That’s troubling. I’ve been playing the shit out of both GTA V and RDR 2 because they have the two best campaigns I’ve ever played. Especially RDR2. It was unique in its trajectory, in its beats…I really hope the follow ups, (however many years down the road those might be) won’t be affected too much by this. The writing made those games what they are.
I haven’t played baldurs gate, but I’ve been seeing a lot about it, mostly positive. Interesting, the news about that company. Being successful doesn’t usually call for a massive shakeup. But that’s capitalism for you. Fuck the workers, squeeze more out of those you keep. Classic.
As someone who has a very small selection of games they like, play God of War. I never played any of them before the 2018 game and I loved it. I start it again and play through like once a year to 100%. Only game I ever 100%ed.
Loved RDR and GTA but not much else has kept my interest anyway close to GoW except maybe Hitman.
Speculating but they’ve probably already wrapped up all the writing for GTA VI and planned to move on after that. Imagine with Houser leaving we’ll see a few more vets as they finish up their roles for VI.
When you walk into the drunk guys home for his money and kill him, but his son goes “pa, pa, pa…” I know it’s a video game, but I wasn’t expecting that. It was one of those moments where i can never forget. I felt like I actually hurt a person in my mind and kept thinking about it, still do. Absolutely the best game that brings you into the fold as a player.
I dunno, I’m not a huge gamer. I’ve had just FIFA and gta v on my console for years happily. Rdr2 is a newer purchase for me and I love it. But I don’t really like fantasy games, so I’m not really larian’s audience.
I like shooting and driving and open worlds. And soccer. I put off getting rdr2 for so long because I couldn’t drive. I regret writing it off because I was definitely wrong about it
I was saying I’ve been hearing good things about BG3 and saw they fired a lot of people to “streamline” the company. I was just deriding capitalism for that insane mindset
In related news, as part of its recently publicised cutbacks, BioWare has “let go of” Lukas Kristjanson, the lead writer behind Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, and the writer of the first three Dragon Age games, Mary Kirby.
Oh it wasn’t Larian, that name was mentioned to me so I just assumed from the quote above without rereading. I dunno the connection between larian and BioWare, but they’re obviously releasing games together? Or sharing titles?
Gotcha, so Baldurs gate 1 and 2 were released by bioware it 1998 and 2000 respectively, the lead writer for those games was let go by bioware recently, Larian is a completely separate company that got the IP rights to do BG3 👍 I can see where the confusion came in lo Edit: More context in the development section of en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldur's_Gate_3
GTA V? Really? I absolutely hated the story in that, and I hated the characters. Here are some of my issues with it:
Trevor:
interesting epilogue, but otherwise pretty much no character arc
really wanted to see him try to take on the Los Santos gangs (DLC!)
Franklin:
largely just does whatever Michael says
wanted to start a dealership, but he kinda gives up once he makes it big (DLC!)
Michael:
arc was okay, but he didn’t seem like a good fit for main character, especially when Franklin gets the ending
All in all, I felt like the three character perspective was largely a distraction from the lack of actual storytelling. SA and IV didn’t have that, so they actually had a meandering plot with some character development to round it all out.
I haven’t finished RDR2 (it’s so long!), but I really loved RDR and heard that story for RDR2 is even better.
I mean, I’d argue that GTA V didn’t have the most emotional storytelling, but it wasn’t a character driven game like RDR2. The characters had the stories they did because they each opened up different avenues into different types of crimes. They didn’t focus on it. The characters were all insufferable. But that doesn’t mean the writing for the story itself wasn’t good. Yeah, the characters all kinda sucked, but the storytelling propelled the tension and wasn’t just some lame bullshit that felt like it needed to be there. The characters don’t develop that much, but the backstory was great, the intrigue and the vastness of the word made it great. That’s all writing. But you’re right, it couldn’t stand alone as a character driven story.
RDR2 on the other hand is a character driven story at its heart. You definitely need to play it because it’s incredibly well done. If you’re looking for good storytelling, emotional connections to the characters’ trajectories, and a great fuckin game, RDR2 is where you wanna be.
I’m not expecting RDR-levels of storytelling or anything, and the original RDR is way better than any of the GTAs in terms of storytelling and characters. However, GTA V felt like such a downgrade from previous entries.
GTA V starts out strong, with a fun heist sequence, which gets the player excited for more. And then the next thing we see is Michael at marriage counseling, and then we meet Franklin, who seems ready to take up Michael’s mantle. Then we see Trevor, who is now running drugs in the rural area, which is also pretty exciting. At the start, I was excited to see all three develop their individual storylines, with Franklin just getting into the underground, Trevor establishing himself as a drug kingpin, and Michael getting his last heist in.
