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.
It does not help that it shares the namesake and general identity aesthetic with a failed Immortals movie franchise.
But yes, it’s obvious a ton of work went into this title, but at the same time I can’t think of a single reason to pick it up, especially over the games already out or coming out soon.
That’s troubling. I’ve been playing the shit out of both GTA V and RDR 2 because they have the two best campaigns I’ve ever played. Especially RDR2. It was unique in its trajectory, in its beats…I really hope the follow ups, (however many years down the road those might be) won’t be affected too much by this. The writing made those games what they are.
I haven’t played baldurs gate, but I’ve been seeing a lot about it, mostly positive. Interesting, the news about that company. Being successful doesn’t usually call for a massive shakeup. But that’s capitalism for you. Fuck the workers, squeeze more out of those you keep. Classic.
As someone who has a very small selection of games they like, play God of War. I never played any of them before the 2018 game and I loved it. I start it again and play through like once a year to 100%. Only game I ever 100%ed.
Loved RDR and GTA but not much else has kept my interest anyway close to GoW except maybe Hitman.
Speculating but they’ve probably already wrapped up all the writing for GTA VI and planned to move on after that. Imagine with Houser leaving we’ll see a few more vets as they finish up their roles for VI.
When you walk into the drunk guys home for his money and kill him, but his son goes “pa, pa, pa…” I know it’s a video game, but I wasn’t expecting that. It was one of those moments where i can never forget. I felt like I actually hurt a person in my mind and kept thinking about it, still do. Absolutely the best game that brings you into the fold as a player.
I dunno, I’m not a huge gamer. I’ve had just FIFA and gta v on my console for years happily. Rdr2 is a newer purchase for me and I love it. But I don’t really like fantasy games, so I’m not really larian’s audience.
I like shooting and driving and open worlds. And soccer. I put off getting rdr2 for so long because I couldn’t drive. I regret writing it off because I was definitely wrong about it
I was saying I’ve been hearing good things about BG3 and saw they fired a lot of people to “streamline” the company. I was just deriding capitalism for that insane mindset
In related news, as part of its recently publicised cutbacks, BioWare has “let go of” Lukas Kristjanson, the lead writer behind Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, and the writer of the first three Dragon Age games, Mary Kirby.
Oh it wasn’t Larian, that name was mentioned to me so I just assumed from the quote above without rereading. I dunno the connection between larian and BioWare, but they’re obviously releasing games together? Or sharing titles?
Gotcha, so Baldurs gate 1 and 2 were released by bioware it 1998 and 2000 respectively, the lead writer for those games was let go by bioware recently, Larian is a completely separate company that got the IP rights to do BG3 👍 I can see where the confusion came in lo Edit: More context in the development section of en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur's_Gate_3
GTA V? Really? I absolutely hated the story in that, and I hated the characters. Here are some of my issues with it:
Trevor:
interesting epilogue, but otherwise pretty much no character arc
really wanted to see him try to take on the Los Santos gangs (DLC!)
Franklin:
largely just does whatever Michael says
wanted to start a dealership, but he kinda gives up once he makes it big (DLC!)
Michael:
arc was okay, but he didn’t seem like a good fit for main character, especially when Franklin gets the ending
All in all, I felt like the three character perspective was largely a distraction from the lack of actual storytelling. SA and IV didn’t have that, so they actually had a meandering plot with some character development to round it all out.
I haven’t finished RDR2 (it’s so long!), but I really loved RDR and heard that story for RDR2 is even better.
I mean, I’d argue that GTA V didn’t have the most emotional storytelling, but it wasn’t a character driven game like RDR2. The characters had the stories they did because they each opened up different avenues into different types of crimes. They didn’t focus on it. The characters were all insufferable. But that doesn’t mean the writing for the story itself wasn’t good. Yeah, the characters all kinda sucked, but the storytelling propelled the tension and wasn’t just some lame bullshit that felt like it needed to be there. The characters don’t develop that much, but the backstory was great, the intrigue and the vastness of the word made it great. That’s all writing. But you’re right, it couldn’t stand alone as a character driven story.
RDR2 on the other hand is a character driven story at its heart. You definitely need to play it because it’s incredibly well done. If you’re looking for good storytelling, emotional connections to the characters’ trajectories, and a great fuckin game, RDR2 is where you wanna be.
I’m not expecting RDR-levels of storytelling or anything, and the original RDR is way better than any of the GTAs in terms of storytelling and characters. However, GTA V felt like such a downgrade from previous entries.
GTA V starts out strong, with a fun heist sequence, which gets the player excited for more. And then the next thing we see is Michael at marriage counseling, and then we meet Franklin, who seems ready to take up Michael’s mantle. Then we see Trevor, who is now running drugs in the rural area, which is also pretty exciting. At the start, I was excited to see all three develop their individual storylines, with Franklin just getting into the underground, Trevor establishing himself as a drug kingpin, and Michael getting his last heist in.
But instead of that, Trevor and Franklin kind of give up on their arcs and they just focus on helping Michael with the heist. Why? Why doesn’t Trevor try to take over the drug trade in Los Santos? Why doesn’t Franklin try to start his own dealership? Or at least steal cars as side content? If they’re really interested in heists, why is there only about five of them? Why can’t I go do more after finishing the main storyline? What about Las Venturas, doing heists there would be a ton of fun!
To me, the storytelling really dragged once Trevor came to Los Santos, which was more than half of the game. In fact, I dropped it and came back about three times (restarting twice) because it was so uninteresting, until I finally forced myself to speed through the story just so I could cross it off my list so I wouldn’t feel the need to come back. I didn’t have the same problem with either GTA SA or GTA IV, and I even finished GTA IV after GTA V (played off and on on console before GTA V, then bought and played through on PC).
And the world felt small to me. I know it was physically bigger than every other GTA game, but it felt so much smaller than GTA SA, which was able to fit three cities and a rural area and still make them feel far apart (GTA V just had one city and a rural area), and it felt similar to GTA IV. I didn’t feel any desire to explore like I did with SA. The backstory was interesting, but I think it just highlighted how disappointing the rest of the story was.
In fact, I even like GTA III more than GTA V. It’s pretty janky to play today, but it still has that OG charm to it.
So I honestly don’t understand why it’s so loved. Nothing about it really stood out to me aside from the graphics and performance of the engine. I didn’t like the driving as much as IV (controversial take), the humor felt bland to me, and I didn’t find any of the side characters particularly interesting, except maybe Lamar, and he also largely gave up on his arc.
So GTA V is by far my least favorite of the series, so much so that I’m not looking forward to GTA VI.
And an EA account. And agreement to a 3rd party EULA with EA. For a single player game. That’s some real “we’re gonna sell you microtransactions later” energy out of a 60 dollar release.
GTA Online could have been so great, but instead it feels like they put no effort into doing anything but selling new DLC. The missions are boring and unrewarding, the motivation to work with others is nil, there is no good teaming system, it’s incredibly complicated to start any business and the guide is lacking to the point where there might as well not have been a guide at all. Then if you say fuck it, I am going to attempt this all on my own someone comes up and frags you with a rocket launcher 3 seconds into attempting to pick a lock.
So frustrating. It could have been the coolest game ever and it’s just a pile of shit.
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