Scaling up as a game developer (or any software company) is hard, but not "it takes a decade and half a billion dollars" hard.

The people that preorder clearly aren’t listening

Or they are listening and just don't care.

Why are people preordering a DIGITAL, BETHESDA game?! It’s still the Creation Engine (Creation Engine 2 so hopefully they fixed it!) so it’s probably gonna be a buggy mess at release.

Unlike most online gaming communities, there are many people in the world that enjoy playing video games. So, when they see a game that looks fun to play, they buy it or pre-order it.

Kingdom Come is a solid game, but it's also still a very narrow game compared to Skyrim. You play as a specific character and the "sandbox" nature of the game is much more limited.

It's more like the Witcher where you can roleplay slight variations on one person, rather than Skyrim where you can role-play as a vast array of potential characters.

It was over a long time ago for me when I realized that most AAA games were all the same.

Do people actually believe this or is just one of those cliches that people repeat when they don't have anything meaningful to contribute?

I'm curious how many similarities there are between games like Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6 and Starfield? I could make the list bigger but figure that's a good starting point.

Windows and IE was an issue was an issue because of monopoly concerns when it came to the PC OS market and browsers.

Are you concerned that Microsoft will have a monopoly in the console gaming market if the Activision deal goes though?

Open world games like Skyrim are hard to make, and modern expectations are making them even harder.

People are shitting on Bethesda for taking so long, but no other developer has managed to make a worthy competitor in the decade+ since Skyrim released.

Yeah that's the part I'm waiting to hear more about. The first one just felt like no decisions needed to be made other than what you wanted your city to look like. And if course, as you mentioned, where to put roads. But the actual management of the city felt like almost an afterthought.

I think I finally put some real time into the game not long after Wastelanders came out and I really enjoyed the game overall. Put I think roughly 150+ hours into the game at least.

The CAMP system was way more addicting than it has a right to be. To bad do much of the game is behind a cash shop.

An attempt to change the rules/laws to target a specific individual would rightly be seen as an attack on Trump/Republicans.

But you sound more in the now about their internal processes, so you’re probably right and I misinterpreted what they meant by that quote.

The general summary of how "bugs" work in software development is simple at a high level.

1. Someone reports the bug (developer, qa, player, user, etc)
2. Someone prioritizes the bug
3. Lower priority issues are put on a backlog to potentially be worked on later
4. Higher priority issues get fixed (most of the time)

The product releases when an acceptable level of bugs from steps 3 and 4 are reached, and "acceptable" never means zero or even close to it.

Or they just don't care what niche communities think about pre-ordering and they just play their games and enjoy them?

Plenty of developers have shipped out a game they believed to be bug free only for the players to discover hundreds of missed bugs on launch day.

You are mistaken if you believe that developers believe the games they ship are "bug free", and I would bet that many of the bugs you think are "missed" are actually already known on an internal issue tracker somewhere. But those bugs were determined to be shippable. And again, that's not specific to games, but software in general.

Yeah how can they say it has the “fewest bugs any Bethesda game has shipped with” when the game hasn’t shipped yet??

Issue tracking has been a part of software development since the beginning. They know and have always known roughly how many bugs they have shipped games with. Just like any company that releases a product knows roughly how many bugs they are shipping with. I pretty much guarantee you that any software that has ever been released has had a huge backlog of bugs of varying levels of importance sitting on some form of backlog.

So, it's pretty straightforward for them to know how this game is comparing against their previous releases. Not to say that there won't be plenty of bugs that have been missed, but that's not really the point.

I’m not saying there’s not going to be less bugs than previous games, I do believe them on that because it being a flagship game from Xbox game studios they’re going to put a lot of pressure on the team to get it right, but don’t take that to mean there’s no bugs at all and especially no game-breaking ones.

Isn't this almost exactly what Phil Spencer says from those quotes in the article?

lemmy.ml isn't explicitly "tankie" but the main devs are and the moderation will include not allowing posts/comments critical of China/Russia/communism/etc.

Skyrim in space sounds pretty good to me. No one including Bethesda had released anything close to competition towards Skyrim in the last decade+. So I'm all on board if they can pull it off.

Yeah, it's strange to think that even outside of Bethesda no one has really been able to come close to replicating the gaming experience you get with Skyrim. I still end up booting it up now and then when I'm in the mood because if I want that style of game that's all there really is (not including Morrowind/Oblivion of course).

Lots of Diablo 4 this weekend if I can actually get some free time. We'll see about that, but that's been my main time sink lately.

Their aim plainly was not to kill the peaceful protestors but to capture or kill militants who demonstrated a willingness to kill in cold blood. The civilians who were killed were caught up in that crossfire.

Let's assume you are right that soldiers never purposefully shot civilians as their main goal. Unless you are claiming that these "militants" were fighting with their own guns, I don't see how firing blindly into groups of protestors with firearms is that much better?

But I don't believe that violence against the protestors was never part of the plan. Just like in the US I would never put it past the government to use violence, "accidental" or otherwise, as part of a scenario to suppress a large-scale protest movement.