Skimmed through a few of these earlier and REALLY excited for later today (pre-ordered on Steam for the bonuses, will refund if it is a total trainwreck)
The scores are all over the place because this is a B-A game so it has to actually technically perform well (unlike AA-AAA games like Jedi Survivor that get a pass…), But the actual text is fairly consistent:
The world is amazing. The early-mid game balance is brutal and unforgiving and you will spend a LOT of time using AKs so degraded that they WILL jam. The emergent behavior from the storms and enemy placements lead to frantic struggles to reach cover. And the performance and bugs are all over the place and we all REALLY hope the day-one patch fixes things but nobody is that optimitsic.
And… as a STALKER fan who loved SoC and CoP (and didn’t hate CS…):
Just to add on a bit for people thinking “I’ll wait ten years for the community patches”. Yeah, that will be a less painful experience. But it is well worth looking back at how modders have handled the STALKERs over the years. Even as early as year one there were people who insisted on changing the game balance heavily and EVERYONE wanted to re-enable the cut repair features at merchants. Which made the game a lot less frustrating but also kind of defeated the purpose of the game.
Because the experience of stocking up on ALL the good 9x39 ammo in The Zone to take your VSS up against the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant? That involved using AKs and ARs to go from point A to point B because you wanted to save up that durability for when it mattered. And when it did matter? The fighting was so intense that you burned through ALL that ammo AND your gun was busted and there was the experience of basically throwing away a perfectly good gun that you spent your entire net worth on to sprint out from the cover of a burned out bus (that looked suspiciously like the same asset pack Metro and Fallout 3 used…) to grab an AK off a dead zombie to return fire before the RPG soldiers got a good shot.
Also… this is a Ukrainian as fuck game made by Ukrainians during a war for their very survival. Decide how much slack you are gonna cut for that and how much long term support you expect with the upcoming “wrinkle” of 2025.
Stellaris. I’m almost at 1400 hours in the game and while I now play it a lot less often than in the first 1000 hours, I still get the itch to play it again a few times a year.
I can’t believe Shadow of the Erdtree got nominated over Helldivers or Space Marine 2. It’s a DLC and it’s not even that good compared to the base game.
You are very brave for playing Starfield for 1,000 hours. I gave up after 25 hours when I completed the entire quest line and started new game plus. Literally couldn’t do it. Went and played some No Man’s sky, and now that’s becoming my new addiction
I still play Starfield, I really like the game but have it modded a lot now.
Never had any fun with No man’s sky, for me the story is boring and the rest of the game can’t hook me. In my eyes Starfield is a way better game, but I can see and understand why other think different about this.
But like what are you doing Starfield for that long? I feel like after 25 hours I had seen and experienced everything that there was to offer. What else is there left to do?
There is so much to do and to see in the game, I have so many hours in and still find new stuff that I had not seen before.
25h is barely the main quest and there is so much else to see and do then the main quest. Faction quests, side quests, radiant quests, base building, ship building, new game plus, DLC, mods.
Starfield is packed full with stuff to discover, people just have to be open for the game. Yes it has lots of flaws, the awful temple puzzle was the first thing that I changed with mods, and yes the loading screens are not great. I can forgive the game it’s flaws, maybe because I never over hyped it as so much other did.
I am playing Bethesda games for over 20 years now, since Morrowind, and I have a very good idea what to expect from a Bethesda game and where the strength and limitations of the engine are. Due to this I never expected to be able to do atmospheric flights or to travel over huge parts of the planet in one go, or to have huge interplanetary or interstellar areas. The engine is not made for that kind of things, not at all, so I never expected the game to have those features and so my expectations for the game were very similar to the delivered product.
I haven’t got around to playing it yet, but what you’ve described sounds a lot like The Witcher 3 for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it enough to finish pretty much everything (except all the Skellige question marks which thoroughly outstayed their welcome), and Hearts of Stone is better than Blood and Wine, but the gameplay was pretty flat throughout, and most of my enjoyment was in the cutscenes and dialogue and following threads to their inevitably grim conclusions. It’s not a game that I would ever replay.
Not because it doesn’t deserve to win at least one, it definitely does, but because the people who count for 90% of the vote were literally writing misinformation riddled hit pieces and for some reason think that Chinese gamers are only 3/5ths of a gamer or something (to discredit the large player count).
