"I'm old, stubborn, don't know how to manage remote teams, and have no interesting in learning." - Todd Howard
Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sheds so much light on Bethesda's decades-old problems.
Edit: I'm looking forward to seeing what Ted Peterson, Vijay Lakshman, and Julian Lefay do with The Wayward Realms. These three are the actual fathers of The Elder Scrolls. Todd has been shitting on their legacy since Redguard.
AAA studios were used to having local build farms, in-person build-review sessions, and testers being in the same physical space so engineers could see what’s going on. They have collections of unreleased hardware that need to be distributed and secured.
It’s not simple to completely overhaul a setup like that and go full remote. You’re moving 100s of GB a day to each dev and trying to change every one of your processes.
Every AAA engineer I know complained about how how slow everything was remote. Studios are figuring that shit out now, but I don’t think “hurr durr Todd Howard old” is really accurate or adding anything to the conversation here
My current management has no idea as well and it has made it impossible to get anything done. We have 3 status meetings per day, with 3 different audiences, led my 3 different people, for 1 project. And we have multiple projects going on being managed like that. We have more managers and PMs than developers working on stuff. They have left 0 time to do any real deep work. If they’d leave everyone alone for even a couple days per week productivity would soar.
I have slowly faded away from those daily meetings and my rate to address issues increased. Working and supporting 2 different projects while doing extra research topics to future proof our tech or migration path. I do still have those weekly meeting though but my work pace have been better without the daily ones.
Even my manager ask me today if I want to do the biweekly checkup or skip, “well, we did the weekly this morning so I see no point of doing the biweekly.” “Sure, let’s skip.”
Now if I can have my own status board and progress bar on a internal page and tag it with my slack profile, maybe I can skip all the meeting?
There is some truth to remote being worse for engineers especially less experienced programmers that can’t talk to more senior programmers face to face.
This is where tools like Slack Huddles or Zoom come in handy. Need some face time? You are a click away. Need to collaborate on one screen? That’s one more click. Need to pair program? That’s a click.
There is nothing that is done face to face that can’t be done faster, better, and more efficiently using readily available digital collaboration tools.
Sure, the technology is available and it works well (mostly). But people are not machines, and in my experience quite a lot of them are not as comfortable communicating through chat and webcams as they are in person. Older people in particular don’t really get that they can be used for quick, informal conversations, and only use them for preplanned meetings.
So am I :) The “older people” in my comment refer to my former boss and colleagues, and their reluctance to adapt to a remote working environment was a major reason for my departure towards more remote-friendly pastures.
For sure, there were other issues, which were amplified by the distance and the lack of communication. Point is you can come up with the best technical solution to a problem, but at the end of the day if the people aren’t able or willing to adapt, there’s not much you can do except fire them (which I couldn’t) or move on (which I did).
I strongly disagree, I am a software engineer, have worked on the field for over a decade, while I understand that’s not enough to be one of the extremely senior developers but nevertheless I’m a senior software engineer that can answer any and all questions posed from a beginner or even a mid leven engineer. The company I work for pairs developers when they first join so you have someone who’s expected to be there to answer anything, this creates a positive climate and makes new joiners feel safe to come and ask questions, which in the long run makes them feel comfortable with doing the same.
When you send a message to someone on slack he can finish what he’s doing then respond, on an office setting the question will cut your thought line and cause you to lose track of what you were doing. Back when I worked at the office there were days I couldn’t get any work done because after 30min of investigation someone asked me something, then I had to redo the full backtrack of what I was doing only to be interrupted again for something stupid like shown a meme or be asked if I wanted to go out for lunch. The company I worked before my current one got so efficient during COVID that there wasn’t any work left to do, the managers had planned a year worth of projects and we finished them in a few months and they had to rush to try to find things for us to do. However working from home makes micromanaging harder, so managers who want to micromanage make everyone’s life harder (including their own), and then complain that the engineers are producing less.
100% is way too subjective to claim, if I ask someone something and I can review the semantics of how they worded it as many times as I need, I’ll definitely understand it better than if told me it in person and my ADHD brain just missed it
If you ever used the server browser in Steam itself and not from the game, that’s basically what they were. An external app that you could get a list of servers for pretty much anything you added to it.
