People in the comments act like they have been to a family party and are now nitpicking every detail of the party, speculating that granddad might not let uncle celebrate their birthday next year, exclaiming that auntie had much better cake, and discussing the clip their niece posted to Facebook of the dirty basement.
It's fine to be skeptical about the intentions of big family, but it's also fine to enjoy the cake once in a while.
Bethesda doesn't think anything. Some people in leadership there think this. It would be very nice if they codeified what "support" means and the circumstances around it into company policy so that fans know what is what while that policy is in place (and who to blame if the policy is abandoned).
It even kind of irks me when people talk about “Bethesda” when it's really “Microsoft Corporation presents Microsoft Gaming presents Zenimax Media presents Bethesda Softworks presents Bethesda Game Studios”.
Not picking on you in particular since the same thing happens with iD Software, Github, NPM, and many many more. I feel like there's a collective lack of straightforward language to discuss the influence of this kind of corporate structure. Falling back to the singular-subsidiary name with the rest unspoken is probably exactly what they want.
I wouldn't know who Bethesda was owned by without going and looking it up. I personally don't think this kind of corporate structure should be allowed, too much controlled by too few.
What would you allow? Just one level deep? Two? All you'd be doing is incentivizing the creation of more proxies and more legal fees/inefficiencies to go along with it.
I think one solution would be to always have the parent company iname n the children company. This way you don't have github by "Github by microsoft". But any links in between should appear if a separate legal entity.
1. It makes it clear how few powerful people are owning everything.
2. It makes it obvious there's something wrong when you see that the 30 different bottles you can buy in front of you are all from coca colla
3. It makes it very obvious that there's something fishy about "chocolate chips by a france by b luxembourg by c switzerland by d ireland by big conglomerate by mondelez international"
I think using the term "by" like that at all is going to lead to serious confusion.
As we all know, GitHub is not "by" Microsoft (as in, written by them). It's under their control now, and sure, they've made a lot of changes, but the actual code was written before Microsoft purchased them.
Not sure. I certainly think there should have been anti trust interest in Microsoft buying GitHub. If only we had good agencies with subject matter experts who can't be bought off by the companies.
I would only allow one level: all companies must be owned by a person or persons named.
I would also have it that any contract controlling that person's interest is nullified so if you're trying to use a proxy to get around the law you'd have to be very sure you trust them because they are the legal owner.
Ah yeah, all the many social wealth funds that are owned by people without names. Such a loss!
I've no idea what a K1 is. Presumably something from your country. If the tax system in your country is so broken it can't cope with humans, you should probably fix it.
I hate the same about how media presents news regarding to nations. Russia attacks instead of Putin's army attacks, Brussels denies instead of EU officials deny, etc. It irks me so much, especially in a world where we pretend to do away with racism. Because what these headlines end up reinforce are just stereotypes. Which just keeps the people in their bubbles, wasting the chance of them learning something new about the world.
Do you mean the Russian opposition who are actually opposed to Putin and persecuted out of the country / existence, or the opposition Putin allows to exist to make elections appear legitimate? One of those doesn't support the war, and one of those isn't really an opposition.
It feels pretty likely that it's not even company leadership? Lead dev is not company leadership, and someone higher up next week could decide they don't like it and sic lawyers on the project.
I mean, when you reach the point where they advertise the mod in dev spotlights videos, I think it's fair to say there's some institutional support, even if it's not codified.
Even if they do, I very highly doubt that they successfully process it emotionally too. I especially dislike when news conflates leaders with nations. I think it just adds unnecessary emotions to the mix. Which, of course, is good for the news source, so I doubt I'll ever see a decline in this phenomenon.
I'm having a lot more fun with the Oblivion remaster than I did with the original game (which I first played years after Skyrim came out).
