All game content and story issues aside, what pisses me of the most is that a month after release, we still only had a microscopic amount of bugfixes that don't even address some of the larger issues with the game.
I don't want to bring up BG3 again, but at this timespan after the game release, Larian already fixed THOUSANDS of bugs, big and small and overall, the game was much less obviously buggy than Starfield is. It's issues were more inconsistencies in logic and a handful of quest breakers, but otherwise not even noticeable until you read the patch notes.
It's crazy to me there's so little action from Bethesdas side in fixing this heap. I guess it rolls into their bullshit PR of pushing for Awards (they are literally looking to get a Grammy ...) and saying the game is nigh on perfect.
When has Bethesda ever released patches to fix anything short of game breaking bugs? And even then more often than not they don’t fix those.
I mean, some of the most popular mods for fallout 4 and skyrim were community patches. I’m not saying I agree with that practice, just that this is par for the (shitty) course for Bethesda. Starfield probably won’t be an actually good game until there are thousands of mods for it.
I’d wager technical debt is the reason. It’s no secret that Bethesda’s engine is bad. Bad code makes it harder to do bug-fixes, because it’s harder to find the root cause of things and the risks of having accidental side-effects is far higher. There’s only so many hacks and emergency fixes you can slap into a codebase before it becomes a house of cards that collapses if you breathe on it the wrong way.
The engine is what makes the games so great though, no other engine I know is so flexible and open for mods, while at the same time can keep states for huge numbers of game objects that can be manipulated and moved freely in the whole Game world. Yes it has limitations but I am happy to live with those in exchange for what it enables. It is more then a fair trade in my eyes.
“This is the way it’s always been done” is also the same rhetoric bigots use to justify racism. Just because Bethesda has always sucked ass doesn’t mean anyone likes it or wants them to continue to suck ass.
What the fuck are you on about? I’m not defending Bethesda. I’m saying that if a company makes games with the exact same kind of flaws every time - getting upset when they do it again suggests the issue might be with the inability to make basic inference.
It’s like if you don’t like chocolate, buy a bar of chocolate, and going “Gah! This one has chocolate too!”.
They didn’t rewrite the creation engine. It’s going to have the same feeling and issues as other games made with that engine. It wouldn’t have to be this way if they had done a good job. But, they don’t seem to have to do that for a lot of people to enjoy their games. But being surprised by it? Nah, that’s on you (figuratively)
Being disappointed requires unmet expectation. “Surprised”. Why don’t you pick a word you prefer that conveys unmet expectations? I think you know perfectly well what I mean. And if you don’t, then, well, I’m not here to argue.
Bethesda has a bad reputation and still sells so they don’t need to fix it. Their reputation is to make games with the things you outlined specifically
I’m almost certain most of the team went on vacation after launch. However, that should probably be over by now and there still hasn’t been much of anything as far as I’m aware.
Please explain the larger issues with the game. I have like 50 hours into it and the only things I’ve noticed were 1 glitched quest (Madam Devine won’t progress, which was fixed with 1 command) and some companion bonuses not applying. Also my chameleon-wearing companion’s head would remain invisible sometimes! But largely the game has played well. It’s great to bitch and moan but what actual bugs are you talking about, because personally I haven’t seen them!
Rarely, outposts can become unbuildable. You have to save and reload
The bounty system is slightly more jank than I’m used to. Sometimes I’ll get a 15000 bounty for a stealth kill while unseen - those 15000 bounties never go away from witness death. Other times a 650 bounty that immediately goes away from “last witness died”. I had to save-scum a pirate ship because it happened with some specific folks, and I solved it by chucking a grenade into the bridge. I commented elsewhere, grenades are super-stealth and you usually get away with throwing a grenade in full view in a crowded room if you can hide before it blows up.
I’d like to see #2 fixed/improved, but honestly don’t mind either very much.
