Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have a show that basically is Bel carpet bombing the trello with current events topics. First up we talk about the acquisition of Zenimax by Microsoft and our thoughts about that. From there we discuss the wildly tinfoil hat theory that Microsoft is going to acquire Sega next. We also talk about how poorly the Xbox One performed in Japan and how it seems Microsoft is attempting to fix that with their TGS 2020 showing. Kodra talks about playing Pokken with his son and how it is a fighting game that allows you to look awesome without frustrations. We end up spinning off a side discussion about Fighting games in general and how they expect you to learn the characters. Ashgar talks about Monster Hunter Rise and how the main line Monster Hunter series seems to be borrowing heavily from Monster Hunter World… also Doggos. Finally we talk briefly about the flaws in the RTX 3080 design, at least in some of the add-in board partner cards attempts to save money.
It has been a few days and the dust is starting to settle, but on 21st the game world was shocked by the announcement that Microsoft was going to acquire Zenimax the parent company of Bethesda Game Studios. What this practically means is that Microsoft will be the publisher of the Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, Doom series, Quake series, Wolfenstein series and Dishonored series among others. Bethesda itself has gobbled up a number of studios in a bid to compete with other major second party studios like EA and Ubisoft. It is somewhat uncertain however how this is going to change the calculus of how business is done in Maryland.
The initial concern is of course that this is going to lock Bethesda titles to being exclusive to the Xbox, XCloud and Windows PC platforms. At least in the short term there are a number of games that have already signed contacts for PlayStation timed exclusivity and it seems like those are going through as planned. Immediately this is going to mean is that the Bethesda games will be making their way to XCloud and Game Pass which makes me wonder how exactly something like and Elder Scrolls Online will work in this world. The truth is I am optimistic about this decision because I can’t necessarily say that it has been bad for other studios that have become acquired.
I’m a big fan of the State of Decay series and Undead Labs and for the most part what acquisition has brought is a seeming stability. There are a lot of names that I see associated with that company still all these years later that I talked to in person at Pax South. They’ve become a company with a single franchise unfortunately, but they have done a good job of supporting State of Decay and its sequel without having to load it up with heinous microtransactions and are prepped to bring the third installment to the Xbox Series Whatever. Admittedly they started off as a company on Xbox Live Arcade on the 360 and for the most part have always supported Xbox and Windows PC so it wasn’t likely much of a transition to move to being a first party studio.
Another studio that got gobbled up is Double Fine a studio with a notoriously independent streak. Tim Shafer has talked candidly about this quite a bit and for them it was largely a move for stability once again. Wildly paraphrasing, he has talked about in the past how tight the independent development cycle is and how rough the finances have been and Microsoft represented a huge font of available cash. You can’t acquire a studio like Double Fine without a full realization of just how quirky they are and how unique the products that they make are, so I would like to think that Microsoft is more or less just going to allow them to continue doing their thing.
Microsoft has been on this acquisition spree, gobbling up game studios and then seemingly letting them do their thing. A prime example is the acquisition of Mojang studios and with it Minecraft which brought a massive rewrite of the game that it desperately needed. However this new version doesn’t support the modding capabilities that the original Java client did, but they have seemingly continued supporting the old kludgy mess along with the new hotness. As far as I can tell the only thing they have done is bring a sort of regularity to the update cycle and the churning out of new features. The clients for “rival” consoles have languished a bit but they are trying to join them all together under a shared Bedrock edition. Basically it has not meant the end of Minecraft and I don’t think this acquisition will really change much for the day to day business of making the next generation of Bethesda titles.
This acquisition made sense for Microsoft for a lot of reasons. I have talked about this generation being a battle of business models. Microsoft is going hard on the game pass model and the recent deal with EA Play bringing it to the platform only underlines this point. Game Pass is massive for the players and I went on a whole twitter thread about this the other day. I use the hell out of it to try new things out, and it still floors me that games are available on day one to download and even pre-load ahead of time. Star Wars Squadrons is a huge game that is coming out soon, and I am probably going to wait to play it through the Game Pass because me and flight sim type games don’t often get along. It gives me the opportunity to test something out before I commit to it, which I find myself doing a lot more.
This generation really seems to be defined by Microsoft who are leaning hard into platform as a service with a reoccurring monthly/yearly subscription that unlocks access to a significantly library of games. Sony on the other hand is for the most part pushing a single platform with their own exclusives and the key decision being made is if you go digital or disc with those purchases. Xbox as a platform seems not to care what system you are playing the games on and appears to be supporting console, pc and mobile via xcloud equally well. It is really that last offering that I would love to see them flesh out some more with the addition of clients for other platforms like PC, Mac, and maybe even some consoles like the Nintendo Switch. If I could play my Xbox library on the Switch I would be so freaking into that.
