I’m kind of used to devs releasing apologies for their games after a bad release and the following review bombing. It’s almost guaranteed to happen for any modern AAA game, it’s the sorry state of the industry. But now, we’ve reached a point where devs apologize for their games before they’re even released. This shit is hilarious.
What’s next? “We’re going to release a game four years from now. You should temper your expectations, it’s probably going to suck.”
I mean, kudos to them for warning the potential customers, instead of lying to them or luring them in with nice trailers and trying to silence journalists by prohibiting them from showing game footage (I think I remember someone doing that…). Although I’m not sure how I should thank them. Should I buy the game because they were honest? Or should I not buy it, because, well, they were honest? I’m confused.
I mean, I think it just demonstrates that the problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.
Crunch and unreasonable deadlines in the gaming industry are the norm, and there’s too much pressure from higher up to deliver a product as soon as possible, even if it isn’t 100% ready.
Unfortunately, there’s no real good answer for this as a consumer… If the game does well, the execs who set the deadlines pocket the profits. If it does poorly, the developers who worked on it bear the brunt of it by either getting insufficient raises, an even higher level of pressure on the next game, or at worst, get laid off.
The real answer would be widespread industry unionization. Efforts to do this are ever-so-slowly being made, but it’s not even remotely close to being a reality. I’d say that if the game appeals to you and you don’t mind performance issues at launch, buy it, but if not, then don’t.
problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.
In any industry as time progresses the production becomes more and more capital intensive and that needs more and bigger investors and all that capital means that there is a bigger risk and that is mitigated by the investors by requiring “their guys” to staff the management and these people are unusually really bad for the technical and actual value side of the business on the long run, because they are usually people with financial or marketing backgrounds. They fundamentally work by the logic of profit maximization and there are always easier and more surefire ways toi achieve that than with supplying a good product. It’s even worse when the end product is something that could be considered “art”. In AAA it all eventually leads into pushing bland installments under rushed deadlines for the same once successful franchise out one after another, just because that is where the risks are lowest and money is still being made.
You're failing to take Paradox's lifecycles into account. Even though they're only the publisher, keep in mind that they're used to supporting games for 8-10 years after launch. Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 and has seen continual development ever since. Its performance was also abysmal at a point, but people kept playing and the devs kept improving it to the point where nobody even fully remembers why we cared about SimCity going to shit when Cities: Skylines was right there.
Given that Paradox has near decade-long lifecycles for their games the launch window is utterly meaningless. Hell, Europa Universalis IV had an expansion released earlier this year and it was released in 2013.
That game had the unfortunate timing of being released when everyone knew CK3 was around the corner. It ended up being seen as a stopgap release and that just got worse when CK3 came out. It got a couple of DLCs but the players just weren't there anymore. It has some good ideas.
Of singleplayer games, it may be Quake. This one was created before the recent remaster and compatible with different engines.
In honor of Quake’s 20th anniversary, MachineGames, an internal development studio of ZeniMax Media, who are the current owners of the Quake IP, released online a new expansion pack for free, called Episode 5: Dimension of the Past.
Episode 6: Dimension of the Machine was released in 2021. Quake was released in 1996, making it 25 years.
I have a feeling there's probably some obscure-ass Nethack clone that's been getting regular updates since the creator first programmed it on a PDP/11 but outside of that I can't think of any actual commercial products that have received expansions that long after.
Yeah, guess, Doom and Quake are the earliest non-arcade games that are still accessible to current generations of players making it somehow relevant. I feel like only Sega could do something, like releasing one of their classics updated with some new content, but it won’t be the same as original cartridge releases and obviously incompatible with them.
Sure. But if you know your product is going to be trash, why not jump ahead of the curve and victimize yourself to start with? It’s not difficult to do these days, and why wouldn’t you do it? Altruism? At this point, not assuming this happens is just naive.
the game will be optimized eventually. if you want to wait until then, do so. me, I just want to play this. I don’t care I’ve been waiting a long time for this game, and I have a very powerful desktop PC so I don’t really care.
