As someone who worked QA on Ghost, I'm always appreciative of comments as to its relative bug-light status. We worked our asses off to ensure it was, and it's nice to know it worked :P
One of the biggest bug i've encountered in the PC port (after adressing the armor tremors and AMD frame gen in the first week...) was that maybe due to the better view distance i've seen NPC's waiting for me to move closer and trigger their chase or fight scene. And that was funny.
Putting a bucket on their head working because they use actual line of sight, sure, if that was the biggest bug it'd be amusing. But simple quests breaking for no reason, npcs just stopping responding, shit like that? no. fix your shit.
Yeah quests just flat out breaking and undoable is awful. Was playing Skyrim re-release one day and it still had bugs from over ten years ago that made quest undoable or just flat out broken
reminds me of when I was replaying skyrim this year. First time modding it and I was having a blast... I was doing a modded vampire run that I had to end early because the dawngaurd questline was broken not because of any of my mods, from just an issue with the game.
God, I remember on my first playthrough, The Companions questline broke entirely because one of the wrong NPCs got killed during the attack on Jorrvaskr. Her body never despawned, which I thought was funny, but I didn't realize it had broken the whole questline until like 30 minutes later. I had to go back to an old save, and my kid self learned an important lesson that day about saving frequently, because the last save I had before her untimely death was a while back. Definitely could've been worse but damn was it annoying.
I think the biggest mistake Bethesda ever made was letting Obsidian make Fallout: New Vegas. Even with the incredibly short turn around, unfamiliarity with the engine and technical troubles at launch (to say nothing of missing a lot of their pay as a result), Obsidian proved that you can make a somewhat more stable, deeply branching, reactive world with good writing and interesting characters on Bethesda's tech, even when under duress. After seeing what it had to offer, along with the important quality of life features over Fallout 3 (open character background to aid roleplaying, ability to skip intro, more varied perks at a more balanced rate of progression, a sneak system that can actually work, multiple ammo types and an enemy balance system better than Replace-Bloatfly-With-Deathclaw, etc.), people realised the potential for future games. Then Fallout 4 walked most of that back. Then Fallout 76 proceeded to reverse into a ditch. Bethesda games often defied criticism simply because there wasn't anything else quite like them on the market. F:NV proved that even a smaller team could do more with less, which I think was the moment many people started waking up to Bethesda's poor quality practices.
Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs when the best game Bethesda published wasn't even made developed by Bethesda. I don't think they ever recovered from the butt-hurt either.
@@darkstar0000000000 nah Bethesda isnt upset about NV, they made a lot of money from it. This is a myth. Fallout 4 is also better than NV and 3 in many ways. Though 3 and NV have way better stories. Strongly suggest watching Many a True Nerds "Fallout 4 is better than you think". Starfield on the other hand is creatively bankrupt dogshit.
@@nozhki-busha Fallout 4 feels a lot nicer when it comes to base mechanics/shooting/navigation of UI for the most part, but it traded off a massive amount of its potential to be an interesting RPG as a result. Limiting of dialogue trees to 4 options sucks, and the potential for skill checks diminishes because of it. The general dialog/quest stuff was kinda piddly too, at least compared to NV's offerings.
I sometimes wonder if I’m charmingly janky or unacceptably broken. Then I remind myself about the state of the gaming industry and I immediately feel better about myself.
everyone is charmingly janky if you look at them the right way and they aren’t intentionally and consistently harming others it’s good to give yourself grace and believe in your inherent human worth while you try to enjoy your life
Reminds me the interview where they asked josh sawyer why fallout new Vegas was so buggy at lunch and he pointed out that QA is normally covered by the publisher, so for example when he worked at interplay, they had a big QA team to check all the games, even ones done by bioware, when obsidian worked with other publishers they covered QA, but Bethesda just doesn't do QA so they were confused why they didn't get notes back during development about bugs and glitches, that why Bethesda games are buggy, they don't care for QA, the only reason not all the games Bethesda published were buggy is cause ID, machine games and Arcane probably learned to take QA in house and not trust Bethesda to do their job.
I don't know about your lunch with FONV, but I played it on PS3 years after it came out and it was a hardly playable buggy mess. (So much so that I didn't even finish it.)
Jank: Tried their best. Probably overspent/overworked by choice to get their vision out there. Better quality not an option at the moment. This is the intended product but will likely keep working to improve it because this project was their baby. Anything unintended the community likes will not be fixed because it's about the fun. BS busted: Capable of better quality but decided to cut corners to save money for the overpaid people at the top to get better bonuses. Likely abuses and underpays its workers. No passion involved, only a need for profit. Patches out issues that might hinder their profit asap, even if they remove fun. All other issues will likely be fixed by the community before they 'get to it'.
When I saw this video, I first thought "I don't remember Starfield being very buggy". Then, I remembered I had needed to use console commands to fix my broken playthrough and then install mods to turn achievements back on. My standard for Bethesda games is so low that I just considered troubleshooting and fixing the game par for the course.
Yeah speak about the power of groupthink right there, there was this line being parroted everywhere, it's Bethesda smoothest game! Finally a polished game even if it sucks! People are so disappointing, and you really just you can just feel it festering with the power of the internet!
I feel like the flipside of this is Coffee Stain Studio's perfection of jank-as-gameplay with the soft clipping system in Satisfactory. Letting you clip some objects into each other makes building far more comfy and allows some really creative structures
Or Warframe having a movement glitch that was exploitable, and using that bit of jank as inspiration for improvements to their movement system when they fixed it.
Skyrim taught me that having npcs with repeated voice lines actually makes a world feel smaller, not bigger, because what’s exciting and expansive about a world full of the same two guards who will make the same joke about one of your skills when you get close to them?
In Morrowind everybody but a handful of npcs had SOMETHING unique to say. No spoken dialogue to take up memory space, time, and money. Back when Beth was good....
And they all have the same voice actors, with same cadence, same pitch, same accent, despite perhaps leagues of distance and several city-states between them.
@@1IGG indy games are mostly done with engines and off the shelf plugins and a massively reduced scope, you'd HOPE they'd be more stable than a world scale physics engine where thousands of cheesewheels can be dropped into the world at once
@bradleyhiggs3824 Oh, this is just sad: *No, we wouldn't.* There's a world of difference between Skyrim breaking because someone intentionally placed a bunch of items to exploit a glitch and Skyrim breaking because you looked left during the Thieves Guild mission. The fact that you had to reach for such an over-the-top scenario to defend Bethesda is the most pathetic corporate simping I've ever witnessed and my sister is an Elon Musk diehard.
The thing about a "passionate modding community" is that the game has to be good enough and enjoyable enough for them to care about modding it. Starfield is just terrible.
I was so glad to see MGS3 given as an example of how interacting with NPCs can be done creatively. It's amazing and a shame that other games don't explore things like that more.
I'm sorta still, kinda, just about, part of the Sims community and you see that everytime a new patch or pack is released. There's always a "I didn't have that problem so people are blowing it up just to have something to complain about." Not only do they downplay the problem itself, but also the people that are experiencing it.
There is, however, also the problem of people immediately playing up a problem. Just because you experienced problems on your specific setup doesn't mean it's a broken game made by braindead devs or that EVERYONE thinks the same way and have the same experience as you.
@leetri that gets very annoying whenever someone does it with a painfully average game. Like the game isn't phenomenal, but it also isn't bad. Don't make me defend mediocrity.
@leetri Having one person experience glitches and bugs due to a specific set up is one thing, having multiple people experience the same problem on the same the system is an whole another issue.
Bethesda is borderline shovelware to me at this point. Maybe if their art design was interesting I could be drawn back, but I have not been the least bit interested in their sandboxes with no toys in them since Skyrim. Their games feel like a platter of mediocre to bad food that will at best leave you bloated and at worst give you food poisoning. If it was at least super cheap you'd have an argument, but it's not. It's not cheap at all. Why would I take that over a multicourse good meal or a fantastic gourmet sampling plate when ALL THREE OF THEM COST THE SAME?!
AND DON'T SAY MODS. I'm not going to a fucking restaurant because other diners at them make a really good sauce they'll give me for free to cover up how absolutely shit the food is. The person making the sauce is great, they got talent, love them. But fuck that shitty restaurant.
@@pseudonayme7717those games are 16 and 14 years old respectively, and the second one wasn't developed by Bethesda. You shouldn't have to reach back that far for a studio that's released several video games since.
My video stopped loading at like 11 seconds and I legit thought it was a bit considering the video content and not just TH-cam's video streaming being kinda shit lately.
Having the same issues. Thought it had to do with the dozen plugins I use to make the modern internet bearable but it persisted after a fresh browser install. ... Does anyone know how I can adblock youtube *harder*?
