Bethesda games are always boring trash. The real game won't even appear for another year or two at least (after the modders have finished fixing all the bugs, the horrible writing, the design flaws).
Compared to the average game? I don’t agree. Compared to entirely exceptional games like Fallout: NV, yeah. But you don’t have many options if you enjoy open world fps RPGs, and Bethesda games are sometimes the only passable option. I mean, I’d take Starfield over Elden Ring any day, because of personal preference, not because it’s a better game- but my own preference means I also couldn’t say it’s a worse game.
But you don’t have many options if you enjoy open world fps RPGs, and Bethesda games are sometimes the only passable option.
This is only true if it’s literally true that it has to be “first person”. There are, in my opinion, way too many 3rd person semi-RPGs with a vast, open world that are very similar to Bethesda games. It has gotten to the point with me where there are only so many games like this I’ll even play, because they’re huge time drains and they come across as basically the same game with a different skin or setting.
3rd person semi-RPGs with a vast, open world that are very similar to Bethesda games
With the “charm” of Bethesda game(that I don’t really know how exactly to describe) the only other recent games I can think of are Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk.
I think that may be right for first person only, but many games that are largely played in third person fit the bill to me: Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Horizon, and even the latest Zelda games to an extent.
I know I’m leaving many other titles out here too, I’m just listing ones I’ve personally played.
No Man’s Sky is even close to being on the list IMO but it’s not quite RPG enough to fit in the same category.
Players are really kinda spoiled for choice when it comes to large, open world games with quasi RPG elements.
I’ve personally grown kinda sick of the genre.
There’s standouts of course (I actually think all the ones I listed are pretty excellent), but all of them require hundreds of hours to complete and I’m just sick of the same game type after a while.
It’s not so much about the first personness of it. It is just that the only examples of games I can think of that meet what I’m talking about are first person. I never played Horizon or Zelda games(past the OG), but for the Witcher 3 and Elden Ring I personally never enjoyed them- despite genuinely trying, mainly because of the style of combat(an actually Bethesda games give you much more choice, but also more clunkiness in that) but also because of imo a lack of engaging freedom(or psuedochoice) in dialogue. Although, Witcher is definitely closer, but Elden Ring felt like an RPG only in that you had stats. Fallout: NV was not fun because of the stats, Fallout: NV was fun because it felt like you could immerse yourself and engage with a living world in a way that actually felt somewhat free. There’s a reason there are so many Youtube videos with premises like “playing Skyrim as chef” or whatever, it is fun to build your own stories, with your own character, in a world that it feels like they can genuinely interact with. FROM Soft games I think intentionally make you feel detached from the world, and the Witcher has you following the story of an existing character. The interaction and choice in Bethesda games is definitely often shallow, but at least it exists.
I haven’t played it but if that stuff is what you’re looking for I think baldurs gate 3 might be for you.
I’ve never really felt like the dialogue choices in any Bethesda game save maybe new vegas (which I don’t even think was technically a Bethesda game) had a lot of real impact on the game. In Skyrim I think there were maybe a handful of times that it mattered. Most times in those types of games I wind up exercising the entire dialogue tree because usually it lets you, and sometimes that’s the only way to get some side quest or whatever.
The combat in Bethesda games save some of the Fallout series is actually pretty bad IMO. In Skyrim, the combat doesn’t feel like combat at all and feels more like two characters swiping air near each other.
The thing that’s the most disappointing about most of these games to me is the squandered potential. At first there feels like there’s depth there, and if you try to get there it is shown to be a facade.
They have a lot of breadth to their games but IMO they’re as deep as a puddle.
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
Same here: if people play the game “wrong”, you didn’t design it properly and/or marketed it completely wrong.
Sure, there will always be “dumb” (or too clever) individuals who you simply can’t properly address and satisfy, but if the group is large enough to be loud, you failed your job.
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
I find this ironic, because even the tutorials in the game only communicate half of the information you need. A lot of them just outright expect you to have played one of their games before. I could imagine if this was someone’s first Bethesda RPG, they’d be confused as hell. Plus there are a few things unique to Starfield that are confusing even if you’ve played every one of their games before.
I hope it gets all the love and care The Witcher series and its fans deserve. They are going to have to make up a lot of ground with consumers to get back to W3 standards though.
I hope the praise heaped on Cyberpunk 2077 now doesn’t let them forget the absolute shitshow of a launch so that they don’t try to rush out the next game half-baked as well.
I think the biggest problem for Cyberpunk was that they also released it on last gen consoles which cost them many resources that could’ve otherwise been used to polish the game for the other platforms.
They also flat out lied about what kind of game it is right until the release. They promised NPCs with their own lives and incredibly intricate dialogue choices that have ripple effects on the whole game. Nothing like that is in the game, even now.
No man sky also barely has a story and has zero voice acting. It’s apples and oranges, just because they’re both fruit doesn’t mean they can be compared
Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
To anyone who might care, you can identify an apple as a low-quality orange, but that doesn’t also mean the apple is a low-quality apple; they’re optimized to different ends. That is, I think, the point of the expression.
But, if we’re trying to evaluate them on something like taste, which is entirely subjective, yeah, I’m comparing those shits. And, I’m going oranges all the way.
