Game News 2.0

So, new EA patent allows you to speak into your mic, EA records your voice and their tech makes the main character speak in your voice. Yeah.... your voice is gonna be used fire NPC's for the rest of time.

You’re playing it wrong is never a good response tbh - the game probably gets more hate than it deserves but there are clearly legitimate criticisms that Bethesda should just take on board and move on.

They bring this on themselves though, promise the world pre release(while being pretty selective on previews), then defensive when people criticise.

The usernames at the top of the posts are marked as [developer] and with Bethesda usernames, so it looks like it really may be from proper Bethesda accounts.

I get the desire to try address the narrative around the game having empty planets, repeated outposts etc, but they're trying to say the negatives aren't negatives rather than praising the positives. From what I've heard the main experience you're supposed to get from the game is going through New Game+ repeatedly, and how things change, how you can do things differently, how that can affect your next NG+, and that once you get into that cycle you do far less "exploring" and more just belting through the bits you want to play.

But when you get down to "Yeah, there are loading screens, but think about how much info the game has to generate!" and then in the next post "Sure, most of the planets are completely empty, but think about how much fun you can have on an empty planet!", people aren't going to pay attention to the positives.

Hollywood can't even knock those movies out anymore, people have gotten sick of them and all of the major releases this year outside of Barbie and Oppenheimer have massively underperformed.

With Starfield it is a different story though, I honestly think the last game I remember with that level of hype was Ocarina of Time. It needed to be absolutely brilliant and it was just OK at best.

That is true but even still Starfield and OoT were in a league of their own, seen as how they were both the one great hope of underperforming consoles. I also think the Zelda series and the Bethesda RPGs had a larger cultural cache that TW3, which was CDPRs only really high-profile game to that point.

Yea, instead their strategy is pretty much:

And in other breaking news f**k Unity.

Retro already got there before you in the humour thread

Embracer will probably keep ownership of all the IP as well even though they're closing the studios. So no chance of a new TimeSplitters.

Oh they are proper accounts. I just don't think the higher ups came along and asked developers to stop coding and start replying to steam reviews.

More likely it's Devs that spent 3-5 years working on a game with hundreds of colleagues and are proud of the minor miracle they achieved to actually get a game out there, and are trying to explain why things are the way they are to people who are questioning the choices around the technical limitations they had to over come, or design decisions they made.

It's also not just one person so if one explains the loading screens, and one the empty planets, they are likely on very different teams addressing very different aspects.

Now could it be said better? Sure, I think starting out by acknowledging the planets feel empty but the design choice they were trying to get across was x y z, or loading screens are needed but we managed to condense X amount of data into that 3 seconds which took a huge effort and hid massive amounts of texture pop ins that was a worse narrative experience, would have been better.

But people give out all the time about Devs not talking, that the industry is more secretive than MI5, but when they do talk they get bombarded.

I can 99% guarantee that corporate will have a word, they have gotten a slew of death and rape threats for "ruining the game" and will never talk to anyone again.

For what? Talking politely to someone in a comment thread.

Edit: Ah scrap that, I just saw them all signed off by customer support with a template 🥴. I just saw the [developer] tag beside the name and assumed they were Devs.

Yeah that's customer outreach or some such.

Yeah it's customer support. The tweets were blurred on purpose so I didn't see it at first. But each one is signed with the same template with a big paragraph about "Starfield is an RPG with hundreds of hours of quests to complete......" And signed off by customer support.

But that happens, they have someone write a template and they have to stick to it. But at least they ask for feedback and say they are still working on improving it.

But it's not uncommon for actual Devs to engage online. It's frowned on if they appear to speak for the company. But not if they are just talking.