What I wonder however is if all of the Intellectual property that is being gained in the form of Bethesda games is just icing on the cake. Last year at E3 Bethesda introduced that they were working on a new technology called Orion that had the ambiguous goal of making games run better on streaming platforms. The tests that were shown were all involving XCloud and Doom 2016, but the results were supposedly phenomenal. It makes me wonder if this acquisition was at least in part a way to lock down this tech and make it exclusive to Xcloud and serve as a market differentiator between the streaming options. Microsoft is putting a lot of eggs in this basket and it would make sense that they want XCloud to have every advantage possible.
I’ve talked a lot about the potential positives here, but here comes the big negative. I don’t forsee a world where we do not see new Bethesda/Zenimax games coming out exclusively on the Xbox platform which includes Windows PC and mobile via Xcloud. I am not sure if this is going to be a timed exclusive or a true exclusive, but whatever the case something like that is going to happen and you aren’t likely to play Starfield or Elder Scrolls 6 on team blue. Sony has its own stable of first party exclusives and that is the reason why I will probably always own a Sony PlayStation. Does this Bethesda exclusivity negatively impact me? Not really because I will always favor the PC when given an option of how to play my games and Microsoft has shown that they are willing to treat console and PC as equals.
Does this suck a lot for players who are console only and own a PlayStation? Yes, yes it does. Do I think platform exclusivity is a good thing? Not really and I honestly find it pretty freaking annoying. However it has been the rule of the land since the Nintendo Entertainment System era, and I don’t really see that changing any time soon. Do I think Microsoft is finished acquiring companies? Probably not and I think both Sega and Capcom look like potential targets. Capcom is going to be a little awkward to acquire, but the controlling interest is only 22% which seems highly vulnerable to me. For the players however I think the things that Microsoft is offering at the price points they are offering it is deeply compelling. Game Pass is a phenomenal deal for the consumers, but I guess time will tell how good of a deal for the studios it ultimately is.
The post Microsoft Aquisition of Zenimax Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
The last few days have seen folks losing their shit over pre-order frustrations, myself included. On the 16th the PlayStation 5 started pre-orders in a very haphazard manner leading to a lot of units seemingly snapped up by flippers and not that many folks in my circle managing to secure the unit they were wanting. Yesterday Microsoft tried something different and instead started all of the preorders at the same time, or at least attempted to. It felt like Microsoft was even throwing a little bit of shade on what happened with Sony, which now seems like hubris. Yesterday did not go smoothly but I can’t necessarily tell if it was more or less successful than the Sony start.
Modern Vintage Gamer is an excellent YouTube channel that goes over the security and design of retro consoles, and he was an early member of the Xbox mod scene. He filmed his out journey yesterday as he attempted to get a system as the preorders started. In my experience it seems like the only folks who got a unit early were the ones who tried to do so through Walmart.com. Target and the Microsoft store both cratered under the weight of all of the user sessions. I have no idea what happened with Best Buy because either the preorders went so fast that it seemed like they never had any, or they still have yet to do their presells.
The person that I knew that was most invested in getting a Xbox Series X was my friend Pete, so I more or less lived vicariously through him during this launch. In the lead up to the PlayStation 5 pre-orders I had followed a bunch of sources of gaming news and releases and as the process unfolded I was sending Pete links each time a new one came across my feed. Even though I expanded my feed significantly, the two best ones seem to be the tried and true that I have followed for years @Wario64 and @VideoGameDeals. Luckily when things opened up on Amazon he managed to get in and snag a unit and hopefully it really is a good order.
That has been another frustration in this whole process is not really being certain that you did in fact lock in your preorder. During the PS5 preorder, there have been cases of orders being invalidated because the platform oversold the number of units that they had been allocated. The image above is from my own PS5 preorder through Sam’s Club and I am hoping it is real. That last statement however always gives me great concern, because they can and have changed orders on me in the past but never in a significant manner. To be truthful… the only online retails that seem to have been able to handle this in stride are Walmart/Sams and Amazon. Target, Best Buy and Game Stop sites all fell apart under the load of all of the people trying to hit them in both the Xbox and PS5 situations. In all of those cases I had systems in basket but encountered problems actually checking out.
