but of course you know the mindless hordes of ignorant little goblins out there will not only buy it, they will preorder the mega super luxury ultra elite edition at that, making the game have a launch day sales record twice that of what GTA5 was in its entire first week.
Thus proving to TakeTwo, Rockstar, and every other company that it doesnt matter how shitty, or how exploitative that they are… because gamers are fucking morons and will dumptruck money to their doorstep, and not even major fuckups like cyberpunk and starfield can prevent it.
I liked Starfield and I still logged a shit ton of hours on it.
But it’s story, dialogue, and character interactions feel that bad combination of rushed and PG13 in a setting that should be R. The fact that they will likely never rewrite and re-record these quests kinda blows. And the looting took a step backwards with the lack of clothing pieces and non-unique clothing stats.
I’m excited for what the modding community does to the game, which is the major reason I bought it. I’ve got over 3000 hours on skyrim, less than 200 of that is vanilla gameplay ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It’s kinda crazy how quickly people just… stopped talking about Starfield after release. Like, even if it ended up being bad or disappointing, people would’ve at least still been talking about it in that capacity.
Starfield was one of the most hyped releases in years, at least since Cyberpunk, yet when it finally released, it seems like the entire gaming world played it for a few days, collectively decided, “eh, this is alright I guess,” then moved on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the mood towards a game shift so rapidly from massive hype to complete indifference…
I think discussion around it just became toxic, you can’t really say anything about Starfield without a bunch of people hijacking the conversation to talk about how much they hate it.
I watched some videos on it after it released and for about a week after my whole YouTube frontpage was full of Starfield-bashing (many with several hundred thousand views) so it’s definitely out there.
Yeah a couple of streamers I watch made it a point to stream “starfield bad” streams and then stream literally anything else while talking about how it was better than starfield
Lemmy was filled with posts linking to clickbait articles from PcGamer bashing the game.
YouTube just flooded my feed with videos about how Starfield was the worst game ever made, modern gaming was dying or something of the sort after watching a couple positive reviews.
Even in comment sections, whenever I mentioned some nitpic I had about the game, I’d get answers bashing the game as if I had said it was terrible.
It was pretty much everywhere for a month and a half to the point I just decided to stop trying to find discussions on it.
I don’t hate it, I’m mostly just ambivalent to it. It felt like Bethesda’s Ubisoft moment, where they went from being a company that had been doing something really well and switched to doing something really safe…which is iust boring and generic nowadays. For the first ten or fifteen hours it was like ooh my first Bethesda game in ages! And then I put it down and never felt compelled to go back. I don’t hate it, I don’t love it, I don’t really feel anything towards it. Skyrim grabbed me from jump street and I was all in, same with FO…idk I really wanted to like Starfield…but I just never really felt anything towards it.
I feel like the same thing thing happened with FO4 until the new mod tools came out. Like I bought starfield, it’s ok, but IMO it won’t hit it’s stride as a game I play frequently until there are a bunch of mods to improve QoL
That’s what hype does. Hype can be good if the end product lives up to it, or the hype isn’t so potent. Tears of the Kingdom comes to my mind for this. The hype was more like “it’s coming, we think it’s going to be cool” and a couple of gameplay vids. Then their reputation combined with the understatement of how good the game actually was created a wildfire of good hype.
Starfield was like “PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR THE BEST GAME EVER MADE, IN THE WORKS FOR HALF A DECADE, YOU’LL NEVER PUT IT DOWN, GAME OF THE YEAR GUARANTEED” and created a ton of bad hype. Bad hype is good for sales, but creates unrealistic expectations and makes a lot more people go “meh” once they find out what it is.
Let me tell you a secret: bad hype is intentional. All that matters to a studio is how much they sell, not that players continue playing.
Bad hype makes players stop talking about a game pretty quickly.
But didn't TOTK also have the issue that to some it felt like an "expansion pack" (Probably closer to a switch's version of Majora's Mask, where many assets are reused and remixed with a new gameplay element added). While it was a good game its probably not as revolutionary as BOTW. It also doesn't help it was the switch's first 70$ title.
I’m not really commenting on how the actual game was, just the hype building up to it. Nintendo consistently teaches a masterclass on hyping their IPs. Whether or not the game was good, or worth the money, is an opinion beside the point.
