Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
I'd just like to point out that many games are developed by "actual gamers" but that doesn't mean they will produce a good product.
as of right now there are only three good RPG studios that I trust to make a good game and they are
Right now, I agree with you.
However, Bethesda hasn't gone so far as yet that they couldn't pull things back if they wanted. Fortunately, the Fallout series never really appealed to me, Starfield is little more than a curiosity, but if ES6 eventually proves to be the same buggy, frustrating yet immensely fun and massive as the last 3 ES games (without too much additional bullshittery added on the fringes), I'm good, despite their current issues.
I would also add FromSoftware and Platinum Games to that list.
By that I mean the mod community of course.
platinum games are on their own level and I love them for it
This is absolutely true.
Every ES game has four distinct phases that, imo, everyone should play through.
The first is the initial release. The bugs are always awesome and need to be experienced first hand.
The second is when the community fixes those bugs, and you get to play the game as it was intended, as opposed to as it was released.
The third is with all the expansions, but only after the bug fix mod has fixed the bugs for the expansions (no need to play bugs twice).
The forth is a few years later, when the community has put out large scale mods.
I *think* Bethesda know this though.
What I don't understand about Bethesda is that they release a game with bugs in it, then the unpaid community modders come along and fix it, then Bethesda releases the next game in the series that has the same bugs that the previous game had.
How the hell do you manage to put the same bug in 2 separate games?
Honestly though, the only enjoyment I get out of Bethesda games anymore is watching the speedrunning community exploit the hell out of it.
I think they purposefully put obvious bugs in to their games in order to get the modding community kicking off with an immediate project that sees a good portion of the hardcore modding community working together early.
As to why the same bugs can exist in different games - that would be for the same reason textures and models can exist in different games...
I have a different theory which is that the programmers at Bethesda are incompetent idiots who don't care because they know the unpaid amateur modders can do a better job than them and will fix any mistakes they make.
This is what I used to think too, but then you look at the fact that almost all of the game works perfectly well, and the few bugs that do exist are all things that players can see and understand easily. They are far more obvious and in your face than bugs in other games, to the point where some of them seem like they are purposeful
If you assume that these bugs are there and players are supposed to see them, and so remove them from the equation, the remaining game has significantly fewer bugs than most other games.
Errr... Did you play fallout76? Literally nothing about it "worked perfectly".
There is this delightfull video called "The Fall of 76" by the Internet Historian.
Nope.
They sell stone soup.
For people unfamiliar with the story, it’s a folk tale about hungry bums who enter a village with nothing but a pot, so they put a rock in it and claim it makes a delicious soup. They fill the pot with water and heat it up, and say they’ll share it but it just needs some final ingredients to make it perfect. So then villagers put in vegetables, and meat, and herbs, and then they all share the soup which is delicious. They thank the bums who basically tricked the villagers into sharing their food.
That’s a bit extreme but I think there’s some truth to it. Fallout 76 was like serving hot dirty water and trying to convince people that it’s soup.
The biggest issues I've heard about that game though, seem to come from its design. They seem to stem from the fact that it is a single player game developer trying their hand at an online game, without knowing what an online game should be.
There are so many issues with Fallout76 I struggle to list them all, so just watch this video instead:
It's not just about how broken the game was, but also Bethesda's conduct before and after launch. If Fallout76 had merely been a broken bug-filled mess that would have been one thing, but every time Bethesda interacted with the community, and literally every time Todd Howard spoke, it was lies and bullshit across the board.
This video sums it all up quite nicely. I really hope that Intrepid will take a lesson from Fallout76 and be honest with their players instead of trying to screw them over or treating us like idiots who can't see past their obvious bullshit. Hell, since that video was released there has been even more drama surrounding fallout76 like how Bethesda banned a legitimate player who had put hundreds of hours into the game for having "too many items"....
It's OK though, because according to Todd Howard, it's not about how the game launches, but what it becomes. That's honestly what pisses me off the most about people like Todd Howard. They make a mistake, they know the made a mistake but instead of owning up to it they try to blame someone else for as long as they can before offering a half-hearted "I'm sorry, I'll do better next time", then wait for your back to be turned before doing it all over again. I'd expect that kind of behaviour from a 10 year old child, not a fucking 48 year old executive producer of one of the biggest games companies in the world.
You’re right that the bugs weren’t the only problem with the game. There were many design flaws that would have made the game suck even if it was technically perfect with no bugs. Conversely, the bugs were so bad that even if the game had been designed well, with fun mechanics and goals and story and a reason to play it (and no gouging players with micro transactions) the bugs alone would be worthy of ridicule. It would have still been infamous.
It’s like the Bud Light of crappy games; rather than Tastes Great/Less Filling, it’s Unplayable Bug-ridden Mess/Terrible Design Lacking Entertainment Value.
Sounds like the last three ES games.