Bethesda did not play-test Fallout 4

DirtyOldShoe

DirtyOldShoe

Some kind of lucky
Howdy boys and girls. I, and I'm sure a few more of you believe that Bethesda game studios did not play-test Fallout 4. I personally think this is one of the many reasons it is such a bad game. I have some info that I've gathered to make my point. If you find any others, please share, or post your thoughts!

2012 Dice, Todd Howard explaining that they did not outsource play-testers for Skyrim and it was all in house for up to 6 months at a time, per person.

Bethesda recruiting random people in the US to play-test Fallout 4
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

Todd says in an interview that they were playing Skyrim when they were making Fallout 4
Link 1

I can tell by playing the game that it doesn't have that level care as their other games. I also noticed that they credit the executive chef in Fallout 4's credits. Not sure how useful he was in it's creation.
Link
Next big mod I release I might add ROYALE® to the credits.
 
R.Graves said:
Sometimes I just like sitting in libertalia and watching the boards between the boats go fucking apeshit for no reason.
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Don't remind me of that wasted potential. A barge settlement, with minutemen turned raiders. They had it all there, and they fucked it up.

JetCan'tMeltVaultDoors said:
Bethesda is kind of like raw cinnamon powder, it's okay in small amounts if you add sugar (mods), but if you try to take a spoonful without it, you're going to have a bad time.
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Except the whole world suddenly thinks cinnamon powder is the greatest thing ever and better than actual meals (TW3).
 
Actually, I started this thread because I am working on a different article and this came up and pissed me off so much that I had to have it as an OP. If you watch the whole first video in the link and see Todd reveling in the glorious success at Skyrim, you can see none of his core rules applied to Fallout 4, if they followed the same rules as Skyrim, 4 might have been good, but the other thing that pissed me off was him saying that:

"Your ideas are not as important as your execution." ~Todd Howard 2012 Dice
Wrong fucker, they're equal and for a AAA, they should be near perfect.
 
Wouldn't surprise me that Bethesda didn't playtest all that much. I know the Toddler didn't seem all that invested in Fallout compared to his usual gusto with Elder Scrolls. But then compared to how they treated Morrowind to Skyrim and even Fallout 3, alongside it's expansions, Fallout 4 feels like they just made it for the money and brought very little commitment and energy to the game.
 
MercenarySnake said:
Emil being one of the biggest reasons.
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Old Pete's bigger. He's a PR VP after all, everything should please him in the first since he speaks from the target audience. Remember his glorious praise at Fallout 4 based on a sole fact that you can just leave the conversation?
And remember that marketers are in better position in Bethesda than anyone else.

Here's another thing. Skyrim for PS3, according to vgchartz, sold 6.56 million units total. Bethesda pretty much self aware about how not well this game works on PS3 but outside from workarounds, there's no real fix for memory overflow shit. Basically cucked over 1/3 of their audience.
https://gamerant.com/bethesda-aware-skyrim-ps3-problems-tao-133791/
Yet they go full denial when called bullshit.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...futes-skyrim-ps3-lag-claims-by-fallout-nv-dev

Don't forget about how they just forgot to turn on optimization flags in compiler and modder the job for them at launch.
http://wccftech.com/elder-scrolls-skyrim-mod-40-cpu-boost/
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/12/mod-boosts-skyrim-performance-by-up-to-40-per-cent-could-be-faster/

And back with Fallout 4, a question. Is it just me or with the last update the game now performs worse?
 
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cordelionreaver said:
Bethesda in a nutshell
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Nutshell.png
 
pretty obvious they haven't playtest Fallout 4 at all (or the kids they used went so far as Cambridge police and then said "DONE WITH THIS SHIT!") even without research but with common sense, I mean for fucks sakes, how the fuck do people even manage to get into Goodneighbor's region without bashing their skull on the desk? Even on Low, the heart of Boston takes a massive shit on computers with decent graphic cards, hell even people with gtx 970 the game lags like utter shit there, dropping from 60 frames to 5-15. I recall having to sit there waiting for MINUTES for Boston to stop thrashing my systems and finally load up. This is fucking unacceptable.
 
Zerginfestor said:
with decent graphic cards
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These will do shit against CPU-calculated shadows and shitty rendering right from Morrowind, 14 years old. Can't believe they still leave engine render scenes not even being looked at.

Also, Creation Engine's V-SYNC is worse than, say, Nvidia driver-ready one.
 
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0wing said:
These will do shit against CPU-calculated shadows and shitty rendering right from Morrowind, 14 years old. Can't believe they still leave engine render scenes not even being looked at.

Also, Creation Engine's V-SYNC is worse than, say, Nvidia driver-ready one.
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Oh yes, forgot about the Shadows being focused on just one processor, which absolutely fucks up the entire game and makes it downright playable in most regions..
 
0wing said:
These will do shit against CPU-calculated shadows and shitty rendering right from Morrowind, 14 years old. Can't believe they still leave engine render scenes not even being looked at.

Also, Creation Engine's V-SYNC is worse than, say, Nvidia driver-ready one.
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Having extensive work with the engine, I had a theory about what they could do for performance. There is a thing called occlusion. It's like a plane or sheet. In the creation kits you can draw occlusion, what this means is that if I make a tall occlusion box in a building, when you look at the building from any angle, what is behind the building doesn't render, meaning it doesn't need to waste any resources on rendering things you can not see. I have done this in my works, Bethesda does it too, but I was hoping they would have the sense to build it into their models, so when a building is dropped, it has perfect occlusion, instead they stuck with the old manual way which is imperfect and tedious. The manual process leaves much room for error and some areas missing occlusion, this would drastically help ground level Boston which is a stuttery mess. Basically the game would only render what you see. It would be a matter of upgrading the .nifs they use to have the included occlusion mesh, much like the collision mesh. Birds eye view would gain a slight performance as well.
- Also Dynamic object render distance can improve performance.
- Actual Enemy clean up, there is on some NPCs, but not all and a dead NPC still have processing.
- Better Priority management. In games like Oblivion and Skyrim, if there was too much AI in one cell the game would store the data or hide the NPC until the cell limits could be used. Cells were not bogged down with hordes of enemies. A good test of this is to have a couple companions in the Dragonborn DLC, stand out front of Tel Mithryn. When you talk to them, they will seem normal. Then install Vicn's Fantasia and do the same thing. Your Companions mouths won't move any more. Systems shut off to keep the game running. Obviously having 50+ mushroom people in one cell isn't a good idea, but at least the engine handled it properly. In Fallout 4, you companions AI package will permanently break. I experienced this doing the final scene with the Mechanist because the bodies don't clean up properly and your companion should have the highest priority over a generic NPC.
 
Nice how there's a quasi racist gag in that first video, what with the guy getting a Chinese Fortune cookie that alludes to him having eaten cat. Cute.
 
I mean personally for my mod I do play test alot and play my mod through stage by stage because i'm not even that good so I need to test to see if it actually works. But yeah I don't get how you can make a game with out seeing how it will actually work. But saying it sometimes I can do things and not test it because I know how it will work or can use the render window. I like other to test my mod so they can give fed back but as i'm making the mod I need to pkay test it.


I think basically you should play test it well as much as possible
 
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