J4MES OX4D

Todd Howard: ''fly anywhere do anything'' Meanwhile.... Starfield Doesn’t Let You Fly Seamlessly from Space to Planet: ‘That’s Really Just Not that Important’ - IGN WWW.IGN.COM Todd Howard has said that Starfield won't allow you to fly seamlessly from space to its 1,000 explorable planets, saying the feature is "really just not that important to the player" to justify the engineering work... That's a bit disappointing! Don't want to be greeted with loading screens as it'll kill the immersion. Definitely not easy to do technically especially if it's running on old architecture but I would've expected them to do some masking of sorts where it would feel like a landing experience even if it was the game simply loading in the back-end. Not sure how it'll be presented but if it's just a 'click to go to X planet' format then it'll really diminish the experience especially as their existing games are largely seamless in exploration.

It's not just 60 - that was a single example because you said you hadn't seen anything of it related to gaming (despite it being the biggest lay off of a first party studio ever and it being widely covered in the mass media all week) No, as already said, these are main-line developers - literally their entire development portfolio including the main project lead who was transferred back to Xbox Gaming. That's why it's caused such a ripple and put the entire future of the brand into doubt because they literally have no recognised devs left with a project that has 9 years left to run. 10k is just the headline - once again I am not attributing this all to gaming. With no many failed parts of the business and outdated aspects, mass-layoffs were bound to happen but it's just crazy to see them obliterate their only in-house studio instead of allocate them elsewhere especially when they have over $100bn invested in grabbing external companies so they don't sell their products on Playstation. Could've easily merged them into a new studio or elsewhere and that's one good thing about Activision - no matter how shite their studios perform, their staff will always be allocated to projects and have work available. That is the main point - not whether a few hundred from a call centre or Kinect got the boot. Microsoft have always needed first party games so for them to kill their only in-house team overnight is quite a big move especially if they will use any small savings as partial collateral to complete the AB merger to capture another tiny indie studio to stifle on the Game Pass.

60 for 343 is huge. Nobody is saying that 10,000 equates to Xbox entirely or their gaming division as a whole, but this level of layoffs in their first party gaming sector is significant especially considering the personnel that's departed and how it will affect Halo going forward. As it stands, it's the biggest layoff of an active studio in gaming history. If Activision came out tomorrow and said that MW2 performed so badly during the first 3 months, we're going to be sacking every developer involved at Infinity Ward; that in itself would cause a huge shock to the industry and for people that follow Halo and have supported 343 in the last 13 years, that's the impact this announcement has had. Unlike Call of Duty, they have no other studios to fall back on to carry the series forward so the brand's future is in serious doubt on a game that had a 10 year plan. There is also a massive sense of injustice from people affected, that most of the management associated with the project remain and are also sitting on huge bonuses.

I've followed this story for days and they certainly haven't been generic - 343 have had around 60 front line developers culled which puts the entire future of Halo into doubt. Some of the names that have departed are massive especially Joe Staten. This is Microsoft's flagship first party studio too https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/19/xbox-bethesda-hit-by-microsoft-layoffs-as-halo-campaign-team-gutted-18128386/ Halo had the biggest budget in gaming history and a 10 year roadmap set in stone.

Oxford 2-1 Ipswich (I think - couldn’t see anything)😂

I'm not saying its all to do with Xbox - it's Microsoft as a whole but this has impacted the Xbox Division because they've literally obliterated their one and only major first party studio which they've haven't bought. 343 has been a prime example of shocking management and then innocent employees being the scapegoat and this has spanned a decade. I also don't buy into the pandemic excuse - this is something corporations use to mass offload staff without walking into unfair dismissal claims. Most companies would recruit staff with forward consideration and then allocate them elsewhere in time rather than pull the plug entirely to save money. It's not like Microsoft made sweeping hires during the pandemic period either so it sounds like a cop-out in a bid to rid them with justification to satisfy public opinion. Like Google and Meta, Microsoft also have many failed, neglected or abandoned projects and staff pay the price for those too even if it down to mismanagement once again. Companies like that will never own up to failures of their own doing especially Google who have cut tens of projects over the years. The game pass makes good money for Microsoft but not for the developers. Their in-house studios aren't immediately affected because they belong to Microsoft anyway but others are seeing their margins reduced to pennies per install for going down this route the same way developers have experienced with the Epic Games Store. It's a great deal for the consumers and an easy way for Microsoft to catch up to Sony by using their own studios as collateral for flogging the consoles but in time, I think developers will grow demotivated playing second fiddle to Xbox's rapid growth plan when success is determined purely on installs and can't be adequately measured by want or impulse. It just goes to show that no matter how long you've been there, what job you do or how much money the company can make, your job is not always safe especially if the hands of a characterless corporation. Game Pass certainly wont be sustainable throughout especially at its current price and management will always escape (sometimes with bonuses) for failures of their own merit where others have to suffer, sometimes very talented and experienced staff.

