Man, "15 hours in and not a single bug." I love Bethesda, but I feel like that's an incredibly bold claim to make and that his definition of bug is probably a bit loose. I wish they wouldn't make this big of a hubbub about it and just let the game speak for itself if it's really that solid.
Exactly. By pointing a big red arrow at the problem they've historically had to the point of memory it just serves to make the skeptics more skeptical and create concern in everybody else since it's just a big "source: trust me, bro".
“So I killed an entire city, which caused the dead body clean up cell to overfill and explode dead bodies into the void, which first makes it rain dead bodies and then crashes the game.”
The funny thing is we kinda expect bugs, not game breaking bugs, but bugs that we understand would be there since people are about to have more than 100 hours of gameplay. With possibly over billion hours of game testing time from consumers. So there will be bugs.
IIRC didn’t Microsoft hold the game back specifically to ensure it didn’t launch in a horrific state? Bethesda games are known for being a nightmare at launch, and even with these assurances, I’m still expecting the first few weeks to be a mess. That being said, if any Bethesda game was going to launch well, it would be this one.
It’s been held back for a full year and the rumors/leaks from when it got pushed out of 2022 was that it was in about the same state as their games usually launch in, but the higher-ups were worried that someone would make a viral youtube compilation of bugs (cyberpunk being an obvious example) and have their flagship title turned into laughing stock.
IIRC spaceflight was something mentioned as working well but looking really jank, so they spent time fixing that as well.
I expect to encounter many bugs still, but hopefully nothing like fallout 76
I don't think that the issue is the quality of their QA. Well, okay, maybe that's a factor, but I don't think that that was the big one for Fallout 76.
Some of the issues in Fallout 76 that they shipped with, they had to know they were shipping with. It wasn't that QA didn't turn up problems, but that they took too-ambitious a plan, ran out of time, and then didn't delay the release to fix all the broken stuff. Yeah, they did a lot of work to fix the game post-release, but by then, a lot of players had already been soured by the initial bad experience.
They did significantly delay the Starfield release, so I assume that they are trying to put this out in a more-sane shape.
In the case they are actually being honest, they could just be speaking relatively - which still doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me that Starfield is going to be seamless and smooth at launch, or even a few months past launch.
In the case that they are just clearly lying, it's an intentional strategy: they're counting on the fact that they will gain more money from this than they will lose from people discovering it was a lie after the game launches.
We should not be applauding a company for doing what should be the right thing from the start. I used to think the Bethesda glitches were cute too until 76 came out.
It’s not cute, it’s not funny and I refuse to participate in games until all the major bugs are worked out.
I still have not bought or played the new Diablo and I likely won’t at this point because of the ongoing issues I keep hearing about. Honestly, my money is better off in my pocket to be used for literally anything else. I know it’s sucks but if you really want these devs to change you’re going to have to suffer for the cause a little bit.
Indie dev games are just as good anyways and the smaller developers work hard to earn your money. Try looking in that direction to fill the void. I’ve found some really awesome and addictive games this way.
I used to think the Bethesda glitches were cute too until 76 came out.
I enjoyed Fallout 76, but I also ignored it until something like three years after release, at which point it was in a decent state.
It wasn't Fallout 5, which is what I really wanted, but I got my money's worth out of it.
Only bug I hit that was kind of obnoxious was the occasional inability to pick up an item from a corpse, where one would have to look away from the corpse and then back. While being a bit immersion-breaking, it was also pretty easy to work around.
Honestly, the whole Fallout series has been pretty buggy, starting with Fallout 1, but still, a good series. Some of it just comes from the complexity of having a bunch of scripts running that can interact in odd ways in a relatively free-form world.
One of my bigger wants for Fallout 5 is easier diagnosing of problems with mods and trying to be more-robust against such problems. Maybe produce more-foolproof API functionality for common script tasks or something.
a big part of the hate for fallout 76 wasnt even about the bugs, to this day i am 100% convinced that it was stoked massively by folks that bought it expecting a game it was fundamentally never trying to be, never marketed to be and never going to be
That's probably part of it. A big chunk of the aspects that I didn't like about it relative to Fallout 4 -- from killing off slow-mo/pause VATS, to not having a world that can change much, to limited-size "settlements", to limited moddability, to having immersion-breaking other players jetpacking around with not-in-theme names, to having limited story content -- come from the fact that they built it to be a multiplayer game.
But even so. I've seen some footage of the game at release, and it was pretty bad. And not just bugs, but the content...I mean, a Bethesda game not having human NPCs?
I will give them props for putting a lot of effort into fixing the game post-release, but I still feel that the thing shouldn't have shipped when it did. It simply wasn't ready when it went out the door.
Also, some of the fixes they did do that I think people did like -- like reducing the severity of the food/water/radstorm survival elements, which many players didn't like having to hassle with, or reducing the role of PvP, which a lot of the playerbase didn't like -- didn't result in game rebalancing. Like, the player shelters were clearly intended to be a significant element to deal with radstorms, but radstorms are essentially ignorable. Food was intended to play a bigger role, and there are features oriented towards things like reducing the rate of one's demand for it, but that was removed.
If you look at Fallout 4 or even moreso Skyrim, modders went through and rebalanced the game long after the release. I'm not saying that everyone who played those games got to enjoy those changes, but I think that they were good ones. Fallout 76 isn't really moddable in that way, so it's dependent on Bethesda's devs to do all that...and they didn't really do that.
