Why...

:(

I'm amused. I read about half of the book and then forgot about it, but I remember it being pretty good. I 'specially liked the way it handled alien invasion (and actually prefer that Zone explanation to the magic radiation one in the games).

The Official S.T.A.L.K.E.R. facebook page also says the rumour is false, according to their sources.

They also outsourced the shitty gamebyro engine with it, along with the same shitty NPC AI they have used in every game since Morrowind.

Come on, the only tolerable thing in FONV is the writing, because of the involvement of MCA.

Really. Obsidian should have picked the Unreal 3 engine as with Alpha Protocol, the results would have been so much better. Oh, wait..... scrap that.
Also they should have taken their own AI from Alpha Proto... sry, scrap that too.

It never ceases to amaze me, how many jump at the first possibility to bash Bethesda. It's Bethesda's fault that Splash Damage's Brink disappointed, despite being on the hype-machine for quiet a while pre-release. Same for inXile's Hunted. And of course it's common knowledge that Prey 2 wasn't heading down the same road and only Bethesda is to blame for that....

Yes, I'm a Bethesda fanboy and admit it. But some of you guys are in no danger of coming anyway near being unprejudiced.

Personally I don't have this prejudice against Bethesda, they are a good company and support modding. I *just* prefer in this case that STALKER 2 be developed by the original devs, who get the feeling of the series and not an unknown studio+worse engine.

Also you cannot deny that there's at least a tiny tiny Bethesda influence in the projects, just look where id's Rage headed to?

Of course it would be preferable when the original devs could finish Stalker 2. I'm nowhere near the point of thinking, much less defending, that Bethesda should get the IP or even do a game in the Stalker universe.

Even with realizing that I'm a fanboy, I'm all for criticism. However, if someone comes up with claims like "HH didn't even bother finishing an almost shippable game before telling them to fuck off" - he / she better has some facts to back that up. If not, it has nothing to do with criticism, but with slander and mindless bashing.

Of course Bethesda has some influence in the projects - they didn't pushed Brink marketing-wise for over a year, without checking with SD. Just how much influence however, is difficult to say or claim, left alone to point with fingers at anyone else then the actual devs.
And frankly: it was the devs that claimed a revolution for the shooter genre, with the media jumping on it - not Bethesda. Same with Hunted claiming to put the co into co-op.

But now I really wonder: if Arkane manages to deliver Dishonored in the state everyone is anticipating, will they blame Bethes... sry, let me try again... Bethshittia for that too? I bet my hairy ass they won't.

Why does your file system check overheat?
Oh, wait, nevermind...

Splash damage has made several statements about how they will never work with a third part publisher again and will not release another game locked into a third party client ... in not quite saying it outright they said that BS fucked them on the game's revenue and that it was BS's fault the game shipped in a shitty state. it also seemed like (from the wording) that they were not happy with steam .... probably in relation having to jump through a bunch of loop holes to get the patches certified and having to struggle with getting the game to play nice with steam despite SD being far more than capable of building a simpler and more reliable multiplayer back side for the game (both ET:Quake Wars & ET:Wolfenstine had flawless matchmaking systems).

with inExile I am reaching a bit with my assumptions, since they have never made any statements against BS that I have read, however I find that they went with a kickstarter for Wasteland 2 instead of working with BS to be quite damming. BS owns the Fallout IP, and the entire Fallout IP was developed as a spiritual successor to Wasteland ... if the two properties were to be rejoined into "Wasteland II: Fallout" it would undoubtedly result in a literal money explosion. the kickstarter pulled in close to 3 million, BS probably would have thrown at least ten times that at the game but then the product would have been developed under BS scrutiny (if not control) ... Brian Fargo chose to go with the crowd sourcing and that says volumes to me.