Thank God someone else said it. I thought it was just me because ever since I've updated windows to 24H2 I've been having some serious internet connection problems with TH-cam and that's really strange. I'm just hoping there's no connection between those 2 things. Also of note with others updating windows to 24H2 certain particular brands of Western Digital harddrives have issues connecting to the internet afterwards. Just an FYI if anyone has a Western Digital HDD in their system.
I think a big reason why Oblivions jank has been remembered as charming is because the game freezing or crashing doesn't go well in an Elder Scrolls Glitch Compilation
@@ValkyrieTiara As somebody who has Fallout 3 and Skyrim as some of my favorite games I've ever played... honestly, much as I loved it when I played it and still love it, it really is dated, especially Skyrim which IMHO needs at least 100+ mods to be genuinely great like it was to kid!me (Fallout 3 at least has amazing sidequests and IMHO unironically good writing outside of the main story like Agatha's Song and Wasteland Survivor Guide, and even inside the main story like Tranquility Lane). At this point, there's no excuse for this level of incompetence when other companies do better by default. Hell, Ubisoft is a shit company, but before I learned they were run by abusers, I used to play Far Cry as a series a lot; it's what spawned the "Skyrim with guns" meme due to how open-world and polished it was, and y'know what? It's still by far one of Ubisoft's better game franchises, even when I long stopped paying for them and began pirating them starting with 6 when they were exposed for being run by r4pists. It's definitely not for everyone, but I can at least have genuine fun with the game's madness and exploration on top of a genuinely good villain for a game that's basically the Dynasty Warriors of open-world FPSs _without needing mods to be made playable_ than I would with a game where _I'd_ have to put the effort into making it acceptable quality-wise.
@@ValkyrieTiara I loved Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, Fallout 4. Skyrim kind of blew me away back in the day. Even without mods. I'll forgive bugs if I'm having fun. The new thing here is the fun wears off on Starfield, it's not a compelling loop and just makes me want to play Fallout 4 or Skyrim again.
It helps that oblivion had a sense of humor too.. I can't exactly place it but there are just so many little weirdos in that game, not even counting the unintentional comedy of the AI bumbling through conversations with itself. Skyrim takes itself too seriously
I'd just like to shout out the consistent and amazing 'Lee' jokes in the visuals. That smarmy Bruce Lee smirk in so many weird images gives my brain exactly enough time to 'get it' before moving on and it's just delightful.
It doesn't matter how many things you can do with an NPC, if that NPC is critical to one's objective in the game, and they get stuck on the geometry. At NO POINT in any game that has a multi-million dollar budget behind it is that ever acceptable. If a game is putting players in a position where they have to load a save to get around a bug, it's not "charmingly janky". It's either something the developers didn't find during playtests, or something they knew about and did nothing to fix.
Every time I play a Bethesda game, the bugs pile up and crashes become more frequent until, by the time I reach the ending/last DLC quest, it feels like I'm escaping from ancient ruins as they crumble around me, the game's code actively unraveling by the second. And I suppose there's a certain esoteric charm to that, but I'd say I much prefer games that just actually fucking work.
There was a few skyrim bugs that I sort of found endearing. Flying horses, and dead companions falling out the sky when marrying lydia , leading to lydia flip the fuck out for killing people during the wedding had me almost in tears with laughter. Note: You can buckethead NPCs in Starfield. But you cant steal stuff while the shopkeeps bucketheaded. Boo.
It's been over a year since Starfield came out and I still enjoy watching takedown vids a million times more than I did playing through the actual game
My brain keeps trying to serve me a super old-school Sesame Street video bit where the a transforms into a u, depending on what examples are being shown...
I remember them booasting aboit Oblivions NPC AI like they were actual people. Theyd decide if their house needed cleaning, theyd clesn it. Maybe theyd take time out to craft a potion. Run an errand and stock their pantry. Turned out they were just on a timer. At 4pm, walk to shop. At 5pm leave shop and walk to well. At 6pm leave well and go home, etc.
I started watching and thought “I’ve seen that blue thing somewhere before”. It led me down a very long rabbit hole of 80s children’s tv series until I stumbled upon a very obscure show I’d seen on vhs at primary school, made by the same creator as trapdoor, hence why the blue creature you have jogged my memory. I can relax now and watch your video x
@@luketfer it was called “Stoppit and Tidyup”. A cartoon narrated by Terry Wogan from ‘83 I think. The only slither of memory that I had of it was some strange creatures with long heads sitting on toadstools. Steph’s toy suddenly brought that up from the depths!
@@georgeashley6643 Oh I remember Stoppit and Tidyup! It must have been reused a lot because I wasn't around in 83 (I was 84, so earliest memory is gona be like 6 years old ish) and I definitely remember seeing it. Though a lot of those school VHS tapes were often positively ancient. Even in the 90s we still had the 70s educational tapes that the 1st season of Look Around You parodied.
@@luketfer I was ‘97. I think it was just an old tape our teacher happened to have in a cupboard. It was put on while we waited for our parents to collect us because of a snowstorm. It’s funny how I remember tiny details from 20 years ago but can’t remember what happened yesterday.
Fascinating...Bethesda saying there is a lot to do in their vast open worlds when I have seen Yakuza games more chock full of content in a single city.
19:45 Emil Pagliarulo, has basically admited to expecting the modding community to add to their games. In an interview, he stated that for oblivion (or if it was morrowind) they wanted to add, thief mechanics. Tvis inclusing: the different arrows, hiding in shadows, blackjacks, etc. Then he realised that the modding team would more than likely add it in later. Once again, he's admitting that bethesda expects the modders to fix and add to their games.
It's almost certainly not Morrowind; that was their first game with integrated modding tools and Pagliarulu only joined Bethesda the same year as Morrowind released, with his first credit for Bethesda being on Morrowind's second expansion.
It would also make a big difference if Bethesda games improved quality post release... but each game is still incredibly buggy after years or even decades of 'support'. Even crashes don't necessarily get fixed when Bethesda wants to release a game on another platform, especially including next gen.
There's also the Script Extender mod which, in addition to allowing other mods to function, generally makes the game more resilient against bugs and crashing. This mod has been released over and over again for Bethesda games, almost always on day 1, because the problems it addresses and the way it fixes them *don't change* between games. It would seem that Bethesda is content to keep using the same tool for scripts and make zero updates to it between games. They don't even attempt to understand what the mod is doing, and incorporate it into their code. It's almost as if someone made a conscious effort to *not* update that code, and just rely on the mod to improve their game.
Kenshi is an open world sandbox RPG that has mostly been made by one single person (the great Chris Hunt) and despite it being rather buggy at times, it oozes love, care, vision and dedication and is absolutely one of the best and most addictive games that I've ever played in my 38 years on this rotten earth. Despite genuinely liking some of Bethesda's games, I often love "janky" but passionately made indie games like Kenshi so much more.
I think you're entirely right, Sterling. The mods especially and brand reputation alone are huge parts of it. However, there are two additional factors which I feel play a part in it - 1. Both of their major brands have a long history and association with bugs. Both Morrowind and the original two Fallout are noted for some big oversights. Which could be exploited for the player's benefit, Morrowind's alchemy especially. As such it's unfortunately become baked into what to expect with each brand. 2. The bugs which stick around or are notorious are sort of beloved by fans. Thes are either the kind which can build overpowered characters or just abuse the environment. Oblivion's paint brush glitch, Fallout 3's indestructible Winterized Power Armour, or Skyrim's chicken police informants all come to mind. When it breaks the internal game for your benefit (or at least amusement) it seems to become much more forgiving. I comment on this as I've seen it with a few other games where it sort of becomes part of the internal culture. Dwarf Fortress is probably the biggest example of just this, and it's part. Of why it's fans love it. That said, you're entirely right that such a rich company should be beyond this. Even as someone who genuinely holds Fallout 4 in high regard, their programming and design is slipshod and their failings have never been fixed. I'm not sure if all the pasta in Italy could be strung out to resemble their coding. It seems like Bethesda largely refuses to to improve when it comes to the depth of storytelling and basic interaction with the world's they build.
I'm total-Lee disappointed that there was no mention of Fallout: London in this video. It would be a near perfect counterpoint of "charmingly janky" vs official Bethesda "unacceptably broken." Also, ZMan wins at everything forever with "in hair-ent Lee."
if i have to hear more of this bullshit flagwaving i'm gonna puke. FL is COOL but its a fucking boring jankfest that is _RIDDLED_ with bugs, FESTOONING with them.
literally just finally got through the re-install process of F4, first time i've had a fresh install since release day (i copy my steam dirs between new machines), after giving up on FL, its great fun but the fucking bugs are terrible and the install process is an aggressive monster, eventually the ratio of fun to "work" is too much. Huge hats off to the team though, fucking incredible effort, hope they can stabilize that shit in the future. Actually thinking on it, that's probs a Beth issue more than a FALON issue. Maybe they can remake it in UE5 lol.
