Far Cry New Dawn

[TheGadget1945]

Looks a little bit like another popular game franchise :ohmy:

 

[zanity]

Things are getting nasty. You'll notice the Far Cry 5 'reskin' is in Rage 2 colours. But the main issue is the very clever reversal of the whole 'woke-ness' concept by having a Battlefield V style cover that is cleverly revealed as showing the ATAGONISTS (the 'twins'). This is how marketing has its cake and eats it too- full marks to them for once.

 

And, of course, Rage 2 (which is essentially Mad Max 2 with a new layer of iD combat added in after WB dropped the project), has a rather generic marketing campaign so far, and is coming on the back of the VERY poorly received Just cause 4 (same engine, same devs- tho their NY office).

 

I think there's a very clear Law in nature, and what is unfolding at Beth is yet another example. A giant creature ages so much is reaches the point where a myriad of predators descend upon it and pull its still living body to shreds. There is no doubt we are witnessing the END of Bethesda.

 

Wolf 2 flopped. Dishonored 2 flopped (both deservedly- they were lousy and dumbed down compared to the earlier games they sequelled). Prey flopped. And I mean in terms of sales- the dosh Zenimax needs to see from any large project. Doom 2 is a casual gaming-as-a-service release in 2019. Starfield has had three years of full-on development and gotten exactly nowhere.

 

Blades has all the making of the biggest disaster yet in its mobile/casual space.

 

So of course we have this spectacle of younger more agile predators ripping into the Bethesda corpse. Rage 2 better be better than Far Cry New Dawn given the mediocre heritage of Fallout from Fallout 4 to the present day- but if it is that's still mostly Avalanche, which cannot now be bought by Zenimax (someone got to Avalanche first- the reworked Mad Max 2 is likely a one-off, or maybe two-off if there is a simple sequel to Rage 2).

 

The Outer Worlds allows Todd Howard to get Zenimax to allow him to cancel Starfield as he wishes. Which leaves Bethesda looking at Fallout and Elder Scrolls again. Elder Scrolls already has its LOOT BOX edition- ESO. But Todd wants microtransactions and loot boxes in his future games.

 

In the light of Far Cry Rage Edition, and The Outer Worlds, what would YOU do if a Christmas Fairy granted you a wish and made you supremo at Zenimax/Bethesda? No cheating now- you have to accept the company in the state Todd has left it.

 

This is why I know Beth is dead, even if it takes some time for the message to reach its dinosaur brain. I couldn't think of one way to turn Beth around now the wolves are both circling and attacking.

 

The Creation Engine is good for nothing but handing over existing Skyrim SE and Fallout 4 assets to an outside bunch of contractors and paying them to knock out cheap follow-ups in 18-24 months time. But in two years time the new consoles are bedded in (1080TI GPU class, 8+ zen 2 cores, 24GB RAM) and a game that looks no better than Fallout 4 or Skyrim SE would just be laughed at if it claimed AAA status.

 

Build a new engine at Beth. They don't have 1% of the talent needed to do so. Give a Fallout or Elder Scrolls project to Arkane? Well you'd get something half decent, but without the scope of earlier games and it would probably take three years.

 

The main problem is that Todd has grown Bethesda USA- and now has a useless giant series of barely functioning sites that all pull in different directions.

 

I personally think the open world game is going to suit Microsoft down to the ground- and MS is going to fund great titles in this direction. Sony, on the other hand, is going full-on VR with its amazing PS5/AMD VR solution (drool).

 

Beth, never the most competent of companies, had its time- a lucky period when only Beth kept the faith in a gaming genre that could only grow in importance as hardware improved. But as tech truly advanced, Beth did not. It could and should have done a ground up replacement for the Gambryo/Creation engine starting just before Skyrim- a background fully funded project that would only have seen its first game when the engine matured enough. OR Beth should have given in and accepted a need to use another external engine like Unreal, for all the downsides. For while UE is poorly suited to open world, it at least advances tech wise each and every year.

 

If that Xmas Fairy offers to make me boss, I'd have to decline. I can think of no way today to reverse so many years of truly lousy decisions by Todd Howards.

 

I think Beth's Rage 2 is going to be another Beth game proud to have no personality. I think this far Cry New Dawn is smart enough to have a very vivid personality. Far Cry 3 was pretty good, its sequels including 5 poor - so Rage 2 SHOULD have an easy victory over this Far Cry, but I think Rage 2 will be another sales flop for Beth.

 

In the midst of the FO76 fiasco, this is what we should ask of that Christmas Fairy. Can we finally have an age where a myriad of devs make open world RPG games so we need depend on any particular company no longer. This genre is the closest to Hollywood and TV- where the artistic assets are simply a matter of time and money- with a myriad of skilled artists and technicians that can bang out the motion capture, models, textures, stories etc in a given time with given funds. The game devs have but the 'engine' to wrangle - to ensure the assets make it to our game screens.

 

FO76 was an attempt to strip most of all the new assets from an open world game, and simply asset flip assets already created for earlier games. And then to rely on 'special' gamers to lap up the dumpster fire. Every internal justification of FO76 at Beth HQ was a rotten one. FO76 became a perfect poison pill- if it were happily swallowed it meant an end to our genre in the form we loved it.

 

Instead the poison pill poisoned Beth, not us- and Beth is now is its final death throes. Far Cry New Dawn will be an amusing triviality at best- The Outer Worlds is infinitely more promising- and MS money backing Obsidian means Obsidian is no doubt going around saying THEY are the 'new Bethesda'. I'd say the future is looking very bright.