I am upset they do not have a native Linux build this time around, however. And I don’t care that proton has gotten good, a game like this needs to run natively to get the full experience. The first one did and Unity makes it trivially simple to export builds to other operating systems.
Ah, another post where I get to rant about Piratesoftware. Fuck that self righteous, egotistical, fear mongering, ignorant, big headed, grifting, skript kiddy, cornball. Dude couldn’t be assed even to read the Q&A, then makes up stuff about the initiative out of thin air. Dude is such a little weezel, I can’t BELIEVE he still has a following after his hate campaign against the initiative. The fact that anyone outside of his immediate family cares about what he has to say boggles my mind.
Louis Rossman is, at best, a “free speech absolutionist” libertarian, but he is probably the youtuber with the most experience actually working to get consumer (well, small business) rights legislature passed. And he specifically talked about this www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4zH8bJDI8
In a nutshell: It doesn’t matter if thor is a dipshit (he is and always has been). Attack the arguments, not the person. Because others will have similar complaints and all “He is a fucking prick and he didn’t read the FAQ” does is hurt your argument and make things seem culty.
Because if it really WAS actually addressed (and understand that a response is not necessarily a refutation), point that out. Rather than require people to go dig through a bunch of youtube videos and blog posts.
The relevant actors in this discussion already tried to address the arguments. Ross made a response video because Thor refused to talk to him like a petulant child.
Thor simply doesn’t care, his first comment to the initiative was literally “eat my whole ass”[sic]. The whole conversation is way past rational discourse. Thor decided to actively oppose the initiative under the main argument of “this is fucking stupid”(direct quote). There simply isn’t any rational argument to address. It’s all a personal attack and misinformation from a narcissist with an audience. He knows that this initiative kills his grift business. That’s all there is to know about the content of his rationality.
They certainly didn’t conduct themselves in a polite or persuasive manner during their argument(s). As others have said in this thread: he has attacked everything but the topic and when they did they (purposefully) seemed very confused about the overall goal and desire of the campaign.
Is this a case of being wrong about your initial conclusions and doubling down? Or is this a bad actor spreading purposeful misinformation? Going by the video alone it’s hard to see an alternative.
He’s a dev himself. He won’t be able to abandon his next game after it flops if this goes through. That’s why he’s spreading disinformation. I can only hope MoistCritikal’s video on it helps.
Also, SKG should seek legal action for defamation.
See, this again. They can abandon their game, it’s just that they have to patch out call home to function functionality. Patch out account verification and other bullshit. The game won’t work like before? That’s OK, it’s about reasonable playability. MMO with no players? That’s OK. No match making? That’s OK. However it was playing before abandonment, just let that run on the computer.
Maybe the final law will ask for a local server client, but the petition is only asking for reasonable playability. Reasonable.
He is referring to the fact that the only game pirate software has made was abandoned 7 years ago in early access and the dude just keeps patching it without significant content to avoid steam flagging and keep charging money for an unfinished demo. It’s an unimaginative ripoff to boot.
If not for this, I would've chalked this up to the designs being abstract enough that it'd be feasible for two separate artists to have come up with them independently. The fact that he was following the artist is a bit damning.
It's a shame, because he's a fantastic artist, himself, but this is definitely going to soil his reputation, and probably calls into question some of his earlier pieces, as well.
That’s what I don’t get. Presumably there is some lore behind this game (unless they really are that lazy) so why don’t they just use one of the companies that they definitely have for the game
If you think that’s “abstract enough”, I’m guessing you’re either a plagiarist or an “AI artist”. Or do you want to admit that you didn’t really look at the comparison images?
More pics are coming out. One of them has the artist’s handle in it. Original art is the yellow to the right. Whoever added it to the game intentionally smudged the name, but left enough of it to be readabale.
