James Sawyer Ford
Member
And what else would we expect from our local clown
We ALL know your position James. 100% of Neogaf knows. You're so predictable that there's only one thing more predictable in life and that its the sun will rise tomorrow.
I'll try Avowed, still deciding on gamepass or standard version for next week
If I'm not satisfied I can leave a harsh review just like I did with Starfield.
Are you even able to critique a single game from your plastic box James? Is such a thing even possible?
You can cherry pick what posts you read, but I've been critical of plenty of things. While I thought Concord's mechanics were solid, everything else I criticized about it since it didn't have the right features, progression, and interesting/unique gameplay to really stand out. I also think the strategy of GaaS was wildly overdone; it's still important but the extent to which they were allocating resources to it was just wasteful and not realistic for their overall goals.
But when most of their games release to 90+ metacritics on the regular and go on to sell tens of millions of copies, there's not a whole lot to criticize there. And you're hyper critical of many of those games, which you're free to have an opinion about, but at the same time should recognize that you're the outlier here and it's not a default position to be hypercritical about these sorts of titles given the combination of those two metrics.
Avowed isn't one of those games. The metacritic is going to be in the 70s when it's all said and done - not necessarily terrible, but not exactly a beacon of quality. The sales will also likely be very poor. So on what metric can we say, "absolutely Avowed is a resounding critical and commercial success WORTHY of praise?" It's probably justified to be critical towards this sort of game. Doesn't make it bad. Doesn't mean you can't like it. But certainly not something that is anywhere near as exciting as it should be.
Microsoft is in a period of transition. They are becoming a full blown third party. They've already made sizable cuts to their workforce the last few years, but we're at a point where Microsoft is not going to completely abandon all studios outright simply because many of these games will be given a bit of a free pass since it's very hard to have commercial success when you're not on the most dominant home console(s).
Microsoft is also looking a margin/profitability of their games business, stated directly by Nadella at their last financial release. They absolutely do rely on sales or GamePass growth for success, and if GamePass is not growing to 90+M users (nowhere close, it's stagnant), the focus becomes SALES. And that's why they are going third party. So it's clear that in the future, their entire studios will come under pressure/scrutiny to perform, but should recognize that they can't achieve these goals overnight with many games still being developed as exclusive titles. So it may take another cycle or two of each studio releasing games before they can be judged as a complete failure or not. I think Obsidian will still be given another chance if Outer Worlds 2 flops, which I suspect it will. Mainly because I think Microsoft will judge the quality of their games as "good enough" to take the torch of Fallout, which Bethesda does not have the resources to directly support since they are occupied with Elder Scrolls.
Not everyone plays games solely because they have different variety of builds that's structured well enough. RPGs are also heavily influenced by stories, characters, side content, world building/lore, exploration, and combat mechanics. These features all look very poor to me. I play games to have moment-to-moment fun that plays into a grander scale/narrative that overall makes for a compelling gameplay and thematic experience. Avowed looks to be deficient in many of these other aspects.
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I don't think you wanted to like the game in the first place
