The two GTAs I actually lived and finished are from before Rockstar era: GTA and GTA2 - the 2D ones. I played all the big open world Rockstar titles (except for Bully) and I think I’m just not the right audience for what they are making.
Maybe it’s because I was playing on PC but none of the games prior to 5 held my attention because of the awful controls. Then 5 lost me in under 4 hours or so because it just felt like a lot of nothing going on. For a game called Grand Theft Auto, there wasn’t a lot of Grand Theft Auto action in those few hours.
GTA5 was the most profitable entertainment product of all time when it was single player only. It turned a profit in one day. It’s definitely going to have an online mode, but there’s no reason to expect it to forgo single player, especially after rdr2.
I looked into it and yeah, the only thing that made more has been Minecraft. And Minecraft made twice as much. GTAV made twice as much as the one below it.
That’s pretty crazy.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand why they focused on multiplayer. Im just a fan since GTA 1. They have a completely different set of values since then, and it’s too bad to see them degrade into Corporate Company No 1. So to speak.
I mean, we got RDR2 5 years ago and that game is a masterpiece. Yes, there is potential for the next thing to suck, but it hasn’t happened yet, so why be pessimistic?
I tried some online stuff (no friends and just casual play) with V and it wasn’t interesting at all to me. Mean the story wasn’t stellar in V but I had enough fun through single player. Hopefully they put at least the same effort in VI’s single player. Though with all the companies wanting more money I bet there’ll be more focus for online from the start this time.
It’s not a terrible game. I still inexplicably have hundreds of hours put into it. (according to Xbox achievements I’m one of only 6% to bother reaching level 50)
Their comment about being a different experience each time is disingenuous, though. The only major questline that “feels” any different is The crimson Fleet storyline, which I loved and legitimately had a tough decision about which way to go.
But Vanguard, Rangers, etc… are all variations on the same missions with a different faction slapped on them. It’s all pretty generic stuff with the occasional cool mission tossed in. (Ryujin, for example was far to easy and uncreative until the very last mission, which was legitimately fun)
Settlements and outposts are entirely pointless. You can ignore them completely. And you never have to visit a random mining/civilian/science outpost if you don’t want to. Which to me seems like a negative. If a major feature of your game can safely be ignored, you haven’t integrated it properly into the larger narrative.
But yet somehow I still have just about 250 hours into it. I don’t know why. Probably the ship building, which is fun as hell.
(according to Xbox achievements I’m one of only 6% to bother reaching level 50)
When everyone gets to try it for free via Gamepass, you’re going to get very different statistics than when everyone has to shell out the money for the game and fight through the shit gameplay thanks to sunk cost fallacy.
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.
This doesn’t strike me as a bad move on their part. From the way the responses are worded, this feels very much like it’s intended to counterbalance negative impressions specifically for potential buyers who might otherwise be swayed by negative comments.
If I’m on the fence about something, I can be pretty easily swayed by a negative review that enumerates things that I’m specifically on the lookout for. Like if I saw one of those reviews that said bad story and boring gameplay, I would find myself think “sounds like the Bethesda formula hasn’t updated enough for me,” but I could be swayed back then other way by a dev response that enthusiastically mentions the exploration and crafting. “Maybe there’s enough here for me that I don’t need to bother with the story.”
Is it underhanded? Maybe. But it seems like a no-lose scenario either way for Bethesda.
I would agreeish, but from a different perspective. However,
“consider the amount of data needed to load procedural assets in under 3 seconds” is a laughable response considering the very real criticism of having so many god damn menus, all of which revolve around picking things on a map.
They have the tools to make the game however they want. I find it pretty insane that there’s no consistency in how the game allows you to fast travel in space - sometimes you can select a solar system/planet and travel right from there, no map required. Other times you get to a planet and then you can’t land on the planet until you open the map and “fast travel” to it, even though you’re right there.
And the response says “consider” no, no I won’t consider something you should have optimized before release lmao. It is how it is now and that’s what I’m considering, and I’ve decided that it’s got potential and in it’s current state it sucks.
And I actually liked the game. I did not like NG+ whatsoever though. Disappointing
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