Menu
What's new
By:
Filters
the Sim Settlements forums!

Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

If you think Bethesda dropped the ball, read this.

Jonnan

Jonnan

Active Member
Messages
362
This article pops into my head every time I hear people say 'X' should have been in the game from the start. I was a little surprised I could find it with a quick google.

Witness a game company the didn't drop the ball on anything trying to make the perfect game. Look ye upon the Vaporware and despair.

Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem
 
One thing Bethesda did drop the ball on, from Nuka World the cash registers we get for settlements have no collision to be able to place them on the store counters/stalls. It makes zero sense that they didn't do this little bit.
 
I mean, it's an interesting take, for sure. But it's a bit on the end of the spectrum, really. You have to have balance when you create everything; if you're focusing on every little area then of course you'll never finish something. That seems to have been their issue. Bethesda is a games studio with a project lead that understands deadlines have to be met in order to complete their goal, sometimes at the expense of the game itself. That's been really evident with Fallout 4. It was a really big game, and in some areas it struggled. But they got it done.

Also, consider RE7. They pushed back release dates for the two last DLCs to make sure the quality of it was what they wanted for the game and a lot of people flipped out. So it's always going to be an interesting dynamic.
 
Bethesda are lucky in that they have a publisher who isn't pushing for a sequel every year or 2. That does mean longer waits for us between installments but we haven't had any debacles like Dragon Age 2.
 
God knows it's a ... possibly the... extreme example, but in all honesty it's an example that in a lot of ways could easily have become Bethesda, and almost every complaint I hear about Bethesda games could be rewritten as something in this article. The game engine is behind the latest and greatest, such and such wasn't implemented like it could have been and is only half complete, this other game does this so well and why didn't they ...

I'm sure there are bad decisions where a lead goes 'I wish I had gone ahead and delayed. It would have launched in March instead of Christmas but 'X' would have been done *right* ...' but I think it's worth keeping in mind that there is a point where you've got to go with what you've got because you're *always* going to have one more thing that would make it *perfect*.

Just a thought
 
Last edited:
Aren't games of this size always going to be at least a generation behind in terms of engines, though? Because even if you start with something state of the art, two years later you're still building the game, and at least two or three new engines or updates to old ones have been released.
 
C B Wright said:
Aren't games of this size always going to be at least a generation behind in terms of engines, though? Because even if you start with something state of the art, two years later you're still building the game, and at least two or three new engines or updates to old ones have been released.
Click to expand...

And how much does it matter if the game engine or the graphics aren't quite the latest thing?
Yes, they're important but they can't make a mediocre game great.
 
AmazonQueen said:
And how much does it matter if the game engine or the graphics aren't quite the latest thing?
Yes, they're important but they can't make a mediocre game great.
Click to expand...
I've played too much Skyrim to claim they're not nice, but I think we're way past the point of diminishing returns on them.
 
I only hope they don't leave things out of their next games in lieu of putting them behind some BS paywall or loot boxes/chests. You want the uber umber sword of magical bum licking lightning levitation? Yeah...not in the game this go around. But you can buy it for 5 dollars!

Bet the next game has a new engine though.
 
eldiabs said:
I only hope they don't leave things out of their next games in lieu of putting them behind some BS paywall or loot boxes/chests. You want the uber umber sword of magical bum licking lightning levitation? Yeah...not in the game this go around. But you can buy it for 5 dollars!

Bet the next game has a new engine though.
Click to expand...

I mean, they did that for Oblivion. They made you buy stupid horses (or was it saddles? Something) as a DLC. As long as they support third-party modding I don't care what they try to sell me.
 
C B Wright said:
I mean, they did that for Oblivion. They made you buy stupid horses (or was it saddles? Something) as a DLC. As long as they support third-party modding I don't care what they try to sell me.
Click to expand...

Horse Armour, but you could pay the game fine without any dlc.
FO4 you can too but there is some ubergear that just magically appears in your inventory (BFG and Doom Armour) if you pay for it. Thats a bad direction for Bethesda to be going. Happily the latest Tunnelsnakes gear at least added them through a quest.
 
I mean, ubergear landing in your inventory is literally no different from any of the cheat items you can download yourself. If Bethesda can find people willing to pay for it, I'm fine with it. It's not like this is an MMO and I have to actually fight them in a zone somewhere. :)
 
Feature creep and product bloat are real concerns when designing almost anything, esp software and games. So, it's understandable that eventually they've got to release a mostly functional product. I agree that they (Bethesda) seem to have overlooked, or underdeveloped, many features within the game, while focusing on - by many opinions - what appear to have been largely unnecessary, or at least not-as-vital, gameplay aspects and mechanics. However, for a general market acceptableness, one can certainly see the reasoning behind why it was released in the state it was. That said, it's not unreasonable to at least expect more consideration to how those included features work, if they make sense, and what possible criticism might occur due to the somewhat disjointed implementation of them. Likewise, it's not wholly without merit to presume these things couldn't be addressed either through future alterations via completive patches, by gane development updates (as we're seeing on many old, popular games), or even with expansion/dlc packs, to resolve the apparent issues regarding the seemingly half-baked, or even glaringly obvious, features that were passed on or overlooked. It's this reasoning precisely as to why I think certain things should have been excluded completely, or perhaps added later, and generally why i would have liked the Settlements system be an entirely separate game or add-on pack altogether.
I like most of what was done with Fallout 4, honestly, I'm just not convinced that - as implemented - they make sense being all in the same game, even with consideration to the conditions discussed above... At least not until SimSettlements came along. With the inclusion of this mod system, I'm fairly confident Bethesda could have done a better job meshing the ideas more congruently - though perhaps not all at once.
 