Yet they have about $100bn+ worth of acquisitions on the table? 343 have been massively affected with 'hundreds' sacked. The Halo franchise is at rock bottom plus their 10 year Infinite that had a $500m budget is dead in the water after less than a year but this is a catastrophic and persistent failure of management and other personnel at the top-end of the company yet the workers are the ones who get the boot. This has been going on for years. Not only that, MS also plague their internal studios and divisions with outsourced contracted staff who usually only have 18 months on the books so they aren't exactly motivated to bolster the company or the products within. If they weren't throwing piles and piles of money around to try and beat Sony and had a forwarding vision post-pandemic, they wouldn't be in such a poor stagnant situation where thousands of innocent people are affected. Give it a couple of years and in-house developers will also get cut off and they will likely say what a tragic deal the Game Pass has been for them and how other companies made much less than if they sold standalone. The old Microsoft is really coming back to the fore and can see them shafting much more down the line.

Alec Baldwin to be charged for fatal Rust shooting - BBC News WWW.BBC.CO.UK A crew member will also be charged with involuntary manslaughter over the death of Halyna Hutchins.

The GTA Defective Edition trilogy has been added silently to Steam with very little fanfare. No update(s) since March 2022 but they did manage to fix the spelling errors caused by AI generation, some missing textures, character models, other visual bugs plus they added the haze effect to mask the draw distance scaling. Currently £27 from £55 which is disgusting really. These are mobile ports made by a fringe studio that used AI to generate the city and borrowed assets from Unreal. Such a disgrace!

Rejuvenate and update this thread:- Another one cancelled today More bad news for Ubisoft: it just cancelled another game | PC Gamer WWW.PCGAMER.COM Ubisoft said it halted work on Project Q, which it announced last year, in order to focus resources on "priority projects." 3 cancelled last week and this takes the total number of canned Ubisoft titles to 8 games in 6 months. XDefiniant and The Division Heartlands must be clinging on to dear life😂

We used to get 4 maps every 3 months through the paid expansions and it helped keep the games fresh and people interested. Everyone is in the same boat when new maps release and it's more exciting to experience a wealth of new content in one go than it is difficult to adjust to the amount given. Everyone got into MW2 perfectly well in no time with several original maps and now they are used of the mechanics, learning new content is easy especially if its just rehashed crap. It would give the game a huge boost for the time being. As it stands, this game will still have less deathmatch content come July than what we got in MW2 of 2009. This game will likely have less content in year one than Vanguard had on day one at this rate. Even Gun Game and Gunfight are old modes and the latter actually detracts away from 6v6 content because it needs its own pool of maps to support the tiny playerbase that participate in it. A game like this really only needs a skeleton crew for post-launch support (25-75 employees) but because they've done such a terrible job with core content, they are back to working towards square one and as we see in every COD cycle, it detracts from future titles such as the inevitable MW3 sequel here. They don't even have the excuse that they are working on the new premium DLC this year either. 3 years is huge for COD and the original Black Ops was actually completed in around 14 months. They have 3000 staff available across IW, Raven, Treyarch, SHG and the external contractors which is an insane amount of resources to pull a package like this off even with 3 components. Infinity Ward themselves have access to over 400 full time employees and seeing that they were only responsible for the campaign and multiplayer, to give us less than 10 maps at launch in 3 years is an absolute embarrassment. Funny how none of their bundles or monetised content gets delayed or neglected. If we had paid map packs like we used to, there would be an incentive and obligation for the developers to deliver but without this, they don't need to bother. There is absolutely no defending them in this instance - this is a highly experienced studio of a very longstanding brand with a ludicrous amount of financial and personnel resources at hand yet not only have they failed to deliver a decent amount of content at launch, they've also failed to deliver a convincing future content plan and will instead be busy 'fixing' their game despite having years of experience and community feedback on record.

The perk system is set in stone I'm afraid, no way they would touch this because it's held with so much internal pride. We'll end up with one small multiplayer map and that it'll be it I bet, at least for the first 3/4 weeks. Most of their attention will be on saving Warzone I reckon. Really sounds like they are just winging it and making it up as they go along whereas other games like Fornite and Apex have a clear forward strategy which is why they aren't desperately scrambling to keep their games off life support. 3k devs, years of experience and feedback and we always end up having a battle just to get the game back to square one every bloody year. If they don't sort this out then they will have a really struggle trying to sell Sledgehammer's premium MW2 expansion this year.

Rumours confirmed and it’ll drop on Feb 15th. Sounds like it’s panic stations with the sharp player decline this year and content creator revolt so they better issue some serious content instead of drip-fed crap plus some sweeping changes are needed with Warzone 2 because that is in a diabolical state. Activision confirms delay for MW2 & Warzone 2: Season 2 - Dexerto WWW.DEXERTO.COM Activision confirmed the rumors making their rounds, announcing a delay for Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2...

Command and Conquer Remastered Collection 85% off at £2.69 Save 85% on Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection on Steam STORE.STEAMPOWERED.COM Command & Conquer and Red Alert are both remastered in 4K by the former Westwood Studios team members. Includes all 3 expansions, rebuilt multiplayer, a modernized UI, Map Editor, bonus footage...

