This game had all kinda of problems, but problem #1 was releasing on epic games with 0 hype. At least with a wider release they could have secured a decent launch.
It wasn’t published by some rogue and inexperienced entity. Accepting Epic’s offer meant that it beat the projected sales figures. The game also ended up being a top seller on Epic, possibly adding to that revenue. On Steam, a negative score would likely bury the game, though we can only speculate.
Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it’s going to bomb, so they took Epic’s money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.
It’s a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.
The issue with SR Reboot is that they did try to modernize the humor, they went and dove head first to new style of humor and it clearly didn’t work for them.
We have to remember that it’s the people who make the games, not the companies. I expect the talent will find work somewhere else, and hopefully create something great once again.
You don’t understand, it’s not the companies that make everything suck, it’s the management, modern software management crushes the beauty out of both the work and the design, and passionate visionaries are displaced for marketing droids with PowerPoint slides about dlc monetization through nfts.
Embracer is currently the one killing half the companies they acquired a year ago. If embracer is even around a year from now it’s far more likely that they are selling ips rather than developing them
Yes indeed, fuck saints row, this is the real loss.
Ah well. We’ll always have the fact that the freespace community was the first community which got pissed of by the great Derek whatshisname. That was fun.
I enjoyed the new game, just as I did the previous titles.
They made a mistake of setting, placing it in a sparse desert city didn’t do much for visual spectacle, but imho it wasn’t anything close to the irredeemable piece of shit people made it out to be.
I honestly think gamer’s expectations are too high in general these days, and treating an enjoyable game like crap because they didn’t meet unrealistic expectations will just lead to more safely profitable regurgitated remasters and microtransaction games as the industry is drained of any passion or risk tolerance, just as what happened to hollywood abandoning stories in favor of profit formulas and known IPs.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect progress from a sequel. I think it’s even more reasonable to expect progress from a reboot.
The whole point of rebooting something is to be able to bring fresh ideas into the system, which can include stories or mechanics. At the very least a sequel should have some kind of feature parity with the first game, otherwise you’ve essentially just made a shitty DLC as the next iteration by dropping features.
Saint’s Row 2 had a great amount of content, and even when we were playing over LAN with Hamachi, the game was somehow smart enough to figure out what stupid shit we were getting up to, and it prompted us to play “death tag”. We didn’t even know it was a built in feature in the game, we had just been running around killing each other in various funny ways until the game said “hey, we have a structured way you can do this” and we had a blast.
Saint’s Row 3 expanded on everything SR2 had set up. It drove the story forward, the engine was much better than the original PS2 iteration and there were just as many minigames if not more.
Saint’s Row 4 took everything to the extreme though, which is unfortunate because that’s really where the death starts happening. When they literally blew up the planet as a plot point and turned it into a Matrix parody it lost a ton of focus and grounding that made it enjoyable long-term.
I think they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2. It’s fun fooling around and being wacky in a game that has realism to it but when the game is built solely around being wacky it’s just boring.
I don’t agree at all. SR3 and 4 were peak for me. I don’t want a game that feels like it lives in the shadow of GTA. SR4 really had it’s own personality and it was a ton of fun for me.
SR3 was the top game for me. SR4 was a bit too much, but SR3 felt like it hit that sweet spot of goofiness, insanity, and just enough realism for me to keep me invested in the world
SR 1 and 2 were the best because they were like GTA, I don’t consider it a bad thing. 3 and 4 were a bit boring for me because Steelport was one of the dullest cities I’ve ever seen in a game.
Another victim of arrogance perhaps. Before the game even released fans told them that’s not what they want and they said “fuck you, you don’t understand shit” and proceeded to make one of the most uninteresting video games on the planet.
…no? It honestly has more to do with ego than anything, and I say that as somebody who currently works in the game industry. It’s shocking how out of touch some developers can be when it comes to delivering a product that the players want, especially when those developers hold actual positions of power over the rest of the team (directing and managerial roles).
Volition also did this with Red Faction: Armageddon. They took everything that was good about Guerrilla, threw all of it in the bin and then made Armageddon.
So Volition have form for not doing what the players want.
If Embracer Group wasn’t frantically trying to right the ship, Volition would’ve been left alone. This is on the gratuitously large capitalist conglomerate that’s bought up every studio it could.
