I worry that this also has a rose tinted glasses effect on early user reviews. The only people leaving reviews for the first few days are going to be the people already invested enough to pay extra for early access, and they may be more willing to overlook issues with the game.
That's precisely what I'm seeing with streams of the game. There's so many bugs and just bizarre design decisions, especially with the opening hour or so, but the streamers then claim it's a perfect game with no problems.
A significant amount of the bugs do seem to be based on how long you've been playing and how far into the game you've gotten. The farther you get, the more bugs start appearing.
Glad there’s a fix for that first one at least. That’s too bad, but it does seem to be very specific - if it’s prevalent outside one system then it’s definitely a huge issue though (and it’s big already).
For the second thread, I’m not really seeing any specific bugs outside of 2, it’s mostly just complaints about performance. I have over 1 day in save time so I’d have expected to have seen some of them by now I guess lol.
The only one through these threads I can corroborate is an NPC once turned around and faced the wrong way during conversation. Otherwise it’s simply been minor script delays - someone leave from an elevator that’s still closed so they run in super speed, or there’s a small delay when seating/conversing and the audio desyncs for one line before it’s back to normal. Once an NPC starting clipping into the air one step at a time, but then they reached the ceiling and it stopped.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the game honestly. Oh, one other bug I’ve seen that I’ve seen mentioned is a quest on random planets where we are to place a gas sensor on gas spews. Well, I’ve found gas spews but no quest icons appear. Others said there’s ways to make it pop up when they’re seen though.
Compared to my launch week 2077 which was also very bug free both Starfield and it seems to have a reputation that people want it to suck? The games have shortcomings, absolutely but have they realistically negatively affect my gameplay experience? So far for both games, they have not.
That said, if I’d dealt with that ship bug I’d have gone crazy! So I’m not at all trying to dismiss the bugs, but rather am just generally more confused as to why my 2077 experience was prisitine and my friends was a bug fest. Do we get different distributions of the game or something!?
I wonder how long it takes for some of those people to transfer to a more embittered relationship with Bethesda over it? Assuming any of them have that “I’m staring at a title screen realizing I haven’t actually had fun playing the game in weeks but the dopamine loop of the ‘loot, kill, craft’ system had me deluded into thinking I was enjoying myself. Like a social media doom-scroller or something” moment.
You used to be able to literally brick your build (get to a point where it’s impossible to progress any further) in Bethesda games. I’m sure that’s changed now, but that paranoia lingers.
I haven’t bought a triple a game on release in ten or fifteen years. For this one enough of my friends were already playing it for several days by the time I got it that it’s hard to see it as “early” (certainly not patient, either, but it’s fun to cheat on a diet now and then). And I’m really not finding it buggy particularly, no more than any non-aaa title would be shortly after launch. I hate to be overly kind to Bethesda but it’s really not worth the hate the net is leveling at it
I think the title is a joke about how Bethesda games are notoriously always full of bugs. Like, to the point that it's just expected for any new Bethesda game to be a bug-riddled mess at launch.
Hell, there are still bugs in Skyrim that never got patched, even after they re-released it onto modern platforms. Not even obscure bugs, but things normal players will encounter in their playthroughs.
It’s crazy that they haven’t used things like the unofficial patch to fix their own damn game. Like they could pretty much just copy paste that shit and be fine. But no. More than a decade later and that shit is still around and even propagated to things like FO4 and FO76.
That’s still orders of magnitude easier than figuring it out from first principles, and nowhere near arduous enough to excuse leaving the problems unaddressed.
It's not that simple. Even using it as a base gets you into a legal gray area. Learning from a work and incorporating elements into your own work is legal, but copying someone else's legwork like this is legally murky even if you don't take the actual code.
Yeah I’m sure Microsoft-owned Bethesda is shaking in their boots about learning from modifications to their own game. That’s gotta be everything stays buggy.
If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.
If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.
If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person’s code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn’t been noticed or isn’t being pursued because there’s not likely any money in it anyways.
It’s that murky area that I’m guessing they’d want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.
Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)
Hiring the modder is not necessary, to look at a mod, go ‘oh that’s what we did wrong,’ and fix it. That’s not the ctrl+c/ctrl+v situation you seem to expect. And considering it’s their own game, and fixing bugs, the legal concerns are practically nonexistent.
If an employee writes code for a company, that employee owns the copyright.
For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else’s invention.
Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn’t gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don’t agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don’t think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.
That’s not to say that it’s legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there’s just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.
Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.
There’s copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There’s parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn’t use copy/paste). And there’s precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).
