6 ms·

You mean they took the "BETA" event, found bugs and patched said bugs? On the first day of OFFICIAL release! NO! That's impossible! Why would they do something

You mean they took the "BETA" event, found bugs and patched said bugs? On the first day of OFFICIAL release! NO! That's impossible! Why would they do something like that!?!? Everyone knows BETA means 5 years of an incomplete game that you have to pay early on... Seriously, they were pretty honest and upfront about their Beta and did it in the truest sense. "There are bugs in the game! It's total trash!". Yea... that's why you run betas... to find the bugs. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. More than likely there was an issue with their patch tool too, thus it's a whole new download. Haven't bought the game yet, but I see nothing they're doing as "ridiculous".

ocfx 8y ago
The game is terrible though. Has one of the worst user review scores I've ever seen. The lack of content is terrible, everything is boring. Fallout was one of my favorite franchises and once again, a new one has been ruined. Online only games/MMO's almost never recover fully from really bad launches (look at The Old Republic)
stetrain 8y ago
I think the "Ridiculous" part is the trend of shipping a physical copy of the game with a giant patch of all the stuff that wasn't tested/ready in time for the disc to to go print. If you're going to just effectively re-release the whole game as a day one patch, why not skip the discs and mail people a nice decorative card with a redemption code for the digital download version?
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  It's funny how much the Xbox One team anticipated this, and tried to move to that model, but got so much flak they gave up. People seem to like their ownership Totems (discs) that they can continue to sell to Pawn Shops (Gamestop) for pennies on the dollar of the original purchase price. It's okay to me that the nice decorative card rack keeps growing, right next to the Totem shelves in most stores. If I'm going to download the whole thing anyway, I might as well not waste shelf space in my home on the Totem.
  - kipchak 8y ago
    While I think you're right that the Xbox One's Always Online features were mostly just mistimed, (and marketed) in addition to a Totem aspect physical disks are also a way to keep a game longer than however long the service's servers exist, assuming there's no required day one patches and the like. The Wii shop for example will be going down for good soon, making purchases not already on the console inaccessible. A copy of a Gamecube game on the other hand will work until the disk physically breaks.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      Right, but there are also Wii games that won't work when the shop goes down because what's on disc isn't playable and needs a Day One patch it can no longer download. We absolutely should be fighting for digital store rights, but focusing on physical discs isn't the right way to solve that.
  - swebs 8y ago
    What a silly way to trivialize stripping consumer rights. When you buy a game on disc, the disc is the product. You now OWN the game. You're free to lend it to a friend, sell it, give it away, trade it, or whatever the hell you want because its your property. Microsoft was attempting to go the Steam route and forcing people to LEASE their game and tie it to an anti-consumer terms-or-service agreement (redundant, I know). With that you're not allowed to do anything with the game that they don't approve of. And if you behave in a way they don't like, they can take away your entire library in the middle of the night. Naturally people don't like shit like that. And unlike Steam, the Xbox actually has competition, which is why people opted for other consoles instead.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      On the contrary, I'm not trivializing the stripping of consumer rights, I'm suggesting that property rights in this matter have always been more complicated than "discs are property" and "codes are not", because in the digital realm discs are codes in a different form factor. The terms of service are the same on the Xbox for digital store downloads and discs. I refer to the disc as a Totem, because that physical artifact holds more spiritual value than it does physical value. Some property rights of that disc are implied, sure, by virtue of being a physical token, but they haven't been tested in court, and they aren't guaranteed. EULAs have been the name of the software game for ages now; they predate the digital stores (even Steam) and have always stated that Software is Leased, never Purchased. Discs were always a physical token tied a EULA. Now discs don't even have the actual software on them anymore, and its getting increasingly silly to pretend that they do. The original Xbox One plan included lending, giving away, and trading games, it just intended to cut out the Gamestop middle man and let you do it directly Gamertag to Gamertag. That's what Microsoft was really punished for, cutting out the Pawn Shops. We should be demanding our rights in the digital stores (and securing them in copyright reforms and regulations, if need be), not fighting for bits of plastic that pretend to be rights.