I lasted a little longer but not much. It really was bad. I reinstalled it after their giant patch that was supposed to fix it and gave it a second chance: the shooting was better but the main issues with everything else were still there.
It was like they asked ChatGPT to create a Saints game.
User
Create the plot for a game similar to the first four Saints Row games
ChatGPT
Title: “City Unleashed”
Plot:
In the sprawling metropolis of Havencross, crime syndicates have taken control, leaving the city in chaos. You play as a street-smart vigilante who rises to power in order to reclaim the city from the clutches of these criminal organizations. As you build your own crew and establish dominance, you’ll face off against rival gangs, corrupt officials, and powerful crime lords.
Starting as a small-time crook with a personal vendetta, you’ll complete daring heists, engage in intense street races, and execute audacious stunts to earn respect and resources. Your actions catch the attention of an underground resistance that seeks to topple the syndicates. They offer you support, guidance, and a chance to reshape Havencross.
The game offers an open-world environment, allowing you to explore the sprawling city, engage in a variety of activities, and make choices that influence the narrative. Customization plays a significant role, not only in terms of your character’s appearance but also in building your gang’s identity, from outfits to vehicles to hideouts.
Throughout the game, you’ll encounter memorable characters, each with their own motivations and backstories. As you forge alliances and rivalries, the balance of power in the city shifts dynamically. The story takes unexpected turns as you uncover the dark secrets behind the syndicates’ rise to power and their connections to influential figures in the city.
With a blend of over-the-top action, humor, and engaging storytelling, “City Unleashed” captures the essence of the first four Saints Row games, delivering a high-octane, open-world experience filled with outrageous missions, explosive combat, and a dynamic environment that reacts to your choices.
I’ll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.
The problem is in the details. They failed to:
Create other games worth mention.
Have memorable characters.
Implement motivating vendettas or any personal motivation.
Make the city feel alive, which invalidates the whole open-world environment (a criticism I’d level against CP2077 too, it feels way too sterile).
Have any meaningful way of influencing your relationship with characters or forces.
Have a story worth mentioning.
In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that’s where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.
SR2 was the peak of the series for me. I played 3 and 4 but they already felt like they were being constrained by budget even back then. They were mostly copy pasted mini games with far fewer missions.
Yeah there’s always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn’t even a GTA fan in the first place.
But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.
3 struck the perfect balance for me, it was like playing an action movie that didn’t take itself too seriously while still maintaining a tenuous grasp on reality. 4 fully jumped the shark for me and was hard to enjoy.
I didn’t even bother buying it. The trailers looked so bad and then you’d have to wait for a Steam release. No thanks. When the first gameplay videos dropped it looked like absolute trash and really just rehashed all the repetitive content from the previous games, which was plentifully criticized to be a huge weakpoint of them already, with a lame story, idiotic characters and a boring map on top of it. It was just a rehash of all the bad, but I guess that’s all they could pull off.
For me, the big “Nope” was how despite being a modern game and running like arse (and not looking all that well), the streets are mostly empty. I mean at the very least I would assume they could re-implement SR3 one-to-one in more … opulent?
But instead it looks and feels worse than the older games, even in a direct comparison, because everything is dead and empty and still stutters like crazy.
From Wikipedia:
In November 2022, Embracer Group stated that Saints Row “did not meet the full expectations and left the fanbase partially polarized”, but financially “performed in line with management expectations in the quarter.”
The piles of money were as high as we expected, but really we wanted them to be higher
Sales are typically not going to be followed up by refunds in a meaningful way, however poor public reception will hurt the sales of the next iteration.
The sales were ok but the consensus is that the game is shit, or ” the udders are dry, time to slaughter the cow"
More like "We don’t want to say it was only that game… "
Though actually with it a year later, I would say their follow up effort wasn’t amazing them… which makes more sense. They probably were going through Pre-prod on “saints row too” or what ever it was going to be. And Embracer didn’t want to continue.
Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.
There was this guy working on the patch and he was basically the only person in Volition that cared about it, guy got cancer and instead of spending his last days with his family he worked on it until he died. His dying wish was to get this patch out. Soon after they diverted all their resources to that garbage game, it failed and now we’re here.
Both insulting to his memory and for everyone waiting for this patch for damn years. Fuck Volition and fuck Embracer.
Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.
Which would be kinda fucking wild considering it was literally someone’s dying wish and something they passionately worked on even while they were dying… That project not coming to fruition due to financial quarter this, franchise expectations… that would be absolutely ghoulish.
Who died exactly? I ask because I work less than a block From the Volition offices. I’ve tattooed a few employees their, but there was a guy I would see walking around in a sort of Cowboy hat that I think worked there and I havent seen him in what feels like a year or two.
Years ago when I played SR2 on PC I needed to download a reverse speed hack (a slow hack) because my processor clock speed was faster than the console the game was designed for. Would that patch have fixed that? If so, very sad indeed.
Bethesda games up to the Xbox 360 era were mostly processor-bound prior to community patches.
Oblivion on the 360 would actually secretly reboot your console during long loading screens to clear the cache when it started running out of RAM due to memory leaks. Bethesda is hilarious.
Let’s not forget that in fallout fucking 76 speed was tied to framerate on launch. An online game. With a beefy compy and graphics set to low, you could look at the ground and absolutely zoom across the wasteland.
Mind you, that error was already patched in fallout 4, so they literally copy pasted an old version of 4 to base 76 off of. Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.
That game was so fucked I actually blocked out my memories of playing it. Now all I remember is going to the office to get fans to get screws to repair my shit because I was trying to upgrade something and my guns broke because weapon degradation is fucking bullshit.
I heard that Bethesda was being told by Microsoft to adapt the Idtech engine that runs Doom and Id games to be moddable, and (if you can believe this) media are reporting that it’s the “least buggy Bethesda game on launch to date” so maybe something did happen. Or they’re lying.
Talking about starfield? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised that they’re being forced to shape up, and the reviews seem pretty good so far. I’m still gonna give it a few months before looking at it seriously though. I tend to wait on all triple A games just because how launches traditionally go (baldurs gate being an exception, girlfriend was too hype to wait).
I thought that was Morrowind on the OG Xbox? Or did they do that on both? Still a hilarious fix, I remember Morrowind taking so long to load and thought it was due to the cheese collection I was building up in Balmora.
I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.
Dark Souls 1 had the stupid 30 fps cap and rendered at 720p and then stretched it. But otherwise it was very stable and bug free, totally playable from beginning to end. Dark Souls 2, Scholar, 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring were all fantastic ports, rock solid 60 fps, all the settings that you could ask for, and ran great. If I was picking on a Japanese dev that did shitty ports, wouldn’t really have picked From.
The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.
All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.
Apart from your first point, I think this just indicates that they hate m+kb users. There is a reason people say that people that use m+kb in a souls game are masochists!
I recall a few games where I’ve had to limit the processor speed.
The weirdest one was an old adventure point and click. It was either “The 11th Hour” or “The 7th Guest”. It had a puzzle where you need to beat the CPU in a board game.
At the time it was released, it was possible. On a modern PC, not so much. The more powerful your processor, the more skilled the CPU was in the board game. Made it impossible.
SR2 is unplayable without stuff like Gentlemen of the Row on modern machines. Fixes a bunch of baseline bugs on the port in addition to removing the processor-bound bullshit.
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They had absolutely 1 thing to do:
Remake Saints Row 2.
And they continued to ignore what everyone wanted.
I never played 1 or 2, but 2 is the one I wanted remastered and yeah, they couldn’t even manage to remake the one folks wanted huge facepalm
This game had all kinda of problems, but problem #1 was releasing on epic games with 0 hype. At least with a wider release they could have secured a decent launch.
It wasn’t published by some rogue and inexperienced entity. Accepting Epic’s offer meant that it beat the projected sales figures. The game also ended up being a top seller on Epic, possibly adding to that revenue. On Steam, a negative score would likely bury the game, though we can only speculate.
Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it’s going to bomb, so they took Epic’s money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.
It’s a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.
The issue with SR Reboot is that they did try to modernize the humor, they went and dove head first to new style of humor and it clearly didn’t work for them.
Never tell a joke, if you don’t think it’s funny.
Wise words
Epic was the least of the problems here.
SR2022 is free on PS+ next month and all the advice I’ve seen says “save your bandwidth and time”.
