Paul Tassi: “I have seen bugs in games like Starfield and Spider-Man 2 weaponized as so-called evidence that Microsoft or Sony, Bethesda or Insomniac, has released an unfinished, technically poor game.”
"Big update coming really soon" has city maps and shipbuilding improvements
The update "should be" properly revealed this week
Oh stop ✋️. Starfield is a good game. But definitely could be better. Would like some quality of life changes. Although if past games are anything to go by. Bethesda is gonna rely on the community to update the game :(
Exactly Starfield is a good game and I can't wait until we get mod support. I'm looking forward to the new update and dlc.
Its not though. If it was more people would be playing it but its long forgotten. Its average at best.
@Crows90 You are looking at numbers, numbers dont tell the whole story. What about Palworlds 90+ percent drop off, or other games like that dropped lst year? People that think starfield is bad will find “evidence “ that it is, but its just confirmation bias my friend.
eh, bethesda completely killed the sense of exploration in starfield. In fallout and elder scrolls I could walk to a mission objective only to get knee deep on a random vault/cave 3 hours later because I randomly encounter other missions on the way, in starfield it's just travelling from city to objective to city to objective again...
would've been way better if they just make 3-4 planets but with big open area each full of contents.
@armageddon
There's no bias. I played the game. Beat it. There's nothing interesting throughout the entire game...half baked systems galore. Just boring content...tons of boring content.
I have more fun throwing bread and chairs at players in chivalry 2 than in the entire Starfield experience. That's not bias...I don't care about numbers. Nobody cares about Starfield. It was a failed attempt ..maybe they'll do better with the next one.
Maybe if they give it to obsidian we'll get something awesome like fallout New Vegas. Hopefully with less bugs.
My my, look at all these downvotes to people that actually like the game. Time to get a mind of your own people.
How is it not having a mind of your own to not like the game. I bought a whole series x for this and was pretty disappointed. No lore, exploration(half baked unlike their other games, and it felt like a step back), lack of lore, etc. As it stands I don't really like the game. I think it's a bad game and a huge step back. Step back is the problem as well. With that said I'll try it again after some of my complaints are fixed. Sadly though I doubt my lore issue(no books or pc's to actually read like their other games) will be fixed. Trust me I didn't spend series x money to say I didn't like the game.
This happens far too often on here.
"Whats that?!?, you like something that I don't? Here's a down-vote to you good sir for liking something..."
(Down-votes inbound)
Literally the point of down voting is to down vote takes you don't agree with. So if most people think the game is mediocre at best then yeah praising it will get down voted.
Have you seen the Steam engagement numbers? I mean don't you guys gauage a games sucess on engagement these days? This game was slated as THE game to be played for months and years.... Allow me to save you the click its low.
What if, and hear me out here, but what if... these people actually don't like the game? I know, I know, pretty profound.
Thank you Todd! Thank you Phil! Thank you team Xbox!! Thank you Bethesda! Thank you to my mom for giving birth to me so I could experience this masterpiece of a game!! This is the most amazing news I've ever heard!!! DLC to the best game ever made!!!
Let's gooooo!
!!!1!!
Cool so I bet the PS5 version with all the updates and the expansion etc releases early next year then. I'm not particularly fussed or looking to buy it given my time with the game on pc was very "meh" but importantly it will help prove a point to all those in denial claiming the reports about a starfield port were wrong.
I enjoyed the game. I wasnt into Skyrim that much but using a sci fi setting got me into this one
Video games -- particularly AAA video games -- have become too expensive to make. The intel from every fly on the wall in every investor's room is there is an increasing level of caution about spending hundreds of millions just to release a single video game. And you can't blame them. Many AAA game budgets mean that you can print hundreds of millions in revenue, and not even turn a profit. If you are an investor, quite frankly, there are many easier ways to make a buck. AAA games have always been expensive to make though, but when did we go from expensive, to too expensive? A decade ago, AAA games were still expensive to make, but fears of "sustainability" didn't keep every CEO up at night. Consumer expectations and demands no doubt play a role in this, but more and more games are also revealing obvious signs of resource mismanagement, evident by development teams and budgets spiraling out of control with sometimes nothing substantial to show for it.