I robbed my self of that ability accidentally, because I preferred cs 1.3/4/5 and it was won only, so I actively avoided 1.6 like the plague and with it steam. Then halflife 2 came out and I bit the bullet.
I don’t understand the people who spend a hundred hours on a game to then give it a bad rating, calling it boring. Why don’t they just quit much earlier and play Chrono Trigger or something?
I have about 30 hours in it now. I wouldn't say it gets any better over that time, if you didn't like it at the beginning you won't like it after 30 hours.
With some games after 20+ hours the honeymoon phase is over. But I want to finish it so that all this time doesn’t feel wasted. And there’s hope that the game will get better. I mean everybody else loves it so it must be a great game right?
However, often it just feels like work and it makes the flaws of the game even more obvious. And I just end up despising it.
This is the best answer, players are invested after a certain point, but the realization that they don’t like the game comes later in the process. The more you play the game you don’t like the more you’re frustrated with it and the more likely you are to give it a poor rating, especially when the things that are your biggest complaints feel like obvious bug fixes that should have already happened, but continue to exist.
That is a great question! I’ve certainly asked myself the same thing and the only answer I can come up with in 2 parts.
1: The game is compulsive. While you are playing you want to keep playing. And while the moment to moment interactions are dull (imo) but not so dull as to drive me away. There may be plenty of Oblivion nostalgia keeping me playing.
2: Many of the games problems appear in retrospect. The dumbing down of the subsystems, for example. Much like Outer Worlds; it feels fine while you’re in there but once you stop and step back you realise how crappy they are.
Yes, this was exactly how I felt when playing Fire Emblem Engage. God. I hated how the hub world basically sucked an equal amount of time for each map I cleared. Sure, the mini-games are optional,But so is brushing your teeth.
I may be getting older but it feels like a lot of games are just padding their runtime with gameplay that doesn’t mesh well at all.
To be fair, the game is so massive, any review (positive or negative) done on less than 60 hours probably won’t do the game justice. It’s entirely possible to hold hope for redeeming qualities only to be a bit disappointed in the end.
Customers aren’t professional reviewers. Paying customers are entitled to have their opinion at any time. Tiny Tina’s Wonderland immediately put me off with that lame overworld. I think I clocked around 3 hours and then uninstalled it. Never ever would I spend dozens of hours in a game where a significant portion massively annoys me.
IDK, I think 10 hours is plenty for any game, and 2 hours is enough for most. By two hours, you’ve likely discovered the core gameplay loop and seen how it handles progression, and by 10 hours you’ve seen whether that core gameplay loop changes throughout the game.
I don’t like negative reviews for games when they’ve spent double the time HLTB gives for a playthrough. I don’t expect to play much more than “main + extras” on any game, so any review that’s expecting content beyond that just isn’t useful for me.
But it doesn’t excel at any of those play styles. It’s the classic case of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
I guess it’s fine if it’s the only game you play, but if you have choice, I don’t see why you’d pick Starfield over other games you could get. It’s kind of like the cult around Minecraft, you can play pretty much any style you want with mods (e.g. soccer, Pokemon, roller coaster, etc), but every style is done much better in a standalone game.
So I give Starfield an 8/10 or a B, it’s pretty good, but it doesn’t really stand out in any particular way.
Honestly, the games that take the most time I often have more negative opinions about. The Assassin’s Creed games, for example, purposefully waste your time. They shove a bunch of junk in and try to make you interact with it when I could be doing something enjoying with my time. Enjoyment per hour should be the measure of a good game, not hours alone. If the game takes me 300h to complete and I only enjoyed 10h of that, it’s a bad game.
Games are meant to entertain. If they aren’t fun or force you to do unfun things, then why waste your time on them?
I got the same with collectibles in games. Chasing collectibles is boring to me, and you will never see me going for one that isn’t directly on my path. It is meaningless fluff.
Chrono Trigger was the first example of a game that came to my head that’s just great. I replayed it a few weeks ago as well. It’s time better spent than playing a shitty game for 100 hours.
