Topic: The everything Xbox thread

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@MsJubilee " The old Assassins Creed is dead," Don't say that. DON'T SAY THAT!!

Actually I liked Origins a lot...still haven't finished it. AC1 remains the best AC and the only TRUE assassin simulator that was a fun assassin simulator. The Ezio series was a fun action adventure, but not truly assassiny like the first one. 3 was a trainwreck that starts our Brawler's Creed series. Every element that made AC AC was stripped out (to be fair though I have not replayed the remaster yet that was supposed to fix some of that.) 4 a fun but monotonous pirate game that had nothing at all to do with Assassin's Creed. Origins....was actually good and felt like an assassiny stealth game again. I won't mind more of that at all. Odyssey....I haven't played it yet except for the beginning, but it looks like a step back to 3....a brawler. And Valhalla looks to double down on brawling and looks like a cross between For Honor and old PS2 era GoW or something. It seems largely like the full realization of what For Honor wanted to be but never was, which should be awesome....except calling it AC makes it seem worse because even if it's an amazing game, it's a horrible Assassin's Creed game.

@BruceCM Ahh. Yeah Obsidian has a good legacy of their own. inExile is kind of a small "indie" shop made up of some folks who use to be megapublisher giants. Separately, inExile isn't known for much but Wasteland. Obsidian is known for quite a bit on their own. Recently of course Outer Worlds "in the spirit of Fallout. The real fallout" They were also responsible for FO3: New Vegas, which is why New Vegas is the only "Bethesda Fallout" that feels vaguely like real fallout....it's the only one made by much of the original creators.

FWIW, What Bethesda calls "Fallout" is not at all "Fallout" to the original fans. It's a new IP about surviving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.....which is not at all the spirit of the original 2 games. The whole thing was a tongue in cheek pastiche on basically human selfishness, greed, insipidness, all in a dark comedy undertone.....exactly like Outer Worlds...but in an apocalyptic setting for irony. Fallout, real Fallout, is a dark comedy not a serious apocalyptic survival sim as Bethesda's pure garbage series is. I love TES, but Bethesda has butchered Fallout.

Anyway, Obsidian is known, on their own, for quite a few other RPGs. Alpha Protocol, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 (It was better than Bioware's 1, but the budget fell out and the end got cut off abruptly.) Neverwinter Nights 2 (basically they fixed Bioware's odd NwN 1 and made it a proper D&D game again like Baldur's Gate and NwN1), recently Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 that tries to also recall Baldur's Gate era games....they're more or less the Western RPG studio other than CDPR (Bioware is long dead, and I'd argue Bioware was never really great, most of the talent lied with Black Isle who co-developed their big breakout games like Baldur's Gate. Bioware got credit for content they weren't really behind.)

Obsidian's problem for their whole run has been money. They haven't had a budget they've needed to do what they do, really, ever...so all their games are "really great....but....." they have technical issues or ran out of money and had to cut the end and it's obvious in the game, or they had to shoot low, etc.

But you have to understand who Obsidian and "little indie inExile" are.

Once upon a time there was Black Isle Studios under the large publisher Interplay. You'll see some of their published titles back on the NES and SNES, still, including ironically, The Lost Vikings, which was an early game made by Blizzard (Diablo, WoW, now part of Activision.) That studio within the publisher was basically the western RPG studio. Bioware gets credit for Baldur's Gate, but it was co-developed with BIS. BIS went on to make Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, a handful of other non-Infinity Engine games, and are, of course, most famous for Fallout 1 & 2. The main writers on Fallout were Chris Avellone and Tim Cain. The main designer on most of these games, was Feargus Uquhart. The guy who founded and ran Interplay (the parent publisher) was Brian Fargo. He created a little game called Wasteland, which later got a sequel, Wasteland II, but changed the design a bit and named it......Fallout. (See where this is going yet? Yes, Fallout is Wasteland II, Fallout 2 is Wasteland III......so a little indie company that released "Wasteland 2" while Fallout 76 was releasing from Bethesda wasn't an oversight ) Feargus, Chris, and Tim built that game into what it became with him. It was a heck of an RPG studio. The best. The CDPR before there was CDPR, only bigger.

Flash forward a bit and the shareholders leveraged a hostile takeover of Interplay. They oustered Fargo as CEO. They started running into debt as they nickel and dimed every penny out of the company into their hedge. They weren't paying employees.

Fargo still looked in from the outside and tried to help the people that used to work for him....and the IPs he created. Still trying to "run" the company from outside the walls without an actual official involvement. He started to refer to himself as "Interplay's CEO in-exile." (And thus we get his eventual indie startup: inExile.....despite having an indie budget, it's really run by a former megapublisher founder and the creator of Fallout....it would be like if Trip Hawkins (founder of EA) started an indie studio today.) Eventually Fargo ran a gambit to get his old staff paid. He sued Interplay for forced bankruptcy. The end goal was that either they fold and have to pay off the employees and debts, or they liquidate some IP and inExile could pick up some of his old IP again on the auction block. Unexpectedly, Interplay negotiated privately with Bethesda and sold them Fallout directly, shutting inExile down from ever getting the rights. At the time Bethesda was....a really really low grade B-level budget publisher at best. They published a bunch of odd Russian games, and some pretty low end no-name studios. But their parent company, Zenimax, an MMO company had deep pockets. But the Interplay employees got paid, so he got a lot of what he wanted.

During that bankruptcy time, Interplay wasn't paying royalties on Baldur's Gate II or Freespace 2, causing Bioware to leave the contract and seek out, first, MS for Mass Effect and Jade Empire, and eventually get gobbled up by EA. Similarly, Volition tried to strike it out on their own, failed entirely, and were gobbled up by THQ (You know them now for Saint's Row among other things.)

When Interplay folded and Black Isle Studios dissolved wholly, Feargus, Chris, and Tim, of Fallout fame took half the staff and founded Obsidian. Brian founded inExile as a small indie.

Now they're both united under one big budget banner once again......... That could mean great things.

Yes, MS said they're not combining them, they're keeping them separate, so it's not a true, full BIS unification. But still everyone important from the old BIS really works for the same shop again....and I'm sure some collaboration is inevitable. And more importantly they have a proper budget available to them for the first time since BG2 released back in, what, 2000? Technically MS now has the best Western RPG designers in-house other than the CDPR team. Bioware's dead. Bethesda, frankly sucks outside Elder Scrolls...they're a one trick pony but it's a great trick.

@BlueOcean I think one of the biggest problems Microsoft made in the early days was they didn't actually own the IP rights to most of the games they made exclusive. They SOMEHOW ended up owning Halo....which I presume to be a mistake rather than intentional. They got Gears...not sure how they wrested that from Epic just in time. But some of their biggest stand-out hits on X-BOX....Mechwarrior, Crimson Skies, both owned by FASA, not them, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, both owned by Bioware, not them, and then it fell into EA's hands through buyouts. They had some great system seller exclusive franchises going but they didn't actually own any of them so they all faded away, went elsewhere, got bought out by other publishers, or just faded away.