The lies of D-evelopers.

 Who's telling porkies?

You've probably heard the news. The world has finally be awakened to the existence of the universe's first time traveller by way of a review for Starfield dropping more than two months before the game arrives. Even for those that over charge the ridiculous sum for the 5 days of early access, this is a bit of a premature take denoting that our guy here must be one of the most powerful timeline manipulators ever to enter this realm- and he chose Metacritic to be his first port of call. To be serious for a moment, I actually had no idea that Metacritic was stupid enough to allow reviews for games to be posted before the thing was even out; but I guess manually switching reviews on and off for every single game that has ever existed based on the shifting sands of various release dates would be a monumental moderation conundrum given the sheer unbearable size of the industry. Still, at least they hid the review before long- at least there's someone with keys to the moderation office.

And what does this virginal review say, you ask? Well isn't that just the query, let's see...  oh, it's a 0. Well that's a shame, I was really looking forward to Starfield too! What 's the issues then? "Bethesda- because making games that work out of the box is less important than figuring out all the ways to extract as much money for your bank account as possible. Starfield super special 76 edition includes the expected disappointment. Comes with a shot glass so you can participate in the recurring internet Historian drinking game. Take a shot every time Todd Howard lies. Or don't, you will be dead from alcohol poisoning 5 minutes into the 20+ minute masterpiece highlighting yet another Bethesda disasterpiece" Hmm... strong words that read distinctly as though they're being written by a Twitter user who is currently making use of the side-ways cry-laughing Emoji- the international symbol of cope. But he, because I can safely assume this is a youngish-male who owns a Playstation, does draw on a point I do want to touch on though- the lies of Todd Howard.

Because it is by no means some wild or unexpected take to call Todd Howard a rampant liar who carries a cutting knife specifically for extracting that pound of flesh he's always after from his fans. A base, beggarly finical rouge, incapable of keeping his pinching fingers out of the pockets of those that think the world of Bethesda as he drowns them within a tide of false promises, endless unwanted re-releases and broken disasters that break your console, sleep with your wife, kill your dog and go on to run for office in your local elections as a spoiler candidate with really unclear and disruptive policy promises. And it's a perception that I've always found... odd. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fanboy for anyone in the industry and Todd has certainly had his moments of questionability, but when it comes to the liars who flaunt mistruths about what their games contain, I never really think of Todd.

I think of companies like Ubisoft, when it comes around to some of their most famous game reveals like that for Watch_Dogs. We all know not to get excited for the promises of CGI trailers that merely attempt to 'predict' what a final product will entail, but seeing gameplay should really be a moment to dispel such uncertainties. Yet the Watch_Dogs reveal gameplay is infamous for how badly it oversold the movement, density and visual fidelity of the final game based on world simulations the team weren't even nearly finished creating yet. The same was true for the initial gameplay for Assassin's Creed 3 which made the open-forest sections of the game look wild and untamed and wreathed in gloriously chilling snow blizzards that glitter with the enemies blood. Or 'Ghost Recon: Wildlands' which just straight up presented a heavily scripted gameplay snippet in which the AI reacted in ways it never does in the real game. Running away leading to an exciting chase? Um... Wildlands AI invariably stays in it's assigned area and shoots dumbly until it's dead, trust me I played that game for years.

And what about 'No Man's Sky'? Perhaps the poster child in 'games that actually just lied'. To be fair, the issue with No Man's Sky was a complicated one. The lead of the project wanted it to be the best game he possibly could make it, and that lead him to having broad conversations about concepts they expected to be in the game as though they were already present. He claimed in hindsight that everyone knows about the twisting sands of game development, but his was a mind befuddled with excitement- rewatch all those interviews and actually hear his promises- Playing with others, giant sand worm monsters- none of that was offered with an air of doubt or portent. The man guffawed about how exciting these systems were, how cool it all was to interact with. And of course it runs a little deeper than that, No Man's Sky was in bed with Sony to some degree and I'm sure some pressure must have been applied from that relationship. But if you're looking for excitement dragging out into unintentional mistruths- there's you benchmark.

And then we have Blizzard- famous Blizzard. This is perhaps the company best known for bad faith and intentional lies. Lies about their own trustworthiness and competency as a developer. Lies that Diablo Immortal was going to be fair and equitable, whilst simultaneously courting various Chinese investors about ways they could make it as predatory and pathetic as it ended up being. Or how about Overwatch 2, launching the game hand-in-hand with the pre-launch promise of their dedicated single player mode with hero skill trees and diverse playstyles and all that goodness, all the while knowing they would be winding down those projects but refusing to publicly cancel them because that would dampen their early release perception. And then WOW Classic, meant to invoke the loving sensations of old school World of Warcraft without the overbearing monetisation which sickens old players in the base game. Oh wait, WOW token premium currency ended up landing on the Classic severs. I guess nothing is sacred in those offices.

Or perhaps we can look at lies incarnate: Peter Molyneux. The man of a thousand falsehoods, he too started speaking mostly out of pocket thanks to his excitement and hopes for what the final product could be. He wanted his games to be the best they could be and he spoke as if they were. Then he just got bad at keeping promises. Let's not forget the whole 'Godus' debacle with the member of the public who was meant to be the architect of his new game whilst receiving a wage for their time, only for that deal to completely fall through when Godus itself started falling apart. And now we have his modern grift wherein the man has ripped off the mask and just tried to start a shockingly prototypical crypto-gaming nowhere project where he sells plots of digital lands to braindead crypto-investors who think they're getting in on the ground of something big, not even realising the rug they've happily stepped onto. I guess with the amount of scams that make up the Crypto space, at this point they're used to being grifted.

In comparison to all of those extreme examples, what has our man Todd really lied about? "It just works." in relation to the settlement builder mode of Fallout 4 which was much lauded when the game came out. Was the system perfect, no. But nobody claimed it was. In fact, all we were promised was that the thing would work. "Sixteen times the detail!" Is often parroted with actually no concept of the context at all, because people just hear that description about anything to do with Fallout 76 and make their assumption. He was talking about the rendering draw distance- I can't personally attest to if that is true or not based on my time playing 76, but neither can any of the people who wave that as a weapon to make a vague point about 'Lying Todd'. "See that mountain, you can climb it." I don't even know why this quote is controversial, it's factually true. Any landmass within the borders of Skyrim is scalable, that's just the nature of scale in an Elder Scrolls game. "Fallout 3 had over 200 endings"- is more facetious. I can understand the issue there- Todd was talking about the various different combinations of ending slides in a manner that was either utterly clueless or deliberately misleading for effect, I definitely err towards the later in that instance. "You can play forever." If there's any game for which that's true, it's Skyrim. People are still making content for that game more than 10 years later. All in all, I'd say that Todd has a pretty good track record for being decently stand-up, and the fact that the general consensus is to consider the man one of the most duplicitous in the modern industry- hell, I can't tell if that's an insanely privileged view of the industry or you're just plain lying to yourself!