Today, we are delighted to welcome the talented game development teams from Activision Publishing, Blizzard and King to our Game Studios and Content organization. Together with Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda our studios organization will continue our mission to build world-class games that entertain and inspire players and create lasting communities of dedicated fans.

In addition, today we are announcing Jill Braff as Head of the ZeniMax/Bethesda studios. Jill has a wealth of experience in games and entertainment, with previous roles at Nintendo, Sega, Glu Mobile, Home Shopping Network and at Warner Bros. building the online and marketing business for the Ellen DeGeneres Show. She was our leader for the integration work when ZeniMax/Bethesda joined Xbox, and through that work she has come to know many of their teams and leaders well.

Jill will be responsible for leading the ZeniMax/Bethesda game development teams, which will continue to operate as limited integration entities, as well as continuing to oversee the Microsoft Casual Games team. Reporting to Jill will be Todd Howard, Todd Vaughn, Matt Firor, Paul Jensen, and Heather Cooper. Jamie Leder will remain in his role as CEO of ZeniMax/Bethesda, reporting to me, and will continue supporting the ongoing integration work. To support the development of the ZeniMax/Bethesda portfolio of games, Robert Gray (ZeniMax Quality Assurance) and Timothy Beggs (ZeniMax Release Management) will move to report Todd Vaughn.

Building on the successful launch of Starfield, all the ZeniMax/Bethesda studios are poised to create some of the most exciting and innovative games in the industry. I am confident that Jill's leadership and support of the teams, along with her proven ability to build meaningful bridges back to Xbox, will further empower everyone at Bethesda to bring amazing experiences to our players.

I want to thank each of you for your dedication and hard work. The best part of leadership at Xbox is the opportunity to see across all our projects and engage with all our teams. I'm excited for 2024 and our slate of games over the next 18 months is looking strong. Together we can create amazing, memorable experiences for our players, built in a culture that empowers everyone to be their most authentic selves and do their best work.

-Matt

"I'm excited for 2024 and our slate of games over the next 18 months is looking strong"

40 hours average playtime seems great.

"We've been reading all your feedback and are excited to start launching these new features. We'll be adding new ways to travel and you’ll now be able to access city maps while exploring the major cities. For those of you who love ship building, we'll also be expanding on ship customization with ship decorations, new ship building options, and more."

Welp. Time to customise my ship for hours again, haha.

"We're also excited to be adding all new Gameplay options. With these new settings you'll be able to alter your gameplay to allow for an easier or more challenging experience that will expand beyond our normal "Difficulty" setting. These will allow you to easily customize carry capacity, cargo access distance, ship damage, vendor credits, how you suffer afflictions, new survival mechanics, and more."

Encumbered haters rejoice.

New survival mechanics could be interesting, they should add a purely survival mode, I saw a lot of requests for that.

Vendor credits should be attached to the skill though, not a difficulty option, Imo, but makes little difference.

"And lastly, the team is hard at work on the development of Shattered Space, our first major expansion coming next year. You’ll have new story content, new locations, new gear, and much more. We can’t wait to share more with you next year."

Is this the first confirmation that Shattered Space is launching in 2024? Looking forward to it.

Also they call it their "first" major expansion so I'm assuming they'll be more?

If they keep updating it then Starfield would be a game I would likely keep returning to for years.

I saw people suggest for a survival mode they add having to eat, drink, sleep, etc. But also making the environment effects more extreme and the fuel stuff more extreme too, such as you need to actually build outposts with fuelling stations and refuel to keep making jumps or you could get stranded in space, stuff like that, not my kind of thing but it would be worth going all out in a survival mode I think.

That 40 hours average playtime is even more impressive when you consider the millions who open up a game on Game Pass only to play it for 2 minutes, amirite?!

Lmaoo.

Hopefully everyone did their prelim voting.

https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/247897/vgchartz-official-game-of-the-year-2023-ndash-preliminary-voting-now-open/

Couple of short reviews of games I completed recently.

Little Nightmares 2 - 8.0

Kinda expected it to be a longer game considering the success of the prequel. Other than that it's basically identical gameplay-wise. Sadly, the game (like its predecessor) still relies a lot on trial and error segements. Somehow they can't do what other developers who make similar kind of games (Limbo, Inside, Planet of Lana, Bramble) can do. Even when you know how to proceed it still feels like you need a bit of luck to make it work and not die. From what I remember though, the trial and error sections aren't quite as frequent as in the first game.

SteamWorld Build - 8.0

I really like the SteamWorld games and this is no exception. The gameplay is basically a shameless copy of the Anno games but it's still fun, even though Anno is far more complex than this one. The mining part is quite unique and fun though. The game doesn't offer much replayability unlike many other games in the genre. Once you finish the story there's no point in continuing and no reason to start a new game as there isn't even any AI to compete against.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - 8.0 (yeah everything gets an 8.0/10 today. Boring, I know...)

Very nice spin-off in the Borderlands series but other than the setting it doesn't do enough to evolve the series. Gameplay is fun, enemy variety is good and there are plenty of bosses to kill. There is once more tons of loot even though I don't quite understand the drop rate. I always got plenty of rare wards, melee weapons, rings but almost never rare weapons which is why I used maybe 10 or so weapons throughout my whole playthrough. Needless to say I often felt underleveled when I tried to kill enemies that were at least 5 levels above my weapon level but what to do when you don't get good drops?
I used performance mode but I still got some heavy drops here and there. One time it was so bad that I had continous drops to 0 FPS for a couple of seconds in the middle of a boss fight and still managed to beat the boss. A full console shutdown solved the issue.

Has anyone's opinion of Starfield changed? I feel bad for even liking it now lmao. All I see are a bunch of trolls trashing it, most disappointing game of 2023 (dumb as fuck, give me a break).

Probably my fave bethesda game (only played Fallout 4, Oblivion, and Skyrim though). Gave it a 9.7.10, but I never thought the game was going to be no man's sky or total exploration.

Did you like Starfield?? thoughts?

The only things I really didn't like were the loading screens, and the new game plus how they got rid of your ships. I liked the extra dialogue choices though added.