From overnight, in what Edwin called an « unexpurgated oopsie document » related to Microsoft’s attempt to buy ActiBlizz, two things that interest me were revealed. Well, three actually. Firstly, Phil Spencer emphasizes « Gaming », which I hate. Secondly, as stated in this related story, Phil Spencer wants to buy Nintendo and, in pity, Valve, which has the same energy as me, walking into a real estate agent and demanding a six-bedroom house with a new fitted kitchen and a hidden library. And thirdly, according to a release schedule from a 2020 presentation, Bethesda and Zenimax have planned their upcoming years of games in a depressingly MCU-style presentation. Damn, are the next few years going to be exhausting. As we can now predict, it’s mostly a list of sequels and remasters, many of which are optimistically dated. This document sets Starfield for 2021, for example, and that obviously didn’t happen. There are also two unnamed games for this year (Project Kestrel and Platinum; the 2021 Project Hibiki, we know, refers to the surprise release Hi-Fi Rush) and it seems unlikely that they will appear before the end of the year. We know that The Elder Scrolls 6 won’t be released for at least five years. They’re going to remaster Oblivion (but not Morrowind, the weird cousin that everyone loves the most, but whose parents don’t know what job to give it in 2023). And they’re going to make Dishonored 3. I’m excited about that! But also fearful. To see this content, please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings Was Starfield worth the wait? Liam and Alice B discuss this question – and much more – in the video above. Watch on YouTube The Zenithesda plan is a litany of safe bets, as that’s the culture of today’s video game industry. Making a big game costs a lot of money, so for a company with shareholders, it makes more sense to do the same things over and over, as it will reliably generate profits rather than taking a big risk with something weird or new. Even Starfield is largely a remake of other Bethesda games and concepts. If you take a leap and miss, like with Immortals Of Aveum, a chintzy fantasy that didn’t quite get everything right but at least tried and showed that a developer had ideas, you may not get a second chance. You might have to lay off almost half of your staff. Jak the Immortal, we hardly knew ye… | Image credit: Paper Shotgun/Electronic Arts So. We’re remaking. We’re serializing. Dishonored 3 is the sequel to a series I at least really like. It’s weird, specific, imaginative, and the systems that let you run around using stealth magic to empty people (or knock people out if you’re going low chaos, I don’t know your life) work really well. But it was also pretty well summed up in the Death Of The Outsider expansion, a game about removing the very source of your stealth powers in one way or another. Death Of The Outsider showed the world itself moving away from superstition and mythology towards technology and rationality. So, are you making a prequel? Are you just spoiling it? What are you doing? That’s the second fear, but it’s a kind of fear that clings to my silly art beads. My other fear is more concrete, that this 2020 plan was made before Redfall came out and sank (I maintain that Redfall could have been great, but it wasn’t – though I did have more fun playing that with a friend than I played hours and hours of Diablo IV). Bethesda was already unsure about doing more Dishonored, but Arkane now has a black mark against them in the big book of profits. Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda Softworks Image credit: Bethesda Softworks“But Dishonored is a proven series from a proven studio,” you might rightly point out. And thanks to this leak, I can report to you that Microsoft is so reluctant to take risks that it decided not to include Baldur’s Gate 3 in Game Pass and described it as a « second-rate Stadia PC RPG » in a leaked email. Why should I, writing on a PC website, trust a game company that uses « PC » as a pejorative term – while providing the operating system for a vast majority of PCs! I look a few years into the future and I see that Arkane will be abandoned, or massively downsized and turned into a developer that creates Starfield DLC. Though that could at least mean that the Starfield DLC was interesting, I suppose. If I’m talking nosedives, I’m going down with one. I’m going down one of these days. If it turns out that Kestral or Platinum are brand new Arkane games, or something weird and cool, different, all shredded and strange, and not rounded off by the forces of market trends, like a beach pebble caught in a swirl, you can bring me back to this article, poke me in the nose, and tell me to get my stuff outside. But I woke up today unconvinced that we live in a world ready to make the next Dishonored game, either metaphorically or literally. (They should, however, make an infinite number of Ghostwire: Tokyo sequels, it’s the exception that proves the rule).
Salut je suis Max ! Je partage toutes mes dernières trouvailles sur l’actualité du jeuxi vidéos, gaming, équipement et software sur ce site.
