Bethesda the publisher and Bethesda the developer are different things.
The publishing arm seemed to know what they were doing, certainly enough for MS to buy them.
The developing arm is nothing if not consistent. You know what you’re getting into. An RPG, with lots of character build possibilities (even if a particular build overpowered enough for 90% of players to accidentally stumble across it, like Skyrim’s stealth archer build), a handful of memorable NPCs, no real character development, so-so performance, and a shitload of bugs.
If people are still buying them and still not enjoying them I don’t know what to say. It’s like watching Fast and Furious 10, and going “well that’s fucking dumb”.
This is how games and drivers have been for decades.
There are huge teams at AMD and nVidia who’s job it is to fix shit game code in the drivers. That’s why (a) they’re massive and (b) you need new drivers all the time if you play new games.
I read an excellent post a while ago here, by Promit.
It’s interesting to see that in the 8 years since he wrote it, the SLI/Crossfire solution has simply been to completely abandon it, and that we still seem to be stuck in the same position for DX12. Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don’t look bad on benchmarks.
Series S performance with it like this would have been something to behold.
I’m not sure why “performance mode” is disabled in co-op either. In single player it runs at a decent pace. It’s just as soon as player two joins that it starts to feel like a PS3 game.
I mean, it’s still fun, the underlying game is clearly good, and occasionally the hitching stops for a few minutes and it’s less frustrating, but it soon comes back again. It’s like it’s doing something daft like reloading the zone between characters.
I love couch co-op, but BG3 has all manner of bugs in co-op on PS5.
Your PSN name and a “mute” icon is overlaid at all times in the top corner of the screen where your rolls and character approval/disapproval information should appear.
From about halfway through Act 1, swapping characters (which you do all the time) triggers multi second pauses for both players.
Cut scene bugs, like invisible characters, no lip sync, no voice acting, voice acting only on alternate lines, one cut scene didn’t actually load at all, just leaving me with the text and a screen full of fog.
We also had no tutorials, but this does appear to be rectified now via a patch released yesterday.
Not sure what happened to the horn-fest other players got, but I suspect that co-op players aren’t getting full “reputation” with NPCs, as this appears to be tracked individually.
None of my PS4, 5 or Switch controllers have had any drift. I even used the Joycons in Ringfit for ages, and I was sure that spending months being strapped to my leg would bugger it up.
I’m not sure if I’m the luckiest person on Earth, I just don’t use them enough, or others are doing something I’m not (smoking or vaping are possibilities here, along with greasy food fingers).
DLSS or the AMD knock-off would actually be pretty good for them.
RT is kind of pointless in low end hardware though.
Be interesting to see if they support VRR since they control what screen goes into it. A lot more PC users accepting 40fps since Steam Deck. Forcing everything into 30 or 60 is kind of limiting.
I got it on PS5 (co-op) and in the space of 2 hours had randomly silent cutscenes, an invisible character in one, and my PSN Name and a mute icon permanently stuck the top left of the screen where all the information about rolls and characters liking or disliking things should appear.
Didn’t get any tutorials either, which is apparently a thing. So we’re just randomly pressing things and hoping it doesn’t fuck up the story for later.
Most bad Denuvo stuff seems to come from any extra DRM they add as well, just in case Denuvo wasn’t enough. Always online sounds like one of those extras, because I don’t think it’s part of Denuvo itself. I think the Denuvo online requirements are when you install, every X days (seems to vary from two weeks to a month, probably configurable per game), and when you change your hardware configuration.
Denuvo alone is enough, because as soon as Denuvo is removed, the rest can be removed by regular mortal hackers.
Crackers: We don’t do it for the piracy, we just like the challenge.
Denuvo: Try this one then.
Crackers: Too hard bro, at least give us a chance!
I acknowledge that this isn’t going to be a popular opinion in a piracy sub, but the main reason people hate Denuvo is that it works.
It’s basically killed the entire game hacking scene, because by the time they break it, nobody is interested in the game any more. There’s like one person left that can do it, and they’re more than a little bit odd.
It may be “anti-consumer”, but you know what was worse? All the other shit they tried on PC. Always online bullshit. Single player games that you couldn’t save any more if your connection wobbled. Actual rootkits.
Have no real interest in playing it, but do they still do the Skyrim thing where they have like 5 wildly different voice actors, so it feels like the guards are following you from town to town?
The controllers connect to the Shield. You can also connect keyboard and mouse to it.
I find Steam Link to be slow and low framerate though. Sunshine running on the PC and Moonlight running on the Shield seen to do the trick. I also disabled the image sharpening on the Shield because it looks really odd.
Nvidia GameStream being disabled now is a really fucking shitty thing for them to do. Sunshine lacks the ability to change the PC resolution to match the streaming resolution.