- ChrisAntaki 8y ago
  Could physical copies still be traded, whereas digital downloads are typically tied to a single account?
- cowpewter 8y ago
  If you have multiple people in a household, each with their own Live/PSN/whatever account, you can buy one physical disc and it unlocks the game for everyone in the household. If you buy the digital version, it's locked to only whichever account bought it. That's why I still prefer physical versions of games. Both me and my wife have our own separate accounts on the services.
  - mikewhy 8y ago
    PS4 requires the physical disk in the drive to play. While yes you can simply share that copy with multiple people, they cannot play together simultaneously. With PSN you can have two people playing the one purchase of a game simultaneously.
  - stordoff 8y ago
    PSN/Xbox Live unlocks it for the _console_ (as well as the user). I have 4 accounts on my PS4, and they can all access content purchased by the other accounts.
    - cowpewter 8y ago
      Hmm, something is not right with our setup then, because I have absolutely been blocked from playing games my wife has bought on her account on our PS4.
      - luminiferous 8y ago
        You have to set your particular console as your PSN account's "primary" console. When a console is set as your primary console, any other accounts on that console can use software that you have bought using your PSN account. However, I think only one account can have a particular console set as their "primary" console at a time, so if your PS4 is your account's primary console, then it cannot be your wife's account's primary console, meaning if she buys software, your account cannot access it. https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/activation.html https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/act...
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  I bought FO76 from Best Buy, and that's exactly what I did - I just bought the "Digital Download" edition, which gave me a code I could enter into the Bethesda launcher. I honestly don't remember the last time I bought software on physical media.
heimidal 8y ago
People want “games as a service”-level updates without having having to download big patches. Or they get upset that a patch comes out every week or so. There’s really no winning.
- corodra 8y ago
  Right? They've been pretty up front and honest about the online only aspect due to the nature of the game. If they hid that fact, yes, lots to be pissed off about. But it's like "I bought this package that said it's salt on it. It's not sweet at all! Why isn't this like sugar? This should be like sugar!" Later, they complain a pack of sugar is too sweet. "I'm so pissed over what EA did with Battlefront" What did they all do? Buy Battlefront 2. "I hate EA!" They still buy EA games. "I hate online only games!" They buy online only games. Gamers are such a whining bunch of babies and you can downvote me all you want. There are alternatives and options out there.
  - pmichaud 8y ago
    I suspect the people who complain about various things are not the same people buying those same things. It's not a willpower or hypocrisy problem, it's a coordination problem.
    - heimidal 8y ago
      I think you’d be surprised, honestly. Lots of people put hundreds of hours into games like Battlefront 2, Destiny 2, World of Warcraft, etc all while screaming at the top of their lungs about the good old days and how awful it is now. Meanwhile, they’re effectively paying $0.50/hour.
- e1ven 8y ago
  I don't own the game, so I don't have a dog in this race.. But it does seem a bit silly that you have to download the ENTIRE game again.. At that size, they should have some sort of delta update tool.
  - 8y ago
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I don't understand this line of thinking. If the game was as broken as you say this close to release, and they knew full well about it, why not delay it by a few weeks and incorporate this patch into the master!? I'm lucky enough to have very high speed broadband with no monthly limits, and I gather from the tone of your comment that you are too. But it's not universal and patches like this cause a lot of problems for people who aren't as privileged as us.
