It might be nostalgia speaking, but I think the real issue is that a 20 year old game can actually be this good and popular. How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)? Doesn’t that say that game companies in general have dropped the ball on game design, focusing on graphics and money over content and gameplay? As I said, it might just be me stuck in my wonderfully comforting blanket of nostalgia…
I think it's almost definitely nostalgia speaking.
Granted, by the point Oblivion was made I was the nostalgia guy talking about how Bethesda games kept getting smaller and less ambitious. Most people saying that then did so because they were coming from Morrowind. Not me, I am a proper dinosaur and I was just pissed that after Morrowind dropped everything interesting about Daggerfall to make a console game they just kept moving further in that direction.
Was also not a fan of Fallout getting turned into Oblivion 40K instead of a proper turn-based CRPG.
Which goes to show this conversation isn't new and gaming is old enoung now that it has gone in cycles.
I mean, seriously, Daggerfall was continent-sized and was using procedural generation to make dungeons and build dialogue and quests and essentially reimagining how games could be made in ways that wouldn't resurface until what? No Man's Sky? Oblivion is bad Lord of the Rings. If anything it's the awkward middle child now, because man, the Imperial City in Oblivion feels hilariously tiny and basically deserted against modern RPGs. There are five people running loops and having canned conversations. Coming from Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk to this is... a bit of a shock.
"Why is an old game good?" feels like an odd question. It would be silly to ask that of any other medium, wouldn't it? The most beloved classics being beloved isn't an indictment of modern stuff, especially when cherry-picking the greatest hits and ignoring how many flops existed back then too.
Clair Obscur came out the same time and it’s probably the best RPG I’ve ever played, and I’ve played every noteworthy one in the last 40 years at least. GOTY at the LEAST.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.
I mean I am all for criticising creatively bankrupt mush like Ubisoft et al pushes out and Call of Duty 420: Black Ops 69 or FIFA or whatever but we can’t pretend there are literally no good games being released nowadays either. Just now we had a month with both Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being released within weeks of each other. BG3 and Alan Wake 2 releasing in the same year was just two years ago.
There are plenty of not just good but great recent games.
How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)?
Possibly because you’re buying the wrong games? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a massive nostalgia-on for Oblivion, and I picked up the Remaster, and it’s cool…
But there have been a lot of great games so far this year. Just this month alone, Blue Prince and Expedition 33 have both been fantastic. Both better than the Oblivion remaster imo.
The Indiana Jones game is cool. I haven’t played Split Fiction yet, but it looks really good as well. Just to name a few.
Edit: More that I remembered: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Wanderstop is pretty chill. Xenoblade Chronicles X was finally released on Switch (game map is like 5x the size of Skryim or something…). Atomfall. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is pretty cool if you’re into that kind of thing.
You can always request a refund while outside the 2 hour limit, it’s just going to be manually reviewed instead of automatic.
The time limit is arbitrary. There are lots of games that can be finished within a few hours. I’ve heard some devs say their short games are refunded at much higher rates than longer ones and recommend ensuring a game is at least 2 hours long. It’s like YouTube paying more money to creators who make videos that are 10min+. Now you have videos that could have been 2 minutes stretched out for meta reasons.
I doubt Blue Prince specifically tries to hide game mechanics for 2 hours to prevent people from refunding it. It’s just a slow burn puzzle game.
This is the answer… the 2 hour “limit” is just the window in which it will almost certainly be automatically refunded… anything more than that 2 hour limit and they will actually look into your reason why… I’ve refunded games over the 2 hour limit for reasons like “game isn’t what I thought it would be” or “just not very fun” and I’ve never been turned down over it.
I play heavily modded Elder Scrolls, where my character never touches the main story.
My favorite Morrowind run was a princess who ended up creating an agricultural baron, buying up every plantation and owning probably hundreds of slaves. She also got into the skooma business on the side (needed money for all of her dresses). Morrowind had a ton of wacky mods that were just fun to play in general - people made Star Wars and LOTR questlines. There’s also the work of Tommy Khajiit (RIP), which is something unique and which has never gotten the respect it deserved. (Or Lady Rae - she liked to recolor the game bright neon colors, and basically got bullied out of the modding community.)
Skyrim is a hunting/vagrant simulator for me. I usually play a Dunmer refugee and avoid the in-game quests entirely. Survival and economy mods to make the focus of the gameplay getting enough gold to afford a room for the night, tweaks to loot to make things more “mundane.”