IDK, I bailed around halfway through. I got to the Magus fight, and it felt really RNG dependent. If he attacked in a certain order, I would lose a team member and eventually lose because I couldn’t keep up with healing.
Maybe I was too low level, or maybe I didn’t have the right items equipped, IDK, but I completely lost interest when I failed several times without knowing what to do differently except hope that he attacked in a different order. So I bailed.
Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I originally played on my phone, but maybe I’ll have more patience on my Steam Deck. I really enjoyed the game up to that point, but I just couldn’t bear the RNG. I have no problem failing over and over (I love the early Ys games and some bosses took a dozen tries), but I need to see some sort of progress.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
Wait you think danganronpa fucks up it’s third act? I was absolutely hooked from start to finish for danganronpa 1 and 2. Not yet had the time to play 3 properly yet though but I’ve looked what I’ve played so far.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
2 hours doesn't let you experience even 10% of what a game like this usually offer, less alone giving you time to tinker with the systems and see if they actually work, and furthermore if they are actually fun once you're good at them.
Of course I agree. But it’s still not that great game design, if you are bored for hours. It’s like people telling me about tv show that gets good after first season. What should I do until then… :)
How else do you explain to someone what dwarf fortress is, for example? You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game. Same goes for many bigger games, for example mount and blade (bannerlord) starts off strong with a promise of you establishing and leading a kingdom but once you actually reach that part through tedious grind, you realize it was all for nothing and the game's a badly designed, shallow, unfinished sandbox with absolutely no vision or execution in that regard. Good luck getting to that conclusion without already investing at least 50 mediocre hours in it though.
You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game
The problem with this thinking is that you split the game in 2 parts: first a tedious learning process of dozens of hours, and then an enjoyable experience once you know how to play, and imply that you need to get over the first part before being able (or allowed) to rate the game. But the learning part is the game, even more so if you need to invest dozens of hours.
Many players will simply enjoy the grind of Mount and Blade, because they don’t care about the endgame. Many players (maybe the same) will uninstall Dwarf Fortress after half an hour, because they will estimate that the learning curve isn’t worth their time, even if it was the greatest game ever.
I understand your point. But, if I take your example of mount and blade. If it’s starts off strong with 50 hours of fun, that’s a win in my book. But yes, in this regard steam ratings fail, because of binary recommend or not recommend voting. On the other hand, you can see how many hours did the user that posted a review played, so you can kinda make your own decision.
Also, I would like to add that games like dwarf fortress, rimworld, factorio and similar, all start of fun, if you’re into this genre….at least for me, they did. Thinking back, I think I never experienced playing a game for X hours having a horrible time, and somewhere in the middle changing my mind. At least from the gameplay standpoint. Maybe sometimes story had some unexpected bump in quality (thank god), but not really core gameplay.
Overall, I agree with you, 2 hours is too little for a complete review of a video game. But these are user reviews that can be helpful as well. For an example, for someone who hasn’t that much time to invest in a game to get to the good part. Professional reviewers (or people who have themselves as professional) should play the game for a suitable amount of time, before making an informed review.
If I game can't keep you engaged while doing that for the first 2 hours it's not a good game, at least for that person. You don't need to know everything the game has to offer if it's bored you for 2 hours.
I think there are too many exceptions to this that the best way to truly know is to play it for yourself. I hated Death Stranding, Control, Days Gone, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Fallout 3 and many other games in their initial few hours, but as they opened up they quickly became my one of my favourites. I’ve started my first playthrough of Witcher 3 and in the first 3 hours I’m not yet impressed, but I’ll give it a good chance before dropping it. Not sure if Starfield is any good but given its systems, it’ll probably need some buildup time I guess.
It’s such a bizarre, but real issue. I’ve always been boggled by the idea that you can’t offer your opinion on some games without first giving them a full work week. “I know you just sat there for the length of 5 movies and didn’t like it, but it doesn’t really get good until you sit through another 10.”
If you give it 2 hours, a game should have made it worth your time.
Probably not so much COVID and instead trying to coordinate 27 different outsourced studios. Why not just make it mostly inhouse like before??? If we’re talking scale issues; why introduce these by aiming for deluge of samey procedurally generated worlds instead of the one quality handmade world you’re already known for?
