Bethesda no longer sending out early review copies

wtf are you talking about

Speaking of which, those seem to be more common in games now. Almost nobody seems confident in their games now.

This really isn't that big a deal for Bethesda though since they have a tremendous track record for making such great well received games. :^)

You could just not buy the game at release and wait - and this makes it so game review sites aren't the gatekeepers of information and actually have to provide worthwhile content.

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I see you've gazed into the abyss.

Smart, so they can keep giving games the Skyrim treatment: great first hours, shallow and repetitive afterwards

Dismiss.

What's hilarious is how humble and reserved he actually is despite the people who love him and the people who understandably hate him.

you can't be serious

Yeah, right.

Yep, and further from that 2-hour refund point.

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Such a great loss for us gamers, we will miss all the cocksucking such as fake nostalgia about Fallout 4 from hipsters who didn't even play Fallout 3 well earned praise and all the obnoxious shilling joy that comes with it.

user, o, woe is me, to have seen what I've seen this day.

This is a good thing, besides if you base your buying habits on the opinion of a journo then you need to reevaluate your life, pirate before you buy anything.

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Hey, No Man's Sky did it, I don't see why other's wouldn't do it.

4u

I don't care. I got it for free and will try it out.
Pick one and only one.

But morons here still think that dishonored 1 was okay.

They probably did this because of the Boston Salt Parties, which is understandable but I will miss them dearly. Doesn't change anything for non retarded consumers though since you should ALWAYS try before you buy. If there's no demo then just pirate that shit.

But user, don't you know that demo = potentially lost sales??

NMS was a giant gallery of false advertisement

surely you jest?

Only if the game is shit, which is why before demos stopped being a thing I didn't even bother pirating games without them because that just meant that the developers knew their game was shit.

Not that user but I've seen people unironically praise it here. Far less than the amount of people that shit on it but still, there are casuals among us.

It has pretty nice art direction and a cool setting though, and I guess some of the powers are creative but they pale in comparison to even the most simple spells in Dark Messiah

Look at me, do I look like I'm jesting?

Bethesda doesn't send out review copies, they send out early builds of the game with a nice fat load of dosh

Yeah, as completed.

Even normals aint falling for this shit, what a time to be alive.

It's not just that, it's bethesda admitting that they're afraid of bad scores, kukchera, polygon and the rest crying about no free rides and after years admitting that preorder culture is bullshit.
It's beautiful.
Trump 2016

They all lose. What a lovely time.

:^)

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Wait will I still be able to use skyrim as a degeneracy simulator? Will this SE fuck up the mod community (loverslab mods, could care less about gameplay)?

Not likely, I'd guess that any data mods will be just fine. The script extender will likely need to be remade though but that will happen quickly, and any other non-data mods like ENBs might not work either but I can't say for sure.

whats the point of remastered edition again when mods bring it beyond what remaster is offering.
only thing i can think of is making base game run far better and not complete ass.

Well it'll be able to use more than 4gb of memory now, but the system requirements look pretty retarded considering how old the game is so I think it's safe to say they won't be going for the "run far better and not complete ass" route on this remaster and might just do the opposite like that Bioshit 1 and 2 remaster.

SO GOYIM CAN BUY IT AGAIN

Bethesda cucks are out in full force.

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wouldn't hold my breath its Bethesda we are taking about oh wells.

didn't buy it the first time

No. The Special-Edition has it's own install directory, so it's basically like an entirely different game. Your degeneracy mods are perfectly safe for the time being.

That is only a problem for early adopters. Never be an early adopter. Show some willpower and wait a couple of days.

Bethesda fans be all like.

this is the best one.
could be better though, photoshop him coming out of Big Bang's Legs.

Probably more trouble than its worth to give copies to a bunch of reviewers who are just going to make it an excuse to post a page-long tantrum about a random social justice complaint that no one will read except to rage/laugh/cringe, while everyone who cares has either already bought it or won't.

Why should they have to pay for good reviews from IGN or GameStop? It's just cheaper to give out a few early access codes to a hand-picked selection of super-fanbois who are desperate enough to slit each other's throats for clicks and legitimacy. There's no way they'd fuck up potentially the sweetest gig of their entire lives just to piss off Beth by giving an honest review.

[citation needed]

not suprising

I thought that was Nathan Vetterlein for a second.

Is he an actor or something? His I know his voice.

He voices the Scout from TF2.
He verbally shitposts constantly.

Woah shit, is that what he actually sounds like? His voice is way deeper than I thought it'd be.

Fuck I thought I was the only one who didn't like that shit game

I always try to finish it but I get bored of the repetitive shitty gameplay halfway through and leave it

Fuck I thought I was the only one who didn't like that shit game

I always try to finish it but I get bored of the repetitive shitty gameplay halfway through and leave it

Shame he stopped making videos long ago.

