Skyrim never “clicked” for me. I remember hearing awesome things about it: a vast open world full of things to discover, the ability to create my own character and build it however I wanted, the option to influence the world around me with my choices…
In practice, I found myself in a very big but mostly empty world, full of copy-pasted uninspired dungeons with randomized loot, and no matter what character I chose to build, the combat system sucks and the AI never tries to do anything more than mindlessly walk towards you (and get stuck on the scenery). I was never able to immerse myself in the world because everything was so drab and insipid: generic characters living in generic cities talking about generic things with a very bad dub.
Choices never matter because the game insists on spoon-feeding you everything it has to offer. You can roleplay as a barbarian and still become the headmaster of Hogwarts; you can side with the romans or the vikings but the world doesn’t change aside from the uniform of the guards patrolling the cities you visit; you can ignore the dragons roaming the land and they never do anything, because they are just random encounters in the world without any kind of personality or goal aside from turning up and being a minor annoyance to the player.
The modding community is great, but even after spending a few hours installing a dozen or so mods, I was never able to escape the jankiness of the original game: it was still Skyrim, just with a different coat of paint (and a few less bugs and horrible UI decisions).
Reading about the overall reception of Starfield, I felt like I was going crazy, because everything the people say about that game, I already felt about Skyrim fifteen years ago. On the one hand, I felt like my feelings were being legitimized; on the other hand, I still don’t understand why people forgive Skyrim (and still play it to this day) but hate the new Bethesda game so much.
I feel like, at this point, any enjoyment I still derive from Bethesda games is really just leftover nostalgia for Morrowind that will likely never come close again to how 14yo me was able to enjoy them, when they were still something new.
There’s travel and discovery in Skyrim, which imho makes up a bit for its many flaws. Starfield on the other hand was stripped of that, in the sense that you always land directly on points of interest, so there’s never a process of “getting there”, or even “getting around”, which to me was the whole point of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. Also the landscape is almost never handmade, but procedurally generated, so it has very little appeal. That sense of discovery I had in Morrowind was still there in Skyrim,… but completely gone in Starfield
GTA games are the epitome of shallowness, for me. The story is always so vague and not interesting, you never get attached to characters. Gameplay is a boring loop, but its strength has always been being some sort of theme park. But it’s 2024 and “hop onto a game just to go fast on car and shoot a couple of civilians”
Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Like Pokémon, nintendo developers know fans will buy new games regardless of how much new content there is to it. There is no legitimate reason for the game to be so close mechanically to its Gamecube entry, and I find it an insult to long time fans.
The last of us was a boring shooter with unlikable characters who continually did things i wouldn’t do so i couldn’t invest myself in their story. The gameplay didn’t save it.
What I find most interesting about the game is experiencing the characters stories and their reasoning for their actions. The gameplay is fine enough to keep it interesting for me.
I think the gaming industry has not existed for long enough for this to be a thing. Chrono Trigger & Chrono Cross are just as good today as they were 20-30 years ago, same for Baldur’s Gate or Jazz Jackrabbit.
One example comes to mind is Oddworld: New and Tasty. It’s fairly faithful to the original game, but at the same time the updated 3d rendered graphics failed to portray the same mysticism & gloominess. (and yes I have played Odyssey just recently on my retro PC) Not saying no one has pulled this off, but it’s like Resident Evil is the only one I can think of.
There are VERY FEW games where pop culture references need to be updated so much that this is worth it. It’s better to just make a new game with a completely new plot then.
Since this year is looking to be the first year in monster hunter history without a new release (ironic since it’s the 20th anniversary of the series) people have started imagining the possibility of Capcom re-releasing older monster hunter games that are no longer on the market.
