You Can Blame Bethesda For This ...
I had another post in mind for today but as my only lightly modded version of Fallout 4 is buggy as FUCK I'm going to complain about Bethesda instead.
Disclaimer: I actually love Bethesda but their games ARE buggy as fuck.
I had quite a stressful day yesterday (I'm not going to tell you why, not yet in any case) so in the evening I thought I might enjoy a couple of hours of Fallout 4 before a live-stream I wanted to watch began. I haven't played it for ages because it's been much too hot in my little flat for my PC - we have three extra fans in here and "Mordheim: City of the Dammed" still overheated my PC - so I've been trying to not over stress it lately but last night I thought it would probably be cool enough.
I unplugged my XBOX 360 controller [1] because if you don't it won't let you play with mouse and keyboard without .ini fiddling and I couldn't be arsed with that bullshit. Sorry, I'll calm down now. I just wanted to play so I unplugged my controller and started the game. All was going fairly well. Preston was no longer stuck on the roof of the little Gym that I had made next to my house although Mana Murphy was standing on her chair (looking quite spritely I might add, I wish she's go get stuck somewhere ...).
Went to get a screencap of Murphy standing on her chair but apparently she wants to stand on the floor now. Bitch!
I handed in a repeatable quest to Preston and checked out what quests I had to do. Finally the Automaton DLC was open - I had the radio signal! I played it once and the proceeded to get ready for the mission. I always play a sniper/archer type character in all of the Bethesda Gamebyro Engine Games (apart from Morrowind but anyone not using magic in the game is insane) so I had my 4 different scoped sniper rifles slung over my shoulder (stuck god knows where .. seriously Bethesda, what is that?) and off I went travelling down to where the marker sent me.
As you can see I have all three "3d Universe" ES and Fallout Games all built in Gamebyro. If you see any games in my list you want to know about, leave me a comment!
It was pretty much a blood (circuit board) bath. Everyone but Ada had been slaughtered maliciously by The Mechanists Minions - I thought I'd sorted him in Fallout 3! It was here that I noticed the first bug - it was with a mod, I have one that makes corpses glow so you can find them easily. The glow is supposed to disappear once the corpses have been looted once but in this case none of the exploded robots had a glow about them even though they had tons of loot. Oh well, I thought, I'll send Ada back to Sanctuary and take Dogmeat onward to Diamond City to grab some ammo.
This should be a relevant screenshot but as often happens, I didn't get any so instead here's me about to get brutally murdered. By the Behemoth. No, that's not me ...
This all went well enough (not enough Ammo that I wanted) and so I fast travelled back to Sanctuary intending to pick Ada up and carry on with the DLC. Except she wasn't there. I walked all over Sanctuary and couldn't find her. I built a bell and rang it a ton so all my settler's would come to me. Still no Ada. I built the robot bench to see if I could modify her and just couldn't see her because she was under the textures. Nope, Ada was nowhere to be found.
Time for some Googling I thought. The Steam forums told me what I expected, that I could just use a console command. I went back into the game and hit the ¬ key to open the console but nothing happened. I looked online again for more answers - ah they disabled the console, I have to go re-enable it in the .ini file ... maybe now you understand my annoyance? Let's take a trip down memory lane ...
it won't let you play with mouse and keyboard without .ini fiddling and I couldn't be arsed with that bullshit.
Source: Me about five paragraphs ago.
So, we've come to the crux of the matter. Bloody Bethesda, perhaps in solidarity with the Console Peasants (sorry)[2] had disabled the console by default on PC. Even after it's been patched with the Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch (no I can't get achievements, no I don't care) the console, for some reason was disabled. There's no real reason that I can see why they would do that. I don't use the console often, I life'd Lydia once after I accidentally shouted her off a mountain during a fight with a dragon and in Morrowind I play the inheritor class - after getting off the boat I find a rich aunt has died and left me a lovely house (mod) and five grand - I've played Morrowind so much I don't think of this as cheating, it's just part of my character's backstory.
My lovely house. This is such a great mod but it has too much storage space for me. I'm an awful hoarder.
Anyway. So Bethesda, knowing that their games are as buggy as fuck[4], disabled by default a tool that is left in the game so it can be used to fix bugs on the fly. Do you see why I'm annoyed? This is almost as bad as when I found out they had nerfed the magic again in Elder Scrolls V. The one good thing they did with that franchise is allowing Jiub to wipe out the Cliff Racers. They make really strange decisions about their games. Sure, why not have voice protagonists? Why not remove levitate? Why not make it so there's only eight shortcut keys? Why not make the player use the controller if it happens to be plugged in? It's not like PC players have any other ways of controlling their characters in the games? Okay rant over.
I started writing this last night so I lost some of my annoyance but I still believe everything I wrote I'm just really tired and want to get this up so I can start on something more positive which at the moment looks like will go up tomorrow. Thanks for reading. Upvote. Comment. Resteem etc. TTFN. x
[1] After writing this post I reinstalled GTA SA and have been having a grand old time burning round Los Santos on my PCJ - 600 and I prefer to do it with the controller. No idea why.
