We need to let Bethesda die

[LevyMcGarden]

Bethesda has been digging a hole and they have a strange relationship with modders. But with the recent Fallout 76 issue (the essay) and with the fact that they release sub-par games that we have to fix for them, and I am sure we are glad fixing them, but we helped Bethesda get where it is now. But we made a pretty big mistake in that because now Bethesda sits on a high horse making subpar games that we fix, with no official patches for their issues. Such as with Skyrim, the biggest community here on Nexus with the 50,000+ mods, where a bad physics engine and a nearly 20-year-old game engine being used still, you can die in Riverwood for no reason if you jump into the cart of cabbages. Or the black face bug. Or all of the other countless issues that USP fixed. They were able to make these games because they knew we would fix them. But Bethesda either needs to get their stuff together, or die as a company, and I am sad to say it but maybe the latter needs to happen.

[CharrGazgre]

Can't help it. Making bug-free games are nearly impossible.... Unless the game was made by or checked/licensed by Nintendo.

 

Only company that I know able to make [probable] bug-free games is Nintendo.

[ElPolloAzul]

One of the great sad truths about society is that it assigns value almost pathologically poorly from the humanistic perspective, and it does this much more efficiently and perniciously than a single person, however misguided, ever could.

A lot of the very most stupid and inconsiderate kids many of us despise growing up turn out to live pretty nice lives while the rest of us in some sense fritter opportunities of youth away caring about various people and issues and cultural products and bodies of knowledge and jeremiads that are important to us at the time, as opposed to simply advancement. A few of Those who don't Care stumble through a semblance of higher education, just having "fun", occasionally with all of the shockingly stereotypical trappings and interpersonal abuses you'd expect, and end up as decently-paid "business development" "professionals" who get to spend their careers swarming around any identified artifacts of aesthetic value or people of competence they are directed to, hoovering them up in an intellectual property version of the historical practice of enclosure, and devouring nearly everything good or interesting about them.

This happens in some way to everything that's visible enough of a target for commercial overexploitation because there's not much of a concerted mass movement afoot to identify and extirpate these personalities from the positions of influence that they are intent on inhabiting or from society at large. Enough soulless marketers or "strategists" come to roost can and will kill any good thing and disband any assemblage of talent. You cannot realistically expect many of these types to exhibit gratitude, humility, authenticity, or charity in their professional lives either and it is notoriously hard to clear them and their ideas out from organizations and affiliates, even if their ideas strangle and kill organizations, ultimately destroying shareholder value. Like any infestation, they tend to bring their friends.

I think that regardless of our various disappointments at some number of missed opportunities, the core team at Bethesda Game Studios isn't at all in that territory, and has been doing something "special", that is, reasonably miraculous and not successfully replicated at scale by anyone else for many games in a row. Until recently, they have weathered runaway success (which is typically ruinous) reasonably well. Their dominance of a particular type of highly-engrossing, zeitgeist-type game is more like Rockstar North's old situation and less like the golden ages of Westwood or Maxis or DICE or Bioware or Blizzard.

Nontechnical people talk all the time about replacing the engine with something more-or-less off-the-shelf (Crytek! Unreal!), but don't really seem to get that the engine that's there has a unique combination of competencies built-up over time in a Ship of Theseus scenario. If you want to understand how engines evolve, and sometimes form, direct, and outlast companies, just look at the legacy of the Quake family of engines. "Bethesda games" take on interesting technical challenges not often confronted that won't go away just because someone else has chosen to take them on. Unfavorable comparisons to more on-the-rails games (even if they are open world!) with better animation systems, particle effects, inverse kinematics or facial animations will always be substantially invalid: these are massively object-oriented, highly-interactive, simulation and dynamics-heavy monsters with a whole lot of data, entities, and moving parts. When you have to design and then model the logical consequences of these elements interacting, the complexity grows combinatorially. Furthermore the mechanics, the art assets, the writing, and the worlds have a LOT of emotional expectations set upon them -- they aren't peripheral grass or water simulations in a racing game. Both of these facets (the technical and the emotional complexity) conspicuously keep the modding community for these games busy for many more man-years than could be profitably sustained in commercial development. Ultimately, there are tradeoffs in response to resource, time, and core competency constraints -- you can look at the X series by Egosoft to see what some games developed with a skeleton crew which embrace (re)invention of a franchise-specific engine and their players are capable of sacrificing in the pursuit of a rarefied level of systems-heavy gameplay. When you see a nice, shiny, stable game, you also have to ask how much of what's good about it comes from the root of a reused engine, vs. how much is bespoke and project-specific.

