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Comment on Fable delayed to 2026

Can we please stop pretending Obsidian post acquisition is a dinghy independent studio rather that the real cog in the metastatic tumor that is Microsoft? The game credits ~1.2k people, that’s 4x the studio size. There’s 0 excuses for how mediocre Avowed is, especially when they charge 70€ for it! BG3 in contrast has a similar professional credit list while costing the consumer less 10€ and being an excellent game. Good management is not churning out mediocre shovelware while charging AAA prices.

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masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Bruh avowed is great, I’ve been loving it.

This sounds like a you problem.

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- Viri4thus@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I think Kojima said it best in the Resetera review, and I think it applies here too. Avowed is basically a shooter with fantasy trappings and it does appeal to a certain demographic. I’m not it.
  
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  - masterspace@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Lmao. Bruh, wtf are you talking about. I’ve basically used nothing but melee or stealth / dialogue the whole time.
    
    It’s a tight, well written game, that doesn’t waste your time with endless auto-generated quests.
    
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    Viri4thus@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Of course you have. If you mean picking the mobs one by one from a distance because they reset after x amount of m from origin just like in an MMO (mobs are leashed), I have bad news for you. Already in Far Cry 4’s release that was rightfully pointed out as shit design, several years later is just unacceptable. Again, Kojima was right, pearls to pigs.
    
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ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I’m not excusing Avowed for anything, because it’s excellent. BG3 is a better game, true, but it’s a better game than almost every other game ever made too, and it was built reusing a ton of work that the studio had already done over the decade that came before it. There’s a very, very good chance that lots of work on Avowed was done knowing that it would be used in Outer Worlds 2 also, reducing the risk of spending money on both projects. Making great games isn’t a function of how much money was spent on them, or Balatro wouldn’t have been nominated for game of the year. I’m not saying they’re some scrappy indie studio, but it sure seems like they know the answer to the question, “How much money can we spend making this relative to how much money it needs to make?” Spending more money on Avowed wouldn’t have made it more financially successful. It’s why there was that headline about wanting to make a Pillars tactics game and evaluating how big that game could feasibly be for that market. I got more value out of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that doesn’t make Avowed not worth $70 to me.

Good management is getting a working product out the door and keeping your people happy and employed. This game reviewed well; not phenomenally, but well. And Obsidian is spoken of in high regard when it comes to employee satisfaction. All that while getting several other projects moving along too. It’s impressive. And I’m sorry Avowed wasn’t what you wanted to play.

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- Viri4thus@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Avowed is a success in which planet? Grounded, which is a pretty good game for what it costs, has a 33% higher player peak and gigantic tail compared to avowed’s player drop off… This is a game, from the same studio, that cost a fraction of what avowed cost (1/4 people credited) to make. MS pulled all the stops for people to engage with avowed but ultimately failed because the game is just mediocre.
  
  Regarding management, MS are the paragons of good management and would never put a team on a game they don’t want to make, resulting in several delays and ultimately a poor quality product. This never happened at Microsoft… EVER!
  
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  - ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful. Grounded has a 33% higher peak and also cost 57% of what Avowed cost for the audience to buy; they may have sold more copies and made less revenue. A more repetitive multiplayer focused game will retain players longer than a single player game with an ending. But ultimately, we have no idea if the game was successful outside of the team saying publicly that they’re happy with its performance. That will never mean raw sales anymore, since they are a part of Game Pass. Game Pass pulls in, in all likelihood, 3-4x Avowed’s budget in revenue every month. Even with the overhead they have of running the service and licensing third party games for it, they can probably afford at least one Avowed on their books every month and justify it as long as they feel like the presence of a flashy new game is what’s keeping people subscribed. No one knows how many people on Game Pass need to play a given game for Microsoft to consider it a success, but perhaps the worst way to evaluate the game’s success is to look at Steam charts and compare it to some other game arbitrarily, much like what’s happening with Assassin’s Creed right now. The Steam forums are full of armchair quarterbacks that are sure that Shadows has flopped by doing the same nonsense comparisons to Steam charts even though this is a series that handily sold tens of millions copies on non-Steam platforms for years.
    
    Mismanagement has and will continue to happen at Microsoft. The first iteration of Avowed was aiming at being “Microsoft’s Elder Scrolls”…but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no need for that design anymore once they bought Elder Scrolls itself in the next couple of years after that. I’m not too concerned about how long Fable has taken to develop thus far considering when their last Forza Horizon game came out and that full development on Fable probably didn’t start until that game shipped. What I did hear was that when Microsoft originally announced it for 2025, the development team laughed at the idea.
    
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    Viri4thus@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful.
    
    This premise is flat out wrong. A cheaper game, from the same studio, captured more return customers than a flagship with a massive ad campaign and significantly more effort behind it. That’s an epic blunder, so much so, Patel had to do the rounds in the press to appeal to the stock holders and paint a pretty picture, lest MS dissolve the studio before Outer worlds 2 is done.
    
    This level of reality distortion field is almost as the one from the people (and some subhuman racists) saying AC Shadows flopped. AC Shadows delivered (according to reviews) exactly what was promised to its customers, an AC game in Japan with shinobi. I haven’t touched AC since Black Flag, but if I were a fan of Ubisoft open worlds, I’d be ecstatic right now. A Ubisoft game delivering on what was promised without game breaking bugs is actually remarkable. It’s still a mediocre game, but for its niche, it’s a solid release. It’s diametrically opposite to Avowed, which advertised a deep RPG and sold a fantasy action game with no depth or interactivity.
    
    If someone would have told me, a year ago, Avowed would review worse and, have lower user score than AC Shadows, I would have laughed in their face. That game has suffered controversy over controversy just because they decided to have an afro samurai and the conservative anglophones lost their shit.
    
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