There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Rare. The N64 is my favorite console and part of reason for that was Rare's constant output of good (Jet Force Gemini) to great (Golden Eye) AAA games for that system.
Even Star Fox Adventures was a decent gorgeous looking game. But their woes did start during their GC days. Microsoft paid top dollar for Rare, much more than they paid for bungie ( which in retrospective was a dumb move) during the late 90s early 00s Rare was as highly regarded as Naughty Dog is today. I remember being excited about Microsoft acquiring them until I played Perfect Dark Zero.
While PDZ looked good, the game played like Halo 1 (or 2) never happened. It felt like playing an HD version of one of their N64 shooters. Then I was underwhelmed by their Banjo game. Rare seemed stuck in the 90s trying to replicate the magic, while competing titles evolved. My guess is that apart from the founders, some of the original staff left and since Nintendo no longer supervised them, the quality of their games took a plunge.
So Microsoft isn't to blame, in fact they were very high on Rare during the early days. Nintendo no longer working with them might have had a bigger impact. Thankfully Sea of Thieves while not a critical success has been a commercial hit...I guess more than a decade later that gamble MS took on them paid off.