Beyond that, in the current situation with BGS games, you have a community of highly acculturated tool users and content creators that is almost entirely alone in the world, in its own class. It elevates regular players to mod creator at a greater rate than nearly any other mainstream game. That shouldn't be thrown away lightly. Outside the games industry, untold millions have been lost and ventures and careers abandoned due to needlessly reinventing relatively simplistic healthcare records, accounting, and educational software and then thrusting it upon scattered groups of bewildered users who need to be very expensively trained. Their throwing more bodies at an foundational overhaul isn't necessarily going to improve things: the Hollywood/Ubisoft-game model of throwing thousands of very-short-term workers at a project to get it produced faster produces beautiful art assets quickly and assembles worlds fast when well orchestrated (and that orchestration is a marvel) but doesn't tend to work well for producing a cohesive piece of complex software or an organically iterated world where there is a lot of interrelated stuff to do. It is true that a lot of indie devs regularly inflict hardship on themselves to produce a few polished gems, but the relative brevity of the credits for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 especially is still impressive. Alone, it is impressive how many users of Papyrus there are compared to how many were likely involved in its development. Perfection is easier to aim for in circumscribed, initially-despotically-led freeware projects with unconstrained development schedules.

Bad or not, Havok is largely the same physics middleware used by nearly everyone and so a lot of games have been replete with its hilarity. The cart of cabbages is decent microcosm: here you have an odd corner case where the dynamics of the physics system lead to a runaway situation. Overall, among flaws crying out to be fixed, it's low priority: It's pretty funny, it generates some press, and a lot of viral videos. A whole lot of other games would have made the cart a static object and called it a day. They would have never had to deal with this kind of criticism, but the carts in the game would also be completely unremarkable. It's hard to justify finding the expertise to evaluate and fix all of these things (if they can be fixed -- at some level of simulation, these become potentially insoluble empirical problems), because if you strove first to produce a bug-free game, you would never succeed, and it is time spent circling the drain that you would not be putting out a new creative work, thinking about innovations, cool little details, and so on. Nintendo's internal studios pour immense resources into polish and QA, plan as if they had still had one chance to "go gold", typically shun including complex systems "just for the heck of it", target homogeneous hardware they don't have to scramble to support around release day, don't allow or allocate resources for modding, don't have a lot of background dialogue and map filler and multiple paths to completion and AI-centric scheduling in their games, and correspondingly have a great release quality track record, but they still have showstoppers (e.g. in Skyward Sword) and have somewhat embraced the patch and DLC culture. BGS catches quest bugs with a bit of a lag and less completely than is really ideal, but arguably you should be comparing their changelogs to games of comparable complexity (some MMOs, and Minecraft, etc.).

To understand why choices with a lot of alienation potential (online and mobile plays that could be described as cynical) don't kill a developer like this, you have to ask "Why do people like fixing these games?". Many of us love BGS games despite anemic main quests, for example. It has been implicitly demonstrated, then, that while we would really like improvement there, it isn't our priority. So are the bugs even a top-5 priority as consumers, especially considering that the first wave consumers are the more important, rather than the die-hard realism and fixes folks who inhabit the long tail? I do think the games have to be said to succeed pretty well while not being fixed (before the CK comes out, and historically indefinitely on consoles with no recourse but official patches, which previously had to go through an expensive and hardly agile certification process demanded by the likes of Sony and Microsoft). Also, how many people can justifiably take credit for fixing the games? Who's "we", really? The small percentage of prolific mod authors out of total players, and the percentage of bugfixing mod authors over those mod authors (many of whom want to just get something out there that others can enjoy) should maybe be more regularly considered when this argument is made. While I think it is the right thing to do and the smart thing to do to meaningfully respect and incorporate and maybe even reward modders, most disrespect they are exposed to does not originate from Bethesda, and they are a more agile and larger collective, so they will always be fixing faster than the devs if they are motivated and given usable tools.

I think it would be interesting to know what the real opinions of development studios were among different kinds of other developers, as opposed to the gaming public (which still funds modern-day Activision & EA, and deals with collective action so very poorly).

[Dark0ne]

Nope, this is a silly idea.

 

I think people have lost sight of two simple facts:

1. Bethesda games have always sold well, and better, on consoles than they have on PC. Console modding was never possible until very recently.
2. The vanilla games (excluding perhaps FO76) are still very good to play, for the most part, even if they are buggy in places. I myself always play any new game without mods first, before I do any playthrough with mods. They always stand up and provide a good source of entertainment.

The conclusion of these two facts is that:

1. The modding community is not as important as people like to make it out to be. It supplements their games, sure, but it is not what makes them so successful and if it didn't exist, they would still be an economic success.
2. Bethesda games being buggy has become more of a meme than something mired in truth. Yes, they have bugs, but you can still get a very good, enjoyable experience out of the vanilla games.

[JimboUK]

Bethesda's last gen titles were more broken on the PS3 than they were on the PC but they still sold well despite having no fixes available.

[Lisnpuppy]

I just read an article that there is/was a bug with 76 here in the past week-ish where you can not launch the nukes. I kinda had to laugh, I admit.

