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.
I wanna hear how bug free the game is from those 2,000 hours in one save file weirdos.
Yeah the games solid til about hour..269? Then everyone T-poses and then falls into geometry.
Yeah, maybe the 2,062 cheese wheels I have stored in my house could be bugging things out but I doubt it.
👎 Not recommended
6,940 hours playtime
Bugthesda strikes again!
Think the game is stable? Try teleporting nothing but cheese wheels for three straight days.
#CHEESEWHEELGATE
"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."
Yeah true. Why do the talking when you can do the walking.
This actually gives me more concerns than before, which is probably not what they intended.
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".
We'll just have to see.
Honestly I dont think I will care if I see bugs, but if people are going "there arent any bugs" im gonna keep my eyes out for them.
I'm guessing bug free just means their game didn't crash. Or they're just really unobservant.
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.
That's such a low bar that it's clipped through the floor.
That's how they do door sills!
Least buggiest? Are we just giving up on English, "journalists?"
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
Alas, I just tried searching that and a few close variants, and find nothing but this Memmy post.
Hah, this was about 10 years ago - I doubt anything I wrote is still around.
Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn't make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.
Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.
For a while? So are other companies now hustling in on your game.
I imagine that LLMs have been trained on his reviews by this point and are vigorously producing articles exploring the intersection of pop gaming and the Elder Things.
What are editors?
— journalists probably
I mean, an automated grammar checker should get this. Shouldn't even require a human editor.
Plugging it in there catches it and suggests "least buggy".
Rewording things is also one of the few things that LLMs seem to be able to reliably do, too.
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 doesn't have to be "proper" if it works as a joke. It implies that a Bethesda game can't be merely "buggy," it must be the "buggiest," even if it's (paradoxically) less buggy. So, "least buggiest."
Doesn't matter what he claims, he just wrote an article for a publishing/news/media company. That's called journalism, professional or not.
jour·nal·ism
/ˈjərnlˌizəm/
noun
the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast.
"she had begun a career in journalism"
Now define "claim" (verb).
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.
Someone distributing it for free doesn't mean they can legally just put it in their code and sell it.
If it is licensed in a way they can use it, they'd still have to do a bunch of testing and validation to actually do it.
That's still orders of magnitude easier than figuring it out from first principles, and nowhere near arduous enough to excuse leaving the problems unaddressed.
It's not that simple. Even using it as a base gets you into a legal gray area. Learning from a work and incorporating elements into your own work is legal, but copying someone else's legwork like this is legally murky even if you don't take the actual code.
Yeah I'm sure Microsoft-owned Bethesda is shaking in their boots about learning from modifications to their own game. That's gotta be everything stays buggy.
If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.
If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.
If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person's code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn't been noticed or isn't being pursued because there's not likely any money in it anyways.
It's that murky area that I'm guessing they'd want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.
Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)
Hiring the modder is not necessary, to look at a mod, go 'oh that's what we did wrong,' and fix it. That's not the ctrl+c/ctrl+v situation you seem to expect. And considering it's their own game, and fixing bugs, the legal concerns are practically nonexistent.
If an employee writes code for a company, that employee owns the copyright.
Bet.
Oops thanks for putting that out, corrected.
For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else's invention.
Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn't gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don't agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don't think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.
That's not to say that it's legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there's just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.
I don't even know who you're talking to at this point. It bears little resemblance to anything I've written.
Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.
There's copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There's parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn't use copy/paste). And there's precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).
Our first public comment about Starfield being a polished game came from journalist Tyler McVicker, who’s currently under an embargo for the title.
Wow they name dropped a youtuber. Nevermind, went to my favorite source for gaming, Dexerto, aaaand it's the same shit.
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.
The author also used the phrase "least buggiest" in the headline, I think we can guarantee there isn't any actual journalism in the article
It's basically nothing more than a badly written advert.
No worries about launching horses or trolls into orbit in a space game.
"Redfall is looking awesome, it has Arkane's best gunplay yet."
I remember this one. Don't trust AAA developers and game journos. Wait for reviews before buying.
"You won't find any bugs if you don't do any QA"
-Todd Howard probably
deletes the Jira ticket
“Problem solved!”
Nah gotta mark it as cannot duplicate then close. Gotta rack up those sweet story points.
You can't fault his logic. /s
iirc they have focused on QA significantly more than with their previous games
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.