The Sims for me is either 1800s Utah polygamous Mormons, post apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale scenarios, or prisons.
I always like to see people who go all in on the roleplaying in RPGs.
I do wish people would leave mods that aren’t for them alone. There are a bunch of mods extremely not to my taste that I just scroll past instead of intentionally clicking to tell the mod author just how much it is not to my taste and that they should not have made it because I am uninterested in the content.
Downloading unhinged Morrowind mods in the mid naughts exposed me to new franchises, music, ideas… Like this banger, which plays at some point in the Underground 2 along with this one. (btw, Dawnguard is Emil or whoever wrote it ripping off story beats from a 20 year old Morrowind mod based on the Underworld series lol - play both and don’t tell me that the Soul Cairn sequence isn’t inspired…)
Did she make music? Holy shit - if you have a link I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her for years. She’s genuinely a major inspiration for my painting and art.
The prison mod is great for running the “re education” camps in the Handmaid’s Tale scenarios. I usually rezone all of the lots in Downtown to residential, and then explode a series of bombs across them (+ enhance with some assets ripped from the Fallout games). Occasionally I add in a zombie apocalypse to shake it up.
My Utah Mormons I play out the generation after they moved from Nauvoo. Clothing is period accurate, as much as possible. The goal is to populate an empty map, and find something to do with all of the extra men (wars, Indian raids…)
When I was ten and playing the original Sims, it was Roman families with historically accurate slavery (minus the sex stuff.)
I thought that was the Sims intended playstyle? You mean to tell me the developer didn’t intend for me to make a family of 8 of my friends, then trap them in a house until each of them dies one-by-one Hunger Games style? Then build a glorious mansion for the final one?
Will Wright after seeing everything he owned in ashes after a series of major wildfires in the Palisades: “what if I made a virtual dollhouse for people to explore sexual and violent fantasies that would make Freud say, ‘no, that’s too much.’”
I get the tone is jokey but I wasn’t sure if that was a hypothetical alternate universe proposition with a different Will Wright, or something that happened in real life, so I looked up the wildfire thing.
Wright’s house was caught in the Oakland Hills firestorm.
Rebuilding his life, and having to reacquire so many of his basic possessions, fed into the idea for The Sims.
BG3 has great voice acting, but I don’t really think it’s that far beyond any other games. As a personal example, Cherami Leigh as Female V in Cyberpunk 2077 is probably my favorite voice actor in the last several years, even if BG3 is probably my favorite game in that same time.
Dude Cherami Leigh also voiced my favorite gaming character, Gaige the Mechromancer from Borderlands 2. She’s fucking phenomenal.
It’s a bummer none of the echo logs made it into the game, but they’re still great. The fact that she cuts her arm, and then instead of patching it up, she just slices her arm clean off and then builds a mecha arm WHILE she’s bleeding out is so fuckin hardcore. I love it
Upskaling is a fabolous technology and the split that quality needs to do between hardware upgrades and software support. Overall the existence of the technology is definitly a positive one.
However people are worried about a development that we are already seeing where games are just not efficient with their resources and require way to much computing power. People are afraid studios will decrease the amount of work they put into optimising because they feel like Upskaling will solve all perfomance problems for them. But optimisation needs to happen on both parts. That’s what people are afraid of.
ofc optimization is still needed, I meant that upscaling improves the maximum you could reasonably get out of your hardware. I'd also like to see actual low options come back bc it's really annoying not being able to turn the graphics down anymore.
I think the greatest growth for me is realising how good “high” or “medium” presets are nowadays. There is a lot of FOMO on missing the best (looking) experience, but IMO modern medium settings are stunning. I was watching a graphics comparison of Kingdom Come 2 and the improvements from “ultra” were so miniscule. The jump from “low” to “medium” to as incredible tho.
I’m a game developer and I will 100% confirm that studios have already started and will continue assuming the user has DLSS/FSR/XeSS enabled because it turns out rendering half as many pixels can get you across the finish line.
It was already fairly standard practice to try as hard as you can for performance, and when that fails to bring you good performance at native resolution, just cut some resolution (for example, to 900p from 1080p).