I had to use a cheat and kill a achievements because into the unknown was bugged. Where the temple should have spawned there was a mining rig and the scanner never distorted. It’s a pretty common issue reported over and over again on their discord (which is a freaking horrible way to deal with support BTW). And then on the final quest one of the mini bosses clipped through an elevator and I had to wait like 10 mins while he decided to teleport behind me.
I wouldn’t say that past generations wanted to be marketed to, it’s just that before the internet, marketing was the closest a customer could get to being spoken to by a brand.
And at some point in the history of marketing, I think companies used to see it that way too, marketing was a means of communicating with potential customers what your product offered. But as capitalism progressed, and media outlets expanded (print, radio, film, TV, etc.), honesty was optimized out in favor of “bamboozleism”.
It’s now easier than ever for a brand to have a direct, two-way conversation with their customers at any time, but marketers are still stuck in that 20th century mindset of “we just say whatever we want, and you just accept it”. The internet is in the process of popping that bubble.
Largely agree. I think the bamboozlers were there the whole time - after all, a lot of early radio was for propaganda purposes. But I do think most companies try to do things the right way, and there was a point when marketing was seen as simple outreach.
I work in the industry, and yeah. Before, marketing was based on utility. “Buy this because it can do this and this and that”, basically marketing how effective or what it can actually do for you. Around the 50s (in the US) marketing changed to be based around lifestyle. “Buy this so you can be this”. Now nearly all ads appeal to emotion instead of reason, and it is very effective.
Researching about what a product offers is so much harder than just buying on a whim because the ads and the product are colorful.
You can see this change in old (really old) newspapers. Ad spreads were chock full of text about features. Now 3/4ths of the ads are an image of a happy woman if marketed for gals, or a stoic muscly man if marketed for guys.
Ubisoft games have such a weird “design by committee” feel to it. Like they poll the internet every few weeks and make decisions off of that. New hot game has battle pass? WE HAVE BATTLE PASS.
They also seem to follow a checklist of mediocrity. Every game needs a dozen collectable items. Every game needs to have the same l types of quests that GTA3 had. Every game has to have a massive open world. Every game needs a online component and live service. Every game needs a incredible hook, which then they Marvel-safe it to avoid offending online babies.
Their games come off with 7/10 energy. Ubisoft games don’t move the needle. They’re pretty adequate as a game. But when I have thousands of games to choose from every year… Ill pass.
They CAN still be fun. General fact of the matter is that the games we find fun aren’t always necessarily innovating much. Sometimes it’s just a comfortable routine.
Absolutely not going to fault anyone that finds their games boring though.
I played the Division 2, Ac Valhalla and FarCry 6 for 100+ hours. They helped me during the worse times of the pandemic.
But if I was talking to friends or making recommendations, we’d be taking about games that are better than that. The Elden Rings or the Ghost of Tsushima
I think the problem is that they use the same open world formula that they started, but others have taken and improved it and they haven’t kept up with the times. Shadow of Mordor/war scratch the same itsch as assassin’s creed with more interesting mechanics. Those aren’t even new games at this point. Horizon zero dawn and forbidden West offer a more action focused experience with a better open world, again not super modern games.
It’s like Bethesda, they are still putting out games that are straight from 2010.
I like steam as a user but it’s still proprietary software and I’m slightly concerned about what is going to happen when Gabe Newell steps down as president and ceo of Valve.
They are a Russian Developer with contacts to military units who support the war in Ukraine and also mocked Ukrainian with screenshots in their game…so why expect you no shitty behavior from them?
From what I found they have made no comment other than “they will not leave any markets due to war”
As for being Russian
"We have a mix of talent, some veteran developers, some new to game development. But everyone loves guns and FPS games. One of the studio leads is actually a former Spetsnaz officer, the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Special Forces."
I am aware they are Russian, and I don’t expect them to actively condemn the invasion, as it would be dangerous for them. If there is proof they were actively supporting the war or mocking Ukraine, that’s a different story.