As a natural continuation of this, people have speculated on how they would handle these re-releases. The most popular opinion, and one I share, is that they should absolutely not touch the game content. Modernized controls, re-opened multiplayer servers, maybe a slight graphical touch up, and if we’re getting really fancy possibly implementing multiplayer monster health scaling, but anything beyond that would be damaging the reason people want to play these games, which is that they’re the old monster hunter. They’re weird, clunky, and sometimes jank as hell but that’s their charm. They also lack all of the quality of life improvements that came in the 5th generation, however those annoyances that were whisked away come Monster Hunter World were truly part of the identity of those older games, and any new release should absolutely keep them in. It may turn away many newer hunters but it’s about preserving the history of monster hunter more than anything.
Anyways tl;dr yeah “updated for modern audiences” can be concerning regarding the preservation of the history of these games. If you mean shit like removing slurs and stuff though I’m all for it.
I mean it’s actually fair and it’s not the game’s fault.
Hell I bet if we dug into a deeper it turns out to be age gap as much as anything else.
When I grew up, video game consoles were hard for the sake of being hard because the games didn’t have enough storage and ram to be that long. Back then I hated dragon’s lair because it was so f****** pretty and I really wanted to play it so bad, but it was just a coin eater and I was too young to have disposable income
I moved into first person shooters around the time of Quake. I was decently skilled but not amazing, but I was making enough money that I could afford a really nice rig and a really fast connection. Slowly FPS started turning into military combat which I really didn’t care for.
Many years later I got into mmorpgs, I spent thousands of hours playing in guilds, running raids, and grinding equipment. I still hated the same things but didn’t really focus much on them because the only thing I did was MMO.
Years later I start a family, now I hate anything that’s not casual. If I can’t pick it up play it for 30-40 minutes and put it away it’s going to do nothing for me that cost me pain.
I mean games are pretty homogenized anymore. There’s strong trends and bandwagons giving rise to new genres and subgenres everywhere. The OP asked for games but I don’t think there’s a problem replying with genres.
I would really consider it a deckbuilder first and anything else second. Obviously yes it has the roguelike elements, but the gameplay is so different from almost any other roguelike. If you like the idea but couldn’t go for the totally card based gameplay, maybe try Inscryption or Hand of Fate.
proprietary games that install rootkits(wrongly called anticheats) on the system. the corporations in charge have brainwashed masses into thinking that it’s just a benign thing there to fend off “cheaters”, conveniently brushing aside the fact that this is a massive and lucrative attack vector. it only helps bad actors(including three letter agencies).
and this is not a what-if scenario. every year you can find an incident where such a “solution” is exploited.
Yeah, I played the hell out of gta 3, San Andreas and vice city… But 5 felt very boring. I can’t really nail why but it got to a point where I tried to force myself to play before giving up.
Similar story with RDR, I played the original and the zombie dlc, loved both, the sequel just didn’t do much for me
Never liked GTA games. I find them very repetitive and boring. However, I fucking LOVE Saints Row 4 which I think of as comedy-GTA. Had so much fun pissing around doing insane shit on SR. It’s a shame the franchise died.
Some games are so old that the technology needs to be sorely updated for modern gamers to be able to understand the controls, and “upating (the controls) for modern audiences” can be good.
Further, older games often have some pretty awful stereotypes in them that don’t need to be preserved so we can remember them.
I know Disney’s Bambi isn’t a video game, but I’ll use it as an example that’s being re-made. Bambi was made in 1942, and a massive amount of cultural references and ideas just don’t make as much sense in the modern era. There are literally things young people today would be like “what now?” in films that old. Sometimes “updating for modern audiences” is removing stuff that just doesn’t make sense anymore, or people don’t recognize or understand.
Even further, it used to be that “getting updated for modern audiences” was the norm. Anyone remember that hokey fucking Romeo & Juliet with Leonoard DiCaprio in the 90’s? Yeah, that was “updated for modern audiences” and it was a smash fucking hit. Back then, updating for modern audiences meant setting it in Verona instead of Venice and swapping swords for guns.
Like if you’re dealing with games that were always meant to frustrate and offend like Postal 2 or Conker’s Bad Fur Day or Redneck Rampage, you’re probably not gonna have a lot of people happy to “update for modern audiences” but there’s not much to update about campy schlock humor anyway.