But I will say, while the graphics are better than the original Oblivion, Unreal 5 is NOT an improvement over the engine they used for Skyrim, not from a visual point of view, at least not for me. Quite frankly, I'd much rather have Skyrim-era graphics, which are plenty good enough, and Skyrim's quick startup times, than have to wait for shaders to load as you do with lots of recent games.
This is a bit different situation than Nintendo and it's not fair to compare the two. The mod requires the base game where Nintendo software is hardware coupled. Furthermore, Bethesda has monetized mods directly (the Creation Club).
Let’s call a spade a spade. Nintendo litigates worse than any other company and they never drop prices. I can look the other way because they’re otherwise very good to their customers but they do have genuine faults.
Nintendo doesn't litigate if they believe the community project won't impact their sales/profits.
For example, wii homebrew is not taken down by nintendo, even if there has been a recent "discovery" that the wii homebrew had relied on decompiled nintendo SDKs.
Nintendo's litigious intention always has been profit driven (and this includes vaguely IP related issues, such as palworld's game mechanics - which i think is frivilous but apparently not according to the courts).
Nintendo sent cease and desists to streamed super smash Brothers melee tournaments during covid. Buncha free advertising to their IP by a group of their most passionate fans
Japanese companies don't like surprises or things they can't control, and often care about this more than money. They don't /want/ free advertising and have mixed feelings about passionate fans.
…Especially adult passionate fans of children's media.
> and this includes vaguely IP related issues, such as palworld's game mechanics - which i think is frivilous but apparently not according to the courts
Do you happen to have a link handy to an opinion document? It seems weird that Palworld’s “mechanics” would put them under fire but somehow development teams behind Tem Tem and Nexomon (and Cassette Beasts and Abomi Nation and ...) get away with selling games that are primarily about capturing and/or befriending different monster species and pitting them in fights against other monsters.
Pokemon didn't invent that, it's an actual Japanese children's hobby. Although they do it with stag beetles. You can see the realistic version in Boku no Natsuyasumi.
A funny thing about Nintendo games I've always noticed is how completely disconnected the fans are from the people making it. Like, people argue about Zelda games' lore and timelines and such, but Nintendo cares about this so little that BotW and TotK have the same plot even though one is a direct sequel.
I'd guess that zero of those "Zelda T-shirt and cargo shorts" people work at Nintendo and that almost none of their employees have had video game-themed weddings. (Well, the US office is in Seattle so that one's definitely possible.)
Pokemon is it's own weird situation. It's not solely owned by Nintendo, but co-owned and managed with Game Freak and Creatures Inc by The Pokemon Company. It's not just a game but a media empire. They have to coordinate between the game, anime and TCG. It's not quite the same as Zelda or Mario where they have complete control and don't have to worry about messing with dozens of other product launches if the game needs a delay.
I wouldn't agree that their other franchises are stale right now either. Certainly not compared to Ubi's, Microsoft's, etc.
Game Freak’s latest Nintendo offerings are subpar compared to somewhat open world offerings from the Wii generation like Xenoblade Chronicles and Breath of the Wild. They are just milking the Pokémon player base.
IDK, personally I had more fun with Scarlet/Violet and Legends Arceus than Xenoblade Chronicles (30 hours too long IMO). Technically they are both flawed but the game play is fun and they have made a lot of changes from past entries.
They do make amazing games though, for all the ones that they make. BOTW and TOTK are just so so special games to me (and I hope many others), and I have learnt by experience that almost no Nintendo game gets released half baked or lacking their best efforts.
In fairness, Pokémon is perhaps the worst case in game design difficulty. You have an audience insisting on 3D characters and animations for 400+ (or however many now) Pokémon, each necessitating ~6 animations for unique attacks, 5+ status effects, idling/reaction animations, and ideally some trainer interaction.
I understand why Nintendo has tried to use a lo-fi artstyle, make games with only subsets of the total bestiary, and generally limit development. Hell, I even understand why Palworld gave up on unique attack animations and just went with guns.
