The preview looks nice, I am excited to try it. But why are all of the colors so muted? I thought after Skyrim we would get a more colorful game, but everything seems kind of washed out and has one of those cinematic filters on top of it. I wish game makers would stop making everything so drab.
The preview looks nice, I am excited to try it. But why are all of the colors so muted? I thought after Skyrim we would get a more colorful game, but everything seems kind of washed out and has one of those cinematic filters on top of it. I wish game makers would stop making everything so drab.
It's almost like they're all secretly investors in ReShade or something.
Only, none of them bothered to figure out how they were going to profit from driving installations of a free, open source utility. 
This is the whiniest article I've read in ages.
Expect many more similarly whiny stories. FO76 taught people you can get lots of clicks and views by making up complaints about non-existant promises being broken or exaggerating bugs.
Veloxi wrote:This is the whiniest article I've read in ages.
Expect many more similarly whiny stories. FO76 taught people you can get lots of clicks and views by making up complaints about non-existant promises being broken or exaggerating bugs.
Which sucked because it obfuscated the actual lies and serious bugs that were there.
Thank-f this is single player.
Thank-f this is single player.
I bet people are Female Doggoing about that too. Entitled f*cks.
“No one wanted to be on that project because it ate people. It destroyed people,”
Some testers would only find reprieve when they finally left the Fallout 76 team. Two former testers recounted that one of their colleagues said in a QA group chat after leaving the project: “I didn’t cry last night when I was taking a shower.” Another said in the same chat: “I pulled into work today, and I sat in my car for a second, and my chest didn’t feel heavy like it normally does.”
One QA source recounted how badly they wanted to stop working, despite their financial need. When they almost broke a bone on the stairs, they fantasized about the prospect of being too injured to go to work the next day. They said it was the most comforting feeling they felt while working crushing hours on Fallout 76.
It wasn’t just testers who were having problems. Some designers raised questions about griefing, multiplayer stability issues, and quest checkpointing, but said their concerns were dismissed or postponed by management.
When Kotaku asked about which features were broken as a result of poor scheduling, a developer replied: “Tongue in cheek: the whole game. In general, every major bug in 76 [that appeared at launch] was known by QA.” Bethesda did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
These two really deserve to be paired:
In a 2019 IGN interview, Howard acknowledged the existence of crunch at Bethesda but felt that employees stayed because overtime was adequately managed. However, he did not completely disclaim the necessity of crunch, telling IGN, “Every game deserves some amount [of crunch] at the very end.”
These testers shared stories with Kotaku about ZeniMax management, and how it would habitually require overtime from QA, even when that overtime wouldn’t contribute to fixing a bug. A former tester who worked on the game’s DLC recalled being coerced into coming in to crunch on the weekend because the latest version of the game needed a fix. The individual tester would later discover that the development team had not implemented the fix, and that any work they did on the unfixed build would be for nothing. According to the former tester:I remember seeing one of my coworkers stand up, look at the person who was in charge that day, and scream across the room: “Why are we here? We gave up our day for this. The build isn’t the build we need. This is useless. This is a waste of our time. Like why are we here?”
And
One source told Kotaku that many Bethesda developers were excited at the prospect of improved employee benefits that might come with an acquisition, such as healthcare.“Microsoft has like, really amazing employee benefits,” the source said. “And all of us were looking at the benefits and saying, oh, man, are we going to get these benefits? Are we going to get more parental leave [and] health benefits. And they were just like, No, nothing is changing… Don’t look at these benefits and think that you’re going to get them…”
Starfield seems interesting to me, but yeah, after whatever Fallout 76 was, heck after all Bethesda launches really, wait and see is the best approach.
I thought Starfield showed well at the Microsoft + Bethesda showcase but nothing that warrants me to think about buying a Series X anytime soon.
On the positive notes it looks like they've upgraded the shooting from Fallout 4 quite a bit, it actually looked more like Rage 2 which is a good thing. The other changes I noticed the creatures & enemies actually looked like they were walking on the terrain & not through it.
The npc faces look better but they still have that far off look in their eyes as well as a bright sheen. The landscapes of the different planets look really good, the capital city looked a bit lacking in places for some reason though.
It'll probably be a really good game even with it's shortcomings, I'm eager to see more of Starfield as it draws closer to release.
The Fallout 76 crunch sounds absolutely brutal. What a mess that development process was & the game ended up being. The QA team for seemingly every AAA game seem to get hammered more than any other part of the staff. You can only hope the release of stories like this from Bloomberg, Kotaku etc will force change in how games are made.
They were talking internally about doing this kind of game since the mid-90's at least. And when I saw the gameplay stuff, I waited to see how they would handle ground-to-orbit stuff. Cutscene? Really?