It’s a question that I’ve pondered myself too. How are these developers spending this much money? Also, like the article stated, I cannot tell where it’s even going. Perfect example was used with Starfield and Spiderman 2.
They claim they have to increase prices due to development costs exploding. Okay? Well, I’m finding myself spending less and less money on games than before due to the quality actually going down. With a few recent exceptions games are getting worse.
I thought these newer consoles and game engines are easier-therefore-cheaper to make games than previous ones. What has happened? Was it over hiring after the pandemic, like other tech companies?
Costs quite a bit to maintain a team of 700+ employees. Which is what it takes to create something with state of the art fidelity and scope. Just imagine how many 3D artists you'd need to create the plethora of 3D objects in a AAA game. There's so much stuff and each asset takes time and effort.
That's atleast one of the things that didn't get easier. Also coding all the systems and creating all the character models with animations and everything. Animations alone is a huge thing because games are expected to be so detailed.
Back in the day a God of War type game was a 12 hour adventure with small levels, now it has to be this 40+ hours of stuff. Obviously it didn't have to be this way of AAA publishers hadn't convinced themselves that it's an arms race. Games probably didn't need to be this bloated and they probably didn't need to be cutting edge in fidelity.
Starfield’s animation and character models look like they are from Oblivion, a game that came out about 20 years ago. I cannot tell the difference between Spider-Man 2 and the first one at first glance. It’s been a joke in some YouTube channels.
Seven hundred people for 1 game? Make 7 games with 100 people instead. I think recent games have proven that it’s okay to have AA games, such as Hell Divers 2.
I guess I’m a bit jaded with the industry and where things are headed. Solutions seem obvious and easy, but maybe they aren’t.
@franwex
I'm not talking about Starfield.
And I'm not advocating for these behemoth productions. I think shorter development time and smaller teams would lead to better and more varied games. I want that, even if that means that we have to scale things down quite a bit.
Take something like The Last of Us 2. The amount of custom content is ridiculous if you break it down. It's no wonder they have huge teams of animators and modellers. And just to make things worse, each animated detail requires coding as well.
Just to add to animation work. It can take up to a week to make detailed walking animations. A lot of these tend to vary between character types. And then you need to do every other type of animation as well which is a task that scales quickly depending on how detailed the game is. And that's just a small aspect of AAA development. Each level might require several level designers who only do blockouts. Enviroment artists that setdress and lighting artists that work solely on lighting. Level needs scripting and testing. Each of these tasks takes a long ass time if the game is striving for realism.
Personally I prefer working on games where one level designer can do all aspects. But that's almost exclusively in indie and minor productions. It gets bloated fast.
Then there's Doki Doki Literature Club which took one person to make along with a character designer and background designer and it's absolutely brilliant.
Simply because they want you to believe it’s so expensive to develop a game that they must turn into other practices like releasing games unfinished, micro transactions and in the long run adopt the gaas model in all games..
I think game budgets are falsely inflated for tax purposes.
Just look at Godzilla Minus One. It cost less that 15 million.
If they include CEO salary and bonuses on every game and the CEO takes a 20 million dollar bonus every year for the 4 years of dev time, that's 80 million the company can claim went to "making" the game.
Yep and clogged with a bunch of corporate bs that has nothing to do with making good video games. Like diversity coordinators gender specialists. Like most jobs you have 20-30% of the workforce doing 80% of the work
I honestly think this is where a large portion of the budget goes, a significant portion to the CEO, then another large portion to the "Consultancy" group they hire. The rest can be explained by too much ambition in scope for their game, or being too inefficient with their resources available, then you have whatever is left for meaningful development.
Who is upvoting this shit? They are counting a CEOs $20 million dollars 4 times for tax purposes? You have zero comprehension of how taxes work.
Spiderman 2 is so weird because the budget is insane yet I don't see it when playing
Yeah it's decent, refined gameplay, graphics and the like from the first game but it's very short, there's apparently a lot cut from it thanks to the insight from the Insomniac leak and the story was just not that good compared to the first so where the hell did all that money go to.