[2] I feel like I should clear something up. The only reason I have an XBOX 360 controller is because I found one for a fiver in a charity shop. Bow down console peasants, we use your tools because we can, not because we have to.[3]
[3] I went a little over the top there but seriously PC MASTER RACE FTW!
[4] I know I don't normally swear this much but I feel quite strongly about this ...
A bummer the game's so buggy. Those graphics are gorgeous.
My newest hardware is only up to playing Fallout 3. Great fun but uniformally grey and mud-colored. I've been waffling for years over whether to build a gaming PC or just buy a damn console. In any case I usually trail the scene by being a generation behind on games. (The last console I bought was the original XBox, second hand, in 2003.)
I had to chuckle about your computer overheating because the weather's too hot. The humidity around here tends to wreak havoc with our electronics in the summer. The struggle is real, man.
I love Fallout 3 and New Vegas although NV is my goto place when I want to experience the dull mud-colored, almost insane making uniformity of Bethesda's idea of a dystopian future. There's nothing quite like crossing the desert in the middle of the night hoping to jump some NCR targets and having a Deathclaw jump out at you!
As for my PC the processor is one we bought second hand in a box about 6 years ago, for my other half. It's almost a different computer now apart from the fact it's in the same case. It started life with a very cute little Nvidia 9600 graphics card. Since I've had it it's had it's mobo changed (the pci-e slot blew) and now has a RX 460 which I bought myself for my birthday. It's so darn easy to upgrade your PC, especially with all the videos on Youtube to show you how to do stuff. Also, it's very satisfying when you turn it on and it works after it's been in bits for ages on your kitchen table.
Yeah, I love taking the PC apart and upgrading it. You'd be amazed how many functional parts I've gotten from the dump's recycling pile! (And how many people just toss their hard drives out without wiping them.) I usually stick with older PC's though, because the pleasure of putting them together is greater than the pleasure I get from playing the latest games.
But that latest Fallout does look tempting. And it would be cool to turn on all the fancy shaders in Minecraft...
My Mum's attic is full of the last fourteen years of computer parts - wires, hard drives, disk drives the alot. I wasn't exaggerating when I said I was an awful hoarder.
That sounds like an impressive stash! I think my mom's attic still has the original IBM PC and a dot matrix printer.
I've been on a minimalism kick lately and just unloaded a Pentium-4 tower, a Sony Vaio from 2000, and a 12 year old MacBook at the dump. Seemed a shame, since everything but the MacBook still worked fine.
Bethesda's games has maxed Charisma skill so that no matter how buggy they are, we'd still want to play them.. And loved them. One more buggy game from Betheda I might start to think the bugs and glitches are the actual features of the game.
"It's not a bug, it's a feature" said every programmer ever ....
And yes, I'll still love them no matter what but at the moment Fallout 4 is my least favourite child.
It was all downhill when they tried to charge you for mods they didn't make. I've avoided their products since.
From what I hear they are doing it again with this creator workshop but as I have the games as I like them - very lightly modded with some basic quality of life mods, SkyUi, DarkUI (for Morrowind) and the Fallout 4 Glow thing - I doubt it'll effect me too much. I'm not even playing on the special edition of Skyrim which seems to be the only one they care about now with VR allegedly getting big.
ESO disappointed me at first - I played in the Beta - haven't played since because it reminded me too much of WoW but apparently it's got better and now it's free to play (just gotta buy it) I'm tempted to give it another go.
Thanks for making me laugh on the .ini quote part with that source. It seems like everything went wrong for you yesterday ! I'm just curious as I see Delver in your favorite games on Steam, is it really that good ? Because I played it for about 10 minutes and never relaunched it again, is it that kind of game that gets interesting after some time ? I know 10 minutes is way too short to judge a game but I got it in a bundle so I quick-tested all the games.
Delver is in my favourites because it's fun for a spare 20 minutes when I'm waiting for something on Fallout Shelter. I never get down very far as I'm not terribly good at roguelikes but they do update it all the time - they put modding support in in April. I admit I haven't played it for a while, GTA has been taking up most of my time recently.
Well, I guess I'll give it a second chance then, thanks ! I can definitely see how cool it could get with modding as it looks like the perfect game for that.
Yep, bethesda has a reputation for notoriously buggy games. I recently highlighted that in one of my recent posts. It almost feels like they release the games knowing that the community will fix them so they only do essential QA then release the game.
I have thought that for ages. I don't know that it happened so much with Morrowind, most of the options in the Unofficial Patch seem to be for fixing the game for new systems or adding features to make it more like the newer games like Oblivion style Magic use but with Skyrim? Didn't they need to patch it within like 6 hours of release? Maybe it's partly our fault, being ravenous for the next game. To be honest they could sell me the dev kit and graphics for ES VI and I'd be like "W00t, got the new Elder Scrolls Game!" Seriously, gimmie that thing :D