It’s unclear exactly what the developer’s standards threshold might be, given the mess that was deemed acceptable enough to release in the first place.
This should be the top comment. Anyone even considering the game at this point should really avoid it out of principle. The only way things like this will stop happening will be when people STOP BUYING SHIT-PERFORMING GAMES!
I did the same thing when I pre-ordered. I didn’t know it’d be this much of a clusterfuck. This feels almost as bad as KSP2, which I wanted so, so badly to be good…
Well, supposedly the devs have finally implemented autostrut in the upcoming update. I’m just in it for the multiplayer, which is going to be stupid fun if they don’t fuck it up. As an actual aero engineer, I’ve loved KSP since before I could remember, really.
Specially for devs in countries that don’t have tax treaties with the US, if you’re buying it in the US. They’ll refund you fully but still have to pay 30% of the value to uncle Sam.
First week Performance was unplayable. 2nd week its fine and I’ve forgotten about the bad performance and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the game. It’s so good and I’m excited for future dlc, assets and mods.
It kinda sucks honestly, because I think if they literally got one or two more weeks, and disabled the offending settings such as depth of field, they would have received far less flak. I feel like a good 70% of the complaints are due to bad defaults.
Like, sure, they probably still would have gotten some justified criticism for it, but I don’t really think the game deserved as harsh criticism as it got, or at least, the problems are all very surface level, and underneath what is there actually works well.
No there are actually severe bugs in the financial model of the city also, stuff like that. But it will be fixed eventually. It’s not a bad game. It does what it’s supposed to and it’s more user friendly than the previous version.
Examples? I’ve been playing since launch and haven’t seen anything glaring. The way it’s structured is a bit different, but it all works out when you learn the system.
The one theyve acknowledged working on is related to garbage. Your cargo port/terminal will import a lot of various resources for your city to use, including garbage. Which means no matter how much garbage handling to build, your imports will flood it.
Workaround is to district everything and make sure your garbage handling facilities excludes the districts with the poets/terminals.
Some other economic bugs are not as bad. Like services not using resources correctly or zoned buildings having too much of a safety net for bankruptcy. Theres a lot the community is tracking down and the devs are working on.
I wouldn’t say it makes the game unplayable. The complexity that does work is great. Its still so much better than CS1. Im not in the camp of anyone not buying “out of principal”. Its a fairly small team who had a deadline to meet. They made a great game in that time despite the glaring issues. They provided 10 years of CS1 support (even excluding dlcs), CS2 will be no different.
Tried and true method is still wait until patches and DLC fix everything. If they don’t have the patience to create a working game, I’m not rushing to by it.
Anyone interested will buy it eventually. It doesn’t matter if the release is shit they’ll buy it eventually and CO will make money from dlc sales. Based on what I’ve played so far I can tell this game is going to be amazing in a few years.
I personally went from having to have everything on low or turned off to literally cranking everything all the way up and it’s still playable. Mind you, I’m running an eight year old quad-core Xeon, 64Gb of 2400mhz ECC DDR4, and a 2080ti. Game’s installed on a SATA SSD that isn’t exactly new.
And yes, I’m aware that’s an odd mishmash of parts. Most of it came from an old server my last job was throwing away.
I’ve been having playable framerates but they’re not improving. On a 10k city I get about 45fps average but I frequently experience frame drops which definitely make it less enjoyable to play the game. My specs are Ryzen 9 5900HX, RX6800M, 32GB RAM
I’m not sure what framerate I’m getting but it’s good enough for me and I do get some drops. I’m on a 50k pop city with a 2070 and a ryzen 5600x and 32gb ram.
They’ve said there is a lot of room for optimization but I don’t expect to much because cs1 ran like shit for what it was.
Arizona State Univeristy self-imposed a ban from going to a bowl game this year in college football to address their recruiting violations…they’re 2-7 on the season…same vibe.
Malibu Stacy can't stand up, her face is mush and the arms aren't attached, but this time she has a new hat!
Of course you don't sell add-ons to a broken toy? Weird that you were even selling it in their first place. I wish companies wouldnt stick so hard to release dates
I think the risk they ran is ending up like Cyberpunk, where they don’t delay long enough to make a difference. What was it…a week or something that they first delayed the launch, and only within a day of the release? To be clear, I agree they should have delayed, but longer, and the delay should have been announced earlier. If they said it were now slated for a Q2 2024 release, and said so back in late September, it might have been a good move. But nope.
