Microsoft buys Bethseda (ZeniMax Media)

[ThunderboltDragon]

It was announced a few hours ago that Microsoft have bough Bethsesda parent company ZeniMax Media. How do you think this will affect future Fallout games? Presumably they would want to make future titles of Fallout and Elder Scrolls exclusive but on the other hand IIRC MS have said recently that exclusivity is negative for the industry.

Xbox-owner Microsoft has acquired the games company behind blockbuster titles including Doom, Fallout, Skyrim and Wolfenstein.

It is paying $7.5bn (£5.85bn) for Bethesda's parent ZeniMax Media

https://www.bbc.com/news/54233235

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidt...-bethesda-maker-of-elder-scrolls-and-fallout/

https://www.polygon.com/2020/9/21/2...imax-xbox-game-studios-starfield-fallout-doom

 

[WetRats]

I think it will be good for the players.

With Bethesda's primary job being to make games that sell Xboxes (and gaming PCs), rather than directly making profits for their investors, there should be more emphasis on quality.

 

[CerebralHawk]

Highly doubt Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI come to PlayStation 5, or at least I doubt they come on launch date. PS3 stuff was delayed due to timed exclusivity (and probably some adapting to Sony's way of doing things, e.g. I know the audio is different so must be converted), so Microsoft owning Bethesda will mean at least first-party titles are at least delayed on PS5, if not unavailable altogether.

Sony's greatest strength with the PlayStation brand is exclusive titles like The Last of Us, and the Uncharted series. And formerly the Tomb Raider and Metal Gear Solid series. Otherwise, it's a console made by lawyers and boardroom executives. Opposing things like mods and cross-play tells me it's not made by gamers or even by people who really understand gamers. Like Apple, Sony seems to value a curated existence, while gaming is about moving forward, and coloring outside the lines.

I just hope the PC versions don't get lost in the shuffle, and that the baseline quality is improved. I don't think Bethesda ever really had a budget problem, not in the last 10 years, anyway, but their reliance on the old engine from Morrowind and patching that rather than replacing it implies they have other priorities. I'm hoping the Microsoft acquisition allows them to seriously consider "why not both?" moving forward. And hopefully, Starfield is the kind of game that is so demanding, the Morrowind engine just isn't enough for it, so they're forced to roll a new one.

 

[msalaba]

I think it will be good for the players.

With Bethesda's primary job being to make games that sell Xboxes (and gaming PCs), rather than directly making profits for their investors, there should be more emphasis on quality.

They will still be beholden to investors. They will just be internal now.

I just hope this does not end up like an EA acquisition.

 

[msalaba]

I just hope the PC versions don't get lost in the shuffle, and that the baseline quality is improved. I don't think Bethesda ever really had a budget problem, not in the last 10 years, anyway, but their reliance on the old engine from Morrowind and patching that rather than replacing it implies they have other priorities. I'm hoping the Microsoft acquisition allows them to seriously consider "why not both?" moving forward. And hopefully, Starfield is the kind of game that is so demanding, the Morrowind engine just isn't enough for it, so they're forced to roll a new one.

Watch what you wish for. It might end up on the Unreal engine. From what I understand, that is not mod friendly.

 

[WetRats]

They will still be beholden to investors. They will just be internal now.

I just hope this does not end up like an EA acquisition.

Whole different power dynamic.

Small company like Zenimax had to cater to the demands of their relatively few large investors.

Mammoth company like Microsoft, has hundreds of thousands of investors, who are interested in the actions of Microsoft as a whole, not relatively tiny divisions like Bethesda.

Bethesda does not have to make a profit, as long as the entire XBox division does. Let alone the kind of high-percentage profit that Private Equity investors want.

 

[msalaba]

Whole different power dynamic.

Small company like Zenimax had to cater to the demands of their relatively few large investors.

Mammoth company like Microsoft, has hundreds of thousands of investors, who are interested in the actions of Microsoft as a whole, not relatively tiny divisions like Bethesda.

Bethesda does not have to make a profit, as long as the entire XBox division does. Let alone the kind of high-percentage profit that Private Equity investors want.

Good point. I just hope I can see another Fallout game that is not 76 or some other online type.

 

[WetRats]

Good point. I just hope I can see another Fallout game that is not 76 or some other online type.

76 was a direct result of investor pressure for a steady income stream, so odds are good.

 

[XxA1xX]

Some of the latest interviews from Bethesda and Microsoft sound promising. Talks of complete engine re writes whole new ground up animation stuff I think starfield will be a testing ground for the next elder scrolls game like Skyrim was a test for fo4’s settlement building. Really hoping to see something similar in starfield to settlement building but for building the ship or worlds who knows. Just hope Bethesda is done with the crap games from now on.

