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Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda, id Software, Arkane Studios, and more
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Welcoming the Talented Teams and Beloved Game Franchises of Bethesda to Xbox - Xbox Wire
- Authors
- Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox
- Published
- Sep 21 2020
- Word count
- 519 words
This makes me scared about new iD titles. They've been big on Vulkan and OpenGL for years so this move might make that change.
This actually makes me slightly hopeful about new Bethesda titles, since they really screwed the pooch with Fallout 4 and 76, IMO. That and the two other recently acquired MS studios (inXile and Obsidian) have put out decent games since their acquisitions. Though time will tell if this ends up being good or bad news, I guess.
Bethesda has been on a slight downward spiral for a long time now, arguably since morrowind. They've been dumbing down their RPG mechanics ever since. Arguably, this was caused by the management of zenimax hijacking the company from the original founders.Although I do admit the trend was only modest until about skyrim. Oblivion and FO3 were good games, and skyrim is still good, but much less of an RPG.
Some of that might be documented here - caution, long YT vid. I've watched that a while ago, I recently wanted to go back and take some notes while I'm at it.
Ironically, I feel like Microsoft buying Zenimax increases the chances that we might actually get the source code to id Tech 5.
The reason we will never get the source code to Id Tech 5 is probably because it relies on too much proprietary middleware. Ripping all that out would result in source code that has no practical use.
id Tech 5 was made specifically to be open source, and relied on very little proprietary third party code, according to interviews with John Carmack. Id's business model was basically make a great game engine and games that demo the technology, then sell licenses for people to use it in their own games. When they'd make a new one, they'd open source the old one.
Then Zenimax bought id, and stopped this practice. They even stopped licensing engines to third party developers.
To be fair, I don't think anyone wanted to work with Id Tech 5.
Why do you think so? Microsoft has gotten better with open source (in a half assed way if you ask me) but has the Xbox division ever actually released anything?
I don't think Microsoft would release source code to id Tech 5, just that in my lifetime, Zenimax has seemed to be a lot more anti-open source than Microsoft has. And I think that really puts things into perspective.
Can't wait to add Skyrim to my PowerShell script of things to delete from Windows 10's start menu.
This is a sad day. If you told me 25 years ago that Id Software's bloated rotting corpse would eventually be sold to Microsoft I would never have believed you in a million years.
Tbh, id died when it got sold to Zenimax. If anything, I'd have more confidence in id as a subsidiary of Microsoft than Zenimax. Like Zenimax is truly terrible. And I hate Microsoft!
Yeah. With Zenimax mingling in id and bethesda creative decisions, I think this might actually be for the better. Microsoft seems to have a bit of a longer-term plan. Zenimax was just a manglement shell that imprisoned good game devs.
I have a hard time calling the current Id Software a bloated rotting corpse when their last two games have completely knocked it out of the park.
genuinely surprising.
if they were going to be bought by anyone, though, i’m glad it’s Microsoft; console exclusivity doesn’t affect me at all as long as they keep making PC releases, which this pretty much guarantees.
this is also a good microargument on why console gaming has been terrible for decades, though, and why i cannot imagine the appeal.
I'm really surprised, the mood on this post is extremely downcast and much different to what I've been seeing elsewhere (mainly on reddit but also a few discords).
Are people really that worried about Zenimax's properties under Microsoft?
Most people here seem to be worried about exclusivity. Which surprises me given both their recent history and the statements from Microsoft and Bethesda alike assuring otherwise.
I think Microsoft respecting the exclusivity of DeathLoop and Ghostwire speaks more than anything on their mindset here. So I'm inclined to believe their words.
Uff, I'm glad that most of their franchises ran its course but this is frickin' Bethesda.
Doom is now a Microsoft company. Say hello to logging into Xbox to play frickin' Doom in 2022. A personal loss: Arkane Studios. Prey was a brilliant revival of System Shock (in anything but name) and it would suck to lock that behind some exclusivity I wouldn't want to pay entry to.
Doom is basically the PC's mascot, in multiple ways. And to my knowledge, none of Microsoft's first party game are exclusive to the Microsoft store.
Microsoft hasn't been very strong arming of exclusives, so I'm not too wary yet. They are honoring the PS5 exclusive of Death Lopp and Ghostwire: Tokyo, after all. Worst case, we see more timed exclusives.
Doom Eternal already requires a Bethesda account. Frankly I would gladly trade that for using my Xbox account.
My first thought was that if MS now owns both Obsidian and Bethesda, maybe they'll say "now kith" and we'll get a surprise Fallout: New Vegas 2 or the like. Despite The Outer Worlds' flaws, bringing that team back into the fold somehow could be the best hope for the future of Bethesda's open-world RPG properties. Not holding my breath for this, but it's fun to think about.
That said, it looks like any future titles from either studio are probably going to be exclusives. That tempers my enthusiasm quite a lot.
