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Gabe Newell on why game delays are okay: 'Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever.'
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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These quotes are from a time when games were stamped into hard plastic and circuitry. No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk are two examples of games with rocky launches that are both amazing now. Saying a game is forever bad simply isn't true anymore provided the makers stand behind the product.
But they don't most of the time. If you aren't very lucky like with No Man's Syk or Cyberpunk, you are stuck with an abandonend pile of garbage. And even with those games, it would have been better for everyone involved if they were what they are now from the start.
Hey anyone wanna play fallout 76?
You mean the family friendly version of rust
While we're at it, mad props to facepunch. Rust was always a great game. Even through the weird bits with xp and blueprint scraps and aimcone, it always felt like a complete game.
Granted, I'm not touching it again unless a new plague shuts everything down for a month or I quit my job, but if you have 18 hours to waste every day it's the best game ever.
Sad as that sounds, I'm sure there are some poor souls who are up for it.
From everything I've heard, 76 is a lot better now, I am planning on playing it with a friend... Sometime... Ha
It's a lot better, but it's not Fallout 5, which is what I think a lot of people -- including myself -- actually wanted.
If you wanted to play a game in the Fallout universe with some of your friends or your spouse or something, then, yeah, I can see Fallout 76 being a legitimate fit.
But Bethesda built up a fan base around a franchise that liked playing an immersive, story-oriented, highly-moddable game where the main character is kind of core to the story. They moved to a genre where xxPussySlayer69xx is jetpacking around, the story couldn't matter much past the initial part of the game (since the point of the online portion is to have people replaying relatively-cheap-to-produce content), that couldn't be modded much (to keep balance and players from cheating), and where the player's character cannot matter much, because there are many player characters.
They did make some things that I'd call improvements, like shifting away from PvP (the Fallout 76 playerbase has not shown a lot of enthusiasm for it) and reducing the emphasis on survival mechanics (it turns out that focusing a lot on gathering food and water can kind of detract from playing the rest of the game if you have limited time to play with other people).
But Fallout 76 just fundamentally cannot be Fallout 5, because it's aimed at online play, replaying the same events over and over. It can be a lot better at being an online-oriented Fallout-themed game than Fallout 76 was at release, and they did that.
People complaining about, say, the lack of human NPCs in the initial release are complaining that they want that kind of single-player-oriented game. Bethesda put some in, true enough, shifted things a little towards earlier games in the series. But they have not and were not going to convert the game into Fallout 5.
There have been franchises that have spanned multiple video game genres. Think of, say, Star Wars. But I'm not sure how often there are long-running video game franchises that shift to other genres successfully. If Capcom decided to make a 4X Mega Man game, or a dating sim Mega Man game, I'm not sure that things would go well.
Granted, Fallout 76 is closer to earlier 3D Fallout games than a hypothetical Mega Man dating sim would be. But I think that there are some important, not immediately-obvious divergences from what made the series popular.
For real. I know every Fallout fan says this, but I don't even need a new Fallout game-a remaster of new Vegas or even FO3 would be awesome. I know that's not easy but it's less work than designing a whole new game. Sometimes devs could save themselves a lot of trouble and aggravation if they listened to the fanbase instead of trying to tell us what we want
Specifically with the Fallout series, I think that one complication is that there was a lot of unhappiness way back when with the series moving from a much-liked isometric, turn-based/real-time game to a 3D game with shooter elements. A lot of people, including myself, didn't think that it would likely reproduce what they liked about the series. And, well, it was a change, but what ultimately came out was pretty good, and while I'm sure that it didn't cut it for some people -- you had things like the Wasteland series continuing the isometric approach -- I think that it was a pretty decent transition. The same people who liked the isometric games generally liked Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. So in that case, the game series was taken through a major shift that a number of players were skeptical about, and it generally worked.
But with Fallout 76, I think that the transition caused tradeoffs that didn't work out as well for many players.
3 and new Vegas had such effort to keep the same level of writing, and VATS was an excellent nod to to the isometric games. So while the form was different, the experience was still fallout. 76 was a copy-paste of FO4 with no story, no npcs, and the entire game revolved around the most controversial part of 4: settlements.
Supposedly. But I was never a fan of the Bethesda Fall Outs, so I'd just never play FO76 in the first place.
But the damage is lasting. NMS will always be known for the absolute shitshow it was on launch. Props to them for eventually delivering, but the game will never be as iconic as it could have been. Like compare bg3's reception of "holy shit it's so good" vs NMS's "oh it's finally good now."
Indeed. I always read in forums people asking if NMS is worth playing now. Imagine if it had a great launch from the beginning. It would've been much more successful and wouldn't have a bad reputation like it does know.
NMS is better since release but saying it's amazing now is a bit of an embellishment. At its core it's the same game with all the fundamental issues it always had, there's just more fluff added on.
Out of all my VR games almost none make it into double digits playtime (notable exceptions, Beat Saber and Boneworks) but I have logged hundreds of hours in NMS VR. No other VR experience comes close in terms of content.
I mean, IMO it’s good enough to get your moneys worth out of it, its a hell of a lot of fun actually. It’s just that the main storyline is relatively short and the gameplay loop after completing the main story is not engaging enough to make it one of those games that you end up sinking 500+ hours into. To me that puts it in the same tier as Subnautica.
Same goes for Cyberpunk 2077 tbh.
On the other hand, making me a beta tester for games I paid AAA prices for leaves me with a very negative feeling. You only get one chance to make a good first impression.
Also, while some genres can be fixed after release, some can't because they aren't very replayable.
A number of adventure games, for example -- you're probably not going to play through them many times. If you blow the initial release, you kind of blew the experience.
No those two games are the exception no the rule.
I think it depends on if the bad game has enough public attention that it can get a second chance after launch. When No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk got updated, the story was plastered all over the game news channels/sites.
Most games if they get off to a bad start, nobody gives them a second thought. How would you even know if it got better? If nobody is newly buying and reviewing it, the steam reviews won’t reflect the change in quality.
There’s something to be said for the unfairness of which of these games that botch their launch get that second chance, but it kinda is what it is. People can’t pay attention to everything.
Actually, Steam now does have two separate ratings. One is for lifetime rating, and the other is for recent ratings.
I know, but that still requires that some people give the game another look and review it. That works for games that people keep checking on to see if it’s good yet, not so much for some no name game that people don’t give a second thought to when it turns out bad at launch.
The question bring why you'd keep working on something you got money for. Especially when you've been shown time and time again that people keep buying your games anyway. Seems more cost effective to pay those marketing people than your code monkeys...
Tell that to Game Freak.