Agreed.

Some of these dev studios find themselves in bad predicaments due to lack of funds and/or mismanagement. Gamers make the publishers out to be the villains nearly always, but the publisher wouldn't have any rights or be able to place any restrictions on the dev studios if they hadn't signed them over to begin with.

That's just it though. I love Morrowind to death, I have spent thousands upon thousands of hours in Vvardenfell. It was and is amazing. (Though I would kill for new animations...and to be frank dice-roll first person combat has not aged well...)

I also spent thousands of hours in Cyrodiil.

I am working my way toward thousands of hours in Skyrim.

Spent a thousand or so in the various Western Wastelands.

I spent about one thousand hours in the Capital Wasteland.

Working my way there in the Mojave Wasteland.

My point is, I love the old games, they were great. The new games are different, but they're still pretty darn good games. People call FF7 garbage all the time, it didn't earn it's reputation from being trashy though. It's just cool to hate on newer stuff these days. So that's what all the cool kids do.

One symptom of this same attitude is how for so many people the rating system is either a 10/10, or a 1/10, nothing in between exists to a lot of people nowadays.
So it's always:
Morrowind: 10/10
Oblivion: 1/10

When really it should probably end up more like:
Morrowind: 10/10
Oblivion: 7 or 8/10

I wonder what they meant by returning it to steam ? it was already there just change the names of the owners or re-release including steamworks features like achievements or steam cloud or cards ?

Given some of the vitriol directed toward some devs over Kickstarter projects, I think gamers are beginning to see the other perspective. We've heard allegations of financial irresponsibility, slipped schedules, broken promises, intentionally unrealistic funding targets, etc. Crowd funders are raising the kinds of fusses expected of publishers, and you can.imagine how tense the relationship might be if $20 million were on the line.

As with many things, nothing is black and white. Good and bad things happen on both sides of the fence.

That's for sure. Not being able to buy Fallout here is a rather bad thing though. Bethesda so far seems to boycott GOG.

I'd like to thank Bethesda for removing the GFWL from the Fo3 steam version and leaving it on the Retail version. Which is lovely....If Take Two and Warner allowed you to redeem the retail codes for Bioshock 2 and Batman: AA and AC, throwing in some bonuses or upgrade versions ( Bioshock 2 got Minerva's Den for free, the Batman games were upgraded to the GOTY editions ), the Fallout 3 retail disc owners are vastly left with their eyes to the post-apocalyptic sun. They still have GFWL, with only way to get rid of it being what is the equivalent of using a crack. The launcher has SecuROM and if you bought the DLC's via GFWL market, you are "bleessed" with the GFWL activation.

For the people that own the said combination, the method of having a functional game is to move the DLC's in the data folder and use a xlive crack, If you are one of those fortunate people that own a GOTY edition, you will need only the xlive crack. So again, big thanks to Bethesda for providing "legal" alternatives for the retail buyers to play their game after the GFWL closure.

P.S.: I'm a bit lucky, because i do have a GOTY edition.

It is mostly only on rare occasions like this that I am happy that I am sort of semi-shopaholic when it comes to , well , amongst others GOG.com games (though I recently have had to face that I severely needs to cut my spending) , so I had bought the Fallout games already back in 2011 ....
671 other fantastic titles offered in GOG.com's DRM-free catalog ? well then maybe there is still hope for my wallet ;) , I mean then if GOG.com gives their customers a lot of really nice offers , as they have done in the past - then there is still hope that I might find the money to buy those GOG.com games that I don't have already....

I was hoping to see a classic or two to start the new year off after this but so far it doesn't look like it. Well atleast I have the Fallouts and didn't miss them. :)

What do you mean with "dice-roll first person combat"? The possibility to miss with melee swings?
For me that's actually one of the strong points Morrowind has over the newer Elder Scroll games. The progression from being a weakling, barely able to hit a rat with a sword to a mighty hero, strong enough to slay the demi-god Vivec worked very well in Morrowind. Additionally the gameworld is probably the most interesting Bethesda has ever done.
Morrowind is far from being a perfect game but it's the last Bethesda game I really enjoyed playing.

Oblivion shares it's positives with all newer Bethesda games: great modability, lore and a huge world to explore (although Cyrodiil is extremely generic fantasyland with far worse world design than Morrowind and Skyrim).
It was completely destroyed by the terrible level scaling (I don't like it in general but it was implemented in almost the worst way possible here), the cringeworthy writing outside of lore, the uninspired quest design and lack of C&C.

Writing, world & quest design were actually one of my biggest gripes with FO3 as well. It could have been a decent game if Bethesda had improved these things.
Case in point, I actually like Obsidian's New Vegas. It shares some downsides with all newer Bethesda games: Clunky, unstable engine and less than perfect combat. But it actually feels like a Fallout game, the writing is not the best I've ever seen but lightyears ahead of everything Bethesda ever did (especially in the DLC campaigns!), it has lots of branching dialogues and C&C (although Obsidian chickened out several times, adding so many alternative paths leading to the same goal that it's almost impossible not to succeed no matter what). The world and quest design is far superior. And Obsidian actually took the effort of making a huge, branching main quest with several fail saves in case the player kills everyone instead of taking Bethesda's lazy route of simply making every second character immortal.


While I'm of course super cool, I don't hate new games in general, there are many new games I enjoy (like New Vegas). I just genuinely dislike everything Bethesda has done in recent years, which is especially frustrating as their games are right up my alley in theory (open world RPGs) but after having fun exploring heavily modded worlds for a while I always hit a point where I just can't stand the tedious combat, writing and quest design any longer.

Spoken as if the the devs are given any better contracts to sign instead of either closing down their studio or hoping that the publishers are not run by soulless vampires who exploit every loophole that their legal department provided for them.

While hand to mouth economics may be the way some studios have always operated, even the better managed studios can get to vicious circle if their next game gets delayed just enough to allow the competition to release their games at the same time. Then the publisher's like EA and Zenimax can appear as saving angels while in reality they are just waiting to find an excuse to dump the developers as soon as they can get away with it and absorb the new IPs to their collection.

Bethesda reportedly tried to do the same thing to Human Head, according to IGN: http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/06/05/what-went-wrong-with-human-heads-prey-2 (that message board post Iinked to eariler is in a thread about Human Head vs Bethesda too)

The publisher is not like a bank. They don't loan to developers anything. A loan would mean developers pay it back and get to keep the profits and become self-sufficient (no more loans needed). In reality, the publisher typically keeps all the profits, and the retain all the rights of the game and the IP. The developer gets absolutely nothing beyond the "loan". Once the developer finishes their game, they have no control over it. And once they finish their game, they will need another "loan" to continue to exist as a company and work a game.

From the IGN article: And that was the studio's mistake and that seems to be the problem more often than not - why rely on (oral) promises that are not turned into legally binding terms for both sides?

Sounds like they need to close those loopholes...
That's the cold reality of it, I suppose, at least for the devs that find themselves in that vulnerable position.
The point I was trying to make was that the publishers provide funding, and there's stipulations involved. I should have just said that instead of comparing it to getting a loan from a bank.



Perhaps more dev studios should start out with smaller projects and a smaller budget. There's also crowd funding that some are using, though as Yause pointed out in post 695, crowd funders are raising fusses due to several allegations.

You don't end your posts with "Yours Truly"?

Disappointing!

;-)