GameSpot's The Lobby: Fallout 4 - When are glitches acceptable?

[MUSIC] Forking met this week. It's a good video game. Do we agree gentlemen? I think it's a great video game.>> Do you? It depends on which platform you're playing it on. Oh really? Yeah. All right. What have you been playing on? So our review just went up, reviews I guess I should say. Okay. And I played through it on PS4 because that's what they sent first was the console version of the game and then PC followed up. I wish they had done it the other way around. [LAUGH] Because the PC version of that game is significantly better. So you did two reviews. Well, so the text is identical because we always figure that people that are playing one version would want to know about the other versions. So rather than just tailor the text differently, but yes. So the PC got four stars and the console version got three. So speak about the technical issues you came on the console version. On the PS 4 version? Oh, I mean, the frame rate is a trainwreck in that game. Depending on where you are, it just, indoor areas seem to perform worse than outdoor areas. It started near the beginning of the game, and [UNKNOWN] every time you reload the gun, it was just like, why is it so chunky? And then just Progressively, as you keep playing, wait this doesn't look right. This doesn't look right. Then, you know, a lot of the frame rate stuff, specifically, culminated in a late game moment for me. You're in a large area, I'm going to try to talk vaguely- Yeah. You're in kind of a large area, but it's catwalks, so it's kind of a tight moving movement space. Maybe a about a dozen enemies. It was kind of hard to count them at some point because There were more enemies on the screen, than frames per second. [LAUGH] You know, it was like maybe five frames per second or something, you know. At some point, you can't aim the gun Gun when it's that bad. That doesn't freeze time so that's not like a great option either to shoot your way through that thing. So it just became like well I need to heal every 15 seconds to keep my health up and try to use all of my stealth boys to get out of here. [CROSSTALK] Wow. Back where the frame rate lives. It's crazy because we had it in office obviously as well for the past week or so. I've played maybe like 15 hours on Xbox One. Frame rate wasn't you know. I played on PC subsequently and it was market difference obviously. But it never really got super bad unless I was in sometimes like [UNKNOWN] in the forest during the day. But it never crunched bad like that. Did you experience that much when you were playing? The only moment that I experienced that is as bad as you were describing was in a building where they were trying to do some sort of like particle smoke effect thing and it's the first time I had seen it and seen frame rate that bad. But I never had any sort of like moment where the glitches, or frame rate rather, impacted My abilities in combat. RIght. So, I'm I've heard a lot of people say similar things, but I'm surprised to hear SAP ad for you. yeah, and you know the Xbox one version has that kind of, those digital foundries pieces was kind of like talking about straight up stopping And then the recommendation there seems to be, play the game off an external hard drive which I at this point actually play, because USB3 is faster than whatever they have. Wow. Internal and the SATA. So, I've actually, I moved to an external hard drive on XBox One a while ago. So, I'm playing that version and I didn't see anything quite as bad as what people had talked about. But it's certainly Was you know, right around PS4 levels of performance for me, so. Yeah. Those versions of the game just have an extra layer. I mean, these games are always messed up right, I mean. It says the ships buggy, weird games. But in this case like the console versions, were just an extra level of messed up. You're just like I can't even. This isn't But it's a bizarre- You can't recommend this anymore. It's a bizarre echo of the Playstation 3 version of [CROSSTALK] Did they sneak a cell processor into the pit boy that comes with it or something? Yeah, it was messed up, yeah. So I guess, let's talk about glitches in terms of when new games come out because obviously There had been some massive high shows over the past couple of years, we held on our anniversary this time last year like Batman, Arkham Knight, has just come in PC apparently it's still jacked up a little bit. Yeah. Our people nowadays kind of sensitive to glitches because of those type of stories or if this is the same has ever been. I think games are shipping in lesser states. As games get more and more complicated, they don't have an infinite amount of dollars and time to throw at QA and fix all these things prior to ship. It's hard to say. Every game's gonna have a different story attached to it whether it's like Well, they mismanaged the time and just didn't have time to really get a final polished pass on it or whatever. It's hard to know and it's hard to care, because at the end of the day, like, people buy a game, they expect it to work. And these days that's just seemed less and less certain You know I just came off of a, yeah obviously like the PC version Batman is