Stanislav Petrov is the guy who refused to launch the Russian nukes and possibly averted World War 3.

IMO it’s generally not a great idea to pre-order anyway because it’s not like they can ever run out, plus you never know what’s going to happen on launch day. The game could be a big mess like Cyberpunk was, or the servers could go down because everyone’s downloading at once so then there’d be no point paying to get it on day 1 anyway.

And on top of that, Bethesda has a bit of a reputation for putting out games that are… let’s say unpolished on release day. I usually find the best approach is to leave it for a day or two, see what people are saying about it online, and then pick it up if you really want to.

And it’s a good thing that Bethesda has never released a game that was unplayably janky at launch, otherwise I’d be worried for everyone.

I’m currently really into playing Mount & Blade Bannerlord on the Steam Deck, but I use it for just about everything these days. Between my whole Steam library and emulators that can play all the games I grew up with, it’s like having my whole gaming lifetime in a tiny portable machine.

In a similar vein, KDE just launched this.