MrBuddyLee posted:

By the way, a counterpoint to the Skyrim haters: I'm 40 hours in and only one freeze so far. I've seen a few small physics bugs like the spellbook that kept hopping an inch off the table and slamming down.

My PS3 froze 20 times in both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and actually died permanently while playing New Vegas (I looked into the laser-from-the-sky and the game hung and stopped reading forever.)

So maybe I've just been lucky with Skyrim on PS3, but it seems better. And it's definitely loads of fun. The menu systems and combat could use SOME improvement, but the world is huge and I'd rather have less detailed textures and more content in this game than vice-versa.

Millions posted:

Samurai Sanders posted:

I'm never really sure what Kotaku is trying to be. Are they a blog that reprints Japanese game news articles, or an all purpose game website, or what?

MUFFlNS posted:

This is how Bethesda gets away with constantly releasing buggy games that become literally unplayable.

40 OZ posted:

There will never be huge open ended games that don't have LOTS OF BUGS.

Samurai Sanders posted:

I'm never really sure what Kotaku is trying to be. Are they a blog that reprints Japanese game news articles, or an all purpose game website, or what?

Morpheus posted:

They're a pile of poo poo trying to get free games.

Policenaut posted:

Isn't that literally why Destructoid was created? Or was that for free E3 passes?

40 OZ posted:

There will never be huge open ended games that don't have LOTS OF BUGS. I feel really sorry you for if you buy these games and are just shocked every time you run into a glitch or a bug.

Ein Bear posted:

I hear this quite a lot and I've never really understood it. The stuff you do in Bethesda games all takes place in a big world, yeah, but what you're actually doing never seems all that complicated in a technical sense. You talk to a person, they give you a quest, then you go hit stuff with swords/magic. I don't understand why Bethesda get a free pass when they release a glitchy product just because the world's pretty big, when there are loads of games doing much more complicated stuff bug-free.

Samurai Sanders posted:

They tried to make a world where all the NPCs know what the current status of the world is and react accordingly. It obviously is full of flaws (often hilarious flaws which I think are part of its charm) but its better than not trying anything at all.

Admiral H. Curtiss posted:

Why does that excuse random game crashes or randomly falling through geometry?

Ein Bear posted:

I hear this quite a lot and I've never really understood it. The stuff you do in Bethesda games all takes place in a big world, yeah, but what you're actually doing never seems all that complicated in a technical sense. You talk to a person, they give you a quest, then you go hit stuff with swords/magic. I don't understand why Bethesda get a free pass when they release a glitchy product just because the world's pretty big, when there are loads of games doing much more complicated stuff bug-free.

vote_no posted:

Red Dead Redemption is a great example of that: it's huge, and I've never had it lock up my console or even seen the bugs everyone talks about for it. It's always been flawless.

Talkc posted:

You truly dont understand how much work it takes to make something like this do you? The sheer manhours it takes to design an open world game's environment alone is staggering, not to mention build a game into that environment and vice versa.

It takes thousands of man hours by hundreds of people, and millions of dollars, and a huge risk taken on the part of the developers and publishers. The more manpower you put behind a game, means the more money you put behind it. The more money put behind it the bigger the risk. Games like this dont have an unlimited amount of money or man power, and for something on the scale of skyrim there just isnt enough of either to go around to perfect it. There isnt enough money to pay enough testers, to have enough programmers and designers on staff with enough hours to address the myriad thousands of issues that pop up in a game like this.

Id also like to see which games are more complex than this. I can think of a scant few. Like Red Dead Redemption or GTA IV. You have everything from animation, to collision, to enviroment detail, to weather simulation, to physics, to object and npc location indexes, to game balancing, to i cant think of all the loving things that go into a game like this.

Why do people forgive its bugs and poo poo? Because there is so much sheer content and so much variety in what you can do and how you can approach things that there really is nothing like it. There are very few games that compare to it in scale, graphical fidelity ( on such a scale ), and the sheer amount of content.

Thats why people forgive its bugs.

I dont get how that equals sucking Bethesda's cock, when games like Modern Warfare 3 ( Which recieves the kind of blind "cock sucking" praise for what is essentially a MUCH MUCH simpler game ) are pumped out year by year with far fewer improvements or differences in how the game works.

TL:DR

Apparently to some people liking Skyrim despite its bugs = Sucking Bethesda's Cock. Yet Modern Warfare continues to get rave reviews and millions and millions of sales.

Yodzilla posted:

I'll gladly drive to Maryland and start gobbling all the knobs in sight if it gets me more games like Skyrim.

Crows Turn Off posted:

It does NOT excuse serious bugs, but I do understand why open world games have more of them. Something like the save file getting so big it freezes and crashes your game, though, that's just inexcusable and shoddy.

Ein Bear posted:

Eh, I never said that liking Skyrim despite it's bugs was sucking Bethesda's cock. I've been plaing the game, and am enjoying it, but I don't think they should be getting all this massive critical praise and never getting called on the faults. Oblivion had similar problems, but got 10/10 reviews, won GOTY, and people were saying stuff like "Well it's a really big game so I guess it's bound to have bugs". Then the same thing happened with Fallout 3. And then again with New Vegas. Now with Skyrim coming out, it reaches the point where you start to wonder if it's a case of Bethesda being unable to release these things without so many technical flaws, or if they simply know they can get away with it since they'll be excused anyway. The actual engine running Skyrim is clearly based on similar code to that of Fallout and Oblivion, and the game itself isn't vastly different to those two either. By now you'd think they'd have a pretty good grasp on how to make these things, not releasing something which still has the exact same problems. The big save file = stutter thing is a great example, it was a recorded problem in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, and yet here it is again.

