Would be neat to open this up to all developers and allow them to make one for their game and maybe even tie it to a basic achievement or something like that.
Oh this would be great I love the key art.
In this specific point, sure. But I don’t like saying Horizon, GT and GOW are superior to ADF, Grounded and Pentiment just because they are bigger budget and more AAA.
I had more fun with Grounded than I have with any first-party game this year on either side (except Deathloop but I count that as last year). ADF has a better story than most games this year.
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Watched a new video by Juicehead where he covers Starfield and the question he keeps seeing by some fans that if we should be worried, since we don’t hear all that much about it since E3, except for last month’s video.
He then plays a clip from 2019 when Todd explained he prefers short marketing campaigns. He said:
Five months, that was as short as I was told anyone would allow me to do.
Ryan asks if Todd would go shorter if allowed and Todd gives a very enthusiastic “oh yeah”, lol.
Now, obviously the game has had its deep dive, and the situation this time is different. But there’s a good chance we won’t see new gameplay until it’s very close to release. Very likely we won’t see it anymore this year, unless they surprise us all at TGA with a trailer and release date. Only if they have a real date, I bet they don’t want to be there otherwise.
MS might actually allow Todd to have a marketing campaign exactly as short as he wants this time around. Of course a lot will depend on if the game for them right now is still tracking nicely for H1.
Whatever the case, I think we could definitely see this way shorter campaign for TES VI.
This is what Todd said about a shorter marketing campaign:
Maybe a week just to get people excited, have those moments of “I saw it, here’s some trailers, percolates in your mind”.
When have you seen a trailer or demo and said I like to wait. "?
But he does say nobody should hold him to that, haha. I get what he means though. And he’s right about that, nobody wants to wait. That’s why I can absolutely see him waiting with a big new update until it’s pretty much gone gold.
Maybe a new interview video or just snippets of new info this or next month , but brand new gameplay of the latest build? Nope.
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Grounded 2: You are the Spider
Only a few minutes into Pentiment but it’s already clear this is written really well. I don’t understand some things that are being said, but that’s because history is involved, history I don’t know a thing about. I do really like how they ask you to pick your background and how that will affect things in the game.
Art style is growing on me. Obsidian is just different in how they do things, that’s why I can’t wait what Avowed will offer us, stuff that the other studios don’t do or not nearly as well.
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Everwild will be special
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I didn’t see It
Maybe we’ll have more Age of mythology games in the future. And i could expect also more AOE games.
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Do we know what sort of game is it going to be. I heard they rebooted from being a non combat game.
Shouldnt be delegated to just the xcast because even most games get mentions on their main shows at times.
And the Xcast has been hard to listen to lately as well
Literally COD this COD that for thr past few shows. Getting kind of boring.
I dont know theyve gone downhill a lot.
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That game was simply announced too early.
Phil Spencer talked about the Redfall and Starfield delays to The Verge.
The Verge:
That is in a very middle state. It hasn’t happened yet, and you are now facing down the holiday quarter. You just made some big decisions. You delayed some big games that were supposed to come out for the holiday. Those would have been the hits. Talk through making that decision to delay the hits. Then I want to talk about this shift in the industry from being an “all hits all the time” model to this more recurring-revenue subscription model.
Phil:
I think positioning it as a decision might be slightly wrong, at least for me. It isn’t really a decision to move a game after spending the team’s effort over multiple years just to get to a point where you know you’re not going to deliver the game you want on the date that was promised. Now, it is at some level, because I have shipped games too early. We have experienced shipping games too early.
In hindsight, when you look at a game like Starfield, it’s taken so long and so much investment in new IP from the team. The decision to give the team the time to build the game that they feel they should be building is just the right thing to do. There are financial implications to those decisions. Weighing what is going to happen, whether it’s platform growth, subscriber growth, or frankly, the revenue that you generate when a new game launches, those are business decisions. You definitely have to weigh the outcome of those decisions.
For any game, but definitely for our games Starfield and Redfall — which are our first big Xbox games with ZeniMax coming into the team — I just wanted to make sure those teams felt they had all the support they could get from Xbox, and to maybe feel some of the benefit of being part of a larger organization that has other revenue streams and other helpful things going on. In the end, I believe the quality of the games will be better and customers will find the experience to be more interesting, which will hopefully feel like the right decision in hindsight.
Walk me through how the decision was made. Did those teams come to you? Did you look at the work? How long did it take to make that decision?
This is maybe where some of my experience in the industry comes to play. I know both Todd [Howard, Starfield game director] and Harvey [Smith, director of Arkane Studios] well, and we had a discussion about where those games are.
I’ll focus on Starfield with Todd — he and I have an honest discussion going on, starting from the day the deal closed on [the purchase of Zenimax] “Where are we with the game? What are the risks that we see?” We have some internal teams at Xbox, like our advanced technology group, ATG, which we can deploy to help teams look at where they are with tech challenges and production challenges.
As somebody who has seen a few county fairs here, I might get some gut instinct about where we are, just by the way the teams are talking about their game and where we are in playing builds. One of the things I have learned is that you want teams to feel like they own their dates. They deliver better when they feel like they own their own destiny with their games, so you wait for the real signal from the creative and production teams. It’s an ongoing discussion about where we are. It’s not like one day, all of a sudden, somebody comes in and says, “Okay, our date is going to have to move.” We track and understand the weighted risk on everything that is going on. It’s a fundamental part of the job that [Head of Microsoft Studios] Matt Booty and [CEO, ZeniMax Media] Jamie Leder do in running our first-party studio organizations.
Source :
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That was interesting to read, more questions like these and less about Activision / CoD please interviewers!
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People point to these delays as a sign of Xbox incompetence, but reading that quote shows nothing BUT competence. Xbox takes a financial hit when they delay big games, but they know in the long run that releasing quality products is more important. These decisions are not made lightly, and they are made in full cooperation with the teams like BGS and Arkane and in particular Todd and Harvey.
Say what you will about Halo Infinite post-launch, but the experience AT LAUNCH benefited hugely from the delay.
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Yeah it’s great seeing them putting quality and polish first. Really happy to see them approach things this way this generation.
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Next FO76 update for December 6 is packed. You can tell that the new studios BGS brought in are helping.
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Quite enjoying Pentiment. The writing is superb, man it’s good. Loving the dialogue options so early in the game already too, story is getting really interesting too. I did Google some difficult words and names just to learn what it’s all about. Because I knew that for example Martin Luther could never be the one I was thinking of, or even family of him.
But then I noticed the Glossary pretty much has everything you might want to learn more about written down there. And the audio is damn good too!
Yes, this is the kind of stuff I hope we get a lot of from (XGS) RPGs.
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