Please help me understand this Bethesda thing

[Nella_Bolt]

Wait so you're telling me that to compensate people who are really into a first person shooter multiplayer game that bombed... They're giving away 3 games to those players that are entirely different in mechanics and playing, and at this point practically have nothing to do with Fallout 76?
I mean, 3 free game is cool, but why didn't they give those players like.. Fallout 3 or something that's actually in line with the current Fallout games? ESPECIALLY when they're apparently messing their own lore up that goes all the way back to those games.

[Nella_Bolt]

I'm just not sure how people are continuing to defend Bethesda. I was painfully reminded by a lot of people to not even bother playing Skyrim on PC if I don't get the SKSE, which is needed to just to fix a lot of base bugs. When your games start to require the help of modders who aren't in your company to make the game better once you release, that's just fucked. How can you even defend a company and hope their next games are gonna be good when they're still using an ancient engine and keep fucking up with their newest game? Honestly it's not even something to laugh at or meme anymore. I legit feel bad for the fanbase and community surrounding Bethesda.

[PriestTroit]

I'm not defending Bethesda as a whole, you know... just their decision to give the 3 free games to their FO76 players as being a reasonably acceptable peace offering. That is, after all, what this thread is actually about. Feel free to correct me if I've somehow screwed up and misread the entirety of the OP.

Take this quote from OP as an example of just one ridiculous objection to Bethesda's action: " Bethesda is giving away Fallout 1, fallout 2, and tactics to everyone!!! Yes! 3 free games to all gamers!!!!!! OH wait. Just for people who purchased or will purchase fallout 76"

Like, what... he's upset that he isn't getting the 3 free games since Big Meanie Bethesda is only giving them away to their customers? That's the equivalent of saying you, a non-customer, somehow deserve free McNuggets because some other guy had his order messed up and got free McNuggets as small apology. Or that you're angry you weren't given a free Big Mac instead. Literally makes zero sense.

[RaptureReady]

I just want to clear up what I meant by that scarcastic comment about the free games only going to fallout 76 present and future buyers.

I should have said this differently in the post but I was scarcastically bringing up the fact that it was being used more as a ploy to hopefully generate sales of their game. I was in no way meaning to come off as me being upset i didnt get the offer extended to me or anyone else that didnt purchase fallout 76. Bethesda offering free games is not a bad thing in and of itself. When you look at everything surrounding that decision to offer the free games, that's when it starts to look like there may be a little more to it. An apology is great, however, an apology with an agenda is not a sincere apology.

Honestly, the biggest point I meant to make about my post was they were offering free PC games to gamers who bought the game on xbox, ps4, and PC.

[Nella_Bolt]

Oooohh yeah I kind of glossed over that bit. It's not entitled to every and any gamer of course; it's for the poor purchasers of 76. I'm from the No Man's Sky over here, but I feel like it's a kind of different case with that game. Regardless, I think some major compensation is needed, more so than 3 measly games. Maybe they could like... I don't know, catch up with the rest of the industry? They're like the special kid that everybody feels too bad about to make them stay behind a grade because they write really endearing stuff. It looks bad, but it's endearing, and so they get passes from everybody.

[Arcade]

Wanted to add a small factoid in everyone who preordered was also promised all of the extra games as well

I've also read some more and when the game went on sale for black Friday i posted a ticket on Bethesda's support page and ended up receiving 25 dollars in game currency for any of there products i ended up getting atoms but still.

[Astraea]

Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics are each on sale at GoG for $2.49 USD.
https://www.gog.com/games?page=1&sor...search=Fallout
Off sale price is listed as $9.99 each but they go on sale often enough there is no reason to pay full price.

I don't always buy classic games but when I do I buy from GoG.

I remember buying Fallout 1 in 2000ish for 5 bucks in the sales bin. It came with a huuuuuuuuuge manual. I actually used that manual a bit :/

[fenrif]

It's easy to understand what's going on. Bethesda are greedy and lazy. For many years their fanbase has accepted them gradually becoming more greezy and lazy with each release. Finally people have had enough and are fed up with this trend. Bethesda, however, now only know how to be greedy and lazy. So their response is more of the same.

