>20 minutes Sorry typo, 10 minutes

>>1718498 Oh neat. I was always curious about this game back when I first heard about it.

Very nice, but the game was cool for the time, when everything with a budget was either COD or Halo. The reason it was well received is the same reason Skyrim and FarCry 3 were well received, they were open ended games with a budget in a time where everything was a linear dumbed down experience, or in the process of becoming it. Still, it's cool to see the last breath of Human Head Studios before being fucked over by Bethesda/Altman like idSoftware, Arkane and Headfirst Productions.

On one hand, Human Head were NOT putting out good games for years. One of the worst games of the 2010s, The Quiet Man, was later developed by them. On the other hand, this looked so fucking cool. It might have been one of those janky but classic games like EYE. Prey 2 is one of my biggest white whales in gaming. To this day, it's not entirely understood why Prey 2 was cancelled. It's known Bethesda was ultimately behind it, but they've given conflicting remarks. Pete Hines said it wasn't up to their quality standards (LMAOO), but years later said it wasn't what Bethesda wanted it to be. I wonder if it was some attempt to sabotage the studio for a buyout/to raid its IP which ultimately worked :(

>>1718498 Fuck Pete Hines man

>>1718560 >Human Head were NOT putting out good games for years. Because Bethesda completely fucked them over, same kike tactic they used for several companies they bought out. After Prey 2 they had to layoff a shitton of talent.

Every day, I wish that Prey 2 actually came out. Space alien bounty hunter just sounds too cool to disappoint. Also I loved Prey 1 and it would have been really cool to see the story followed up in a sequel. >>1718498 >They were posted on YouTube a few days ago and just now discovered. Wasn't there final release level gameplay footage put out onto Youtube years ago? I swear I've seen gameplay footage of some pre-release build of the game before. >>1718560 Considering TQM came out so late in their life and after all of the corporate fuckery I always got the impression it was what they managed with what little talent and capital they had left.

>>1718560 >sabotage the studio for a buyout/to raid its IP which ultimately worked this is obviously what / why they did it. but they did NOTHING with the IP. the "Prey" game they made Arkane develop later didn't sell well, and makes no sense in general as it has no connection to the first game. what else did they get out of this slaughter? Bethesda don't make money from anything that isn't called TES or Fallout or maybe Starfield although considering the budget and the lukewarm reception who knows if they really made a profit off even that. as a publisher Bethesda are a complete failure. already were before Microsoft bought them and now it's even more over because... Microsoft.

>>1718595 Is it too outlandish to believe it was all just an exceptional case of mismanagement by people with money mucking up the works and hoping for gold to come from it somehow?

>>1718610 not when they kept doing the same thing to several studios in a row. EA had been using the tactic since the 90s. reject milestones to bleed a studio dry, then buy it for cheap. over and over.

>>1718621 Studios stopped falling for it around the 2000s The only reason Respawn let itself be bought was because Vince Zampella got a fantastic deal out of it, getting a position in managing other EA studios, as you can see with Battleshit 6. Vince had EA connections for years as well, since Medal of Honor Allied Assault.

>>1718560 >I wonder if it was some attempt to sabotage the studio Sometimes it's not even direct sabotage. Sometimes the studio just happens to select the worst control group imaginable to test the game on and they give unimaginably awful criticism that ruins the game from the roots. Maybe that's what happened and they figured the game wouldn't have a market and dropped out early.

>>1718795 Man I wish Overstrike didn't become fuse.

>>1718795 No anon, Bethesda tried fucking over Human Head, which is why they left the project. That's well documented

>>1718824 Oh. I wasn't aware. That sucks but is also entirely unsurprising for corporate kikes.

>>1718834 At least the biggest one is already in hell

I hate Bethesda

>>1718857 I hate their fans more

>>1718560 Human Head was bought out to poach talent, and, and I type this as only a theory, get rid of competition like Microsoft and Activision do. After the loss of 3D Realms and GOD, and thus Prey 2 to Bethesda, Human Head would make Brink, a mediocre online multiplayer game, for Bethesda, then proceed to make a string of online multiplayer games until it was finally shuttered by ZeniMax and put under Bethesda for a quick flip scheme to decouple the company from previous licenses after Rune II. From here, Human Head would be used to make another online game, Redfall, under Bethesda management before being moved to ZeniMax Online Studios because Human Head had been a multiplayer game developer for so long. Outside of numerous support roles, Human Head hadn't been a FPS developer for over a decade because the loss of Prey 2 was devastating. Bethesda and Zenimax intentionally prevented Prey 2 so Human Head would eventually be known for things other than Prey, making it lose its star power and worsening its financial situation as it would be forced to take on increasingly bad jobs until it would finally fold, entirely unable to publicly contest its treatment. Zenimax then had Arkane slap the title Prey on its System Shock clone so it could completely change the IP, further drowning Human Head. In businesses that aren't related to entertainment, this is blatant bad practice and potentially monopoly power. It's the sort of behavior that caused anti-trust laws to be made.