But instead of that, Trevor and Franklin kind of give up on their arcs and they just focus on helping Michael with the heist. Why? Why doesn’t Trevor try to take over the drug trade in Los Santos? Why doesn’t Franklin try to start his own dealership? Or at least steal cars as side content? If they’re really interested in heists, why is there only about five of them? Why can’t I go do more after finishing the main storyline? What about Las Venturas, doing heists there would be a ton of fun!
To me, the storytelling really dragged once Trevor came to Los Santos, which was more than half of the game. In fact, I dropped it and came back about three times (restarting twice) because it was so uninteresting, until I finally forced myself to speed through the story just so I could cross it off my list so I wouldn’t feel the need to come back. I didn’t have the same problem with either GTA SA or GTA IV, and I even finished GTA IV after GTA V (played off and on on console before GTA V, then bought and played through on PC).
And the world felt small to me. I know it was physically bigger than every other GTA game, but it felt so much smaller than GTA SA, which was able to fit three cities and a rural area and still make them feel far apart (GTA V just had one city and a rural area), and it felt similar to GTA IV. I didn’t feel any desire to explore like I did with SA. The backstory was interesting, but I think it just highlighted how disappointing the rest of the story was.
In fact, I even like GTA III more than GTA V. It’s pretty janky to play today, but it still has that OG charm to it.
So I honestly don’t understand why it’s so loved. Nothing about it really stood out to me aside from the graphics and performance of the engine. I didn’t like the driving as much as IV (controversial take), the humor felt bland to me, and I didn’t find any of the side characters particularly interesting, except maybe Lamar, and he also largely gave up on his arc.
So GTA V is by far my least favorite of the series, so much so that I’m not looking forward to GTA VI.
I could almost see the "digital foundry can't share it" as not giving their review outlets preferential treatment over everyone else (because the technical breakdown is a separate thing), but the timeline is just not anywhere near sufficient, especially for a game of this scope.
I understand that Beth delayed the review codes, but I don’t quite understand why. The subtext of this article seems to suggest that they expect higher reviews from other outlets. Is that the case?
I'm kind of reading it like the Europe team did kind of a shitty job, considering they said some places got codes from the American team.
It's generally a hard balance to strike on when it's good enough for reviewers to get their hands on it with enough time to actually provide meaningful evaluations (because they genuinely are fixing shit up to and through launch. This is the same reason it's hard for reviews to provide a lot of information on general bugginess. They also play a lot of unfinished stuff that's actually cleaned up before launch). But there's no reason to give different reviewers codes at different times. It sounds like different divisions and one fucking up.
While this headline is true, I don’t think it’s the fundamental reason for the game’s success. Having characters that feel alive is awesome, and part of what elevates BG3 over D:OS 1 and 2 for me. But what makes it great is the amount of control you have over the narrative; how the game responds to your choices. There is nuance. There are permutations. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than any rpg Bethesda ever put out (fite me).
A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.
Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.
Yeah, this is true. I think Bethesda games have just felt really empty and lifeless to me for a long time. I enjoyed Morrowind a lot. Oblivion I played for a while, but never finished the story. Don’t even remember if I ever finished Skyrim, which was obviously massively popular. Same with their Fallout games, it’s just been diminishing returns for me. Different strokes, and all that, obviously, they just don’t have that secret sauce I crave.
I think part of it is that your character doesn’t have any personality; you’re some total cipher of a Chosen One, which makes it difficult to form an emotional connection to them, and by extension to any of the NPC’s. Some of their NPC’s have well-written dialogue, but I sure don’t remember any of them.
Bethesda's "good stories" have always been moreso the player's stories of cobbled together mechanics as a a result of their playstyle/current abilities, gear, and motivation.
Most of the time it might be rote open world questing with some enjoyable grind loop, but there are a lot of particular memories I love, like robbing the Red Diamond jewelry store in Oblivion's Imperial City, "casing" the place by day as a customer and purchasing a necklace, purely to experience the joy of breaking in at 3 AM and robbing it blind.
The joy and hilarity I felt when I came back the day after I'll always remember. Entering the store to see the shopkeep, beaming at his new customer, all of his shelves and cases completely fucking empty, as he vacantly grinned at me, buck naked as id stolen the clothes right out of his sleeping pockets.
I've stolen a lot of shit in that game, but that one was good. It's incredibly rare for me to remember Bethesda's actual character moments that fondly, as they've always come off plastic and rehearsed in some combination of writing, voice acting, and rigid animation. Sometimes they almost reach a good story, like some popular side quest chains, or Paladin Danse's personal quests.