I kind of feel a bit sorry for them. It's like if you have a dog, and for ten years you let it sleep on the bed, then one day you just start screaming at it every time it gets up on the bed. It's not the dogs fault. Todd Howard doesn't know lying about his games is bad. Bethesda doesn't know half assing their development is bad, removing features is bad, and predatory pricing measures are bad. Their fanbase has been defending this stuff to the hilt for longer than I can remember. I can just imagine in the Bethesda offices "They are upset we're using the same engine?! What? Why didn't they complain about this 3 games ago when it became an obvious issue?!"

[R.U.S.E]

To be honest I have not really played Fallout (maybe new vegas once at a friends). But wasn't Bethesda reguarded as one of the best companies out there before 76 hit? What I wanna know is what changed during the development of this game to have their rep take a 180 like this? Yea I get the game is bad. But they keep making it worse trying to do damage control, Fallout 4 had a bad reception but it seems to be a decent game at it's core (just not a true Fallout game) from what I understand. Yet they didn't pull these kinds of stunts when 4 started taking heat.

So what changed?

[Mental Midget]

I actually liked Fallout 4 (about 2500 hours on it) or at least it had alot of addictive gameplay elements. And i like many others were very hyped for Fallout 76 up until Bethesdas E3.. Due to the sloppiness/laziness with the development of this this game, its clearly just a cashgrab, to fund Starfield or Elder Scrolls 6.

The funny thing is that ideas for Fallout 4 to have multiplayer was tossed around in the works around 2015 but deemed to be "To distracting" according to Todd Howard around E3 2015.
Also they i have a very faint memory that they also declined/removed a Fallout 4 multiplayer mod that someone made like 1-2 years ago (same as they did with Skyrim a few years back due to it might be conflicting with ESO i guess).

Fallout 76 is nothing else but a big distraction itself. And if Fallout 76 was a proper playable game the community would not get annoyed about stuff like Ripped scripts, doxxing, the canvas bag, The Rum and much more controversy that has befallen Bethesda after Failout 76 its going to take more than a couple of free games that most hardcore fallout fans already owns to satisfy the community and end the Witch hunt on Bethesda.

The sad part about all this that this will HIGHLY affect the launch and credibility that the fans have on Bethesda when releasing Starfield and Elder scrolls VI. They will have to delay these games for soooo long to make up for the wildfire around Failout 76 and make sure the game runs so smoothly and 99.9% bugfree or the wildfire will spread even to those games..

[Omegapyrate]

Might as well weigh in on this....
I've said this before in YT comments, but the only way Bethesda could unfuck themselves right now is to do what Square-Enix did with FFXIV- stop selling it, remake it into something GOOD, then re-release it and give existing customers a free upgrade. That's how consumers trust is regained, and that's exactly what Bethesda fucking needs for their future to not suck.
I'm not going to defend them over this game and the series of fuckups surrounding it..... but what really twists the knife for me in all this (as a longtime fan of theirs) is that all it took to mess up Bethesda's good name was one crappy game that caused it all.

[fenrif]

To be honest I have not really played Fallout (maybe new vegas once at a friends). But wasn't Bethesda reguarded as one of the best companies out there before 76 hit? What I wanna know is what changed during the development of this game to have their rep take a 180 like this? Yea I get the game is bad. But they keep making it worse trying to do damage control, Fallout 4 had a bad reception but it seems to be a decent game at it's core (just not a true Fallout game) from what I understand. Yet they didn't pull these kinds of stunts when 4 started taking heat.

So what changed?

Bethesda was regarded as the best company in the same way Justin Beiber is regarded as the best musician.

[R.U.S.E]

Bethesda was regarded as the best company in the same way Justin Beiber is regarded as the best musician.

Ah, I see. So are you saying they always deserved this reputation? Or am I reading this wrong.

[fenrif]

Ah, I see. So are you saying they always deserved this reputation? Or am I reading this wrong.

I think so. Most of the problems that are coming up from Fallout 76 have existed in their previous games. They've just been incrementally getting more lazy and greedy with each game. I think Fallout 76 is just the one step too far.

[twidget]

You're reading it right.

Bethseda's games have been bug ridden messes since I first played Morrowind.
It had the Morrowind Code Patch, the Morrowind Patch Project and other endeavors to fix that games bugs.

There have been unofficial patches for each Fallout.
Where are the official patches?

Bugs from the original Skyrim weren't patched and reappeared in later version of the game.
The same goes for FO4 bugs in FO76.

