Thread 717405471

What went wrong?

>>717405471 (OP)
>old guard doesn't want to make similar games to those that defined their golden age
>make a very successful live service game and live off of that while everyone that was around for said golden age slowly goes away
>finally try to make something new and fail miserably at it
Blaming Microsoft is fine and all but a lot of Rare's issues are self inflicted. It's fine to want to make new things, but you have to actually be able to make them.

>>717405471 (OP)
The short answer is that game development became much more expensive and complicated.
People say there was a mass exodus upon the buyout or Microsoft meddled too much and "forced" Rare to make games they didn't want to make.
By all accounts, that's not true.
At most it was a large chunk of the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark guys who were leaving anyways and Rare's management were on board to do Kinect titles because if you actually paid attention to their history Rare has always been interested in working with new technology.
Had they stuck with Nintendo they would've done all sorts of stuff with the Wii Remote
Hell, we kind of got a glimpse of this design with the gimmick filled Diddy Kong Racing remake on DS

They're british

Given the amount of cancelled projects they've had over the last two decades, I've have left the company too. It was just a generation of Kinect shit, followed by Sea of Thieves, and nothing else since that wasn't cancelled.

Unless we're really going to count that shitty 'modernized' 2d Battletoads game.

Nintendo wasn't around to keep them in check.

>>717405609
>It's fine to want to make new things, but you have to actually be able to make them.
Probably one of the best demonstrations of game budget inflation killing off mid-sized games. For the SNES and N64 they were working on like 5-6 games at a time and they literally all suffered from being too large because they created so much shit within all of those games.
Nowadays, it's largely impossible for studios to do that without reusing assets across each of those games, something that people typically are critical of, with the exception of FromSoft.
Like seriously, imagine if in between DKC:R and Tropical Freeze, RetroStudios also had pumped out a new original kart racer, a new original critically acclaimed FPS, a new and original critically acclaimed platformer, and 3DS ports of it all as well. That's essentially what Rare was doing.
Games are too large nowadays and require too many people, one studio just simply couldn't be working on that many projects without spending insane amounts of money.
TL;DR, agree with your point but the industry shifting towards being only capable of working on 1-3 games at a time, and needing those games not to flop, as well as their talent loss, meant it became way harder to put out anything "new".

>>717407123
i have no idea why i spaced my post like that wtf lol ignore me hitting enter after every sentence

>>717405471 (OP)
They had a great run then shitted themselves with Starfox and were finally told not to comeback by the big N. C'est la vie.

Up until the early 00s their focus was pushing the limits of video games, but ever since then games could do pretty much anything anyone wanted and they've pretty much lost all purpose. They don't want to work on their old franchises and Microsoft doesn't want them to either. Cartoony games don't sell to the Xbox consumer base, but they don't want to really work on realistic games either. They probably would've been better off sticking with Nintendo where they could keep pushing technology and making cartoony games with the odd realistic one when they felt like it.

>>717407234
Star Fox Adventures was still in development after the buyout was underway

>>717407123
>imagine if in between DKC:R and Tropical Freeze, RetroStudios also had pumped out a new original kart racer, a new original critically acclaimed FPS, a new and original critically acclaimed platformer, and 3DS ports of it all as well.
they were, but kept getting canceled.

>>717407616
>they were, but kept getting canceled.
>Implying Harmony was any of those
Retro for the most part is a one game at a time studio

>>717405471 (OP)
Strange how everything went downhill after microsoft bought them, why is that so common, I wonder?

>>717406484
>Battletoads
Might call my local gamestop to see if they have it

>>717408236
Microsoft is guilty of many many things
Rare wasn't one of them
They were largely hands off aside from MAYBE not wanting more Perfect Dark after Halo got big (and that was after Zero was a disappointment) and even then there's no concrete source for that claim
A lot of Rare's rough history came down to poor decisions on their part and shitty luck
>Grabbed by the Ghoulies had to be scaled down because Rare wasn't used to working on Xbox tech post-buyout
>Kameo had to change identities frequently to be more appealing to the Xbox audience
>Perfect Dark Zero was made after the key people who made the original and Goldeneye had left to make Timesplitters

>>717407778
i'm not implying shit nor care about that dumb game, retro was working on 4 games, a car game, an NFL game, a zelda clone and an FPS. Investors and miyamoto hated their work, but gave them a chance with their FPS project that turned into metroid.
After that like 80% of the staff was slowly fired and all their side projects were nuked. Even then between both DK games they worked on mk7.

