The title made me think they were responding to users that needed customer support, but no. This:
Meanwhile, when another user lamented the amount of loading screens, the support team replied imploring the reviewer to “consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under three seconds”.
is just pathetic. This is nothing more than low-effort damage control. Which, funnily enough, is rather fitting for Starfield in general. It’s not a terrible game but it absolutely fell flat on its face on its biggest selling points. Procedural exploration will always have drawbacks but No Man’s Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department and it came out nearly 8 years ago and made by a team a fraction of the size. And I don’t expect Bethesda to put in the same effort as Hello did and make Starfield live up to its promises
but No Man’s Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department
I had high hopes for No Man’s Sky based on how people talked about it but was left underwhelmed. I found it boring and repetitive.
Starfield took a lot longer before it started feeling that repetitive (to me.) I put many more hours into Starfield (than NMS) without even thinking about it.
I just rolled credits on Starfield last night and went back to keep playing because I have a ton of unfinished quests and some goals for building my spaceship. With No Man’s Sky I felt like there was nothing else to find.
(All that said, I do find a lot of the writing pretty lackluster, the planets now feel boring to look at and now predictable as to what will be there, and I do not particularly enjoy running around trying to find the last things to scan for very little payoff.)
I agree about NMS, I can’t bring myself to try it again. The original feeling that everything is the same is still with me, even after reading reviews of updates.
The best summary for NMS I have read is “huge but shallow”. There is so much stuff to do, but everything is so shallow that it becomes boring very fast
Yeah, I ended up feeling the same about Starfield as I did about NMS. A huge universe that’s wildly unrewarding in every way possible. And getting to the end of Starfield, the NG+ feels exactly like getting to the center of the galaxy in NMS. Completely pointless.
The main quest of Starfield had literally no impact on the world at large. And don’t get me wrong, that’s totally fine. As long as it has an impact on something. But it doesn’t. It all boils down to “no one can know about this” and where you stand on the issue, which in itself its meaningless because no matter where you stand, the outcome is exactly the same. You just run in circles and your choices have no effect on anything.
The side quests and faction quests are pretty good. But that’s about it. The ship building system is painful, the outpost building system is so fucking bad I don’t even know where to start, and it takes hours upon hours to go through levelling up, doing skill challenges, as well as research, to even get to a point where any of it is rewarding, and even then it isn’t actually rewarding. At least the settlement crafting in NMS felt like building a cool house and a rad looking planet. Whereas Starfield, settlements are just massive pain in the ass mines and manufacturers.
An issue is that Bethesda might be getting deluded into thinking that Fallout 4 on its own was fantastic.
It is, on its own, very boring. The story is bland, characters left unexplored. But the mods make it amazing.
Sim settlements alone revitalizes the game, changing settlement building into an optional and story driven thing, particularly in its version 2.
The vertibirds mods which not only fix the abysmal default abilities, but even let you call one in as air support.
Various mods that add travellers on the roads and paths, so you encounter other people.
The mods that let you turn the feral ghouls into zombie hordes.
The list goes on.
Yeah, at the beginning Fallout 4 was just Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it. And especially since the game really pushes you into the Minutemen faction, for a new player, the annoyance of constant settlement building and rescuing settlers and setting up new settlements completely overwhelms you and makes the game extremely frustrating. After my first playthrough I put it down and didn’t come back to it for over a year because it pissed me off so much. Realizing you could just ignore the Minutemen made the game so much better. And then when mods came to the consoles, it completely changed the game. Made it so much more enjoyable.
Like, yeah, there’s loads of YT channels now devoted to FO4 content, but only because mods allowed people to transcend how lackluster the game was at the beginning. The love of it now is despite Bethesda. And they definitely spend way too much time smelling their own farts thinking they hit the ball out of the park because of all that.
We will truly live in a world where 95% of games are based on Unreal Engine, 4% on Godot or GameMaker Studio, and 1% custom engines.
Which is such a shame… When Unreal does something bad, like absolutely messing up shader compilation, pretty much all games start suffering with this for years. And there are some amazing engines out there… Resident Evil’s scales surprisingly well and looks way better than it has any right to.
I have a love hate relationship with this man. He has spearheaded some of my favorite games even if they came nowhere close to what was promised. It’s so weird to come back to Fable and enjoy it more than I did when it came out.
The worst thing is none of the executives are getting fired (in a proper more manner, no golden parachutes and clawbacks on any stock based compensation).
Yeah? The executives are firing people, to lower costs, make the numbers look better…? Which makes the owners of the business money?
Why wouldn’t the executives get bonuses or golden parachutes if let go? They are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Executives don’t make products, provide services, or add any productive value. They are just the face of the owners, and will do the “hard” things for them.
Executives are responsible for the direction of the company. They aren’t just there to cut costs (at least, not usually). They’re there to see what opportunities the company to move into, and guide them to success.
This is the opposite of what most executives at these gaming companies have done lately. They’ve driven up budgets and pushed them in a direction that makes people not want to purchase their games, causing them to fail.
If a company has to fire employees then that’s the fault of the executives. They should be taking cuts first, not the people who were doing their job well but were just pointed in the wrong direction.
I’ve worked closely with the people that do reverse engineering and such for FromSoft games and I can damn near guarantee that any PSN requirement would be ripped out pretty quickly. At worst they might tie it to online features. My real worry is exclusivity, timed or otherwise.
Sony: Thanks for letting us know! The next FromSoft game will have zero modding support. Make sure to login using your PSN account. Remember, we love you!
