I know it’s not much, but I hope that if you don’t already, you find some time for yourself to just make games for the fun of it.
Not if you’re already dealing with overwork stress, but if you have free time that you’d like to spend on something. No one has to play them or you could do game jams (even though that’s inherently crunch, it’s the choice of the dev rather than their boss and more of a self-imposed limitation) or do otherwise random stuff and just let people muck about with whatever you’ve created. No pressure, no deadlines, no expectations.
And since you know already know how production in general works, you’re well aware of the iterative process and won’t fall into the trap of “why is this taking so long and why can’t my graphics be as good as GTA V” or whatever, which a lot of new developers (and programmers and pretty much everyone) encounter.
Don’t forget mocap. A lot of actors are doing mocap for games now, which also potentially results in injury.
This also includes stunt workers (who do the more intensive motion capture work) and stunt coordinators, many of whom are in the Screen Actors Guild already.
Sure. I don’t think I was pretending there weren’t any bugs. I think it’s more the dismissive approach toward their games before release that gets a bit tiring, even if it is often warranted in some respects.
Creation Engine is buggy as fuck, and I’ll always expect their games to have a fair amount of jank at the very least. Even Obsidian had troubles with it (though some of those bugs could also be attributed to lack of time and testing).
But I hope that if this does prove to be have better release than their others (admittedly, it can be a low bar), that it sticks.
As much as I love them, I’m about to be a hypocrite and say I don’t know if Bethesda will ever have non-janky AI. It’s the one thing that’s been fairly consistent over a very long time now.
Whether it’s enemies or your followers, or just pathfinding weirdness with NPCs, it’s like their AI is just kind of… there sometimes. If had a conspiracy theory about it, I’d say they’re doing it on purpose to get you to explore the world by finding your missing followers (of which I’m sure we’ll see many get stuck on different planets entirely now).
You are right, but I just get tired of it sometimes as a “predictor” or that they should be lauded for not releasing something that falls apart at release.
Bethesda have a reputation for a reason, but the lack of QA (or at least publishers willing to listen to QA) in a lot of modern gaming has made some of Bethesda’s previous issues seem almost normal.
I guess that’s more an indictment of modern gaming than really a defense of Bethesda, lol. And for all the shit they get about “modders fixing their games”, they were the ones who actually went and fixed a lot of FO76’s issues after that launch disaster.
Either way, regarding the story… Yeah. I find that oftentimes the side quests (particularly faction quests or the FO4 follower quests) tend to be way more interesting than the main quest in some of their games.
Kind of interesting that the vast majority of negative/mixed reviews are regarding gameplay/story rather than complaining about major bugs (although jank has been noted in a few, and I’d honestly be a bit disappointed if there wasn’t any).
We’ll have to wait until release (Cyberpunk’s bugs weren’t that prominent in reviews either), but I really hope this “lol Bugthesda” meme can die.
Regardless of how buggy it is, I expect Dunkey to somehow break it as soon as he boots it up, which should be entertaining.
I’ll just be playing it on Game Pass and then probably buy it when it goes on sale on Steam in a few months. Probably Winter Holiday sale or whatever.
By that time, maybe the Creation Kit will be released (though, that’s more likely to be next year) as well, which makes for much more in-depth mods. Also any script extenders (which will very likely only work on the Steam version) and unofficial patches should be a bit more stable early next year.
Until then, I don’t really need it on Steam.
I keep forgetting to preload, though, which I should do when I get a chance, just to get the initial ~120 GB out of the way.
Lol, it’s kind of funny because the first time I played, I was hoping to get a credits roll with Skyrim and was confused when it didn’t happen.
Instead, I just one-shotted Alduin with a dagger or bow or some OP stealth nonsense, got teleported back to Paarthurnax who had a bunch of dragons with him saying their mourning stuff in dragon tongue, spoke to him and Odahviing, then they took to the sky and that was it.
After that, you can go talk to the Greybeards or the Blades (you won’t get to speak to best bud dragon Mariosnax on the top of the mountain if you killed him for those idiots) and they’ll acknowledge it, but they never really speak about it again.
If you haven’t killed him, the Blades will straight up be all “cool, thanks for that, but we still want you to kill dragon Mario so don’t come back until you do”.
Either way, you can then go off and kill a chicken in Riverwood and deal with all that nonsense. Or go and do some side quest elsewhere.
But never credits. Not in any of my several playthroughs at least.
FO4 at least has the slideshow. I guess it’s more necessary because you lose actual factions which can affect some stuff post-game. And also the Ron Perlman “War Never Changes” slideshow tradition.
In Skyrim, you can just be the guild leader for every faction simultaneously without any problem and dragons don’t stop spawning or trying to kill you after defeating Alduin, so almost nothing changes like it might in the Fallout games.
I had forgotten about the previous games, but since Skyrim, I don’t think Bethesda has done a proper credits roll because the games don’t technically “end”. They’re designed to continue long after the main quest.
For a lot of players, the main quest ironically feels like a not-so-relevant side quest that can wait (moreso with Skyrim; things get weird in Fallout 4, where you can just fuck around for months in-game and never bother finding the son you’re supposed to be desperately looking for).
The closest of their recent releases is the ending of FO4 where after finishing the main quest you get a slide show showing the “consequences” of your choices.
In Skyrim, there’s nothing in-game. You finish the main quest and continue as if nothing happened. It doesn’t throw you back to before completing it, so you’ve still beaten everything (some NPCs might comment on it, actually, but I might be misremembering due to mods which add in stuff like that), but nothing else changes.
You can finish every single quest and side quest (actually this is technically impossible due to some side quests being never-ending repeatable stuff) and still never get a credits roll.
I actually liked Anthem and Andromeda. Had a lot of fun with them, if I’m being honest.
Granted, I played them after many patches quite a while after release back when EA Play was called Origin Access, so I didn’t exactly “buy” them specifically. Opinion might be different if I did, and probably would be if I played them on release.
Still, I enjoyed them for what they were. I guess I just wasn’t waiting in anticipation for their release or with any hype that could end up disappointing me, so I didn’t have to deal with unmet expectations.