Raise a glass to a fallen comrade, and maybe play Red Faction Guerrilla again, but the Volition of old was gone a long time ago.
We have to remember that it’s the people who make the games, not the companies. I expect the talent will find work somewhere else, and hopefully create something great once again.
They won’t.
You don’t understand, it’s not the companies that make everything suck, it’s the management, modern software management crushes the beauty out of both the work and the design, and passionate visionaries are displaced for marketing droids with PowerPoint slides about dlc monetization through nfts.
Well fuck, it’s now 150% we ain’t getting Freespace3 anymore.
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Freespace 2 was such a great game.
I still want to know what lies past the second Knossos portal.
Volition dies.
Literally the only thought that goes through my head :(
Need to finish war in heaven, the difficulty spikes a few times.
If you haven’t, play the mod campaign Derelict. Unfortunately it’s the closest to FS3 that we’ll ever get, Blue Planet aside…
There’s a wing commander mod that’s megadope as well. FS2 is one of the few story games I can go through just again and again.
Embracer still owns all the IP. It may still happen if they think it’s financially viable!
Don’t give me hope…
I think Interplay still owns Freespace. They still exist, apparently.
Embracer is currently the one killing half the companies they acquired a year ago. If embracer is even around a year from now it’s far more likely that they are selling ips rather than developing them
Between this and it now becoming clear how limited the space exploration is in Starfield, it’s a bad day for space sim fans.
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Yes indeed, fuck saints row, this is the real loss.
Ah well. We’ll always have the fact that the freespace community was the first community which got pissed of by the great Derek whatshisname. That was fun.
And Fortunately we’ve hard light productions.
I think everyone was kinda expecting it but it’s still sad to see 😥
I enjoyed the new game, just as I did the previous titles.
They made a mistake of setting, placing it in a sparse desert city didn’t do much for visual spectacle, but imho it wasn’t anything close to the irredeemable piece of shit people made it out to be.
I honestly think gamer’s expectations are too high in general these days, and treating an enjoyable game like crap because they didn’t meet unrealistic expectations will just lead to more safely profitable regurgitated remasters and microtransaction games as the industry is drained of any passion or risk tolerance, just as what happened to hollywood abandoning stories in favor of profit formulas and known IPs.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect progress from a sequel. I think it’s even more reasonable to expect progress from a reboot.
The whole point of rebooting something is to be able to bring fresh ideas into the system, which can include stories or mechanics. At the very least a sequel should have some kind of feature parity with the first game, otherwise you’ve essentially just made a shitty DLC as the next iteration by dropping features.
Saint’s Row 2 had a great amount of content, and even when we were playing over LAN with Hamachi, the game was somehow smart enough to figure out what stupid shit we were getting up to, and it prompted us to play “death tag”. We didn’t even know it was a built in feature in the game, we had just been running around killing each other in various funny ways until the game said “hey, we have a structured way you can do this” and we had a blast.
Saint’s Row 3 expanded on everything SR2 had set up. It drove the story forward, the engine was much better than the original PS2 iteration and there were just as many minigames if not more.
Saint’s Row 4 took everything to the extreme though, which is unfortunate because that’s really where the death starts happening. When they literally blew up the planet as a plot point and turned it into a Matrix parody it lost a ton of focus and grounding that made it enjoyable long-term.
I think they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2. It’s fun fooling around and being wacky in a game that has realism to it but when the game is built solely around being wacky it’s just boring.
I don’t agree at all. SR3 and 4 were peak for me. I don’t want a game that feels like it lives in the shadow of GTA. SR4 really had it’s own personality and it was a ton of fun for me.
SR3 was the top game for me. SR4 was a bit too much, but SR3 felt like it hit that sweet spot of goofiness, insanity, and just enough realism for me to keep me invested in the world
And yet their successful games were SR3 and SR4, when the games could stand on their own instead of needing to tag along with GTA for publicity.
SR 1 and 2 were the best because they were like GTA, I don’t consider it a bad thing. 3 and 4 were a bit boring for me because Steelport was one of the dullest cities I’ve ever seen in a game.
30 year old studio. That’s quite sad. Another victim of hyper capitalism.
Another victim of arrogance perhaps. Before the game even released fans told them that’s not what they want and they said “fuck you, you don’t understand shit” and proceeded to make one of the most uninteresting video games on the planet.