Already down to £35 already on Amazon currently! Also Publisher slashes Callisto Protocol sales hopes by over half after it fails to meet absurd expectations | PC Gamer WWW.PCGAMER.COM Krafton poured over a hundred million bucks into the game, but it might not get it back. I cannot believe this game had a budget of $162m! What idiots gave Glen Schofield and his new studio that sort of backing jesus. Be very lucky to break even come 2025.

BBC investigates after Gary Lineker interrupted by mobile phone playing pornographic noises NEWS.SKY.COM Host Gary Lineker shared a picture on Twitter of a mobile phone that he said had been "taped to the back of the set" after the prank at Wolves' Molineux stadium.

Cannot believe this happened on MOTD It went on for about 3 minutes straight😂

Haven’t seen this, don’t want to see it and I feel sorry for those that had to watch it. Apparently it’s such an abomination, even some of the critics it’s pandering to hate it. I’ve only seen snippets of footage and a few articles about its creation but it’s safe to say, they’ve massacred what was once a very likeable original source series and rebooted it into hell

Activision always send shit to the idiots - they love giving merch even to blatant cheaters😂

I think people would be more respectful of these students if they could back up their argument and concerns without quoting generic tripe they pulled off of TikTok for instance. Most of them bathe in hypocrisy which doesn't help their cause and when confronted with facts and logic, they mostly have no answer and struggle to provide a credible response that is factual and could provide debate. I don't like people who outright dismiss worries of the world but people that complain about stuff without knowing why just doesn't help the situation. Always nice to see the Union plant some comedians and alternative thinkers on show because most of the time, the University is pure clown world and it defies belief how some of them walk away with degrees with such a poor and immature understanding of the world. The level of wokery in today's society is bordering on insanity levels and most of it is completely unnecessary and of a minority. Most people will not engage in such stuff of fear of being called a right wing Trump supporting Nazi or because they simply don't buy into the credibility of what is being said because it is coming from people that don't come across in a positive or respectful way.

Wait to you see our hotdogs😎 Thankfully we don't own our ground and aren't responsible for the catering so the ex-owner is getting all the brunt of it, not that he'd care anyway. Most of our fans have been boycotting food and drink up there for 15 years which is partly why they don't care what the end product looks like. Seems to have go much worse looking at that tough🤣

Skull and Bones shows off new gameplay, and it’s still not very impressive | PC Gamer WWW.PCGAMER.COM The latest developer stream focuses on “narrative gameplay.” This is the trouble when your game is in development from a decade - by the time it is shown off, it's already dated visually and conceptually. Looks like a game from 2016 and has the typical outdated and uninspired Ubisoft gameplay framework.

I think the ultimate point is no matter how much you like this Call of Duty, the amount of map content in the multiplayer aspect is pretty disgraceful really and everybody should feel this way under the circumstances irrespective of other positives of the product. It's far less than what we were getting over a decade ago and even Vanguard manage to deliver a strong and original pool of maps despite its various shortcomings in other areas. After a piddly 9 in WW2, 10 in MW2019 and about 7 in Cold War, it has really dismal return for the player in these titles and for a company that is so leaning towards retention, content quantity should be what really drives players coming back and not other factors such as gameplay or commercial. This may seem like a feature packed package with DMZ and Warzone, but Infinity Ward aren't responsible for those portions and have not actually developed any part of them so they are hardly under the cosh and spread thin of things to develop and maintain. I also don't buy into the philosophy that because there are other modes, I should expect less content in ones that I play to support others. I couldn't give a shit what happens in Warzone 2 - I don't want to see support declining just because there is another priority in the franchise that I, and many others aren't interested in. I respect Activision chase the money but that shouldn't mean some aspects are neglected especially on the main paid portion of the product irrespective of how many players it has compared to the free mode(s). Call of Duty 2022 essentially consists of 3 different games made by 4 different developers and over 3,000 staff which is an absolutely outrageous amount of resources and to receive less than 10 maps at launch on a game that costs upwards of £90 is a deplorable return really. Many people simply don't give a shit about DMZ or Warzone and they must be left feeling very alienated that the only part of the game that requires purchasing is being let down by a lack of content whether tactically done this way or by incompetence. Sledgehammer are creatively useless overall, but in the last 5 years and despite much internal upheaval, they've really tried their utmost hardest to deliverer gamers as much as possible in terms of playable content and this really should be the numeric standard expected for launch titles. All this with the smallest studio by a mile too. The loss of map packs has actually had a dire knock-on effect with the developers not obliged to deliver content by a quantity or on time - instead they hide behind 'seasonal' updates winged on the fly. Income lost from these are easily mitigated with easy bundle sales that cost nothing to develop and can be made in less than a couple of days. Many will still be satisfied with the current maps on show but all in all, there's no harm in wanting and deserving more.

Still can't believe it isn't out yet. Ghastly amount of red tape must be going on. If it's just a port of the original then that will be disappointing - the unreleased XBLA version from 2008 was on another level and you could switch between new and classic graphics on the fly. From what I gather after the knee-jerk announcements last year, they are just going do what is essentially an emulated version that people have been playing for years through under the table means.