Last edited:
I mean, even before Sim Settlements came along I thought building settlements was the best part of the game. With SS it's even better, though I'm finding that ultimately I'm probably going to want to not use RotC (after I see all the designs) because I'm finding I really do prefer building them myself. Being able to build settlements and then go out and fight raiders and gunners and then build more settlements is so satisfying -- to me -- that I literally haven't finished playing the game. I know how it ends, of course, but I've never gone farther than the glowing sea in the main storyline.

And yet this is the game I've played continuously since release day.

Whatever its flaws, it certainly hit all the right marks for me, and what they didn't manage the modding community has stepped up. So... yeah, other than some of their aesthetic choices (really Bethesda? Trash EVERYWHERE?) my complaints are standard oh-look-ctd-in-a-bethesda-game-again stuff.
 
Honestly one of the things I like, despite it's downsides is that Bethesda is essentially a small studio. EA wouldn't release stuff in the condition Bethesda does, because EA would polish every kink or drop it entirely.

Bethesda ... gets excited. I kind of imagine a conversation over lunch like 'Did you see what this guy did in New Vegas? We could combine that with hearthfire, and they could build their own house, completely theirs!' 'You know what would be cool? Let's make a whole settlement system. Like 'The Sims' but they're running a whole town on the wasteland!' 'Oh ... Oh -- we could make, like 30 of them, each with slightly different problems. Todd said he want a set of Minuteman quests so people weren't tied to the other three, we could load that up with this!'

It didn't involve filling out a 1073d Resource allocation form with estimates on manhours and potential impact on other subsystems, it involved catching Todd after lunch and he was skeptical, but they got him into it. Of course, it didn't get fully fleshed out. They were still working on it two days after the code freeze word came down. They wish they had thought of the Sim settlements idea, but they at least got a framework where Sim Settlements could be created.

And EA might get a game out with the same concept in 18 months, but they would never have created it. Because the 1073d form goes through a manager with 'not created in my department' disorder and there's no room on the timechart for a new system anyway.
 
C B Wright said:
Being able to build settlements and then go out and fight raiders and gunners and then build more settlements is so satisfying -- to me -- that I literally haven't finished playing the game. I know how it ends, of course, but I've never gone farther than the glowing sea in the main storyline.
Click to expand...

Yup.. I'm right there with you. If I'm playing and my wife walks by I get the obligatory "Found your son yet?" Um... not yet hun... just need to get these plots lined up straight first then I'm on it...
 
AmazonQueen said:
Bethesda are lucky in that they have a publisher who isn't pushing for a sequel every year or 2. That does mean longer waits for us between installments but we haven't had any debacles like Dragon Age 2.
Click to expand...

I don't consider Dragon Age 2 a debacle by any measure. Sure, I think it is lacking a bigger world and bigger maps and some story elements but otherwise I liked it and enjoyed playing through it, more then once.

And I do not and never will agree with those who whine about Bethesda. If someone says "but Fallout 4/this other Bethesda game had bugs!" then that person really needs a slap from a reality. Because there isn't a SINGLE piece of software out there which didn't have bugs. And games like these are a gigantic piece of software which are incredibly complex so things do happen. Anyone who has ever really used software on any platform (and isn't a total schmuck) would understand this and know that patches will come along and fix things. That's a thing with every piece of software. For crying out loud, do we really need to say anything at all if a person is a Windows user (and most of people are)? Absolute most of those updates added constantly aren't "things to make it nicer and more comfortable", it's to fix yet another issue.

I personally never experienced almost any of the bugs in Fallout 4 what some people cry about. ONLY bug which I do experience - and many others - and which really gets my goat is the Pip-Boy reporting bug. You know, the one where in settlement in workshop mode all the settlement stats are OK, you leave it and check later the Pip-Boy and it tells that the water/power/food/bed is at 0 and happiness has dropped by friggin' 20 points and when you race over to settlement and go into workshop, then everything is OK. It's a bloody Pip-Boy display bug, settlement does have all the stuff, but that bug does affect the happiness. Wish that got fixed, or someone somehow would "disconnect" settlement happiness from Pip-Boy...

Other then that, I am actually very thankful to Bethesda. Not only because they make the games I've really liked for many years, but because they're making Fallout. Because I played Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 years and years ago and then there was nothing. I was absolutely sad and pretty sure that this was the last we've seen of Fallout, one of my most favorite gaming franchise, and then Bethesda got the license. And not only did they get it but they've released already two great games, bunch of DLC's for them and I liked all of those. And they're continuing to make more of Fallout. So as far as I am concerned, Bethesda is the savior of Fallout franchise and maker of great games and I only wish to them the best and hope that they keep making their games.

EDIT: Oh, and just to add, yes I also think that Bethesda needs either more/better writers or some lead story teller or whatever. Because Bethesda is a bit lacking in their "story telling", their stories aren't bad, but they don't have that "punch" either, you know, like Bioware stories used to have in the past (not anymore though, BW's going down the hill for years). If they could improve that, then it would really be a cherry on top of a cake.
 
Last edited:
AmazonQueen said:
Bethesda are lucky in that they have a publisher who isn't pushing for a sequel every year or 2. That does mean longer waits for us between installments but we haven't had any debacles like Dragon Age 2.
Click to expand...
I'm late to the discussion, but it might be worth noting that Bethesda *is* the publisher.
 
Gard said:
I'm late to the discussion, but it might be worth noting that Bethesda *is* the publisher.
Click to expand...
Zenimax is the owner, Bethesda Softworks is the publisher, and Bethesda Games Studios is one of the studios that Bethesda Softworks publishes
Different people, not the same people swapping hats
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top