So yeah, sometimes its not great, but I think the worries about it are overblown.
In movies there used to be a joke about how “the black guy always dies first” in action/horror movies because it held true for a long time. Black characters were given bit-roles that were quickly written out of movies. That is no longer the case, but you don’t see movies that don’t kill off black characters right away as being advertised as “updated for modern audiences” because that’s just silly.
“updating (the controls) for modern audiences” can be good.
My only experience of that is when they removed grid based movements from New N’ Tasty and forced players to use the analog, trying to walk felt horrible.
But something like the first 2 Fallouts on the other hand can really use a controls overhaul.
But something like the first 2 Fallouts on the other hand can really use a controls overhaul.
Those were literally on my mind! I know Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II got some updated control schemes more recently, including gamepad support, but it seems my favorite Fallouts are still stuck in the past.
God damn it what I would give for a modern Fallout in the style of Baldur’s Gate 3. It breaks me how Bethesda has ruined that series.
I think you're looking for Wasteland. They shared a lot of DNA already, and they've got different senses of humor, but Wasteland still has a black comedy angle.
As in most RPGs, having more actions was always beneficial, so I for sure always had companions in Fallout, even though they were AI controlled and often got in the way. At least Wasteland just gives you control of them.
Both updating the controls, and removing stereotypes, should be optional, at most behind a parental lock.
Some historic material is evil shit, and some people may understandably not want to get exposed to it… but it shouldn’t be some censor’s decision which scholars get access to the historical originals, while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.
Everyone should have the option to see as much evil as they want, no more, no less.
Going back to your Bambi example, I learned a lot about 1942 US by watching the now censored scenes, much more than by just listening to the opinions of those who condemned them.
I agree with this sentiment in respect to the idea that you’re actually trying to learn something from what you’re looking at. I agree, because I felt the same way when I watched censored WWII cartoons. If you’re willing to learn from them, that’s great, but here’s the thing.
Not everybody is taking away the same things.
What you take away from it isn’t what everyone takes from it. While you might rightfully not be a giant piece of shit yourself, there’s a lot of people who are.
My personal example is growing up with the Grand Theft Auto series. As a youth, I thought concerns with it were more or less overblown, and I was more or less right, for the most part.
However, after the torture scene in GTA 5 and talking to a wider community about it, I started to realize a lot of people weren’t learning anything good from that scene other than how to torture people, and a perverted glee in being able to do so.
And that’s where I begin to worry, because while like, I’m in the middle of an Evil playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, like… It’s hard to feel real “glee” at being evil. Many of the decisions I make tend to make me go “awwww” inside, but I tell myself “I can’t get caught up in that if it’s an evil playthrough.” And in that sense is where I agree, because like, yeah, I should be allowed to play evil if I want.
But the reality also is that a lot of people don’t care about the nuance and are looking for reasons to be pieces of shit, looking for dark things to make fun of, and are generally going to take horrible justifications from what they do learn, and yes, that does worry me a bit.
while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.
You realize that while there might be some hamfisted attempts at this, that not all of them are so hamfisted, right? This statement doesn’t inspire confidence that you see that.
The commentary said they wanted to do rival criminal gangs, which would have made a lot more sense than the construction magnates they went with, but my guess is they realised West Side Story already did it.
Outer Wilds. I think it’s a fine game with a pretty cool gimmick (time loop) and a neat story. The gameplay itself isn’t that fun. I think what ultimately ruined it for me was the online discourse about the game; every time it gets mentioned, hundreds of people flock to the comments to extol the philosophical storyline, and throw around hyperbolic descriptions like “life-changing”. Again, the story is pretty neat, but I was left underwhelmed after having been built up by fans of the game.
I’m glad you liked it! I really wanted to like the game. I wish one of my friends in real life played through it so I could walk through some others’ perspectives on the game in person.
Several hours in, I couldn’t even make it to a point where the story started rewarding me. Which was part of the problem. I “cleared” one of the planets (Brittle Hollow), with its platforming elements (something I don’t like in 3D), and my “reward” was a small piece of a puzzle. I needed a lot more than that.
