I played it with coop mates (via game pass IIRC), all EGS fans since Oblivion, well after 76 was released and patched up, and it was just… boring. And grindy. Yet kept trying to upsell us stuff. I kinda get how some like the game with those BGS environments, but that was still a shock to me.
Starfield did nothing either. I watched YT story videos/tried the intro out of a friend’s Steam library instead of buying and felt like I was looking at a AI slop Skyrim mod, both technically and in terms of writing. Again, I’m a hardcore fan going way back, warts, glitches and all.
It’s remarkable the studio has fallen so far, without basically changing anything, yet still has such a loyal following. How is that even possible?
Fallout 1 - exceptional world-building, fantastic game, great character writing, superbly replayable RPG. Your build is instrumental to what you can do; decisions affect the world. Held together by jank and bugs, alas, but generally superb.
Fallout 2 - fixes most of the jank and bugs and has a much bigger and deeper world, but not quite as well-integrated a story. Worthy sequel, though.
Fallout 3 - “Oblivion with guns”, but has a pretty decent story, lots of interesting side quests. Seems like Bethesda misunderstood the point of the setting a bit, but very promising. Has some RPG replayability - different builds and different choices change what’s available in the world.
Fallout New Vegas - best game in the whole series. Good plot, great sidequests, great characters, reactive world. Actually makes it seem like the Creation engine can be used for ‘proper’ RPGs - everything by Bethesda tended to be a mile wide and an inch deep up till then. Obsidian actually understand the setting, which is not surprising since they had a lot of original Black Isle devs in their team. Held together by jank and bugs, which I’m going to pretend was a callback to Fallout 1.
Fallout 4 - just what the fuck. Plot that you can barely believe is as stupid as it is. One-note, irritating characters. Dreadful writing. Gives up being an RPG in favour of crafting and base-building. “Talking” interface which was the butt of jokes at the time and an insult to the history of the series. Barely any decision is of consequence, you could save near the “final decision” point, see all the endings, and miss nothing of consequence. All of Bethesda’s worst habits, given free rein.
Not going to be spending money with Bethesda again unless the reviews turn up exceptional. After F4, I was expecting nothing from 76, and was not surprised. Was expecting nothing from Starfield, and was not surprised. Am expecting Elder Scrolls 5 to be a bag of shite as well - am whatever the complete opposite of ‘hyped’ is for it.
I think the rose tinted glasses effect is strong. Fallout 4 wasn’t that bad and had some neat characters and sidequests. I played heavily modded NV too, and while great, has plenty of missed beats and slow quests.
Also, making a (mostly) top down, tight text game is very different than producing a voice acted, sprawling 3D world. It’s like trying to compare the writing quality of a novel vs a 2 part blockbuster movie.
Not that I disagree with the decline, but I think that’s putting it too strong and ignoring huge differences.
For me the technical and artistic of aspects are factors too. Starfield would’ve been unreal if it came out in 2012… but look at its contemporaries. CP2077? KCD2? Even ME Andromeda utterly trounces it in artistic creativity, animation quality, graphics, scripting, performance, HDR quality, combat, even some voice acting; I could go on and on. And it’s basically the same premise.
Yet Starfield feels like modded Skyrim, looks only superficially better, and runs at like a tenth the speed.
One thing that really threw me off FO4 was the voiced main character. They had to simplify the dialogue options significantly, and I just don’t need my character to have a voice, my imagination can sort that out just fine. That way I can make up my own mind about how my character sounds in my head, have more detailed dialogue options (like FO:NV), and not have a locked in boring voice with boring dialogue options. Lots of cool additions in FO4, but it just seemed so shallow, I stopped playing quite early.
Project Hel, a DLC for Ghostrunner. The base game was already pretty great, but the DLC added jump trajectories, making movement less ambiguous and improved the frankly wonky upgrade system of the original. It also added a new (albeit shorter) story, a new rage mechanic and you get to play as a cold, unfeeling cybernetic abomination controlled by the villain of the base game.
All of this is to say that I was floored on how much I preferred playing the DLC than the original and I loved Ghostrunner.
