John Bedford (Modojo): A short while ago industry veteran Peter Molyneux announced his intention to leave Microsoft and go it alone again, forming the new indie outfit 22 Cans in the process. We still know almost nothing about the new game he hopes will change the world, but we certainly hope that mobile platforms will play at least a part in his planned revolution. It got us thinking about who else we'd like to see making the jump from corporate console culture to independent mobile games development.
Vapourware can end up being the stuff of legend, like Rockstar's Agent, Star Wars 1313, or StarCraft: Ghost. Without ever seeing the light of day, these games never risked the possibility of being played and forgotten, and instead live on forever as the subjects of lengthy YouTube essays.
Still, Molyneux's most notable lost game (or tech demo, depending on who you asked at the time) was arguably Project Milo.
I can see the potential of the kinect hardware... its rather impressive tech, but it was just not meant to be for gaming. If anything, MS had a huge missed opportunity to have used it for the AR/VR projects.
You can use the Kinect as an SLS camera for paranormal investigations. So it wasn’t a complete failure.
Remember Star Wars Kinect announcement? Biggest laughable acting seen
"Unfortunately, as we were developing Milo, so the Kinect device was being developed. And they realised that the device that Alex Kipman first showed off would cost $5,000 for consumers to buy.
"So they cost-reduced that device down to such a point, where the field-of-view...I think it was a minuscule field-of-view. In other words, it could only just see what's straight in front of you."
Hmm, exactly what tech was in it, that was cut, affected the development? It was only ever interpreting visual and audio inputs right? The xbox was processing those inputs.
Nor do I see how the field of view thing is relevant to the discussion.
Exactly! Tf kinda BS statement was that? i don't really see how fov is relevant at all, since when do you move all around a room while talking/interacting to someone?
This is entirely untrue. There was never a 5000 dollar Kinect prototype that could somehow use a wider field of view to scan and import generated in-game items and advance AI by over a decade. Anybody that fell for this was a stupid moron child, myself included. Anybody that falls for this lie now is a stupid moron child who doesn't realize that these people *only* know how to lie.
Todd Howard has held onto the idea of Indiana Jones and The Great Circle for 15 years, but he's not the only dev with a long story with this game.
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Todd howard has never produced stable games.
Starfield was a mess, the Fallout games have always been really buggy.
this is not the flex they think it is.
Howard, who serves as executive producer and director at Bethesda Game Studios and was most recently game director on Starfield, recorded an interview with BAFTA speaking about his work.
During the interview, he explained that the reason Bethesda’s games are so big is because the studio rarely cuts any content.
''Bethesda’s games are so big is because the studio rarely cuts any content.''
Where is this content?
One of The Witcher 3 random NPC side quest have more content than most of Bathesda games. Tales of games, FF, Persona, Most of RPGs have far more than any Bathesda games.
wide as an ocean deep as a puddle. There is a lot of "content" 1000s of planets sure, but nothing to do on them.
Alot of quests lines, that lead to not much.
Gamers want " content" as in depth. IE teh goblin camp in BG3, that one quests has dozens of variations, depending on alignment, race, class, you can join them kill, the leave them be and everything inbetween
A large world is only part of the content. I feel they focus to much on that and the world lore and everything else like the quests, the dated animations, the terrible voice acting, glitches, bugs, dated graphics are subpar. I'm happy the rest of the industry caught up and surpassed Bethesda so they can finally be called out for their work. They are so far behind so many other studios.
@RPGer You may want to specify what you mean exactly, befause Starfield has more raw content than all the games you listed combined.
@IAMREALhooman
Depends on how you look at it. For someone looking for the stimulation of just having a cutscene play out because they picked a certain dialogue option *cough* BG3, these types of players will not like starfield. The planets do not have stimulating content, but potential, potential surpassing most other games. If you are someone looking to build, the empty planets become more alluring, because its a playground where you can find the resources to build…but then also start building. Its fine that people dont like starfield, as some games are more of a niche fit; however, people have mistaken preference for starfield being a bad game, a “pathetic” game, when its just simply preference. Hey, I like starfield better than BG3. Things that entertain the majority are abhorrent to me, and I can at least play starfield without being accosted with inappropriate innuendos or shock value.
@Kyro
Other studios have not surpassed Bethesda. Sure, other rpgs are better in certain areas, but it has literally always been like this. When Skyrim took the world by storm, there were games with better visuals (Mass effect), games with deeper combat(Dragons dogma 2 or kingdoms of amalur), rpgs with deeper writing (Mass Effect 2-3 and even dragon age 2), rpgs with superior presentation and animations (again, Mass Effect 2-3), etc. No one else makes games quite like Bethesda, and they are unique. “But where is the quality?” The quality is in how they get so many different aspects and systems to work in tandem, in a way that virtually no other AAA developer even attempts. The saying “It just works” is alluding to Bethesdas propensity towards pushing the limits of how much stuff you should put into a single game. Their lack of focus has been and still is their greatest strength. However, as time goes on, people are becoming increasingly more overstimulated, impatient, and attention spans and understanding are shortening. This has resulted in Bethesdas greatest strength becoming a liability. The audience has changed…for good or ill(mostly ill), and its having an apparent effect.
I’m sure there’s some things they’ve cut in their games, some Fallout 3 files over weapons and the like where it’s just “why was this cut, what purpose did it serve to cut it”
Often devs will do tasks and sometimes they dont pass testing so have to revisit old tasks they’ve worked on when they’re already in the middle of something else.
If it ain’t critical it gets left behind for more critical fixes or maybe what they’re working on currently is more important.
Now you know…
They spent all the dev time and money on making terrain and empty worlds.
Not necessarily. The content seems lacking in respect to just how gargantuan, the tame is. But there is alot of content in starfield. And people have to stop with the empty planets. Did people really think they would handcraft random landing zones? Come on people…think.
Its not empty, you just dont like what is there. I could say breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom are “empty”.
I think what he's hinting at is that future games will have even less content.
Game Pass isn't going to be able to support the type of super long development time games that Bethesda makes.
If Starfield was the test run, things aren't looking great.
I don't think GamePass is the problem here, tbh. It's more of a worsening Bethesda issue.
Starfield likely sold enough when there was that initial hype to be profitable. The Steam Charts showed that a lot of people paid extra for early access on PC.
The game design is just deeply flawed. They tried something bigger than they could properly achieve. And they've ignored most feedback for a long time.
This might be the blunt wake-up call that they needed.
Starfield sold less than 3m by the end of the first year. It's hard to imagine that was enough to recoup it's 8 year development cycle. Nor did it increase game pass subscriber counts in any significant way.
Irresponsibly using an ancient engine that needs trains to be a hat on a player to fuction.