@@bradleyhiggs3824 The 1.02 patch was just a couple of days ago, and had over a thousand bug fixes. Sadly, FOLON did start out even more bug infested than an official Bethesda game, but I'm pretty certain the devs also care more about fixing them than Bethesda would.
Much needed video. Hopefully more people realize and things improve or at least the working conditions of the staff making the games. Keep up the good work.
Fair to point out the thing everyone forgets about Witcher 3. It had a LOT of bugs and issues early on but they got fixed relatively fast. At least in comparison to literally anything Bethesda makes. Skyrim for example to this day has bugs that have not been officially fixed because the people who made it are incompetent.
That bit about the Krypton Factor dialogue made me burst out laughing because there is genuinely an extremely simple solution. In the Creation Kit, you can set conditions for dialogue, including completion of quests and world events, meaning that more than likely they just fucking forgot to set the right condition for the dialogue to appear/disappear
In many cases it comes off like they just don't care enough to consider it. Ideally they should have replaced it altogether with a new line, but they didn't bother recording any greetings about the player having completed it. The entire point is to add new greeting lines about things the player has accomplished, after all, and that's supposed to be a major accomplishment. Big enough that they hold a celebration in your honor.
Yer didn't mod it out, Sterling! Seriously though, I've played Bethesda games since Arena - spent thousands of hours in them and modded them heavily - but I cannot get into their modern-day releases any more. There was a charm to their games, especially in the world building, even up to Fallout 4, that just evaporated along the way. Now it seems all that is left are bugs, drudgery and the same procedure as every year from a company that - for example - used to ship Morrowind with its own construction set (developer tools) included on a separate CD.
Some things never change. Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall was famously unplayable and referred to as "Buggerfall". Bethesda released patches on floppy disks, it was novelty back then
Part of the problem is that the people with the money have no way in which they view a game that results in them claiming the fault is in management. It either sells or doesnt, and they take all the credit with none of the blame
I saw the same animation for aiming your gun from fo4 in a trailer and knew it was fo4 in space. Passed, and super glad I did. Guessing skyrim 2, but worse will be the same.
Even worse than that though. At least FO4 still had a hand crafted world to explore, the one thing Bethesda can claim they do well. Best part of Bethesda games is just wandering around exploring. Starfield has none of that. That exploration is replaced with procedurally generated planets that all just blend together after a while. It's all the worst parts of Bethesda games with none of the stuff people like. It's kind of impressive how wrong they got it lol Thankfully I got it as part of game pass so *shrugs*.
I got Starfield for $20 off on launch day (I wasn't going to buy it at first but with the deal I figured why not), and in the opening of the game they have the same "opening the Vault" moment with the big rolling door like in Fallout 4 when you come out of the mine that the tutorial is in. There were moments in the few hours I played where I kept having like liminal space flashes because the music kept making me think I was playing Fo4 or 76 because it had that same dramatic swell of the leaving the Vault soundtrack. Between that and how lifeless and repetitive the procedurally generated worlds were (and the walking from loading screen to loading screen within 2 minutes of each other endlessly), I felt ripped off despite getting the game at a massive discount on release.
The difference between Jank and Broken is very much like the difference between a movie made by someone who tried but still failed due to limitations of either budget or talent but by god they had PASSION (any early Ed Wood movie) and cynical, intentionally cheesy "oh look at us aren't we clever for making a silly bad movie now watch me wink at the camera for 90 minutes" slop (Sharknado or it's 5 million sequels/imitators). Bethesda also largely depends on the modding community to pick up the slack on their games, fixing bugs and repairing broken/incomplete quests/adding in stuff that should have been there in the first place. Mods are why I played Skyrim for literally a decade (and sometimes I still miss my dear friend Inigo) but a game shouldn't HAVE to have a robust mod community to be playable in the first place.
I'm glad Dead Island is mentioned. Those games are full of jank and bugs bit still can be pretty fun and you for the most part, thise bugs don't break the gamr to the point of making it unplayable.
Brynjolf in Skyrim is one of, if not the most annoying NPC, that isn't Preston Garvy. You can rock up to Riften in the heaviest, most shiny, silver paladin armor you can find, and this idiot thinks, "master criminal". At least in Oblivion you had to go out of your way to have an infamous reputation instead of some braindead NPC simply assuming you're some kind of crook.
Skyrim had no shortage of obnoxious NPC who were worst. Here's 5 off the top of my head: 1. That obnoxious female member of The Companions who mouths off to you even when your leader. 2. Maven BlarBriar, who not only is nasty to you despite being her literal messiah who is running two of the organizations keeping her in power, *but is also Essential for some reason, so you can't kill her despite being evil.* 3. Waaay too many npc brats, who you also can't off, in vanilla game anyways. (Thank you, based mods.) 4. *THE GUARDS. ALL OF THEM.* 5. Belethor: Snaps at the Dragonborn for asking "What brings a Breton to Skyrim", *even if the Dragonborn just saved the planet and is a Breton themselves.* Notable disqualifications: Nazeem: Disqualified for being intentionally, hilariously douchey. (And quite killable.) Screaming prophet guy in Whiterun: Killable, but Whitrrun just isn't the same without him.
Piranha Bytes studios known for the Gothic series, Risen series and recently Elex series comes to mind when I think of a company that dances on a razor thin line between "charmingly janky" versus unacceptably broken. Their designs back in the day were charmingly janky but in 2024 their games are just busted some by design and others by budget constraints. But even pointing out those reasons does not give them a free pass on a sub par product 🤷🏾
The problem I have with Bethesda is when you compare it to say CDPR. Cyberpunk was broken now it's amazing. Star field will still be broken for all time just like Skyrim, how many releases with all the same bugs have been released!,?
I think this is one of the sharpest delineations between Bethesda and other companies. Bethesda seems to no longer understand the code they are working with. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the same bugs and issues reoccur from one game to the next. Or at the very least, games would improve over time with patching. Instead, they seem to just fiddle with numbers to try and fix things, without addressing the actual core problems that keep causing things like this to happen.
To be fair, they did actually fix up a lot of the issues with Fallout 76. But they also had incentive to do so, with its live service model and it not really allowing modders to fix it for them. Meanwhile they seem to be ok with the state Starfield is currently in.
@@-tera-3345 You are right, they did eventually fix FO76. But with how much of a trainwreck that game started as, and how long it took them to fix it, it kind of highlights how much they've been skating by on the work of modders. Somebody in management didn't want to spend one more minute than was strictly necessary to get their minimum viable product out the door, and they weren't going to add time to the schedule to fix some "trivial" legacy bugs that players have been ignoring for decades. Except they couldn't be ignored anymore, because you couldn't rotate your saves and roll back to a previous one, or use the console to fix a broken/missed flag, or install a mod that cleans up the scripting engine and fixes most bugs with quests and dialogues. The MMO format cut off every workaround their fans had been using since at least Morrowind and forced them to confront their real problems.
@@nonyabidness8676 Yeah, like I said, they really didn't have any choice BUT to fix 76. And even then, they kind of did the minimum required to make it playable. It wasn't a Cyberpunk style comeback. (Of course, Cyberpunk's comeback was greatly assisted by a super-popular anime series and a big patch designed to release alongside it. Which the amazon series could have been for 76, but instead of doing anything with that Bethesda just broke all the mods for Fallout 4.) Meanwhile for Starfield, they apparently care so little about fixing things up that there are paid DLC creation club weapons that are apparently still nonfunctional even half a year after being put up.
@@-tera-3345 Sorry, I don't want you to think I'm trying to disagree with you. I just had a little extra pent-up vitriol towards FO76 and Bethesda, and thought I'd commiserate with you for a moment by going for another dunk on them.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said people were and are willing to put up with jank when a game is trying something that hasn't been done so much before, trying new mechanics and gameplay styles and systems. I have no doubt that under the hood there have been some innovations with Starfield, but on the whole, the game is every other Bethesda sandbox before it with a different coat of paint. The game is actually probably less buggy than ones before it, but people gravitate towards blaming bugs for the game being unpolished when really, the problem isn't the bugs, the problem is that the whole game is incredibly uninteresting. Gamers in general are growing older and have less and less time and patience, so we really aren't interested in wandering around and making our own fun. At this point, other games have perfected that model to a mirror shine and we would play them if we wanted something like that (See: Minecraft/No Mans Sky). We're done dicking around, let's DO SOMETHING!
Not just Oblivion. Morrowind. IIRC ES III in like 2003 was the first game to use the Dev Engine that Bethesda have been using for every game over the past 20-25 years now. While everything looks prettier, and sounds better (even if not a huge amount, release to release) the mechanics have all been the same and had all the same game breaking spawn glitches where key NPCs can spawn under the world, or outside the world and die, or wander the map because pathing is fucked and/or wander in to an end-game encounter and die in a fight, or find some exception in the code that regularly crashes the game if not occasionally corrupting a save file. Fallout 3 was my first experience with modern Bethesda. Fallout NV was my last. Good games, but Fallout 3 felt like it had content cut and didn't have quite enough understanding of the world. But the bugs in those games, and the fact that BethSoft never made strides toward fixing the mechanics the game was built on that were unacceptable... welp fuck them, I'm out.
