I'm right there with him until the end:

I'll probably enjoy playing it. I'll also probably find myself repeatedly asking why it had to be born in circumstances as horrible as these.

My dude, you just laid out a perfectly compelling argument that morale in the studio is catered, the management is cruel, and projects are getting slashed left and right. You'd have to be huffing glue to say all this and still believe that you're getting something other than another Fallout 76 squeezed into New Vegas 2 packaging. Get fucking real.

"Oh man, you remember when Microsoft totally butchered Fallout New Vegas 2? That was pretty fucked up."

-Us in a few years probably

Fuck Microsoft. It's easy to not buy their shit. I've been doing it all day.

Big corpo-owned studios can't make games anymore.

They just can't.

Good games require creative thought, shared vision, and the liberty to change anything you don't like.

They need a passion to make a dream real and to share that dream with the player.

An environment where a quarter of the workforce got fired and you've been given the project only because the 'board' thinks it's the best chance to shit out something profitable for the shareholders is not where that happens.

Feels like a weird decision from a business point of view, too, to gut your studio right as you come up with new projects for it to tackle.

Maybe those devs aren't needed in the early stages of these new projects and they expect to be able to rehire when they are. That's still short-term thinking, but at this point, I would be surprised, if anything at Microsoft happened even with just this much rationale.

There's probably one decision that they need to milk their cash cows some more, and an entirely separate decision that they need to bolster their numbers for shareholders to be happy with this quarter. And the only time those decisions crossed paths, is in some middle manager who's told to make the impossible work...

Same studio, but is it the same devs?

This will supposedly have JSawyer as head director again, I still dout anything will come of this but its still crazy this is happening.