Oldirtybearon

So Bethesda keeps saying that Fallout 4 has no level cap, but I'm having a hard time believing it (CDPR said Witcher 3 had no level cap - it's 70).

I ask because I messed up a couple of perks on my character and in true Bethesda fashion, there's no respec available.

I would argue that The Bureau: X-COM Declassified was ME1's combat fully realized. Everything around the combat was shite to mediocre, but the core combat was challenging, fun, and really taxed the player with managing the party.

The parts of this game that are Fallout are pretty great. Shooting feels good and responsive, too. Having a hard time getting used to the crafting system, and how I shouldn't pick up every gun I find as vendor trash or repair materials, but I'll get there.

It's odd. Ignore that submachine gun, pick up that can of gasoline. It's counter-intuitive to how Bethesda games normally play, but it's not so bad.

The settlement stuff is hit or miss. Running a town sounds fun in theory, but actually making settlements and building defense towers and running power cables... not so good. I never liked those kinds of games though, so it could be just fine for somebody who is into Sim City. I am not into Sim City.

@grantheaslip: The Witcher 3 1.0 was fine. 1.1 (the day one patch) was fine. I think you're mistaking quality of life improvements and changes to balance with "The Witcher 3 was broken upon release!" which is just not the case. I see this argument cropping up a fair bit now, and I find it puzzling. Why is CDPR catching flak for listening to their users and making improvements to the UI or tweaking settings in game balance to make their customers happy? It's strange that a company willing to spend the cash on new patches for really obscure and minor problems (and even "problem" is stretching it) is catching shit for it as well. As for new patches fixing shit that old patches broke, that's the nature of open world games, let alone open world RPGs. Sometimes you fix one thing and it breaks something somewhere else. In other words, shit happens.

As for Bethesda, eh, you could have a thousand people testing the game for a thousand hours a piece, and you still wouldn't find everything. Finding everything isn't even the crux of it, as fixing one bug can create a domino effect that sets off a bunch of other things, and suddenly the game crashes to desktop. Just by the nature of video games these days, patches are a reality. Fallout 4 will have a day one patch, and whatever issues crop up from millions of players banging against the game will crop up. That's what I'm referring to with "don't worry, it'll get patched," by the way. Holding off the release until February wouldn't fix that. Holding the release off until Fall 2017 wouldn't fix that. The fact of the matter is that one million players are far more creative than two hundred bug testers. The math works out that somebody, somewhere, will discover a bug. It'd almost be a mathematical impossibility for somebody not to find something.

I guess I'm just over this idea that games are going to ever ship in a 100% bug free state. Bugs are going to happen. Graphical glitches are going to happen. The more complex the game, the likelier it will be.

@humanity: I get that it might be tempting to expect better of people, but you really, really shouldn't. Reviewers haven't actually existed to tell consumers the pros and cons of a title for a few years now. Not since reviewers put on their dad's pants and started chewing on a corncob pipe playing at Art Critic. If you want to know the answers to the important questions you're far better off watching videos on youtube or twitch streamers than reading anything put out on a game website.

For the record I agree that it'd be nice if reviewers didn't make their biases so readily apparent, giving certain devs and games a free pass while holding another's feet to the fire, but that's not the games press we have. Maybe I misunderstood a rant for a call to action, because whenever I hear or perceive a problem my immediate reaction is to fix it. I guess I assume that of other people as well.

@imsh_pl said:

In my mind as long as the serious issues are addressed I don't think it really matters. Giants in Skyrim ground pounding and rocketing the player into the cosmos? That's a bug. It's also hilarious. I don't think I'd want that to disappear. It's like the donkey lady in Red Dead Redemption; sometimes scripts and code interact with each other in unexpected, but hilarious ways, and each developer has to weigh the pros and cons of addressing a silly issue like that. Sometimes with the way open world games are stitched together, pulling on one thread can unravel another section entirely. Bethesda games are far more Frankenstein'd than most, I imagine, but at the end of the day, priorities.

@humanity said:

Except you already know why people rail on Assassin's Creed; it's because Assassin's Creed is a popular dog to kick. People weren't just frustrated with bugs and glitches, they were also concentrating all of their frustration with the franchise and its direction and taking it out on that one game, for a variety of reasons. You see this happen a lot. Mass Effect 3 had an awful ending, so people threw the rest of the game under the bus. EA releases Dead Space 3, which is virtually identical to Dead Space 2 from a gameplay perspective, but people lashed out at it because it was cool to hate EA. Justified? Maybe. Maybe not. The point is that games coming out from publishers/developers already under scrutiny for whatever sleight, real or imagined, will be criticized/lampooned/brutalized that much harder, because people really need to get the poison out, I guess.

Bethesda isn't under a microscope, and people expect jank. Like I said before, you can accept that it'll be released hot out of the oven and that it will be patched for the next few months, or you can not accept that. The only issue I have is when a person acts like they're catching everyone with their pants down because they don't react with universal disapproval for game A when they hated game B. People plain don't care about Bethesda jank. Unless you want to go door to door and nut punch everyone who disagrees with you into submission, I don't see the point in trying to rile up resentment that Bethesda games are still being released, and they're, well, Bethesda games, with all the pros and cons that entails.

@teddie said:

People tend to forgive Bethesda games for being massive, unwieldy projects with an incredible amount of scripting and code that's more or less held together with duct tape and a prayer. Whether you can get past that or not is entirely up to you, but I don't think it's strange that people overlook silly glitches like dragons flying backwards in order to appreciate the scale and complexity of what's going on in these games.

There's a reason Bethesda is the only studio that makes games as big as this, with this kind of reactive, emergent gameplay. I suppose it all comes down to whether or not you can ignore some flaws. If you can, good for you. If you can't, well, good for you, but it's pretty self explanatory either way.

@wemibelec90: So... you're upset that you can't get free money?

Could be that WB decided that it wasn't worth the hassle to continue paying for their hired help to keep cranking out patches and fixes. I can't remember if Rocksteady took over the PC port internally after the colossal, calamitous fuckup that was the PC release, but I remember reading somewhere that they did. If that's the case then I can see why WB is washing their hands of the whole deal. As a business decision it's actually pretty sound. You want your rockstar studio making the next hit game, not slaving away fixing a product that is DOA.

That being said I wonder what an "unfixable issue" is. Is it user hardware related or is there just something in Unreal 3 that is causing it to spaz out on PCs?