40 OZ posted:

Oh come on.

I hated Oblivion more than anyone alive but you just cannot make games this big and open that don't have a billion bugs and glitches.

There will never be huge open ended games that don't have LOTS OF BUGS. I feel really sorry you for if you buy these games and are just shocked every time you run into a glitch or a bug.

Think for 2 minutes of all the poo poo you could do in the game that they have to program around.

I said come in! posted:

It's really frustrating to see a bunch of rear end in a top hat pricks like Kotaku come along and become so popular. While people like SamBishop have been doing this writing about gaming thing for longer then every single staff member at Kotaku has, combined, and only has a tiny, unknown website to show for it. It really shows the issues with gaming journalism; if you're not writing about Halo being better than Call of Duty, or boobies, then your site won't go anywhere.

Flayer posted:

The problem with games journalism is that it soley covers a particular commercial field, and as such games journalists are particularly vulnerable to the commercial interest they are covering. If a certain games site says things about a game that a distributor doesn't like that distributor can withold review copies and so forth of games to that game site and directly impact their business.

MUFFlNS posted:

Skyrim though? I mean, did they even playtest it? The game locks up once the save file gets too big. That is inexcuseable and downright pathetic, especially when you take into account the fact that their previous games had the exact same problem. This isn't something you excuse with "Oh it's because it's a big game" at all, Bethesda are just incompetant and lazy.

Megasabin posted:

Sorry Sam, but you can't just brush the problem off by claiming all bad journalism suddenly doesn't count as journalism anymore. That attitude is just as , and also demonstrates you are having some serious denial about the state of your field in this industry. Every professional field has low quality practitioners, but those members are still part of the profession (much to the dismay of their colleagues). Kotaku has it's own writers/reporters that investigate, report on events in the gaming industry, and would definitely consider their website gaming "journalism", no matter how bad a name they are giving the profession.

I do want to apologize for my statement, because I didn't mean to offend you. Unfortunately gaming journalism is such a small field, and the majority of it is flooded with poor quality stuff, that it becomes easy to make sweeping statements about the field in general. I was exaggerating with my statement and I don't actually wish all of gaming journalism disappears, since there is some great stuff out there if you look for it, but I won't lie when I say I wish 80% of it did.

SamBishop posted:

The games industry is probably one of the easiest to break into, and because there's such a dearth of what I'd call proper journalism, it would be possible to really stand out as having quality coverage.

I said come in! posted:

You're the only one i've heard of to say this. What do you mean, exactly? If anything, it seems like it's one of the hardest. You got so many people wanting to get into anything video game related as a career and attempt to make a living off of it. I know websites like IGN.com, whenever they have openings for writing positions, they get over 25,000 applications.

SamBishop posted:

I mean anyone can whip up a web site, start contacting the PR departments of companies to get press releases, cover news there for a bit to build up contacts, then start actually doing investigative work if that's the gripe with the coverage. I'm not saying it's easy to get hired at one of the big places, but you can absolutely cover the industry, go to events and, yes, eventually get product from publishers by simply starting a site/business (not a blog; covering other people's news isn't really addressing the issue many have with the way the press covers the industry). It'll take time, won't make you bupkis and may not be seen by many, but if you're looking for fame and fortune from writing about video games, you're probably not in it for the quality of your coverage.

SamBishop posted:

It's really not a smug thing to say that absolutely nothing on Kotaku should be taken as any form of journalism based on their output. They literally became popular by taking other people's stories and writing a few words about them, usually in such a way that they'd get hits. Their controversial bullshit may get them games, but it doesn't legitimize what they do.

I guess if you consider stuff in The National Enquirer or Star or something journalism, then I can understand seeing most of the stuff in the games industry as journalism, but I most definitely don't. Maybe that's where the differences in how we classify the stuff lies, but I would point, again, to Gamasutra as an example of how games coverage can fit with something like a Time or Newsweek or some other "proper" journalism publication (and they cover games too, though obviously only on the odd occasion).

In any event, I didn't take any offense or anything, I was just saying I wouldn't like to be without a job; I definitely get to do what I love for a living -- whatever we end up calling that. I just hate hearing people lumping the really bad examples of hit mongering as anything investigative or even resembling impartial reporting, and most would just rather roll their eyes and berate it rather than trying to get in and do it themselves. The games industry is probably one of the easiest to break into, and because there's such a dearth of what I'd call proper journalism, it would be possible to really stand out as having quality coverage.

It just wouldn't get any traffic.

In any event, I didn't mean to derail the thread. How about all them games, eh? Sure was nice of the whole industry to just go ahead and release all their big stuff in the span of a couple weeks!

Megasabin posted:

I don't really read Kotaku much, but I was under the impression they also wrote some of their own stuff? If they truly only comment on what other people write, then yes, I'm inclined to agree with you that they are in fact not journalists at all. Perhaps I should not have used the world journalism then, and just said "writing about games". I also wouldn't want you out of a job, since judging by your posts here you seem like a reasonable person who is capable of writing well. I do however still wish there was a large purge of people who write about games, since it's so hard to find the few good sources in the sea of garbage.

I don't really think we're that off topic, unless there is a separate games journalism thread, which would probably just devolve into people posting screenshots of horrible kotaku articles like the one above.

SamBishop posted:

... Kotaku? I don't even know, and I feel bad ripping on just one site, so I'll shaddap.

I said come in! posted:

For what it's worth SamBishop, I think most goons are in agreement that Kotaku is a terrible website. SA forums are the only place I really need for gaming.