1st bethesgay game I ever bought: skyrim
last bethesgay game I will ever have bought: skyrim

The only way I'd ever buy a bethesda game ever again is if I were played for every recorded steam hour of playtime (say, $20/hour) so that after 5 hours I would make a hefty profit.

Fixed because you couldn't pay someone to play it Vanilla.

On one hand Bethesda make buggy, poorly optimised games that almost always feel more like a cashgrab than a quality product. So it's highly likely an element of this move is damage control in regards to their low quality product. However, Bethesda has suffered recently due to review copies for reasons that don't pertain to the low quality of their product. The Boston salt party leaks for FO4 and its DLC came from people with access to review copies. And while I found it funny as hell, you know Bethesda and its fanboys got butthurt about it. Also consider what happened in regards to nuDoom. The video of that fucktard from Polygon playing like he'd never seen a FPS before was widely circulated and it hardly demonstrated the game in a positive or informative light.

So I think that what Bethesda is doing here is dodgy as fuck. Which should honestly go without saying since Bethesda are a dodgy as fuck company. But I can kinda see reasons why they'd make this move beyond anti-consumerism.

yeah they're pissed the journalists made their game look bad so they're like "REMOVE PINKHAIR". The problem is that some journalists that knew what they were doing got taken out in the cross-fire, they will likely loose all credibility with the core gamer completely as a result- if it hasn't happened already. But they figure who cares when brofags and soccermoms buy their games en-mass.

That was what was funny about it and the only good thing to come out of FO4. The piece of shit game is such a turd it can't even support proper porn mods.

He/she likely hasn't. Do you think Polygon hires people that actually play games?

To be fair no one thought badly of nuDoom because of it, everyone was too busy laughing at Polygon and humiliating them online.

It's not like it changes anything. Their fanbase is so retarded and well trained they'll keep buying the trash they peddle regardless.

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People literally buy games because of YouTube. Influencers are not a meme.

I wouldn't even mind "infinite" quests if Bethesda could give enough of a shit to implement them in an interesting way or have them make sense and work in the lore.

If you're gonna have faction warfare then add shit around that. Eliminating high ranking enemy officers, sabotage their bases, intercept their convoys, loot their caches, fend off assassination attempts, do all of the above as the defender this time.

It's not really that fucking hard to implement procedurally generated content so long as you don't have the machine handle everything. Give it hand crafted "blocks" and make it combine them in logical ways and keep in mind it's a fucking machine, it's dumb so keep shit simple.

I hate pretty much everything Bethesda makes, but I still don't see this as dodgy. If anything I think blatant favoritism towards fanboy Youtubers who are a wiling hype team is, in a sense, more straightforward. They and every other publisher have no particular motivation to send early code to publications except for the threat of getting slammed if they don't play ball. Or maybe worse, not getting attention or promotion whatsoever. With the publications being less relevant, that threat is getting emptier by the day.
In a hypothetical future in which publishers ignore journos and send material out to willing hypists, if anything there would be a growing opportunity for reviewers, whether independent or part of an organization, to make a name for themselves as trustworthy, or at least capable of decent analysis.
The journos are just salty because they sold their credibility to be useful idiots for the publishers, and now they're being discarded for more useful idiots. They can never get that credibility back either, so they have no way of clawing back into the "respected reviewer" role – they can only be replaced.

its dodgy because it encourages Previews over reviews. We saw how many hands off demos they did of no mans lie and how the press just simply didn't do their job. Well now, all the mainstream journalists will be forced to do hands off demos. Yes it does play to the strengths of Youtubers, however we've seen how easily manipulated and how just outright unethical Youtubers can be, at this point they might as well be paid marketing.

Its so stupid, its like what they do with pedophiles they want to censor the entire internet just to get at 1% of the population that did the wrong thing. Same applies here, we have stupid reviewers but the majority still tend to do their jobs- just because Polygon released a shit review doesn't mean every other journalist has to suffer for their stupidity. Even if these journalists barely do their jobs as is. But same applies with Youtubers.

You're not fixing the problem, you're actually making it worse.

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I'm talking from the perspective of Bethesda.
As in, SHILL GOYIM SHILL.

The publisher isn't censoring anybody, and the mainstream journalists won't be "forced to do hands off demos." If they want to be a reviewer, they can pull up their big boy pants, play the game on release, and review it properly. If they want to be a marketer, they can gobble publisher cock because they want early access. The difference now is that it will be harder to hide that that's what they're doing, and harder to compete with loyal fans.
They got to this point because they wanted to be both paid marketers and respectable writers/reviewers, and it collapsed on them in a major way.

I would disagree with that, but the specific numbers are irrelevant – if someone has maintained their credibility they aren't going to lose it because they stop getting early copy.

Reminder that Gone Homo became popular because all journos were reviewing it as a ground breaking horror game. Good luck now, fucktards.

Why do review copies exist in the first place? That seems like it'd always create a conflict of interest.

my question then is what value is a game journalists opinion when any other crackpot can jump in front of a camera and shill.