- corodra 8y ago
  Dude, it's a stress test. The only way you can fix it is by... STRESSING it. It's really straight forward of a concept. That means lots of people doing lots of little things. You can't find these bugs without lots of people doing lots of things WRONG. It's basic dev 101. Your user is stupid and will do everyone wrong. It's flat out amazing when you stand behind someone that uses a bit of software you built, took the time to make everything as straight forward as possible. But they find how to break it in crazy ways.
  - brootstrap 8y ago
    dude is right haha. no matter how hard to try to write nice documentation and make my code nice and user friendly, when i pass it off to someone else for usage they ALWAYS find a way to pass in the wrong arguments and misuse my methods -_- I agree that this is the standard for modern online games... I had friends really into destiny 2 and they tried to get me to play. As soon as I realized the game was 'online only' i was like fug this man. I had been playing soulsborne games offline on an old xbox 360 for years with no complaints. Nowadays shit is fucked with most games, they expect you to be online and paying extra. No thanks! As someone else said, i think the trend is 'game as a service' rather then a "game" in traditional sense. Sony has put out some good single player offline capable games, i just have the think the re-occuring revenue of these GaaS games (fortnite, fallout, etc) is SO damn high that the business value ends up guiding decisions.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  People want the game now and don't mind downloading a patch. Those who do mind can wait a few weeks for the master to become the patched version.
e1ven 8y ago
It's a little unorthodox to have your week long beta after the game is already pressed to disc, and a week before the game launches. Also, I agree with you - Their patch tool is pretty terrible.. Perhaps due to the way the game files are packaged up, but unless they edited every model and sound file, you shouldn't need to redownload the whole thing. Maybe it's due to their DRM? But even rsync can handle better updates :)
wild_preference 8y ago
I've seen criticism online related to how soon the beta happened before release. But gamers are such a childish (usually literally) and entitled bunch that I've noticed it's hard to take most of their criticism seriously about anything. The only criticism I've agreed with lately is the rise of lootboxes. Everything else just reminds me of a non-technical manager trying to tell developers how easy something should be because it was easy to write it down as a Trello card. For example, there's a common meme on /r/gaming about how lazy/selfish Bethesda is by not include a single-player mode. As if it's some trivial undertaking. Same with Bethesda reusing its engine instead of "just" building a new one. What gamers never seem to realize is that their demands are no different from the ideals of the developer. There probably isn't a single person at Bethesda who wouldn't want to work <40hrs/week incrementally improving the game to perfection for a few more years, or working on a cool single-player campaign with fresh ideas. Meanwhile, criticism is easily squished when the financials come out. If enough gamers bought and enjoyed the game to make the venture profitable, then criticism is exposed as nothing but a wishlist, not as the damning evidence gamers like to think they're circle-jerking over.
Dylan16807 8y ago
Updating the patch tool should only take megabytes. What do you mean?
- corodra 8y ago
  As in it's possible the build can't interact with the patch tool. Thus, they needed to make some fundamental fixes that just requires a flat out new build. I don't know, I'm speculating. But I highly doubt there going "Hey, let's throw in 50bg+ of stuff just to piss everyone off! That'd be funny because everyone is already complaining about online only." Shit happens. Especially when people also decide to try hacking the crap out of the builds and post the results online. I mean, for a community of devs, I'm really trying to figure out all the "None of this makes sense." You'd figure on HN, most people would start speculating why instead of throwing shit in the dev's face. I work on only small to medium sized projects. Nothing to the scale of what this game is. But I've been contracted to fix, have seen and heard about far worse problems than just a new build download patch.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    I just assume it's ultra-low priority, and I bet if they bumped it up to medium-low priority they wouldn't have this problem.

