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Fallout 4: When are Glitches Acceptable? (Gamespot)

Z

Zombie James

Banned
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6r5EYqd5rQ

Very good discussion on Fallout 4 and Bethesda's issues. I completely agree with Jeff here saying (paraphrase) Bethesda has hardware they're more familiar with this time around and it's frustrating we're still dealing with the same jank and shit we've been seeing from them for over a decade.

Lock it up if old.

Jeff said:
The lesson learned from Fallout 4 is gonna be, "Hey, look at us, we just sold another 20 million copies of a game that was just as broken as the last one which also sold 20 million copies," and no one's going to learn anything.
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Spot on.
 
It's just the inherited faults of their more-than-a-decade-old engine. If Fallout 4 sells more than Skyrim they would be even more less inclined to use a new one.
 
Why care about glitches when your audience will move the heavens to defend you?

Bethsoft has done a great job at creating a competitive advantage. Other companies wish they could pull that off, having people pay for the honor of fixing your broken game.

Win win.

BLACK AMERICAN PSYCHO said:
Hopefully competition will make them switch. Fallout is embarrassing when compared to something like the Witcher.
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How exactly? The reviews and sales would indicate otherwise.
 
BLACK AMERICAN PSYCHO said:
Hopefully competition will make them switch. Fallout is embarrassing when compared to something like the Witcher.
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I mean, CDPR has been excellent with their support, but let's not pretend like Witcher 3 doesn't/didn't have tons of issues. I understand that open world games are more prone to being buggy, though.
 
diamount said:
It's just the inherited faults of their more-than-a-decade-old engine. If Fallout 4 sells more than Skyrim they would be even more less inclined to use a new one.
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I've read similar statements a lot. But isn't their Creation Engine (on which Fallout 4 and Skyrim are based) a new engine and not a straight regular evolution of Gamebryo?

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/t...technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx

To create a diverse country filled with steep mountain passes and dense forests, babbling brooks and violent waterfalls, glacier coastlines and snowy tundras, Bethesda went back to the drawing board and rewrote every major system powering the gameplay experience. The result is the newly dubbed Creation Engine and Kit.
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Or is that just PR and it's architecturally still the very same engine?
 
ElTorro said:
I've read similar statements a lot. But isn't their Creation Engine (on which Fallout 4 and Skyrim are based) a new engine and not a straight regular evolution of Gamebryo?

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/t...technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx



Or is that just PR and it's architecturally still the very same engine?
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If you have to ask, you already know the answer.

It's PR. They said the same thing with Skyrim and it was the same fucking thing.
 
When it doesn't generally effect your enjoyment of the game.

Problem is that answer is different for everyone.

I generally don't care about glitches unless I lose content. I have loved nearly every Bethesda game.
 
The mental hurdles in accepting this shaking, walking into walls and glitching dog as my companion are the same to me as accepting a 75x75px sprite of a dog with less than a dozen animations in the original fallout as my companion.

Games are always going to require some imagination to smooth the gaps and rough edges.

For some reason I don't have a hard time with Bethesda games ignoring the glitches most times.

Just like my imagination made up the huge battles and interactions in fallout 1 and 2.
 
I liken the Bethesda glitches as a form of B-Movie tier polish. Most aren't game-breaking and often times they add to the overall charm of the product.
 
Scientist Supreme! said:
You can still have this conversation even if you gave it a high score, it may make you a hypocrite but whatever.
Also, Jeff (the guy on the left) is from giant bomb and gave the console versions a 3/5 so.
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excluding jeff, to me it makes them huge hypocrites.

complaining theyll never learn....well...you gave them a 9, geniuses. why should they?
 
I have 144Hz monitor, it craps for me way more than any game in existence and possibly more than for other people who are capped by 60Hz display.

Same goes with Skyrim. They are simply broken for me.
 
ElTorro said:
I've read similar statements a lot. But isn't their Creation Engine (on which Fallout 4 and Skyrim are based) a new engine and not a straight regular evolution of Gamebryo?
http://www.gameinformer.com/games/t...technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx
Or is that just PR and it's architecturally still the very same engine?
Click to expand...

Same engine, with some parts replaced, e.g. their rendering pipeline now uses DX11, instead of DX9 in Skyrim. The evidence it's the same engine are everywhere, from console commands, to ini parameters, to things like ugrids. If they had rewritten the engine, they definitely would have moved to a system different from ugrids, as it currently kills their engine: there's no dynamic LoD possible currently as it requires whole cells to load in full to e.g. see buildings across a river in more detail than the 'precalculated LoD' they have had since the beginning (where you run a program to calculate the LoD per cell): if they had rewritten it, they would have made it more dynamic: i.e. a building to see in the distance is something else than a spoon on a table in front of the building to interact with. They currently either load a very simplistic LoD for geometry in cells which are not loaded currently (and thus will look like ass) and if you set ugrids to a high value (which will bring your system to its knees probably) it will load everything of these cells.
 
