Falling out

 

This ain't one of those pleasant everyday topics. This is a rant. A complaint against the powers that be that touches on merely the extent of my own burnished ego. No one is made better or whole by my whining, and accepting that in full public is how I'm going to get over the fact that I know Bethesda are working on this, but good lord am I just not in the mood to be understanding. It takes a special kind of idiot to do what Bethesda does so often and so fully, so I am going to rant, I am going to be upset, and there's nothing that logic is going to do about it. Because to be fully honest, it reflects so badly on Bethesda as caretakers that this was ever a conundrum to begin with, and perhaps we should start moving to a future where we tell the big B no! Work on your new damn games for once!

Fallout fever was going haywire for a while, and whilst the knock-on effect is going to be alive for a while- I'd say that the fever pitch has faded somewhat. People are knuckling down and waiting for the second season, passing away their rampant excitement into that box they bury under the church and then slather in concrete next to the emergency sledgehammer should it ever need to be recovered. The production may be talking big talk about how they are rushing to bring the next season "as soon as humanely possible", but considering that now it's not uncommon for a season of a show to take three years of production to bring out- that is straight meaningless. We'll still have buried this show and it's characters long before anything new can be shown off. And do you know what Bethesda did during this golden period of the show? Sabotaged themselves.

Your average gamer flocked to the properties they love in gusto, partaking in all the great vanilla games and stories kept therein, delighting in the eccentricities that the game developers laid out for them. The rest of us are well and used to all of these mods. We've been there, we've gone through the motions, we're fully done with them. We use Bethesda games as springboards to canvass out our adventures through mods- and that concept alone has kept Bethesda RPGs at the very top of single player RPG play charts for years creaking into decades at this point for some. I'd argue it's a core pillar of the company to develop with Mod Making intelligently included in the equation, which is why all the utterly brainless cries to move their new games onto Unreal Engine 5 so they'll look more 'conventionally pretty' always scrapes at my very mind. Unreal Engine games have never, and will never, be as accessible to mod as Bethesda's own propriety engine games, that would be literally the worst move that Bethesda could possibly take towards their future. That being said, that doesn't mean Bethesda don't sabotage their modding scene in other ways...

Fallout 4 has endured so very much, and us with it, in the struggle to be 'recurrently profitable'. The eye-wateringly bad 'Creation club' early days- where Bethesda tried to sell us various recolour mods for every shade of the rainbow, still stings in my mind. And even though they've largely moved past that, and reserve their paid-modding efforts for the largely substantial leaps- we're still scrapping at the dark ages. Make no mistake that this is no the breadth of Bethesda's ambitions, and I suspect what the team really want is to try and get one of those truly seismic mods on their service. Which in actuality would be great for console modders- it would essentially just be a brand new DLC for them to buy. As for everyone else... I shudder to think of the prices cooking up in that twisted head of theirs.

I've said before how insanely 'Bethesda' it is to have Fallout 4's mod-breaking modern version come out directly during the most profitable period for the franchise ever- but I could hardly have predicated just how badly they screwed things up. 'Just wait for the F4SE' I thought, 'as soon as that is updated- we'll have all the mods we need available'! Little did I know the extent of how bad things are. First off, Buffout 4 is AWOL. That near-essential mod that fixes engine problems and provides crash logs- hasn't been updated and no one knows if it ever will be. The creator just can't be found and given that the last time the mod had to be updated was four years ago- that's no great surprise. Who the heck is going to be Fallout modding 4 years down the line- we still don't get any new companion mods in the Fallout modding space!

But what if it gets even worse than that? What if they somehow managed to ship with a mod specifically detrimental to the best the community has to offer, large scale mods? Of course I'm not asking hypotheticals- Fallout 4's current version has a seemingly inherent bug wherein the game stutters whenever an NPC's data is updated- which covers quite a lot of mod types out there. Anything that updates enemies to keep them competitive with the levelling system, for instance, or maybe a mod that changes visual data. The stutters build with the more NPCs added- and though I don't think anyone has been brave enough to try it and post the results online- one could only wonder what big faction remixes do. The more NPCs loaded into the vicinity there are, the worse the stutters become. If you had a Brotherhood remixer and stood under the Prydwen the game would probably crash.

And that has just persisted. Bethesda left that in the final patch. And guess what- the only way it's getting fixed again is if the team go out of their way to patch the game on more time, which means another arbitrary round of updating script mods! In fact, I suspect the only reason we haven't already got the update is because the maintenance team are smartly waiting until they've figured out everything they broke with the latest update so they can safely fix it all with the next one. Because that is just the cursed cycle that all of us live within under the white sun that is Bethesda. Not to imply that Bethesda is dying- I'm sure that Starfield latest DLC reveal went great and we're all talking about how Bethesda is back right now. I don't know because I'm writing this blog literally 15 minutes before Summer Games Fest- but Bethesda wouldn't let us down again... right?

So this was a rant to basically say- good god does this company have it's hand firmly on it's ass recently- they can't even accept a free PR moment correctly. The only net positive thing they did was maybe update Fallout Shelter- oh wait- I forgot that Fallout Shelter has been abandoned for the past few years on every device that isn't a mobile! So that update didn't touch the Switch or PC version! (Yes, the PC version is the un-updated one! Kill me.) I just want to grab at the team and shake them by the shoulders- desperately pleading for them to nail something. Anything! I want to talk about how much I love this studio again but by god- they really don't want me to! I love their games but it's getting harder to convince myself of that as the years go by...