With how busy bethesda proper is, I'd not be surprised to see FO itself "returned" to obsidian (obsidian being a company made up of many ex-black-isle guys). Bethesda is working on starfield currently and TES6 next, so fallout will be lying dormant for a long while; might as well have Obsidian do something with it.
I mean, Skyrim was '11, FO4 was '15, FO76 was forgettable and arguably not a full scale project anyway. With starfield coming up I-dunno-when, but maybe '22 or so, TES6 might be 2026 or something, if starfield is a full scale project; earlier if not.
Fallout 5 might be 2030, leaving the series dormant for 12 years and unresponsive for 15. IF Bethesda game studios make it. That would be a longer break than FO2-FO3. I don't see that happening.
So with all that in mind, I kind of expect that MS will make Obsidian get to work on FO5 soonish. Ideally giving them full creative control.
By the way, TESV:Skyrim and TES3:MW are closer in release date than TESV:Skyrim and TES VI. That ship is sailing early next year.
Obsidian is still working on Grounded and Avowed, so they are probably no less busy than Bethesda these days. Of course, none of that would prevent MS from scaling up the teams, or even just taking the people from Obsidian who worked on the original Fallout games + F:NV, putting them together in the same room with the Fallout 3/4 people from Bethesda, and Fallout/Wasteland people from inXile, and seeing what they can come up with together... so here's hoping!
I would kill for a new, collaborative, Obsidian/Bethedsa/inXile game, whether Fallout or even a new IP. And despite that probably being a pipedream, even that remote possibility is why this news has got me more than a little hopeful and hyped.
Agreed.
But also, if you compare the workload of Bethesda with Obsidian, it looks like Obsidian might be available sooner.
Bethesda is turning games out very slowly. If we assume that starfield is no exception, we can expect TES6 by 2026 or so. If we continue Obsidian's trend of recent games, Avowed will be out in 2022 or sooner and by that time the core team needs something to do. So time to start pre-production is sometime around now. Unless of course Avowed takes longer than I think or Obsidian has another unannounced title they're working on in pre-production.
I really hope they do, TBH... and I pray it's an isometric RPG, since I absolutely adore all of theirs. That's the only downside to MS taking the reins with them that I have noticed so far, they seem to have totally stopped making the throwback RPG games I love so much, and seem to be working solely on 3D stuff now. :(
Do you think that the old-school presentation is an inherent part of the likeability of these games? I find the presentation hard to get into and don't like the mechanics that are tied to isometric games (turn based combat, e.g.). What do you like about these games?
Do you think these features are portable into a more modern presentation? And if so, could that be made as accessible as a mainstream title without sacrificing too much?
Yes. Nostalgia for the format is definitely a huge factor for me in my enjoyment of them. I grew up on the isometric CRPG games of olde (Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, Icewind Dale, etc). But even though I personally love them, I also totally understand their lack of appeal to most people, especially modern PC game consumers. So TBH I don't really begrudge any big publishers/developers for not continuing to make more of them, but that doesn't stop me from wishing there was more being produced though. ;)
Even all the modern ones I have played have vestigial annoyances to them that I think is inherent to the format. I honestly don't think you can really do away with most of them either, otherwise they wouldn't really still be isometric, classic CRPGs. I would love to be proven wrong there though, and if I ever find a game that does manage to transcend the limitations of the format I will let you know. :P
I will say that Disco Elysium came mighty close to accomplishing that though, IMO.
Let me clarify: I did not mean to ask whether isometric games can be made into accessible games with a modern presentation. Rather, if everything else that makes them likeable to you can be transferred into a game with said presentation.
Did you mean "into a game without said presentation"? If so, definitely, yes. Deep lore, tactical turn-based (or pause & play) gameplay, deep and branching character progression systems, choice-based nonlinear stories, etc. are all elements I enjoy about isometric CRPGs that can, and have, been incorporated into many other games that I enjoy. It's just that all of those elements are almost always included in every CRPG as a package deal, instead of like in other games of other genres where they only sometimes incorporate one or a handful of those elements at a time.
I agree. There's few games that have all of that in a accessible package. Nonlinear stories in particular are hard to find, and most RPGs have very dumbed down progression systems. Nevermind that almost all RPGs nowadays have foregone any kind of in-game justification for skill-ups: Skills are not taught or learnt, they're selected in a menu. sigh..
Oh well, guess I'll have to do that myself. :D
If they end up making the next Elder Scrolls game xbox exclusive I'm gonna riot (as opposed to being on PS5 as well)
Though I'd probably end up just getting a new gaming computer by then since it isn't gonna come out until like 2024 or something.
I don't know if they'll make it an xbox exclusive. With the Halo Master Chief Collection, they went out of their way to port it to PC, and even went as far as selling it on Steam in addition to the Microsoft Store.
Yet it will never arrive on Playstation...
Halo? probably not. Not just because of Microsoft, but because
Just a quick clarification, since this is all confusing as hell: Bungie no longer work on Halo. Microsoft retained the rights to the property when Bungie went independent after Halo Reach, and Bungie have been focused on Destiny ever since (which tends to align more closely with Sony, with occasional timed PlayStation-exclusive content).