Obsidian doesn't make that great of games, it's a fact and I have personally passed on more of their titles than I have bought, so don't think me an apologist for them. Obsidian inherited a mess from BS when they were presented with the source code to F3 and told to (essentially) mod it into an actual Fallout game. however it was their choice to just take it "as is" instead of fixing the flaws before building NV. that said it was also a choice when BS happily told Obsidian to fuck off when NV only had an 84% instead of the contract stipulated 85%, and kept the bonus money .... whatever Obsidian's failing, one fucking percentage point, on a arbitrary (and known inaccurate) grading scale, resulted in several projects getting canceled and multiple long term Obsidian employees losing their jobs.

simply because BS was too busy being pricks to flex on one god damned percentage point.

as for Human Head; read the news, they went on strike because BS was fucking them around the contract and when BS tried to hard ball them into finishing Prey 2 they turned the source code in and walked off ... probably without getting paid anything for what they had worked on for years.


look, many good and highly skilled people work at BS, however the managers for it are a giant bag of dicks and constantly piss all over the fans that keep them afloat: the PC market.

launch day console sales may bank a massive income but it's the PC market that has keep the products BS makes alive, and in the long term roll in far more income than console market on launch day. people are still buying Morrowind for the PC; who the fuck even uses their Xbox anymore much less tracks down new copies of games to play on it ... yet the PC market gets fucked with shitty ports and has to fix most of the bugs / rebuild the UI to be playable on a monitor.

p.s. and for the record, I expect Dishonored to be presented as a bug riddled mess .... care of Bethshitta's QA department being more interested in the launch window than the launch state.

BethSoft makes cool games and then stuffs them full of bugs I swear these bugs are deliberate We should start boycotting bethesda untill they release less bug riddled games I for one won't shell out 89.95 for their bug riddled games they are a software company They should know better!

You actually said it with that one. With all the facts at hand, given / stated from the devs, how many percent is just assumptions?

I can't really comment much on Splash damage, so let's go with inXile. At that time inXile made iPhone games. That's right, after their Bard's Tale rework back in 2004, they where pretty much stuck producing mobile games like Line Rider. And I think we all know how much money is around when you go down that road. Now tell me, who gives a studio in that position the money for a potential AAA-tile like Hunted?
It looks as if inXile didn't gotten off with big money to spend, as the only thing released after Hunted was Choplifter HD. If that now is coming from a bad contract with Bethesda or Hunted just not getting a good enough reception / sales is, once again, just assumptions.

For Obsidian you agreed that they don't make that great of games. Yet still it was clear for you that they received a mess to start with in form of the F3 source code. I do doubt that, seeing that F3 was basically just the Oblivion base further advanced. And a few guys managed to create [url=Nehrim/]http://www.nehrim.de/[/url] with that.
Yes, Bethesda has a track record of releasing buggy games. Just how much that is coming from bad source code and lousy devs or from the sheer scope of the game, is debatable. I tend to go with the last part, as Oblivion, F3, F:NV and Skyrim all managed to run without much problems for me from the get-go. I know that isn't the experience all others gamers had too, but frankly no other game delivers that.

As for the 85% metacritic thing - you sign a contract, you get payed for what you signed for. Yes, it could have been handled differently and it would have looked good if Bethesda would have done so. However, claiming that this is the reason Obsidian employees lost their job and projects gotten canceled, despite knowing that Obsidian wasn't doing well before the F:NV deal AND without knowing just how much that bonus would have been, is beyond assumptions. That's slander.

For Human Head once more, I've read the news about the strike, but nobody's seen behind it. I can't and won't claim that Bethesda didn't done any wrong-doings, but neither is their enough facts around to do so.
And once more, the last title coming from them was Prey back in 2006, which came from 3D Realms and with a development history of over one decade, WITH 3D Realms owning the franchise at that point. The same 3D Realms originally behind Duke Nukem Forever, who are a likely candidate right now, for going the Interplay way.
That's not the studio anyone throwing money at. Who else would have stepped in, buying the Prey franchise and putting HH on it?

I also don't see Bethesda pissing all over the PC market. Or did you miss somehow that in the last 10 years there's NO other publisher / developer around, that supports modding even 20% of what Bethesda does? They certainly don't do that for consoles.

The shitty ports from console are a general problem, not an Bethesda exclusive nor are they the spearhead of it. Frankly, Oblivion was a bad port for me language-wise, but other then that, I can't claim on any Bethesda game being a shitty console port.
The one thing coming closest to that claim, was Skyrim's UI and while I see it's problems, I also see what they tried to do there: to get the clever functionality of Apples iPod in it. Did it work? For some it did, for most PC gamers it didn't. However, I doubt it wouldn't have happened without consoles.