They moved their office to London (wonder why…) but part of the team still works from their origin in Russian St. Petersburg. And here is what I’ve found:
And this happened more than once, so that is a long-term partnership. Buyanov recorded joint videos with Dmitry “Goblin” Puchkov, a Russian translator and blogger known for his anti-Ukrainian stance. And Puchkov himself was a guest at the Battlestate Games studio.
Nikita Buyanov and his company actively partnered with companies in the Russian military-industrial complex. This group actively funds and supplies separatists, they ask for donations to supply their members who are going to fight in Ukraine, they participate in podcasts from occupied cities and Tarkov’s developers prop up their platform by including them (in no small capacity) in their game.
One of the new traders they are planning to add into the game is named “Khokhol” which is an anti-Ukrainian ethnic slur used by russians. There is also a feature in the game where you can become a character called a “Scav” when you become one you are assigned a random russian name, sometimes they are memes like “garandthumb” or “robokop” but in their depravity, there is a chance that your character can be named “Hohol” which you see when you die, or other players see when you kill them.
The developers of Escape from Tarkov, the Russian studio Battlestate Games, have published several new screenshots of the game. As Artem Lys noticed, on one of them the character shows the middle finger to the player in pixel uniform and with yellow tape on his hand, which clearly symbolizes the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
" A moderator on the game’s Discord server, for instance, said “watching u all cry, amuses me so much,” while another said on Reddit that complaints about weapon nerfs were perhaps in reality a question of “skill issue.” "
Are you kidding? That’s fucking hilarious. Learn to use a different weapon than the railgun you absolute chuffs.
There is this exercise you can do for Agile/Lean estimation where you run a multi stage beer store by passing only order quantity notes up and down a chain.
The intent is to trick the participants into a whiplash effect where the retail store has a one off jump and so orders bigger than normal, and the whole supply chain then gets excited and thinks this is the new normal rather than an anomaly.
The exercise ends and the excess beer in the chain is counted.
You are not wrong, but remember that they only employ like 40-50 people. Even if the playerbase goes down to 10% of what it is that’s still not a lot of people.
David Rosen of Wolfire Games (Receiver, Overgrowth, Lugaru) is alleging that steam reps have threatened to de-list his game if he lists it as less expensive on other platforms. Specifically not just steam keys but other distribution platforms.
Which is hard to believe, considering how many times I’ve bought steam games on other (legitimate) platforms that were cheaper than on steam, that are still on steam today and werent removed for being cheaper on another platform.
I believe it is in the Steam marketplace agreement, and applies to all games. Are you referring to sales on other platforms, or to the full listed price?
Sure, but Valve essentially reserve the right to no longer sell your game if it’s offered cheaper elsewhere. See the quotes on pages 54 through 56 of the complaint.
I think the justification would probably be that if they continued listing the item:
It maybe mislead consumers into paying more for the same thing
The reason why people pay more in that scenario is for convenience (IE all games in the same place) but that would be exersizing valves monopoly, so it may be safer to just remove to reduce complaints to steam about the higher pricing because there will be operational cost to processing those support requests and complaints
I don’t feel like valve does everything because of lawsuits. Open sourcing proton wasn’t due to a lawsuit. Releasing Cs2 as a free upgrade to csgo wasn’t due to a lawsuit.
On the other hand and in response to your comment, I think the regulatory fix is that platforms must display their platform fee clearly and separately to the publishers price.
CS2 as an “upgrade” to CSGO has been less than well received from what I can tell. If they wanted it to be free it should have been a new game and left CS:GO in place. Removing a game many of us paid for in favor of a newer, different game isn’t something that should be praised, and should be called out as the anti-consumer move it was.
It isn’t the peoples’ company, but nor is it a publicly traded company that is obligated to pursue profits above all else. It’s Gabe’s company, and he gets to run it as he sees fit.
Ultimately Wolfire’s argument falls apart not because Valve is setting the terms, but because their claims about Valve’s position in the industry and supposed abuse of power don’t hold much water.
No corporation is “the peoples corporation”, but some corporations treat their customers with a lot more respect and fairness in pricing/policies than others.
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