I sometimes play GTA 5 (because I have over 100 million in that game, I have I don't give a fuck money) and they've released a new update. Nothing major just a few additions and changes.
Since the update however, there's been two bugs, one that could delete ANY personal vehicles and the current one that randomly removes insurance so if your vehicle is destroyed you lose it for good.
Between Rockstar with this, Activision not knowing when to just shut the fuck up and Fable looking like their character artists use downs syndrome patients as their models it seems all the talent has gone out of the western video game market, at least in a major studio sense.
So which ones do you think are the biggest fuck ups that you're surprised hasn't burned down their own studio by now?
Did your company delete boot.ini?
No?
Stfu.
Holy shit at this level of incompetence.
That's the most meme worthy of their mistakes, but walking-in-stations, which was their tech demo for the cancelled World of Darkness mmo, melted 1080's in the wild by trying to run at 700+ FPS, because they hadn't tested it with shaders & HDR turned off.
And they were proud of it.
WTF is wrong with these clowns?
LOL! I remember that :D Also, I shit on EVE Online, I don't care how many fanbois get mad at me, it's a pointless grindfest even by MMORPG standards. By the way, that's just the tip of CCPs' incompetence, there's exploits in their game like with the blueprint system I wouldn't be shocked they never fixed even today.
Rockstar Studios is pretty close though because their loading bug they had was caused by somebody copy-pasting a for loop without meaning to and they didn't fix it for years until it was uncovered by some random on the internet that they only paid $10,000 for. I write only as if it's a small amount but that really is a pittance considering how he saved a big chunk of their game.
I've got the sneaking suspicion that the new GTA is probably going to be something hilarious even compared to EVE Online. Star Citizen and RSI are a worthy mention I feel and I was somebody who was really looking forward to that game.
Tbf I think like a lot of game studios CCP is merely a shell of what it used to be, now owned by a Korean company, and with none of the original company founders. Not to say the current studio couldn't be just as incompetent.
Have you played the alpha?
I do agree with that, the coders who knew what they were doing with these projects finished up and moved on, probably bought sports cars and retired to the tropics somewhere. Which is why people should wake up to this and realise these companies are often not run by the same people anymore and they're riding on the successes of the previous generations
I not only played the Alpha, I still technically have an account and could log in at any time. I could waste 3 - 4 hours of my time downloading the 80gb install file and check it out to see if it's improved but I know they won't have fixed anything or make it stable.
The only people who seem to 'enjoy' this game are yet again people with personal addiction problems that keep buying RSI's bloated high poly ships they keep advertising every couple of weeks instead of doing any real gameplay improvements or adding features. They often also tend to have beast like rigs so maybe they're just hoping to have something they can finally push their machines with but in reality Star Citizen just isn't a game.
it's a tech demo at best, even the die-hard fanbois are quitting on this game and are fed up on the forums which tells you a lot. Some are still holding out hope on the singleplayer portion getting a release date but even if it does I bet it's going to be pushed back further and further with little to show for it even if they do somehow release everything.
I remember quite enjoying the month or two I played of SC, but that was a couple years ago and I haven't gone back since, so that alone may say something.
Then again I'm someone who likes Cyberpunk, so take my opinions on a game's quality with a grain of salt. I know what I like, but it might not align with what's considered "good" game design.
Cyberpunk is actually a functioning game right now. Too many people expected the second coming of christ, and it was a mess on release, but intelligent humans don't preorder and wait a year - and the game is fine now. The same cannot be said of scam yiddizen.
I've got about a thousand plus hours in now. The salvage missions are a real hoot, and PES kind of gives you infinite emergent possibilities since you can always find player wrecks and other cool cargo scattered throughout the verse.
I dump money into their coffers because they're at least trying to build new tech to forcibly push the industry forward, while the same can't be said for any of the AAA studios (a other few indies are trying, and I definitely try to show them support when possible). CIG, meanwhile, had to build four new pieces of middleware and 18 new backend services from scratch (because, well, no AAA studio bothered to build it and license it), and they managed to build about three of those middleware suites and all 18 backend services in about eight years, which is pretty quick all things considered, especially when you look at how long it usually takes to build bespoke middleware to scale.
But I always say, if there's another game out there that has all of Star Citizen's current features, I would gladly go play that game. But sadly, the only game with ship interiors and multiplayer without tons of load screens is Space Engineers, but it lacks a persistent universe, MMO aspects, any kind of story elements, and proper enemy NPCs. Can't think of any other games that come remotely close, despite Star Citizen at the moment being widely unfinished.
Speaking of incompetence, that link you gave actually loaded the content but then imposed a transparent black filter and a huge picture saying "500 Internal Server Error" over the top.
Maybe I don't need to finally get around to trying EVE after all.
That's a shame. It sounds like it was a great game once upon a time, but some things you just need to experience in their prime. Apparently it's simply impossible to leave alone something that isn't broken!
