Xbox Game Studios Stupidity Hate Thread Game Pass Edition

[guiltyspark85]

The "ray tracing mandate" certainly didn't help. Nothing like automatically soft-locking about 30-40% of your potential audience out of the game.

I question that they're excluding such a large audience. The 30-40%, I assume based on Steam hardware surveys, more the kind of people playing the 'latest and greatest' AAA games, or are they more skewed towards playing older games and indie titles? TDA min system requirements are mid-range first gen RT cards at this point 5-6 years old - not bleeding edge hardware.

But I think the RT requirement could dissuade people from purchasing the game that have RT hardware. There's a quite justifiable association with turning on RT features tanks a games performance, so if TDA requires RT it's going to run like shit.

And I'm not trying to simp for RT and the obsolescence of older hardware. I've heard one of the 'really good' reasons for requiring RT is that lighting is it's significantly more efficient for artists to work with than traditional baked lighting. Fascinating how we hear about such efficiency gains with better technology and tools for game development, but teams sizes are ever increasing for marginal improvements in graphical fidelity.

Sold well on Xbox, or overall? Because I know Silksong broke Steam because demand was so high but I can't imagine people were rushing out to buy Xboxes so they could own a digital copy on their Series X.

Personally I bought Silksong on Steam and a physical copy of Clair Obscur for PS5; it never even occurred to me to use Game Pass,

I'm speaking overall, but I'm not sure how much relevance selling well on Xbox hardware has. In user base it's behind PS5 and well behind PC. TDA peaked at 31,470 concurrent players on Steam. Forza Horizon 6 on the other hand, which I assume would be more Xbox skewed than TDA, peaked at 302,645 players. That's nearly 10 x players as TDA.

I sincerely doubt anybody outside id is even qualified to work with (much less understand) id tech. It's depressing to know now there's only two major general-purpose engines left (Unity and Unreal). id tech has always been state-of-the-art. Their decision to mandate ray tracing in id tech 8 was something a lot of people found baffling. It absolutely didn't need it. Doom 2016 ran silky-smooth on potatoes. Even "low quality" looked good. Losing that tech to history and scattering knowledge of its inner workings to the four winds by laying off its developers is a big technological loss. It being Microsoft-owned means we naturally can't expect them to open-source it like older engines were.

MachineGames and Arkane have used several different versions of id tech. The Indiana Jones game used an enhanced version of the id tech 7 engine, so I'm not sure why they couldn't move over to the id tech 8 engine. Not sure if Arkane have updated to a newer version of id tech with their Blade game, but they supposedly used id tech 6 with Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot

 

[El Chacal De La Trompeta]

i wonder why rockstar doesnt license the rage engine

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Naaah, she'll delegate that shit. There will be like a jeet death squad going from one studio to another. Nobody will even know be able to pronounce their names, but they are feared and there's always something ominous in the air before they arrive.

fixed

 

[Super Hans v2]

I don't get the ire over idtech being killed off. Nobody outside of Zenimax has used it since idtech 4, and 8 was announced last year. It's not like any studio worth complaining about will be affected.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

I don't get the ire over idtech being killed off. Nobody outside of Zenimax has used it since idtech 4, and 8 was announced last year. It's not like any studio worth complaining about will be affected.

It’d be cool if Microsoft could hire some engineers away from Epic that know the inner workings of Unreal Engine to help create a real competitor to Unreal Engine,

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Who bought that? Outer Worlds 1 sucked. It's wasted potential the game.

Nah, it never had any potential.

It was the blandest game with the blandest gameplay and the blandest setting in the history of the world. The only noteworthy thing about it was the "FALLOUT KILLER! BETHESDA IS DEAD!" hype train prior to release, which all went markedly quiet the very moment people started playing it.

 

[Quijibo69]

I played it for 4 hours and the amount of copy paste assets was mind boggling.

 

[Questions are a Burden]

I played the first one for free and I think I finished it. I'm not certain because the entire thing was completely forgettable.

 

[moocow]

MachineGames and Arkane have used several different versions of id tech. The Indiana Jones game used an enhanced version of the id tech 7 engine, so I'm not sure why they couldn't move over to the id tech 8 engine.

Word is the engine is being discarded/discontinued, not shared with other Microsoft studios or licensed to third parties.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

I played the first one for free and I think I finished it. I'm not certain because the entire thing was completely forgettable.

I pirated the first one and didn’t get 10 hours into the game before I uninstalled it.

 

[Oliver Onions]

I'm speaking overall, but I'm not sure how much relevance selling well on Xbox hardware has.

I consider it relevant because Game Pass was supposed to be Phil's hail mary to save Xbox as a brand, but all it seems to have achieved is the acceleration of its demise while the competition prospers.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

It’d be cool if Microsoft could hire some engineers away from Epic that know the inner workings of Unreal Engine to help create a real competitor to Unreal Engine,

The last thing the world needs is MS having a foot in the door for game middleware.

 

[Korpon]

there's always something ominous in the air before they arrive.