Yes and no. Morrowind used netImmerse, which was an earlier iteration of Gamebryo (used in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and NV), which Bethesda would then fork into Creation for Skyrim, so it's the same engine in the same sense that Goldsrc is Quake, but there have changes over the years, including, yes, to basic mechanics, like Oblivion's direct support for NPC schedules and needs (which in turn allowed things like making NPCs eat poisoned food).
Larian made an objectively more complex game through the middle of a pandemic and by and large there have been few game breaking bugs and the ones that are found, are rapidly addressed.
Been saying exactly this for years! Bethesda has such a weird cult following that it borders on being a literal cult. Think of it this way: Sonic Team released one broken-ass game (you know what one I'm talking about) nearly _20 years ago_ and it has _never_ lived it down, and that game _still_ isn't as buggy as Oblivion - which released the same year - or Skyrim - which released five years _later._
It really baffles me when people are unable to take criticism of a game they like without getting defensive. BOTW is one of my favorite games of all time, and my favorite in that series even going back to the NES. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the 7/10 score. Hell I have issues with the game myself even though I still love it.
Hey, so, I recently got recommended a response video by what appeared to be a group of clucking chickens, metaphorically speaking. But in trying to criticize you, they kept pausing the video and interrupting your thought stream, while tearing into the halfs and chunks of your sentences they singled out... it became difficult to keep up with what they were talking about, and I couldnt see exactly what points they had against you by the end. They claimed you were complaining to complain, among other things, but it seemed like they were just bashing just to bash! It was dumb, and they lost the point of what they were trying to criticize with the way they presented those criticisms. Anyways, I got recommended a video trying to dismantle your vids, it didnt work, and they seemed like they were fishing for something that wasnt there. Cheers!
I have been playing Xenoblade Chronicles lately, is an openworld rpg 10 times the size of Skyrim, in the wii, like wat, and it doesn't have any bugs, i found one at hour 50
It's a leek, but it-it sounds like leak. See, it's a clever play on words! Love it, like for real made me cackle. The editing is always on point. ❤ Bethesda jank was once a problem of focusing on other things while working with limited tech. Now it's just formulated laziness.
Technomancer, and Elex1 are both filled with jank, but they're still worth-while games... but the jank from games like Redfall or Fallout4 or Starfield is just unacceptable because the studios have the budget to delay development and fix the games first
I believe that Fallout 4 was still accepted for what it was and the state it was in, simply because that game brought something new: base building. Yes, Skyrim had it as well in a dlc, but Fallout 4 brought it to another level. It was as junky as the rest of the game, but it was something new that brought additional stuff to the table. Plus, it's Fallout. Starfield on the other hand? Well... ship building is something that turned out to be great. But the rest? Typical Bethesda jank, and sadly you can skip ship building and be fine without it. So for many, Starfield = more of Bethesda. And not only can I blame people for having enough of it, I'm quite happy more people have opened their eyes to the obvious: games made by Bethesda are not up to modern standards.
Omg Barth. I went through such a n emotional rollercoaster. With heavy subject matter being discussed and then some great after school member berries seeing a single frame from “you can’t do that on tv”. Sterling is playing 4d chess while I’m here happy with my checkers
Don't forget the ever-present "But Fallout New Vegas was really buggy, and it was made by Obsidian." Bethesda gave Obsidian fuck all to work with and a deadline that was so close you would think they were deliberately trying to sabotage the studio. edit: Oh! You didn't forget.
Verymuch need "open" and "huge" to not be the same thing. Give me an open "world" that's a city small enough that from the highest vantage I can trace along the entire perimeter with my eyes unobstructed, then jump down off that point and survive the ensuing fall damage. Give me an open world where it's too tiny to justify fast travel as a feature. Open world where I can walk from one end to the other in one play session, not run or bike or drive or fly, WALK from one end to the other end, LONG WAYS, in just one play session.
Give me an open world like Liberty City in GTA III or Kamurocho in almost every Yakuza / Like A Dragon game Don't give me a sprawling empty expanse of nothing like the top half of the GTA V map or Hyrule in BotW or every Ubisoft game
As someone who worked QA on Ghost, I'm always appreciative of comments as to its relative bug-light status. We worked our asses off to ensure it was, and it's nice to know it worked :P
got s best friend playing ghost recon rn btw, what ive heard is GOOD
Ghost of Tsushima had some true top class QA, you guys did one of the best jobs I've ever seen!
One of the biggest bug i've encountered in the PC port (after adressing the armor tremors and AMD frame gen in the first week...) was that maybe due to the better view distance i've seen NPC's waiting for me to move closer and trigger their chase or fight scene. And that was funny.
QAs are unsung heroes unironically
@@teatime3009 and usually the first corner the corpos try to cut.
This is like me trying to explain to people the difference between a B movie and a bad movie.
With the latter, you're speaking of Cats or...much of what's more recent with the MCU? As in EXPENSIVELY bad, rather than just bad.
A B movie is a movie thats not an A in quality but has cultural staying power example the room
@@NetMoverSitanor like the terrible joker musical
Former is cheesy but stilp good
@@RealSlowLike Ooh, that's another for the dung heap.
Putting a bucket on their head working because they use actual line of sight, sure, if that was the biggest bug it'd be amusing. But simple quests breaking for no reason, npcs just stopping responding, shit like that? no. fix your shit.
Kind of like the chickens reporting your crimes to guards versus the game just not being able to save. One's funny; the other's stupid.
Yeah quests just flat out breaking and undoable is awful. Was playing Skyrim re-release one day and it still had bugs from over ten years ago that made quest undoable or just flat out broken
The fact that they've rereleased Skyrim multiple times and have NEVER patched their quest bugs is especially grody.
reminds me of when I was replaying skyrim this year. First time modding it and I was having a blast... I was doing a modded vampire run that I had to end early because the dawngaurd questline was broken not because of any of my mods, from just an issue with the game.
God, I remember on my first playthrough, The Companions questline broke entirely because one of the wrong NPCs got killed during the attack on Jorrvaskr. Her body never despawned, which I thought was funny, but I didn't realize it had broken the whole questline until like 30 minutes later. I had to go back to an old save, and my kid self learned an important lesson that day about saving frequently, because the last save I had before her untimely death was a while back. Definitely could've been worse but damn was it annoying.
I think the biggest mistake Bethesda ever made was letting Obsidian make Fallout: New Vegas. Even with the incredibly short turn around, unfamiliarity with the engine and technical troubles at launch (to say nothing of missing a lot of their pay as a result), Obsidian proved that you can make a somewhat more stable, deeply branching, reactive world with good writing and interesting characters on Bethesda's tech, even when under duress. After seeing what it had to offer, along with the important quality of life features over Fallout 3 (open character background to aid roleplaying, ability to skip intro, more varied perks at a more balanced rate of progression, a sneak system that can actually work, multiple ammo types and an enemy balance system better than Replace-Bloatfly-With-Deathclaw, etc.), people realised the potential for future games.
Then Fallout 4 walked most of that back. Then Fallout 76 proceeded to reverse into a ditch.
Bethesda games often defied criticism simply because there wasn't anything else quite like them on the market. F:NV proved that even a smaller team could do more with less, which I think was the moment many people started waking up to Bethesda's poor quality practices.
Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs when the best game Bethesda published wasn't even made developed by Bethesda. I don't think they ever recovered from the butt-hurt either.
And all of that while having had a large section of the world cancelled due to the short turn around time.
@@darkstar0000000000 nah Bethesda isnt upset about NV, they made a lot of money from it. This is a myth. Fallout 4 is also better than NV and 3 in many ways. Though 3 and NV have way better stories. Strongly suggest watching Many a True Nerds "Fallout 4 is better than you think". Starfield on the other hand is creatively bankrupt dogshit.
@@nozhki-busha Fallout 4 feels a lot nicer when it comes to base mechanics/shooting/navigation of UI for the most part, but it traded off a massive amount of its potential to be an interesting RPG as a result. Limiting of dialogue trees to 4 options sucks, and the potential for skill checks diminishes because of it. The general dialog/quest stuff was kinda piddly too, at least compared to NV's offerings.
@@darkstar0000000000 feels a bit like Square's story
I sometimes wonder if I’m charmingly janky or unacceptably broken. Then I remind myself about the state of the gaming industry and I immediately feel better about myself.
One person's charmingly janky is objectively unacceptably broken.