Plus come on... space and customer ship! :D
Yeah, I have thousands of hours in Bethesda games. Something about sneaking around murdering bandits, mutants, mythical beasts, heavily armored soldiers, etc. especially sniping them with a bow in Skyrim and watching everyone run around like "who shot Steve in the face!?", that was just... chef's kiss. That and finding something interesting around every corner, and just the visual aspect of it. It's hard to explain but there is a certain Bethesda magic that no other game really captures. Plus the modding...
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.
I was thinking the same thing. I'm sure launch will be a bit of a shit show, but at least we usually get some entertaining bugs.
Your daily reminder to not preorder. Least buggiest is not a high bar, TBH.
I'm a little disappointed I was looking forward to Skyrim bugs in Space
The Giant Club space program could now actually send you to space; but there are no giants 😔
That we know of
Pressing x
What a sales pitch!
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 title hurts my eyes!
Least buggy*
Bugleastest
I don't believe you.
Seems like a standard marketing move to get ahead of the meme. We'll see how this article ages by next week, but I pretty sus. 😂
No fatal accidents in this workplace in over 30 days!
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.
no, no, no
you see this is a space game, they are supposed to fly off into space in this one
FEATURE
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'll believe it when I see it.
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.
Just love the pre-release reviews being all "this is shit" when the game hasn't even released yet.
I see the npcs still have the signature Bethesda empty stare… is that a stylistic choice or do they just suck at face mocap?
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.
Clearly the game needs a Dogmeat facial expression mod.
neither. They probably just haven't implemented default facial expressions yet (but probably have support for them).
This just in: the least-stinky shit you ever took still smelled like shit
Least buggy?
Guess journalists are forgetting how to grammar.
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 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!
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.
Reminder it’s on gamepass!
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.
It will be a few years before it's on GOG, so it really depends how patient you are. Fallout 4 only appeared on there a week or two ago to give you a frame of reference.
Oh dang. thanks for the headsup. Will it not be on steam day1?
It'll be on Steam day one, yeah.
I sincerely don't mind their balance between bugs and ambition, but all this shit has me terrified.
It's hilariously sad when you require a headline like that because of your previous games.
Oh no, what'd they break this time?
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?
What a ringing endorsement.....
Well then im not interested
As in no giant bug beasts?
(x) doubt
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.
Can't believe people are still gonna trust this Bryan Kohberger-looking motherfucker anymore.
Todd Howard should spend more time debugging and less paying for positive articles.
Based on their other games, that's the bare minimum we should expect
Yeah, because when you've used the same engine for the past 15 years, I'd expect you to iron out most of the issues by now.
I kid because I love. I'll play the fuck out of it regardless, but I'll almost be disappointed if this game isn't a glorious mess at launch.
Morrowind was the first game on the engine.
Morrowind came out in 2002 so it's actually been 21 years
Not gonna lie, that makes me less confident
Lucky to receive it for free. No way am I trusting those who made 19 versions of Skyrim and didn't fix bugs present in the first ver.
Does it come bundled with some hardware?
Yes, the latest generation of AMD CPUs, or the latest two generations of AMD GPUs. If you buy the more expensive ones you can get premium edition.
That's some good shit.
It's also in game pass from day one
Gamepass usually means unmoddable, which is basically against the whole point of Bethesda games.
Probably the result of Bethesda having to answer to Microsoft who gives final approval.
Good for them. Where the hell is the next Elder Scrolls already? That poor old woman who plays Skyrim is gonna die before it comes out.
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.
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.
I wanna hear how bug free the game is from those 2,000 hours in one save file weirdos.
Yeah the games solid til about hour..269? Then everyone T-poses and then falls into geometry.
Yeah, maybe the 2,062 cheese wheels I have stored in my house could be bugging things out but I doubt it.
👎 Not recommended
6,940 hours playtime
Bugthesda strikes again!
Think the game is stable? Try teleporting nothing but cheese wheels for three straight days.
#CHEESEWHEELGATE
"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."
Yeah true. Why do the talking when you can do the walking.
This actually gives me more concerns than before, which is probably not what they intended.
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".
We'll just have to see.
Honestly I dont think I will care if I see bugs, but if people are going "there arent any bugs" im gonna keep my eyes out for them.
I'm guessing bug free just means their game didn't crash. Or they're just really unobservant.
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.
That's such a low bar that it's clipped through the floor.
That's how they do door sills!
Least buggiest? Are we just giving up on English, "journalists?"
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
Alas, I just tried searching that and a few close variants, and find nothing but this Memmy post.
Hah, this was about 10 years ago - I doubt anything I wrote is still around.
Ah damn, I guess the internet monks didn't make new copies of your articles before they feel apart and decayed to dust. Too many monks these days probably follow the flashier acrobatic martial arts career path.