So the question that has been kicking around my circles is why this console preorder cycle seems to matter so much. For me I had put off upgrading to a PS4 Pro for roughly a year and a half thinking that the PS5 had to be right around the corner. So this was absolutely a purchase that I had planned for a long time and as such I have a back log of games that I would simply rather play in glorious 4k. For others… I think given the shitty times that we find ourselves living in we are in essence trying to buy happiness or at least future happiness. I’ve been watching a lot of collectable markets that are tied to the nostalgia of days gone by booming. Vintage Magic the Gathering prices for example are going through the roof after stalling or retracting at the beginning of the pandemic.
All products right now are having severe supply chain issues, either in getting the materials needed to manufacture something or getting the product out to the customers. This is leading to an artificial sense of scarcity on products that should in theory be stable. We all remember the toilet paper rush at the beginning of the pandemic, and I still have yet to be able to purchase a single Clorox wipe either online or in store. This ends up building to a anxiety of not being able to get the things we want or need and that is sort of trickling out to everything as well. Console launches are always stressful and frantic, but the level of fervor over this one is considerably higher. Products that feed into this, like Zendikar Rising Set Boosters which already have a massive gambling component are benefiting by either a real or manufactured scarcity. In this example it is a product that should retail for $150 a box that is going upwards of $250 if you can even find it.
So we live in this time when things that should never normally be hard to get are weirdly hard to get. I think everyone is craving stability and normalcy, and it is leading us all to do some somewhat dumb things. For me it is raging over trying to order a console system that doesn’t really even really have a game that requires it. For others it is attending big house parties that end up infecting everyone with Covid-19 all because they craved social contact. We are living in weird times and I find myself digging deep into nostalgia to get through them. I think that is why I have been hoarding cartoons that I grew up watching and playing World of Warcraft again because it lets me drift along on the afterglow of better times. Folks deal with things differently, and I am trying to do so in the manner that keeps me the safest in the long run.
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There are a couple different versions of this “quiz” floating around social media. I saw the very truncated version on the left first and later a more complete version circulated on the right. However it got me thinking about consoles and the generations that they belong to. Essentially for a long time now I have heard people refer to a specific console as being part of the third, the seventh , or even now that we are entering the ninth generation. I wanted to know more about this and as a result it sent me down a rabbit hole that I am now sharing with you. Of course you can just read this handy wikipedia page I found in my travels and be done with it, but I figure if you have made it this far into the post you are probably going to continue down to the end.
Generation One – The Single Game Units
Generation one for the first part were the pong clones. The above is an image of the unit that I remember playing as a kid but unfortunately I didn’t get to play very much of it. My nephew had borrowed it and apparently left the image up on screen all night and burned it into the very expensive zenith cabinet television that my grandparents had, and from that point forward it was only used with the utmost of caution and under full supervision. Even as we entered the Nintendo era of gaming, said Grandparents refused to let me hook any game consoles up to any of their televisions. For the most part the consoles in this generation were a single game, or a number of game modes that were switchable on unit.
Generation Two – The Era of Cartridges
This is the era that was the counter effect of the arcade boom and in my memory was dominated by the Atari 2600. The defining feature of this generation was the inclusion of some way of swapping games, usually through a cartridge slot. For the most part, even though I played a pong clone… the Atari 2600 was the first video game system that I considered to be mine. I remember a few friends had the Intellivision or the ColecoVision… and a very rare few had an Atari 5200… but the vast majority were 2600 kids. I won’t lie I have a certain nostalgia for the wood grain era of gaming, and I really would have loved to have seen a Vectrex in its prime.
Generation Three – The 8-Bit Era
The second generation was exceptionally long, not necessarily because it was still booming but more that video games crashed hard in the late 70s and early 80s. This generation was largely heralded by the introduction of better 8 bit graphics into the equation. It was not until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System that this marketplace revived, and with it was a change to start treating these things as toys rather than living room computers. For me 1987 was the “Nintendo Christmas”, and I remember it being legitimately the only thing I wanted that year and I was scared to death when nothing vaguely Nintendo shaped showed up under the Christmas tree. I remember the consoles being in extremely short supply, but ultimately I got the set I wanted with the all important Super Mario Bros. The folks left out in the cold here were the kids who ended up getting a Sega Master System, because they couldn’t quite join in the recess huddles talking about game strategy, and absolutely couldn’t participate in swapping cartridges.
Generation Four – The 16-Bit Era
This era is really my favorite and the one I am the most nostalgic for, but it was also a really odd generation. It is largely signified by the inclusion of 16 bit graphics, but as a result you have a few odd cases where technically the Sega Genesis and the Turbografx 16 were contemporaries of both the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo. Ultimately this generation will forever be marked by the competition between the SNES and the Genesis and the various advertising campaigns fomenting this. The staggered nature of the generation was a bit odd because even though the Genesis and Turbografx released in 1989, they wouldn’t really have much impact in toppling the older 8 Bit NES. This was also the first generation when I owned more than one console, as I got a used Genesis Model 1 pretty late in the cycle.
