Slashdot Mirror
"Fallout 4" Release Raises Questions About Reviews of Buggy Games (kotaku.com)
RogueyWon writes: Fallout 4, the latest instalment in the long-running video-game series and one of the most hyped titles of the year, was released on 10 November. The game has generally been reviewing well, currently holding a Metacritic score of 89. However, a number of reviewers have noted the very large number of bugs present in all versions of the game and have, in some cases, reflected on the difficulty that these pose for reviewers, despite still awarding positive overall write-ups. Can it be ethical to recommend a product to consumers on the basis of its strengths, despite knowing that it contains serious faults?
And have no bad bugs to report. A couple instances of things disappearing and reappearing, but no hard crashes or getting stuck.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
"Can it be ethical to recommend a product to consumers on the basis of its strengths, despite knowing that it contains serious faults?"
Yes. Are you disclosing those flaws honestly, so consumers can make an informed choice? Unless you're lying about your endorsement, what's the problem?
there is, it's called don't line up at midnight to buy a video game. don't pre-order it and change your store to australia just to play it at the first possible moment. wait a month after release to buy it after the first half dozen of patches have been released. i've bought games for my kids that they didn't like and they won't touch the next one in the series after that. some idiots out there continue to pre-order this stuff and put up with the first month problems. it's like stockholm syndrome or battered wife syndrome.
- Goat simulator devs
It is currently sitting at 5.3 User reviews. Reading through the negative reviews, they have a point. Many immortal characters (where is the kill anyone Fallout?), game on rails, only like 5 different enemies, terrible voice acting, horribly stupid AI, same quests over and over (go kill this many of this creature), refusing quests doesn't refuse the quests, the world is empty, only one city on the map, and a bunch of ruins with nothing there.
It sounds like Bethesda forgot to actually build a game and just built an engine.
I'll wait till it is $5 on Steam and has a ton of mods.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Sure, they will likely fix these bugs eventually, but why couldn't they fix the bugs _before_ release and ship a working product? As I said earlier, Bethesda has always worked this way. I have never played a Bethesda game that worked on release date (to be fair my first was Morrowind, maybe the earlier ones were better). Instead they throw out this thing held together by chicken wire and chewing gum with the promise to fix later. That is the problem, there are no consequences for shipping broken software because you can patch it later.
Actually, from my understanding of my own personal experiences on release day with Fallout 4, and the experiences I've read about so far, overall the game IS currently a "working product". Sure, there are bugs, and certain system configurations are partially or severely broken, but I'm running a GTX 980 -- a recent, but not the fastest video card, by any means -- and I don't have any lag or crashes.
Once you are able to keep the game running lag and crash-free, in my opinion, as long as the main quests can be completed, it's fundamentally a "working product". If there are conversation bugs or NPCs that get stuck on a telephone pole or whatever, that's stuff that can be fixed later.
Face it: with a game as hugely complex as this, with an uncountably huge number of different variations and sequences of the quests and the quests' interaction with random NPC wandering and so on, you're never going to be able to ship a product that's as tight and polished on release as, say, Witcher 3, which is designed from the ground up to be MUCH less dynamic and significantly more linear. Each quest is in its own separate, isolated sandbox of sorts, like a universe in a bottle, where random deathclaws can't wander up and murder the quest-giver. That's Witcher 3. This is Fallout 4, where the aforementioned deathclaw can, and will, kill your quest-giver out of pure random chance.
And that unpredictability is part of what makes Bethsoft games fun. It also makes them frustratingly difficult to ship bug-free, but then, if their engine weren't designed in a way that's so incredibly moddable, we'd have a legitimate complaint that the game sucks. Instead, we take matters into our own hands and we FIX that telephone pole bug and we FIX that stupid deathclaw's pathing.
This is a game for people who are patient, technically oriented, and willing to deal with a product that is flawed initially but continually improving, and shaping up to be closer and closer to the individual player's ideal experience as they install mods and download patches. This is a game for people who prefer flexibility over polish. There are other games out there that accomplish the spit-and-polish, near-bug-free holy grail much better than Bethsoft ever could, but the closest those games can come to an open world experience is probably Witcher 3 (and the fact that they managed to make the game as dynamic as it is, without making it as buggy on release as a Bethsoft game, is *astouding* and a true feat of game development.) If you expect the same of Bethsoft, we'd be waiting until Christmas 2017 to get our hands on Fallout 4.
I can appreciate both types of games, myself. I definitely enjoy Witcher 3 a great deal, as well as other, even less moddable, even more linear games, like the Mass Effect series. But I find myself spending a lot more time on open world games where I can play a part in shaping the design of the game by choosing which mods to install, or even little forays into modding projects of my own.
If you want to disparage a developer who's contributing to the dilapidated state of the game development industry, complain to those who make perfectly linear FPS games that are bug-ridden, slow, crashy, and unplayable on release. Complain to those who release games that are so broken that even 6 months of patching doesn't help its case at all, like EGOSOFT and their X: Rebirth game (as well as most other titles that preceded it in that franchise). Complain to the publishers that buy up publishing rights to old, low-budget games from the 2000s and flood Steam with thousands of games that are utter garbage and not even worth the bits they're stored on.
But don't complain to Bethsoft about Fallout 4, when they're bumping up against extremely hard problems in software engineering that are necessarily exposed by the type of game they choose to build. Because the liberating freedom and long-lasting appeal and replayability of their games (ESO excluded; what a disaster) more than make up for a month or two of annoying bugs. That's why I feel the reviewers are 100% justified in giving the game a good rating despite bugs.