Honestly at this point they could go back to 151 and just do a good job filling them out and go from there. But all 3d games suffer from not being able to hand craft such a large 3d world but Pokémon is absolutely terrible at it. The Games look like they could have ran in the ps2 mid generation.
I personally loved how Scarlet/Violet was set in "Spain" but they were constantly giving up and just making it Japan. Like the school has a Japanese nurse's office and one of the bosses is an overworked salaryman.
> I can look the other way because they’re otherwise very good to their customers
I thought their customer support sucks ? In France they got a law suit because they refused to replace the joystick of their latest portable gaming machine when they had an insane rate of failure.
Regardless, the remaster appears to have been rushed out due to increasing leaks, no? It's hard to believe that with the technical issues the release was actually intended to land in April 2025, instead of fixing issues until March 2026 and releasing it as an anniversary remaster.
Bethesda farmed the remaster out to another studio and the issues are mostly performance related. They chose to utilize Unreal Engine 5 for the graphics[0] which means you get all the stuttering and uneven frame times present in most games using it.
0: I recall reading somewhere that the game uses a really old version of Bethesda's proprietary engine too - but only for physics.
It's a pattern a few remasters have used: Run the entire old engine for the game logic, but bolt a more modern engine on top for the rendering. So it's not just physics but pretty much all gameplay logic thats done by the old code. Which is also why mods that don't touch graphics were apparently easy to port to the remaster, but changing models etc needs adapting to the new system.
This one does feel extra infuriating though, since it still has bugs that were fixed by fan made bug fixing mods from the original game. It doesn't really even feel like they try to fix bugs
This is also not surprising for BGS as was demonstrated with the multiple Skyrim re-releases, which didn't fix all issues patched by the unofficial patches, and even introduced more.
I think the remaster may have been an experiment with Unreal Engine on top of Bethesda’s scripting / etc. I love Starfield, it is my favorite BGS game by a wide margin, but Creation Engine 2 is very difficult to work with - the Creation Kit is intolerably slow, I imagine BGS rank and file got very frustrated. Creation also lags with fancy lighting / fog effects, and might not ever support PS5[1], so I can see why Bethesda would explore the option for the next Elder Scrolls.
I don’t care for Oblivion but I hear the remaster crashes a lot, whereas I’ve had 3 crashes in 400 hours of Starfield. Two of those crashes were BSODs that Microsoft was responsible for. Maybe the Oblivion remaster’s instability indicates they will stick with Creation 2 in TESVI: I was skeptical that UE memory management was a good fit for BGS games’ complex global state. My suspicion is that Creation 2 uses multithreaded scripting, and Starfield on release had some odd bugs suggesting dangling threads (e.g. NPCs which stayed stuck on “busy” and couldn’t be interacted with). But in recent updates they’ve hammered a lot of that stuff out.
[1] Obviously Microsoft has a strong incentive for console exclusivity but the other side of this is that BGS games always sucked on PlayStation. Morrowind was also PC/XBox only, and Bethesda’s roots are in PC development.
Anecdotally, playing Oblivion Remaster made me nostalgic for Creation. I have a beefy card and ample RAM, but it just runs like crap and I don't think it looks that much better than e.g. Starfield or Fallout 76
In some ways, the bugs are part of the charm. Sometimes anyway. Having to run esoteric commands to fix broken quests in a years old game isn't so endearing.
True! On the other hand, performance appears to be quite bad and there seem to be tons of very obvious visual glitches with transparent objects, foliage etc.
It using the UE5 renderer of course means the usual reservations of that engine also apply - it will most likely never run smoothly, as Unreal Engine games invariably have more or less severe stuttering.
My controversial opinion is that Fallout 2 is by far the worst mainline Fallout game: it was obviously written by sexist 90s teenagers, the humor is plain awful, and most of the game is incredibly tedious, especially the dungeons. It’s also by far the buggiest Fallout. I think people give it points for ambition + a desire to take Bethesda down a peg, without actually playing it. Alternatively, they last played when they themselves were 90s teenagers so they’re looking through 30 years of rose-tinted glasses, and never noticed how misogynistic the script is.