Team Reptile didn’t have a release date for Bomb Rush Cyberfunk until they knew when they wanted to release it. No one knew when it would come out until the release date trailer, about a month before it actually released.
Well that's good. It's a great game. I've been spared of some of the technical problems, so I'm good - but there are still some bugs lurking around. Could have used couple of more months of polishing before release.
Wouldn't be surprised if mod tools never come at all.
If there's one thing I learned, it's that gaming companies will promise you anything to get on your good side. Take statements like these with the biggest grain of salt.
True but Bugthesda has got to know that mods and modders are the backbone of the longevity of their games by now, right? Without mods their games tend to be unplayable.
So people play it on console because it's a good game without mods, which would mean it's not unplayable. There's also little reason beyond just general cynicism to believe mod tools aren't coming when their past several offline games got mod tools a handful of months after release, including Skyrim. As far as I can tell, it's quite normal for mod tools to come several months after release for non-Bethesda games as well. I don't think the longevity of mods has anything to do with whether or not a game is unplayable.
If the game is so riddled with bugs it famously needs modders to create mods for the sake of fixing the product, there is quite the significant tie between longevity of an unplayable game and mods. See, the problem is your wording sees the cause and effect the wrong way around. Hopefully this helps you to understand.
Oh and yiu ask about people continuing to play Bugthesda’s games on console, I’ll happily point out you’re asking fir a logical answer from a market that proliferated child gambling, standardised season passes and the standard of the complete version of a game release costing 100 bucks before the industry still found an excuse to increase the usual price of 60 bucks up to 70. It’s not because something is bad that idiots won’t buy it.
I've played Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the latter two at launch. I've never installed mods for any of these games, and I rarely install mods in general. Skyrim had a rough launch, where it would crash for me frequently, but that problem was resolved within a few weeks, tops. They're all very playable, and I never felt like I needed mods to fix them, which is why they also sell well on consoles.
and the standard of the complete version of a game release costing 100 bucks before the industry still found an excuse to increase the usual price of 60 bucks up to 70
Inflation is a fact of life, and prices were going to increase somehow, especially since a lot of AAA games these days are recklessly large, including Bethesda games. There's a lot more at play with the way DLC works and the pricing around them than just trying to sneak a price increase by you, but the short answer is: I don't think it's a big deal to have an entry level price for a game and another price for the game and expansion content.
I missed Oblivion so I can’t weigh in on that one. However, every game since has brought some kind of issue that prevented me from finishing the game to a satisfying level of completion. I will be including New Vegas in this because, although it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, there were enough caveats included in the creation - including their god-awful game engine - that Bugthesda might as well have made it themselves, and thus suffered from the exact same game-breaking problem Fallout 3 did.
Fallout 3 & New Vegas: If you owned the original disc versions of the games and bought the DLC (how dare we), there was a glitch where the save game would become large enough the game would cease to run properly, gradually getting laggier and laggier until the game would struggle to manage a whole 5fps in a built-up environment like the Bethesda Ruins. This same bug would occur without the DLC during the natural progression of the game once the player heads into Red Rock Canyon although that particular iteration fixed itself as soon as the player bruteforced their way into one of the rabbithole buildings. I can’t say for the RRC version but the one that would lead to basically dead saves was fixed by buying the GOTY/Complete editions respectively and only with a fresh save. All old saves were still borked. To highlight the difference in the developers, the parts of New Vegas that get praise are the parts Obsidian were left to their own devices.
Skyrim: 70+ hours in, I personally encountered two game-breaking glitches that locked me out of the Companions and Blades quest lines respectively.
Fallout 4: After a game patch, I loaded up the game to find my 110-hour save hardlocked from loading (permanent black loading screen). Reaching out to Bugthesda gave me the solution of “completely reinstall the game and DLC and just start a new save”. Naturally, I wasn’t too impressed with their “help” considering this was also back when I had 8Mb/s internet so spending another week redownloading wasn’t inconsequential either.
All of these previous games were on console. From here, both I and the friend to be mentioned had already swapped from console to master race.
