Most notably, John Gonzales, the actual writer on New Vegas, is also there.

outer worlds was not that good (imo) avowed was decent. would be insane to just assume theyd catch lightning in a bottle again

Microsoft's leadership, specifically.

True true

Someone with that skill set who wants to keep making games, looking for any port in a storm.

Anecdotally, I was illegally fired by Microsoft in December 2024 because I helped form a massive union earlier that year. I want my job back because I want a union contract.

I have friends at Zenimax that stayed because they have a union contract. There are currently 14 unions at Microsoft actively negotiating for their first contract. The thousands of people who are protected by a union stay because they have a union.

The entire games industry, and software development in general, is unstable right now. The few companies that are still stable aren't hiring. If you have a job, you try to keep it. Because trying to get a new job will be an absolute nightmare. I'm in that situation myself right now.

Sometimes, people leave a company and move to another one, only for that first company to buy the company they moved to...

Knew someone this happened to.

It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of situation.

The games industry has a lot of shitty business practices in general. Job security is almost nonexistent unless you manage to get a key position at a successful studio. Otherwise, you're more likely to be hired for one project and then let go just before release, so you don't get to collect the sales bonus. Some contracted employees are even omitted from the credits, so you don't even get much of a portfolio boost out of it.

Larger companies like Microsoft are shitty in their own ways, but they don't tend to do the hire-fire cycle of game dev as much as other studios may. So it was seen as stable work for a lot of these studios that were acquired. Especially for the former Activision studios that were falling apart at the seams while being rocked by a sequential train of scandals.

And by all accounts it truly was good times for a lot of developers at Xbox, where they were given resources to develop whatever they wanted with relatively little corporate oversight. But then these teams that were previously given carte blanche on their projects suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them by new management. They suddenly care about results, and that's apparently now the developers' fault for just doing what they were told was okay before.

its the fault of the player becoming godlike. do you remember the first time you played? even at the end game, i was struggling against enemies and banking on my companions to bail me out. but now that i know what to do, and know how to maximize perk selection, gear, and where to loot and sell stuff, no wonder i become godlike

Build it on the bones of The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard!