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.

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.

Fighting what you perceive as racism but pushing your own racist views seems like a strange stance to take. But I would be lying if I said I was surprised.

D4 feels more like a sequel to D2 than it does to D3. The style and feel is much more in line with the older titles.

The story I think is pretty solid, and though I haven't played all the ARPGs out there, it's the best one I've seen, and it's presented well.

The open world gives you a good mix of activities between the main story quests, and there are lots of side quests that you can get side-tracked with.

It's also a really polished game overall, performs well (at least on the Series X), and they've provided a decent baseline of content for a launch. Though I can't speak to the longevity or end-game activities yet.

But overall, I'd say it's almost incomparably better at launch than D3 was. As though it was made by a different company. Biggest question is how ActiBlizz handles monetization and how well they are able to improve and build upon the foundation going forward.

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

Lots of Diablo 4 this weekend if I can actually get some free time. We'll see about that, but that's been my main time sink lately.

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.

Yet, racist westerners continue to regurgitate it because it fits perfectly with their chauvinistic world view. American media doesn’t just portray eastern countries harshly, it lies shamelessly about them.

Right there. If we are going by the rule of "Being critical of a country or group of people makes you racist" then statements such as that would surely qualify.

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.

Yeah, it's strange to think that even outside of Bethesda no one has really been able to come close to replicating the gaming experience you get with Skyrim. I still end up booting it up now and then when I'm in the mood because if I want that style of game that's all there really is (not including Morrowind/Oblivion of course).

lemmy.ml isn't explicitly "tankie" but the main devs are and the moderation will include not allowing posts/comments critical of China/Russia/communism/etc.

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.

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.

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.

In order of usage:

Series X

PS5

Switch

PC

Though PC is mainly on my crummy laptop and not my aging gaming PC these days. Can't really just disappear into the office to play games anymore.

Is there any expectation that PoE2 is anything but large-ish patch to the original game? I haven't seen anything that says to expect any significant differences from the current game.

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.

I’m not saying there’s not going to be less bugs than previous games, I do believe them on that because it being a flagship game from Xbox game studios they’re going to put a lot of pressure on the team to get it right, but don’t take that to mean there’s no bugs at all and especially no game-breaking ones.

Isn't this almost exactly what Phil Spencer says from those quotes in the article?

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

Do people actually 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.

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