Eve's golden age was 2009-2013 (2009 was when wormholes and Tech 3 cruisers came out). Awesome fun times back then. I'm not saying it's not worth trying at all, but the current state of the game is nothing like how it was, mainly due to a series of stupid changes and pointless additions CCP made.
The game still limps along, but I'm the only person from my group of e-friends from back in the day who still plays, and even I only resub for a couple months a year, mainly out of nostalgia.
Even in the face of all that tho - probably my favorite game of all time. Some of the experiences I've had playing it can't be had in any other game, imo, and I met some great friends who I still know today over the course of playing.
What? Huh?
I'd like to crap on blizzard or some other big studio, but the people making star citizen comes to mind. They got $500+ million and 10 years, and still I have no clue what's going on with that mess.
I'm leaning less towards incompetent there and more towards straight up scam.
It is mostly nepotism - Chris Roberts putting his friends and family members in charge of development instead of an established studio - and the whales accepting the current state of affairs. I don't think it set out to be a "scam" but when you're making more on selling digital content (ships) than you ever will on a proper release, that incentivizes certain behavior.
Game doesn't even run for shit. They have a refund policy, I tried it, got in once and then crashed. Was unplayable after. Thankfully got my money back.
Ubisoft. They're completely creatively bankrupt and have been a shovelware developer for about ten years.
I would say the most incompetent is generally Bethesda. Their games are always afflicted with bugs.
I don't know if that's incompetent or laziness as they know the modders will fix it
It's like having a slouch older brother who has a responsible younger brother that will clean up his mess. Actually the one thing that really ticks me off is how they made it that mods disable the trophy system as your games pretty much REQUIRE mods to be good!
Edit: that's probably one of the reasons why Fallout 76 had such a bad release, it was a live game so they couldn't fall back on mods and their staff had to keep it running daily.
It was also their first attempt at giving a game on that engine multiplayer support. Never underestimate the challenges in adding netcode to a long established singleplayer game.
No, this is nonsense, I happen to know a thing or two about this and not only did they try reverse engineering an engine that simply wasn't build for multiplayer. If I remember correctly they gave the job to ex-SOE employees who were involved in Star Wars Galaxies. Why the fuck they would give a job to any employee involved in that hot mess I will never know but it's not surprise they fucked up Fallout 76 as badly as they did.
Also the whole engine argument is a load of bullshit in of itself with their funding. They could have very easily switched over to an engine more suited for the task and carried over their 3D assets and even their skeletal rigs if they were sensible and made their stuff in a proper third party 3D software.
Don't excuse incompetence coders, I don't get any slack when I fuck up or write bad code, why should they?
I know a fair bit on this topic as well, and you're "slightly" oversimplifying the technical hurdles for the alternative solutions you're suggesting. IE, porting to another engine. Assets only account for a tiny fraction of how much work that involves. There is a fuckton of framework and functionality that you'd have to redo on another engine, especially given just how the Creative engine was designed to handle cells (my memory fails me on more specific details than that, and I haven't exactly slept well).
Netcode-wise, the rule of thumb, as I learned years ago, is that if you're going to make a multiplayer game, implement the netcode from the get-go to save yourself massive trouble and headaches later on. The game they were basing this on had gone on for over a decade without so much as a even stepping foot into multiplayer support, so obviously it was going to be a trainwreck, especially when it's rushed.
I WILL agree though that they fucked up. The project was doomed to failure based on their intended objectives. They wanted to make it a quick easy to do multiplayer project with minimal development time, and keep it as close to Fallout 4 as possible. They released it early, before they even had proper PVE content available, and then ended up stuck with a half-complete game with no long-term vision for what the game was supposed to be, resorting to pathetic microtransactions to justify its continued existence.
Perhaps, it does depend on the engine, however I'm somebody who recently had to make a switch to a new game engine for my main project and I had to learn an entirely new language in the process, all while living in a house under renovation I I should add. Yes it did take me a fucking long while, but I did it and so far it has been totally worth it. I made the switch from Unity to Godot and many others did as well because not just that Unity is a bug ridden and bloated mess at the best of times but they were making highly questionable business decisions that an ex-EA executive had a hand in. Adding that with the security breach problems precisely due to their over-reliance on third party dependencies for almost everything and you have the absolute mess the engine is today.
It wasn't worth it for me to continually stick with all that crap for the sake of finishing my biggest project when it was still early days so I made the switch and it's been absolute bliss ever since. The best part about the new engine is the Godot 4 update and the fact it's open source so in theory I should have no future problems even if the internal devs do something silly but they seem to be pretty intelligent people. I also got a massive performance boost recently with Godot 4 and was pretty surprised by it.