So, I think these two games tell their best culminational "stories" in different fundamental ways, and I think it's neat how each one's best potential narrative, whether written or otherwise, is a marriage of the game's possibilities and the player's motivation and intent. But you're probably right, BG3 can tell a lot more, better stories than my idiotic repetitive Bethesda adventures, but I do like some pulp.
Yeah, I think you’re right, and maybe my waning enjoyment of that style of rpg says as much about my lack of imagination as anything else. I’m just a sucker for a story I can get caught up in, with characters that I can somehow relate to, and I’ve nearly always felt let down by Bethesda games in that regard.
Very sad. Have enjoyed all their games. Just reached the end of Shadow Gambit and would have gladly stuck around for more. Hope the rest of the studio goes on to do more elsewhere.
You could. But that's also if it's the only game you play and you don't boot up Sea of Stars, Quake, Halo, Goldeneye, Yakuza, Unraveled, or what have you. I don't have a Game Pass subscription, but the math on it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.
Yeah. If you play a lot of little indie games, and tend to only play through them once, it’s an absurd bargain.
It’s also great in that you can try a lot of stuff without having to research it at all first, so you get really nice surprises sometimes. And you can try things risk-free, so sometimes I’ll try something I wouldn’t have expected to like and wouldn’t have bought and be pleasantly surprised. It can open up entire genres to people this way, as an intro to different types of games.
I do tend to buy a month or two, drop out, then buy another month when the catalogue is different though.
In this scenario above, playing Starfield and it being too enormous to finish in a month or two, you'd hardly have any time to enjoy these other games either.
You could spend all of your free time for one month playing Starfield and have finished it for $17. You could functionally "rent" 17 games for $1 each to get a feel for each of them, one of them being Starfield, to decide which ones you want to stick with. You could beat two smaller games each month and spend the rest of your time playing Starfield, and four months later still come out ahead of the $70 Starfield would have cost you. There are lots of ways that math works out for you to come out ahead.
Baldur's Gate 3 came out less than a month ago, and I already know at least two people on my friends list who've beaten it, plus several others who put over 60 hours into it in the past two weeks, according to Steam. There are plenty of people who could get through Starfield in one month for $17.
Looking at my game purchases a year and as a pretty heavy gamer, I come out just over the cost of game pass. Big thing is that I get to keep my games without needing to re-up the subscription.
Yeah right now when there’s a lot of games coming out it seems great, but middle of COVID I remember nothing was coming out, and I would have had to keep paying for the games I had already played.
$9.99 for a month of gamepass PC, or $10.99 for console (ultimate you’re paying for cloud access or online play, so it’s a disingenuous comparison) You can play starfield for a month, then buy it for 20% off through gamepass, so $55.99. $55.99+10.99 = $66.98.
So you basically get a $11 month-long trial, then $2 off the full price if you decide you like it enough to keep.
Of course, it was a bait tactic to get subscriber count up. Subscription services are cancer, they use cheap tactics to grow rapidly and then cut them off once enough people are hooked. This was an inevitability.
I thought Lae’zel looked like that because she is a githyanki, but after seeing the actual actress I’m not so sure. Her nose looks unreal. They mocapped her way too well.
A lot of things, but most of them stem from the expansion being very clearly rushed to release. The narrative was also incomplete, and Bungie had to add a bunch of supplemental lore to the seasonal missions instead of putting them in the main campaign where it belongs.
Traditionally, Bungie keeps the seasonal storyline separated from the campaign story, because they're technically separate purchases the player has to make, so it makes sense to keep those stories apart from each other, so that a player who only buys the expansions but not the season passes won't be missing out on any narrative threads that they haven't already invested time and money into.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with Lightfall. The campaign didn't finish telling the story, and spent about half of the campaign time sending the player on a search for a MacGuffin that the game never properly explains, and the other half was spent awkwardly learning how to use the new Strand subclass. Except all the campaign missions where you get to experiment with Strand gave you a super-boosted version of the subclass which isn't available in normal play, so players were disappointed with how Strand performed in the endgame when it felt so overpowered during the campaign. A lot of the unanswered questions from the Lightfall campaign got explained in seasonal cutscenes, instead.
Now, granted, the seasonal and campaign stories are part of the same over-arching plot, so it's expected for there to be some overlap. But it's not supposed to go to the point where you literally can't understand the point of what you did during the campaign until 3 months after the campaign was released, and only if you also bought the season pass. They introduced "The Veil" in the Lightfall campaign, and it was never made clear to the player what it actually was or what it meant as far as the story goes, until some Season of the Deep cutscenes came out.
