Opinion - Obsidian is becoming Bethesda
 

The Escapist writes about Obsidians apparent desire to take Bethesda's mantle.

Thanks Farflame!

More information.

Only without the budget and the shitty PR.

Maybe 'Bethesda done right'? Obsidian seemed to be on the brink of going under for so long I think their present success is deserved. They continued releasing RPGs during a time when they were out of fashion and now their finally hitting paydirt - Good for them!
Success has lead to games companies losing their direction *Bioware* or becoming stagnant *Blizzard*. So the best I can hope for are a couple of truly great Obsidian games before it all comes tumbling down!

Obsidian only HARMED the gaming industry: they should burn in hell along with Larian and their guts & insides should turn into Black Rotting Goo!

Don't know about the PR at the moment but now they are owned by Microsoft.. so budget shouldn't be an issue anymore.

I'd be tempted to take this observation a step further and suggest that RPG's are becoming FPS/3PS's.

I don't think we're going to be getting much more of that hopelessly lost feeling you get when rolling your party in future games.

I don't think we'll be getting lost in dungeons and forced to walk back with 2 of the front rank dead while all out of spells in the back, only place you can save is in town.

Nope. It's all loud mouth companions and quick travel from here.

Text should be as rare as magical items to make it exciting to discover. Not this slog through cinematic dialogues.

More like Bioware honestly

…then RIP

So according to Escapist future Obsidian games will be utterly broken.

If that's so, lemme agree with @porcozaur
RIP

How about another question. Why every open world game made by Obsidian compared to Bethesda games? Seriously I know the answer just tired of reading the articles.

Anyway fingers crossed Avowed turns out half as good as the leaks suggest.:please:
As noted Obsidian are owned by Microsoft now so the PR should be up to par. If not it wont just be their fault as usual this time. Put that money to good use Obsidian.

I wonder what inXile's unannounced RPG under Microsoft will be also?

Didn't Obsidian make Grounded too? That game also gives me the Bethesda vibes a bit. I'm not paying $30 for early access, not even for full release unless it's hundreds of hours long. Don't see how it could be since it takes place in a backyard.

I like never-ending survival games….

What? No.
It has Fortnite vibes.

Grounded is nothing like fortnight, jesus how do you come up with this crap.

I prefer to think of it as Obsidian becoming Microsoft. Both Obsidian and Excel use pixels.

:rolleyes:

The only obsidian games I’ve really like was their NWN 1&2 stuff. POE was ok but I’ve still yet to finish it. Didn’t really care for the watcher stuff though.

Given their last couple games I’d say Obsidian is becoming a developer that doesn’t make games I’m interested in.

Bethesda became a money grubbing, microtransactions loving type of developer, so hopefully Obsidian won't fall down that far. If we hear news that their new game is focused on being an "ongoing service", and/or stuffed full of microtransactions, then we can count one more rpg developer that lost its soul and turned into a Call of Duty-esque type of developer, but for rpgs.

I guess this article thinks "Obsidian becoming Bethesda" is a good thing? :lol: I saw the title and figured it was intended as an insult.

Well..since Bethesda is no longer themselves, I don't see why Obsidian can't move into the void. It's been 5 years since Bethesda Softworks made anything worth playing.

Yeah, I'm happy to see what they can do in this style with a proper budget. I think almost all their past productions have been up against it, one way or the other. If MS is funding them to make a tentpole game for their platform, as Sony does, I'm keen to see what they can do.

I would be all for two bethesda's - more open world great games is a good thing.

Despite their many shortcomings, I love Bethesda's style open world RPGs. Nobody has done them with the scope Bethesda has, and I still get excited at that moment in every one of their games when you emerge from the opening area and have a giant world open up in front of you.

But BGS isn't headed in a direction I care much for. Their games are getting more bland as they go, and obviously they've fully committed to multiplayer, crafting, games as service and all that garbage. If Obsidian can fill that niche, all power to them. Nothing about the teaser appealed, but that's not important. I do think making a game that large and open-ended is probably a lot harder than we armchair game developers realize, so maybe Obisidian won't succeed. I hope they do, though.

Becoming? NWN2 was a long time ago (and NWN wasn't Obsidian), so you haven't been interested in their games for almost two decades. They've made quite a few different types of games over that span, so I guess I don't know what you do want from them.

