It sucks, on one hand I’d prefer a delay so they can release what they’re happy with - but on the other this is a developer that I know and trust to continue working to make things better for a long time. For many other games this would leave a bitter taste, but for this one it’s a bit of a shrug for me.
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.
Erroneous bans, they intend to reverse them once AMD implements a fix:
AMD's latest driver has made their "Anti-Lag/+" feature available for CS2, which is implemented by detouring engine dll functions.
If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban.
Once AMD ships an update we can do the work of identifying affected users and reversing their ban. @AMD
The Anti-Lag software from AMD seems to get flagged as some sort of cheating from the Anti Cheat software by Valve, as it tempers the Counter Strike code. In other words, its not compatible. AMD should have tested and worked together with Valve, before shipping the update. It's not to blame Valve, because the Anti Cheat software works as intended, but AMD, because they did not work with Valve before launching their software.
Anti-lag has been in the amd drivers for a long time. This seems more to be caused by Valve rushing CS2 out the door so the drivers couldn't be thoroughly tested.
On the one hand, happy to get the opportunity… on the other hand, this kind of just increases the testing overhead needed to finalise the preview version and ship the final version to more devices. Win some, lose some.
I’m not really looking for spoilers so I only took a quick glance, but it looks neat. I heard the main quest line wasn’t that long so I’ve been avoiding it; however, if there are that many powers to unlock, it can’t be too short. I’ll probably resume those quests tonight.
They become semi-side quests once you reach a certain point in the main quest line. Technically, I think you only have to collect just one to three of them to finish the story. I’m not 100% sure though, I too have been too distracted by non-mainline quest thingies.
I just did my first one after about 50 hours and I really hope there’s not many of them… I didn’t know what I was doing or if I was doing it right untill I passed it.
My experience with starfield is “ughh this is annoying, ughh this part sucks, oooh thats kinda cool” and then I check my save file and have over 130 hours. So basically my typical Bethesda experience. 10/10 would do again.
This also shocked me when playing Starfield, I basically just completed one of the faction quests and basically just spent time building and stealing ships and my playtime is more than 100 hours. WTF.
Second: Some people find the game enjoyable enough. Not every part will be though. If I turn off the startup logo shit, am I wasting my money? That’s part of the vanilla experience that I’m now missing, right? How is this different if not?
I’ve got better stuff to do with my time then those temples and that more important than any “value” I lose not engaging in it. However, how is it valuable to do? If it isn’t enjoyable, it wastes time, and I don’t get anything for it, isn’t that the reverse of value? Isn’t the smart thing to do removing it? Wtf is wrong with you where you’d want to engage with something you don’t enjoy?
Dude, read. I didn’t pay for it. Damn, you’re annoying. I’m done. I’m not sure why I responded so many times when you’re clearly a troll, or at least as good as one.
Obviously Im referring to the game when I say paid, not the mod that would be even funnier, well if being intentionally obtuse helps u cope like when youre equating logo to gameplay, so be it
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 saw a bit of those on stream and thought maybe the time affected the quality of the result… but no. It’s just filler shit to get your space dragon speech spell or whatever. Then the enemies are all bullet sponges. It all seemed very transparent and very familiar.
pcgamer.com
Gorące