It’s definitely not starting from scratch, it’s just throwing away what they built so far.
To be honest though although I’m not a game dev it does seem like a pretty reasonable decision given presumably the difficulties of maintaining your own engine. This will hopefully allow them to invest more time into different parts of the game and avoid a repeat of the Cyberpunk launch. I wonder if that launch and issues that lead to it was a big part of the drive behind the decision.
That said, I am a bit worried about what seems to be a bit of a consolidation happening with game engines after Unity burning a lot of bridges and now CDPR not moving forward with their in house engine. It’d be nice to see some more competition in this space I think. That’s my layman’s take at least, maybe there are already plenty of options that I’m just not aware of.
The stuff you can do in UE5 just makes it a no brainer for everyone. Especially if you want an object and detail dense environment where lighting is super important. UE5 and cyberpunk is a match made in heaven.
I do home Godot can get similar features to UE5 one date. I’m rooting for those guys.
I’m also a little sad that REDengine is getting scrapped after seemingly finally getting to a pretty decent spot, and I definitely wish there was more competition for Unreal.
That being said, it’s a very understandable decision given not just the capabilities and ease-of-use of UE5 but also its popularity, which means finding new developers competent with it is easier and onboarding is faster.
And as you say, it lets them focus on actually making games.
This is easily verified by installing an original hard copy into a xbox one with no internet. It installs a “beta” version. You know you did it correctly when the opening scene has no over dialogue just music. Every vendor stand can be interacted with and certain models can be looked at in 3d in the menus. It’s wild to play now that we’re on 2.0.
Umm… honesty. Games used to run on the bleeding edge of performance. Not Bethesda games but just games in general. Now the release half broken blatant cash grabs and think no ones gonna call them out for it.
They don’t think that. They just know that the people will pay up anyway, bringing in the profits for shareholders and the C-suite, and that’s all that matters.
The DLCs, cosmetics, MTX, etc. are all pretty much alive and well despite everything just because enough people cash out, so why change their ways?
AAA gaming is a big industry, and big industries are nothing wholesome.
“we have worked a lot on PC performance. wanted to reach performance parity with consoles for release on similar hardware and we achieved that, However, our teams will continue working on improvements and integrating technologies like fsr and dlss in the future. “
Seriously? Just say that we’re always trying to optimize our games and we’ll continue working on it. It’s such an easy question to tackle. I refuse to believe you can’t see that. People just think Bethesda is above criticism for some inane reason.
That’s not an answer that people would have accepted either and no matter what answer was said, it would have been dissected and criticized by the syllable.
The point I’m trying to make here is that “optimize your game” doesn’t help anybody. Especially not as an interview question. You might as well have asked “why didn’t you make your game fun?”
I have MSFS2020 and enjoy completing long haul flights. literally a whole workday spent where I see nothing but cockpit controls and the sky through the window, with no interaction needed due to autopilot. then I bring her in to land 10 hours later.
Very different games and very different expectations of effort spent. I’ve space trucked a lot in Elite, spending hours going back and fort. But it was never dull, more of a relaxing experience.
That comment stems from games failure to live up to its promises.
This game was marketed as an explorers game with 1000 planets to see, for example.
None of those planets have even the half of the content Skyrim/Fallout has. None of those planets are barren as Elite’s planets, either. You can’t traverse them more than 30 minutes, so it doesn’t even scratch NMS itch. People that liked the exploration of any of those four games would dislike this games exploration very much.
The person above was probably expecting a more lively game, like any other Bethesda game and got whatever this is instead. It’s completely justified to be disappointed.
I have no clue what people are talking about? I have beaten it twice and surveyed an entire solar system and there was plenty. You can fly around to any point in most planets and moons and have stuff generate at each landing, within hiking distance.
I feel like the game is so big and good, the haters are just hating and being stupidly immature about it.
I think here we are reacting to the colossally dumb reasoning in the quote from the article. Astronauts had a few things to be excited about that gamers… won’t
Everything in the game is “within hiking distance” because that’s how the game generates planets. You don’t just “land on a planet”. You go through several hidden loading screens and arrive in a 1km x 1km square of planet.
Honestly, after the allegations on Xitter, I think it’s time for Linus to not just post apology videos but actually take a leave of absence. He’s the problem and he needs to admit that to himself. Bring in experts on fixing a broken company culture, reorg the company, let those experts fire some problem people, go take some classes on leadership full-time, and come back in a few months and just be a talking head at his company. No leadership at all.
Either way I’m done with them now. Maybe not forever, but I’m not giving them any benefit of the doubt for a very long time.
I get what you meant but a couple means 2, so someone uploading once a week for a couple of weeks means he uploaded 2 videos, which could just be coincidence, not a pattern.
Fans patching the Bethesda games is as at least as old as Daggerfall, if not earlier. Daggerfall didn’t have Helseth and Barenziah as Dark Elves until fans fixed it. Pickpocketing in Morrowind is broken unless you use the code patch. The Oblivion leveling problem punishes you for playing the game.
Like every guide for every Bethesda game is going to start with download this unofficial patch, and the unofficial patches for the DLC, and this installer. They’ve relied on fans and treated the community like it’s an FOSS community, without realizing that without good product, the volunteers won’t come.
Yes, but that shouldn’t be the norm, or an expectation, of the developer. “Oh, we don’t need to worry about the game, the fans will just mod it and it’ll bring us lots of money!”