So basically capitalism
Under the socialist utopia, every company would be able to make things nobody wants.
Such joy.
Ah yet another “I don’t understand socialism at all yet it’s the thing I obsess about most” stance.
It’s just a joke.
What, socialism or your statement about it?
Yeesh
…no? It honestly has more to do with ego than anything, and I say that as somebody who currently works in the game industry. It’s shocking how out of touch some developers can be when it comes to delivering a product that the players want, especially when those developers hold actual positions of power over the rest of the team (directing and managerial roles).
Volition also did this with Red Faction: Armageddon. They took everything that was good about Guerrilla, threw all of it in the bin and then made Armageddon.
So Volition have form for not doing what the players want.
If Embracer Group wasn’t frantically trying to right the ship, Volition would’ve been left alone. This is on the gratuitously large capitalist conglomerate that’s bought up every studio it could.
Damn hyper capitalism. THQ should have kept funneling money to a company that couldn’t make a game people wanted.
RIP to a company that made my favorite game series (SR2-4)
As someone who loved their older games, this sucks; but as someone who has played their newer games, this was expected.
The remake was so boring that I uninstalled the game before I even finished the first mission.
I lasted a little longer but not much. It really was bad. I reinstalled it after their giant patch that was supposed to fix it and gave it a second chance: the shooting was better but the main issues with everything else were still there.
It was like they asked ChatGPT to create a Saints game.
ChatGPT did way better.
I’ll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.
The problem is in the details. They failed to:
In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that’s where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.
SR2 was the peak of the series for me. I played 3 and 4 but they already felt like they were being constrained by budget even back then. They were mostly copy pasted mini games with far fewer missions.
Yeah there’s always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn’t even a GTA fan in the first place.
But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.
SR2 just felt like the crazy Vice City sequel that Rockstar refused to give me at the time.
San Andreas, GTA4 felt too serious. SR3 and 4 felt too silly, to the point of turning into Crackdown.
GTA5 felt back on track though, and that’s probably mostly down to Trevor. You can cause utter mayhem without breaking character.
3 struck the perfect balance for me, it was like playing an action movie that didn’t take itself too seriously while still maintaining a tenuous grasp on reality. 4 fully jumped the shark for me and was hard to enjoy.
I didn’t even bother buying it. The trailers looked so bad and then you’d have to wait for a Steam release. No thanks. When the first gameplay videos dropped it looked like absolute trash and really just rehashed all the repetitive content from the previous games, which was plentifully criticized to be a huge weakpoint of them already, with a lame story, idiotic characters and a boring map on top of it. It was just a rehash of all the bad, but I guess that’s all they could pull off.
For me, the big “Nope” was how despite being a modern game and running like arse (and not looking all that well), the streets are mostly empty. I mean at the very least I would assume they could re-implement SR3 one-to-one in more … opulent?
But instead it looks and feels worse than the older games, even in a direct comparison, because everything is dead and empty and still stutters like crazy.
It was so boring I deleted my OS before the opening cutscene finished.
It was so boring I tossed my tower out a window before I even purchased it.
It was so boring I rebooted the simulation before it was even announced. Unfortunately, things don’t seem to have gone any better this time around.
From Wikipedia: In November 2022, Embracer Group stated that Saints Row “did not meet the full expectations and left the fanbase partially polarized”, but financially “performed in line with management expectations in the quarter.”
The piles of money were as high as we expected, but really we wanted them to be higher
Sales are typically not going to be followed up by refunds in a meaningful way, however poor public reception will hurt the sales of the next iteration.
The sales were ok but the consensus is that the game is shit, or ” the udders are dry, time to slaughter the cow"
More like "We don’t want to say it was only that game… "
Though actually with it a year later, I would say their follow up effort wasn’t amazing them… which makes more sense. They probably were going through Pre-prod on “saints row too” or what ever it was going to be. And Embracer didn’t want to continue.
As Sterling likes to say (from memory, I’m paraphrasing) “Game publishers don’t want to make money, they want to make *all *the money”.
A profit is not enough anymore, got to aim for that infinite growth.
Red Faction: Guerrilla will always be my favourite game of theirs.
So many good memories in the multiplayer. 🥲
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That’s it! I couldn’t figure out why, a SR fan, had zero interest in their latest release.
