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.
Feels like we’ve hit the point of diminishing returns where the console cycle stops making sense. Does anyone really expect to ever play a PS6 game they just flat out couldn’t make at all on the PS5?
This gen gave me the kick to leave consoles. Neither Sony or Nintendo seem that interested with me being a customer, constant paywalls and upsells while getting less and less in return. I’ll get the next 8-10 years of games through the ps5 after that I imagine everything will be on pc. VR is not my thing, neither is online or live service so I can get all the emulators without a monthly cost.
They offer a sub! Ever dreamed of paying monthly to use an alternative launcher that does the same stuff than the already FOSS existing launcher? Now you can! 🤦
I’m not very inclined to take at face value what a studio founder has to say about a service that might make them less money, and might save their customers money.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Nobody is forcing studios or publishers at gunpoint to release on a subscription service.
Except for the hilarious number of studios owned by Microsoft. One would hope Microsoft takes the effect of Game Pass into account when they’re reviewing sales figures and shutting down studios. One would hope…
There’s no industry pressure to be on Gamepass, yet.
Microsoft doesn’t willingly lose money on something unless they think they can make it into a market distorting rent extraction hellscape. something very profitable later.
A) it’s already profitable, as per Phil. Unless you think he’s misleading shareholders there’s no reason to doubt that claim. B) they would never be able to buy enough studios to create industry pressure to be on GP, it’s just not possible and the service would crumble under its own weight
I kinda hate the guy so it’s hard for me to keep the tone neutral but I’ll try my best.
Long story short: He’s a popular streamer that had a few controversies that caused many people labelled him as arrogant or egotistical.
The latest one is his take on the “stop killing games” initiative that he was against. He had a video a few months ago were he misrepresentated the movement and spread misinformation (whether or not this was intentional or misinformed is up for debate) and caused a significant drop in the momentum of the movement, refusing to accept any criticism and doubling down on things. That was until recently were the initiative was in the last month and a half before the big deadline at only around 50% of the required signatures, but then huge momentum sprung up with a lot of people marking him as the “villain” of the movement and because of his controversy before it wasn’t long before word spread.
This has obviously led to harassment of the guy(which I feel is too far personally) which he responded to by tripling down on his opinion causing further being labelled as the villain. Eventually the momentum carried it over the finish and people are happy that he didn’t get his way.
whether or not this was intentional or misinformed is up for debate
It’s not, in his response to the initial controversy he cut out the part of Ross’ video that directly contradicted his misrepresentation, he’s a lying piece of shit.
Almost, but not quite. A portion of those signatures will turn out to be invalid, so we have to keep going past 1 million if this thing is going to fly. Aiming for 1.4 million might be wise.
Yoshi’s Story. Yeah it’s short, and level unlocking is weird as all outdoors, but people really hating on it for being too easy? Bro, it’s a YOSHI game. That’s a quarter of the appeal! It’s a game you can get younger kids involved in, or you can play after a hard day when you want to turn your brain off partially.
Plus almost everything in that game is adorable. And 64 bit sprite art is goated
Its the context and expectations. The last “Yoshi” game was a mainline Super Mario World 2, and people expected similar scope and challenge but in 64 bits. Super Mario 64 had further primed people for crazy genetlrational leaps. Yoshi’s Story was a fine game, but it wasnt SMW3 by a longshot.
Exactly this. Yoshi’s Story was a follow up to Yoshi’s Island, often considered one of the greatest 2d platformers of all time. I spent weeks if not months completing Yoshi’s Island. Then when Yoshi’s Story came out, I rented it and completed it over the weekend.
That’s a bit reductive. Perhaps plenty care but don’t know to even look for this thing to sign, or are too young to know how games used to be made, or didn’t get the message about this petition in their own language. 1M signatures is an absurdly high threshold to clear; that’s one out of every 450 people in the EU.
I think that reframing it in the context of consumer protection for digital planned obsolescence might benefit this campaign. Ultimately, this is bigger than games and I think it could benefit from a broader appeal
And it’s something that only applies to a fairly small subset of people. If we look at Steam users (decent indicator of people passionate about games), Germany has the highest in the EU at 3.6M. 3.6M is ~4.3% of the German population, so if we extrapolate to the EU, that’s ~19M Steam users.
If we assume that’s an accurate measurement of people who would be interested in this petition, you’d need 1/20 of them to sign. I’m not in the EU, so I don’t know how popular these petitions are or what the requirements are (do you need to be voting age?), but if I assume a lot of people who play games are young, and that young people tend to be fairly uninterested in politics, getting 1M signatures would be incredibly difficult even if it’s something that all games agree with (and I would imagine most would care about this at some level).
So yeah, getting >400k signatures for something like this sounds like amazing success.
Yeah, under 50% of the required signatures and it’s just a few weeks from expiring, there’s no chance this will succeed unless some big-name influencer gathers support for the petition, which at this point I doubt will happen.
It made some people talk about the problem, though. That’s a step in the right direction.
I’ve played Subnautica so much that it’s no longer a challenge, even on hardcore. I installed this mod (Deathrun Remade) to increase the difficulty and had the most fun I’ve had in a while
Many of us have been doing this from the beginning, but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how gacha games work.
Most people do not pump loads of money into these. Many don’t pay anything at all. But those people are not the target audience. These companies are going after the whales. Basically gambling addicts who will destroy their entire lives to pump everything they have into it.
Which is exactly why these games either need to be illegal, or the law needs to put caps on how much individuals are permitted to spend on these.
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