As a person, whenever you're self-reflecting you're never a lost cause. So I'm certain it's the first! :) *long distance internet hug*
everyone is charmingly janky if you look at them the right way and they aren’t intentionally and consistently harming others
it’s good to give yourself grace and believe in your inherent human worth while you try to enjoy your life
Reminds me the interview where they asked josh sawyer why fallout new Vegas was so buggy at lunch and he pointed out that QA is normally covered by the publisher, so for example when he worked at interplay, they had a big QA team to check all the games, even ones done by bioware, when obsidian worked with other publishers they covered QA, but Bethesda just doesn't do QA so they were confused why they didn't get notes back during development about bugs and glitches, that why Bethesda games are buggy, they don't care for QA, the only reason not all the games Bethesda published were buggy is cause ID, machine games and Arcane probably learned to take QA in house and not trust Bethesda to do their job.
I don't know about your lunch with FONV, but I played it on PS3 years after it came out and it was a hardly playable buggy mess. (So much so that I didn't even finish it.)
@@tubensalat1453 Bethesda games didn't play well with the PS3
@@DragonNexusYeah. PS3's split RAM pool and strange asymmetric CPU architecture didn't make it easy for some developers, not just Bethesda.
@@tubensalat1453on launch it was very very bad
Not worse than the average Bethesda game though
Jank: Tried their best. Probably overspent/overworked by choice to get their vision out there. Better quality not an option at the moment. This is the intended product but will likely keep working to improve it because this project was their baby. Anything unintended the community likes will not be fixed because it's about the fun.
BS busted: Capable of better quality but decided to cut corners to save money for the overpaid people at the top to get better bonuses. Likely abuses and underpays its workers. No passion involved, only a need for profit. Patches out issues that might hinder their profit asap, even if they remove fun. All other issues will likely be fixed by the community before they 'get to it'.
When I saw this video, I first thought "I don't remember Starfield being very buggy". Then, I remembered I had needed to use console commands to fix my broken playthrough and then install mods to turn achievements back on. My standard for Bethesda games is so low that I just considered troubleshooting and fixing the game par for the course.
That tells more about Bethesda games than about Starfield. Fallout 4 is still one one where I had to use console the most.
That's some otherworldly accidentally selective memory. The things our brains do man, it's crazy.
Yeah speak about the power of groupthink right there, there was this line being parroted everywhere, it's Bethesda smoothest game! Finally a polished game even if it sucks! People are so disappointing, and you really just you can just feel it festering with the power of the internet!
I feel like the flipside of this is Coffee Stain Studio's perfection of jank-as-gameplay with the soft clipping system in Satisfactory. Letting you clip some objects into each other makes building far more comfy and allows some really creative structures
Or Warframe having a movement glitch that was exploitable, and using that bit of jank as inspiration for improvements to their movement system when they fixed it.
In MGS you can also shoot their radios so they can't call for backup
You can shake them down if you sneak up on them and aim at them
Skyrim taught me that having npcs with repeated voice lines actually makes a world feel smaller, not bigger, because what’s exciting and expansive about a world full of the same two guards who will make the same joke about one of your skills when you get close to them?
In Morrowind everybody but a handful of npcs had SOMETHING unique to say. No spoken dialogue to take up memory space, time, and money. Back when Beth was good....
Imagine if they did something crazy like people in different locations having accents.
@@lunarose9Dragon Quest moment.
And they all have the same voice actors, with same cadence, same pitch, same accent, despite perhaps leagues of distance and several city-states between them.
Let me guess, someone stole your sweetroll?
A 10 dollar game that works 60% of the time is charmingly janky, a 70 dollar game that works 90% of the time is unacceptable
I play a lot of indie games. And bugs like Bethesda's are very, very rare.
Goat Simulator agrees
Then there's Action 52 on NES, a $199 dollar game that works 2.5% of the time.
@@1IGG indy games are mostly done with engines and off the shelf plugins and a massively reduced scope, you'd HOPE they'd be more stable than a world scale physics engine where thousands of cheesewheels can be dropped into the world at once
@bradleyhiggs3824 Oh, this is just sad: *No, we wouldn't.* There's a world of difference between Skyrim breaking because someone intentionally placed a bunch of items to exploit a glitch and Skyrim breaking because you looked left during the Thieves Guild mission. The fact that you had to reach for such an over-the-top scenario to defend Bethesda is the most pathetic corporate simping I've ever witnessed and my sister is an Elon Musk diehard.
The irony of the ending argument about mods is that modders have looked at Starfield and said "Yeah, no, this is beyond saving."
People mod stuff they're passionate for.... sometimes too passionate for
One dude from the skyrim MP mod, come on now.
The thing about a "passionate modding community" is that the game has to be good enough and enjoyable enough for them to care about modding it. Starfield is just terrible.
@@PamperedDuchess Well you need a reason to be passionate about the game.
Counterpoint: Starfield seems to have a pretty active modding community.
Z. Mann Zilla really got a lot of miles out of the leek joke and I couldn't be happier.
Z. Mann Zilla is a treasure
The leeks and the Lees. So many Lees. My word.
The Bruce Lee puns are still funnier.
Don't get me wrong, the dancing panda is awesome, but this time i was kinda hoping for "Bethesda did naughty" dance.
I was so glad to see MGS3 given as an example of how interacting with NPCs can be done creatively. It's amazing and a shame that other games don't explore things like that more.
2:25 I hate it when people immediately downplay a problem. Like, just because it wasn't an issue for you doesn't mean it's not one for me!
I'm sorta still, kinda, just about, part of the Sims community and you see that everytime a new patch or pack is released. There's always a "I didn't have that problem so people are blowing it up just to have something to complain about." Not only do they downplay the problem itself, but also the people that are experiencing it.
There is, however, also the problem of people immediately playing up a problem. Just because you experienced problems on your specific setup doesn't mean it's a broken game made by braindead devs or that EVERYONE thinks the same way and have the same experience as you.
@leetri that gets very annoying whenever someone does it with a painfully average game. Like the game isn't phenomenal, but it also isn't bad. Don't make me defend mediocrity.
@leetri Having one person experience glitches and bugs due to a specific set up is one thing, having multiple people experience the same problem on the same the system is an whole another issue.
Yes, and if it's an issue disproportionately affecting less able people, everyone keeps a level head and takes those people at their word. . . 😣
Bethesda is borderline shovelware to me at this point. Maybe if their art design was interesting I could be drawn back, but I have not been the least bit interested in their sandboxes with no toys in them since Skyrim.
Their games feel like a platter of mediocre to bad food that will at best leave you bloated and at worst give you food poisoning. If it was at least super cheap you'd have an argument, but it's not. It's not cheap at all.
Why would I take that over a multicourse good meal or a fantastic gourmet sampling plate when ALL THREE OF THEM COST THE SAME?!
AND DON'T SAY MODS. I'm not going to a fucking restaurant because other diners at them make a really good sauce they'll give me for free to cover up how absolutely shit the food is. The person making the sauce is great, they got talent, love them. But fuck that shitty restaurant.
You didn't play FO3 or FONV?🤔
@@pseudonayme7717those games are 16 and 14 years old respectively, and the second one wasn't developed by Bethesda. You shouldn't have to reach back that far for a studio that's released several video games since.
I’m glad so many people are starting to shit on Bethesda. I can’t understand the people that are excited for TES 6…
@@pseudonayme7717 Only "true" fallouts are the ones before Bethesda era.
My video stopped loading at like 11 seconds and I legit thought it was a bit considering the video content and not just TH-cam's video streaming being kinda shit lately.
Having the same issues. Thought it had to do with the dozen plugins I use to make the modern internet bearable but it persisted after a fresh browser install.
... Does anyone know how I can adblock youtube *harder*?
@@jmsp000 Put NewPipe on your phone if you can! TH-cam mobile app who?
i have the same. i suspect it has something to do with Ublock.
Thank God someone else said it. I thought it was just me because ever since I've updated windows to 24H2 I've been having some serious internet connection problems with TH-cam and that's really strange. I'm just hoping there's no connection between those 2 things. Also of note with others updating windows to 24H2 certain particular brands of Western Digital harddrives have issues connecting to the internet afterwards. Just an FYI if anyone has a Western Digital HDD in their system.
Its been *insanely* bad. To the point I can't watch a lot of streamers I like T_T
I think a big reason why Oblivions jank has been remembered as charming is because the game freezing or crashing doesn't go well in an Elder Scrolls Glitch Compilation
Bethesda has literally never developed a good game change my mind. Do most people actually like Skyrim, or do they like Modded Skyrim?
@@ValkyrieTiara As somebody who has Fallout 3 and Skyrim as some of my favorite games I've ever played... honestly, much as I loved it when I played it and still love it, it really is dated, especially Skyrim which IMHO needs at least 100+ mods to be genuinely great like it was to kid!me (Fallout 3 at least has amazing sidequests and IMHO unironically good writing outside of the main story like Agatha's Song and Wasteland Survivor Guide, and even inside the main story like Tranquility Lane). At this point, there's no excuse for this level of incompetence when other companies do better by default.