Fallout 76: After the lackluster release, I had zero desire to play the game, let alone pay for the (dis)pleasure but a couple of years after further development (which should have been done prior to release but the true mark of a money-grubbing company is convincing your playerbase to pay you for the privilege of beta testing for you. We’ll be coming back to the corporate practices you want to excuse later, don’t worry) my best friend - the person who introduced me to the game series - decided he wanted to play 76 and wanted company for the endeavor so he bought me a copy of the game. Much to my surprise, the experience started well. There were the usual hallmarks of a GaaS product such as the daily grind-a-thon quests, the multiple currencies - one of which could only be obtained by paying - and the walled garden of desirable cosmetic items conveniently tied to the premium currency as well as other niggles in that vein but it was overall enjoyable so we got a couple of hundred hours of it… until they updated the game and I suddenly found myself with a lighting glitch that prevented me from seeing anything in buildings (the overworld kind, not the rabbithole kind). Naturally, I reported the issue and got a canned response; reinstall, blah blah blah. Didn’t fix it. So I waited patiently for the next patch, then the next update and the inevitable patch to follow. Still borked. Eventually, I just removed the blight from my hard drive since it was only taking up more and more space to keep hoping Bugthesda would actually fix their game (something I should have already learnt was a good punchline instead of even wishful thinking by that point).
Starfield: Now for this pile of crap, I refused to watch any trailers, listen to anything anybody was saying about it before the release, genuinely skipped segments of podcasts to avoid hearing any amount of hype about it. Just didn’t care for it. Naturally, cultural osmosis being what it is, I still ended up hearing bits and bobs including when release time came around and all of Dear Todd’s Molyneux-isms (see: false advertising) came to light too. A buddy hooked me up so I got to find out how bad it was for myself. Despite meeting required specs by some margin for 1080 high settings and being installed on undeserved SSD real estate, I encountered constant lag spikes despite how slow movement speed is in the game and generally empty environments. All problems that reek of minimal optimization at best.
Games like Dishonored, DOOM, and Deathloop prove Bethesda has an eye for quality and make for one hell of a AAA publisher but as a developer, they’re subpar on a good day and depend on unpaid modders to put the other cheek in their half-assed jobs. Personally, I don’t care for The Elder Scrolls - fantasy just isn’t typically my bag but I really like the premise of Fallout and I genuinely think the only way we’re going to ever get a genuinely good one, the overlords of Microsoft need to micro-manage enough to see Obsidian in charge of the next release. Their choice of team, story and most importantly, get rid of that massively out-of-date and unfit-for-purpose engine Bugthesda insists on repolishing.
Inflation is a fact of life
Sadly, that’s where you’re actually right. However, the excuse of inflation only goes as far as explaining why the real release of the game costing $100 until recently. And even then, that’s when being extremely generous. You refer to the bloated size of games - most of which isn’t needed and often drags would-be great games down - as a reason for increased cost but something people tend to fail to mention is how much bigger the market is than when $60 became the norm. There are more players than ever before and the industry is bragging bigger profits year after year. You see, the problem there is that one and one doesn’t make three. If the cost was rising equal to all of these different price hikes, why are profits not comparable to how they’ve always been? Instead, what we see is exponential growth in profits. That’s profits, not net worth. Those two are very different and should not be confused.
Now, I’m not opposed to expansions, they aren’t a new concept by a long shot but they need to add value. I, and many others, think of The Witcher 3’s expansions as valuable. They scratch the itch for more of the same product while being easier for the developers to bring to market than a full game. Win-win. Not every expansion can be on that same level, I will give you but there’s also a massive difference between a Blood & Wine and all the nickel-and-diming bull excrement companies like Ubisoft, EA, Activision and Konami - for the sake of pointing out it’s not just North American companies who are guilty - have become infamous for.
A company has won when they can convince their customers they’re getting a bargain for ultimately giving them nothing. By the way you’re buying and reselling the regurgitated excuses, you have clearly lost to them like many, many others and I’m genuinely dreading what my favorite hobby is going to look like in five years time because of those people and their ever-increasing tolerance to getting screwed and expected to be grateful.
but something people tend to fail to mention is how much bigger the market is than when $60 became the norm.
No, people mention it a lot, but it's got a fundamental flaw in its rationale in that the larger market is not spread anywhere near evenly across the industry. Grand Theft Auto will outsell Starfield 10:1, and Starfield is an elite position to sell more copies than the vast majority of games out there. When we talk about how much bigger the market is than it was when prices increased to $60 (which was itself lower than prices had been 10-20 years earlier), we're capturing the sales of games that blow their next closest competitors out of the water. The same goes for profits, which are going to heavily favor an industry with Shark Cards and Ultimate Team loot boxes compared to a game that just sells a base game and an expansion pack via season pass for a total of $100. A rising tide does lift all boats, but it lifts a select few way higher than just about everyone else.