Developers. UE5 is chalking up to be the defacto standard for modern titles that don’t have budgets large enough to make their own engine.
EGS, on the other hand, is still an abysmal failure beyond the lure of free (and increasingly shittier) games and a yearly 25% off discount coupon that people fall for.
I really wish they’d start by not making the EGS program a fucking UE5 app. Seriously, using the whole ass engine to render html is stupid beyond belief
If you peruse the folder where it’s installed and compared to any UE4 or UE5 game, you’ll notice all the other similarities in .dll files, folders and whatnot. Even the CrashReporter.exe is the same you see in unreal games. Or you can check the config files at Epic GamesLauncherEngineConfig which has stuff like BaseEngine.ini which, among other networking configurations, also has this:
Meanwhile, in Epic GamesLauncherPortalConfig, the “game” part of the launcher, you have DefaultGame.ini and DefaultEngine.ini, the latter’s first 2 lines pointing back to the Engine folder: [Configuration] BasedOn=…EngineConfigBaseEngine.ini
So, yeah, it’s the actual engine. I was going to complain about disk bloat, but my Steam install is currently sitting at 1.3GB and I’m not entirely sure how much of that is from cached stuff. GOG Galaxy is taking ~980MB, but roughly 650MB are from redist installers (MSVC2005, 2007, dotnet, etc), so a “clean” install would be way lighter than Steam or EGS, the latter at 1.1GB on a clean install.
Ever heard the saying “Everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer”? Basically, just because you have a tool, it doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for every job. UE5 is great for making games, cinematics and loads of other stuff. But why use it to effectively behave as a browser like Chrome or Firefox, but worse, when there are alternatives made specifically for that?
I don’t think benchmarks are really needed to explain this. The whole game engine part is an unnecessary step.
To initialize a web browser component within UE5, you first need to initialize UE5 and then the web browser within it. Or, you could initialize a web browser directly, saving the memory and time needed to start up UE5.
They clearly have developers who know how to use CEF or whatever web view framework since they added it to Unreal Engine, so it’s not like they don’t know how to add it to a standalone application.
Wait, wait. Do you think that “the whole engine” is loaded for every UE5 executable? I can tell you that’s not at all how this works. The point of a scalable engine is that it loads whatever relevant libraries or portions of the engine that would be needed, including swapping for custom code where appropriate. The idea that the storefront is unoptimised purely because it uses a game engine is just as ignorant as saying that you should measure all computers purely by a single metric. Maybe you could also compare EGS to other stores and measure only the executable’s size? By your reasoning there’s no need for benchmarks, so surely the store with the smallest exe wins, right?
When I said “the whole game engine part”, I was referring to the usage of the engine at all. The whole engine obviously isn’t loaded, but there’s further abstractions and initialization code compared to using CEF or the Edge web view directly.
I’m simply saying that it’s a waste of resources to require loading or initializing any other part of Unreal Engine (including the component loading code!) when they’re only using it as web view.
I’m also not saying any other storefront is better. Steam is a bloated pig that half uses CEF and half uses Valve’s own proprietary GUI library, and the various other Electron-based publishers’ launchers suffer from different but equally stupid problems.
You have provided absolutely no proof that using UE5 to run EGS is a waste of resources nor that your idea of using a browser directly would be more performant. Just saying things isn’t proof and the burden sits with you.
I’m not about to install EGS to prove something that can be deduced using common sense and critical thinking.
Abstractions are not free. The more of them you add, the more resources will be consumed by the application. Unreal Engine is an extra layer of abstraction sitting above some web view framework. Ergo, using the same web view framework without the Unreal Engine component abstraction would be cheaper.
I know Godot exists, and it’s preferable to supporting Epic, but it isn’t up to feature parity with UE5. Particularly, when it comes to asset streaming and open world games, Unreal has better support out of the box.
I would love for Godot to be the standard and first choice for every developer (including AAA), though.
