Steam forces game updates down your throat. It makes sense for competitive online games, but take fallout 4 for example. Totally offline single player. A million mods made for specific game versions, and all the guides for modding stress a half dozen little things you can do to your steam install to stop the updates but the shit happens anyway. Crap like modifying steam INI files and making them read only. Shit users shouldn’t need to do.
It’s not on Bethesda to just what…not update their game? It’s on steam to say hold up, maybe we shouldnt be pushing this update - it might break everything. Yes/no dialog prompts aren’t rocket science.
A few weeks ago Bethesda pushed a new update on a 10+ year old game, and it destroyed countless modded save files for everyone. This is on steam and their ham fisted updates.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
It varies.
There are definitely cases where the latest update outright breaks the game and that is bad QC.
But what people generally refer to here are games with a modding scene. A vocal part of the userbase rely heavily on mods and/or custom DLLs. So when the game updates, all of those break until the modders and tool writers are able to catch up.
There are a lot of implications to this for games with (meaningful) online components. But for predominantly SP games? It is a fun time when you sit down to play a game in the evening and see it was updated and know you can’t go back to that save/game for at least a few days. And there very much SHOULD be a way to opt out or freeze a version for those.
priapus@piefed.social 1 day ago
Devs are able to include the ability to run past versions of the game. If they push an update that breaks mods without doing that, I feel like thats their own fault.
Also, even if the dev doesnt do this, there are ways to download previous versions of the game using the steam console.