Though they are doing a good job of preserving the ancient internet memes.
For a while? So are other companies now hustling in on your game.
I imagine that LLMs have been trained on his reviews by this point and are vigorously producing articles exploring the intersection of pop gaming and the Elder Things.
What are editors? — journalists probably
I mean, an automated grammar checker should get this. Shouldn't even require a human editor.
https://languagetool.org/
Plugging it in there catches it and suggests "least buggy".
Rewording things is also one of the few things that LLMs seem to be able to reliably do, too.
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 doesn't have to be "proper" if it works as a joke. It implies that a Bethesda game can't be merely "buggy," it must be the "buggiest," even if it's (paradoxically) less buggy. So, "least buggiest."
All he claims to be is "a[n] FPS fanatic, social media guru, and a father."
Doesn't matter what he claims, he just wrote an article for a publishing/news/media company. That's called journalism, professional or not.
Now define "claim" (verb).
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.
Someone distributing it for free doesn't mean they can legally just put it in their code and sell it.
If it is licensed in a way they can use it, they'd still have to do a bunch of testing and validation to actually do it.
That's still orders of magnitude easier than figuring it out from first principles, and nowhere near arduous enough to excuse leaving the problems unaddressed.
It's not that simple. Even using it as a base gets you into a legal gray area. Learning from a work and incorporating elements into your own work is legal, but copying someone else's legwork like this is legally murky even if you don't take the actual code.
Yeah I'm sure Microsoft-owned Bethesda is shaking in their boots about learning from modifications to their own game. That's gotta be everything stays buggy.
If an employee writes code for a company, the employer* owns the copyright.
If an individual writes code on their own time, they own the copyright.
If someone publishes a free mod containing code, that mod could contain a combination of that person's code, code from other contributors, and even other copyrighted code that none of them had the right to in the first place but it either hasn't been noticed or isn't being pursued because there's not likely any money in it anyways.
It's that murky area that I'm guessing they'd want to avoid. They might be more likely to hire the modder to do that again from scratch for them than to use their work directly. Blizzard did that back in the day with two (that I know of) of the people writing modding tools for StarCraft. Their tools remained on the modding site and were never officially adopted by Blizzard but the authors worked on the WC3 map editor to add some of that functionality right into the official map editor that was going to be released with the game.
Edit: corrected a mistake where I said the opposite of what I intended to (that the employee owned the copyright rather than the employer)
Hiring the modder is not necessary, to look at a mod, go 'oh that's what we did wrong,' and fix it. That's not the ctrl+c/ctrl+v situation you seem to expect. And considering it's their own game, and fixing bugs, the legal concerns are practically nonexistent.
Bet.
Oops thanks for putting that out, corrected.
For the first point, it might be more of a patent thing than copyright, because you can patent improvements you come up with for someone else's invention.
Though another angle might be that game studios want to avoid encouraging a freelance game improvement market where people look to financially gain from swooping in and making improvements to their games. It might result in improvements they already planned to make but hadn't gotten to being blocked by patents and license demands. I don't agree that this is something that should be avoided, though I don't think current IP laws would make this a desirable system for anyone other than lawyers.
That's not to say that it's legally impossible to figure out how to navigate pulling in community changes to the main game, there's just complications involved that so far Bethesda has preferred to avoid. They might even just want to avoid a case going to court to set some kind of precedent because it might involve paying royalties to modders. IMO they would deserve to be paid if their work gets pulled into the game directly or indirectly, and even just as modders adding value to the base game I think maybe they deserve some compensation for their efforts.
I don't even know who you're talking to at this point. It bears little resemblance to anything I've written.
Just generally rambling about reasons why companies might not want to adopt user-authored changes in their main game.
There's copyright that applies to code (which would cover copy/paste). There's parents that apply to ideas (which might still cover cases where you didn't use copy/paste). And there's precedence where if you do something one way one time, others might expect you to continue doing it that way even if you intended it to be a one-off (which might overlap with both of those).
Wow they name dropped a youtuber. Nevermind, went to my favorite source for gaming, Dexerto, aaaand it's the same shit.
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.
The author also used the phrase "least buggiest" in the headline, I think we can guarantee there isn't any actual journalism in the article
It's basically nothing more than a badly written advert.
No worries about launching horses or trolls into orbit in a space game.
"Redfall is looking awesome, it has Arkane's best gunplay yet."
I remember this one. Don't trust AAA developers and game journos. Wait for reviews before buying.