UE5 had turned into the standard whether you like it or not. I personally don’t like the engine, but that doesn’t mean I’ll lie about its position in the market, and neither should you. You aren’t doing Godot any favours with it
When said “major players” only pump out trash that’s not fun to play, yes, I will ignore them gladly. The last AAA game I bought was Fallen Order, which I promply refunded after finishing, since it was more of a walking and climbing simulator than anything else – and that was one of the better AAA games to come out in the past decade.
Indie devs and studios are the ones actually carrying the industry forwards.
Your preference doesn’t dictate what’s industry standard is my point. It would be like someone only playing exclusively Total War games claiming the Warscape Engine is industry standard, sounds pretty stupid doesn’t it.
The last AAA game I bought was Fallen Order,
A shame you missed out on Baldurs Gate 3 then. Alan Wake also got great criticism.
Fallacious reasoning. “Indie” isn’t a genre of games. I don’t claim AAA games are garbage because of a preference – they’re objectively slop made without passion as a cashgrab.
Steam is largely driven by Valve’s own games and freebies as well. 1.5M currently playing Dota 2 and CS 2, with the next best being F2P games: PUBG with 370K online, Apex Legends, and Naraka.
There was a lady lawyer show on TV called ally mcbeal and she was like crazy or something and used to hallucinate the dancing baby. I don’t remember it that well as it was an old people show and I was a kid but yeah way before youtube
Dancing baby was everywhere, truly the first Internet driven viral phenomenon. And yes, it did feature in Ally McBeal which was a huge TV show mid-late 90s which goes to illustrate how truly viral the dancing baby meme was at a time where Internet usage was still limited to only a minority of people with access to desktop computers.
Yeah, dancing baby was 1996, 9 years before 2005, which is an eternity in internet years. Leeroy is one of the internet’s older memes, sure, but way too new to qualify as one of the oldest.
Elon’s companies have been successful despite his input, not because of it. If you’re interested, do some reading on how middle-management protected their teams from his nonsense in both Tesla and SpaceX, basically just feeding him bullshit that sounded good and ignoring him whenever possible. Those people are why the companies have thrived.
Shit, just look at Twitter before and after. The valuation difference is staggering.
If you have a startup and someone offers you 9 figures so they’re the CEO and you still run the day to day…
You’d be an idiot to risk it, because any number of billion dollar companies can fuck you over thru innumerable ways.
So every once and a while someone with shit tier risk assessment lucks out and suddenly becomes unimaginable rich. And those are the people making offers on the next generation of startups.
The system is set up so the worst people possible run shit. Because no sane person would keep “letting it ride” to the point they make billions, and a crazy person who does becomes too big to fail. And once they get to that point, they’ve convinced themselves no one else is smart enough to play Russian roulette 100 times in a row.
At that point they’ve conned themselves into really believing they’re geniuses who know more than anyone.
I tell people this all the time. There are people who have the job of distracting musk like a 3 year old. They don’t believe it and continue to worship him. They act like he personally invented everything and refuse to accept the truth. The only thing he actually invented was the cybertruck.
Did he actually invent the Cybertruck? He drew the world’s shittiest picture that was all straight lines and then made a bunch of toddler-level claims about its abilities while demanding results from the teams of real people that actually had to make his nonsense even somewhat functional.
People who deserve the title of inventor actually do the fucking work. He just said “and it’ll be invincible and climb over mountains and can pull GOD and be SO COOL”
I read this whole article by some truck review guy? And he was confused because he said the cyber truck came within a hair of filling a niche in the truck world that was pretty much free to take, but just narrowly ended up being in a much better established range of trucks that it had no hope in competing in. So yeah… he did all the demanding and none of the thinking, and everyone else was just there for the paycheck.
The niche was what the Rivian and fuck, even the F150 Lightning are doing. The Cybertruck looks like ass and I could almost say the appearance is “kinda neat for trying something different” if it wasn’t such a dogshit product in every single way.