If it isn't broken, don't fix it. When Bethesda fans will let them get away with anything, and keep buying their games religiously, why would they do something to ruin the system they have going? The time and costs to iron out and polish everything is far too high against the small amount of extra appreciation and sales they would get,

The almighty dollar, indeed.
 
I'm in a weird spot. I'm not a gigantic fan of Bethesda, but I can't deny that a lot of my favorite games were really buggy on launch. It's often only fixed through a ton of complaining, so I definitely think people should complain.

I love New Vegas and Witcher 3 and both of those games were riddled with bugs, glitches, and all manner of issues. Of course, I never had any progress stopping issues in either, so maybe that's why I take such a neutral stance.

It's definitely something that needs to be brought up every time it happens though. even games I love shouldn't get a free pass. But there's also a sickening feeling that this is happening at an increasing rate. We're hiring tons of devs and they're going through an outrageous amount of crunch, but we're still being shipped really buggy releases.
 
OtisInf said:
Same engine, with some parts replaced, e.g. their rendering pipeline now uses DX11, instead of DX9 in Skyrim. The evidence it's the same engine are everywhere, from console commands, to ini parameters, to things like ugrids. If they had rewritten the engine, they definitely would have moved to a system different from ugrids, as it currently kills their engine: there's no dynamic LoD possible currently as it requires whole cells to load in full to e.g. see buildings across a river in more detail than the 'precalculated LoD' they have had since the beginning (where you run a program to calculate the LoD per cell): if they had rewritten it, they would have made it more dynamic: i.e. a building to see in the distance is something else than a spoon on a table in front of the building to interact with.
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Yeah, I just found this blog post: http://peter.corrosivetruths.org/2011/12/21/is-skyrims-creation-just-gamebryo/

Seems to be indeed an evolution of Gamebryo, and thus likely has the same overall architecture.
 
Infinite_Daremo said:
Q: When are Glitches Acceptable?
A: When its a Bethesda game
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Yeah...

I'll never forget, I had the PS3 version of Skyrim. It was sitting on a 92/100 on Metacritic at launch in November. I was watching the Spike VGAs and the GAME OF THE YEAR was Skyrim. They marched up on stage, music blared, and they took home the highest award being presented. And more and more Game of the Year awards were showered on them in the coming days and weeks.

That very same day, I had tried to play my copy of Skyrim... and I couldn't. It was entirely unplayable. They received universal praise, sold millions of copies, won the highest awards... and the game wouldn't even play on my system.

At that moment I realized... they were never, ever going to improve or learn from the experience. Why should they? They have no incentive to. The only thing they learned was they could release a legitimately unfinished, unplayable game and still sell more copies than 99% of the games released that year, win more awards than 99% of the games released that year, and get a higher critical score than 99% of the more polished games released that year.

... And to this VERY DAY I encounter fans who get upset for me asking for better standards. A Bethesda fan just yesterday told me I "should have known better" than to get Skyrim on PS3 and that the problems were with Sony's machine, not the game. One fan said "glitches are part of the charm!"

Bethesda is a lost cause in regards to quality control. They have no incentive to improve.
 
The Jackdog said:
excluding jeff, to me it makes them huge hypocrites.

complaining theyll never learn....well...you gave them a 9, geniuses. why should they?
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Unless the people in that room are the ones that reviewed the game and gave it a score they aren't a hypocrite at all. The review of a single person does not have to be the same sentiment of the entire publication/website. Often it is not.
 
So far it doesn't seem like anybody is letting Bethesda go lightly.

Bugs are cited in reviews. Aggregate score has suffered heavily. Top-voted topic in reddit games is about its technical issues. Tons of GAF posts and topics. Glitch videos popping on youtube. Shows like OP's link highlighting its bugs. Constant reminders from gaffers about PS3 Skyrim.

Only metric left is sales numbers. We'll see in a few months.
 
singhr1 said:
Unless the people in that room are the ones that reviewed the game and gave it a score they aren't a hypocrite at all. The review of a single person does not have to be the same sentiment of the entire publication/website. Often it is not.
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peter brown on the couch did do the gamespot review
 
I guess expectations, as they said it, fits here.
People go "oh, Bethesda, you're so silly, take my 60 bucks" but would burn Ubisoft of EA to the ground.
I guess because of the excuse "no one makes games like this" from the last generation, but people are making more polished larger games with less bugs.
 
Garlador said:
... And to this VERY DAY I encounter fans who get upset for me asking for better standards. A Bethesda fan just yesterday told me I "should have known better" than to get Skyrim on PS3 and that the problems were with Sony's machine, not the game. One fan said "glitches are part of the charm!"
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This is what annoys me the most personally.