By the way you’re buying and reselling the regurgitated excuses, you have clearly lost to them like many, many others and I’m genuinely dreading what my favorite hobby is going to look like in five years time because of those people and their ever-increasing tolerance to getting screwed and expected to be grateful.
Buy the stuff you like and don't buy the stuff you don't like. Loot boxes and battle passes prey on impulses wired into people at an instinctual level that makes that more than just a free market scenario, but you like Witcher 3 expansions. Starfield is offering the same business model as that. Buy it or don't, depending on how much trust you have in that product to be good. I'm content to buy a $100 version of Street Fighter or Guilty Gear or Mortal Kombat but not so much Tekken (remember Street Fighter II cost $70 in 1992 money, $150 adjusting for inflation, offering far less than we get today). I feel like I got a bargain on Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3, but if they had something to upsell me on, I'd likely be a happy customer to pay for that too.
As for the game-breaking glitches you ran into, I fully believe that you encountered them, and that sucks. I also believe that sheer law of averages would indicate it's not the norm, and that the vast majority of people are able to play these games without mods, or they would not do as well as they do, critically and commercially.
But it’s not for the benefit of modders anymore. It’s because of how they can monetize them like they did with Skyrim and Fallout’s “Creation Club”.
Get modders to make what’s essentially some minor DLC for you and offer it at a “small price” or with a “Special Edition upgrade” while those same modders are actually making waaaaay better mods and releasing them for free on Nexus or wherever (this is basically the state of Skyrim AE; some very notable modders did some cool stuff for CC, but their other mods were way fucking beyond those in terms of quality).
I would argue the mods they don’t directly make money from still increases their profits. People aren’t still playing Skyrim for the Creation Club content, which is pretty much all garbage and actually makes the game worse.
I wouldn't count on millions of people suddenly all deciding to boycott now, if all the egregious practices of this industry weren't enough to get them to do it already.
I'm not. Choosing not to buy a bad product has incremental effects on what gets made in the market from 1 person choosing not to buy it all the way out to no one buying it.
Not really. Often companies degrade their products as a calculated choice, considering that they will save and increase their profits more than they will lose. If only a few people protest, which seems to be the case here, then they have no reason to change course.
But chosing to buy from companies that do better can at least carve out a niche.
That's exactly my point. At some point, Divinity: Original Sin was a niche. Now Baldur's Gate 3 is poised to be called Game of the Year and outsold Larian's wildest expectations. Many of those sales came from people who bought BG3 and not Starfield. That sends a message for what customers actually want. There wasn't some mass campaign to boycott Battlefield 2042; their customers just told them, by way of not buying it like they used to, that the product EA put out was not worth the price they were asking.
Honestly Bethesda games are just a modding sandbox for me. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Skyrim and I’m not sure I’ve ever finished the main quest. I know I’ve never taken a side in the civil war. The built in story and quests are important but my fun comes from downloading mods and just roaming like a wandering monk doing whatever quests I run into. Sometimes OP, other times with immersive mods or alternative perks or spells.
I’m probably not a typical gamer as I’ve had hundreds on hours into BG3 and only made it to act 3 once so far and have yet to finish any of my runs before I decide to have a relationship with someone different or try a durge run, or evil, or realized I forgot to resolve some quest that is now closed. I’m not sure how long a full run is maybe 100 hours? But it’s a lot to invest before I get bored and want to try something new.
I also have a need to collect all the gimmicky items even when I know I have or will get much better stuff for the slot. I play Bethesda games the same way. Gotta run over and collect the book of arcane bow if I’m going to be an archer…
Anyway, mods are a core part of the deal for me. They should prioritize them more.
It always impresses me how seemingly every corporation adopts this mindset of not needing the “little guy” to function. Like their company isn’t made up of “little guys” that produce their given product.
It was pretty much one of the biggest lessons of the whole covid affair. The groundfloor personel is the most essentiel part of everything. Without, the whole system collapses.
putting in an official way for users to create and load mods takes resources that the small indie company Bethesda just can't afford to use; the modders can do the work for that, too
eurogamer.net
Aktywne