I don't think there is any value. As I was saying them doing their job was in regards to them being Marketers. You cannot deny that they aren't doing as what Bethesda commands of them. Polygon however didn't do that and that's why Bethesda were pissed. So it is a bit unfair because those other journalists were playing to Bethesda's fiddle. I'd like the point out though this is not what I believe. I'm playing Devils Advocate here in which the Journalists being targeted are likely being targeted because Bethesda couldn't be fucked white listing people so black listed everyone.

Because Demos stopped being a thing.

Gorilla Hernandez basically proved every game journalist (and any other journalist for that matter) is better off in a gas chamber.

Polygon and Kotaku are notoriously staffed by imbeciles that can't even prostitute themselves properly.

Review copies aren't the problem. Reviewers should have access to games sooner to give costumers an informed opinion on what they're buying. Problem is that, first, the reviewers are mercenary harlots with not a shred of integrity, and second, publishers use early access to review copies as leverage to make sites/magazines play ball, else they get blacklisted.

But really, the biggest culprit in all of this are the slobbering, mouth breathing hordes of normalfags that lack the self-control not to shit out $60 as soon as they can on a product they only know about through marketing.

It's not dodgy. It's business.

Bethesda makes games for money. Most gamers are idiots who pre-order or buy into marketing. That's fact.

Control the flow of information and spin. Influence media like YouTube and gaming sites. Make people feel left behind if they don't buy your game.

Because folks literally can't wait a week for the reviews to come out.

Agreed. There is an element of "well you should know better". My issue is more with the fact that they keep setting bullshit precedents with business models because they bought something they didn't necessarily understand what they were buying to begin with. And that's why we have DLC.. (you can blame Bethesda for their existence) and that's why we have Microtransactions.

Back in the day though when a journalist covered a game, the game was distributed in Demo form with the review. The internet made away with that process as now Reviews and demos had become totally separate (this was when Gamespot stopped publishing in Magazines for ZDNet/Cnet). Because of that the scrutiny on the Journalist was reduced because they didn't have to prove what was immediately accessible on the cover disc and that the review had become the content. Because the only reason why anyone at least in the DOS market cared about Reviews was to score the latest shareware. Half the time the reviews were discarded because we were too excited to try the game out for ourselves and generate our own opinions. The steps it took to go from Hype to Consumption was less in the 90s compared to today. In the 90s it was almost instant, today it takes ages- this is because of the internet, it sped up the distribution and the Journos couldn't keep up anymore so their role as a distribution platform ended and reverted to being a Buyers guide like they were in the 80s. (in the early 2000s this was the case) By the late 2000s the emphasis was on E3 coverage which lead to the exclusivity wars. This was common place in the Console Market with exception to Playstation that included Demo Discs. But Nintendo was notorious for lying out their asses back in the day in the press, as was Sega and the whole emphasis was on E3 and prior to that CES.

What we're dealing with here has always really been a Console problem in regards to coverage because they were the ones that created the current platform. DOS reviews were so much better because they focused less on events and more on what the game proved right off the disc because in the case of Outpost, gamers could tell IMMEDIATELY that the reviewer was lying. There was so much more accountability. But the console gamer (exception being PS1 because as I said their Demo discs were fantastic and spot on to what the games industry needed at the time) was brainwashed by the bullshit that went on at E3. Why we lost this I'll never know. Just Cause 2 for example had a demo, fantastic one, it didn't hurt their profits, so the stats that Demos take away from Profits is bullshit. It takes away from profits for BAD bait and switch games, but actual good games sell well at the expensive of having to delay the game and put effort into making a demo version.

This is how you fix the problem. But it'll never happen.

I'd also like to point out that the few demos Bethesda actually did were shit and at no point represented the final product in anyway.

GOD FUCKING DAMNIT
Don't even remind of that shit. I picked it up recently, because I only vaguely remembered that something was wrong with it.
Played it for a few minutes until I realized (again) how fucked up the game stats get later on. Not to mention half the shit you build/research is outright broken or simply does nothing.
Fucking FUCK SHIT BALLS.
At least Outpost 2 was good I guess.

Oh, by the way.
When you mention demo discs, you should also mention the most important feature they had:
BEING SHARED
I don't know how prevalent it was were you guys live, but around here, demo discs travelled MILES. Everytime someone got a hold of one, he tried everything in there. Then borrowed it to someone else, who did the same. The same disc would make the rounds doing a better marketing job than a 2million dollars ad on TV. You know why? Because it actually featured good fucking games. Imagine this:
And repeat for a few years. It blew my mind back then. Close to nothing spent on marketing, just a disc travelling around.
Heck, the PS1 demo disc was enough to get a lot of people to switch from the Megadrive to the PS1.

And now we get the "demos hurt sales, goyim".
Fucking hell.

It only hurts sales because games are shit.