They said repeatedly that this was the biggest game they had ever worked on, multiple studios all contributing etc. That spells money, lots of it, being spent. 80% is definitely a ‘heads will roll’ scenario if it doesn’t turn around.
I’m pretty sure they did the math and figured it would be more profitable to launch now. I’m guessing the console side of things really drove the decision, though. March is indeed better than February, I’d agree, but again, I can only assume they figured money now was better than waiting, even if they have to work harder to patch.
Then again, it’s Bethesda/Zenimax, and sometimes it seems this company works on a system driven by astrology and metaphysics.
If that’s the case, they’re complete idiots. Why would you expect equal or greater sales to your absolutely blockbuster smash success franchises when you’re dipping your toes into a completely different market and trying something new for the first time? I guess we’ll see how it turns out.
It is janky, oh yeah. It’s also pretty damn fun, if you like the sort of gameplay it exemplifies. But I’m a lot more tolerant than many. If I had a strictly limited gaming budget, and this was my big buy for the month, and i was not a jaded old veteran of game launches, I’d probably be pissed too.
Well certainly that was the decision they made, but companies make mistakes all the time. THQ thought it would be a good idea to make millions of drawing pads for kids and it literally destroyed their company.
This exactly. There’s so much contradiction in this game. They committed what appears to be an all-hands for resources and putting it together…but then they ended up doing so much asset recycling, and so much appears to have been done on the fly or on the cheap.
And the design document appears to have been so fungible that who knows what initial vision there was in this.
Everything I get from this game – even the positive reviews – make this feel like a game that was designed and developed by committee…and I mean that in the pejorative, unflattering “platypus” way. :)
The real tragedy of this game is the build limit.
Is fun to make a base, but the build limit is so low, you are going to make different versions of the “unabomber house” ( I am going to steal this line )
This is my experience as well. I ignored it, then got interested when people here said it wasn’t so bad. Exploring is my favorite part of Fallout anyway, so I picked it up and have enjoyed wandering around, gradually expanding my camp options and finding better gear.
I did accidentally ax a fellow player while we were fighting rabid mole rats, and they promptly used that opportunity to kill me while I went after the remaining rats, which sucked, but whatever. Last time i help a stranger. The wasteland’s a cold place.
I think it’s generally safer to assume companies make more or less correct business decisions on things like this, though of course there are the occasional screw ups. Not to say you aren’t correct and this will be a huge financial disaster for them, I have no way of knowing.
My experience though is much more like @KevinC has had. I knew nearly nothing about this game before I got it, and it has delivered pretty much what I’d expect. I will say it feels less-than-AAA in its overall performance, and the design is, to be generous, unfocused, but it scratches an itch well enough for me.
Some of the decisions are just odd, even if they sort of work. The lack of human NPCs is an idea that sounds good on paper (the players will be the focus!) but simply ends up making the world seem more empty. They compensate by adding in a group of NPCs/bad guys that are “humanoid” and use guns and stuff, like raiders in Fallout 4, but are not human (any more) sort of like ghouls, but smarter. You find tons of raider and settler corpses, but no living examples the players are the new “settlers” and I guess if you go rogue you can be the new “raiders,” too, but that is nowhere near enough to make up the density of actors you would need to reach the level of earlier Fallout games. You have a survival focused, crafting based economy, which encourages pack rats and hoarders, but then you have nearly no storage space and end up either leaving stuff you would normally scavenge or always being encumbered. Fun? Nope, not that aspect of it for sure. And the whole other people/PvP/social side of the experiment is about as well designed as a VaultTec foray into scientific jiggerpokery.
Still, the writing is pretty good, in terms of the little stories and holotapes you find, and setting is very good for exploring and stuff. Gunplay is adequate, given the age of the engine, though no one will mistake it for Battlefield V. There’s a ton of emergent gameplay to be had, even if telling the difference between bug-driven fun and player-driven fun is often hard.
I’ve worked in gaming for 20+ years, at big publishers, small publishers, and dev houses. Generally everyone means well and tries to do their best, given the information they have, but the number of times I’ve worked on a game that everyone knew was shipping too early and would suffer because of it is in the double digits.
Why that happens is multivariate and complex and is probably best for another thread.
It can. They have already stated that future updates would be much smaller. But this one is the big first post launch patch and it seems the changes require the large update.
“This update will be large compared to what we expect for patches going forward,” Bethesda said.
"Regular updates will always vary in size, but future updates should be much smaller in comparison.
Heh, no doubt; “business” decisions and “quality of game” don’t always coincide.
If they can do delta patches then I do wonder why the update is so big because the only explanation for that are changes to all texture files. So why are they changing them (again)?.
I’m not super technical, but if they change the way the game stores its data, that would require them to re-send all the data, wouldn’t it?
Yes. That would be one heck of a change to queue up a week ot two post-release!
Keep in mind that they’ve probably been working on this patch for 6+ weeks. It’s all stuff they knew about when they shipped off their retail client for the first parties. Maybe one or two simple fixes that came up in the first week of release.
I didn’t realize it had an ending. What do you do then? Are you done with it or do you just go back to finding more stuff?
You “join” the enclave. They have their own vault. Some sort questlines. Is not much.
I was worried my vote wouldn’t have an option. Thank goodness it wasn’t wasted.
After seeing those poll choices, I think the winner is a foregone conclusion.