this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Stop. Preordering.
100%. I'm a diehard Bethesda RPG fan, but never ever preorder. I'll never understand the stupidity in doing this.
I also got hyped and joined the launch day queues when i was a kid. But then we as a community got burned again and again.
Like even the most casual gamer must get pissed off by broken servers.
Honestly I think this is a considerable portion of pre-orders. We didn't have too much money when I was a kid so having something pre-ordered, knowing that when it comes out I'll for sure get it, felt really good. Those were the ODST, Battlefront 2 (original) and Oblivion days, though.
Times have changed since, and even to kid me I'm pretty sure how buggy these games tend to be would annoy me.
At the end of the day, it's a constant battle in my head between "let people enjoy things and do what they want with their own money" and "their spending actively lets companies know it's ok to do this over and over again, delivering buggy messes that will affect game series I enjoy" lol.
The people that preorder clearly aren’t listening
Like at least find out if the planets are any good first and not just 2000 procedurally generated flavors of bear asses to collect.
Hopefully there's a whole RPG game in there and those are just side stuff to muck around and get some loot.
I feel like mods would liven those planets up, but even then, I’m still expecting starfield to be very buggy.
The only thing they showed as a quest there was collecting bear asses from generic dialog with a scientist so that's not a great sign. I can live with bugginess but if the content isn't compelling why am I playing? if the content is compelling enough I'll deal with a lot of bugs.
This is the part that really worried me. They were talking about how the planets are procedurally generated but have the little "environmental narrative" elements that Bethesda is known for. So I thought, okay, maybe they procedurally generated 1000 planets and then populated them by hand with quests, NPCs, etc.
Then they go on to talk about how "your experience on a planet may be different from your friend's experience on the same planet," and they show an obviously procedurally generated fetch-quest from a generic NPC. So I'm getting the feeling that anything to do with the main story or the main faction quests is done by hand, but everything else in the game is just going to be procedurally generated nonsense. I could be wrong, but it's worrying.
I feel lucky. The only game I have ever pre-ordered was Battlefield 3 for PS3. Considering it's EA and Frostbite was relatively new, I really lucked out
Why are people advising against pre-ordering? Is Bethesda known for not meeting expected release dates?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf5Uj4XIT1Y
Basically, preordering incentivizes companies to release games that are not finished. In general, companies will always maximize revenues while minimizing costs. If they can release a game that didn't cost them as much to produce (getting massive preorders through good marketing but pinching development and quality) then they absolutely will. look at any AAA released this year
It's a digital good, there's no scarcity and a lot of them turn out buggy or just bad.
Why are people buying products that they can't even have until release day?
IMO it's generally not a great idea to pre-order anyway because it's not like they can ever run out, plus you never know what's going to happen on launch day. The game could be a big mess like Cyberpunk was, or the servers could go down because everyone's downloading at once so then there'd be no point paying to get it on day 1 anyway.
And on top of that, Bethesda has a bit of a reputation for putting out games that are... let's say unpolished on release day. I usually find the best approach is to leave it for a day or two, see what people are saying about it online, and then pick it up if you really want to.
I think one reason is that Bethesda's previous game's, Fallout 76's, release didn't go very smoothly. Not at all smoothly. Internet Historian has a good video about that: The Fall of 76
That and preordering a digital product that literally can't run out has no benefits.
You just put down money for something without any idea what you're getting.
Preordering physical copies used to be a thing because shops would run out of them.