>>717405471 (OP)
microjew only bought them up because they didn't want nintendo to have an fps to pivot to in the gamecube era via perfect dark. nintendo was also buckbroken for a veriety of reasons on rare which someone else aluded to but thats not how microjew saw it at the time.

>>717408613
By all means, almost every Retro dev has nothing nice to say about their cancelled work
The Sheik game was whack-a-mole
Metaforce was a disaster
Raven Blade was nothing
The football game got canned because some third party got the actual NFL license

>>717405471 (OP)
they never were that good as game devs and the number one thing their fans like (the bizarre goofy tone of their worlds and characters) is fundamentally dated and stuck in the 90s, no one would care about it today

>>717408479
>>They were largely hands off
That's part of the problem though. Rare needed someone to whip them into shape to make sure they still release things but MS doesn't do management. Just look at Perfect Dark, that game spent four of its six year development cycle in pre-production.

>>717409616
Not gonna deny that
I'm gonna be a broken record and just say Nintendo/Rare were a good fit because of just how alike they were
They didn't always *get* each other but they had a similar enough mentality when it came to game design that made their chemistry just click better than it was like under Microsoft aside from Microsoft giving Rare more money to do whatever.
Microsoft isn't like Nintendo
They don't make video games themselves so when something is wrong they're not gonna notice something is wrong like what happened with Redfall where the devs WANTED Microsoft to notice something was going badly.

>>717405471 (OP)
Gonna guess you're asking about Banjo (Rare is technically still chugging along and making profit via Sea of Thieves), in which case the answer is that the IP sort of just voluntarily shotgunned itself in the face in a way I've never seen done before or since. Leaping company ownership to a different console line, with a different art style, was NOT the right time to try "experimenting" with your quintessentially collectathon IP by turning it into a car building game. Not to mention you had early trailers making it look like the game would be another collectathon so you could see the backlash coming from a mile away.
There's an old interview from around N&B's release by Axewound Sterling (Formerly Jim's) of Gregg Mayles where he says that he's expecting initial controversy but Banjo's fandom would eventually come around and embrace Nuts & Bolts as a subversive masterpiece, which never happened. It's a mark of someone way, way too confident in his own cult of personality; the most the fandom was willing to offer them was the assumption that Microsoft somehow fucked it up, but Mayles and Kirkhope never stopped seething that the fandom didn't like it.
>>717409286
Ratchet & Clank survived. What excuse does Rare have?

If Crash 4 underperformed why would Banjo-Threeie fare any better?

>>717410205
>Ratchet & Clank survived
I wouldn't call two games in a decade, one of them a budget priced release, as surviving.

>>717410464
We're talking about Nuts & Bolts. You'll note that many of those games released in the late '00s, in the era where Banjo as an IP was supposedly no longer viable to explain N&B's failure, you disingenuous faggot.

>>717410205
The worst part is N&B really isn't even that good at the end of the day. The idea is certainly novel and you get some freedom in how to approach missions, but the game runs out of new ideas about halfway through and ends up stretching its systems way beyond their limits. Missions become dull fetchquests, Jinjo missions become repetitive and there's no real need to build any new vehicles anymore.

>>717405737
This

>>717410464

Man, what happened to companies popping out 3 games in a series per gen? Sure they were all pretty similar but I was just happy to have more games

>>717409286
How can Banjo or Conker tone and visuals be dated? If anything, releasing games like that would kill it today and you know it. Especially if they keep the classic character mumbling

>>717412262
Games became harder to make

>>717412684
conker is especially dated, this kind of edgy
>cute cartoon animals but they fuck and swear and kill???
shit was fresh in the 90s but now it's become completely predictable and trite, that's the problem with subversion it only works once afterwards it becomes another kind of convention

>Sells 8 million copies (that's more copies than Melee on Gaycube)
>Not even a pack in
>Perfect Dark sells more copies than genuine crap like Kirby 64 and Paper Mario

Anyone who pretends RARE wasn't important in the history of Nintendo is a Cuber tendie who had Luigi's Mansion as their first game.

>>717405471 (OP)
Retarded brits made Battletoads