"You won't find any bugs if you don't do any QA"
-Todd Howard probably
deletes the Jira ticket
“Problem solved!”
Nah gotta mark it as cannot duplicate then close. Gotta rack up those sweet story points.
You can't fault his logic. /s
iirc they have focused on QA significantly more than with their previous games
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.
Plus come on... space and customer ship! :D
Yeah, I have thousands of hours in Bethesda games. Something about sneaking around murdering bandits, mutants, mythical beasts, heavily armored soldiers, etc. especially sniping them with a bow in Skyrim and watching everyone run around like "who shot Steve in the face!?", that was just... chef's kiss. That and finding something interesting around every corner, and just the visual aspect of it. It's hard to explain but there is a certain Bethesda magic that no other game really captures. Plus the modding...
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.
That's a really low bar NGL
I'm going to wait for launch and reviews for sure
I was thinking the same thing. I'm sure launch will be a bit of a shit show, but at least we usually get some entertaining bugs.
Your daily reminder to not preorder. Least buggiest is not a high bar, TBH.
I'm a little disappointed I was looking forward to Skyrim bugs in Space
The Giant Club space program could now actually send you to space; but there are no giants 😔
That we know of
Pressing x
What a sales pitch!
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 title hurts my eyes!
Least buggy*
Bugleastest
I don't believe you.
Seems like a standard marketing move to get ahead of the meme. We'll see how this article ages by next week, but I pretty sus. 😂
No fatal accidents in this workplace in over 30 days!
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.
no, no, no
you see this is a space game, they are supposed to fly off into space in this one
FEATURE
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'll believe it when I see it.
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.
Just love the pre-release reviews being all "this is shit" when the game hasn't even released yet.
I see the npcs still have the signature Bethesda empty stare… is that a stylistic choice or do they just suck at face mocap?
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.
Clearly the game needs a Dogmeat facial expression mod.
https://img.ilcdn.fi/IzG\_zochUwlOAhQBDnbDTftjGcg=/full-fit-in/612x/img-s3.ilcdn.fi/33c3f60a7ac4a5c63152c9835552888c10104f6688c6c17f342543889a49dee2.jpg
https://post.bark.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/main1.jpg
https://theawesomedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/derpy-dog-portraits-by-kevin-sarasom-28-1.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/75/21/77/75217779432d335f6bbd2b6e370b6cee.jpg
https://justsomething.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/15-dogs-with-facial-expressions-that-are-so-human-it-s-hilarious-12.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cYNlJYQI3Uw/maxresdefault.jpg
neither. They probably just haven't implemented default facial expressions yet (but probably have support for them).
This just in: the least-stinky shit you ever took still smelled like shit
Least buggy?
Guess journalists are forgetting how to grammar.
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 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!
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.
Reminder it’s on gamepass!
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.
It will be a few years before it's on GOG, so it really depends how patient you are. Fallout 4 only appeared on there a week or two ago to give you a frame of reference.
Oh dang. thanks for the headsup. Will it not be on steam day1?
It'll be on Steam day one, yeah.
I sincerely don't mind their balance between bugs and ambition, but all this shit has me terrified.
It's hilariously sad when you require a headline like that because of your previous games.
Oh no, what'd they break this time?
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?
What a ringing endorsement.....
Well then im not interested
As in no giant bug beasts?
(x) doubt
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFcLyDb6niA
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=hFcLyDb6niA
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Lol nice stroll down memory lane.
Can't believe people are still gonna trust this Bryan Kohberger-looking motherfucker anymore.
Todd Howard should spend more time debugging and less paying for positive articles.
Based on their other games, that's the bare minimum we should expect
Yeah, because when you've used the same engine for the past 15 years, I'd expect you to iron out most of the issues by now.
I kid because I love. I'll play the fuck out of it regardless, but I'll almost be disappointed if this game isn't a glorious mess at launch.
Morrowind came out in 2002 so it's actually been 21 years
Not gonna lie, that makes me less confident
Lucky to receive it for free. No way am I trusting those who made 19 versions of Skyrim and didn't fix bugs present in the first ver.
Does it come bundled with some hardware?
Yes, the latest generation of AMD CPUs, or the latest two generations of AMD GPUs. If you buy the more expensive ones you can get premium edition.
That's some good shit.
It's also in game pass from day one
Gamepass usually means unmoddable, which is basically against the whole point of Bethesda games.
Probably the result of Bethesda having to answer to Microsoft who gives final approval.
Good for them. Where the hell is the next Elder Scrolls already? That poor old woman who plays Skyrim is gonna die before it comes out.
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.