ocfx 8y ago

The game is terrible though. Has one of the worst user review scores I've ever seen. The lack of content is terrible, everything is boring. Fallout was one of my favorite franchises and once again, a new one has been ruined. Online only games/MMO's almost never recover fully from really bad launches (look at The Old Republic)

stetrain 8y ago

I think the "Ridiculous" part is the trend of shipping a physical copy of the game with a giant patch of all the stuff that wasn't tested/ready in time for the disc to to go print. If you're going to just effectively re-release the whole game as a day one patch, why not skip the discs and mail people a nice decorative card with a redemption code for the digital download version?

WorldMaker 8y ago
It's funny how much the Xbox One team anticipated this, and tried to move to that model, but got so much flak they gave up. People seem to like their ownership Totems (discs) that they can continue to sell to Pawn Shops (Gamestop) for pennies on the dollar of the original purchase price. It's okay to me that the nice decorative card rack keeps growing, right next to the Totem shelves in most stores. If I'm going to download the whole thing anyway, I might as well not waste shelf space in my home on the Totem.
- kipchak 8y ago
  While I think you're right that the Xbox One's Always Online features were mostly just mistimed, (and marketed) in addition to a Totem aspect physical disks are also a way to keep a game longer than however long the service's servers exist, assuming there's no required day one patches and the like. The Wii shop for example will be going down for good soon, making purchases not already on the console inaccessible. A copy of a Gamecube game on the other hand will work until the disk physically breaks.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Right, but there are also Wii games that won't work when the shop goes down because what's on disc isn't playable and needs a Day One patch it can no longer download. We absolutely should be fighting for digital store rights, but focusing on physical discs isn't the right way to solve that.
- swebs 8y ago
  What a silly way to trivialize stripping consumer rights. When you buy a game on disc, the disc is the product. You now OWN the game. You're free to lend it to a friend, sell it, give it away, trade it, or whatever the hell you want because its your property. Microsoft was attempting to go the Steam route and forcing people to LEASE their game and tie it to an anti-consumer terms-or-service agreement (redundant, I know). With that you're not allowed to do anything with the game that they don't approve of. And if you behave in a way they don't like, they can take away your entire library in the middle of the night. Naturally people don't like shit like that. And unlike Steam, the Xbox actually has competition, which is why people opted for other consoles instead.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    On the contrary, I'm not trivializing the stripping of consumer rights, I'm suggesting that property rights in this matter have always been more complicated than "discs are property" and "codes are not", because in the digital realm discs are codes in a different form factor. The terms of service are the same on the Xbox for digital store downloads and discs. I refer to the disc as a Totem, because that physical artifact holds more spiritual value than it does physical value. Some property rights of that disc are implied, sure, by virtue of being a physical token, but they haven't been tested in court, and they aren't guaranteed. EULAs have been the name of the software game for ages now; they predate the digital stores (even Steam) and have always stated that Software is Leased, never Purchased. Discs were always a physical token tied a EULA. Now discs don't even have the actual software on them anymore, and its getting increasingly silly to pretend that they do. The original Xbox One plan included lending, giving away, and trading games, it just intended to cut out the Gamestop middle man and let you do it directly Gamertag to Gamertag. That's what Microsoft was really punished for, cutting out the Pawn Shops. We should be demanding our rights in the digital stores (and securing them in copyright reforms and regulations, if need be), not fighting for bits of plastic that pretend to be rights.
ChrisAntaki 8y ago
Could physical copies still be traded, whereas digital downloads are typically tied to a single account?
cowpewter 8y ago
If you have multiple people in a household, each with their own Live/PSN/whatever account, you can buy one physical disc and it unlocks the game for everyone in the household. If you buy the digital version, it's locked to only whichever account bought it. That's why I still prefer physical versions of games. Both me and my wife have our own separate accounts on the services.
- mikewhy 8y ago
  PS4 requires the physical disk in the drive to play. While yes you can simply share that copy with multiple people, they cannot play together simultaneously. With PSN you can have two people playing the one purchase of a game simultaneously.
- stordoff 8y ago
  PSN/Xbox Live unlocks it for the _console_ (as well as the user). I have 4 accounts on my PS4, and they can all access content purchased by the other accounts.
  - cowpewter 8y ago
    Hmm, something is not right with our setup then, because I have absolutely been blocked from playing games my wife has bought on her account on our PS4.
    - luminiferous 8y ago
      You have to set your particular console as your PSN account's "primary" console. When a console is set as your primary console, any other accounts on that console can use software that you have bought using your PSN account. However, I think only one account can have a particular console set as their "primary" console at a time, so if your PS4 is your account's primary console, then it cannot be your wife's account's primary console, meaning if she buys software, your account cannot access it. https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/activation.html https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/act...
LyndsySimon 8y ago
I bought FO76 from Best Buy, and that's exactly what I did - I just bought the "Digital Download" edition, which gave me a code I could enter into the Bethesda launcher. I honestly don't remember the last time I bought software on physical media.

heimidal 8y ago

People want “games as a service”-level updates without having having to download big patches. Or they get upset that a patch comes out every week or so. There’s really no winning.

corodra 8y ago
Right? They've been pretty up front and honest about the online only aspect due to the nature of the game. If they hid that fact, yes, lots to be pissed off about. But it's like "I bought this package that said it's salt on it. It's not sweet at all! Why isn't this like sugar? This should be like sugar!" Later, they complain a pack of sugar is too sweet. "I'm so pissed over what EA did with Battlefront" What did they all do? Buy Battlefront 2. "I hate EA!" They still buy EA games. "I hate online only games!" They buy online only games. Gamers are such a whining bunch of babies and you can downvote me all you want. There are alternatives and options out there.
- pmichaud 8y ago
  I suspect the people who complain about various things are not the same people buying those same things. It's not a willpower or hypocrisy problem, it's a coordination problem.
  - heimidal 8y ago
    I think you’d be surprised, honestly. Lots of people put hundreds of hours into games like Battlefront 2, Destiny 2, World of Warcraft, etc all while screaming at the top of their lungs about the good old days and how awful it is now. Meanwhile, they’re effectively paying $0.50/hour.
e1ven 8y ago
I don't own the game, so I don't have a dog in this race.. But it does seem a bit silly that you have to download the ENTIRE game again.. At that size, they should have some sort of delta update tool.
- 8y ago