I thought I'd detail this little drama I had with my own work to show I'm not just posting out my arse on this topic. It does depend on the engine whether or not it transfers over quickly. Honestly though, I did all this being a fairly noob dev and I managed it fine after frustrating over the syntax. The only real issue is converting your code over.
If you need to do anything more than that, your engine choice is shit and that's why I ignore Bethesda titles now. I have zero faith in Starfield doing anything meaningful wouldn't be shocked if it ends up being a typical 'AAA' produced affair where they have a few cities here and there with content and their 'big open worlds' have some encounters scattered about but are almost completely empty.
In terms of multiplayer netcode itself, again, it depends on the engine, if they had just picked a modern engine Fallout 76 would have been half-decent. However, like a lot of devs, they insist on sticking with their ancient and buggy internal engines and that's why they have the problems that they do. The smart devs out there are making the switch to engines like Unreal, at least then it will be stable for the most part.
I'd say it's probably a little of both.
That may be true, but they're still the masters of the moddable sandbox open-world, and not by a small margin. It really is impressive just how flexible the engine is. You can create your own world entirely and not even have to think about actor groups or loading zones, the engine just does it. Then you can drop a couple DLLs in the folder and change how the engine handles skeletons and animations.
The only engine I know of that even comes close to that level of flexibility is GZDoom, and it's a 25-year old overhaul of a 30-year old game so simple that it cut corners implementing all three dimensions.
I have never understood Bethesda and the Elder Scrolls series' success.
I played Elder Scrolls 1 and 2 and found them to be an interesting core idea but buggy, unplayable, bland messes.
Elder Scrolls 3 comes out and everyone I know that's playing it says it's more of the same, yet it sells. Every subsequent game comes out and does better than the last, despite having the reputation for being buggy, unplayable messes when they release.
And now Bethesda is a gigantic AAA company. Probably indicative of why I no longer pay attention to AAA games.
I tend to agree with this. When TES was in it's heyday I was playing the Ultima games, then later Gothic. TES felt like tabletop simulators with a high fantasy coat of paint, neither of which I was a big fan of. (Ultima were like "low fantasy" JRPGs) I didn't understand why they were so popular when houses and the outside world were on entirely different maps (you couldn't even break doors down), you couldn't have a party of followers, and NPCs didn't follow daily schedules. Those seemed like basic features to me at that point.
Now when I got to Skyrim I later went back and played Daggerfall and Morrowind. I do see why people enjoy them. The core of an amazing fantasy world are there, especially if you study the lore, and Bethesda gradually figured out how to "streamline" them to the point of actually making profit unlike Origin Systems. I don't think I'd want to play them without mods though.
Basically with the modding community it's become one of those "there's nothing else like it around" series even when "it" is kind of meh.
You probably hopped on the wagon too early. Morrowind was the starting point to a good portion of the fanbase, and then it kind of grew with more newcomers to each sequel.
And I have played Daggerfall a little bit, long long after having played other titles.
Naughty Dog.
I have no idea what the worst is anymore I've heard so much bad about every big developer.
But to just add to your rant I'll complain about Koei Tecmo. Yesterday I decided I would try Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. I still have the Xbox Game Pass and it was on there. So, I download the PC version. Crashes first load. I finally get in game, start tweaking the settings. End up settling for a 1080p/60 target. A little low but it's a new game and I don't care to hear loud fans. My system isn't that amazing anyway. So all configured it's maybe taxing the system at 70% most of the time. Except there's these damn stutters. Every 30 seconds (roughly) it seems like. Crashes again in game. Then again trying to load it back up. It's not my PC, I've got loads of other games that are fine. So I give up, delete it, and download on my Xbox. Works fine on there. Now I'm at the point I get to decide if I want to "git gud" enough to kill the first boss and keep going or just find something else.
So yeah, a bad PC version even though I should be the easy player to please, I will just turn settings down and play rather than jack off to benchmarking videos. Should have known when a game had an option for pronouns it wouldn't work that well.
I think Square Enix still wins that prize right now.
What did they do now?
They sold off Eidos and their other Western studios, which were the only ones making them any money whatsoever, while spending a rumored $300 - $400 million on FFXVI, which is likely to be steaming dogshit on release.
If not, I may amend my statement after tomorrow. We'll see how the reviews are. But if what I'm hearing is true, that game is likely to bomb so bad against its budget that Square will likely be gobbled up by Sony within a year.
System exclusivity on that kind of budget is not manageable, that will be the biggest mistake with XVI. There's no way they'll make that back on PS5 alone, too many bridges have been burned with the old PlayStation audience. The XIV audience will absolutely eat it up, but how many of them are on PS5? I sure as hell am not buying the console of a company I feel betrayed its values for the one game I have real hype for.
Yes, SquareEnix is full of fuckups right now. YoshiP is not one of them, and I'm pretty sure he didn't make the exclusivity deal on XVI.