Generation Five – The CD-ROM ERA
Things get a little squirrely with this generation as well as you ended up with a mix of “32 bit” and “64 bit” graphical processing, or at least that was the advertising at the time. In the case of Nintendo it was a 32 bit CPU and a 128 bit graphical processor… and apparently they averaged these numbers to get 64? The Nintendo 64 and the Atari Jaguar clung to the more expensive to manufacturer and more limited space of the cartridge, but the vast majority of consoles in this generation made the leap to the new and exciting CD-Rom technology. This is also the era of the Modchip and rampant console piracy with many offerings in this generation having little to no protection other than the thought that at the time CD Burners were terribly expensive. The most popular consoles of this generation were the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. The strangest consoles of this generation were likely the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar… which did some interesting things but never really caught on and looking back have very few games that would be considered as classics.
Generation Six – The DVD Era
I am calling it the DVD Era because that was the new hotness and every single console above uses some sort of DVD drive technology, with the Dreamcast and the Gamecube going to lengths to obfuscate this fact. However for me there are really two key things that happened. First it was the death of Sega, with the Dreamcast failing to gain traction and being more or less killed by piracy. This meant with it the death of the old Sega versus Nintendo Rivalry, but as that banner fell the next generation of Microsoft versus Sony stepped in to take its place. This also more or less begins the era of Nintendo not really trying to compete directly with the other consoles and doing its own thing, which is a strategy that have served them well throughout the generations. The Sony PlayStation was the clear winner of the generation, but the Dreamcast will always hold a special place in my heart. While I never owned one the Xbox was essentially a PC in a black plastic box and I remember all of my friends that had them modding and doing all sorts of nonsense to dump games to the hard drive.
Generation Seven – The Online Gaming Era
This is a weird generation, because looking back the highest selling console is also the least relevant to the direction in which gaming has moved. The Nintendo Wii sold over 100 million consoles and became a craze with folks who you absolutely did not expect to own one playing Wii Bowling. The thing is… it didn’t convert people into core gamers and I know so many people who bought a Wii and never played anything other than the sports pack in disc. I think a truer representation of this generation and how it moved things forward is that this is the era in which online gaming dominated the platforms. Sure the Dreamcast offered pretty reasonable online play, and you could get a PS2 or Saturn online with a lot of hoops to jump through… but the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 were internet native consoles and finally knew how the hell to handle this interaction with Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Nintendo still to this day doesn’t entirely know what the hell to do with the internet. This is also the generation where severe mistakes were made and Sony had the hubris to expect to dominate this generation the way they had the previous and unintendedly made a machine that was hell to develop for.
Generation Eight – The Digital Distribution Era
Sure you could download games on the Xbox 360, Wii and the PlayStation 3… but it was only specific games and often times limited to ports of older generations or independent games. It was during the Eighth generation that we figured out digital distribution in the proper way, with the ability to buy any game that was being released on day one from the comfort of your home and often times have it downloaded well ahead of time and unlocked at midnight. This is a generation that saw the biggest console flop in years in the form of the WiiU and the effective reboot of the same games to critical acclaim in the form of the exceptionally versatile Nintendo Switch. Microsoft started the generation leaning entirely too heavily on trying to go back to the era of being the “Livingroom PC” that did everything including watch television for you. However after this misstep they carved a really solid path forward with Games with Live and now Game Pass. PlayStation on the other hand rode into the generation with the exceptional value of PlayStation Plus that they used to turn around the previous generation, and more or less squandered that. PlayStation however still stands strong on its exclusives that have only recently been making their way to the PC. The PlayStation 4 has sold the most units, but I feel like Nintendo with the Switch will eventually surpass that.
Generation Nine – ???
So here we sit on the precipice of the ninth console generation, and I have no idea what the eventual hallmark of this generation will be. I think the challenge with this generation is that it doesn’t feel like it is a significant leap forward. As we have moved each generational leap has felt smaller, and largely just being indicated by slightly higher resolutions and graphical fidelity. Maybe ray tracing will be a game changer, or maybe this will be the generation finally capable of delivering virtual reality for the masses. Right now however both consoles that release in November are deeply unproven as to how exactly they are going to make their mark. They are both effectively the same PC being sold under different brands, because at the end of the day the difference between the hardware being offered is marginal.
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