Arkane's founder left because Bethesda 'did not want to do the kind of games that we wanted to make', and that's how it ended up with Redfall
Arkane's founder left because Bethesda 'did not want to do the kind of games that we wanted to make', and that's how it ended up with Redfall
Redfall was a significant departure for Arkane, and culminated in the closure of the Arkane Austin studio.
He likens Arkane's approach to studios like Larian and FromSoftware: "Those are people that have been doing, over and over, the thing they know exactly how to do, until it hits super hard. So to me, that's what Arkane had to do."
Damn, what a concept: doing the same kind of game multiple times, iterating on the design to perfect it. Obviously Bethesda gets releasing the same game over and over again, but this idea of "improving" the design is so alien to them. Wouldn't adding thousands of microtransactions be an improvement?
I mean creators club worked so well...
I still don't understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for... Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.
I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren't included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn't call the results a success.
But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or "unfair" to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because... It's Bethesda's platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they're a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it's better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I've never heard of that happening with CC mods.
Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.
Honestly, give me a good singleplayer vampire game that has Netflix Castlevania-like depth.
Capitalism well destroy everything you love then charge you for a photo of the experience.
I was at universal japan, in the super mario world. My son goes to one of the block, were we've seen kids hit to make the sound of coins. He it's it and and it goes the way it sounds for fake blocks 🚫 🚫 🚫.
Turns out you have to buy a special watch to make the coin sound ! Thanks capitalism.
It’ll be one of those photos from a ride at a theme park where everyone is screaming in terror.
Tbh, I'm fine with big AAAA games burning in financially, like Anthem or Redfall. The AA games from smaller devs are great, and I just don't buy the next game if they buy out a smaller studio and all the OG devs go on to building a new company. That's how we got games like Half Life, when MSFT devs got sick of working for a mega company and decided to build their own game.
If they buy out a studio and all the devs leave and form a new studio with the proceeds of the prior studio, it means more quality indie titles.
You say that but Arcane didn’t deserve this fate. I’d be rooting for a Bethesda game to fail but BioWare and Arcane? That’s just sad. They were both amazing studios ruined by BS. And the AAA space is large enough these days that actual big budget games can indeed innovate.
Like say though, I won’t exactly shed a tear for failing studios like Ubisoft or Bethesda that have been churning out the same crap for awhile now.
Also not every game needs to innovate and it’s not like you lose a lot by having average selling games come out. But even in games packed with AAA bangers, indies still sell incredibly well. It isn’t a zero sum game.
AAAA games are so last year. It's all about the AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA games now.
Like this one?
I mean... It's hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn't published them, but we know that Prey's opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2's was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.
It got great critical reviews. People who identify as "gamers" seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.
So I don't think it's unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can't automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.
You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG's and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.
And it's not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can't just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.
This is ridiculously well trod ground, but Prey also wasn't at all helped by Bethesda's marketing.
They had what is probably the truest successor to System Shock 2 that's been made on their hands and Bethesda made Arkane use the title of a 15 year old portal based shooter that had absolutely no relation to the game and didn't do particularly well because they owned the IP.
The entire Bethesda-Arkane relationship has been pretty thoroughly mismanaged.
You don't need to slash a AAA studio down to the size of an indie; you can just spin off a small team from your larger one and roll resources on and off of that project as needed.
He sold the company in 2010! Big searching for the guy who did this energy here.
Why did they go multiplayer instead of story driven singleplayer? It almost kept me from Deathloop, too.