I figured NMS and ED had set the standard and that they'd build from that level of tech. But apparently not. Very strange to me (and I am a huge Bethesda supporter from way back).
Besides the unseen and we'll find out all those at launch I thought the combat that was shown was in a very bad state. Sub 60 FPS, and stupid AI, along with substandard animations.
I was pretty shocked overall. It seemed like they took parts from each of the more popular space franchises of the last decade, but not the best pieces, just the ones that fit "open world RPG", rather than designing something more like, say, Traveler with lots of procgen elements.
For example, I bet there would be a tremendous market for an NMS-like game with an RPG skeleton built into it. Fly around, do what you like, progress the story when you like, deal with time pressures on occasion, but also just explore if you want. Or an ED-like spaceship economy sim with an RPG overlay. Or even an RPG set against an open-ended corporation/empire builder in the style of Mount and Blade.
But this seems to be based on the PvE style of their previous games. Literally the player *against* the environment. Enemies galore. Combat the first resort. Safe spots like towns just morphed to make them spacey. Exploration but only on well-defined, curated planets (and they have done well if they have 100 of those) with both random and programmed encounters to supplement the storyline. That's fine as far as it goes, but it does not advance the genre. It just seems like Skyrim in Spaaaace...
I hope I'm wrong, but it seems like a "safe" design rather than a gamechanger.
Let's keep some of the realities of FO76 in mind before attempting to rewrite it as this unjustly maligned gem that clearly signals The Next Big IP will be great, clearly, sight unplayed, no seriously clearly, no one has played it yet, but everyone is an entitled f*ck.
That the crunch was absolutely brutal is a separate issue from the complaints people made against it. Many of the things people were complaining about either weren't true (many of the people making videos bashing the game never even played it, they were just riding the hate train and making videos about "what they heard" were problems), or were never actually promised by anyone at Bethesda (most of the things cited as "broken promises" were just things people speculated on before the game was out). I definitely consider it an unjustly maligned gem, and think it's the best Fallout game Bethesda has made, with the best story of any of the FPS Fallout games (yes, even better than New Vegas). It certainly had actual bugs, but most of them were multiplayer related or were made worse/more noticeable because the game was multiplayer. The game mechanic bugs were on par with the bugs other Bethesda games launched with. Skyrim launched with multiple balance bugs that would have completely broken the game had it been multiplayer.
SpacePProtean wrote:Let's keep some of the realities of FO76 in mind before attempting to rewrite it as this unjustly maligned gem that clearly signals The Next Big IP will be great, clearly, sight unplayed, no seriously clearly, no one has played it yet, but everyone is an entitled f*ck.
That the crunch was absolutely brutal is a separate issue from the complaints people made against it. Many of the things people were complaining about either weren't true (many of the people making videos bashing the game never even played it, they were just riding the hate train and making videos about "what they heard" were problems), or were never actually promised by anyone at Bethesda (most of the things cited as "broken promises" were just things people speculated on before the game was out). I definitely consider it an unjustly maligned gem, and think it's the best Fallout game Bethesda has made, with the best story of any of the FPS Fallout games (yes, even better than New Vegas). It certainly had actual bugs, but most of them were multiplayer related or were made worse/more noticeable because the game was multiplayer. The game mechanic bugs were on par with the bugs other Bethesda games launched with. Skyrim launched with multiple balance bugs that would have completely broken the game had it been multiplayer.
Sorry, when I talk about lies, I'm talking about things said from their blog posts, interviews, or from Todd on stage. I hold them accountable for their own words and actions. FO76 made me give up on the 'aw shucks, they did it again vibe' they've been taking advantage of up to that point. Yes, they were plenty of folks jumping on the haterade train, but they deserved a LOT of what was dished out to them. Did the game finally turn into something decent? Maybe, sure, i'll give it that much but it doesn't excuse the outright attempt at deception they tried.
I know a lot of people on this site think I'm too much of a fan boi a lot of times, but I always put effort into the good faith category until a company shows it's not bothering trying anymore. It was very obvious with FO76 they stopped trying. They tried to get by on their good vibes again. Even after all that we went through with Skyrim. There's reports that was also happening with Starfield (comparing it to a disastrous launch like CP2070) and was going for the same thing yet again. Luckily whether they finally started listening to the QA team or MS became the parent in the room and guided them to the delay. It has a chance to be better than what we were destined to get.