Even fixes to suits, bugs to wrinkle out and a New Game Plus mode took months to come out
Put it this way, the New Game Plus took as long to come out as the first games very first story DLC
I don't see it either, you have a good portion of the game already made if you reuse as much as you can for the first game, and based on the developer interviews, there was a lot of stuff they didn't implement. They also hired that one, currently infamous consultancy group, despite all this, I can't see how they spent more than twice as much money making the sequel.
There's so much more at play now compared to 20 or 30 years ago.
Yes tools have matured they are easier than ever to use we are no longer limited and more universal however gamers demand more.
Making a game like banjo Kazooie vs GTA vi and as amazing as banjo was in its day its quite dated an unacceptable for a game released today to look and run like that.
Games now have complex weather systems that take months to program by all accounts GTA vi will feature a hurricane system unlike anything we've ever seen building that takes so much work months and months.
In addition development teams are now huge and that's where a lot of the costs stem from the manpower requirement of modern games can be in the hundreds and given the length of time they spend making these games add up to so much more to produce.
Art is also a huge are where pixel art gave way to working with polygons and varying levels of detail based on camera location we are now in the realm of HD assets where any slight imperfections stand out like a sore thing vs the PS2 era where artwork could be murky and it was fine this takes time.
Tldr the scope of modern games has gone nuts gamers demand everything be phenomenal and crafting this takes a long time by far bigger studios.
We can still rely on indies to makes smaller scope reasonably priced games like RoboCop rouge city but AAA studios seem reluctant to re scope from masterpieces to just fun games
In case of Spiderman license costs were also a big chunk. And then there is the marketing, that exploded over time and is mostly higher than actual development costs.
All lies and top industries owns by elite and lying to shareholders that these are the expensive and getting expensive.
I believe that it is due to this unsustainable rise in production costs that more and more companies are looking to AI tools to help ‘lower’ costs.
The use of AI is all about greed, even for companies that are sustainable, they would use AI because it saves them money.
@Nooderus
It is if they don't care about the employees who made them all those money in the first place. Replace them with AI just so the higher ups can get a bigger bonus.
I don't believe we'll get better or more complete games, the savings will just get pocketed by the wrong people, I wish it wouldn't, but I don't have a lot of faith in these bigger companies.
I genuinely believe it's mismanagement. Why are we seeing an influx of one person or games with a team no bigger than 10 create whole games with little to no budget? Unreal Engine 5 and I'm sure many other engines have plugins that have streamlined to many things you would have had to create and code back in the day.
For instance, before the cull, there were 3000 Devs working on COD alone. I'm a COD player but let's be real, there's been no innovation since 2019s MW. What exactly are those Devs doing? Even more so when so much of the new games are using recycled content
I also think higher up leads may simply demand more based on the IP they are working on. This could explain why COD costs so much to develop.
I've stated this in many other articles, but corporate greed, mismanagement and bloat and failing to understand the target audience and misaligned sales expectations as a result are the big reasons for these failures.
You'll see it in the way devs and publishers speak, every sequel needs to be "three times the size" of its predecessor, with hundreds of employees and over-indulgence. Wasted resources on the illusion of scale and scope. Misguided notions that if your budget balloons to three times that of the previous game you'll make three times the sales.
Compare the natural progression of games like Assassin's Creed 1 to 2 or Batman Arkham Asylum to City or Witcher 2 to Witcher 3 or God of War remake to Ragnarok and countless others. How is it that From Software continues to release successful games? Why don't we hear these excuses from Larian? These were games made by developers with a vision, passion and desire to improve their game in meaningful ways.
Then look at Suicide Squad Kill the Franchise and how it bloats well beyond its expected completion date and alienates its audience and middle fingers its purchasing power by wrapping a single player game in GAAS. Look at Starfield compared to Skyrim. Why couldn't Starfield have 5-10 carefully developed worlds with well written stories and focus? Why did it need all this bloat and excess that adds nothing to the quality of the game? How can No Man's Sky succeed where Starfield fails? Look at Mass Effect Andromeda compared to Mass Effect 3. Years of development and millions in cost to produce that mediocre fodder.
