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
No Man’s Sky is still, in my opinion, trying to make up for what it was on release. It’s a great game now. Not my jam as I find it far too expansive for my tastes, but I can’t knock it for what it is today. I think it’s a work of art and the seamless planet travel is pretty damn cool.
Not really, it’s just that a lot of guides nowadays are done on youtube. I personally think text guides are superior so I really don’t want gamefaqs to go away.
The reason is PC part prices. If you want an affordable in on modern gaming, you get a PS5 or Xbox. Yeah, you can get used parts, change settings, upsampling, upgrade down the line. But tell that to the person who just wants to buy a machine that lets them play games, hard to convince people to likely go through a bigger hassle, pay more, and have to assemble, set it up, and manage it themselves. I own a gaming PC and an OLED Switch, and if a friend asked me, I‘d tell them to just get a PS5. I would‘ve said something different five years ago.
It is all to easy to miss the immense benefits of accommodating accessibility for those of us who don’t need them though.
Most people would generally agree that NASA working on the hard problems of going into space has benefited a wide variety of industries and sciences that aren’t directly related to space travel. Most people would generally agree that athletes competing at the absolute top of a competitive sport benefits everyone who plays the sport both from developing better form and techniques and from the technology and science related to the sport becoming more competitive over time. Those benefits often extend far beyond the sport. A sports doctor being focused on getting you rehabilitated from an injury so that you can specifically play sports again might be a much more effective doctor at returning your body to health than a normal doctor who just wants to get you relatively mobile again so you can get make it into work. That sports doctor is likely using science and methodology that was developed at least partially to help professional athletes rehabilitate their injuries.
I hope we get to a point soon where most people would generally agree that accommodating accessibility needs for people with relatively “uncommon” disabilities benefits a similarly wide range of people and things. If a restaurant has to make their door wheelchair accessible, when someone has a medical emergency inside the restaurant and EMTs are trying to wheel the patient out the door as quick as possible to save their life, the effort that went into making it so someone can get into the restaurant who is in a wheelchair all of a sudden spontaneously improves the life of the victim by helping them get to the hospital faster.
This isn’t a narrative that will just happen about accessibility (especially in video games), we have to keep pointing it out to give it life.
Life is strange is very close to what you’re asking, in the game you can rewind time to a limited degree to try different thing, but sometimes your actions only have consequences much further into the game. Even the things that you can rewind and try different things there’s rarely a clear better choice, since all of them are morally ambiguous, do you take a picture of the security guard harassing a student or do you intervene? One is obviously better, but the other gives you proof which you might need later on.
I know exactly the part you mean and same. Amazing moment. I also LOVED the sequel. Criminal that it didn’t do as well as they wanted because I want them to make an even bigger version next. True Colours was pretty good though
Not only are Kinguin and other key resellers notorious for having scamming cases - to the point of having “protection fees” you can pay while purchasing from them - they’re also pointless in any way except for adding a library entry for Steam - and even then, one that might be removed
Even developers would rather people pirate than buy from key resellers
they’re also pointless in any way except for adding a library entry for Steam
uh… yeah… that’s the point. It works exactly the same way it does for keys you get from Humble, Fanatical, or Amazon. If it’s added to my library, and if I can install it, and if it doesn’t get removed, then I own it, regardless of where the key came from.
edit from main post:
I have purchased literally hundreds of steam keys from such shops over the years and have had a grand total of only 3 keys be removed from my account within days or weeks, and was granted refunds from the shops when I provided proof from Steam that the keys were rejected as duplicates. Every game I’ve installed other than those 3 have worked without issues. It’s an educated risk that I failed to mention because it’s been over 99% successful for me. Make your own call.
edit: Also worth mentioning that there are many games in my Steam account that were added after the games were delisted, such as the original GTA Trilogy, solely because I could still find keys on keyshops. If you want a delisted game, it’s worth considering.
Epic wanted exclusives by pulling games from other platforms. I will never spend a single cent on Epic Games. I’m happy to spend it on Steam, especially games that I have pirated before (Commandos series for example) or indie games (Banished anyone?).
For bigger games such as Civilians, I’ll purchase it on Steam and then pirate so I don’t need to run Steam. I am a big fan of patches to remove the intro screen.
Intro screens and the like can usually be dealt with easily in many games. Look up the game on PCGamingWiki — it’s usually much easier (and less malware prone) than pirating.
Fun fact, many intro screen can be disabled via program flags, those are put there due to faster testing, and usually not disabled due to either laziness, the way the SW is tested, and/or because the devs have some empathy for the players not wanting to watch 15 minutes of crap - like it’s “made for Nvidia”
I used to use PlayOnLinux for exactly this thing. It’s a front end/manager for WINE. Heroic and Lutris are similar, but have carried the concept further.
If my memory is right, after seeing how good sonic was on the megadrive,I was surprised with Jazz on my PC. It was so good and showed me that I didn’t need a console.
I distinctly remember in my city various computer stores had kiosks which were basically coin op PCs and for $1 you could transfer shareware onto a floppy disk. You were still responsible for paying for the full license if you liked it.
Lemuroid is a great open source emulator. Vimm’s Lair is a great place to find games/ROMs. It’s difficult to play games though that require the bumper buttons on a touch screen. Maybe consider getting her a retro gaming handheld device. They can either run based on Linux, so an emulator, or Android which can operate like normal and then you can select an emulator to play. ETA Prime has lots of reviews of these devices.
Awesome, thanks! I’ve tried retro gaming before but they didn’t really like it, we also had a Wii for a couple of weeks, but perhaps I should try again.
Hopefully our grandkids will play a game like that, or be it in real life by the time it is complete… I’m saying that as someone who backed in 2013 and have about 2k worth of ships.
This but unironically. A game like SC would absolutely be My Thing™, although maybe without the MMO part (so I guess Squadron whatever-it-was from the SC team?) – generally people are twats and I want nothing to do with them.
Nice, that’s one I have in my library not yet installed. Bought it when there was a cheap bundle with others by that company, but was mainly looking at The Place which kinda turned me off of those style games. I’ll have to be sure to give it a shot now.
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