The new studio that made Halo 4 and 5, and that are working on Infinite, was fully born from within Microsoft and are called 343 Industries.
But your original point definitely stands. It's extremely unlikely that we'd ever see a Halo game (or a Forza, or Gears) on a Sony console. Those are Microsoft's flagship titles and they guard them much more jealously than, say, Super Lucky's Tale.
That said, I never thought any of those series would be available via Steam, and now both Halo and Gears are, with the next Forza basically a shoo-in. I'd wager that if there were any way to get Game Pass hosted on a PlayStation console then Microsoft would seriously consider the opportunity.
They paid $7.5 Billion for this, so I guess that Microsoft be going all in on Game Pass.
Two more pieces to read, from Bethesda's side:
Todd Howard On Joining Xbox
Why Microsoft Is the Perfect Fit (Pete Hines)
Well that Xbox-specific phrasing strongly suggests that PS5 is out of the picture for anticipated titles like Starfield and TESVI. As an Elder Scrolls fan married to the Sony ecosystem, that stings quite a bit if true.
Are there any positives in this for those who love the games made by the companies they bought? Is there any hope that the next Fallout will be better because of this, or the next Elder Scrolls will benefit in any way from this massive purchase?
I fear not, and this most recent consolidation/buyout is part of a growing pattern of destruction of our favorite IPs. Please help me see the good in this.
There's been a lot of snafus with Bethesda's business side over the last decade (not to be confused with their development studio) between things like how the original Prey 2 situation played out, how Obsidian missed out on significant bonuses with Fallout: New Vegas, the paid mods situation, pretty much everything about FO76, and how they financed the various titles over the years (including DLCs).
My immediate hope is that Microsoft will actually manage these better, based on how MS has really turned it around in the last couple of years when it comes to their own first-party output.
I will join in on your hope, but what chance do you give to MS actually improving things for the various IPs? I feel like it's sub 33% but I'm generally pretty pessimistic about things in general.
I'd say it's pretty high. MSFT has been good stewards of minecraft; in fact dungeons still came out on the Playstation.
MSFT gaming is still the underdog in marketshare, they're going to optimize to capture more of that.
I mean, see my other comment about the possibly workload of bethesda game studios.
MS just has to realize that there will be no FO5 anytime soon. And then do the only reasonable thing and give the IP to Obsidian. Boom, IP improved.
The way I see it, Zenimax was hoarding IPs. And Microsoft has a lot of studios and not many strong IPs. The solution is quite apparent.
I agree, I do have hope that as a result of the buyout the management behind Bethesda's IPs will be much better than under Bethesda alone. I feel as though that the issue many people have is that we're increasingly seeing several corporations buying out other studios allowing monopolies (which is obviously bad for the industry as a whole). I also hope that Microsoft doesn't kill Bethesda at some point (like Lionhead), because although Bethesda's management practices is certainly questionable many of their franchises have large communities.
Not exactly a "positive", but Zenimax seriously is one of the worst, money-grubbing video game publishers around. I don't think them being owned by Microsoft is going to make them any worse. If anything, Zenimax's big problem is all they seem to give a shit about is short term profits, which I could imagine changing big time under Microsoft.
First party studios are generally given a lot more room to experiment with new games since their job is to bring prestige to the platform rather than to bring in raw sales. You will probably never see titles like The Last of Us come out of a third party publisher like EA or Activision because they are too risky.
Also, if you're a Fallout fan, Microsoft now owns both the IP and the two developers where all the OG Fallout developers reside today (inXile and Obsidian). We might actually start seeing good Fallout games again.
Not gonna lie, this actually made me exclaim "What the fuck!" at my monitor. Frankly, it won't change much for me as the only iD stuff I play is early doom and quake (finished 2016, and Eternal didn't entertain me), and I've got ISOs of my TES collection ripped from my box. As long as they don't lock down all these properties as Windows/XBox exclusives it won't change too much for the negative, beyond the gradual concentration of AAA game studios under a few major companies.
I'll be honest, this has put me in a horrific mood for the past two hours or so.
I hate that they are likely going to be Xbox exclusives and that that they are building up a massive gaming monopoly.
I don't think there's a large chance of these games being Xbox exclusives. They'll all be on PC and I think it's more likely that they'll have timed exclusivity or none at all but be on game pass day 1.
They're just putting themselves on an even footing with Sony. For over a decade now, Microsoft has had next to nothing in first party development for Xbox while Sony has put out multiple hits a year on PlayStation from their myriad of in-house AAA studios.
Also everything will come to PC anyways.
And frankly, as PC gamer, Sony pisses me off more. They sometimes have really good stuff which then doesn't come out for PC for ages. XBox exclusives will usually appear on PC too.
With PC being an open platform that no one has a monopoly over on the hardware side and with linux gaming being more and more possible (breaking the OS monopoly in gaming), I'm not at all mad at MS here.