Phoenixmgs said:
Bethesda didn't make the game so expecting a buggy mess shouldn't really be expected. However, with news of a 9GB Day 1 patch, it was obvious the game wasn't quite polished when it went gold. With PCs obviously having millions of different hardware configurations, there's obviously going to be more PC issues than console issues.
Does anyone think Bethesda made this new stance so they can now release buggy games? Because their reputation is already that they make the buggiest games ever. And this new stance isn't anti-consumer for the average consumer. The state of video game criticism is absolute shit and completely useless for those (the vast majority BTW) that use IGN, Gamespot, and Metacritic. When everything is rated as GREAT, that's not helpful at all. If anything, this new stance may indeed be helpful so that you don't have those type of threads on the more popular game sites saying this game sucks because it's Metacritic is 1 point less than similar other game that just came out. I 100% agree that not allowing reviews before release is anti-consumer WHEN there is a proper criticism within the medium, but there isn't in video games so CURRENTLY it is not very anti-consumer.
I know most people on this site are far different from the average gamer to where you probably have a not very known (meaning much smaller than IGN) critic or LPer that you actually trust so you are actually hurt somewhat by this new Bethesda policy. But at the same time if you normally bought a Fallout or Elder Scrolls on Day 1, it wasn't because reviews said it wasn't buggy. I think any educated gamer knew exactly what they were getting with Dishonored 2 and there was really nothing surprising about the game if you just used some basic common sense.
Even informed people could have been surprised this time, Bethesda games are known to be buggy, as in games made by the developer bethesda. This is not a Bethesda game, this is a game made by Arkane studios and published by Zenimax that renamed itself bethesda publishing.
So far, games published by Bethesda have not really been that buggy, not like elder Scrolls and Fallout games, Doom and Wolfenstein were mostly problem free, so was Dishonored 1, people expect Fallout and Elder Scrolls to be buggy, not literally any game Bethesda publishes.
It's still anti-consumer, your opinion on games reviews notwithstanding, because even the state of reviewing currently would have caught the bugginess of this game before release, so it did hurt consumers judging by the number of returns on Steam and the general surprise at the state of the game, people that are familiar with Dishonored 1 expected similar performance, as both the developer and the publisher are the same.
There really isn't any basic common sense that would indicate that this release would be buggy, especially among informed gamers, for one, its not actually made by Bethesda, and the first game, published by the same publisher, did not have these issues, and Bethesda's previous release with no early review copies, Doom, released very stable on PC, and only had a mediocre multiplayer holding it back.
The only people that saw this coming are people that think any and every Bethesda game is buggy by default, unaware that the developer and the publisher are two different entities, so people confusing Fallout and Elder Scrolls for the entirety of the publisher's properties, not realizing that Arkane's first game was very stable, and Doom and Wolfenstein were both stable as well, even their shitty games like Rage and Rogue Warrior were stable on release.