However, I do want to add that DLSS/FSR/XeSS is great technology for the low end of the market who can’t afford insane rigs but do get to have a slightly sharper image than previous upscalers could accomplish.
Look at the release of Rise of the Ronin for PC, the game has a huge CPU bottleneck, poor performance around big cities, looks like the game render stuff that shouldn’t be rendered. The last patch they released? “Graphics mode”…
Right? A lot of games have no win condition it was just to see how far you could get. Already saw some good examples on the comments, but pacman is another one. There is the kill screen but that’s just cause the game wasn’t made to go that long.
I wouldn’t have found “Dredge” without it, so I’m grateful. I’d had a hankering for a fishing game for years and it was finally sated by that little ditty
There have been a few i was genuinely excited for but I’ve also been collecting them regularly so there’s a lot I’ve never played and probably won’t ever play plus fun ones I enjoyed
Civ games at launch are often a bit of a mixed bag, and the games improve over time with patches and expansions. That being said, the game isn’t even fully out yet, and early Steam reviews are notoriously unreliable and undifferentiated. For your first civ game, maybe look at earlier titles like Civ 5 or 6. They have aged very well, I still play 6 all the time.
I played 6 at launch and it was a huge downgrade from 5 but now it’s been updated so much it’s now unrecognizable from what was released as 6.
Every patch, update, and DLC will change it incrementally back into a similar experience as the others. They like to try to get real wild with the initial release but it tends to get back to the same sort of things eventually.
I am hoping that is the case, but I do have to say that this one boggles the mind just a little bit to be launching without significant features that the previous games had like hotseat multiplayer and limited era games.
I want to add on that Sid Meier had a philosophy called the one third rule, where on third of a new game would be kept from the previous, one third would be improved systems and one third would be new. I don’t think he is big into the studio at the moment, but i can see him still being a guiding light.
I don’t play many games, but civ patches will get the game polished and it will be a world better at some point. Until then, you can be the part that is booming the system or wait until the product is in a place that the community loves
I tried to play London and it crashed constantly. Now, that’s not all that different an experience from playing any Bethesda game, but it did kind of kill any interest I had in the mod.
Which version? The latest version includes Buffout 4 which helps some. However, yeah it crashes a lot for me, but thankfully I save a lot and have the patience to just reload. I understand not everyone does though.
It was very early on, the first week or so after it released. I’m sure they’ve fixed a lot of the bugs but honestly I just haven’t really been motivated to try it out again.
Yes, that’s why it is necessary to downgrade Fallout 4 and there are instructions on how to do so on github, that and/or you can use Folon’s downgrader.
I have to try again on my system with AMD 6750 video card, on my other one with Nvidia 3070 it keeps crashing every five minutes and I was already a couple of hours in and liking it.
the discord for the mod is really helpful, and has a pretty smart bot to decipher crashlogs. Definitely solved some issues I had. Recommended, unless discord is a nono, which is fair.
I do some “community service” over there and help out others where I can. And seems like most crashes are either some lingering mods from old-fallout4 install, creation club mods (any cc*.* files in fallout/data -dir, or old config files in mydocs/mygames/fallout4) or “bug fix mods” intended for 1.00/1.01 folon versions, and lastly: weapon debris -option enabled - that causes crashes outright with nvidia cards.
edit: also “long loading times fix” -mod is a total nono, there’s better and less files corrupting options out there (highfpsphysics)
I don’t like messengers without (audited and good) end-to-end encryption,
I get overwhelmed easily in groups and bad things happen.
Still, appreciate the recommendation and suggestion 🙂.
Mine was a fresh install of both fallout 4 and fallout london and hasn’t had any mods added to either, so it is unlikely any of those are the reason it crashes.
Edit: I will look at that option but I have an AMD GPU, so that shouldn’t be an issue if it’s only nvidia.
Wait what? Nexus Mods acknowledges a security flaw that had been breached and took action to notify the community and solve the problem and you think that’s shady?
That’s like one of the super grindy JRPG titles I have (100 hours or so to get through the story). To get all the achievements, you’d have to play through an absolute minimum of 9 times, because you need to kill the end boss without taking damage on each difficulty level, and they unlock as you go. But you’d actually be grinding bosses for ages trying to get them without taking damage…
The game was ok, but I honestly can’t see wanting to play it twice let alone 9 times… there’s definitely a reason almost nobody has those achievements…
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