>>1718976 It's ok, Microsoft will gape their asshole soon enough.

>>1718634 >Studios stopped falling for it around the 2000s you can't really "stop falling for it". what are you gonna do, just cancel production and find a new publisher? if the publishers all pull these stunts you'll be releasing no games and they will stop offering you contracts pretty soon.

>>1719107 >the company that owns 343 will do something good

>>1719896 343 doesn't exist anymore and Microsoft is going to gape every studio under them, Bethesda isn't special.

>>1719889 They don't all pull those stunts and self publishing is kuch easier nowadays.

>>1720050 >343 doesn't exist anymore who the fuck do you think is pretending to make a Halo game right now? >we changed our name fucking LOL

>>1720059 >who the fuck do you think is pretending to make a Halo game right now? Bungie

>>1720059 >who the fuck do you think is pretending to make a Halo game right now? Arrowhead Game Studios?

>>1720099 I thought they were making "Totally Not EDF/Starship Troopers/Lost Planet"

>>1720177 Halo faggots are like Star Wars faggots, they don't know any other SciFi work.

>>1720064 strokeposter please

>>1719107 >>1720050 Isn't Microsoft already in the process of doing that. Todd's no longer in charge and instead some mobile game focused bitch is leading the company, they're on a much tighter leash, and their dev schedule has been forced to speed up significantly. All to make up for Starfield falling way below expectations.

>>1720205 Hines is also gone

>>1720183 Halo has more fuckable aliens I said what I said Star Wars has more fuckable robots But we have a Gaylo thread so there's no reason to drag this up. >>1720205 Starfield was probably a hit, but it didn't have great legs and it was a critical miss. Shattered Space was a huge bomb though, no denying that.

>>1720248 At Microsoft, if you promise the moon you better deliver the fucking moon. Did Starfield make a profit? Probably. However, they didn't promise a profit, they promised the "Next Skyrim" and "Ten years of recurring sales and content". They promised a 10/10 out of the park massive success and all they could make was mediocrity that tanked in long term, in a long-tail focused business. Why do you think they immediately leapt into hard focusing on ES6? I can tell you right now it wasn't Todd's idea. Honestly, I don't think it'll save them. You can even see a premonition as to what Bethesda will go through with what's happening to Obsidian right now with The Outer Worlds 2. >>1720228 Hines retired yeah, good riddance to the retarded ape and the butchering of fallout lore he did. Will Shen also fucked off. Will was the guy responsible for some of the better content in Skyrim and Fallout 4 IIRC, he's the real loss you should care about, if you care at all about this in the first place.

>>1720287 >good riddance to the retarded ape and the butchering of fallout lore he did I think you are confusing him with Emil Pagliarulo.

>>1720296 Nah, Pete was the "Nobody gives a fuck about lore" guy and the one behind retconning Jet into a pre-war chem, amongst other decisions.

>>1720183 Halo (Like Star Wars) revived the dying silliness and campyness of older science fiction, that had mostly been expunged by the Communists who had taken it over the genre in the 40's. This may surprise you, but Star Trek was actually the "norm" for science fiction towards the middle of the 20th century. Hell, even after the success of Star Wars, and all the clones that followed that revived the feel of early sci-fi, that material was still commonly seen as "low-brow shlock" and frowned upon. Even the creators behind films like Independence Day still had to fight with the studios in order to get that out the door.

>>1720299 >retconning Jet into a pre-war chem t. never played Fallout 2 Myron is a lying fuck who admits he copied the formula from a pre-war drug if your INT is high enough, what he did do was figure out an easier way to manufacture it. Lorelets read Nukapedia and act like they played the originals. Focus on the actual lorerape, not obscure canon. The Enclave still existing is inexcusable, and all the FEV scorpions in Washington DC makes absolutely no sense on multiple levels.