He’s saying the “Least buggiest” is not proper phrasing. It should be something along the lines of “the least buggy/bugged” and it’s a pretty bad title for someone claiming to be a “journalist”.
Doesn’t matter what he claims, he just wrote an article for a publishing/news/media company. That’s called journalism, professional or not.
jour·nal·ism /ˈjərnlˌizəm/ noun the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast. “she had begun a career in journalism”
It doesn’t have to be “proper” if it works as a joke. It implies that a Bethesda game can’t be merely “buggy,” it must be the “buggiest,” even if it’s (paradoxically) less buggy. So, “least buggiest.”
I seems in general journalism has gotten worse and worse with their grammar. I honestly wonder if their editors even look at even the title before things are posted online.
When I used to do copywriting for junk SEO, I began to suspect that my editor didn’t actually read anything I wrote and just passed it through a content uniquness filter, so I started putting in random references to HP Lovecraft stories in the articles I got assigned.
They all got published, no questions asked. For a while if you searched “Homeopathy and the Esoteric Cult of Dagon” my content was the only result
I imagine that LLMs have been trained on his reviews by this point and are vigorously producing articles exploring the intersection of pop gaming and the Elder Things.
Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn’t make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.
Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.
I know all the best words, okay, people are saying that I know the most beautiful words, okay, no one knows more about words than I do, big beautiful words, the WORDIST even.
I don't think that the issue is the quality of their QA. Well, okay, maybe that's a factor, but I don't think that that was the big one for Fallout 76.
Some of the issues in Fallout 76 that they shipped with, they had to know they were shipping with. It wasn't that QA didn't turn up problems, but that they took too-ambitious a plan, ran out of time, and then didn't delay the release to fix all the broken stuff. Yeah, they did a lot of work to fix the game post-release, but by then, a lot of players had already been soured by the initial bad experience.
They did significantly delay the Starfield release, so I assume that they are trying to put this out in a more-sane shape.
Honestly this is what pissed me off about the reaction to cyberpunk bugs. I remember how the fallout games were at launch. And I think even now trying to play new Vegas on Xbox (360 I think?) Has an issue if your save file gets too big where the save will corrupt.
CDPR definitely over promised. But every business does. They probably should’ve not released on last gen consoles at all, but that is tricky as fuck. I mean when they started to dev cp2077, I doubt Sony and MS even had dev units for next gen. Probably should’ve delayed last gen release only, made a transparent explanation and apology, and did what they ended up doing after release. But I had a low mid tier PC that played it at a solid 60 fps without major issue at launch. And it was exactly what I had hoped.
I’ll probably also really like starfield, warts and all, when it drops. These are just my type of game.
To be honest, half the stuff people claim they lied about was always entirely speculation hype that never had any backing.
Otherwise, for some people the game worked just fine. For others the game was nearly or entirely unplayable, and everything in between. Cdpr certainly lied and should have delayed their game’s release, probably upwards of a couple years, but the situation is rarely portrayed accurately.
I’m not saying they didn’t lie, there are many of features which were at best skeletons of the features that were expected. But I’m just saying a lot of the hype around the game was so out of control you had people on the sub reddit talking about how cool the car customization will be, or how they can’t wait to play, what would’ve amounted to essentially, gtav but with arasaka. Talking any l about features which actively were never even slightly implied to exist.
People get way too excited for any game, should always expect a pile of shit these days and just be pleasantly surprised instead. People are die hard fans of games like CP2077 before they even release, it's not good.
But expectations don't come from nowhere, a lot of the city stuff they were selling was like GTA, but the AI didn't even release at a 2004 San Andreas level, it's still not as good as GTA AI and that's just people walking/driving around convincingly. GTA V itself was 7 years old when CP2077 released, it's not surprising people were expecting a simulation of the world to be at least as good as that. I think their scope was too big, there was probs a lot of mismanagement behind the scenes. I don't know how they spent 8 years on it and it still turned out like it did, I guess we will never know what happened. The story is the only saving grace, they should have just delayed it and tried to make it a more linear story game and just abandon any RPG-esque/open world elements that were left.
Being critical of games is good, especially ones that completely shit the bed, defending it just leads to more of that in the future. I love BG3 for example, but it has it's fair share of issues that I can point out every time I play it. Why would I not want better products? Why settle for less? There's too much submissive consumerism these days.
For sure. And who knows, much of that could be guerrilla marketing to stoke the hype.
Expecting cp2077 to be anything like GTA is just silly. They are entirely different games.