There's also the issue of Strand being completely reworked from whatever "poison" subclass it was originally going to be, and there's a lot of evidence from the Witch Queen campaign that suggests that the subclass was originally going to be poison (some unredacted text in the game originally referred to poisonous status effects for Strand that are not in the final version). Strand was originally going to be included in Witch Queen, but was cut and pushed back to Lightfall, and in its place in Witch Queen was a really half-baked mechanic called "Deepsight", which reveals hidden platforms for the player to use to progress through the stages (in places where it's clear that the player was originally expected to use the Strand grapple mechanic to progress).
To Bungie's credit, they've made some improvements to Lightfall since release, and it is in a much better state than it was when it launched. But the narrative issues are still there.
It's that sort of feeling that the game is this weird, organic beast that feeds on the "subscriber base" that caused me to leave in the first place.
Sad it worked out that way with Lightfall's release, but if Destiny wants to be such a good game that the ideal player buys everything, then it has to be that damn good to do so. And it can be, but not always.
Yeah, I'm remaining cautiously optimistic about The Final Shape. I'm still going to end up buying it, because despite a lot of the game's flaws and the poor release of Lightfall, the storytelling is still fantastic 99/100 times, and I really want to see how the story ends.
But post-Final Shape is going to be a really hard sell, even for players who are sucked into the game like myself. They've made some decent progress at fixing some of Lightfall's downfalls so far, so it's evident that Bungie does genuinely care about the game still. But they've definitely damaged our trust, and are still gonna need to work really hard to earn that back.
Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was? What was it?
And yeah I 100% percent wish we had gotten poison instead of janky parkour. (I will admit that baiting the Sorrow Bearer into lunging off the map with Strand jumps was fun though.)
Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was?
Well... sort of. There's still a lot of unanswered questions about it, but basically it's another cosmic entity that's somehow linked to the Traveler. We end up finding it on Neptune at the end of the Lightfall campaign, and it basically looks like a giant fungal growth. Aesthetically, there's some similarities to the Egregore that took over the Glykon and Leviathan, but I'm not too sure that they're really the same thing.
They released this cutscene which goes into a bit of the Witness's origins, and it briefly talks about the Veil.
That’s the worst part to be to be frank. Incomplete story and lore with the answer of….another $12 every 3 months. ….or pay 50 more dollars to get the story that you already paid…$50 for.
Fuck. That. Also Joe Blackburn had a hard on for player engagement so almost everything got nerfed when lightfall launched… so you have to play longer and shoot things longer.
Shortly before lightfall came out, I dropped the game and haven’t been back.
The writing was bad. I played through the campaign four times (three normal, one ... whatever the hell hard mode was called) and I still have no idea what "the Veil" even is, why we cared about it, why we did literally anything that we did, etc.
The new Darkness element was fun but the way it was introduced made it REALLY OBVIOUS it was supposed to be in Witch Queen and just got delayed.
Game balance went out the window, to the point where people were getting one-shot mapped by Cabal rocket launchers in patrol zones.
They introduced a new raid that, while thematically fun and visually gorgeous, was un-fun to play.
Eh... the more I Think about it the more everything Chozo said covers it more eloquently.
Edit: I don't remember if it was with Lightfall or Witch Queen but they managed to make Gambit worse. Gambit was already neglected and damn near unplayable. They made it worse.
I quit playing when they started sunsetting planets,
I vowed never to spend another dime on Bungie products until they give me back the $60 campaign I paid for.
I don’t know how this game is still going after they consistently make unpopular decisions that turn people away. Maybe being dumbstruck by that is why Sony bought them.
Edit: Like I straight-up paid them full game price only to be treated like an F2P player because they’re apparently incapable of doing what 343 did with all of their older games in the MCC and allowing players to install specific parts of content. I’m still annoyed that I’m being punished for their incompetence.
Same here, I literally paid for Red War. That was a full campaign, and I want to be able to play it along with every location that was included. DCV was a big fat giant middle finger stuck right in my face, and I don’t care how cheap future expansions or season passes get. I want everything I paid money for back, in addition to access to all the new shit.
Until they do that, not another cent. I won’t even play the game until that stuff is back, even if new content is free.
GTA Online could have been so great, but instead it feels like they put no effort into doing anything but selling new DLC. The missions are boring and unrewarding, the motivation to work with others is nil, there is no good teaming system, it’s incredibly complicated to start any business and the guide is lacking to the point where there might as well not have been a guide at all. Then if you say fuck it, I am going to attempt this all on my own someone comes up and frags you with a rocket launcher 3 seconds into attempting to pick a lock.
So frustrating. It could have been the coolest game ever and it’s just a pile of shit.
If you were okay with “man, after getting away from a life of crime, is immediately pulled back in by people who don’t have his best interests at heart and will use him to betray others before eventually getting betrayed themselves” for over two decades, I don’t think you need to worry. Took until RDR2 to break that mold.
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