I'm sorry, but most of the "hater" videos I saw, and I won't lie, gleefully consumed because it was all hilarious, were either coming from journalistic outfits, namely Giant Bomb and Waypoint, who have a basic ethical obligation due to the nature of their work to play a game before commenting on it, the more amateur commentary community who, and I can't stress this enough, included footage of themselves playing the game in their commentary. Perceived credibility will vary person to person on that, but no, the problems they discussed were not "what they heard." Joseph Anderson made a separate video dedicated to just highlighting the bugs he alone encountered that is 3 hours long. It's great that people found things to enjoy in it, that was bound to happen, but it was quite justly maligned for the launch state alone, to say nothing of everything that happened afterward. I feel the only reason 76 was not a disaster on the scale of Cyberpunk is that Bethesda didn't catch that level of hype because the blog posts, interviews and stage antics ranalin mentions confused people.
My friends and I had already been turned on Bethesda by the slovenly unwritten mess that was Fallout 4, and nothing that they've said so far about Starfield convinces me that they've changed that course (such as "we hired a writer who understands how long a century is").
I was pretty shocked overall. It seemed like they took parts from each of the more popular space franchises of the last decade, but not the best pieces, just the ones that fit "open world RPG", rather than designing something more like, say, Traveler with lots of procgen elements.
For example, I bet there would be a tremendous market for an NMS-like game with an RPG skeleton built into it. Fly around, do what you like, progress the story when you like, deal with time pressures on occasion, but also just explore if you want. Or an ED-like spaceship economy sim with an RPG overlay. Or even an RPG set against an open-ended corporation/empire builder in the style of Mount and Blade.
But this seems to be based on the PvE style of their previous games. Literally the player *against* the environment. Enemies galore. Combat the first resort. Safe spots like towns just morphed to make them spacey. Exploration but only on well-defined, curated planets (and they have done well if they have 100 of those) with both random and programmed encounters to supplement the storyline. That's fine as far as it goes, but it does not advance the genre. It just seems like Skyrim in Spaaaace...
I hope I'm wrong, but it seems like a "safe" design rather than a gamechanger.
Skyrim in space sounds great to me. Your positives are mostly negative for my tastes. :). Procedurally generated environments suck and turn games into repetitive boring gameplay.
Yep, if it delivered Skyrim in space I’d be fine with it.
I am definitely in the camp of give me Skyrim in space. Given what we have seen I am absolutely stoked for Starfield and will be getting it day 1.
I'm totally cool with that. Just possibly not for me. I do love me some random generators!
Random generation depends on the game and genre, for me. If Minecraft only had one map, I'd have played it considerably less. I gravitate towards Factorio more than Satisfactory, because once you know the Satisfactory map, you know it...
...but for story based RPG? Not for me.
On the flip side, no matter how infinite a world is in, say, Minecraft, you can essentially just start building exactly where you spawn, and never really *need* to leave. In NMS, are you really going to find something out there that is that exciting? Or just different... Just because something is generated and you haven't seen it before, doesn't guarantee it'll be good, or worthwhile.
When the choice is infinite, even difference becomes the same.
For me, it's what you do with the spaces and connections that matters. Of course there should be non-random elements in an RPG, lots of them, so everyone gets the backbone of the story. But I'm all for setting it in a randomly generated environment. Having a different canvas to paint on each time, that's really interesting for me. And NMS is a gold mine of "what's around the next ridge?" for me. I don't need exciting, beyond the usual challenges, just... novelty. Newness.
To each their own, I guess.
Not trying to pile on, but put me in the hand-crafted story based world column.
I trust Bethesda to do exploration right (for me) just as they’ve done in Elder Scrolls and Fallout (even FO76 does this bit quite well). The space portions may very well be basic by flight sim standards, but I’m confident there will compelling reasons to explore which includes tiny breadcrumbs of story or lore to learn about.
I personally found No Man’s Sky boring AF. The “randomness” got incredibly repetitive for me way too fast.
I've got a lot of hours in NMS so if there are a bunch of planets with story/stuff going on in addition to the NMS stuff then that works for me. I do trust that Bethesda will pack out the game with lore/quests etc though so it will be a day 1 purchase for me.
so it will be a day 1 purchase for me.
Actual purchase or Gamepass?
I'm fine with a hand-crafted universe if it's fun. My most-played game is Jumpgate, and its map is not huge.
kborom wrote:so it will be a day 1 purchase for me.
Actual purchase or Gamepass?
purchase, don't use gamepass
kborom wrote:so it will be a day 1 purchase for me.
Actual purchase or Gamepass?
Day 1 install then? As opposed to a "when I get around to it" install.
ranalin wrote:kborom wrote:so it will be a day 1 purchase for me.
Actual purchase or Gamepass?
Day 1 install then? As opposed to a "when I get around to it" install.
Definitely. I do prefer to own games as I mostly play open world RPG's so have multiple play throughs and Bethesda stuff is always day 1.
I'm planning a day one purch and install as well.
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