Hell, Ubisoft is a shit company, but before I learned they were run by abusers, I used to play Far Cry as a series a lot; it's what spawned the "Skyrim with guns" meme due to how open-world and polished it was, and y'know what? It's still by far one of Ubisoft's better game franchises, even when I long stopped paying for them and began pirating them starting with 6 when they were exposed for being run by r4pists. It's definitely not for everyone, but I can at least have genuine fun with the game's madness and exploration on top of a genuinely good villain for a game that's basically the Dynasty Warriors of open-world FPSs _without needing mods to be made playable_ than I would with a game where _I'd_ have to put the effort into making it acceptable quality-wise.
@@ValkyrieTiara you can't have modded skyrim without skyrim tho.....
@@ValkyrieTiara I loved Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, Fallout 4. Skyrim kind of blew me away back in the day. Even without mods. I'll forgive bugs if I'm having fun. The new thing here is the fun wears off on Starfield, it's not a compelling loop and just makes me want to play Fallout 4 or Skyrim again.
It helps that oblivion had a sense of humor too.. I can't exactly place it but there are just so many little weirdos in that game, not even counting the unintentional comedy of the AI bumbling through conversations with itself. Skyrim takes itself too seriously
I'd just like to shout out the consistent and amazing 'Lee' jokes in the visuals. That smarmy Bruce Lee smirk in so many weird images gives my brain exactly enough time to 'get it' before moving on and it's just delightful.
This is the Way
unsubscribing for the missed "barely" at 07:45
The thing I love more about the Bruce Lee puns is that he always has the same cheeky grin in that picture. True Lee incredible.
You forgot to mention the Witcher 3. Witcher 3 is also a game. Something Something Witcher 3.
I'm so disappointed that Witcher 3 wasn't mentioned...
It doesn't matter how many things you can do with an NPC, if that NPC is critical to one's objective in the game, and they get stuck on the geometry.
At NO POINT in any game that has a multi-million dollar budget behind it is that ever acceptable. If a game is putting players in a position where they have to load a save to get around a bug, it's not "charmingly janky". It's either something the developers didn't find during playtests, or something they knew about and did nothing to fix.
Every time I play a Bethesda game, the bugs pile up and crashes become more frequent until, by the time I reach the ending/last DLC quest, it feels like I'm escaping from ancient ruins as they crumble around me, the game's code actively unraveling by the second. And I suppose there's a certain esoteric charm to that, but I'd say I much prefer games that just actually fucking work.
There was a few skyrim bugs that I sort of found endearing. Flying horses, and dead companions falling out the sky when marrying lydia , leading to lydia flip the fuck out for killing people during the wedding had me almost in tears with laughter.
Note: You can buckethead NPCs in Starfield. But you cant steal stuff while the shopkeeps bucketheaded. Boo.
You'ed think they'd have got the hang of the Morowind engine by now. Thank god for you.
It's been over a year since Starfield came out and I still enjoy watching takedown vids a million times more than I did playing through the actual game
What's worse is that they never look at the Universal Patches to see their issues. Some bugs got fixed by third parties, and are willfully ignored.
It's insane that some fixes are easily done, too.
The visual gag of Really fucking Something just broke me, thanks Steph and Zilla
*when is it jank, and when is it junk?*
Why not both?
My brain keeps trying to serve me a super old-school Sesame Street video bit where the a transforms into a u, depending on what examples are being shown...
Elex is a good example of the extreme of this, its jank is in no way countered by its fun. Or its weird hints at white supremacy.
I remember them booasting aboit Oblivions NPC AI like they were actual people. Theyd decide if their house needed cleaning, theyd clesn it. Maybe theyd take time out to craft a potion. Run an errand and stock their pantry.
Turned out they were just on a timer. At 4pm, walk to shop. At 5pm leave shop and walk to well. At 6pm leave well and go home, etc.
The "taking a leek" section(s) made my day!
I started watching and thought “I’ve seen that blue thing somewhere before”. It led me down a very long rabbit hole of 80s children’s tv series until I stumbled upon a very obscure show I’d seen on vhs at primary school, made by the same creator as trapdoor, hence why the blue creature you have jogged my memory. I can relax now and watch your video x
You can't just say that and not reveal what it was!
@@luketfer it was called “Stoppit and Tidyup”. A cartoon narrated by Terry Wogan from ‘83 I think. The only slither of memory that I had of it was some strange creatures with long heads sitting on toadstools. Steph’s toy suddenly brought that up from the depths!
@@georgeashley6643 Oh I remember Stoppit and Tidyup! It must have been reused a lot because I wasn't around in 83 (I was 84, so earliest memory is gona be like 6 years old ish) and I definitely remember seeing it.
Though a lot of those school VHS tapes were often positively ancient. Even in the 90s we still had the 70s educational tapes that the 1st season of Look Around You parodied.
@@luketfer I was ‘97. I think it was just an old tape our teacher happened to have in a cupboard. It was put on while we waited for our parents to collect us because of a snowstorm. It’s funny how I remember tiny details from 20 years ago but can’t remember what happened yesterday.
Fascinating...Bethesda saying there is a lot to do in their vast open worlds when I have seen Yakuza games more chock full of content in a single city.
Yakuza is about 10,000 times better than every Bethesda game. Trust me, I did the math.
Steph once did a video of how good Kamorucho is back before discovering themselves.
There is more to do in Champion District than Tamriel
Anyone else loving the constant Bruce Lee meming? Serious-Lee
Definite-Lee.
I litera-Lee love it
Absolute-Lee
Undeniab-Lee
I'm actually pretty over it now.
19:45 Emil Pagliarulo, has basically admited to expecting the modding community to add to their games.
In an interview, he stated that for oblivion (or if it was morrowind) they wanted to add, thief mechanics. Tvis inclusing: the different arrows, hiding in shadows, blackjacks, etc.
Then he realised that the modding team would more than likely add it in later.
Once again, he's admitting that bethesda expects the modders to fix and add to their games.
It's almost certainly not Morrowind; that was their first game with integrated modding tools and Pagliarulu only joined Bethesda the same year as Morrowind released, with his first credit for Bethesda being on Morrowind's second expansion.
@@LordInsane100 My brain easily forget details like this. But yeah, it'd have to be for Oblivion in that case. Thanks for clarifying :)
*Bethesda:* Reach for the _(Loading screen)_ stars!
Plot twist: the stars they reach are projected into a ceiling with a toy.
The stars are a lie😢
It would also make a big difference if Bethesda games improved quality post release... but each game is still incredibly buggy after years or even decades of 'support'. Even crashes don't necessarily get fixed when Bethesda wants to release a game on another platform, especially including next gen.
There's also the Script Extender mod which, in addition to allowing other mods to function, generally makes the game more resilient against bugs and crashing.
This mod has been released over and over again for Bethesda games, almost always on day 1, because the problems it addresses and the way it fixes them *don't change* between games.
It would seem that Bethesda is content to keep using the same tool for scripts and make zero updates to it between games. They don't even attempt to understand what the mod is doing, and incorporate it into their code. It's almost as if someone made a conscious effort to *not* update that code, and just rely on the mod to improve their game.
Kenshi is an open world sandbox RPG that has mostly been made by one single person (the great Chris Hunt) and despite it being rather buggy at times, it oozes love, care, vision and dedication and is absolutely one of the best and most addictive games that I've ever played in my 38 years on this rotten earth. Despite genuinely liking some of Bethesda's games, I often love "janky" but passionately made indie games like Kenshi so much more.
Pun based visual gags have always been a staple of the Jimquisition, but lately they've been particularly exquisite
LATE LEE!!!!
I think you're entirely right, Sterling. The mods especially and brand reputation alone are huge parts of it. However, there are two additional factors which I feel play a part in it -
1. Both of their major brands have a long history and association with bugs. Both Morrowind and the original two Fallout are noted for some big oversights. Which could be exploited for the player's benefit, Morrowind's alchemy especially. As such it's unfortunately become baked into what to expect with each brand.
2. The bugs which stick around or are notorious are sort of beloved by fans. Thes are either the kind which can build overpowered characters or just abuse the environment. Oblivion's paint brush glitch, Fallout 3's indestructible Winterized Power Armour, or Skyrim's chicken police informants all come to mind. When it breaks the internal game for your benefit (or at least amusement) it seems to become much more forgiving.
I comment on this as I've seen it with a few other games where it sort of becomes part of the internal culture. Dwarf Fortress is probably the biggest example of just this, and it's part. Of why it's fans love it.
That said, you're entirely right that such a rich company should be beyond this. Even as someone who genuinely holds Fallout 4 in high regard, their programming and design is slipshod and their failings have never been fixed. I'm not sure if all the pasta in Italy could be strung out to resemble their coding.
