At least we will get another Fallout from the hands of Obsidian right? Right?
Activision in charge of Halo? That’s a deathblow if ever I heard one.
Post bungie halo has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion, the series has survived the last 16 years on reputation alone.
CODification here it comes. Couldn’t be worse than the current state of Halo though?
Activision doesn’t only publish Call of Duty though. They publish all kinds of games: Sekiro, the Tony Hawk games, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, etc.
Way more potential than what 343 had. I mean, 343 was purposefully NOT hiring former Bungie-era Halo employees. The important ones, like Marcus Lehto, Marty ODonnell, heck they only brought Joe Staten to get Infinite “back on track” and then promptly kicked him to the curb too. 343 definitely deserved this earlier, I am gonna be honest.
The games you mentioned ring in my head as mid-2000s highlights, with nothing more than blatant money grabs published in the last decade. Not very indicative of a healthy studio imo. They may have once been capable of turning out good games, but that was roughly in the era
343 was turning out good games toogood Halo games were being released as wellSekiro is the exception to that, but that’s more on FromSoft than it is on Activision, to the extent that it actually hadn’t registered in my mind that Activision was involved with that game at all.
Yeah exactly FromSoft is turning out bangers, and somehow Activision is involved? Maybe just to the extent that they aren’t involved so can’t fuck anything up?
My point is that Activision isn’t a studio. It’s a publisher. I read Activision said they are forming a new studio for Halo.
I mean, I didn’t bring up all of Activisions classic games like Pitfall, just the most recent games they have published since those are most relevant to the topic.
“the era 343 was turning out good games too”
Ok but that never really happened. Ensemble made Halo Wars and Creative Assembly made the sequel which were decent IMO (the first being better IMO). Every other game with the Halo brand under 343 was garbage. Forget about Spartan Strike and Spartan Assault? 343s first game was Halo CE Anniversary, which was horrendously bad, so I suppose it is poetic in a way that Halo Studios, which only survived long enough to drop a single game, would die with yet another rehash of Halo CE.
Except for maybe Fireteam Raven, only because I never had the chance to play it, 343 never had an “era of making good games.” Halo 2A was pretty good but it launched in the very broken MCC which took them years to fix.
4,5, and Infinite were the absolute low points of Halo, with Infinite being the best of the three only because of the art direction. But they are all far below Bungie-era Halo games.
Holy moly.
That is basically the worst case scenario, no?
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The absolute last thing Obsidian needs is Bethesda presiding over them. Bethesda (the publisher) is pure toxicity, and don’t they hate Obsidian?
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They should have given Obsidian TES/Fallout, and folded Bethesda into Obsidian as a studio to farm work out to. BGS has some great level design teams, but the decision makers need to go.
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The absolute last thing Halo campaigns need is to be more like Call of Duty.
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They should have cut 343, and split the IP amongst specialized studios. Like an Arkane “special ops” stealth game, another Halo Wars, and/or a strictly multiplayer Activision game.
This is beyond even my worst expectations. It’s what I would have done if I was a corporate spy inside Microsoft, assigned to sabotage them.
Obsidian is doing fallout.
Halo needs ANYTHING. 343/Halo studios has never had a fucking clue.
Obsidian is doing fallout.
But under BGS now. To me, that is frightening.
It’s worse then that because studios aren’t names they are the people that make the games. All these studios are effectively dead The only good that may come of this are the devs that start their own indio studio and make the games they want. Not an easy path mind you.
Last good game by obsidian ? By Bethesda ? Commercial success now ? Obsidian dig their grave.
They made a bunch of good RPGs/RPG-ish games, and a bunch of “mid” ones.
My personal favorite is Grounded. It does sorta feel like classic Obsidian/BGS game, with its heavy implicit environmental storytelling, audio logs and such, and the survival aspect is great for coop.
No, none of them sold a zillion copies like Fallout 76 or Starfield, but I had more fun in them than either of those, by a long shot.
So one niche game 10 year ago… I know obsidian for being the studio with the art director proudly claiming he would not recruit withe ppl. Wich except the legal side is utterly retard since they are the majority of your audience. Go woke go broke
Since 2016, Obsidian has released 10 games. BGS released 2: Fallout 76 and Starfield.
Grounded 2 is out in EA, seems to be close to release, and by all accounts it is excellent.
Its not even close to the worst thing. The worst thing was letting 343 “Halo Studios” keep Halo.
At worst, we just get another bad Halo game. But with entirely different people working on it, at least there is a chance it could be better. Under 343 “Halo Studios” it had no chances of being good.
Activision is a publisher, they don’t only make Call of Duty. They have a large variety of games they publish, including Blizzard’s Overwatch, which while one can argue doesn’t fit the Halo gameplay, proves that Activision has the capacity to publish FPS games that feel almost nothing like Call of Duty.
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As I remember, back in the 90s, the CEO of Activision hated video games.
So of course that zombie of a company is still fucking up gaming.