You should ask for adequate technical quality in game, especially if you are a fan of the franchise. One would think that fans have the largest interest in getting better products. These defense forces are just shooting themselves in the foot. The same pattern can be observed elsewhere with other troubled games/companies.
 
singhr1 said:
Unless the people in that room are the ones that reviewed the game and gave it a score they aren't a hypocrite at all. The review of a single person does not have to be the same sentiment of the entire publication/website. Often it is not.
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Peter Brown (the bearded fellow in the middle) reviewed it for Gamespot and gave it a 9.
 
James Scott said:
I guess expectations, as they said it, fits here.
People go "oh, Bethesda, you're so silly, take my 60 bucks" but would burn Ubisoft of EA to the ground.
I guess because of the excuse "no one makes games like this" from the last generation, but people are making more polished larger games with less bugs.
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playing through all of bethesda's games on 360 last gen and now ps4 fallout 4 i haven't encountered anything as bad as unity was on launch, so yes
 
I'm about 8 hours on the xbox one version, running of off a 7200rpm external drive and I have yet to experience any type of game breaking frame rate issues that Jeff said he encountered. Not sure if running off of an external drive makes any difference.
 
OoO Speznas OoO said:
i played this game for 20+ hours and have not encountered any bugs or glitches and not a single crash ( PS 4 version )
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I'm on PC with similar time put in and I've had 2 glitches so far.

1. About 4 times now my Pip-boy hasn't shown up in 1st person and I have to go into 3rd person and bring it up there to fix it. Not a big deal, but odd.

2. The distance LOD didn't go away at the limestone quarry when I fast traveled there one time. So everything was obscured by huge low res textures. Fixed after a reboot.

Everything else in the game has been perfectly fine. No broken quests, no roadblocks or screwed up systems that won't work. Performance has been rather solid with only a couple areas taking dips in the FPS. All in all it's been a very smooth experience.
 
7DollarHagane said:
The mental hurdles in accepting this shaking, walking into walls and glitching dog as my companion are the same to me as accepting a 75x75px sprite of a dog with less than a dozen animations in the original fallout as my companion.

Games are always going to require some imagination to smooth the gaps and rough edges.

For some reason I don't have a hard time with Bethesda games ignoring the glitches most times.

Just like my imagination made up the huge battles and interactions in fallout 1 and 2.
Click to expand...

There's a difference here though in that the more explicit and "realistic" graphics become, the less threshold we have for things that break this fickle illusion of reality.

It's like the problem I have with the facial animation tech in LA Noire. It actually makes the experience worse for me, because the faces are in an entirely different league from the rest of the graphics like the character models and their animation. It's uncanny valley as hell because of this jarring dissonance of quality between the different aspectsof the visuals.
 
Kill3r7 said:
When consumers don't give a shit about them and buy the game anyway. IE most Bethesda games over the last decade.
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I'd say it's most AAA games over the past few years, with the exception of Assassins Creed, where I think Unity's bugs did have an immediate impact on Syndicate.
 
Zombie James said:
Peter Brown (the bearded fellow in the middle) reviewed it for Gamespot and gave it a 9.
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If you watched the part before Jeff came in, this dude was saying how he didn't really notice framerate drops and to him it didn't make much difference. And when Jeff comes on, it's almost like a switch where he now mentions the framerate drops.

That whole to me bullshit needs to stop. All it does is distract people from the main point. It doesn't change the game from what it is.
 
Zombie James said:
I completely agree with Jeff here saying (paraphrase) Bethesda has hardware they're more familiar with this time around and it's frustrating we're still dealing with the same jank and shit we've been seeing from them for over a decade..
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Do people expect a leopard to change its spots?
 
I played for a couple of hours and noticed some strange things on the PC version, nothing serious by any means, but definitely annoying at times. Something that keeps occurring is a bizarre audio / conversation bug where the vocal audio will abruptly cut out and the subtitle where the issue occurred remains on-screen for a long period of time. Personally game breaking bugs are the only ones that should never be present, "A" bugs that straight up block the player's ability to play or continue. Honestly from my perspective I always expect open-world games to have shipped with more bugs than other genres. I mean, they're large and there's so much going on, I feel like it makes sense that they occur. The more that I think about it, the more I realize I've yet to play a flawless open-world game.
 
Gipsy Danger said:
So just because it doesn't affect you personally then it's fine? It's pretty clear that the game has a lot of problems on all 3 platforms, some worse than others.



Most certainly. Yukes fans are crazy.
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no, it's that i've enjoyed my time with these games and haven't encountered any huge issues, so i keep buying them. not "oh it's bethesda so i'm more than happy to buy a piece of shit"
 
Lunar15 said:
I'd say it's most AAA games over the past few years, with the exception of Assassins Creed, where I think Unity's bugs did have an immediate impact on Syndicate.
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Agreed, the vast majority of AAA releases since the start of this gen have had some major issues, but since we are singling out FO/Bethesda I figured I would focus only on them.
 
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