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Comment by DanielleMolloy | Hacker News Reader

Breath of the Wild has a huge open world and was, in comparison widely bug-free when it came out. Same goes for most Nintendo games. Also when it comes to pure gameplay they are much more polished than all the GTAs and RDR2s. What are they doing differently?

A little insight here, not sure whether this is the full story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/03/13/zelda-br...

Did the other recent big open world games (Witcher 3, Horizon) have similar issues when they were released?

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I believe this has to do largely with Japanese game development culture. Japanese developers in general are known for rarely, if ever, updating their games. For example, the game Nier: Automata released with game-breaking bugs, and never got a single patch. Nintendo also doesn't patch their games often, but they have a stronger commitment to releasing things in a good state in the first place. Shigeru Miyamoto famously said, "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."

I looked at the SNES development manual once and it said something along the lines of “if an area isn’t required for completing the game, go there anyways to ensure there’s no bugs”

Nintendo seems to treat all of their online services as an addition to their product. This appears in a few ways:

- No integrated voice chat for Switch, an existing mobile device is used instead

- Significant delay between product launch and paid online service availability

- System upgrades included on-cart for the system so you're not in a situation where you need a system update but don't have online access so you can't play the game you just put in your system

- DLC is actually bonus content, not an integral part of the game split off about 50% through development and stuffed behind a paywall to drive pre-order upgrades

- "Day one DLC"/"On disc/cart DLC" not the primary upsell mode on the Switch for Nintendo developed games - instead, free content packs and paid content packs are slowly released when they're done

Sony and Microsoft seem to treat online services as an integral part of their product, make money when a developer has to publish a patch (after the first submitted patch), and seem to encourage a ridiculous amount of microtransaction DLC (example: There are a ton of DLC packs for LittleBigPlanet 3, including packs of three Marvel, DC, and cartoon characters, all priced at about what a child would get for allowance in a week, Sony taking a 20%-30% of each sold, naturally).

As a result, it seems that Nintendo really does their level best to release games without showstopping bugs because they aren't as reliant on the online component to patch their games. I remember there being a bug in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (on the Wii) that would cause you to lose your progress if you triggered it[1]. Nintendo apologized, issued updated discs, and put up a Wii channel that would fix your save data if it was corrupted by this bug.

[1] More info: https://zelda.gamepedia.com/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Skyward_Swo...

I've heard on the grapevine that Nintendo executive management is super against online; they're apparently terrified of the idea of some pedophile picking up kids via their network and the Nintendo vrand being associated with that in the public's eyes. That's why for instance Mario Kart doesn't let you say anything other than the pre canned statements.

As a parent this is one of the reasons I like Nintendo's approach to online. Not for such extreme examples, but because there is a definite attention to safety online.

They've had issues in the past with Miiverse and explicit material, and more recently with SMO and explicit material in the player icons: https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/8syjzw/psa_...

Bethesda has never released games that were complete. This is the worst of the lot, but Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4 were all basically unplayable at launch. Some were unplayable after being fully patched years later and require fan-made patches. At this point, I don't get it.

I'm not sure why people say this. With the exception of Oblivion, I played all of those games at launch day and did not have any issues in any of them. In fact, I rarely experience bugs at all in my games (Bethesda or otherwise). I'm trying to figure out why. I am either extremely lucky or people are making it seem like these bugs occur a lot more often than they really do. I don't know.

I've played skyrim on both an up to date patched pc version and a release version on my dad's unnetworked PS3. The difference was ridiculous. My dad never ended up finishing because of game breaking bugs. I couldn't handle playing it for long. It would lag or freeze randomly sometimes you'd have to just hold the power on the ps3 until it rebooted. A bunch of missions had bugs that stopped them from being completed. Tons of clipping errors that would leave you trapped or outside the gamemap.

My updated one had a few of these but I could play for more than 20 minutes at a time.

Also, I never played the release version of it but apparently my dad gave up on fallout 3 on his ps3 when a hacking glitch gave him unlimited stats and made the game pointless.