Even before that point, the game hadn’t made a good first impression. There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me. And then the ship controls drove me a bit nuts. The loop was the only interesting part about the game for me then.
Felt like the writing was on the wall for me after exploring that first planet, so I dropped it.
There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me.
Yes! I forgot about this. There were like a hundred characters to speak to and very little of it was interesting or even helpful. I couldn’t help but feel guilty when I just gave up and decided to get on the ship and leave without exploring all of the dialogue or points of interest.
I also gave Outer Wilds a try and don’t think it stood up to the hype. Got through probably 95% of the story and then gave up on it, there were two “puzzles” that I just couldn’t figure out. Ended up reading a walkthrough and was not sad at all that I put it down.
I haven’t quite finished it yet, my feeling is that it slightly overstays it’s welcome.
I’ve also noticed that most of the time I do a thing or two in the game then realise there’s not quite enough time in the loop to do another thing, but just enough time to make me want to not waste the loop, since I find starting a new loop a bit tedious.
For me it’s not a bad game by itself. But I think it’s the worst recent CRPG by far, so it irks me that it’s heralded as the best game ever everywhere. Some details:
The character building is so incredibly shallow, this is mostly the fault of DnD5E, but Larian could have at least given us more Subclass options. Multiclassing doesn’t really help because some combinations are just so incredibly overpowered that it doesn’t make sense to play anything else (For example: adding 2 Warlock levels to your Sorcerer is always better than playing a plain sorcerer), this is exacerbated by the next point
Why is 12 the level cap? The game is long enough to go the full 20 levels. Level 12 is particularly odd because almost no classes get anything special at around that level (exception: fighter with the 3rd attack at 11). Going to 20 would have the advantage that all classes get a capstone ability which would make single-classing worthwhile.
The amount of companions available is laughably low, and all of them seem to be the creation of a 13 year-old with how uber-cool they are. We got: Vampire boy, Mystras loverboy, Tiefling badass, stuck-up Githyanki, Shar’s pet and Warlock superhero. Each and every one of them makes me yawn.
This also extends to the main character even when you are not of the defaut origins, you are an instant super-hero starting at level 1. Nice power fantasy, would have maybe been compelling to me when I was a teenager.
All conversations are voiced, whoop-de-doo. The flip side is that all conversations are extremely short. Compared with “real” CRPGs the writing is shallow, once again this feels like it was made for pre-teens. I’d rather have writing that rivals a good book.
Why in the nine hells is this game even called Baldurs Gate 3? It continues neither the story nor uses similar mechanics beyond pretending to be a CRPG. The familiar faces you can meet feel extremely forced. At the very least they should have allowed 6 party members.
It’s Baldur’s Gate in name only. They took Divinity and slapped a Forgotten Realms skin on it.
It’s still the same terrible Larian game: player-punishing gameplay (low hit chance, overwhelming enemies), traps/hazards fucking everywhere, shallow class mechanics, and rage-inducing camera and UI controls. I will finish the game once and never touch it again (like all the other Divinity games).
That’s the thing I’m not entirely sure. I expected the graphics to be better and combat to be more exiting I guess? Especially for GOTY. Voice acting was a bit basic too
Did you play any of the Dragon Age games? I’ve heard the combat is pretty similar, which is a bummer because that was the thing that kept me from continuing DA:O. I feel like I’d enjoy the story of both but can’t get past the actual gameplay.
So I got on that game and it was kind of fun up until the first town when my friends were like “we need to talk to people to figure out what to do.”
I don’t mind games having a bit of lore and story but … I want to be doing (read: typically fighting) stuff in my games not just talking to a bunch of people… And when I don’t even know what people I need to talk to, to most quickly get back to the action, I’m out.
The one exception to that is possibly RuneScape because I’ve been playing that game for ages. However, even there I use quest guides and sometimes just spam through all the dialogue.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne