I think you’ve summarized the biggest problem with Halo currently. Even if you enjoy the game, its one if those games you play for a while, maybe beat the campaign and then move into other games.

It just doesn’t feel like a flagship title anymore. And if it wasn’t for the Halo name it would be even more forgettable then it is now.

I was a big fan of the settlement building in Fallout 4. Was one of the mechanics that kept me coming back for later playthroughs and made the world feel less static and that I could actually have an impact on it. Especially instances like seeing one of the supply chain NPCs from one of my settlements walking around in the world.

I really hope they fix the case sensitivity on kbin soon.

Arm-chair babbling idiot who plays too much video games here, I am one hundred percent convinced that it has nothing to do with visual fidelity and everything to do with that asthmatic engine they’ve been dragging since Morrowind.

Code doesn’t go bad with time, that’s not really how it works. And game engines tend to be a Ship of Theseus situation, where just because it’s still the same “engine” in theory, doesn’t mean that large parts (or all of it), haven’t eventually been replaced or refactored over the years.

Unreal Engine has been around for 30 years at this point, would you also consider that an “asthmatic engine”?

Scaling up as a game developer (or any software company) is hard, but not “it takes a decade and half a billion dollars” hard.

Is this the part where I refer to people worried about pre-orders as “basement dwelling losers having nothing in their lives worth caring about other than whether other people pre-order games” and then we trade insults for a few comments trying to get the last word until one of us gets bored?

I mean, that’s what we would do on Reddit, but not sure if that’s the case around these parts.

Always important to remember that lots of opinions people are posting online are just things they read somewhere and are repeating.

The people that preorder clearly aren’t listening

Or they are listening and just don’t care.

Why are people preordering a DIGITAL, BETHESDA game?! It’s still the Creation Engine (Creation Engine 2 so hopefully they fixed it!) so it’s probably gonna be a buggy mess at release.

Unlike most online gaming communities, there are many people in the world that enjoy playing video games. So, when they see a game that looks fun to play, they buy it or pre-order it.

Sure, but consider the specific situation we have in gaming where Microsoft is sitting in a distant third to Sony and Nintendo. Aren’t any limitations placed on how Microsoft can grow in the gaming market just making it easier for the bigger players to cement their positions in the lead?

Kingdom Come is a solid game, but it’s also still a very narrow game compared to Skyrim. You play as a specific character and the “sandbox” nature of the game is much more limited.

It’s more like the Witcher where you can roleplay slight variations on one person, rather than Skyrim where you can role-play as a vast array of potential characters.

It was over a long time ago for me when I realized that most AAA games were all the same.

Do people actual believe this or is just one of those cliches that people repeat when they don’t have anything meaningful to contribute?

I’m curious how many similarities there are between games like Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6 and Starfield? I could make the list bigger but figure that’s a good starting point.

Windows and IE was an issue was an issue because of monopoly concerns when it came to the PC OS market and browsers.

Are you concerned that Microsoft will have a monopoly in the console gaming market if the Activision deal goes though?

Open world games like Skyrim are hard to make, and modern expectations are making them even harder.

People are shitting on Bethesda for taking so long, but no other developer has managed to make a worthy competitor in the decade+ since Skyrim released.

Yeah that’s the part I’m waiting to hear more about. The first one just felt like no decisions needed to be made other than what you wanted your city to look like. And if course, as you mentioned, where to put roads. But the actual management of the city felt like almost an afterthought.

I think I finally put some real time into the game not long after Wastelanders came out and I really enjoyed the game overall. Put I think roughly 150+ hours into the game at least.

The CAMP system was way more addicting than it has a right to be. To bad do much of the game is behind a cash shop.

But you sound more in the now about their internal processes, so you’re probably right and I misinterpreted what they meant by that quote.

The general summary of how “bugs” work in software development is simple at a high level.

1. Someone reports the bug (developer, qa, player, user, etc)
2. Someone prioritizes the bug
3. Lower priority issues are put on a backlog to potentially be worked on later
4. Higher priority issues get fixed (most of the time)

The product releases when an acceptable level of bugs from steps 3 and 4 are reached, and “acceptable” never means zero or even close to it.

Or they just don’t care what niche communities think about pre-ordering and they just play their games and enjoy them?

Plenty of developers have shipped out a game they believed to be bug free only for the players to discover hundreds of missed bugs on launch day.

You are mistaken if you believe that developers believe the games they ship are “bug free”, and I would bet that many of the bugs you think are “missed” are actually already known on an internal issue tracker somewhere. But those bugs were determined to be shippable. And again, that’s not specific to games, but software in general.

Yeah how can they say it has the “fewest bugs any Bethesda game has shipped with” when the game hasn’t shipped yet??

Issue tracking has been a part of software development since the beginning. They know and have always known roughly how many bugs they have shipped games with. Just like any company that releases a product knows roughly how many bugs they are shipping with. I pretty much guarantee you that any software that has ever been released has had a huge backlog of bugs of varying levels of importance sitting on some form of backlog.

So, it’s pretty straightforward for them to know how this game is comparing against their previous releases. Not to say that there won’t be plenty of bugs that have been missed, but that’s not really the point.