The narrative they want you to believe is that game budgets of triple A games are unsustainable, but it's typical corporate rubbish where they create the problem and then charge you more and dilute the quality of their games in favour of monetisation to solve it.
Indeed, here's a good example, Assassin's Creed 1 had a budget of 10 million dollars. Very reasonable. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag had a budget of 100 million dollars, within the same console generation! Even though BF was released on more systems, its still such a massive leap in production costs.
So you ask why they're making their games so big, well the reason is actually because of micro-trash-actions. Even single player games are featured with in-game stores packed with cosmetics, equipment upgrades, resources upgrades, or whatever other rubbish. The reason why games are so bloated and long, artificially extending the length of the game is because they know that the longer a person plays a game (which they refer to as "player engagement"), the more likely they are to eventually head into the micro-trash-action store and purchase something.
That is their goal, so they force the developers to make massive game maps, pack it boring filler, and then intentionally slow down your progress through experience points, skill points, and high level enemies that are over powered until you waste hours of your life grinding away to finally progress.
A person on reddit made a decent post about AC: Origins encouraging people towards spending more money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pc...
I've lost interest in these types of games, because the publisher has intentionally gone out of their way to make their game boring in order to try and make more money out of me. NOPE!
@Chocoburger That's exactly right, nail hit on head. But this phenomenon doesn't just apply to the gaming industry. Hollywood is just as guilty of self destructive behaviour, if you look at the massive fall of Disney in both Star Wars and Marvel.
Even their success stories are questionable. Deadpool 1 had a tiny budget of $58 million but was a massive success with a box office of $780 million. The corporate greed machine then says "more!" and the budget grows to $110 million, but what does the box office do? It doesn't suddenly double, because the audience certainly didn't double for this kind of movie. The box office is more or less the same. Is Deadpool 2 twice as good as the first? Arguably not, its just as good, or maybe a bit better. It's production values are certainly higher. I wonder what the budget of Deadpool x Wolverine will be.
Joker had a budget of $50 to $70 million, and was the greatest R rated success in history, and now its sequel has a budget of $200 million!!! Do they think the box office is going to quadruple?? Are movies unsustainable now?
My argument is that obviously we want bigger and better, but that doesn't mean an insane escalation in costs beyond what the product is reasonably expected to sell. There needs to be reasonable progression. That's the problem. Marvel took years and a number of movies to craft the success of Avengers. Compare that to what DC did from Man of Steel...
Back to games, you are exactly correct. They drown development resources and costs into building these monetisation models into the game, but you can't just tack them onto the game, you have to design reasons for them to exist and motivations for players to use them, which means bloat and excess and time wasting mechanics and in-game currencies and padding and all sorts of crap instead of a focused single player experience.
Greed from everyone involved including game reviewers, which are the greedy little goblins that help the lords screw over the gaming landscape.
With so many PS5 exclusives to choose from, it can be a little overwhelming to pick which one to play. This is especially true for a new PlayStation gamer who has yet to experience the wonder of PlayStation-exclusive storytelling. So, here's KnowTechie's take on the best PS5 exclusives in 2024 and beyond
PlayStation is killing it with the exclusives this year. Exclusive wise, what has xbox released this year?
They won't complain about Microsoft not releasing games here but put all their effort into saying that only first party counts. Games like Rebirth and Grandblue Relink don't count. Games published by Sony like Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin don't count because Sony don't own the studios.
It's some narrative building so for when Hellblade 2 come out they can say, seemingly without shame, that Microsoft is actually releasing first party games this year. And claim victory.🙃
Weird 1st party games didn't matter when Xbox had so little, but, now they're important again? Guess Ark 3, Stalker 2 don't count any more?
ARK 3 doesn't exist and it's just a timed exclusive. It's also a game that a majority of the ARK player base doesn't want as it's a massive deviation from what people like about the original game
Honestly to me it doesn’t matter what they say, they are just finally getting a chance to say all the things PS fan(boy)s were saying to them for the past few years. Let them get that, they deserve a “win” for a change.
