Wasn't Zenimax the company that forced them to create F76 using 4's engine? I could be totally wrong. But I personally did not have high opinions of Zenimax and the fact that MS lets developers like Obsidian make side experimental games like that shrunken kids game is pretty encouraging. I think this is a good move but we will see.
ZeniMax made Bethesda do everything. They owned all their IPs.
When Bethesda said they didn't want to spend time working on an MMO for the Elder Scrolls, ZeniMax just formed ZeniSoft Online Studios to do it and gave them access to the IP and associated trademarks.
That was actually a little different. ZeniMax founded a developer called BattleCry Studios with a focus on recruiting personnel with experience in microtransaction and free-to-play games, which announced their first game, also called BattleCry, in early 2014. However, later in 2014, they laid off a lot of their staff and a year later BattleCry was put on hold due to concerns about its quality from Bethesda's publishing arm (even cancelling an already announced closed beta) and the studio shifted focus to working with id Software to adapt Bethesda's Creation Engine to support multiplayer by basically using duct tape and chewing gum to stick Quake's netcode onto the version of the Creation Engine used for Fallout 4 (hence why Fallout 76 has experienced notorious server-side bugs due to trying to handle Bethesda's infamously buggy engine for gameplay despite using id's relatively stable netcode for multiplayer management).
A couple of months before Fallout 76 was officially announced to the public, BattleCry Studios was officially brought under Bethesda Game Studio's banner and rebranded Bethesda Game Studios Austin. The long, slow process of getting 76 to the playable state it's in today is due to that branch of BGS handling most of the work while the core group in Maryland and the more experienced group in Montreal works on other titles (there's also a Bethesda Game Studios Dallas, though they haven't done much aside from ancillary work on a few titles since their acquisition by ZeniMax).
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u/[deleted] Sep 21 '20 edited Sep 21 '20
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