Mine’s 15 now, but back in the day I used those bootlegged Steam clients that allowed me to run Garry’s Mod for free. Those were the hackey, piratey times of 700MB aXXo DVD rips that took 1 hour to download.
I just miss the sport games of 10-20 years ago. They were just fun. Of course they weren't perfect but we didn't care. Now microtransactions have ruined everything....
There’re definitely roster updates and other little stuff that gets added and tweaked in the new versions as much as people like to meme about “same game”. The old versions don’t update so that’s how they get new sales. Kinda bullshit but that’s what it is.
PC gets a special short straw though and is the last gen version of the game despite PC being on par or better than the new consoles. 2K knows where they make the money and do the least everywhere else. That part is definite bullshit.
Sports games are one of the few genre where it might make sense as a gaas approach. Make 1 game for the console generation and sell roster updates every year. Add in micro transactions for the dumb stuff and it seem to be a win win all around. The game gets cheaper meaning more people will likely buy it. No one has to complain it's the same game every year because it would be by design. And devs wouldn't have to crunch every year to get the game out.
Totally agree. Shoot, even when I was still buying them I’d wait til they dropped to like $20 mid-season. It’s more of a DLC at that point which makes more sense considering what we get
Many people do. Yes, there are those that buy every year but I genuinely think they are the minority. You gotta think, even if only 1/3 of all the 2k NBA fans buy every three years, that's... still a lot of sales.
Is that really the only important aspect? That it has the NBA or Madden or FIFA brand? Does the actual game not matter at all? Because if so, I think sports gamers made their decision and have no right to complain about it’s results.
It’s the definitive basketball game and objectively does the job when it comes to that. It has its quirks for sure but the popularity speaks for itself. And given the choice, people would rather play as Lebron James as opposed to some random generated Jebron Lames; they want the real thing as seen on TV.
Now, 2K being dicks about having last-gen on PC after so many years. That’s definitely something to complain about and the reviews are deserved.
Wasn’t NBA 2K20’s trailer disliked to hell because it dedicated more time to show off the roulette wheel, pachinko and slots than basketball? That really doesn’t look like the definitive basketball game, dude. Multiplayer seems to work well enough but most of the complaints are over single player features, at least you can play a different game for that aspect.
I didn’t really encounter all that when I played and I stuck to the single player. But I don’t think that detracts from the core concept: 2K is THE basketball game when you ask most any fan or even NBA players. These guys are coming in for face scans and concerned for their in-game rating so yeah, popularity speaks for itself.
That said, the micro transaction stuff is terrible but it’s more of a thing that got slapped onto the game out of greed. I wouldn’t say it defines the game itself. Hence the complaints; mine included.
Blitz the League came out at a different time, Madden was still a beloved series by this point. You have two sports games, both are good, but one of them has the NFL license and the other doesn’t. I wouldn’t fault anyone for looking at Madden as a no brainer in such a situation.
Times have clearly changed, how many times did Angry Joe made videos ripping the Madden of the year into pieces? If the game is really that bad, giving up on the roster seems like a good compromise if it means a good game. But according to Madden players roster comes first, so I don’t know what they are complaining about.
I get that a good sports game that has the players you know and support isn’t much to ask but it’s what it is.
Never met a sports ball fan? This shit isn’t negotiable. Having working multiplayer (last years always get shut down) and up to date accurate rosters is crucial.
EA/2K got these people by the balls because there is no competition due to exclusivity. It’s really fucked up and sad for sports ball fans.
I’m a nba fan though, and I just stopped playing basketball games because I got tired of paying for roster updates. And now monetization is even worse so genre is dead to me. So as a former fan of 2k I don’t understand having to play the games so badly that people keep paying for it every year.
That applies to any game or franchise. If it gets bad enough that I detest it I’d just move on from it even if no option pops up. Especially one so predatory on top of being an annual release.
Personally I’d give it like a C or maybe B- at the top. It’s fine, but there are so many missing basic quality of life features that should be there.