>>1720299 Again, I think you misunderstand what his role was. He was not a writer for Bethesda, meaning he didn't write the Jet thing, he was just the public image guy, meaning that whenever people had problem with the game, he had to spin it into a positive, including the Jet thing, or the planets in Starfield. To be clear, I am not here to white-knight him, rather that some other dude, maybe Emil, maybe someone else, wrote the Jet thing, or the ghoul in the fridge.

>>1720323 I actually did play Fallout 2 but I never reached him. The PC I was playing it on crapped out mid run and I never got around to restarting the playthrough. Funny enough it was a Doctor build so I probably would've passed that check. The issue is in the name I guess. Since they wouldn't be calling it Jet in that pre-war vault tec building with the vault data. The other shit matters much more, of course, it's just the prominent example and the one that got that line out of him. >>1720342 I swear he also wrote some of the quests, guess my memory was faulty on that one.

>>1720481 >I swear he also wrote some of the quests, guess my memory was faulty on that one. I guess he might have had an idea for a quest that was put in the idea box, and later developed into one of the games, but that was something anyone from Bethesda could do, including the sound engineer, and the world artist. Looking at his resume, most of his roles have been Marketing and Public Relations, basically a highly paid shill including for Fallout New Vegas, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, The Evil Within and Prey.

>>1720287 >Did Starfield make a profit? Probably. However, they didn't promise a profit, they promised the "Next Skyrim" and "Ten years of recurring sales and content". Starfield was already deep into development by the time Microsoft bought Bethesda. Whatever they may or may not have promised, the game was already going to only ever be what it released as. If not actually being just a bit better due to the delays to cobble it into a technically functional state. If Microsoft was unhappy, it's their own goddamned fault for not doing due diligence. They could have canceled the game at any time, or sent it back for heavy rework... but they didn't care. They wanted something on the market to help recoup some of the money they spent on the studio purchase, and delaying Starfield even further would have just cut into TESVI development, which is the real crown jewel IP that Microsoft was after. They probably don't really care how Starfield performed - they were just flushing the turd to clear out the pipes. TESVI will be the first real Bethesda game developed entirely (or from a very early stage) entirely under Microsoft's ownership - and being Bethesda's top IP, I have a feeling that Microsoft is going to give them a blank check to get the job done. Whether or not Todd and Bethesda can pull it off when they're not being hamstrung by Robert Altman's hyper-jewish shekel pinching is yet to be seen. Microsoft has owned Bethesda long enough that they're probably getting brave enough to stick their ideological agenda pushing fingers into development. Michael Kirkbride has stated that racism and bigotry is the beating heart of TES Lore, and that's apparent to even casual lore nerds as it reaches all the way back to the elemental components of Elder Scrolls metaphysics - like Anu and Padomay. I don't think that's going to fly well with progressive Microsoft. At any rate, past all the marketing bullshit, I don't think Starfield was really intended to be anything other than a commercial proof of concept. Same way Skryim Legendary was just a polished up version of the test build for FO4. Just like Oblivion Remastered is just a commercial test of the UE5 engine. I think Bethesda intends for TESVI to feature naval battles, and wanted a game out in the market which already had the mechanics for ship combat ironed out so that they weren't launching a highly anticipated marquee title with new engine features that might logjam development if they can't get it to work, or otherwise come out half-baked or unusably buggy. Starfield was largely a throw-away project.

>>1720966 >Starfield was largely a throw-away project. Man, what a legacy for Todd's "dream game."

>>1718850 *Heaven :)

>>1720966 That's all bullshit Starfield was throwaway for Microsoft, not Bethesda.

>>1720248 >Halo has more fuckable aliens I said what I said >Star Wars has more fuckable robots That's backwards. 100% backwards. I am going to assume it is because you are gay and in gayworld that makes sense. Because it makes NO sense in straightworld.

>>1721027 I doubt it was ever a "dream game" for Todd. If this really was something that Todd had been chomping at the bit for decades to make, the passion for it would have been far more evident in what was released. The entire project was half-assed, even by Bethesda standards, and even the most stalwart Bethesda fanboys were nervously tugging at their collars while sheepishly admitting that it's not up to standard. If Todd does have a dream game set in space, Starfield manifestly isn't it. Either that, or Todd is even more incompetent than people give him credit for.