Haven't FF titles always come to PlayStation first? One way to look at it is you're going to have to port it but may as well make some money while you do. And also push development of the game to another stage with another team.
Of course not. FF existed before playstation was a thing
I mean since they started doing initial development of titles on PlayStation line consoles.
I don't trust XVI. Critics were previously panning it because of its predominantly white cast, but now it's getting favorable reviews. It might not be a coincidence that it was banned in Saudi Arabia for homosexual content. You also have garbage like this, and this.
Well for one, they stopped making Gunslinger Stratos
I don't see my two "favorites" listed, so: Wargaming and Gaijin. Both have made it clear that their players are an ore vein to be mined, but they both have unique fuckups. Wargaming has repeatedly denied that things the community have hard evidence of exist (ghost shells aren't real, you just have a bad connection), whereas Gaijin is the world's best source of classified information.
Wargaming thinks Carriers were a good idea and totally not game breaking.
A class of ship that can hide on the other side fo the map where you can't even reach it with your guns, which can not only farm damage on you with torpedoes, rockets, bombs, etc., but also spots you for the other team to shoot at you, is somehow balanced according to them. Oh, and did I mention that AA fire is the equivalent of an army of ten year olds with slingshots?
The only hard counter to carriers were the submarines that got introduced. However, the crybaby soyboys who play carriers whined to Wargaming that they got their paint scratched on their ship for the first time and so what did Wargaming do in response? Did they tell them to suck it and play better? No. They added AUTOMATIC ANTI SUBMARINE PLANES to the carriers, and only to carriers. Anyone else being attacked by a submarine has to manually aim at them, but carrier players are too important to deal with that apparently. Instead they get a weapon that auto locks with 100% accuracy and can't really be avoided, thus neutralizing the only hard counter to carriers in the game.
I haven't even gotten into how broken some of the submarine mechanics are, and I don't hate subs nearly as much as other people do.
Carriers ruin the fun of anyone who isn't playing a carrier, and Wargaming keeps adding more of them, each one more powerful than the last.
I was one of the first to sign up for World of Tanks after it cleared Beta,.was a WoWS Closed Beta tester, and was one of the first to get into WoWP Alpha testing. I haven't played WoWP since they rolled back the more realistic flight physics, haven't played WoWS since they announced subs, and it's been... since Christmas since I played WoT.
Beyond all of the balance issues you pointed out, what drove me away was how little WG cared about the average player. I'm essentially permanently chat banned across all WG products because I told a horrible player who avoided bans by beating his kids until they told him their account password a horrible sack of shit. WG will chat ban you for calling a bad player bad, but a bad player can say whatever they want to (as long as they have made a recent purchase).
I thought Gaijin lost that record to Minecraft thanks to 'thugshakercentral'
Is the latter really Gaijin’s fault? As I understand it, all the leaks have been players getting into technical arguments and voluntarily spewing classified info into in-game chat/on forums. Obviously, auto-filtering out any talk of technical details or removing the chat and forums from an online PvP game would be dumb, so what are they supposed to do if some retard with no impulse control decides to ruin his own career? Did their forum mods leaks up for days after becoming aware of them or something?
It's their forums and their requirement that to get a change implemented for a vehicle, you must provide unclassified documents showing that the current stats/model are wrong. People tend to ignore the unclassified part, especially if they worked with the vehicle in question and know the current model is wrong, eg. Chally 2's mantlet.
Forum mods were busy banning people for calling whales bad players.
All freemium companies see customers as cattle. There is no good freemium game / company.
In GTA? I spammed Cario Perico heist before they nerfed it, that was a gold mine. Afterwards I make so much passive income in the game I never really lose money even if I spend 5 million in a day.
Those aren't bugs... those are "features".... literally....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4wAfsuUDqE
No not talking about the fact they removed 180 vehicles from direct purchase and now your only chance to get them is if they appear in weekly showrooms, I'm talking about bugs as I described the insurance one the first one may be lost if you don't play GTA but I'll explain it here:
In the game you can buy bunkers to research and sell weapons, it also has space for a special vehicle called the MOC (Mobile Operations Centre) a giant truck that's the biggest tank in the game and can be used to upgrade weapon and special vehicles. The bug is it defaults customisation to the cab section and if you try to re-customise it in the bunker, any personal vehicle you have outside gets deleted. This bug is apparently fixed now but people have lost jets, super cars and vehicles costing 8 million in the game now thanks to this bug.
Oh wow, that's awful. So they not only implemented a scheming ((($))) tactic but also had a bug that nuked your vehicles, too? I was unaware they let those kind of bugs through.Thanks for the info.
No problem, I had a few Youtubers that do a lot of GTA content inform everyone QUICK when this bug happened.
Used to be the biggest complaint was people 'god mode' glitching so you couldn't kill them but now all our stuff that we might've spent weeks grinding is at risk because people can't code properly.