Angle the your nose down on a straightaway and you’ll see the speed indicator on the right get a red bar that’ll go up to a green light. When that light goes yellow, you can hit the boost key to go turbo.
(On keyboard, the defaults are the up arrow to angle down and shift to activate boost)
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
Most Mario games in general. I can play Mario Kart or some of the sports games with friends if someone else chooses them, but the singleplayer Mario games just aren’t fun to me. The only exception is The Thousand Year Door. I tried the other Paper Mario games and none were as good.
I also agree on BotW. Nintendo was chasing the survival game trend and I guess it paid off for them, but I find the world empty and boring, made worse by the dull colours in the art style. The worst part is the durability system. If there was a way to repair items it might be okay, but everything is like tissue paper. Even higher end weapons are gone after a few enemies, so eventually I just started avoiding combat entirely. I’m certain they did that and kept it that way in TotK because they couldn’t think of anything else to reward players with for exploring their empty world.
There is still item durability BUT! it is “fixed” by the addition of a weapon creation system. Now monster parts that drop can be slapped onto whatever weapon you find on the ground, making every (still breakeable, disposable) weapon less important than the monster part. You can even (a bit later) save your badass monster parts from breakage and reuse them. Furthermore your can immediately see what monster part will drop (its on their heads) which saves unnecessary farming and serves to show the enemies strength at a glance.
Insert comic of the guy in a staff meeting suggesting they fix complaints about durability by adding a simple repair system like every other game and Miyamoto throwing him out the window.
I mean, TOTK is almost copy pasted BOTW. Yeah there are some new mechanics, but it still has all of the flaws of BOTW.
Crafting and the building mechanic add some fun, but the farming required for all of it is tedious (and I even used duplication glitches for items).
Itll be curious to see how people’s opinions of BOTW change over time because I think it took Zelda in a bad direction (unfocused gameplay with simpler puzzles).
Yes. I don’t mean it has a piss filter like Xbox 360 games. I mean the lighting washes everything out. Compare this screenshot to one from Wind Waker or Skyward Sword.
If your argument hinges on the colors being duller than The Wind Waker, perhaps you are setting the bar too high? TWW is more vibrant than 99% of modern games.
But I’m also not the only one who thinks the colours are washed out. Modders running the game on PC were able to increase the vibrance to something that actually looks appealing to me.
Galaxy is actually the one I was playing when I realized I don’t like Mario games. I got about halfway through it, decided I wasn’t having fun and turned it off.
I think this is actually a good thing. In a perfect world exclusives wouldn’t exist and you would buy things based on their own merits. Having to buy something you don’t want because you fear missing out on a game is a horrible experience. In fact I stopped caring because I got so tired of possibly missing out on a game. It has worked out great for me this generation.
Baldur’s Gate 3! The amount of ways the game can play out is extremely impressive. There are a lot of tough choices to make that can greatly affect your party and even the world as a whole
I’ll be honest, I really didn’t come across any. The “challenging moral decisions” werenot hard choices, no matter how many of my party members took them out of context and got pissy.
Unpopular opinion, but for a game with such immaculate writing for two Acts, Act 3 is such a fucking shit show of mediocre writing and forgotten story threads.
I also disagree. Even discounting the large number of choices which were just a binary where one side was cartoonishly evil, I didn’t remember any I found impactful.
I ended up following The Emperor path in Act 3 . There wasn’t a moment where I got to weigh up the pros and cons of each major path, as I had decided I didn’t trust Raphael already and he doesn’t give you enough detail to do so if you don’t play along when you meet him at the start of Act 3. If I had then maybe the Orpheus stuff could have given me pause, but that’s not how it played out.
I think part of this was playing as Tav though, as the decisions with real emotional weight are all centered on origin characters and I didn’t dictate what my companions should do for things that were so personal. Shadowheart’s choice in Act III strikes me as one that probably would have hit.
But the bigger issue is I think Larian just isn’t very good at writing evil. You never get those moments of practical evil. I don’t remember ever having to consider doing something horrible for the greater good or being desperate enough to do something compromising out of self preservation. It was all evil for evil’s sake.
which is of course what you would expect
Nah. I would expect there to be difficult choices before the final act, especially in a game so long.
Spec Ops: The Line is a pretty decent pick when it comes to having “morally ambiguous choices”. the game itself states that there are no “real good choices” and thus, you must pick between the two evils.
The right choice is to just stop, but this is a phenomenal game that should be experienced by more people. Just don’t let kids play it, it’s very much an adult game.
The end of Red Dead Redemption. Spoilers for a game that's over a decade old, but John's death was a brutal cruelty that stayed with me for a long, long time.
The sequel was even more brutal. I cried like crazy at the end of both games. Like full on sobbing into a paper towel bc tissues weren’t going to cut it crying.
When I was in the final mission of chapter 6, on my first playthrough, my wife came in to tell me it was time to put the kids to bed. She took one look at my face and the tears rolling down it and put the kids to bed without me.
After everything you do in the game to get Abigail and Jack back, and to see John get to be happy and enjoy his ranch in the final act to it being tragically cut short. I know a lot of people don’t like playing as John in the RDR2 epilogue but I felt like it gave me needed closure from Red Dead Redemption
When my husband was playing this through for the first time I was watching him play and guessed what was happening when John was getting ready to propose to Abigail. We both watched that lovely cutscene teary eyed. It really reminded us of our engagement.
Does anyone else remember bringing home free trials on floppy disks? Like you get the first level of Wolfenstein or Commander Keen and you just play that over and over because you don’t have any money.
A bit before my manufacture date but as a kid there used to be CD ROMs in cereal boxes which had games like Tonka, Hot Wheels, Timon and Pumba, Rainbow Fish, etc. Those were hype.
It’s definitely nicer if there’s far less visual emphasis to it, like having the score be in small font rather than slammed in the middle of the result screen.
Same applied to the original Medal of Honor, though I never understood why some of those grades were given, I think they had more to do with where most of your shots landed?
So, the trap of modern game setups is that there is a lot of super high powered hardware out there- but unless you’re driving 4K monitors at 120hz+, or striving for super fast 360hz+ refresh rates for competitive gaming, you don’t need any of it. And people often get too caught up in the flashy new latest-and-greatest to recognize what’s a good deal and what’s just showing off.
Define your use case. What’s your desirable budget? What kind of games do you want to play, do you want to do VR, what kind of display do you plan on using. Because while it’s easy to drop $2800+ on hardware these days (like I did), it is still very possible to end up with a $900-1k machine that is super capable at 1440p and can run most all games you throw at it for at least another 5 years. Dpending on what exactly you want to do with it, prioritizing certain areas of hardware over others will pay off.
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