In what ways do you feel BotW was more polished than RDR2? Genuinely asking. My only real gripe with RDR2 is the sluggish controls (by design in a Rockstar game) and the lack of fast travel late game.

RDR2 definitely has more going on than BotW. BotW is large, but mostly empty.

I believe we are on the same page and think you have just missed my "when it comes to gameplay" here. The overall gameplay (of which controls and control flow are a huge element) of Rockstar Games titles always had a lot to wish for. Been wondering for some time how a AAA company got away with it for so long, it rarely ever gets mentioned in reviews.

On that note, if Bethesda releases yet another TES with that God awful first person battle system I am going to... well I suppose I just won't buy it.

> the lack of fast travel late game.

You can fast travel via stage coach or train (for a fee) or one-way out of camp with the fast travel map (if you've purchased it).

Trains are not what I'd consider fast travel and I've had the camp option since the opening of act 2, but it's one way. I want fast travel from wherever. Makes me not want to go far from camp because ugh that ride back.

I understand wanting players to experience the world, but later on I just want to get things done

I'm genuinely astonished by how bad the entire introduction/tutorial to RDR2 is. It's several hours long, completely uninteresting, bogs you down in every control and feature that the game has to offer, and is so ungodly slow that I can't imagine anyone completing it in one sitting. I've played a lot of games; that was among the top 10 worst introductions I've ever seen.

Bethesda just makes buggy software, but as for comparing RDR2 with BOTW, I think the bugs in RDR2 would stem from it actually having stuff in it.

I'm certain that people more talented than me worked on BOTW, and it is definitely polished, but I think it's probably wrangling less complexity to sparsely populate miles and miles of grass with one of a half-dozen "attack player when get close" enemy types.

Wonder if the Nintendo corporate culture got built around cartridge releases, so once released they were pretty much frozen forever. Less of a need for that now but corporate cultures are very persistent.

I'm not sure if or when it was fixed but Witcher 3 had a lot of minor bugs that annoyed me and reminded me of mid-90s PC RPG gaming. Unclickable chests, uncompletable quests (because an item did not drop, or an NPC died instantly), and so on. All very minor inconveniences for my playthrough, it mostly just detracted from the immersion before I moved on.

> bug-free when it came out

Might want to double check with the speed running community on that.

https://www.nintendoenthusiast.com/2018/10/18/speed-glitch-b...

There is a difference between convoluted glitches left in the published game and publishing a game near-unplayable without massive day one patches.

Most glitches exploited by speedrunning are not things that 99.9% of typical players are going to encounter while completing a normal playthrough of the game. Even something as simple as whistle sprinting is almost impossible to discover by accident, much less things like using shield swaps to reset animations or manipulating the physics engine.

Both Witcher 3 and Horizon required 45+ GB patches for me. Horizon was still an amazing game so I don't mind, but I don't know how TW3 became so popular, I couldn't get into it and had to return it, not to mention it ran awfully (on a PS4 Pro too).

Well, Fallout 76 is multiplayer, so that complicates things heavily in terms of bugs and polish compared to those other titles you listed.

As well, this is Bethesda's first multiplayer game, so expect it to have a lot more bugs than your typical Bethesda launch.

Not their first multiplayer game, Elder Scrolls Online?

'Bethesda Softworks' is the publisher for both, but ESO was made by a different studio -- 'ZeniMax Online Studios'. 'Bethesda Game Studios' is responsible for the mainline Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, including now Fallout 76. I think this is their first multiplayer title.

Could be, but then just give the devs more time. As with RDR2 and their 100h week statement these massive day one patches just scream bad management.

Oh, I agree it sounds poorly managed. I expect the first month or two to be a complete disaster in terms of bugs.

Just Cause 3 for the PC was in a terrible state when it first shipped.

https://gamerant.com/just-cause-3-problems-avalanche/

And its still horrible in terms of optimization, never having been fixed after launch.

> Also when it comes to gameplay they are much more polished than all the GTAs and RDR2s

eh?

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