>>1721272 Todd is, despite all appearances, not the sharpest cookie in the jar. His claim of it being a dream game from childhood I believe as far as he had "RPG in space WITH GUNS + magic(?) = dream gaem!" and then a bic sketch of him wearing sunglasses and a leather coat kicking the head off of his English teacher. Todd is 100% public face, with no actual game design skill or understanding. I frankly doubt he even did most of the work he was credited with in previous Bethesda titles.

>>1721292 >Todd is, despite all appearances, not the sharpest cookie in the jar. you do realize he was in the chess club? >Todd is 100% public face, with no actual game design skill or understanding. just because he is the face of the company doesn't mean he doesn't also really work on the games. especially when it's my dream game.

>>1721292 From what the devs that left Bethesda have said, was that Todd was the one who had to approve everything. if you had an idea for a quest or a dungeon or a faction or whatever, Todd had to approve it, meaning he was responsible for all decisions made. Now in fairness, they also said that Todd didn't want this role, and tried to make the devs more independent, but it mostly failed, and they still had to go through Todd to get things approved. Worked great up until Skyrim when there were 100 people working on Skyrim, but then they hired more and more people and the system failed. As for his influence, from what I understand, he is the one who pushed for Morrowind to be hand-crafted instead of randomly generated like Daggerfall, but he was also the one who pushed for fast travel in Oblivion.

>>1721984 On this note, this implies Todd had direct influence in some well accepted (by casual standards) practices that led to Bethesda's success, which I assume means he's not entirely incompetent as from the point of view of revenue, these changes did lead to more sales and thus he's a profitable asset. That being said... >Worked great up until Skyrim when there were 100 people working on Skyrim I think this is important. As investment and capital circulation increased in the games industry, so did the attention from money grabbers and the incompetent. This is exacerbated by the fact that computers are stronger than ever, yet games are as unoptimized as ever, and game design is shittier and worsened as well. Case in point, developers are on average quite a bit more incompetent nowadays, on average, than they were in 2011 and prior years, and Starfield likely came out a complete dud because of the lack of internal talent. Todd just probably had a way of allowing the developers to manifest their skills well in games up to that point, but, when managing this many people and so many of them are incompetent, it's harder to spot the diamond in the rough and some regression to the mean happened, which does put Todd's skills as a competent enabler to question.

>>1722180 >As investment and capital circulation increased in the games industry, so did the attention from money grabbers and the incompetent. There is a nice talk from Will Shen on how the company was structured between Skyrim and Starfield https://yewtu.be/watch?v=oLjVwfUABvw or you could watch the patrician_tv stream https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ef5ZvDCXnuo . From what I remember, from that talk, when they released Skyrim there were abut 100 people working at Bethesda. At this level almost everyone knew everyone else, what they were doing, Todd was always available for a talk, he would also talk with everyone else to know how they were doing and maybe coordinate them. When they released Skyrim most of the feedback from casuals was "make the sequel just like Skyrim but with 20 cities". Of course there was not enough man power to make 20 cities in a reasonable time frame, so they almost doubled their team and problems began to appear. No longer could everyone know what everyone else was doing, Todd was harder to reach, because he had to manage way too many people and was stuck in meetings. If in the past, getting an idea approved by Todd was easy and fast, now became very cumbersome. Their "solution" was the use of Jira, and writing down everything you they doing, which meant that 2 people could no longer have a talk at the fountain to discuss some quest they would like to implement in over-time, because EVERYTHING had to be logged in Jira. You can also see this in the talk, as it became less about them doing a cool stuff in a dungeon by coordinating with the other people in the company during Skyrim, to mostly talk about Jira during Starfield. The point I am trying to make, is that this is less about incompetent people joining Bethesda while the talent left, and more about their managerial structure, or Todd Howard being the Ubermensch, could not handle that amount of people. Another problem was that some people really wanted to make TES and were unsatisfied when they were forced to work on Fallout 4, while other people really wanted to make Fallout and are unsatisfied that the next project is TES VI. One solution I have heard, and it might be best for Bethesda is to just divide the company in 2, one lead by Todd Howard to make TES VI, while the other will be lead by Emil to make Fallout, with the employees choosing were to go to. Yes, I know Emil will butcher the lore of Fallout even more, I said it was for the good of Bethesda, not the good of the Fallout community.

Why has no studio capitalized on this type of game? a bounty hunter game where you hunt aliens seems like a sure fire hit if done right. If nothing else, it would be something interesting.

>>1725565 I remember renting this as a teenager, same with Strangers Wrath. These types of games seem like a unrealized goldmine.