I always heard that consoles were sold at a loss and made up for with services. Sounds like the logical continuation of this saga is for MS to give up the hardware game so long as Gamepass generates more income due to being on virtually every platform.
How is this current news? This has been the strategy for the last 3 years with Gamepass. Who cares about consoles and exclusives when you just provide a rental service across-the-board.
Their strategy is to curate a good rental library and just deploy it everywhere there’s a screen and internet connectivity.
Right now the block on mobile which the EU just obliterated was store exclusivity taking a percentage, but even Apple will have to allow other storefronts on their devices.
What made Bethesda games decent was how dense the maps were, but there is no density here.
Skyrim and Fallout are games where you can pick a direction, go, and probably find something weird or interesting - a side quest, a fun environmental story, etc. Starfield literally cannot have this by design because everything is on a different planet, in a different system - the density of the map is gone, and scattered across a giant cosmos that can’t be navigated without loading screens.
What happens on a procgen planet if I pick a direction and go? The same thing, every time - a boring cave or outpost filled with the same bullet sponge spacers as literally everywhere else.
There needs to be actual stuff to do outside of quests to make the game fulfilling. There’s so much nothingness.
They have to rebuild the entire game to make it fun. Every mechanic is poorly implemented.
Shipbuilding? Inconsequential.
Gun modification? Same as it ever was.
Food and drink? Why do I give a shit?
Base building? Just as janky as FO76.
Research? Annoying progression block.
The map? So spread out that everything is behind a loading screen.
Everything from stem to stern is just…bad. Stop using the fucking Creation engine you dumbasses! That’s why nothing fucking works! You don’t have an engine that’s even capable of supporting a large space game. Why did they think it could? Sunk fucking cost fallacy out the ass.
Jemison is at least three separate zones, Neon is cut in half, and this is in an age where we have city-scale games that have absolutely no loading screens during traversal - Cyberpunk and Spider-Man to name a few. That’s like a New Vegas-era problem from a decade ago, where we had to cut Freeside in half. Made sense then, unacceptable now.
Everything is behind a loading screen, usually triggered by fast travel.
Worse mechanics than games that are dedicated to each function.
Ship building is janky, it doesn’t actually make any kind of difference, and there are other games with better, cooler customization that allow you to do more granular things. The ship stats don’t actually matter, because you can carry your crew of flunkies around the galaxy with any kind of setup, regardless of the actual stated crew stations and passenger capacity. Fuel exists but is inconsequential, it’s a number that goes up and down as you travel independent of your interaction with it. Space Engineers and Empyrion Galactic Survival are two games off the top of my head that kick the shit out of Starfield’s ship building and exploring.
I feel like the gunplay is worse than it was in Fallout 4. That might not be because of how the guns fire so much as it’s probably directly related to how much everything is a pointless bullet sponge. You can have a pimped out Orion and shit still takes a bunch of hits to go down, and they’re all the same sets of enemies: renegade spacers in random mines and outposts.
The only new thing on top of all the mechanics culminating from Skyrim through Fallout 76 that they added was a research system, which is perfunctory at best and super annoying and artificially limiting at worse.
So to answer your question? Nothing. There’s nothing they improve upon that hasn’t been done elsewhere - the gimmick functionally just is that all these elements exist in the same game in a very disjointed fashion.
I agree with tapes if the data is large and not accessed frequently. Magnetic tapes are still one of the most information-dense mediums, surprisingly. WORM tapes are Write Once Read Many and are used by serious large enterprises for long-term archival storage.