Speaking as a grownup who got about halfway through a few years ago, Fallout 2 sucks.
GP is referencing how rumors of the remaster were spreading a few days before the official announcement. There were some early topics on Reddit at least.
Personally I doubt the "leaks" have anything to do with the release date. The game worked fine on day one for me. Yes there are some bugs, but none serious and none that made me think "this was rushed".
Bethesda knows support for the official remake would go down the toilet if they did anything but praise for the unofficial remake. Its hard to take Bethesda on good faith on this.
I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They may or may not be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but at least they ARE doing the right thing. That decision was made by a set of humans, and likely at least some of them are well meaning.
In any case the corporate entity as a whole is not conscious. A strictly behavioralist approach is appropriate there. If it does the good thing it gets the carrot, if it does the bad thing it gets the stick. We can't win it's heart and mind because it has neither, so we have to settle for keeping it's behavior in line.
It's a lesson more companies should learn (looking at you Nintendo), the revenue hit from a fan-made IP clone is likely negligible. People want the official stuff usually as well. The PR hit from attacking creator fans is way worse.
while i do give them benefit of the doubt, the support for the skybilvion fan remake is in effect a way to sell and market an old game (skyrim's sale has been on the decline but for these fan projects).
The moment such a project might affect sales in some way (that i am unable to imagine right now, but is possible surely), they will backpedal and find ways to take it down.
I know businesses often bring it upon themselves, but this "fucked if they do, fucked if they don't" attitude needs to be carefully applied. It leaves no room for anything, really, and it's exhausting.
It's not unwarranted. With the recent popularity of remakes and rereleases, there's been tension between fans, their multi-year/decade labor of love projects, and the studios hoping to remonetize dated franchises.
Better than Rockstar, eh? Like, these fools had had people remaster their engine and assets for all the GTA games for decades, and instead of leveraging that they go, get a ton of mods taken down and then release a "remaster" done with barely-supervised AI slop.
People in the comments act like they have been to a family party and are now nitpicking every detail of the party, speculating that granddad might not let uncle celebrate their birthday next year, exclaiming that auntie had much better cake, and discussing the clip their niece posted to Facebook of the dirty basement.
It's fine to be skeptical about the intentions of big family, but it's also fine to enjoy the cake once in a while.
Bethesda doesn't think anything. Some people in leadership there think this. It would be very nice if they codeified what "support" means and the circumstances around it into company policy so that fans know what is what while that policy is in place (and who to blame if the policy is abandoned).
> Bethesda doesn't think anything.
It even kind of irks me when people talk about “Bethesda” when it's really “Microsoft Corporation presents Microsoft Gaming presents Zenimax Media presents Bethesda Softworks presents Bethesda Game Studios”.
Not picking on you in particular since the same thing happens with iD Software, Github, NPM, and many many more. I feel like there's a collective lack of straightforward language to discuss the influence of this kind of corporate structure. Falling back to the singular-subsidiary name with the rest unspoken is probably exactly what they want.
I wouldn't know who Bethesda was owned by without going and looking it up. I personally don't think this kind of corporate structure should be allowed, too much controlled by too few.
What would you allow? Just one level deep? Two? All you'd be doing is incentivizing the creation of more proxies and more legal fees/inefficiencies to go along with it.
I think one solution would be to always have the parent company iname n the children company. This way you don't have github by "Github by microsoft". But any links in between should appear if a separate legal entity.
1. It makes it clear how few powerful people are owning everything.
2. It makes it obvious there's something wrong when you see that the 30 different bottles you can buy in front of you are all from coca colla
3. It makes it very obvious that there's something fishy about "chocolate chips by a france by b luxembourg by c switzerland by d ireland by big conglomerate by mondelez international"
I think using the term "by" like that at all is going to lead to serious confusion.
As we all know, GitHub is not "by" Microsoft (as in, written by them). It's under their control now, and sure, they've made a lot of changes, but the actual code was written before Microsoft purchased them.
I meant it more in the sense of, as you said, "controlled by".
But really it could be anything else including new symbols.
You see, whatever you use would become instantly SO ABUNDANT that this symbol would get a whole new meaning.
I don't see how it matters how, when or by whom the code was written.
> 1. It makes it clear how few powerful people are owning everything.
You own Microsoft. It's a public company.
The number of levels isnt the issue, it's the size and scope of control of the market.
The rest is on journalists to be sure to mention "Microsoft owned Bethesda" more often.
Not sure. I certainly think there should have been anti trust interest in Microsoft buying GitHub. If only we had good agencies with subject matter experts who can't be bought off by the companies.
I would only allow one level: all companies must be owned by a person or persons named.
I would also have it that any contract controlling that person's interest is nullified so if you're trying to use a proxy to get around the law you'd have to be very sure you trust them because they are the legal owner.
Why do you want to ban social wealth funds?
(Also, any form of equity investing that isn't a tax nightmare. You'd have to love doing K1s.)
Ah yeah, all the many social wealth funds that are owned by people without names. Such a loss!
I've no idea what a K1 is. Presumably something from your country. If the tax system in your country is so broken it can't cope with humans, you should probably fix it.
A social wealth fund owns companies and isn't a named person. So does any pension fund.
Pensions are owned by people. Social wealth funds can be an exception if required. These are not difficult problems to solve.
> Pensions are owned by people.
No they aren't, that's the point of a defined-benefit system like a pension. You don't own it but instead get guaranteed payments from it.
Owning things involves risk; it's not always good.
If the policy can be abandoned it has no meaning anyway beyond being a marketing stunt.
I hate the same about how media presents news regarding to nations. Russia attacks instead of Putin's army attacks, Brussels denies instead of EU officials deny, etc. It irks me so much, especially in a world where we pretend to do away with racism. Because what these headlines end up reinforce are just stereotypes. Which just keeps the people in their bubbles, wasting the chance of them learning something new about the world.
It's Russia and russians that is attacking not Putin. Even Russian oposition fully supports war
What opposition? Take a stopwatch, stand by the subway with an blank sheet of paper and count seconds before you are arrested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd7Zs9K46Vc
Do you mean the Russian opposition who are actually opposed to Putin and persecuted out of the country / existence, or the opposition Putin allows to exist to make elections appear legitimate? One of those doesn't support the war, and one of those isn't really an opposition.
Yes, those support the war. Their claim is that they would be better at winning it then Putin.
There were few Russian individuals against the war, it does exist. But they are exception regardless of the camp they are in.
They are opposed to Putin not war.
It feels pretty likely that it's not even company leadership? Lead dev is not company leadership, and someone higher up next week could decide they don't like it and sic lawyers on the project.
I mean, when you reach the point where they advertise the mod in dev spotlights videos, I think it's fair to say there's some institutional support, even if it's not codified.
Sure, but that means in a few years another manager can remove it and sue the creators. It doesn't matter who the current guy approves of, long term.
I think people understand how metonymy works.
Even if they do, I very highly doubt that they successfully process it emotionally too. I especially dislike when news conflates leaders with nations. I think it just adds unnecessary emotions to the mix. Which, of course, is good for the news source, so I doubt I'll ever see a decline in this phenomenon.
at the very least, it shows that bethseda leadership are not in the habit of alienating their fans.
I'm having a lot more fun with the Oblivion remaster than I did with the original game (which I first played years after Skyrim came out).
But I will say, while the graphics are better than the original Oblivion, Unreal 5 is NOT an improvement over the engine they used for Skyrim, not from a visual point of view, at least not for me. Quite frankly, I'd much rather have Skyrim-era graphics, which are plenty good enough, and Skyrim's quick startup times, than have to wait for shaders to load as you do with lots of recent games.
This is a bit different situation than Nintendo and it's not fair to compare the two. The mod requires the base game where Nintendo software is hardware coupled. Furthermore, Bethesda has monetized mods directly (the Creation Club).
Let’s call a spade a spade. Nintendo litigates worse than any other company and they never drop prices. I can look the other way because they’re otherwise very good to their customers but they do have genuine faults.
Nintendo doesn't litigate if they believe the community project won't impact their sales/profits.
For example, wii homebrew is not taken down by nintendo, even if there has been a recent "discovery" that the wii homebrew had relied on decompiled nintendo SDKs.
Nintendo's litigious intention always has been profit driven (and this includes vaguely IP related issues, such as palworld's game mechanics - which i think is frivilous but apparently not according to the courts).
Nintendo sent cease and desists to streamed super smash Brothers melee tournaments during covid. Buncha free advertising to their IP by a group of their most passionate fans
Japanese companies don't like surprises or things they can't control, and often care about this more than money. They don't /want/ free advertising and have mixed feelings about passionate fans.
…Especially adult passionate fans of children's media.
So you have to gamble on your project not affecting Nintendo's unpublished plans.
> and this includes vaguely IP related issues, such as palworld's game mechanics - which i think is frivilous but apparently not according to the courts
Do you happen to have a link handy to an opinion document? It seems weird that Palworld’s “mechanics” would put them under fire but somehow development teams behind Tem Tem and Nexomon (and Cassette Beasts and Abomi Nation and ...) get away with selling games that are primarily about capturing and/or befriending different monster species and pitting them in fights against other monsters.
It's being claimed as a violation of their patent:
https://youtu.be/0PQUbotRkLE?t=254
Pokemon didn't invent that, it's an actual Japanese children's hobby. Although they do it with stag beetles. You can see the realistic version in Boku no Natsuyasumi.
A funny thing about Nintendo games I've always noticed is how completely disconnected the fans are from the people making it. Like, people argue about Zelda games' lore and timelines and such, but Nintendo cares about this so little that BotW and TotK have the same plot even though one is a direct sequel.
I'd guess that zero of those "Zelda T-shirt and cargo shorts" people work at Nintendo and that almost none of their employees have had video game-themed weddings. (Well, the US office is in Seattle so that one's definitely possible.)
And they are really letting their franchises go stale recently. Pokémon is especially bad.
Pokemon is it's own weird situation. It's not solely owned by Nintendo, but co-owned and managed with Game Freak and Creatures Inc by The Pokemon Company. It's not just a game but a media empire. They have to coordinate between the game, anime and TCG. It's not quite the same as Zelda or Mario where they have complete control and don't have to worry about messing with dozens of other product launches if the game needs a delay.
I wouldn't agree that their other franchises are stale right now either. Certainly not compared to Ubi's, Microsoft's, etc.
Game Freak’s latest Nintendo offerings are subpar compared to somewhat open world offerings from the Wii generation like Xenoblade Chronicles and Breath of the Wild. They are just milking the Pokémon player base.
IDK, personally I had more fun with Scarlet/Violet and Legends Arceus than Xenoblade Chronicles (30 hours too long IMO). Technically they are both flawed but the game play is fun and they have made a lot of changes from past entries.
I agree their latest games always feel 2 generations behind and woefully lacking in content filled worlds
>Pokemon is it's own weird situation.
Plus, there's that whole CIA thing.
While Pokemon is owned by the Pokemon Company, the trademarks to all the Pokemon characters are owned by Nintendo.
https://www.pokemon.com/us/legal/information
They do make amazing games though, for all the ones that they make. BOTW and TOTK are just so so special games to me (and I hope many others), and I have learnt by experience that almost no Nintendo game gets released half baked or lacking their best efforts.