I prefer not to think about how could life be different now if I had not started this game…
I used to think like this. It took me a while to realize it wouldn’t be different at all. You gotta take care of yourself in life and that includes your mental health and well-being. Sometimes that’s playing a game you love
I actually felt it was one of the best games I’ve played in the last 10 years. I really enjoyed the story. The game is beautiful. I love the amount of immersion that is possible, especially with mods. I’ve played through it twice.
I really, really wish we could inspect weapons. One mod gets close, but it isn’t the same as a Rockstar-style weapons inspection. We don’t even get to zoom in on the models in inventory. A damned travesty because the weapons are gorgeous.
But overall, I find it hard to fault, especially given its state at launch.
I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it’s as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase. And many things in the game actually reinforce that idea.
I played the game at launch and the game was absolutely infested with stupid and annoying bugs, so eventually I just skipped all side stuff and just wrapped up the main story, I think that was about half-way through. Back then the open-world most definitely felt like an afterthought.
No events were happening in the world, there were entire parts of the city that were dead and empty. There were even areas blocked off by doors that were “locked” and implied there was something behind it, but some of those places I could just clip through and fall through the world because there was literally nothing behind the door.
There were few things that made it seem like an actual living world, NPCs were just wandering aimlessly, doing nothing. Just making a cool looking area and then dropping a load of copy/paste NPC clones in there doesn’t make a good open-world. If you comitted a crime the police would just spawn behind you, wherever you were. While in contrast some of the story areas seemed more detailed and have more “scripted” things happening, which is part of why I think the game wasn’t originally open-world.
Gameplay wise it was not that special either, gunplay was okay, melee felt quite unsatisfying, and outside of combat there was practically nothing to do other than just driving around. The choices you make at the beginning of the game don’t ever felt like they mattered, like they make it appear it’s a huge backstory thing that would play a role throughout the game. Nope, after the first 15 minutes it’s never mentioned again. The whole cutscene thing with Jackie after the intro feels like it was supposed to be actual gameplay, but was just cut out and changed to a cutscene to skip time.
Also the skill tree barely mattered, there were even skills like being able to breathe underwater longer, even though there wasn’t any underwater content, aside from one Judy mission I believe (which I didn’t get because she wasn’t accessible as a romance option to my character).
The only saving grace of this game was that parts of the story and characters were somewhat interesting, I liked the concept and style of the game. But it felt like a bad game when it came to actual gameplay. And some characters barely got any time to actually become interesting enough to care about.
I’ve been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.
I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it’s as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase.
That’s my take on it too. The story they wanted to tell does not mesh well with an open world game, but since the people loudly wanted something like “RDR 2 but Cyberpunk” they felt obliged to attempt to shoehorn it in.
The whole cutscene thing with Jackie after the intro feels like it was supposed to be actual gameplay, but was just cut out and changed to a cutscene to skip time.
Completely agree. I think having you play through that part would have made a huge impact on how you connect with Jackie. Maybe they felt it would have pushed the Keanu introduction too deep into the game?
I’ve been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.
They’ve added some touches to the open world, but I think it was too fundamentally broken to be easily patched. The new skill tree from 2.0 is actually good though and I think the combat is pretty fun in its current state, even without going to mods.
Maybe they felt it would have pushed the Keanu introduction too deep into the game?
I was thinking that too. I think during development it might’ve shifted, since I think Keanu originally wasn’t in the game, and they wanted to make him part of the game quite early on.
I would’ve liked if they had extended the Jackie chapter and moved the Silverhand arc to a later act. It would’ve meant that people would just be dropped in the game and let them explore the world carelessly before the story kicks up to next gear. But they probably realised that the game wasn’t good enough to pull off the open-world part, so they decided to get on with the main story right off the start.
Could be, could be. I think your suggestion would make for a better game with less conflict between what the main story is saying and what the game is presenting in the open world. Having the story emphasize how fast V is dying, only for the player to then fuck around with car races and random merc contracts and whatnot really doesn’t work all that well as far as immersion goes.
Jackie’s death would have also been much more impactful if we’d have spent all that time with him playing through those six months.
There is no chance it wasn’t meant to be an open world. The witcher 3 was a very successful open world they made.
Also, CP77 actually is in the style of elden ring that was praised for it, but CP77 came long before it. Most critiques of CP77 missed that part because the game doesn’t throw it at your face.
I think the “breath underwater” perk in a game with literally no missions where you need to touch water except one - where you have a divesuit anyways - is the best example of how shallow the game is.
I played launch version which had it. I didn’t unlock all perks this time around. There really isn’t a major diff between launch and current when it comes to the things discussed in my post except for the insane number of bugs removed.
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Aktywne