The new narrative is that suddenly first party games matter again when awhile ago they didn’t, but that was because they were struggling with the same three games with the occasional fourth or fifth. That games should be everywhere on all platforms since that’s whats happening to theirs. The consoles don’t matter just the ability to play anywhere. Whatever Xbox is doing Sony will soon follow.
They’re not moving the goalpost anymore, but rather just moving the whole damn stadium.
Only a incel would care about who published what and who owns who.
If it’s not on the other consoles it’s an exclusive.
Killing what? Where are the 1st party games??
Stellar Blade and FF7 is what I’m seeing this year.. so shallow!!!!
Doesn't really matter as long as they're great games. Baffles me why people put an emphasis on 1st party. They're still games you can't play anywhere else this year
Andy
PS brand is my favorite because of their stellar first party software.. currently I see absolutely nothing to go crazy for..
Nonsense.
PS1 and PS2 was built on great third party exclusives like FF, MGS, GTA & Tekken.
Replies(2)Of course I love the games I’ve played from PS but I don’t believe we need to limit it to ‘exclusive’ to acknowledge that Xbox will be releasing some good games this year also. In that same vein, I believe that Xbox diehards shouldn’t limit their acknowledgment of good PS games to 1st party. There are plenty of good games to go around for everybody.
This is a Playstation article about Playstation games and your comment is about Xbox. Can't you just celebrate what PS has without dragging this into console war BS?
I don’t think Microsoft is releasing games exclusively on Xbox anymore. They have some timed exclusives that release on Xbox first.
Returnal, Astro Bot, and Ratchet made having it since day one worth it.
GT7 free updates and Spiderman 2 and others at 60fps have made this last year more than okay.
But yeah, it’s been dry lately. BG3 and third party have made great filler, but we ready for that SOCOM or Killzone announcement and some more 1st party goodness. Crossing fingers for Ghost of Tsushima 2 announcement this summer.
Didn’t know Helldivers was exclusive! Wtf is going on at Xbox that they can’t get these games, series s strikes again.
Sony owns the Helldivers IP. The first was a PS3/Vita/PC game. It was never an Xbox game that they could ‘get’ a decade ago. I’m not sure what the upset is with Xbox here
Looks like they are on par with the previous gens. Solid games all around. Interestingly enough, we can't say they released a bad game yet this gen. Unlike the Quiet Man dustup.
Replies(2)I actually do not mind if Marathon releases on multiple platforms . I just wish that Marathon has a dedicated single player campaign.
nope, its been straight up pathetic console fanboys purposely trying to break both games and then going seeee, look how buggy it is!!
Having played both, the only bug i can think of running into on starfield was floating doors in 50+ hrs lol spider man 2 crashed once on me in 13 hrs and thats literally it it for either of them.
so basically both games came out really good quality wise, but you know xbots and ponys gotta protect there box by dragging the other down.
forza is the one with the most egregious bug iv seen so far where after tuning your car from winning a race it then locks up so you have to close the game and then redo the race you already completed again, was happening to much so ive actually stopped playing it due that bug so until its patched im done and yet that gamw has gotten away scot free in terms of bug critisism, you know why, in the console war its not as big as saying starfield or spider man is broken of which neither is.
either way its been kinda pathetic to see the discourse around both games rather than providing genuine praise and critisism
Some of the Spiderman ones are literally people trying to break the game, going out of their way to find them.
I don’t know about Starfield, but I’ve seen videos of people using the bike on train tracks get hit by a train fly off and the character becomes stuck in a weird pose still trying to ride a non existent bike. But as I said they took the bike to a place it didn’t belong, outside it’s specified mission.
Another vid I saw was people using photo mode to rotate the characters into NPCs so that they merge into one and then taking photos posting them online and calling them glitches.
@forbes
Never ever compare the 2, NXT
I was pretty excited to play Spider-Man and didn't install the day one patch the first session I played (since it was 40gb). Without the day one patch the game was very buggy and looked rough in performance mode.
Not to knock the game for this, post patch it's a night and day difference and I haven't seen any bugs since, though this might explain a lot of the bugs people are seeing, and this opens the door to some disingenuous narrative about the state of the game.
Now Rift Apart on the other hand I played a year later and that was buggy lmao