Oh, make no mistake; prior FS games have no modding support. In fact, they encrypt the all game files with RSA nowadays (which is awful for read speeds because RSA is slow but whatever). Current modding support is based off of a robust reverse engineering community that’s documented most of the file formats and a significant portion of the important code. And that’s while contending with Arxan which, while not as awful as Denuvo, still impedes RE. They’d basically have to implement something as draconian as Denuvo to make things more difficult than they are.
Honestly, I am probably in the minority, but I don’t understand the hate for console exclusivity. In today’s world there is almost no reason to stick with a console outside some small stuff like pick up and go and knowing a game will just work. I say let them hold rights to games if it gets people to invest in getting one. I am not really sure why this is such a negative thing for some. It’s also odd that Sony gets the biggest blame when you have Nintendo that has zero games playable on other platforms outside emulation. At least these days 8 months after release it gets a PC release as well.
Yeah, gamers Nexus was saying that the stream deck guys were telling them that they were waiting for the tech to get good enough to be able to call the device steam deck 2, but that’s probably a couple of years out.
Activision Blizzard has become such a huge pile of disgusting shit that people are quite tempted to see what would happen if the devil Microsoft buys it.
Yeah, never thought I’d live the day to see it but here we are. Blizzard use to be the darling of all gamers, only one who did things right and released games when they were actually done. Then money hungry shitheads took over.
I’m just happy to potentially see Bobby Kotick, Ion Hazzikostas, Mike Ybarra, etc ousted.
Don’t get me wrong. Fifteen years ago I would have flipped if Microsoft put in a bid to buy Vivendi and get their paws on Blizzard, after seeing how badly they ruined Rare. Activision tanked the brand so bad that I’m actually rooting for Microsoft.
I don’t think Kotick is at all certain to be kicked out. As easily as I can see MS letting him go with an enormous golden parachute, I can just as easily imagine them keeping him onboard because all they care about is Activision’s ability to make money.
In all likelihood Blizzard isn’t going to be managed any differently. Microsoft’s modus operandi with gaming acquisitions is to leave the leadership in place and let the dev/publisher run itself. Why is everyone expecting different here? The most likely outcome is MS does nothing to Blizzard and Blizzard continues on more or less the same trajectory as before.
Tell that fucknut Tsujimoto to take a fuckin pay cut if he’s concerned about increasing wages. I’m not paying $80-$90 for a fucking game. Hell, I’m still not completely cool with paying $70
The last triple A game I bought at launch was ‘Watchdogs Legion’, to comemorate my new PC. I figured I just build a new computer, so why not celebrate by buying an expensive game. It was a stupid impulse buy.
I’m still not cool with them raising PC games from $50 to $60 almost 20 years ago just because they could and used the console parity excuse due to their licensing fees. I don’t think I’ve bought a AAA game since EA’s stunts around 2012/2013.
Pixel Tap, another popular tap game, outright prevents you from progressing past level three unless you invite at least one friend - and by the time the airdrop rolled around, level three wasn’t enough to be eligible for any tokens. But for every friend you did invite, you got 5% of the in-game currency they earned, and 1% of anything players they invited made, essentially creating something indicative of a virtual pyramid scheme, or MLM (multi-level marketing), that eventually paid out crypto tokens to those at the top. The Pixel Tap crypto reached a high of $0.0977 shortly after it launched, but at time of writing is now worth $0.006405, less than a tenth of that peak.
Virtual pyramid schemes for monopoly money, lovely.
The problem is the monopoly money is being used in a confidence game that’s being permitted by governments because all they see are more potentially taxable transactions and don’t give a shit about what this means for the longterm health of our societies.
What a shit article. There’s a massive amount of context missing.
7DTD is a game created by The Fun Pimps. Telltale Games bought the rights to produce a console port of the game from TFP. Telltale Games then contracted with Iron Galaxy to produce the port. Telltale Games went bankrupt and it’s assets were liquidated, one of those assets was the rights to produce the console port. TFP managed to buy back the rights to the console port, but were unable to get any of the source code for the console port. It took years to get the rights sorted out, and it wasn’t cheap.
It’s a messed up situation, but console players bought a Playstation 4/XBox One game from Telltale Games, a company that went bankrupt and is defunct, and that sucks. TFP is now starting from scratch to produce a console port for the current generation of consoles and that costs money.
E3 has had a foot in the grave for the last ten years. The availability of the internet kinda invalidated any need for expensive physical conventions. When they changed their rules to allow the general public to attend, that was a pretty clear death rattle, imo. And the Big 3 all pretty much pulling out entirely and doing their own streamed announcement events didn't help matters. Covid also ended up killing whatever momentum E3 had left. Basically everything was stacked against E3 for a long while now.
Super disappointing, but also super expected, honestly. See you in the next life, giant enemy crabs.
I honestly think it’s all the in-house directs now that really killed it. The sad thing is now they all get to control their narratives and put on a pretty, but tightly produced/curated show and we all lose the little snipes back and forth and comparisons that happen at events like E3. It felt more…gladiatorial, I guess?
The sad thing was that CoD Mobile was the last decent game in the series. Just think about that for a moment: a freaking cell phone game is better than any CoD title to come out on actual gaming systems in practically a decade.
I agree that it’s probably mostly children / teens that play those games, but I’m sure a non-insignificant portion of their player base is the type of person who is A-OK with listening to nothing but pop music.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but they are either afraid of trying something new or they aren’t interested in discovering what they may end up enjoying more than the same derivative time-wasters.
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