Comment by kbenson
9 months ago
I can't really comment on the quality of the game or experience or how buggy it feels because I've never played it, but I will say that counting fixed crash situations is a somewhat arbitrary and useless metric. If each of those crashes affected and was reported by a single person or even nobody because no regular person could really encounter it is a vastly different situation than if each of those crashes was experienced by even 1% of the users.
The criteria by which something is decided to mention in the patch notes is not always purely because the users care. Sometimes it's because the developers want to signal effort to user and/or upper management.
Maybe Mount and Blade was super boggy in the past and is still super buggy now so all the crashes fixed are just an indicator of how large the problem is for them and how bad the code still is. I dunno, you didn't really give any information to help on that front.
Mount & Blade 2 was released very early and despite constant improvement (they keep patching it at a strong pace), it's only slowly evolving.
It was even downright unfinished on release, with many game systems claiming to be doing something actually being simply unimplemented.
But despite all that it was and is still fairly playable and enjoyable, even at release. A game only needs a great core gameplay loop to succeed, even if large parts of it are completely broken.
Interestingly, Taleworlds make their own engine with fairly unique capabilities. 200 players can fight in fast paced, precise melee combat on a single server. Even more than in fast-paced shooters, it can be extremely frustrating for players when the game doesn't behave in exactly the way that you would expect (for example, standing undefended just a few centimeters away from the reach of an opponent's swing, or relying on interrupting their attack with your own landing 100 milliseconds before). They've made their own scripting language for everything related to policy. So this scripting language is what modders interact with. And it is absolutely atrocious as a language, but it serves the purpose well enough.
> If each of those crashes affected and was reported by a single person or even nobody
Then do you really think they'd be spending time fixing it?
(Actually, you know what, they probably would.)
That's why I had a paragraph mentioning different reasons things might be mentioned. I don't think it's uncommon to find a bug that could cause a crash while working something else, confirm it does crash, and then fix it. If the culture is to mention those things in patch notes even if you're not sure it actually ever caused a user problem, then it will be listed.
That doesn't mean all, or even any, of the listed crashes were like that, but it does illustrate that it's hard to know what they actually mean without additional info.
(for what it's worth, I'm a long time Tarkov player, so I'm definitely familiar wroth buggy games and apparent development problems with rushing, so this is more a devils advocate position on my part)