And the RPG elements are fine, it’s already very linear, and plays like you’re the focus character of a cyberpunk campaign. They did just fine on that front, so I don’t really understand your critique there.
I played through the whole game last year and while I had fun, you can definitely tell the scope is too big. There’s lots to do but when you do things, there isn’t much depth. Systems that you think should be in place just aren’t there. The game also has a lot of features that align with open world action games of the era like Ghost of Tsushima or Horizon Forbidden West. There’s stealth, there’s a crafting system, there’s collectibles and fetch quests. But there’s few features that align with most other role playing games. You cant get a bite to eat at nearly any restaurant. You can’t have a conversation with an NPC that isn’t one of the dozen that’s relevant to the story. (My favorite activity in fallout is to chat with random characters about random things.) Dialogue trees are shockingly stiff and inconsequential. Most missions have choices but it boils down to “X character is alive instead of unconscious.”
There’s a lot more I could go into but in general it just came across like it was almost unfinished. The only mission I played that felt like a true RPG mission instead of a stealth game or a shooter was the Flathead mission, so it makes sense that’s the mission they relentlessly previewed back in 2019.
Agreed. The biggest issue for me, as a PC gamer who expected bugs at launch, was really that it’s a stealth/action game that was marketed as an RPG even though it has precious few consequential choices or playstyle options.
Honestly this is what pissed me off about the reaction to cyberpunk bugs. I remember how the fallout games were at launch
I bought the fallout games at launch. I bought Cyberpunk months after launch when I found it on clearance. Cyberpunk was still far less playable for me than the fallout games were at launch.
This was due to:
The game crashing at least once per hour
Falling through the ground at least one per hour
Dying suddenly though nothing was attacking me at least once per hour
Questlines breaking and being un-repairable
Additionally, CP2077 had all the same bugs in Fallout/Elder Scrolls releases.
I usually power through buggy RPG releases, but I waited to give CP a couple more patches before actually trying to play through it.
The GotY version of Morrowind feels less buggy than the original release. For example, some older PC versions frequently crashed because of some pointer error in the UI. The game detected this and created crash-recovery savegames like what MS Office does for your documents.
Usually. This time, I think it might be different. Starfield is coming out in a time of live service games, and the way they talk about it, they are going for a really long-term support with plans for contents over years and everything. So this time, it could be different. Maybe.
Let’s say an extremely perilous maybe. They provided support for 76 and once they’d finally put in the game, they introduced a lighting glitch that made it impossible to see when inside overworld interiors. I’m not sure how common that bug was but it still wasn’t fixed for me after a few updates so I uninstalled and never looked back. I know it’s a sob story but Bugthesda have never failed to fail me at this point so it’s a heavy vote of no confidence for me.
For context, Bethesda provided minimal support to Obsidian and gave them an absolutely absurdly short development time frame to make the game in. I think it was only a year.
The bugginess isn’t all their fault. The game director even released a free mod or two after the game released to do some rebalancing and add a survival mode to it.
it was 100% obsidians fault. they agreed to the time, and they yet again were way too ambitious, like with kotor 2. its just who obsidian is, bad time management and bad ambition management. they do make great games but those are 2 real flaws they have
At least they no have MS money behind them so they can go that last mile and tidy things up now. Much like Bethesda here too, under Zenimax Starfield would have been out last year with all those bugs and issues still in place.
I think they definitely could, and have. Super buggy games are kind of their thing, it didnt stop with new vegas.
But I dont think it will hurt sales. Long as it isnt crashing the game, people have been waiting for a bethesda rpg like this for ages. Even if npc heads do rotate like propellors people will buy this thing.
You don’t want to play in a sandbox with threeish worlds of actual content and another 900+ of randomly generated garbage missions/barren worlds/mass effect 1 terrain ‘exploration’?
I feel bad for the teams that had to go into “double crunch” mode after BG3 came out. Just so they can get the game into not embarrassing shape for launch.
Or they could, you know, wait for it to be ready to release. How about they wait to announce it until the game is done, and then spend the last few months polishing it?
As long as they’re not game breaking, that’s the best we can hope for. Or at least that they are entertaining bugs. With Skyrim, I admit after the patches I missed seeing flying mammoths and cows.
I remember encountering those giants outside whiterun on launch and having one yet me practically to dawnstar. It was hilarious and I wasn’t mad at all.
I look forward to getting it on sale a year or two after its release, but “least buggy” bethesda game still leaves a lot of rooms for bugs. It’s like saying the “least buggy and most polished 3d sonic game yet!” . I still expect to sometimes clip through a loopdiloop and die.
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Aktywne