I can’t help but laugh every time I see one, and in the occasional instance that the owners actually pay attention to the world around them and notice, they always glare at me 😂 they know exactly how fucking stupid they look, they just try to pretend nobody agrees
It’s crazy impressive. Especially on a technical level. But it feels like a tech demo more than a game almost. It’s still fun to idle time away in, but it’s not engaging. At all. It’s brain idle time. In a positive way, but also no more than that.
In this case I’d call that a positive statement. That’s what I was looking for when I decided to get the game… I’m not going to shell out my dimes to Bethesda hoping for disco elysium, I basically want something that makes demands of my brain just a little more than solitaire or minesweeper.
I don’t really agree with it not being ‘engaging’ though, I guess depending on what you mean. I’m not staying up at night wondering what’s gonna happen next, but I’m staying up past my bedtime designing space ships and then running out of cash and going and doing a fun loot-and-shoot mission to get more money to build more space ships. That ain’t bad.
Not necessarily but yea it trades the bespoke environments for generated ones that aren’t so dissimilar.
I think it makes for interesting comparison. Both space traveling games, one comprised of specially designed levels navigated by menus, the other less variety but you actually journey to them and given the sheer number you can actually discover and name a planet no one’s ever been to.
Both valid but I think starfield shouldn’t really advertise in exploration. Unlike NMS it’s far more narrative based.
Both valid but I think starfield shouldn’t advertise really advertise in exploration. Unlike NMS it’s far more narrative based.
Yep. There are three space games on the market that are not too far apart: NMS, Elite: Dangerous, and Starfield. They have similarities, they have differences, and they have different target audiences.
I told my buddy the other day that it was Bethesda Menu Simulator 2023, and I wasn’t wrong. I was working on my outpost, so I’d place some stuff, go to star map, select the planet with the material, pick a landing spot, land, get up, mine ore for 5 minutes, fast travel to ship, repeat 2-3 more planets, choose the outpost, land, place some more stuff. Then repeat.
i find it less headache to just sit in UC distrobution and fast forward 24 hours to keep reseting inventory to get all the mats I need to build, at least my starter shit.
Or, and I know this is a crazy idea, Bethesda could have made a game that has enough content to fill the space (pun intended) they created. Yes. I can run back to my ship through the mined out area I just cleared just to prove a point that the game is as flawless as you’d like to believe. Or, I can offer one fair critique of the game.
I’m looking forward to what modders do with the canvas Bethesda has provided.
Nah I mean you can just fast travel off the planet without first having to fast travel back to your ship, a few less loading screens and menu interactions right there.
Honestly, I didn’t even think to just go to another planet without stopping by my ship first. That’s somehow… worse? I thought it was super weird when I realized I could do it from the outpost without a ship nearby, but hadn’t thought to just fast travel everywhere all the time.
coming from elite dangerous, flying in NMS feels incredibly simplified. landing is literally “push a button to land”. either way, they both beat starfield in that department
Totally it is but that’s the style. The game isn’t trying to simulate complexity, it’s more a kick back and relax game masquerading as a prog-rock album cover. Pressing X to let your ship land itself gives you just enough time to hit a joint and make a plan.
that may be true, but starfield has some fun quests and interesting characters, which makes the world feel real and not like im the last human being in the universe
I played the game 40+h without any mods and had a lot of fun. It is very much enjoyable without mods. Can mods make the game better? Yes, sure Are the mods needed to have fun with the game? Absolutely not.
For my curiosity, what on Earth could you possibly do for those 40 hours? Cause for me that’s about 5 times more than it’s worth spending with the game in its current state.
I’m 60 hours in and haven’t touched the outpost, ship building, or equipment modding. Main quest and 2 faction side quests completed. I’ve enjoyed my time and bought the game with the expectation that it would be FO4 with some things improved some things worse and a new setting.
