Is it really that broken?
Yeah I think Cyberpunk raised the bar for broken launches. Starfield runs and the only bugs I’ve seen are some wacky NPC interactions and ships clipping through people:
As soon as they opened the post with “why it turned out so awful” I just discounted everything else. We’re not even playing the same game. You could argue that there are parts of it that are designed and executed in such a way that some gamers won’t enjoy it, e.g. lots of loading screens, it’s not a true space sim, performance is lacking, etc.
But there’s tons of content and variety, the game looks nice, the game plays well both on foot and in the starships (of course the shooting isn’t Destiny, and the ship combat isn’t elite dangerous, but it’s good), it’s an enjoyable product in its own right that is buggy, sure, but not brokenly so.
That being said this numerically huge involvement of multiple studios has been a thing in AAA development for a decade or more now, and it doesn’t really mean the game is bad on its own. I do think it’s a problem with scale and visual fidelity of these games hitting a point where this sort of outsourced collaboration is necessary to hit the development time frames these companies expect, but that’s just a sign that they should scale down and get more humble and “locally grown”, though we all know capitalism won’t abide by that and neither will the paying average gamer who can still somehow look at modern AAA titles and say they look bland or all right at times even though the fidelity is absolutely nuts.
It’s on 4chins, so it’s safe to assume the opposite of whatever they say is closer to the truth than what they posted.
So far, I’ve only really experienced one real bug (groundpounder mission suuuucks), and my only other complaint I have (frequent CTDs) is probably because I’m way under the min spec running an RX 570. Considering this is a Bethesda game, it’s surprisingly not that buggy.
No worse than any other BRPG at launch. A lot of people are still let down for other reasons.
ive played nearly all Bethesda games at launch. This one has the worst aesthetical feel. Inconsistent npc facial animations. All the apparel and spacesuits are ugly as heck.
Id argue 4chan is right here. Outsourcing has its downsides in design.
Btw. If you use the mod to turn off color filters the game starts to feel very dark, but with filters even shadows are colored. Inconsistent outcomes fixed with filters? To make it look more uniform around a planet etc. I do know about atmosphere colors, but atmosphere doesn’t color the darkness.
From what I understand they wanted the game to feel “cinematic” so they choose themes for each area to give you a specific feeling. I too am not thrilled with reddish shadows because Bethesda decided this moon should be reddish even though it’s all grey…
Of all the things to get upset about, the game leveraged too many studios to produce too many assets is a weird one.
Luckily for that poster there’s a bunch of indie games where the end credit screen is barely one full page. He has lots of people he can support instead of going with Bethesda and their contracted studios.
I think it’s more they’re upset about exploiting sweatshop labor though…?
Always found that argument kinda weird, do you think the people working in video game development in Vietnam would prefer to be unemployed? I know them, they like their jobs. They want to work. And they will switch jobs to a better one when it’s available. But until then they want the money
let us presume that Video Game N has 100 currency in it budget.
The studio producing Video Game N spends 90 currency on essentially nothing, by purchasing contracts with shell companies owned by their own board of investors, then they take the remaining 10 currency and offshore basically ALL of the actual productive work to 50 developers. Those 50 developers must split the 10 currency between each other while collectively doing 100 currency’s worth of work.
I want them to get paid 100 currency.
I do not think “they should be grateful to get 1/100th of what they deserve” is a productive or helpful position to hold.
If the available budgets of these games were not squandered on laundering and graft, and less spread thin across a vast army of people who barely get to take home pennies on the hour, it would be a good thing, you see.
4chan discovers outsourcing
It’s because creating more complex system requires more than a linear increase in development and then the development system has to also be more complex because it requires more people and communication between them gets harder. Everything grows exponentially.
I just think that fundamentally, the games we imagine and are promised that should be possible with the processing power we have today is just impossible to create because the systems are just too complex(costs too many hours of skilled labor, impossible to earn back).
AAA games mostly seem like prettier versions of games from late 200x’s. Moment to moment everything is higher fidelity but the gameplay systems are just the same.
(I haven’t played the game but mostly because Skyrim was also mostly boring to me because the gameplay systems were actually really shallow and I didn’t care about the “wow big open world” anymore because its not a novelty anymore)