Yeah that's the smell of curry, body odor, and feces

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Yeah that's the smell of curry, body odor, and feces

I don't know what feces are, but they smell like CRAP!

 

[Blitzsneed]

John Carmack has posted his thoughts on the id layoffs.


Seems like a very Carmack take and I think he's doing his autistic best to be sympathetic to those layed off. He has always been pragmatic and forward looking, not someone that clings to nostalgia. But I'm sure it will outrage Redditors and they'll interpret his words in the most bad faith way possible.

He is correct in every aspect here. However, VR is a meme and he should consider going into "traditional" game development for the hell of it.

The simple reality is, cut the bloat, make games that aren't shit, and don't get to a point where you literally have nothing in the pipeline. 1537 professional roles on D:TDA. 20 studios involved in that mediocre release, and then nothing to move onto? That is purely executive stupidity.

That's insane. There didn't need to be this many people to create a game which was (slightly) inferior to its predecessors.

I sincerely doubt anybody outside id is even qualified to work with (much less understand) id tech. It's depressing to know now there's only two major general-purpose engines left (Unity and Unreal). id tech has always been state-of-the-art.

YES SAAR, UNITY AND UNREAL BEST ENGINES (which have glaring flaws at the base and in optimization) SAAAAAAR

Their decision to mandate ray tracing in id tech 8 was something a lot of people found baffling. It absolutely didn't need it. Doom 2016 ran silky-smooth on potatoes. Even "low quality" looked good. Losing that tech to history and scattering knowledge of its inner workings to the four winds by laying off its developers is a big technological loss. It being Microsoft-owned means we naturally can't expect them to open-source it like older engines were.

But I think the RT requirement could dissuade people from purchasing the game that have RT hardware. There's a quite justifiable association with turning on RT features tanks a games performance, so if TDA requires RT it's going to run like shit.

The raytracing requirement broke id's neck in retrospect. It should been optional for the graphics whores to make the game look better, but locking out potential customers due to the requirement is a beyond retarded decision from a business perspective. Sidenote: It was required to play TDA. It didn't even start if you didn't have a GPU capable of RT.

Meanwhile literal jank like fucking "Creation Engine" still keeps hobbling along and they're still grinding out games with that piece of shit.

After NV I refuse to play games which uses this piece of shit held together by spit and duct tape. Bethesda is consisting of incompetent retards, liars and now probably a shitton of jeets.

Glad to see it's Microsoft's idea to force Bethesda to play nice w/Obsidian this time, though I'm sure they'll fuck it up on purpose somehow out of spite anyway. I'd love to see an unflattering parody of Todd Howard get snuck into the end product somehow, though. That'd be a delight.

The issue is that Obsidian's games in the last years were utter shit with atrocious writing which was blatant propaganda at some points. Outer Worlds as a "shining" example.
NV was more than a decade ago and I seriously doubt that another FO game made and written by them will be good in any capacity.

But AVOWED 2 IS COMING OUT SOON. AREN'T YOU GUIZE HYPED?!
Fucking kill me dewd.

 

[p1138]

That's insane. There didn't need to be this many people to create a game which was (slightly) inferior to its predecessors.

Considering a large portion of it seemed like a fucking asset flip? Oh yeah it was idiotic. Even without being an actual asset flip, it was still just a fucking iteration on Doom Eternal anyway, which itself was an iteration on Doom 2016. The budgets and number of people involved should have shrunk between those games, not increased.

 

[TrinityReformed]

iteration on Doom 2016

I wish. It was the most enjoyable for me out of the trio.

 

[p1138]

I wish. It was the most enjoyable for me out of the trio.

Iterative sequels don't necessarily need to get better over time(even if they should).

 

[Geddy Lee's Fee and See]

The raytracing requirement broke id's neck in retrospect. It should been optional for the graphics whores to make the game look better, but locking out potential customers due to the requirement is a beyond retarded decision from a business perspective. Sidenote: It was required to play TDA. It didn't even start if you didn't have a GPU capable of RT.

It's crazy because that's always how id games were from Quake onwards: they were so optimized you could run them on low end hardware but they had extra bells and whistles for people that had more powerful computers to enjoy a better looking version of the game.

Using RT to replace traditional lighting methods for a supposed decrease in developmental time (because that's why they even made it mandatory in the first place) literally cost them the success of DOOM TDA and many people's jobs over at id as a result. It's crazy how modern game development and publishing firms and companies do the most pants on head retarded bullshit to make marginal gains that cost them dearly later on.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

It's crazy because that's always how id games were from Quake onwards: they were so optimized you could run them on low end hardware but they had extra bells and whistles for people that had more powerful computers to enjoy a better looking version of the game.

Using RT to replace traditional lighting methods for a supposed decrease in developmental time (because that's why they even made it mandatory in the first place) literally cost them the success of DOOM TDA and many people's jobs over at id as a result. It's crazy how modern game development and publishing firms and companies do the most pants on head retarded bullshit to make marginal gains that cost them dearly later on.

TDA was up against it even before the raytracing kerfuffle due to how many people found Eternal to be a huge disappointment.