In the same vein, people call starfield “fallout but in space” and “fast travel simulator 2023”. There are plenty of things to criticize there too. But I honestly think the reason those criticisms weren’t taken in stride like totk was is because of all of bad hype surrounding the release. People expected a lot more.
Also, “as revolutionary as the last one” is probably not the standard we should hold all sequels to. Changing the fundamental design of a series is important to do periodically to keep it fresh, but well executed iteration is also really important. I definitely feel I’ve gotten my time outta totk, and I’m not done with it, tho I have gotten a little distracted by life, bg3, and picking ror2 back up.
Also for anyone looking at full price switch games as too expensive, you can pretty frequently find $100 eshop cards for $90, which you can use to buy a 2pack of game vouchers, and effectively get any switch game for $45, including totk.
I mean, the only game on the GOTY list where the hype is still going is Baldurs Gate 3. At least thats how it feels to me. Granted Im not into nintendo games as I once was both the new Zelda and Mario felt like they flew by me. Maybe it was the stacked year. maybe I didnt have as much time for gaming or maybe Im not seeing them much on the internet. BG3 sure feels like its cementing itself into the 2023 zeitgeist.
This is where I was. Decent game, just lost interest after like 2 weeks. There was a bit too much fishing around in the inventory and clicking through menus.
There were definitely a few cool moments in it, but I think they got to engrossed in the procgen planets to really give it all that handcrafted feel. Having 1000 planets forced the content to be too spread out. And other games have been out for years that handle the procgen better.
7/10 review guy was right. Decent game with some cool parts, but also a lot of issues and annoyances.
Yeah this about sums up my feelings on it. The main story seemed alright from what I experienced, and the characters seemed fairly interesting. Better-written than FO4, at least. I was particularly charmed by the PC’s parents that you get when you take that one perk at character creation.
But the exploration just feels… dull and empty. Surveying planets just felt like a chore, and any particular landing spot on a planet was just a few cookie cutter lairs scattered among a bunch of nothing. Didn’t feel like you were actually discovering anything interesting.
Funny thing is that when Morrowind came out using the grandfather of their current engine, they even advertised how every single stone was hand-placed and how that made the world feel more alive compared to a procedurally generated world. Guess some things still hold true.
Well calling Starfield impressive but also immediately-boring would be a massive understatement.
It almost feels like a benchmark. With all the gameplay depth and immersion that goes along with running one. It’s not bad at what it does, quite the opposite in fact. It’s stellar. But there’s just so little to it, despite the massive world fulll of blips and bits. It’s Skyrim driven to an insane extreme: Even wider, even grander, even more impressive. And even more shallow. Much more shallow.
is there an award for best music? cause starfield should win that
and i cant believe hogwarts didnt get 1 nomination. that was a fantastic game and it made my mother so happy to be a witch in the harry potter world and explore hogwarts
The problem with HL is that it had very little to offer beyond “you’re a witch at Hogwarts”. They put together a great setting… then did nothing with it. It’s a huge pity and a great waste of something that could’ve been amazing.
I absolutely liked the castle, was very cool, but aside from a few story missions it didn’t feel like you were in school.
You can run around at night without issue, didn’t have to attend certain classes until you wanted. Maybe some more persona style social simulation aspects mixed in would help. Idk.
I don’t know, the class component thing in fire emblem three houses absolutely killed my interest in that game. Sometimes it’s good to skip a bit of the monotony.
It’s a heavy year so I can understand Hogwarts being left off especially since people have a reason to dislike. Very loved by the casual audience (where I am at least) but I don’t think any of my gamer friends cared for it that much.
I’m pretty surprised it didn’t get any nominations. I guess it didn’t do anything revolutionary, but it was a polished open world rpg with a good story and world building. Personally I think it’s partly because TOTK is given too much praise.
Maybe if the games did anything, uh, interesting. Didn’t play Hogwarts because I can give 0 fucks about the H Potter universe. Starfield was definitely one of the Bethesda games of all time. Just a smattering of mechanics stolen from other games and simplified. It was fun but by no means anything to write home about. Put about 140 hrs—will probably not play it ever again. Did put 120 int BG3, will probably play again in a couple months.
Hogwarts legacy was good until the hype wore off and then you notice that it’s not very good story/gameplay wise and the whole game coasted on the castle itself.