It seems like Bethesda largely refuses to to improve when it comes to the depth of storytelling and basic interaction with the world's they build.
I'm total-Lee disappointed that there was no mention of Fallout: London in this video. It would be a near perfect counterpoint of "charmingly janky" vs official Bethesda "unacceptably broken."
Also, ZMan wins at everything forever with "in hair-ent Lee."
if i have to hear more of this bullshit flagwaving i'm gonna puke. FL is COOL but its a fucking boring jankfest that is _RIDDLED_ with bugs, FESTOONING with them.
literally just finally got through the re-install process of F4, first time i've had a fresh install since release day (i copy my steam dirs between new machines), after giving up on FL, its great fun but the fucking bugs are terrible and the install process is an aggressive monster, eventually the ratio of fun to "work" is too much. Huge hats off to the team though, fucking incredible effort, hope they can stabilize that shit in the future. Actually thinking on it, that's probs a Beth issue more than a FALON issue. Maybe they can remake it in UE5 lol.
@@bradleyhiggs3824 The 1.02 patch was just a couple of days ago, and had over a thousand bug fixes. Sadly, FOLON did start out even more bug infested than an official Bethesda game, but I'm pretty certain the devs also care more about fixing them than Bethesda would.
Much needed video. Hopefully more people realize and things improve or at least the working conditions of the staff making the games. Keep up the good work.
I finally (final-Lee) understand the Bruce Lee image macro!!!
I don't know who the panda at the is, but they always bring me joy. The god for the jimquisition team
Thank you! 💜🐼Z
This Week's Best Lee: In-Hair-Ent-Lee
Fair to point out the thing everyone forgets about Witcher 3. It had a LOT of bugs and issues early on but they got fixed relatively fast. At least in comparison to literally anything Bethesda makes. Skyrim for example to this day has bugs that have not been officially fixed because the people who made it are incompetent.
But fixing bugs is haaard and doesn't make Hot Toddy another million bucks like the umpteenth re-release with a new splatter of paint on it.
Okay, the Lee jokes are becoming my favourite part of the show.
That bit about the Krypton Factor dialogue made me burst out laughing because there is genuinely an extremely simple solution. In the Creation Kit, you can set conditions for dialogue, including completion of quests and world events, meaning that more than likely they just fucking forgot to set the right condition for the dialogue to appear/disappear
In many cases it comes off like they just don't care enough to consider it. Ideally they should have replaced it altogether with a new line, but they didn't bother recording any greetings about the player having completed it. The entire point is to add new greeting lines about things the player has accomplished, after all, and that's supposed to be a major accomplishment. Big enough that they hold a celebration in your honor.
Yer didn't mod it out, Sterling! Seriously though, I've played Bethesda games since Arena - spent thousands of hours in them and modded them heavily - but I cannot get into their modern-day releases any more. There was a charm to their games, especially in the world building, even up to Fallout 4, that just evaporated along the way. Now it seems all that is left are bugs, drudgery and the same procedure as every year from a company that - for example - used to ship Morrowind with its own construction set (developer tools) included on a separate CD.
Didn't expect a nod to Of Orcs And Men! I loved that game, I found it so compelling that I couldn't stop playing it until I was finished.
I never get tired of Zilla finding more ways to work -ly into Bruce Lee jokes.
I was once one of those people that was more forgiving of Bethesda because of how much fun I was having with their games
That time has past
Some things never change. Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall was famously unplayable and referred to as "Buggerfall". Bethesda released patches on floppy disks, it was novelty back then
Part of the problem is that the people with the money have no way in which they view a game that results in them claiming the fault is in management.
It either sells or doesnt, and they take all the credit with none of the blame
I saw the same animation for aiming your gun from fo4 in a trailer and knew it was fo4 in space.
Passed, and super glad I did. Guessing skyrim 2, but worse will be the same.
Even worse than that though. At least FO4 still had a hand crafted world to explore, the one thing Bethesda can claim they do well. Best part of Bethesda games is just wandering around exploring. Starfield has none of that. That exploration is replaced with procedurally generated planets that all just blend together after a while. It's all the worst parts of Bethesda games with none of the stuff people like. It's kind of impressive how wrong they got it lol Thankfully I got it as part of game pass so *shrugs*.
I got Starfield for $20 off on launch day (I wasn't going to buy it at first but with the deal I figured why not), and in the opening of the game they have the same "opening the Vault" moment with the big rolling door like in Fallout 4 when you come out of the mine that the tutorial is in. There were moments in the few hours I played where I kept having like liminal space flashes because the music kept making me think I was playing Fo4 or 76 because it had that same dramatic swell of the leaving the Vault soundtrack.
Between that and how lifeless and repetitive the procedurally generated worlds were (and the walking from loading screen to loading screen within 2 minutes of each other endlessly), I felt ripped off despite getting the game at a massive discount on release.
Please for the love of all that's holy, never stop doing the "Leek" bit.
Bethesda took one big step nearly two decades ago and then... well, hardware has improved
But Lord help me I'm still replaying Skyrim again
The difference between Jank and Broken is very much like the difference between a movie made by someone who tried but still failed due to limitations of either budget or talent but by god they had PASSION (any early Ed Wood movie) and cynical, intentionally cheesy "oh look at us aren't we clever for making a silly bad movie now watch me wink at the camera for 90 minutes" slop (Sharknado or it's 5 million sequels/imitators).
Bethesda also largely depends on the modding community to pick up the slack on their games, fixing bugs and repairing broken/incomplete quests/adding in stuff that should have been there in the first place. Mods are why I played Skyrim for literally a decade (and sometimes I still miss my dear friend Inigo) but a game shouldn't HAVE to have a robust mod community to be playable in the first place.
That'll teach me to comment before the video's over, you cover the mods.
I'm glad Dead Island is mentioned. Those games are full of jank and bugs bit still can be pretty fun and you for the most part, thise bugs don't break the gamr to the point of making it unplayable.
Chun-Li headbutts the screen at 12:33.
I enjoyed the bear dance. I enjoyed it A LOT! More bear dancing please.
Maybe have 4 or so bear heads in rotation for when Zilla(?) dances. I like when there is at least a semblance of variety.
Brynjolf in Skyrim is one of, if not the most annoying NPC, that isn't Preston Garvy.
You can rock up to Riften in the heaviest, most shiny, silver paladin armor you can find, and this idiot thinks, "master criminal".
At least in Oblivion you had to go out of your way to have an infamous reputation instead of some braindead NPC simply assuming you're some kind of crook.
Skyrim had no shortage of obnoxious NPC who were worst. Here's 5 off the top of my head:
1. That obnoxious female member of The Companions who mouths off to you even when your leader.
2. Maven BlarBriar, who not only is nasty to you despite being her literal messiah who is running two of the organizations keeping her in power, *but is also Essential for some reason, so you can't kill her despite being evil.*
3. Waaay too many npc brats, who you also can't off, in vanilla game anyways. (Thank you, based mods.)
4. *THE GUARDS. ALL OF THEM.*
5. Belethor: Snaps at the Dragonborn for asking "What brings a Breton to Skyrim", *even if the Dragonborn just saved the planet and is a Breton themselves.*
Notable disqualifications:
Nazeem: Disqualified for being intentionally, hilariously douchey. (And quite killable.)
Screaming prophet guy in Whiterun: Killable, but Whitrrun just isn't the same without him.
@@BuckyDStickman The freaking guards.
If I hear that arrow in the knee line one more time, I may start a riot.
Piranha Bytes studios known for the Gothic series, Risen series and recently Elex series comes to mind when I think of a company that dances on a razor thin line between "charmingly janky" versus unacceptably broken. Their designs back in the day were charmingly janky but in 2024 their games are just busted some by design and others by budget constraints. But even pointing out those reasons does not give them a free pass on a sub par product 🤷🏾
Fate didn't give them a pass : they're gone now
The problem I have with Bethesda is when you compare it to say CDPR. Cyberpunk was broken now it's amazing. Star field will still be broken for all time just like Skyrim, how many releases with all the same bugs have been released!,?
I think this is one of the sharpest delineations between Bethesda and other companies. Bethesda seems to no longer understand the code they are working with. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the same bugs and issues reoccur from one game to the next. Or at the very least, games would improve over time with patching. Instead, they seem to just fiddle with numbers to try and fix things, without addressing the actual core problems that keep causing things like this to happen.
To be fair, they did actually fix up a lot of the issues with Fallout 76. But they also had incentive to do so, with its live service model and it not really allowing modders to fix it for them. Meanwhile they seem to be ok with the state Starfield is currently in.
@@-tera-3345 You are right, they did eventually fix FO76. But with how much of a trainwreck that game started as, and how long it took them to fix it, it kind of highlights how much they've been skating by on the work of modders. Somebody in management didn't want to spend one more minute than was strictly necessary to get their minimum viable product out the door, and they weren't going to add time to the schedule to fix some "trivial" legacy bugs that players have been ignoring for decades.