There are definitely failings and it’s not a 10/10 game but for a lot of people it’s a great game. The proc gen system needs more variety but that can be improved through updates and mods. If you prefer handcrafted content follow the quests and you’ll see minimal repeats of the POIs. I don’t regret my purchase one bit and would be fine if no DLC, mods, or updates happen even though I prefer they do. End of the day make your own decision based on what you like just realize it’s not a dumpster fire and not the perfect game that everyone should run out and play.
I did more or less like you. I tried the outpost a bit, but when I realized they were irrelevant (same with modification and ship building) I just continued the main quest.
The dame has flaws, and I generally don’t buy games when they just come out, but I’m not disappointed in this purchase, despite the flaws of the game.
Lots of cool side quests, a main quest that is one of the best from Bethesda, exploring the universe. And yes even the power puzzles from time to time to unlock a new power. I have about 100h (hard to say as steam is not logging the time for me anymore because I use mod manager and sfse) now (started with modding after entering NG+ at about 40h and still find new fun things to do. I am in NG+2 at the moment.
Mods I use are mostly cosmetic (I love to change some posters or magazine covers when ich switch NG+) or QoL like faster animations or better UI.
I have 60 hours in and just got to the temples. There’s a ton of things to do. I’ll probably get 100 hours into the base game and then many, many more hours from mods.
You keep asking this in this thread. What answer do you want? The game has a shitload of content in it. I’m 35ish hours in and I have so many random quests and things to do. I’ve spent hours wandering around planets. Around cities. In space stations. Scanning things, reading stuff.
It’s completely fine if what the game has to offer doesn’t appeal to you, but if you truly cannot comprehend how anyone could enjoy it, then I’m afraid you just don’t have much perspective.
This is, objectively speaking, a large scale open world game with hundreds of hours of content. It should be self evident that what it has to offer will appeal to some and not to others. How can you think that because it doesn’t appeal to you, it shouldn’t appeal to anyone? That makes no sense.
I do see your point, but it's out there now. How many thousands of people just grabbed it, or will, because of the article?
Just like PGP, decss, and countless other things, it will be kicking around at the usual places for anyone who wants it for long time, probably well past the point where anyone cares anymore.
Yeah it kills me when I see someone share something like this in the early stages of development though, like great you just ensured this will never see the light of day
Damn this is a pathetic response. He could’ve said “We’ve tried our best to make it as polished as possible before launch, and are working towards further optimising it to give you the best experience, wherever you play”. Even if they did jackshit, it would not come out as condescending and snarky. Maybe he wasn’t prepared for a tough question on the spot right at the beginning of the interview, but it does show how he thinks about his games. In his mind, the game running at all on PC is optimised enough.
I am not saying he’s bad for not making Creation Engine super optimised engine on this planet, I’m saying he’s bad for not acknowledging it is currently most demanding engine despite looking merely half as good as Cyberpunk 2077 or idk Arkham Knight.
They’re clearly building their games in an extremely inefficient way. Starfield does not have anything going on in it that other games with much lower requirements also have done.
You see evidence of this in their previous games. One of the major performance issues with Fallout 4 for example, was that instead of building their cities in performant ways, they literally plonked every building as an individual asset into the world which thrashed the CPU for no reason. Modders just had to merge them all into one model to significantly improve performance. Their games are full of things like this and Starfield will be no different.
Unless I’m completely mistaken here, modders didn’t combine the buildings together, that’s how they are by default. Mods, however, sometimes needed to break said system which resulted in massively degraded performance.
Nah the Boston performance was terrible in vanilla. The precombination fixes made huge performance improvements. There were issues with mods breaking precombined meshes but that was a separate issue.
Why would he? Todd hates everyone who plays his games and cares only about separating money from pockets. Fallout 76 made that quite clear to everyone.
If he gave a standard appeasing PR statement without following it up at all, that would somehow be preferable? This may be snarky, but at least you know what to expect.
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