[RGMage2]

Bethesda makes games that people love to play. If something ever did happen that caused Bethesda to go under, it would be a great loss for almost everyone here.

 

I've played Oblivion and Skyrim extensively on PC, modded and un-moded, and IMO the main cause of instability in those games are the mods that people use. In Skyrim I only recall one bugged quest that was actually un-finishable, Blood On The Ice, and Bethesda did fix that.

 

Fallout 3 I played on PC mostly un-modded, just the few mods I made for myself, and there were absolutely no issues.

 

Fallout 4 I've only played on xbox with no mods, and no problems other than an occasional freeze and re-boot. I love the game and I'll probably play it a little tonight.

 

As for the game engine and Bethesda's slow march forward, As a mod maker I think they've made good decisions. I like the continuity with the editor from one game to the next. Changes and improvements are made, yet still there is enough that is familiar so that even though each game is a little more complex, the learning curve isn't so great that I'm overwhelmed by it.

 

I'll happily continue spending some money with Bethesda, because IMO they've got the recipe for what I want.

 

If life's a box of chocolates, Bethesda is a darned good chocolatier.

[HeyYou]

Bethesda makes games that people love to play. If something ever did happen that caused Bethesda to go under, it would be a great loss for almost everyone here.

 

I've played Oblivion and Skyrim extensively on PC, modded and un-moded, and IMO the main cause of instability in those games are the mods that people use. In Skyrim I only recall one bugged quest that was actually un-finishable, Blood On The Ice, and Bethesda did fix that.

 

Fallout 3 I played on PC mostly un-modded, just the few mods I made for myself, and there were absolutely no issues.

 

Fallout 4 I've only played on xbox with no mods, and no problems other than an occasional freeze and re-boot. I love the game and I'll probably play it a little tonight.

 

As for the game engine and Bethesda's slow march forward, As a mod maker I think they've made good decisions. I like the continuity with the editor from one game to the next. Changes and improvements are made, yet still there is enough that is familiar so that even though each game is a little more complex, the learning curve isn't so great that I'm overwhelmed by it.

 

I'll happily continue spending some money with Bethesda, because IMO they've got the recipe for what I want.

 

If life's a box of chocolates, Bethesda is a darned good chocolatier.

What he said. :)

 

Though, I started with Morrowind. (technically, daggerfall, but, that wasn't moddable, and boy was that one buggy.......)

[Mudran]

I don't mind ordinary bugs that much, but the new direction of Bethesda predicted by players of ESO some time ago. But sadly not only that, it looks like "play with friends" - their latest Fallout 76 motto - can be translated like: play with AAA industry friends=Zenimax with friends. My sad joke - every time some AAA studio does something which players doesn't like, all other studios will repeat that, so let Bethesda die would have to be: let the whole AAA industry die.

 

It will not happen (I guess that is the reason why they think they can afford to be mean on players) if they will be the only one with polishing their games - yes even Bethesda games still have more of polish than ordinary AA studio, not to mention indies trying desperately to do open worlds. So they do have monopoly :sad:

 

So basically creating games would have to be cheaper, that you wouldn't need over 200 people working 5 years to create a single big game like Skyrim. Usually not really advanced engine is a big problem - you need a lot of programmers, and the lack of top assets. And I don't know what could solve that.

 

That is why I can understand everyone who is upset when someone criticize ordinary business - like a lot of collector's ubi editions and call that greed, because there is so much of going on right now, so much worse and I guess they never counted how much 200 people's salary does cost in western USA even per a year. Also they never heard of unsuccessful projects where even Ubisoft looses so much of money.

So I don't think it is angry gamers vs corporations, I think it is angry corporations fighting players :sad:

 

And I don't understand what is going on with Fallout 76, only that it is very sad and I feel sorry for players who trusted them and they are not happy with it now. And I'm so glad Todd saved me from that fate by deciding that it is pvp without npcs - originally I thought that it was made against fans of original Fallout, but now I can see that it was a message for RPG players: do not buy it - it is pvp play with friends without NPCs!

 

EDIT: sorry for my bad black humor :tongue:

Edited January 5, 2019 by Mudran

[RatB0Y68]

Saying we need to let Bethesda die gives the false impression we were ever in control. We aren't. Bethesda may well eventually get so bad it kills itself but it won't be due to the actions of conscientious consumers.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. For every well informed customer that thinks about what they buy and why, there are about 10 hyperactive ritalin-addled kiddies on mummy's platinum credit card, who will mindlessly and effortlessly nullify your efforts.

Then of course there are those who simply can't be bothered or legitimately don't have time to care about the intricacies of a gaming company's business practices and just want to play a game they like. They probably outnumber us 100-1.

 

This can be applied to EA or Blizzard and so on. They're all to big to take down, they will self-destruct at a time of their choosing.