What exactly is their plan? Just collect IPs so they aren’t being released on other platforms?
Yeah so historically PlayStation has had a lot of exclusives (Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, The Last of Us) that would be the deciding factor for a lot of players. So Microsoft wanted to ensure that Xbox/PC could synergize and compete against Sony by buying a stake in a ton of game studios, either to have their own exlusives or at least delayed release for PlayStation. But between bitcoin, AI and enshittification the gaming industry is in shambles so they’re cutting overhead.
Halo to become Call of Duty In Space in 3…
Where have you been for the last 14 years? Halo has been call of duty in space since 343 took over.
The only people in the world left that understand the lineage of Halo, and that Halo is all about the combat dance, and elaborate encounters, and that every enemy in the level is a chess piece that needs to be placed with utmost care, is Id Software.
Id, freshly equipped with everything they learned from resurrecting DOOM, is the only studio skilled enough to possibly save the Halo franchise.
Too bad Microsoft obliterated them last month, too.
Oops!
Wait until they give Doom to Activision, to create Call of Doom - UAC Mercenaries, a game where the hellspawn are replaced with striking UAC workers gone too far and dressing up as imps and such.
Implying it wasn’t already that
Halo was an attempt at a better direction, compared to 5.
That is a very low bar though.
They all ready did that 14 years ago when Halo 4 came out. It had kill streaks and creat-a-class with custom skins.
Deck chairs on the Titanic.
I honestly believe that Xbox will stop existing as a company in a few years.
Yeah, Asha Sharma seems to be set up as an example of the glass cliff. She’s clearly trying to bail out a sinking ship rather than revitalize a stale brand. Giving Halo to Activision shows a misunderstanding of what Halo players want, but the other things she’s doing are things that probably could have helped five or more years ago, but are just too late now. We’re probably heading toward a repeat of the 1983 crash. Xbox and PlayStation might still be around after, but they’ll be in the position that Atari and Sega were after the crash, with their remaining market share evaporating the instant a new competitor arrives.
Meanwhile, so long as Nintendo just keeps doing what they’ve been doing they should be fine. I could see them phasing out game key cards as an option for devs if the digital only backlash on the next generation is bad enough, but they might not have to given that the publishers that have been using them are the ones most likely to implode.
Activision is also overseeing Age of Empires as well… Couldn’t let Sony outshine you in “who can shoot themselves in the foot hardest” could you?
well, R.I.P. Elder Scrolls 6.
So is Halo Studios/343 just…dead now? Seems like they’re dead if they don’t have Halo. Kind of in their name.
They made awful games so who cares. I don’t think even Activision could have made it more like a Call of Duty clone than 343 did.
I agree, but I just find it hilarious that Microsoft reorganized and renamed 343 to Halo Studios, just to basically cut it’s head off.
So since the company has dissolved. There was an idea to make it like a COD game… and an idea to make it like a minecraft/fortnite game… after so many years it turned to just make a halo something game because having 300 contractors alongside the studio ended up costing too much.
I think the plan is to have them do publishing and IP management, like what happened with LucasArts.
Incredible
Fucking hysterical how everyone was celebrating Asha Sharma and Xbox a month or two ago, even though SHE LITERALLY SAID 1,600 CUTS ARE ON THE WAY.
This is because their AI bet fucking failed, and so did gamepass.
Yet the only ones hurt are Devs, the gamers, and potentially IPs people adore.
What a shit timeline this is.
Well fuck, there goes Age of Empires…
How many more versions of 2 do we need? The 2013 sprite version still looks great.
Just the Definitive Edition. It’s pretty future-proofed too, and it’s essentially what I expected the “HD” version to be back when I got it.
But the issue isn’t with expecting another version of AoEII, but how Age of Empires as a whole will be managed from here on out. Activision is responsible for creating a lot of toxic online crap and is, responsible for outlining and coining the term “Live Service”.
With AoEIIDE, AoEIIIDE, AoMR, and AoEIV still getting support, updates, and DLC, I can absolutely imagine a very near future where Activision drags it all through shit and muck.
Ah, thank you for the context.
I tried playing the definitive edition of AOE2 but it didn’t feel right in comparison to the HD version, and haven’t really touched the franchise since. (Other than to periodically go back and play AOE2HD with a friend)
Strange. AoEIIDE to me looks and feels how I remember AoEII being. But looking back at the old version is very jarring.
I hold up the Definitive Edition as something a remake should be. Very faithful to the original. Unlike, say, the Ocarina of Time remake.
Well, I am willing to give it another go. I’ll report back if my opinion has changed!
Fuck 343 Hasn’t made one good game Even the mcc which is great they needed 10 year for it to be good and even now u still have issue
I will say Halo Infinite did have good gameplay even if the single player story and multiplayer launch was half baked.
Not the worse things to play but well known to have unfixable netcode issue
To be fair though, all the halo games had shit net code but infinite’s was horrible
Well Halo has no where to go but up at this point so why not.
More remakes to come
