this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
16 points (100.0% liked)
PC Gaming
332 readers
1 users here now
Discuss Games, Hardware and News on PC Gaming **Discord** https://discord.gg/4bxJgkY **Mastodon** https://cupoftea.social **Donate** https://ko-fi.com/cupofteasocial **Wiki** https://www.pcgamingwiki.com
founded 1 year ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's going to be a lot of bugs. There should be a lot of bugs in a game advertised at this scope.
If you don't have bugs, you don't have real emergent behavior, and your "huge game" is shallow. Polish the gunplay, the stealth, the basic mechanics that people use every day absolutely, but you can't conceivably test every inch of a massive world and all of the varied quest lines with all of dozens of combinations of perks, plus weapons and followers people will play with. If we pretend there are 3 archetypes and 3 levels players could be at when entering a given area*, with 5 different base weapons and 5 different mods per weapon, you already have 225 combinations to test that quest at to find every edge case. And testing a quest for a specific combination isn't one play through. It's several different ways to approach every potential interaction. A character not being a stealth archetype doesn't mean that a real player won't try to approach an encounter with stealth. Also, enemy behavior isn't (or shouldn't be) linear and predetermined, so doing the exact same thing should result in different outcomes, and you have to allow for that, too.
You can't genuinely comprehensively test systems with the complexity a game of the scope Skyrim (and we're hoping Starfield) has. Even with an unlimited budget it's just not doable.
*obviously there are way more combinations of skills, but just for illustration.
Are you genuinely saying the buggier a game is the better it is?
That's kinda weird. I've played tons of expansive games that don't have the amount of bugs a Bethesda game has. Beth games are buggy because they know people will buy it and defend it. They have no incentive to put in working QAing their game when people will write 3 paragraphs on the internet white knighting about it
I'm saying that by definition, if a game selling itself as a massive RPG is bug free, it cannot possibly be ambitious enough.
True complexity and genuine emergent behavior literally guarantee that some portion of that behavior is odd and "broken". If you always know what's going to happen in a game this scale, your systems are too simple and the scale is pointless.
Edit: also lol at the claim that you've played anything of comparable scope without bugs. The literal single 3D RPG of comparable scope to Skyrim in the decade since it was released is Elden Ring, which shockingly, also has bugs. There's a reason people are still buying and playing a massively dated game without QoL mods on switch for $30 on sale, and it's because nobody else has even tried to make anything at the same scale.
Yeah, it's easy to have a bug-free game if everything is hard-scripted to play out exactly in one way. COD SP campaign set pieces are bug-free because literally everything was hand crafted to play out exactly the way it does for every player, in every instance.
They're not games so much as they're movie sets, and the player is just the lead actor. Acting simulators.