Puyo Puyo Tetris. I put out a lengthy video essay about how this game is directly responsible for everything wrong with the series today, and a followup.
TL;DR: Outsold every main series game, and by an order of magnitude. Succeeded in spite of Puyo Puyo rather than because of it, did a terrible job making new players actually want to play Puyo Puyo and just led them to bounce off it and play the other game instead. But even in spite of how much I initially disliked it as a game, I thought its success could lead to bigger and better things for the series, perhaps we could finally get a main series game localized next. Never happened, instead Sega rehashed this crossover four times. Main series is dead, never coming back.
Totally fair. I would say each game in the Elder Scrolls series let me down more than the last, even though I still enjoyed each one, so I can how being a fan of the first would be such a letdown for the second.
Honestly, its gotta be Oblivion. Its really close between it and Morrowind, but I strongly disliked the way you have to get information in Morrowind for the story. I dont mind the reading at all, it’s the fact that you have to ask every n’wah about every detail to get any info that, while realistic, I ultimately just found to be too tedious.
Haha, yeah. I dont think its the best, that opinion lay with Daggerfall. But rose tinted glasses dont care about that, just what you remember feeling when you played it through the first time.
It was not rubbish, but what Xrd did to my main character, Zato, irreparably damaged my relationship with any future Guilty Gear game, and Strive just finished off whatever hope I had left.
And to be clear: I'm not talking about power level here—fuck that. I'm only talking about how much fun I had with the character, and still do in Guilty Gear Plus R.
I like GoG but… GoG very much has a history of “performative” bullshit.
Some of us still remember The French Monk Incident where they pretended the site was shutting down and let everyone hammer the download servers so they would panic and “learn” why “DRM Free” games were better. The backlash was so bad that it actually led to the addition of a new quest (that totally wasn’t ready to go…) in The Witcher 2 that, if you won a game of dice poker (Gwent before we had Gwent) you would get a Witcher 1 code at GoG.
Also… their definition of “DRM Free” is what us olds would have called “that Stardock GOO shit”
They’ve also had a LOT of “we are going to lose the rights to sell this game so buy it now” FOMO sales. I want to say the Atari games have been through at least four?
And so forth throughout the years. It was more or less guaranteed GoG would do a smut games sale once Steam delisted games. The freebies is a surprise but stuff like House Party is a massive DLC sink and the Postals get given away five with every soda.
So e’rybody saying “Now is the time to let GoG know they were being inconsistent and they will fix everything”: Hey, I got a really great deal on this bridge. And I’ll give you a discount if you pay in whatever “untraceable” crypto kids like this week. Err, but through this site that just gives me fiat currency. No reason.
Torchlight 3 and Infinite. I was a fan of Torchlight before there was Torchlight. I played Fate to death in college. I played Mythos during the beta. I probably put more hours into Torchlight and Torchlight 2 than I did into Diablo and Diablo 2 (and I put a lot of time into Diablo).
I actually had hope for Torchlight Frontiers. I thought it seemed like it could be what Mythos was trying to be - finally an online Torchlight game.
But then they forgot about all of that and essentially released “Torchlight 2 Mobile” but on PC.
But, Mortal Kombat 11. I had always enjoyed the MK games (it helped that my sister owned the N64 so I only played maybe a grand total of two hours of the wannabe Tekken ones…). And the timeloop reboot had reinvigorated the series and I was a much more accomplished fighting game player and actually understood how to push through projectile spam.
Then they randomly recast Sonya Blade with (sandy hook truther and terf) rhonda rousey and it was just… ugh. Even ignoring she is a hateful and evil shitbag… she is just a REALLY bad actress. Could never bring myself to grab 11 and by the time “1” came out I had also realized that I actively disliked the x-ray attacks and finishers since they were just boringly gorey time sinks.
And honorable mention to Splinter Cell Double Agent. But apparently the OG xbox/wii u (?) version of that was actually good and it was just 360/PC that was a steaming pile of shit. And Conviction was a very different game but also I still think about the aftermath of the EMP every so often.
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