Some dungeon crawlers I enjoyed: Hades, Enter the Gungeon, Torchlight 1 & 2, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Legend of Grimrock, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth
Neverwinter Nights has 20+ years of custom content, runs on almost anything, is still getting graphical & engine updates and has modules & persistent world servers that cover both of those genres & more.
Not exactly a minor indie game by any means, but bloons td6 is the game I’ve player the most on mobile by some distance. It’s £6 with no microtransactions and a shit load of content. If you like TD games this is a home run.
Yeah, CrossCode is absolutely amazing. I didn’t hear about it until recently. I’m so glad I didn’t completely miss out on it. It’s like my number 1 favourite game now and I almost missed it.
I like to make sure I bring it up anytime people ask about good games they may not have heard of.
Welcome to the CC simps, because you're certainly not the only one who does that. It's generally a no brainer considering that they also still offer a demo to just try it out. Of course that doesn't tell you much about the great story and characters, but I think the fluidity of the movement and combat system definitely can convince people over already.
This list is utterly fantastic, but if you haven’t given Dave The Diver a chance you definitely should. It’s by far my favorite release from this year, and the devs seem to have even more content planned.
Ignore the pre-release hype (I mean hype before anyone gets to try the game, early access hype is good). If the game is hyped after people get to play it, then I find it’s safer to trust, though personal preferences can still make it miss the mark.
I’d like to add Ardor to the list. It’s a free turn based deck building game where you face off against hexagon creatures on a hexagon board. It’s pretty polished for an actual free to play game.
I would. But I didn’t play a lot of their games. Bastion is kind of unique. Story is pretty linear but its structure is quite a novelty. There’s an awesome narrator that is telling the story, but he reacts to everything you do and has a snarky sense of humor. Game is well designed action RPG with a good variety of weapons and in my eyes very little replay value. Still worth the asking price though.
Yea, I wouldn’t give them any money, though. The actual creators got fucked and any purchases of the game go to the people that fucked them. Great game, but I’d sail the seas for it.
A few of those games form my core of things I’ll go back to every so often, though my list isn’t all Indies. I’d probably throw CDDA, Dwarf Fortress and KSP in there too though, off the top of my head. Surprised to see foxhole in there but I suppose it’s in a relatively decent state at the moment and it’s somehow claimed 1400 hours from me on steam now.
Sea of Stars recently came out if you liked older SNES RPGs. Reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they even snagged one of the music producers from it. Great story IMO. I got about 45 hours out of it.
Hollow Knight if you like metroidvanias. Played through it 2 or 3 times now. My son and I are excited for the sequel if it ever releases.
Tricky Towers is a family fun Tetris type multi-player game.
Blue Fire, 3D platformer/metroidvania.
Hacknet, OS UI hacking sim.
Crab Champions (early access coded by EDM producer Noisestorm), 3D bullet hell/loot&shoot where you play as you guessed it… a crab. Has an amazing soundtrack.
Darkside Detective, 2D point and click puzzle solver with a hilarious storyline.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is easily in my top 3 favourite games ever, counting as far back as home world 1 (which also ranks in those 3.) If you give KCD a go be warned though, it will relentlessly punish you for any foolishness early on. It’ll make you work for every thing, no starting out as some warrior running down mobs of bandits. But it pays out with a true RPG experience that rewards incremental skill progress.
In the last decade, apart from the witcher 3, only Indy studios have produced truly memorable experiences for me.
I get that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game and I have no reason to dispute that, but its presence in any category this year leaves no chance for the rest, making the nominations pointless.
Praising it but leaving room for the rest as well. Otherwise what’s good about watching the ceremony? There’s no excitement when everything feels predetermined.
Thoughts like this are why AW2 only has one entry for performance. I’d much rather a game that excels gets many nominations then hand out pity nominations to get everyone pleased
Nomination itself is a kind of a prize. Yes, BG3 will probably win everything, but that’s what happens if it’s really that good at everything. LotR won 11 Oscars because it was better than all the other contenders that year, but the nominations mean they were recognised as good enough to go against the winner.
Sort of a nothingburger article. He says that they didn’t get nominated, then says they probably didn’t deserve to get nominated. Even people that liked the games agree neither should’ve been nominated.
forbes.com
Aktywne