Us or Horizon is sold at gamestop or on amazon or whatever the retailer takes roughly 30 of the 70 dollars from that sale domestically in America.

The cut overseas is generally even less for sony where its more of a 50/50 split

If you look at every action sony has taken since the start of the ps5 generation through the lense of their ultimate goal being to create an end to end system where they are in control of the type and amount of content available inside of it, who has access to it and when they have access to it, and at what price each user can have access to it down to an individual level where I might pay 70 for a game and you might pay 50 for a game based on some algorithm they run in the background that tells them which price to offer to each of us that is most likely to result in a sell.

I am usually for the government staying out of stuff like this but this shite is text book antitrust behavior just for the digital age and needs to be handled

The scuttlebut that I have been hearing which sounds a lot more believable and practical than Xbox having a disc drive and supporting physical media, which I don’t think they will and imo they will join Sony in taking the off ramp, is that they will at least work to come up with some sort of system that allows any xbox user with physical games to convert those into digital copies for free.


Who knows what’s going to happen and who is going to do what right now though.

I admit I am likely not as knowledgeable as the people who frequent this board but what exactly is the demand for AI in areas like recreation and general use for average people?

What has AI been able to do in a commercial setting? There’s been many many different attempts at measuring this in work places where AI has been forcefully implemented.

I say forcefully because usually in these cases the majority of the employees don’t want it, and it has been found to not increase productivity at all, it’s actually more likely to make whatever business it is jammed into have less output


I’m sure there will eventually emerge use cases for it but it’s insane that we (the collective we as in the people who make up the country collectively) are standing by while they barrel forward with this completely throwing anyone who has hobbies in electronics in flux unless you like paying more and as for these data centers when AI inevitably doesn’t produce the generational wealth places like Microsoft have invested a ton in planning on it materializing I will make a prediction that they will end up just being where the video game industry pivots trying to make us all live out the famous you’ll own nothing and be happy while they use them for cloud gaming and intend for us not to own our games or hardware and pay a monthly subscription

You’re probably right I’m sure almost all who post a lot on this board know way more about it’s ins and outs than I do.

I just simply haven’t heard about apple being very aggressive

All I see is their stupid data centers for stuff no one wants and has yet to show any viable commercial or professional case study justification for how much we are putting into it, while all my hobbies get more expensive as a direct consequence

I will admit it likely has very promising military applications, but I don’t think they need to buy out all the ram from the only 3 companies who operated direct to customer