super crazy. Yeah. Yeah they took it off sale for a while and brought it back out for a while. I understand, yeah. And there's still people having problems with it. I mean you know At least they're offering refunds through the end of the year with that one, instead of hey, maybe if you had 12 gigs of RAM. Wait, doesn't this run consoles that don't have any. It's crazy there are games like that which have so many people having problems with them. Anecdotally, one my best mates back home in Ireland bought that game, didn't read any news about it. Worked perfectly fine, completed it before it was taken down like has it just gotten so difficult to QA this stuff? Because I don't know. Well he was saying games are becoming so much more complicated and the tech behind them is so much more complicated it that these intricacies create moments So many moments where things can just go wrong and go haywire. And that's the thing, you know, if you're specifically talking about fallout. [LAUGH] Sometimes it works out all right. Yeah. You know, fallout allows you to do so many different things and pick up so many different. There's so many places where fallout can break, more so than most other games, so maybe it's not surprising. Sorry, that is so busted but that doesn't make it forgivable. But yeah, like it's like, sometimes it's awesome. [LAUGH] But in the fall out case like those games have been broken the exact same way since oblivion have not been Before and at some point it's like well you know yeah it's a roll of the dice. Like I've been on the other end of the conversation we're having right now. Where I finished New Vegas and said this game's fine. Yeah. And then people are like you're crazy. [LAUGH] So, that's just how it goes sometimes. So, what is that just a deeply personal thing or is it an expectation thing? Because going in to play Fallout, I'm like all right I was playing three super mutants all there, I blow two of them up and then the third one is still there, stirring the pot as if nothing happened whatsoever. And I'm like [LAUGH] he didn't fall there. Whereas if that was Half-Life 3, I'm like oh Hey that's ****. Yeah I think that people maybe gotten condition to expect few games to be messed up and maybe that's certainly part of it, but I don't know. For me I think the expectations were not met because I looked at it like well you know, they've been making these games for a very long time. Hm. They've had these issues all along, but now they're moving on to a new generation of technology. Their baseline, their low spec for consoles will be up a rung on x86 hardware. So you look at it and go well, maybe there are now fewer variables and they can actually tighten some of this stuff up. But then I sent my dog companion away and never saw it again. But then I spent an hour trying to click on a quest objective. And having it not activate, and having to fast travel away and back, and having to relaunch the game multiple times before it would actually do anything. Those are all stories that could just as easily apply to New Vegas, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Oblivion. For me it's one of those where it's like we wanna expect more out of our games. Technology improves and you'd think they would have gotten better at this stuff, but apparently they spent their time somewhere else. And that's maybe the larger problem is I look at Fallout 4 and I don't know where they spent that time. Right. Cuz it's not like it's Different. Yeah. The workshop stuff, the base building stuff's in there for whatever reason and- Feels like a natural evolution of their in-house development that they figured, hey, we can just add this to the game. Why not? Yeah, right. We need something new to show at E3, let's just show this. To do this like people that modded the game liked building bases at some point, so maybe they will want to just do that. But it's one of the things when you look it and go this is roughly the same as previous games that the studio has made. it doesn't necessarily seem larger in scope or smaller it's just kind of that thing. So for it to shift out again and be more or less just as glitchy and messed up as their previous games I think is super crazy. And stepping away form Fall Out Force specifically This is sort of getting into the realm of conspiracy theory. But you know with the advantages of people having high bandwidth internet connections and the [UNKNOWN] day one patches now. Like our developers and publishers. Skipping games with bugs and shortfallings knowing that they can scrap them or patch them up later on? Oh I totally think so. A lot of game development is driven by mile stones where the publisher says we need you to hit X feature on X date otherwise you lose budget and the other ramifications. So, when you have strict milestones like that, and then it comes closer and closer to shipping. You really need to start, you know, hitting those from what I understand, to make the whole thing worthwhile. And yes there is a nature of updates and DLCs now that we've all kind of grown accustomed to and have thus made it capable for publishers and developers to make excuses and stuff. It's not great. But I think of that is perhaps why. Yeah, for sure it's a handful