Bethesda is a bunch of lazy fucks.
Is it too much work to get a modern engine going forward?
They've been living on the reputation their games got after modders fixed the bad scripting, added a decent UI, made textures that didn't look like ass and a myriad of other improvements and/or fixes.
Go to the Nexus and look at the Top files for Skyrim and FO4.
The unofficial patch is #2 and #1 respectively (Thank Caliente for that #2 spot. ).
Modders made them and modders made the simplified crap Bethesda was shoveling not just playable but enjoyable.

I don't think of Skyrim or FO4 as RPGs.
More like action/adventure games with some RPG elements.
Use an alternate start mod to not worry about the rails the MQ would have you on, others mods to suit your play style and it's not a bad experience.

FO76 highlighted all Bethesda's shortcomings from the game's code, lies from marketing, customer non-service.
It was the perfect storm of ineptitude by Bethesda, focusing attention on all their previous crap.

I'll close with a Howard Beale quote from the great movie Network.

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

[fenrif]

I feel like I could sit here all night remembering all the shadey as fuck things Bethesda has done over the years. One of my favorites is that their engine had a memory leak issue for years. PC players would just patch it out with the unofficial patch. But when they released Oblivion on PS3 it was a huge issue. Could really fuck up your game. Bethesda never patched it. Then Skyrim came out on PC with the same memory leak issue. Again; PC players had an unofficial patch. Again; console gamers had the same memory leak issue at launch and never received a patch.

I think they finally fixed it in the special edition, though legends say it was accidentally fixed in an aborted attempt to code the "impossible" feat of working ladders into the engine.

[JonnyMorris]

There is perhaps one way that the whole 'three free really old games' thing could have been handled much better - and it's something that I'm sure Bethesda could easily have afforded to do - farm out development of those three old Fallout titles to a reputable company to port them to modern consoles (i.e. PS4 / XBox One), that way everyone can enjoy these titles at their leisure; what's more, once these titles have been ported they can go on general sale too so that those who did not purchase Fallout 76 can still enjoy 'real' Fallout without any reliance on them owning a PC or XBox. The price for each needs to be low, like less than a tenner each, probably more like a fiver, this is part of the penance for messing up so much and the good will to the gaming community - they're unlikely to recoup the cost of the port to consoles but the cash grab from Fallout 76 should easily have covered it already. Generally I think all they would need to do is license some sort of PC / PS2 emulator (Tactics was available on PS2 as I recall) and bolt that onto the game launcher, should be pretty easy really for a competent dev studio to pull off, especially for the age of the games and considering the current trend for retro games.

But we're talking about head-in-the-sand Bethesda here, the obvious is just never obvious enough for them; they could have struck a deal with all those brilliant modders to license their mods into the Special Edition and add the bug fixes to the game engine into the next games that used it, but for whatever reason they just never did this (strangely, it looks like they just went ahead and used some of the mods in the PS3 version of Oblivion as it looks exactly like the PC version with things like the water mod applied, no mention of the mods anywhere though). It's the many things like this just getting worse over the years and wearing down the fan's resolve to be generous towards the company that has now culminated in a massive explosion of bad sentiment, well deserved and not before time.

As a friend of mine pointed out, we would not stand for this kind of thing in almost any other industry - if there's a fault with an electrical product we'll just return it and demand our money back, go to a consumer watchdog or whatever, but sadly with big games like Oblivion there just isn't another company making a product that does almost exactly the same thing like there is for a toaster, so we're sort of stuck with it - play it or don't - and I think that's the only reason why so many people keep buying these games (in the knowledge that modders can finish the job that Bethesda couldn't be bothered to). If Fallout 76 had not been locked down to modders then the backlash wouldn't have been quite so bad, many game-breaking bugs would have been fixed within a few days of release (during the paid 'beta') and then at least the player base would have been relatively happy, the merchandise debacles would have received slightly less attention.

The games industry is turning itself upside down - with one or two exceptions (Rockstar) it's the small dev studios who are doing it right, the big studios have gone SJW or whatever and are driving themselves to bankruptcy through decisions nobody understands. Maybe it is time for those giants to either get it right or just go away, we'll go back to genuinely intriguing and fun games regardless of how low budget they may be.

[R.U.S.E]

So many good companies falling apart. This is why I wanna work for myself. I don't wanna rely on some guy who has other things in mind besides the good of the company and those working for it.

[GermanCrayon664]

I saw a theory video about Bethesda purposely making 76 a disappointment so Todd can get to work on the games he wants to make but the only person that knows the truth is him