It’s because that trailer was oozing with “fellow kids” energy.
Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.
There was this guy working on the patch and he was basically the only person in Volition that cared about it, guy got cancer and instead of spending his last days with his family he worked on it until he died. His dying wish was to get this patch out. Soon after they diverted all their resources to that garbage game, it failed and now we’re here.
Both insulting to his memory and for everyone waiting for this patch for damn years. Fuck Volition and fuck Embracer.
Which would be kinda fucking wild considering it was literally someone’s dying wish and something they passionately worked on even while they were dying… That project not coming to fruition due to financial quarter this, franchise expectations… that would be absolutely ghoulish.
Who died exactly? I ask because I work less than a block From the Volition offices. I’ve tattooed a few employees their, but there was a guy I would see walking around in a sort of Cowboy hat that I think worked there and I havent seen him in what feels like a year or two.
He was known as IdolNinja on the internet
https://www.pcgamer.com/saints-row-modder-and-volition-community-developer-mike-watson-aka-idolninja-has-died/
He passed away mid 2021 but had been convalescing for a while before that as far as I know
Years ago when I played SR2 on PC I needed to download a reverse speed hack (a slow hack) because my processor clock speed was faster than the console the game was designed for. Would that patch have fixed that? If so, very sad indeed.
And here I thought that tying game speed to CPU speed was a concept that died in the early 90s…
Bethesda games up to the Xbox 360 era were mostly processor-bound prior to community patches.
Oblivion on the 360 would actually secretly reboot your console during long loading screens to clear the cache when it started running out of RAM due to memory leaks. Bethesda is hilarious.
Let’s not forget that in fallout fucking 76 speed was tied to framerate on launch. An online game. With a beefy compy and graphics set to low, you could look at the ground and absolutely zoom across the wasteland.
Mind you, that error was already patched in fallout 4, so they literally copy pasted an old version of 4 to base 76 off of. Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.
Bold of you to assume anything wil ever change with their total lack of QA.
That game was so fucked I actually blocked out my memories of playing it. Now all I remember is going to the office to get fans to get screws to repair my shit because I was trying to upgrade something and my guns broke because weapon degradation is fucking bullshit.
I heard that Bethesda was being told by Microsoft to adapt the Idtech engine that runs Doom and Id games to be moddable, and (if you can believe this) media are reporting that it’s the “least buggy Bethesda game on launch to date” so maybe something did happen. Or they’re lying.
Talking about starfield? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised that they’re being forced to shape up, and the reviews seem pretty good so far. I’m still gonna give it a few months before looking at it seriously though. I tend to wait on all triple A games just because how launches traditionally go (baldurs gate being an exception, girlfriend was too hype to wait).
I play a lot of games on Gamepass so I am basically just renting it.
I thought that was Morrowind on the OG Xbox? Or did they do that on both? Still a hilarious fix, I remember Morrowind taking so long to load and thought it was due to the cheese collection I was building up in Balmora.
Pfft-- Japanese devs are still doing this stupid shit nowadays. It’s no wonder their in-house PC ports are usually hit or miss.
I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.
Dark Souls 1 had the stupid 30 fps cap and rendered at 720p and then stretched it. But otherwise it was very stable and bug free, totally playable from beginning to end. Dark Souls 2, Scholar, 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring were all fantastic ports, rock solid 60 fps, all the settings that you could ask for, and ran great. If I was picking on a Japanese dev that did shitty ports, wouldn’t really have picked From.
I mean just looking at Elden Ring here:
All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.
Apart from your first point, I think this just indicates that they hate m+kb users. There is a reason people say that people that use m+kb in a souls game are masochists!
Haven’t played any Japanese games recently?
Nope. It’s been years.
I recall a few games where I’ve had to limit the processor speed.
The weirdest one was an old adventure point and click. It was either “The 11th Hour” or “The 7th Guest”. It had a puzzle where you need to beat the CPU in a board game.
At the time it was released, it was possible. On a modern PC, not so much. The more powerful your processor, the more skilled the CPU was in the board game. Made it impossible.
SR2 is unplayable without stuff like Gentlemen of the Row on modern machines. Fixes a bunch of baseline bugs on the port in addition to removing the processor-bound bullshit.
No FreeSpace games?