4chan discovers outsourcing
I really appreciate them walking right up to the line of understanding (even going so far as to point out that it’s sweatshop work) and then blowing right past it to say the devs hate your guts. Great work guys!
I mean, they don’t “hate your guts”, but the people making the choices don’t give a shit about your feelings as long as you’ve bought the game. The devs, who aren’t making those choices, probably want to make the best game, but they likely prioritise “having food” over “Making the best game ever”.
Not enough people realize this when they say things like “wtf were the devs thinking”, etc. The actual developers, meaning the people writing the code, want to make the product (whatever it may be) the best it possibly can be. Things get messed up for a variety of reasons, but it’s usually not the developers fault.
The people making choices are not the devs!
Correct. I guess that could be clearer, now that I reread my post. Edited.
If I had a penny for every “X game is shit” post on 4chan
Of all the things to get upset about, the game leveraged too many studios to produce too many assets is a weird one.
Luckily for that poster there’s a bunch of indie games where the end credit screen is barely one full page. He has lots of people he can support instead of going with Bethesda and their contracted studios.
I think it’s more they’re upset about exploiting sweatshop labor though…?
4chan is all about blaming bad stuff in computers to ‘underpaid indian laborers who barely know how to copypaste’. It’s not about the exploitation they’re upset about.
Always found that argument kinda weird, do you think the people working in video game development in Vietnam would prefer to be unemployed? I know them, they like their jobs. They want to work. And they will switch jobs to a better one when it’s available. But until then they want the money
let us presume that Video Game N has 100 currency in it budget.
The studio producing Video Game N spends 90 currency on essentially nothing, by purchasing contracts with shell companies owned by their own board of investors, then they take the remaining 10 currency and offshore basically ALL of the actual productive work to 50 developers. Those 50 developers must split the 10 currency between each other while collectively doing 100 currency’s worth of work.
I want them to get paid 100 currency.
I do not think “they should be grateful to get 1/100th of what they deserve” is a productive or helpful position to hold.
If the available budgets of these games were not squandered on laundering and graft, and less spread thin across a vast army of people who barely get to take home pennies on the hour, it would be a good thing, you see.
Theres a difference between a good employer and abusive employer. And countries without strong labor laws tend to have abusive employers.
Is it really that broken?
As soon as they opened the post with “why it turned out so awful” I just discounted everything else. We’re not even playing the same game. You could argue that there are parts of it that are designed and executed in such a way that some gamers won’t enjoy it, e.g. lots of loading screens, it’s not a true space sim, performance is lacking, etc.
But there’s tons of content and variety, the game looks nice, the game plays well both on foot and in the starships (of course the shooting isn’t Destiny, and the ship combat isn’t elite dangerous, but it’s good), it’s an enjoyable product in its own right that is buggy, sure, but not brokenly so.
That being said this numerically huge involvement of multiple studios has been a thing in AAA development for a decade or more now, and it doesn’t really mean the game is bad on its own. I do think it’s a problem with scale and visual fidelity of these games hitting a point where this sort of outsourced collaboration is necessary to hit the development time frames these companies expect, but that’s just a sign that they should scale down and get more humble and “locally grown”, though we all know capitalism won’t abide by that and neither will the paying average gamer who can still somehow look at modern AAA titles and say they look bland or all right at times even though the fidelity is absolutely nuts.
Thank you
No, it’s fairly unbroken
Yeah I think Cyberpunk raised the bar for broken launches. Starfield runs and the only bugs I’ve seen are some wacky NPC interactions and ships clipping through people:
Outside of a crash when placing large objects in the outpost once, I haven’t had any real issues. In the first combat mission I had an enemy sticking through the ceiling and spotting me, but that’s really it
No worse than any other BRPG at launch. A lot of people are still let down for other reasons.
ive played nearly all Bethesda games at launch. This one has the worst aesthetical feel. Inconsistent npc facial animations. All the apparel and spacesuits are ugly as heck.
Id argue 4chan is right here. Outsourcing has its downsides in design.
Btw. If you use the mod to turn off color filters the game starts to feel very dark, but with filters even shadows are colored. Inconsistent outcomes fixed with filters? To make it look more uniform around a planet etc. I do know about atmosphere colors, but atmosphere doesn’t color the darkness.
It’s funny you should say it, because I had the same first impression. “How did you make it drearier than several actual nuclear post-apocalyptic wastelands??”
From what I understand they wanted the game to feel “cinematic” so they choose themes for each area to give you a specific feeling. I too am not thrilled with reddish shadows because Bethesda decided this moon should be reddish even though it’s all grey…
Maybe no one at Bethesda has ever looked at the moon?
For a bethesda game on launch it’s relatively stable on launch, main issues for a lot of people are the performance and how lifeless the world feels.
It’s on 4chins, so it’s safe to assume the opposite of whatever they say is closer to the truth than what they posted.
So far, I’ve only really experienced one real bug (groundpounder mission suuuucks), and my only other complaint I have (frequent CTDs) is probably because I’m way under the min spec running an RX 570. Considering this is a Bethesda game, it’s surprisingly not that buggy.
Given this is a bethesda game, I look forward to playing it a year from now, when the modding community has perfected and expanded it. I’m sure it’ll be truly awesome by then, it’ll run great on my older pc, and thanks to the community I’ll have years of fun. Just like happened with the newer non-online Fallout games and Skyrim.
Bethesda makes diamond tier games. They just need polishing.
Thank you to those who pre-ordered or bought on day 1, for subsidising us patient gamers so we can have thousands of hours of fun for less than the price of a trip to McDonalds.
I’ll wait for what hbomberguy says about Starfield and that’ll be my opinion.
My boy Gmanlives got called out? Lol. 4Chan is awful. If you’ve ever posted there, you opinions are invalid.