 

[CerebralHawk]

Watch what you wish for. [The next game, or a future Bethesda game] might end up on the Unreal engine. From what I understand, that is not mod friendly.

In JuiceHead's recap (17 minutes) of Todd Howard's presentation at Develop: Brighton (65 minutes, pick your poison), Juice says they value the modding community and don't want to change that — but, that's been their excuse for not updating parts of the engine for years. Todd Howard has long said that they don't change the engine because they, and the community, are comfortable with it. They don't want to learn a new engine. The consequences of that being, one, the next game takes even longer for them to complete, and two, the community (modders) have to learn a new engine.

Here's my first problem with that. Skyrim shipped in 2011. Since then, Nintendo took a 2014 Nvidia Shield and modded it into their new console, the Nintendo Switch. Originally it was going to be more of a Shield and run Android; now it runs some bizarre fork of Android. It's further removed from Android than Fire OS (Amazon's fork) in that the Switch can't actually run Android apps, but parts of Android still shine through in the UI. (To be clear, it's no longer Android in any sense.) What that means for gamers is that any game a Switch can run, your iPhone can run if it's newer than a Switch (so, an iPhone 6s or later) because no iPhone has ever released and been less powerful than an Android flagship. Since iPhone > Android in computational power, iPhone > Switch. Since, as of iOS 13, iPhones can now take Bluetooth game controllers, the one differential factor, the Switch JoyCons, has been removed (since there are generic JoyCons that work with phones). For Android users, it's harder to say, but Qualcomm (the company that makes the chips in Android phones) stays about 2 years behind Apple's silicon. So if you have an Android phone from 2016 or 2017, or newer (Snapdragon 800-something CPU), you can beat a Switch as well. As for Bethesda... in 2017, six years and six days after the PC release of Skyrim, Bethesda released Skyrim for Switch. The problem? NONE of the THOUSANDS of fixes made by the community in the Unofficial Skyrim Patch were included in "Switchrim." So tell me again how much Bethesda values modders?

(As for why I went on that long technical rant about the Switch and iPhone and Android capabilities, I wanted to further ruffle y'all's feathers because we could very well have had Skyrim on iOS and Android. The reason we don't? "Switchrim" launched at $60, and no one was gonna pay $60 for Skyrim on iOS or Android. Publisher Square Enix is pushing console games on iOS and Android for $15–25 (mostly Final Fantasy games) and they really aren't selling that many. So, all that is why instead of getting Skyrim, we got The Elder Scrolls: Blades, a play-to-win dumpster fire whose level of bull is only rivaled by that of Fallout 76.)

And here's my second problem with that. No, I'm not done yet. My second problem is Fallout 4 for Xbox One. The Xbox One is not a bad console. On the spec sheet, it's very similar to the PlayStation 4, with the exception that it has 8GB of DDR3 RAM instead of 8GB of GDDR5 (GPU) RAM. So, same RAM, but slower. Still pretty fast though! What I'm saying is, the Xbox One is not an incapable system. And yet, Fallout 4 is virtually unplayable on it. Past level 50, the game poops the bed (not sure if we can swear up here, playing it safe, but you know what I meant) and I can tell you exactly why it soils the bed, and I'm not even a modder. Modders could probably explain it more concisely, though. Also, the mess that is downtown Boston.

I love modding, but Bethesda delivered a broken and incomplete game twice to their hardware partners, partly due to their loyalty to their engine, and partly due to their pride. Loyalty to modders wasn't even on the radar for "Switchrim."

But I'm not mad... just a little salty, because we all deserve better. And these games deserve better. Fallout 4, for example, could have been a great game about a parent and their long-lost son, but it fell short there. It could have also been a great game about rebuilding after an apocalypse, but it fell short there as well. Mods really haven't fixed the former, but I am thankful for Sim Settlements for fixing the latter. And Skyrim for Switch could have had some of the community's many fixes, which Bethesda was well within their rights to use... but it didn't. And that's just sorry.

If the next Bethesda game isn't great on Xbox, who cares if it has modding support? I care. You care. But Microsoft owns them now (well, technically not until 2021, this is covered in Juice's video) and they need to put out a game that works.

 

[msalaba]

Reading through the lines, we might experience the apocalypse before fallout 5 is released.

 

[CerebralHawk]

Reading through the lines, we might experience the apocalypse before fallout 5 is released.

The US and China are sort of unofficially getting into a second Cold War, so, accurate?

Also, Fallout 5 has to get in line behind both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Fallout 76 got to cut ahead because it started life as a Fallout 4 mod (which I have a hard time buying because it has such a big and presumably detailed map). I don't think Starfield will be out as soon as next year, either, based on comments made by Todd Howard at the Developer Brighton conference. Since work started on Starfield right after Fallout 4 was finished, a 2021 release wouldn't surprise me, but also, COVID-19 and stuff surely delayed it.