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

I don't understand this line of thinking. If the game was as broken as you say this close to release, and they knew full well about it, why not delay it by a few weeks and incorporate this patch into the master!? I'm lucky enough to have very high speed broadband with no monthly limits, and I gather from the tone of your comment that you are too. But it's not universal and patches like this cause a lot of problems for people who aren't as privileged as us.

corodra 8y ago
Dude, it's a stress test. The only way you can fix it is by... STRESSING it. It's really straight forward of a concept. That means lots of people doing lots of little things. You can't find these bugs without lots of people doing lots of things WRONG. It's basic dev 101. Your user is stupid and will do everyone wrong. It's flat out amazing when you stand behind someone that uses a bit of software you built, took the time to make everything as straight forward as possible. But they find how to break it in crazy ways.
- brootstrap 8y ago
  dude is right haha. no matter how hard to try to write nice documentation and make my code nice and user friendly, when i pass it off to someone else for usage they ALWAYS find a way to pass in the wrong arguments and misuse my methods -_- I agree that this is the standard for modern online games... I had friends really into destiny 2 and they tried to get me to play. As soon as I realized the game was 'online only' i was like fug this man. I had been playing soulsborne games offline on an old xbox 360 for years with no complaints. Nowadays shit is fucked with most games, they expect you to be online and paying extra. No thanks! As someone else said, i think the trend is 'game as a service' rather then a "game" in traditional sense. Sony has put out some good single player offline capable games, i just have the think the re-occuring revenue of these GaaS games (fortnite, fallout, etc) is SO damn high that the business value ends up guiding decisions.
mywittyname 8y ago
People want the game now and don't mind downloading a patch. Those who do mind can wait a few weeks for the master to become the patched version.

e1ven 8y ago

It's a little unorthodox to have your week long beta after the game is already pressed to disc, and a week before the game launches. Also, I agree with you - Their patch tool is pretty terrible.. Perhaps due to the way the game files are packaged up, but unless they edited every model and sound file, you shouldn't need to redownload the whole thing. Maybe it's due to their DRM? But even rsync can handle better updates :)

wild_preference 8y ago

I've seen criticism online related to how soon the beta happened before release. But gamers are such a childish (usually literally) and entitled bunch that I've noticed it's hard to take most of their criticism seriously about anything. The only criticism I've agreed with lately is the rise of lootboxes. Everything else just reminds me of a non-technical manager trying to tell developers how easy something should be because it was easy to write it down as a Trello card. For example, there's a common meme on /r/gaming about how lazy/selfish Bethesda is by not include a single-player mode. As if it's some trivial undertaking. Same with Bethesda reusing its engine instead of "just" building a new one. What gamers never seem to realize is that their demands are no different from the ideals of the developer. There probably isn't a single person at Bethesda who wouldn't want to work <40hrs/week incrementally improving the game to perfection for a few more years, or working on a cool single-player campaign with fresh ideas. Meanwhile, criticism is easily squished when the financials come out. If enough gamers bought and enjoyed the game to make the venture profitable, then criticism is exposed as nothing but a wishlist, not as the damning evidence gamers like to think they're circle-jerking over.

Dylan16807 8y ago

Updating the patch tool should only take megabytes. What do you mean?

corodra 8y ago
As in it's possible the build can't interact with the patch tool. Thus, they needed to make some fundamental fixes that just requires a flat out new build. I don't know, I'm speculating. But I highly doubt there going "Hey, let's throw in 50bg+ of stuff just to piss everyone off! That'd be funny because everyone is already complaining about online only." Shit happens. Especially when people also decide to try hacking the crap out of the builds and post the results online. I mean, for a community of devs, I'm really trying to figure out all the "None of this makes sense." You'd figure on HN, most people would start speculating why instead of throwing shit in the dev's face. I work on only small to medium sized projects. Nothing to the scale of what this game is. But I've been contracted to fix, have seen and heard about far worse problems than just a new build download patch.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  I just assume it's ultra-low priority, and I bet if they bumped it up to medium-low priority they wouldn't have this problem.