There were no really memorable moments from the game, the way, I don't know, the battle for The Castle or the arrival of the Brotherhood of Steel's aircraft or some other moments in Fallout 4 really stuck with me. I guess to some extent that's part of just having to make a lot of the content something that you play over and over, but it still was kinda disappointing.
And I'm not demanding that they work for free. I bought all the DLC for Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I'd happily have bought something like the (excellent) DLC packs for earlier games in the Fallout series for Fallout 76. But, instead, they only sold mostly-aesthetic content in the Atom Store. Which, okay, great, if someone really wants to decorate their player camp and wants to pay for it could be appealing to someone. But they didn't create a route to pay for more story content, more maps or the like. They did create new free content, but that necessarily has a limited budget, and again, was kinda oriented around multiplayer (and didn't catch on much with me and didn't seem to be terribly popular with players on the fo76 subreddit, either).
There are some things that I did like about it, that I don't think it got credit for. The building mode performance was significantly-improved over 4. They toned down the "everything is dark and awful and evil and every person and company is twisted" aspect in 4, which I think was a big plus; there were plenty of people just trying to live their lives in difficult situations, which felt more like 1. I'm not absolutely rabid about the new areas, but the Mire looked nice by the standards of their engine, was a good use of their engine's godrays. They did a bunch of performance and stability work (that had to happen, given that one couldn't just "reload earlier saves" if something broke in a saved game a la the single player games).
I could have lived with Fallout 76 not being Fallout 5, but what I wished that they could have done was to keep selling single-player content in traditional DLC form. A lot of MUDs and similar games have a "remort" feature where one can start with a new character and earn some persistent rewards for doing so, so playing through story content multiple times is still fun. "New Game Plus", kinda. The online aspect for single-player content would just be to provide DRM, so that people wouldn't just go swipe all the stuff that they're selling in the Atom Store. And the stuff on offer in the Atom Store...ugh. If you look at the mods in Fallout 4, people created high-resolution texture packs, new companions, new story content, and they don't have anything like that for sale. You could have segregated anything that affected balance out of the multiplayer areas, had very solid single-player-only content. It might not have been Fallout 5, but I think that it could have done a much better job of making people who wanted that happier while still providing a multiplayer game for those who wanted a multiplayer game.
I think the title is a joke about how Bethesda games are notoriously always full of bugs. Like, to the point that it's just expected for any new Bethesda game to be a bug-riddled mess at launch.
Hell, there are still bugs in Skyrim that never got patched, even after they re-released it onto modern platforms. Not even obscure bugs, but things normal players will encounter in their playthroughs.
It’s crazy that they haven’t used things like the unofficial patch to fix their own damn game. Like they could pretty much just copy paste that shit and be fine. But no. More than a decade later and that shit is still around and even propagated to things like FO4 and FO76.
That’s still orders of magnitude easier than figuring it out from first principles, and nowhere near arduous enough to excuse leaving the problems unaddressed.
It's not that simple. Even using it as a base gets you into a legal gray area. Learning from a work and incorporating elements into your own work is legal, but copying someone else's legwork like this is legally murky even if you don't take the actual code.
Yeah I’m sure Microsoft-owned Bethesda is shaking in their boots about learning from modifications to their own game. That’s gotta be everything stays buggy.
If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.
If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.
If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person’s code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn’t been noticed or isn’t being pursued because there’s not likely any money in it anyways.
It’s that murky area that I’m guessing they’d want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.
Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)
Hiring the modder is not necessary, to look at a mod, go ‘oh that’s what we did wrong,’ and fix it. That’s not the ctrl+c/ctrl+v situation you seem to expect. And considering it’s their own game, and fixing bugs, the legal concerns are practically nonexistent.
If an employee writes code for a company, that employee owns the copyright.
For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else’s invention.
Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn’t gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don’t agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don’t think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.
That’s not to say that it’s legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there’s just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.
Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.
There’s copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There’s parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn’t use copy/paste). And there’s precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).
He’s saying the “Least buggiest” is not proper phrasing. It should be something along the lines of “the least buggy/bugged” and it’s a pretty bad title for someone claiming to be a “journalist”.
Doesn’t matter what he claims, he just wrote an article for a publishing/news/media company. That’s called journalism, professional or not.
jour·nal·ism /ˈjərnlˌizəm/ noun the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast. “she had begun a career in journalism”
It doesn’t have to be “proper” if it works as a joke. It implies that a Bethesda game can’t be merely “buggy,” it must be the “buggiest,” even if it’s (paradoxically) less buggy. So, “least buggiest.”
I seems in general journalism has gotten worse and worse with their grammar. I honestly wonder if their editors even look at even the title before things are posted online.
When I used to do copywriting for junk SEO, I began to suspect that my editor didn’t actually read anything I wrote and just passed it through a content uniquness filter, so I started putting in random references to HP Lovecraft stories in the articles I got assigned.
They all got published, no questions asked. For a while if you searched “Homeopathy and the Esoteric Cult of Dagon” my content was the only result
I imagine that LLMs have been trained on his reviews by this point and are vigorously producing articles exploring the intersection of pop gaming and the Elder Things.
Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn’t make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.
Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.
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