This is said often, but that's not how budgets work. They may have more resources they did before Microsoft bought them, but just because Microsoft has X dollars at their disposal does not mean they're willing to allocate any particular number of them to an Obsidian project. There are still limits. There are always limits.

I reckon most big productions, be it a game or a movie, have so many moving parts, so many cooks, that it's always a bit of a swing and hope. I suspect most people that do it professionally have to embrace that: "Hey, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you."

Yes, becoming. As I said I played POE and will still try POE2 and tyranny. Grounded and the other world are 2 games I have no interest in. Avowed, while it’s way to early to tell looks like another I wont be interested in. I don’t like first person perspective so the rest of the game will need to really appeal to me for me to put up with it.

As for what I want from obsidian, I don’t want anything. They need to make the games they feel makes sense for them. I’ll judge each game individually and if I like it, great. if not, no biggie they’re plenty of games I do like to play.

I'd be more than happy to see Obsidian produce games more like Bethesda of yore. But isn't the real question whether Bethesda is gradually becoming EA? Tossing young gamers into that giant sarrlac pit of micro-transaction misery.

In my opinion, Blizzard should - to take your picture - burn first. They destroyed almost everything in the RPG genre.

Nowadays, most RPGs have become mere lottery loot kill games. Thanks to Blizzard.

Blizzard, ̶ ̶O̶b̶i̶s̶i̶d̶i̶a̶n̶ Obsidian, Bioware and a few others are long gone: joined the dark side and their lord Darth EA.

Bethesda was at the pinnacle of greatness with Skyrim and Fallout 4 then it all went to hell completely. Bethesda has become the worst of the worst. Not giving players the games they want and ramming forced online microtransaction weak game hell on players.

I don't see Obsidian becoming that but it's possible now that they're under the corporate yoke.

I haven't really been impressed with anything Obsidian has done in a long while.

I found Outer Worlds almost immediately boring with weak combat and weaker stealth. Maybe I didn't play it long enough but after 10+ hours I felt like I'd seen everything the game would ever offer and it wasn't much. Grounded may be decent but I've been bored with the generic survival game formula for a while now.

Corporate tends to ruin everything and the vast majority of devs that end up in a corporate setting end up shifting focus from gamers making great games for gamers to slaves making games to milk money out of gamers.

The downfall of Bethesda really has nothing to do with them. Their parent company ZeniMax Media hired a former EA executive. The shift started soon after.

Just recall their position a few years back when they stated the whole SP games aren't dead campaign and promoted SP heavily. Well it didn't work my friends.

The games that where primarily SP didn't meet expectations. That usually means sales were not that great. Yeah it's bullshit but that's how the business side works.

After that ZeniMax hired that EA exec and the shift to online/live service gained traction. I could go into more detail but videos, and articles about this are on the internet.

Now this doesn't mean I don't enjoy Bethesda games I do. As of right now we know nothing about Starfield, or the new Elder Scrolls game. They might have MP or might not.

Anyway back on topic I'm optimistic about Avowed. Like I said hope the leaks are true.

I use to love Blizzard myself but the switch to online only game with no option to ever play offline soured my outlook any future games they release.

Pity as I hoped to play another Warcraft game someday.:(

I have no issue with Obsidian wanting to do Bethesda-like games, but I also found Outer Worlds hollow and clunky. I love the sci-fi open world genre and I just couldn't get into it, but at least it was mostly finished on release.

And I don't really have a problem with Bethesda, now that I've learned to wait 6-12 months after release to buy their games. Yeah, it's easy to dislike Howard, but I've mostly enjoyed what they've come up with. That being said, I can't name one game that really stuck with me as a classic. Fallout 3 is probably the closest to that.

I honestly don't care about their business model or how they function as an organisation as long as they release fun games.

That their aim is to copy what made Bethesda successful seems like a recipe for disaster since it's a different time and a different audience, but I'm willing to be surprised.

Just cut the crap, make fun games, and everyone will be happy.

Well if they make games like Skyrim or FO4 then we are all set as those are extremely fun games!

They've released one game since Fallout 4. Yeah, there was that Elder Scrolls phone thing, but what phone game isn't a microtransaction hellscape? I'm not terribly optimistic about their direction either, but I don't think any one game, no matter how bad it was, can single-handedly mark them as going to hell. We'll eventually see how Starfield and/or Elder Scrolls VI goes, and then we'll know.

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I want Morrowind 2…