There are just so many good games out there. No time to play them all. Also i think epic free games and this prime free game stuff contributed to it. I just started playing bioshock bc of it. Also on pc it feels so good to play an old game and just crank up every setting to max, 4k, install some mods, no ai upscaling but msaa 8x and not having to worry about performance even on mid range PCs. I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games since for me image clarity is much more important than how many polygons a gun has or how the puddle of water reflects light. Like even the new unreal engine 5 games cannot run maxxed out on a 5090 in 4k without upscaling. They only look good in trailers.
!patientgamers might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
And also, 60 EUR for a single game is a price at least I am not willing to pay for the average game, so in addition to getting a better game, I also get a cheaper one.
There is stuff worth paying that much out there, but it’s not Call of Duty Black Ops Eleventeen
Black ops 6 is so bad IMHO. It takes forever to boot up the game and then hits you with the “update available, quit & restart”. Then waiting another 5 mins to download the update, then another couple mins to reach the main menu again. Oh and what was the actual update? To hit me with an advertisement video of season whatever…with new purchases for dumb costumes etc. Like c’mon just let me play the damn game already! When Im finally in a match the gameplay feels rigged…like I’m playing slots in Vegas than an actual video game. The respawns appearing out of nowhere. I honestly believe what I’m seeing on my screen is not what the other player is seeing. Its like these game designers purposely made this game based on an algorithm rather than setting game rules and allowing the players to compete based on skill. Maybe I’m way off on this (and am just a terrible cod player lol) but would like to hear other people’s opinion on this.
all the advertisements, constantly wanting me to spend more money when the game was already expensive to begin with. The game play as described as above. Also the perks/tiers suck. Makes for a very unenjoyable experience. The game is just not fun.
We’re at Black Ops 6 already? They made 6 of them? Are there other Call of Duty games as well since? I think the last I played was Infinite Warfare, I think I have WWII in my library unplayed.
I actually really have enjoyed the game itself but you aren’t fucking kidding about the rest of it. It’s truly insane how much friction there is between deciding to play and getting into a lobby.
I will say, the zombies mode is the best version in many years. For the low price of $0 through gamepass (which I get for free through an MS Rewards farming script), I can’t complain too much about it. But I wish they would just release a standalone zombies game at some point, it’s literally the only thing I like about cod and would gladly actually buy it (assuming it isn’t ass, which is like 50/50 with cod lol).
Funny enough, black ops 2, a game from 2012, is still listed at full price at $60—or $100 if you want the DLC—online. On the other hand, the current black ops 6 only costs $70 and new content is free. Admittedly, 2 was a far better game in just about every regard from what I know. But the fact that a modern game is $30 cheaper than a 12 year old game is fucking insane. Activision is so bad with this shit.
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style, the graphical fidelity of today’s games was too far out of reach. BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction.
AAA games used to have character to them, now every person has to have 1200 individually rendered pores and a remaster every few years to make it look more realistic (cough cough The Last of Us)
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style>
BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction. >
I totally agree with you. Another good example is Alice: Madness Returns. Just booted it up for the first time yesterday and it looks so good, pleasing in a way.
Dude, not finishing the story and leaving us all on a cliffhanger for seventeen fucking years and then giving this as an excuse is the real cop out.
Looking back, I actually don’t like what Half-Life did to the genre. It didn’t push it forward; it made everything after a linear, set-piece experience with minimal replay value. It might have been different back in the day, but it wasn’t something I had hoped other developers clung to like they did.
:It doesn’t necessarily have to be open world as is currently used these days. The OG Doom isn’t exactly linear, but also isn’t open world in any sense. Remove the loading times between levels and it would be open world in the way that term was originally used. The desirable aspect of an open world, for me, has more to do with the continuity of the play space than how games calling themselves open world games are designed. Free to explore the map without it just being a series of hallways with only one actual path and maybe 1 dead end per fork where they stick a “secret” or treasure.
The OG Doom is fairly linear, unless you play on the lowest difficulty level where all doors are permanently open. Else you need to kill specific enemies that can only be found in certain rooms to get keys.
At this point, I’m aching desperately for that linear shooter. They have other strengths. Halo Infinite offered a ton more freedom than the old games, but it was worse off for it.
I think it was inevitable. Before HL2 we had Deus Ex. It was glorious. Fans loved it. Game devs looked at it and went “F*%@ that! We’re not making 3 games worth of content when you’re only going to see 1 on a given play through!”
So that defines the basic tension. Gamers love replay value and multiple paths and different character builds and tons of secrets to explore. Game devs on the other hand want players to see every little blade of grass and tree they worked so hard at placing in the game. I think they also have a lot of data from achievements that show most gamers barely finish the game once, let alone discover all the secrets and alternate endings etc.
I’ll just say as an aging gamer, I simply do not have time to grind or replay things. I could do that stuff in highschool, but not anymore.
Grinding especially is a no-go for me. 100% achievements? No chance in hell that’s happening.
Life moves too fast and there’s too much entertainment. Devs that think people have time to sit there and enjoy some obscure shit they hid, will be disappointed.
That’s an interesting take! I’m getting to be an aging gamer myself and I no longer really play story-focused games. I play Roguelikes which I can pick up and drop any time, 5-10 minutes at a time, here and there. These games are designed to have maximum replay value. So even though I don’t have a lot of time I spend it on replaying rather than playing new games!
It’s an interesting difference and I think it depends on what we both look to get out of games.
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