Xbox’s Phil Spencer tries to spin not having a new Fallout game ready alongside the Amazon show as a good thing
Xbox’s Phil Spencer tries to spin not having a new Fallout game ready alongside the Amazon show as a good thing
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He's right. If they'd rushed to get a game out in time for the show it would have been a piece of shit and eroded the brand.
Bethesda, a company with an otherwise unbesmirched reputation for polish.
Plus they made a fuckton on new fo4 purchases when show released for zero additional cost. Steam had a killer sale for all the fallout games when the show released. Seems like no brainer especially because you never know if a show will be a hit. Look at Witcher, it never really caught on to the larger market outside of its already existing fans.
I have a feeling the Fallout show is quite similar in terms of not being popular outside of people who already like that particular universe.
Idk. I'm the only nerd out of my family and friends and a bunch of them watched and loved the fallout show. Including my parents who are 60 years old and haven't played an "idiot games," what my mom calls video games, since Robotron lol.
Damn if only they could have somehow knew the show was being made in advance.....
Fallout 4 took 7 years to develop and still felt rushed. Exactly how far in advance do you think they knew about the show?
Options:
- high quality remaster of older game (FO4, FONV, etc)
- reuse FO76 engine to make a new game, with a few graphical upgrades
- story DLC releases for older games
Any of those could've been done in the time they'd know about the FO show release target.
much of a game's development time is spent creating assets, using a new engine doesn't mean your existing low fidelity assets suddenly look better, just better lit
Eh, a lot of it also has to do with designing things, not the producing assets. If you're just doing a remaster and upgrading assets that already exist, it should take a lot less time than building something from scratch.
that's just simply not true. if you look at the project lifecycle for a game very little resources are spent in preproduction, the bulk of the time is in production. preproduction usually has all of the core mechanics and ideas implemented by the end, then it's just about executing on that plan. there's not a lot of experimentation and iteration once you are in full tilt production mode
I'm not saying "game design," but things like deciding on art style, optimizing balance between fidelity and performance, etc. AFAIK, that's all "production" stage things. Assuming it's the same studio as built it the first time, they'll still have the original artwork, which probably just needs to be touched up and reexported. That's a lot less work than building something new from scratch.
In fact, you probably need minimal assistance from developers since all the gameplay elements are already there, you'd just need a small group for making some tweaks here and there to keep consistent performance, and maybe add in a little bit of fanciness here and there (e.g. tweak shadows, maybe some RTX if you go crazy). None of that is particularly time-consuming for a developer to throw in, so once the art team is done freshening up the assets, they can prep for release.
I'm thinking a project like that could be completed in 2-3 years, depending on which game they pick and how far they want to take the remaster. That's definitely in line with the timeline for a TV show.
These Bethesda open world games take a LONG time to make. Even if they knew it was going to be made 7 years from now, there's no guarantee it will be good or that it won't be shelved. It's better to just go at your own pace.
It's not the open world takes them so long, it's the expert writing and amazing animations!
And the amazing variety of points of interests and quests!
You can have literally dozens of combinations!
(Still salty about Starfield, don't mind me.)