Except they couldn't be ignored anymore, because you couldn't rotate your saves and roll back to a previous one, or use the console to fix a broken/missed flag, or install a mod that cleans up the scripting engine and fixes most bugs with quests and dialogues. The MMO format cut off every workaround their fans had been using since at least Morrowind and forced them to confront their real problems.
@@nonyabidness8676 Yeah, like I said, they really didn't have any choice BUT to fix 76. And even then, they kind of did the minimum required to make it playable. It wasn't a Cyberpunk style comeback. (Of course, Cyberpunk's comeback was greatly assisted by a super-popular anime series and a big patch designed to release alongside it. Which the amazon series could have been for 76, but instead of doing anything with that Bethesda just broke all the mods for Fallout 4.)
Meanwhile for Starfield, they apparently care so little about fixing things up that there are paid DLC creation club weapons that are apparently still nonfunctional even half a year after being put up.
@@-tera-3345 Sorry, I don't want you to think I'm trying to disagree with you. I just had a little extra pent-up vitriol towards FO76 and Bethesda, and thought I'd commiserate with you for a moment by going for another dunk on them.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said people were and are willing to put up with jank when a game is trying something that hasn't been done so much before, trying new mechanics and gameplay styles and systems.
I have no doubt that under the hood there have been some innovations with Starfield, but on the whole, the game is every other Bethesda sandbox before it with a different coat of paint. The game is actually probably less buggy than ones before it, but people gravitate towards blaming bugs for the game being unpolished when really, the problem isn't the bugs, the problem is that the whole game is incredibly uninteresting.
Gamers in general are growing older and have less and less time and patience, so we really aren't interested in wandering around and making our own fun. At this point, other games have perfected that model to a mirror shine and we would play them if we wanted something like that (See: Minecraft/No Mans Sky).
We're done dicking around, let's DO SOMETHING!
Very astute video, as ever !
Also the "Frank-Lee" card made me piss myself in laughter so I'm sending y'all the laundry bill
Not just Oblivion.
Morrowind.
IIRC ES III in like 2003 was the first game to use the Dev Engine that Bethesda have been using for every game over the past 20-25 years now. While everything looks prettier, and sounds better (even if not a huge amount, release to release) the mechanics have all been the same and had all the same game breaking spawn glitches where key NPCs can spawn under the world, or outside the world and die, or wander the map because pathing is fucked and/or wander in to an end-game encounter and die in a fight, or find some exception in the code that regularly crashes the game if not occasionally corrupting a save file.
Fallout 3 was my first experience with modern Bethesda. Fallout NV was my last. Good games, but Fallout 3 felt like it had content cut and didn't have quite enough understanding of the world. But the bugs in those games, and the fact that BethSoft never made strides toward fixing the mechanics the game was built on that were unacceptable... welp fuck them, I'm out.
Yes and no. Morrowind used netImmerse, which was an earlier iteration of Gamebryo (used in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and NV), which Bethesda would then fork into Creation for Skyrim, so it's the same engine in the same sense that Goldsrc is Quake, but there have changes over the years, including, yes, to basic mechanics, like Oblivion's direct support for NPC schedules and needs (which in turn allowed things like making NPCs eat poisoned food).
9:17 a Casanova Frankenstein reference?! Thank God for you.
The Sinking City never broke a quest on me. Every ES and FO game has.
Larian made an objectively more complex game through the middle of a pandemic and by and large there have been few game breaking bugs and the ones that are found, are rapidly addressed.
19:09 Funnily, what you said about Bethesda there also fits with 343 Industries as well before they rebranded themselves as Halo Industries.
Your diverse and creative use of the many different types of Lees is much appreciated.
This week's episode of Stephquisition brought to you by the Tenacious D song, Lee.
Been saying exactly this for years! Bethesda has such a weird cult following that it borders on being a literal cult.
Think of it this way: Sonic Team released one broken-ass game (you know what one I'm talking about) nearly _20 years ago_ and it has _never_ lived it down, and that game _still_ isn't as buggy as Oblivion - which released the same year - or Skyrim - which released five years _later._
Would you be so kind as to not use flashing imagery like at 17:57 please? It caught me by surprise and hurt
I apologize and will be more vigilant going forward, thank you for this feedback.
7/10
Not enough Bruce Lee
I dislike how Bethesda both makes unique games that fulfill my favorite niche, but also lower the bar with every new game they produce :(
It really baffles me when people are unable to take criticism of a game they like without getting defensive. BOTW is one of my favorite games of all time, and my favorite in that series even going back to the NES. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the 7/10 score. Hell I have issues with the game myself even though I still love it.
2 things:
1) The Barth reference was A1
2) I'm disappointed you didn't do your little music video about bethesda
Oh my god the “putting a bucket on the NPC’s head so you can steal from them bit” is my favorite part about Skyrim.
Wow youtube, giving me a notification for this video. Finally. Lol
Detective Comics once put out the Super Dictionary
Someday Zilla's gonna show us his extra thick Bruce Lee Dictionary
Hey, so,
I recently got recommended a response video by what appeared to be a group of clucking chickens, metaphorically speaking.
But in trying to criticize you, they kept pausing the video and interrupting your thought stream, while tearing into the halfs and chunks of your sentences they singled out... it became difficult to keep up with what they were talking about, and I couldnt see exactly what points they had against you by the end.
They claimed you were complaining to complain, among other things, but it seemed like they were just bashing just to bash!
It was dumb, and they lost the point of what they were trying to criticize with the way they presented those criticisms.
Anyways, I got recommended a video trying to dismantle your vids, it didnt work, and they seemed like they were fishing for something that wasnt there.
Cheers!
Being British, complaining to complain is a birth right and national pass time
But how many sandwiches does Ghost of Tsushima have? Owned.
We're onto the PS5 now, and the games are STILL just PS3 games with better graphics.
I have been playing Xenoblade Chronicles lately, is an openworld rpg 10 times the size of Skyrim, in the wii, like wat, and it doesn't have any bugs, i found one at hour 50
16:40 This is how I feel about pokemon games now.
Thank you for your consistent commentary Steph, and of course, the Bruce Lee jokes are immaculate 😄
It's a leek, but it-it sounds like leak. See, it's a clever play on words!
Love it, like for real made me cackle. The editing is always on point. ❤
Bethesda jank was once a problem of focusing on other things while working with limited tech. Now it's just formulated laziness.
Bethesda....
Bethesda never changes.
Oh, and they can't write a good quest to save their lives.
the "especially" gag was top-tier
Technomancer, and Elex1 are both filled with jank, but they're still worth-while games... but the jank from games like Redfall or Fallout4 or Starfield is just unacceptable because the studios have the budget to delay development and fix the games first
I believe that Fallout 4 was still accepted for what it was and the state it was in, simply because that game brought something new: base building. Yes, Skyrim had it as well in a dlc, but Fallout 4 brought it to another level. It was as junky as the rest of the game, but it was something new that brought additional stuff to the table. Plus, it's Fallout. Starfield on the other hand? Well... ship building is something that turned out to be great. But the rest? Typical Bethesda jank, and sadly you can skip ship building and be fine without it. So for many, Starfield = more of Bethesda. And not only can I blame people for having enough of it, I'm quite happy more people have opened their eyes to the obvious: games made by Bethesda are not up to modern standards.
Omg Barth. I went through such a n emotional rollercoaster. With heavy subject matter being discussed and then some great after school member berries seeing a single frame from “you can’t do that on tv”. Sterling is playing 4d chess while I’m here happy with my checkers
Don't forget the ever-present "But Fallout New Vegas was really buggy, and it was made by Obsidian."
Bethesda gave Obsidian fuck all to work with and a deadline that was so close you would think they were deliberately trying to sabotage the studio.
edit: Oh! You didn't forget.
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
-Scotty
Verymuch need "open" and "huge" to not be the same thing.
Give me an open "world" that's a city small enough that from the highest vantage I can trace along the entire perimeter with my eyes unobstructed, then jump down off that point and survive the ensuing fall damage.
Give me an open world where it's too tiny to justify fast travel as a feature.
Open world where I can walk from one end to the other in one play session, not run or bike or drive or fly, WALK from one end to the other end, LONG WAYS, in just one play session.
Give me an open world like Liberty City in GTA III or Kamurocho in almost every Yakuza / Like A Dragon game
Don't give me a sprawling empty expanse of nothing like the top half of the GTA V map or Hyrule in BotW or every Ubisoft game
Give me small and dense instead of huge and sparse!
@@Alice-May also please dont create artificial density by just dropping random crap everywhere (looking at you witcher 3)
This sounds like what you want is an imm. sim game not an open world game that's exactly what they do
@@AlphaladZXA ...what do you think I am saying, in your own words?
Smiling Withers gave me an aneurism