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.
"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."
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".
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.
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 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.
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".
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.
The author is basing this claim on feedback from FIVE people who have been playing the game. If Bethseda are only expecting a similar number to play it once it's released, then this is a useful metric. Otherwise it's meaningless.
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.
I have like zero hype for this game, and absolute bangers of games have dropped recently. I'm definitely going to put this on the "maybe" list and let other people test it out for me, I'm in no rush.
I still don't really know what it is. Because it seems to have random generation so that makes me think it's just going to be another no man's sky.
The big problem with randomly generating a bazillion planets is they're all boring. Random terrain generation will always result in dull terrain because an algorithm isn't creative, it's not even AI level aware, it's just maths.
I'm excited for it because Bethesda. I've always put hundreds of hours into their games despite all the ranting and raving.
I'm definitely a bit worried for the same reason as you are though. I think those are likely filler exploration radiant quest type stuff. I'm cautiously hopeful that the story is good and long and deep enough to keep me playing though.
I mean is Bethesda and for what is seen there will main quest and so on....
Yes there will be random generation for random planets or sections not designed for those quests, and for random quests like Skyrim random quests...
But I wouldn't say like No Man's Sky, it should be rpg (at Bethesda way, not like Baldurs Gate of course) with a more defined story and so on, characters, etc. Of course I haven't touched No Man's Sky on years... So maybe they have something for that now?
It looks like they're doing what star citizen does with terrain generation where they hand-make tiles of landforms like mountains/cliffs, hills, etc, then the procedural generation takes over and stitches them all together in ways that "make sense." So it's not 100% hand crafted, but it's also not "strange landform" NMS type nonsense that is entirely made from maths so you only seem to get rounded features. From what I've seen the environments look absolutely stunning! As someone who plays NMS too I can say they look 100x better than NMS.
Don’t fall for the investor hype. Current AI aren’t even close to being intelligent or aware. As you said for algorithms, it’s just math, algebraic topology and graph theory to be precise.
Do they even use facial mocap? Fallout 4's best facial animations were all reserved for Preston Garvey, and they are so not very smooth, I always assumed they were done by hand.
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
That's not much of a brag. Just because the monsters in this game won't mysteriously fly off into space only to reappear right behind you seconds later, doesn't mean we should celebrate.
It's not a brag, period. Not having a buttload of bugs should be the bare minimum every game should strive for. It's like saying "we sell the least rotten food in town".
Its pretty sad that we've gone from "most epic adventure" and "largest open world you've seen" to "least buggiest game"
Nonetheless, I've enjoyed most Bethesda games and I have gamepass on pc and will definitely try the game.
I mean even Skyrim ran pretty nice, till you started playing it long enough to start finding the bugs and jank. Of course, it helped that it had all the familiar jank from the previous games.
I think we've all learned our collective lesson at this point (or at least, we should have) not to over-hype games, nor to pre-order them.
I'm going to have to temporarily move in with my dad in October potentially for a few months, should be some decent reviews in by then so I'm looking forward to killing time with this game!
Thanks. I think I had GP a while back just to play AC: Valhalla, so I won't get a cheeky deal... I'll probably buy it on GOG, as it seems like it's not going to be the sort of game I complete within a month or two, I prefer to 'own' a game than rent it once I'm satisfied it's for me.
The people who have "learned" "the lesson" are a loud minority. The vast majority of consumers will put money wherever they feel like it, philosophy be damned.
For anyone who may have forgotten or may not know: the game is a day 1 launch on game pass. I already have it preloaded and I didn't preorder. You can easily see how buggy the game is for yourself next week.
I feel bad for the teams that had to go into "double crunch" mode after BG3 came out. Just so they can get the game into not embarrassing shape for launch.
Or they could, you know, wait for it to be ready to release. How about they wait to announce it until the game is done, and then spend the last few months polishing it?
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.
Maybe if they make enough money on this, they can expand and develop The Elder Scrolls and the Fallout series in parallel, as well as whatever else they have cooking, instead of working on only one title at a time.