In fairness, Pokémon is perhaps the worst case in game design difficulty. You have an audience insisting on 3D characters and animations for 400+ (or however many now) Pokémon, each necessitating ~6 animations for unique attacks, 5+ status effects, idling/reaction animations, and ideally some trainer interaction.
I understand why Nintendo has tried to use a lo-fi artstyle, make games with only subsets of the total bestiary, and generally limit development. Hell, I even understand why Palworld gave up on unique attack animations and just went with guns.
1000+, though the last two generations have included only a subset.
Honestly at this point they could go back to 151 and just do a good job filling them out and go from there. But all 3d games suffer from not being able to hand craft such a large 3d world but Pokémon is absolutely terrible at it. The Games look like they could have ran in the ps2 mid generation.
I personally loved how Scarlet/Violet was set in "Spain" but they were constantly giving up and just making it Japan. Like the school has a Japanese nurse's office and one of the bosses is an overworked salaryman.
> I can look the other way because they’re otherwise very good to their customers
I thought their customer support sucks ? In France they got a law suit because they refused to replace the joystick of their latest portable gaming machine when they had an insane rate of failure.
The digital game key with Switch 2 feels bad from a the perspective of people who keep their consoles forever.
https://archive.ph/swWEA
Regardless, the remaster appears to have been rushed out due to increasing leaks, no? It's hard to believe that with the technical issues the release was actually intended to land in April 2025, instead of fixing issues until March 2026 and releasing it as an anniversary remaster.
Bethesda is notorious for buggy software releases. They could spend 10 years on something and it would likely have tons of bugs still.
Bethesda farmed the remaster out to another studio and the issues are mostly performance related. They chose to utilize Unreal Engine 5 for the graphics[0] which means you get all the stuttering and uneven frame times present in most games using it.
0: I recall reading somewhere that the game uses a really old version of Bethesda's proprietary engine too - but only for physics.
It's a pattern a few remasters have used: Run the entire old engine for the game logic, but bolt a more modern engine on top for the rendering. So it's not just physics but pretty much all gameplay logic thats done by the old code. Which is also why mods that don't touch graphics were apparently easy to port to the remaster, but changing models etc needs adapting to the new system.
This one does feel extra infuriating though, since it still has bugs that were fixed by fan made bug fixing mods from the original game. It doesn't really even feel like they try to fix bugs
Keeping the VO flubs in is so good though, especially now with the automatic lip syncing https://youtu.be/AWgPq6ocd5c
This is also not surprising for BGS as was demonstrated with the multiple Skyrim re-releases, which didn't fix all issues patched by the unofficial patches, and even introduced more.
See the change log here: https://www.afkmods.com/Unofficial%20Skyrim%20Special%20Edit...
Only a very small amount of the issues fixed there where integrated into the official patch releases.
I think the remaster may have been an experiment with Unreal Engine on top of Bethesda’s scripting / etc. I love Starfield, it is my favorite BGS game by a wide margin, but Creation Engine 2 is very difficult to work with - the Creation Kit is intolerably slow, I imagine BGS rank and file got very frustrated. Creation also lags with fancy lighting / fog effects, and might not ever support PS5[1], so I can see why Bethesda would explore the option for the next Elder Scrolls.
I don’t care for Oblivion but I hear the remaster crashes a lot, whereas I’ve had 3 crashes in 400 hours of Starfield. Two of those crashes were BSODs that Microsoft was responsible for. Maybe the Oblivion remaster’s instability indicates they will stick with Creation 2 in TESVI: I was skeptical that UE memory management was a good fit for BGS games’ complex global state. My suspicion is that Creation 2 uses multithreaded scripting, and Starfield on release had some odd bugs suggesting dangling threads (e.g. NPCs which stayed stuck on “busy” and couldn’t be interacted with). But in recent updates they’ve hammered a lot of that stuff out.