My biggest gripes are all focused on outposts though. Outposts seemed to be one of the focuses from the marketing material, but they’re a pain in the ass to actually use. There’s somehow no list of the outposts you have, let alone a way to view what they’re producing. Outposts need to be linked together, but there’s no way to sort or auto-delete items, so it all eventually will get clogged up with lead, or whatever other resource doesn’t get used often. You’ll have to manually go through your containers to remove the clog and just dump it on the ground, where it’ll remain for the rest of your playthrough. There’s no snapping for anything except storage containers and the habitation modules. Everything else has to be placed by hand with manual rotations, so nothing is ever lined up. The alignment will also change after you place an object, so literally nothing will ever be aligned.
I have issues with many other parts of the game too, but outposts seem so incomplete, and somehow generally worse than what we had in FO4. Yet, outposts were prominent in their marketing. How?
They were certainly Bethesda games. I'm not even remotely fond of multiplayer fallout. But for 4, it's a marvelous modding world that I've sunk over a thousand hours into.
Oh, so you ARE aware of their other games and you were just cherry picking the ones that weren’t as popular? Now with that brought to light, you’re changing the date parameters to suit your narrative?
Technically Skyrim has also been published in the past decade, and even more recently than Fallout 4. In fact it's been released 5 times since Fallout 4.
I've never played 76, but 4 is one of my favorite games of all time. I think most people who didn't like it were going into it desiring for it to be something it wasn't. What it was impeccably good at was being a scavenging looter shooter with addicting weapon and armor modification and a fun outpost building system that wasn't for me, but did let me make my own little home.
Definitely not Bethesda's strong suit and not what I go to their games for. Their NPC interaction is made up of tons of awkward TMI introductions and dialogue too quirky to take seriously most of the time. That's a valid criticism, I would not say Fallout 4 is well written. I think it has some interesting premises like the whole synth idea, but not a well executed story.
The only overall story I really thought was good in that game was Paladin Danse's quest chain.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you filthy Imperial? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in House Telvanni, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Black Marsh, and I have over 300 confirmed farm equipment kills. I am trained in Dunmer warfare and I’m the top battlemage in the entire Vvardenfell armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision spells the likes of which has never been seen before in this realm, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across Cyrodiil and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the ash storm, scrib. The ash storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with conjuration. Not only am I extensively trained in alchemical combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Sixth House and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn N’wah. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
My guilty pleasure is to install Morrowind again and commit to replaying it, but to instead do another Skyrim playthrough because I just have more fun for some reason.
There’s something about the newer Bethesda games. I’ll go and install legacy games from other companies all the time for the sense of nostalgia, but despite having beaten almost all of them going back to Arena, if I want a Bethesda game I always end up playing Skyrim or FO4. And now (I presume) Starfield
It’s another subpar Bethesda game in a long line of subpar Bethesda games. Lifeless bland NPCs, tons of glitches, bad gameplay issues, and the same “shallow ocean” criticisms we’ve been going over since Skyrim.
It’s clear to me that Bethesda thinks Skyrim was peak Elder Scrolls, when I think Morrowind was peak Elder Scrolls. Unfortunately, it seems too much to ask for a decent story and interesting side content.
So I just don’t buy Bethesda games anymore. I was disappointed in Skyrim, and Fallout 4 wasn’t really my thing. It also doesn’t help that I don’t like the leveling mechanics of RPGs either and tend to prefer ARPGs like Ys and Zelda where leveling isn’t a major part of the game loop. I know what Bethesda offers, and it’s just not what I’m looking for these days. I play RPGs for story and immersion, not for graphics, character builds, and mods, and Bethesda seems to be more interested in the latter than the former.
But that’s what I appreciate from Bethesda. They’re pretty consistent at delivering a certain experience, it just so happens that it’s not for me.
Anything is better than No Man Sky, after a trillion updates they still haven’t fixed the one issue the game has. There is only a single planet but a million copies of it with different colors.
Yes but planets like that are realistically quite common. The ones with special features and biomes however are few but quite well done. Really not comparable.
I’m primarily a console peasant, but my Steam account goes back to 2007. I don’t remember the specifics, but I know I opened it after getting a physical copy of The Ship from Target. Never played it much, though.
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