Complaining about a Bethesda game’s performance on launch is like complaining that water is wet.
Are there bugs? Yeah, but there’s way less than literally every other Bethesda game released in the last 5 years. They were trending worse prior to the MS acquisition. Skyrim had tons of bugs, most of which were banged out by the modding community.
Doom was built on the Idtech engine and avoids the issues of re-using the 8th fucking iteration of the creation engine.
Fallout 4 had some pretty gnarly bugs, because it was a copy/paste from Skyrim. Vertibirds are technically dragons.
Fallout 76 was the most incredibly broken game I have ever had the displeasure of playing on launch. So much shit was broken in that game because it was yet again another copy/paste of the engine but with spaghetti netcode pasted on top.
Starfield has bugs. It has performance issues. But they are negligible compared to some of the older Bethesda launches prior to the MS acquisition. I’ve played the game for probably 30 or so hours without anything game-breaking. It hasn’t crashed on me and I was able to essentially play through the entire weekend without getting frustrated at glitches. That’s literally never happened to me with a Bethesda game before.
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of room for improvement though. One of my major complaints involve the maps and UI in general. Honestly the same issues I had with Skyrim 15 years ago.
I also think that tutorials should be a bit more involved. I was mad confused when it came to changing the ship design, or knowing how the research screen worked. It’s pretty straightforward when you start fiddling with it, but it should be more easily understandable and not just a popup when you activate the requisite console for the first time.
Fair points. I still think the issues deserve more coverage but yeah, the author does point out that the water is wet and could’ve touched the bigger topic of uncomplete products becoming a normal thing in the space of AAA games.
I feel like covering bugs in Bethesda games is pretty pointless. It’s a known factor and it’s always been one. It’s not an excuse to let it fly, but it’s something that we’ve inevitably all come to expect out of Bethesda games. Whenever one of those particularly egregious bugs would happen we used to call them “Bethesdas”, as in “Wow, that body really Bethesda’d out after it ragdolled and flew into the ceiling”.
I agree that the larger issue is just incomplete games within the AAA space. I thought early access was for small indie developers with tight budgets, not for large corporations that are sinking dozens of millions of dollars into projects. Halo Infinite launched without co-op. That’s like, 80% of the reason I used to play Halo.
I like how you tend to write longer comments than what is considered the norm on most social media platforms. Have you ever thought about, ahem, starting an indie blog? :)
The author is of the “strong opinion on stuff I like” type. They often write with aggressive tone, though it could be because English is not their native language and they don’t know how to phrase it better.
Nevertheless, I think the points they make are valid and are backed up by further reading section at the end of the blog post, so it’s not something the author made up, because it’s cool to hate the recent thing like the commenter below you said.
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