of things to the discs have to be pressed x number of days before they're on the streets they're not done on street, on day one, they're done a month before that. Then it's like okay now we need this extra time to work on whatever this day one patch is going to be or start working on DLC whatever that ends up being. Back before you could just patch a console game. You'd run into things that, I remember it was one of the Tomb Raider games on PS2 I believe where they shipped it broken. And it was just something that was like, well, this is a bad glitch, and the console manufacturers waived it and said You can shift to you know, they call it a running rev, they're like okay look you can put out this many copies of this game and then you have to fix this thing and reship it, so they were basically willing to allow a certain number of copies, and you know it wasn't like something that every single user was going to find, right? It was just like->> I think it was something along the lines of they forgot to put in a weapon but they put the ammunition in. Maybe, yeah. Like one of the shotguns wasn't it? I never ended up hearing the back end of it, what the problem actually was, it was more just like someone in PR going like Yeah by the way this copy we are shipping you is gonna be kind of rare. Why [LAUGH] Because we are working on [CROSSTALK] fix version. Exclusive day one edition [LAUGH]. Right day one edition, more broken. So you know this sort of stuff used to happen then to. You know Nintendo at one point made people Send cartridges back to them. Right. There are definitely multiple versions of games like Star Fox and Super Mario All Stars and stuff like that just kind of quietly were reved in the background. So you know that's been going on a long time. It's just now we have the power to fix these things, and I think a lot of people complain about day one patches but It's the way of things, the alternative of like setting all this stuff in stone isn't gonna instantly fix all these problems and make them glitch free, as much as we'd like to believe that that would force them to get it right the first time, it wouldn't. It wouldn't. It may plan some things but these things are, there's too many moving parts And there are too many market oriented, you know. They have to have the ship day. There's not that many big games coming out anymore, but they announce their dates so far in advanced that there's so much money being spent on marketing campaigns. And television and sponsorships, and all this other stuff. All these, you know, twitch streamers that have to get their game in so they can start streaming it live. And these are the things that give people the budget to make the games that we're talking about, too. Yeah. That's the sort of stuff if we want The games that we love like Fall Out which are these big expansive games to continue, we kind of have to buy into that system otherwise where is the money going to come from. Yeah it's a tricky problem. There's a ton of moving parts on all ends of that saying that are just kind of systemic to the way that big games get developed, marketed and shipped. A nd it sounds like if what you guys are saying is correct,this is something that we're not going to see less of We could possibly see more of this. Well, you know, nothing has been quite as broken as Assassins Creed Unity, has it? Batman you could say. Yeah but that's only one version of it. I don't even know. I think that we've kind of crossed the threshold where the leaps in technology and- Scope of games is starting to like level out a little bit. Hm. So maybe these sort of huge ambitious projects will seem relatively normal in light of regular development and so you'd hope people learn their lessons, Fallout four is a good example of how that didn't happen. Yeah, yeah. But no one is going to learn, I mean the lesson learned from Fallout four is going to be, hey look at us we just sold another 20 million copies of a game that was broken just as broken as the last one. Yeah. Which also sold 20 million copies and That's true>> and no one's gonna learn anything. But could they do it again? Yeah I guess that's the question is could the next Bethesda Studios game be this messed up? We would like to think no. Yeah I would. I would definitely like to think no but I guess we'll find out. Get another seven, five years? Yeah. Nah, man. New Vegas is at like what? Eighteen months tops at three? I think so. Obsidian. Sky Ring 2 Sky Ring 2, right? Yeah. Elder Skulls online is going to kill you. For a new single player Elder Skulls game and they're probably way too behind that. No, Jeff. Cross your fingers that Dulin works properly. Doom plays, well from what I have played of it, it plays wonderfully. I haven't played the multi-player stuff. It's a different engine though, too. Oh yeah, that's true. The [UNKNOWN] tech engine, it's broken in an entirely different way. [LAUGH] Every game is broken [CROSSTALK] But John Goodman comes free I think at that point. Oh really. Yeah, you just get John Goodman automatically. [UNKNOWN] Jeff Koss and Peter Bryan, thank you for coming on and telling us how broken video games are. Let us know how broken you think video games are in the comment box below. [MUSIC]