[1] Obviously Microsoft has a strong incentive for console exclusivity but the other side of this is that BGS games always sucked on PlayStation. Morrowind was also PC/XBox only, and Bethesda’s roots are in PC development.
Anecdotally, playing Oblivion Remaster made me nostalgic for Creation. I have a beefy card and ample RAM, but it just runs like crap and I don't think it looks that much better than e.g. Starfield or Fallout 76
It's an Elder Scrolls game. Technical issues are part of the product spec.
In some ways, the bugs are part of the charm. Sometimes anyway. Having to run esoteric commands to fix broken quests in a years old game isn't so endearing.
True! On the other hand, performance appears to be quite bad and there seem to be tons of very obvious visual glitches with transparent objects, foliage etc.
It using the UE5 renderer of course means the usual reservations of that engine also apply - it will most likely never run smoothly, as Unreal Engine games invariably have more or less severe stuttering.
Bethesda never releases games. They release mod sdks. Beta versions.
The only good fallout after the first two is the one they weren't involved with. And it was the mods for skyrim that made the game.
My controversial opinion is that Fallout 2 is by far the worst mainline Fallout game: it was obviously written by sexist 90s teenagers, the humor is plain awful, and most of the game is incredibly tedious, especially the dungeons. It’s also by far the buggiest Fallout. I think people give it points for ambition + a desire to take Bethesda down a peg, without actually playing it. Alternatively, they last played when they themselves were 90s teenagers so they’re looking through 30 years of rose-tinted glasses, and never noticed how misogynistic the script is.
Speaking as a grownup who got about halfway through a few years ago, Fallout 2 sucks.
How can you leak a 20 years old game?
GP is referencing how rumors of the remaster were spreading a few days before the official announcement. There were some early topics on Reddit at least.
Personally I doubt the "leaks" have anything to do with the release date. The game worked fine on day one for me. Yes there are some bugs, but none serious and none that made me think "this was rushed".
Bethesda knows support for the official remake would go down the toilet if they did anything but praise for the unofficial remake. Its hard to take Bethesda on good faith on this.
I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. They may or may not be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but at least they ARE doing the right thing. That decision was made by a set of humans, and likely at least some of them are well meaning.
In any case the corporate entity as a whole is not conscious. A strictly behavioralist approach is appropriate there. If it does the good thing it gets the carrot, if it does the bad thing it gets the stick. We can't win it's heart and mind because it has neither, so we have to settle for keeping it's behavior in line.
It's a lesson more companies should learn (looking at you Nintendo), the revenue hit from a fan-made IP clone is likely negligible. People want the official stuff usually as well. The PR hit from attacking creator fans is way worse.
while i do give them benefit of the doubt, the support for the skybilvion fan remake is in effect a way to sell and market an old game (skyrim's sale has been on the decline but for these fan projects).
The moment such a project might affect sales in some way (that i am unable to imagine right now, but is possible surely), they will backpedal and find ways to take it down.
I know businesses often bring it upon themselves, but this "fucked if they do, fucked if they don't" attitude needs to be carefully applied. It leaves no room for anything, really, and it's exhausting.
It's not unwarranted. With the recent popularity of remakes and rereleases, there's been tension between fans, their multi-year/decade labor of love projects, and the studios hoping to remonetize dated franchises.
A friend and old-school RuneScape player told me he was quitting over this: https://www.ibtimes.com/runescape-devs-backtrack-hd-mod-ban-...
Bethesda signaling their blessing might not have happened if others hadn't made such spectacular messes of their own relaunches.
Yes nobody is doing good deeds to stab themselves. Not sure what your point is here?
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Better than Rockstar, eh? Like, these fools had had people remaster their engine and assets for all the GTA games for decades, and instead of leveraging that they go, get a ton of mods taken down and then release a "remaster" done with barely-supervised AI slop.