You shouldn’t compare apples and oranges because they are both great but for different reasons and purposes. It isn’t anti-intellectual to recognize that apples are way better for pies than oranges are but if you want some amazing juice and don’t want to go through a whole process to make it good; oranges are the way to go.
This and the many other examples I didn’t want to fill this page with are the reason why it’s a saying. It’s much faster than prefacing what exactly said apples and oranges are going to be used for before giving a real answer and I personally feel it shouldn’t at all be taken literally.
While I don’t disagree with you in spirit, the use case for most instances of the expression are to dissuade the act of comparison at all because the two quantities are so dissimilar that the correlations are irrelevant.
It is an anti-intellectual statement because it presupposes that the person doing the comparing is not able to distinguish between meaningful comparisons and ones which are irrational but support their argument. It ranks up there with “big words” as far as I am concerned, saying more about the person they are being said by rather than the person they are being said to.
It’s relevant because it’s there. If you don’t play those parts it doesn’t mean it’s there. They put the time in other things more important to the game than transitions. Also, the engine is completely different.
If you don’t like Bethesda games just come out and say it. Those are two games that provide completely different experiences to anything Bethesda has ever made.
Do I wish Starfield had less loading screens? Sure, but the only thing I’m really upset about is that it doesn’t show the ship animations every time I take off and land. But that’s an immersion issue and Starfield is more immersive than either nms or cyberpunk either way.
As far as technical issues go, I couldn’t play it when I had popOS installed but since I switched to Windows I’ve had zero issues on a 3080ti
“Engines” are not static things. What we call “Unreal Engine” goes back to the 90s.
These comments always bug me as a programmer because it’s like someone calling a 2023 Camero old because it doesn’t have the acceleration of a 2023 Mustang… The “age” almost certainly isn’t the problem, it’s where the effort has or hasn’t been put in to the engine and more importantly the game itself (e.g., carrying on the metaphor, the Camero might be slower getting up to speed because all the R&D for the last 3 years was on a smooth ride).
Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they’ve improved over the decades. There’s nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.
I would assume those things are just not prioritized by management because they’ve never been things that have caused sufficient outrage and/or aren’t seen as things that can increase sales… You can’t exactly use “look we fixed physics” in a marketing video to sell a new game. Maybe you can use “look we have vehicles”… but what’s the number of people that will really care? What % will that increase sales?
e.g. maybe someone would care if EA made your need for speed character able to get out of the car and walk around… Do I care? Nah.
(I bothered to look at the Wikipedia page and) they added multiplayer support to Creation Engine for Fallout 76, that was a huge undertaking.
I mean fixing these things can definitely increase sales, but you’re right not in the sense that they are directly marketable. The thing that makes games really blow up is word of mouth, people recommending them to their friends, and you get that best by making a game with overall quality. It’s basically a given at this point that Bethesda games are buggy messes that get fixed by modders. Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less. All of this hurts sales, if not today in the future. So yeah, they probably aren’t prioritized by management, but management is wrong. They often are.
Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less.
These aren’t the improvements you said you wanted ;) Fixing physics, adding vehicles, etc are features/major changes that can increase instability/take a lot more time to QA.
Bethesda revealed in June 2021 that they were working on a new iteration of the engine called Creation Engine 2, and that it would power their upcoming games Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Creation Engine 2 features real-time global illumination and advanced volumetric lighting.
Just slapping number 2 at the end doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better. And how big of a joke is volumetric lighting and “real-time global illumination”… hahaha. Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
Points out it does change.
jUst sLappInG a nUmbeR 2 aT tHe End dOesN’t mEan iT’s bEtTer
That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better.
It is… By a lot, ask any web developer. Even before they switched to using Blink under the hood it was a significantly better browser. Now it’s literally a reskinned Chrome. Meanwhile IE11 is a complete mess that requires a ton of hacks to get it to do what you want.
In both cases IE -> Edge and Edge -> Chrome Microsoft changed the literal browser engine. … This just kinda makes my point even more so, the general public has no idea what constitutes an “engine change” and can’t judge whether that will yield the results they want.
Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right…? Destiny 2 only allows certain areas to have the flashlight on because if they don’t plan for it the flash lights can tank their frame rates (seriously) – but hey “Left 4 Dead 2 had a flashlight in source engine!” /s.
I can almost guarantee Half-Life two also didn’t have “Global illumination”, maybe real time lighting for the flashlight, but Global Illumination is a much bigger thing.
In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a joke that their engine doesn’t change. Whether they want it or not, they have to at least adapt some things and am well aware of that. Joke is that they do so seldomly and we don’t see much progress in quality.
By a lot, ask any web developer.
I am a web developer and have been for 20 years almost. So I know what am talking about. I know IE, whether I like it or not, so intimately I can still quote all the bugs they had from IE6 onwards. All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump. Hence why I quoted it. But by all means please enlighten me with your Google skills in order to justify the fact Bethesda scammed you out of your money once again.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right
Yes, and number of polygons means nothing. Which is why there’s an ongoing joke about people needing to upgrade their computers to run Starfield, when there are better looking games out there which run much much better.
And you are equating global illumination with ray tracing, which is not the same thing. You can do partial global illumination without doing ray tracing. Only thing that means, coming from Todd Howard’s mouth is that they are not using baked in lights, which I don’t believe him either. Remember how FO76 had 16x the details? But in reality they copy and pasted foliage that many times and called it a day with same shitty textures. Yeah, that kind of Todd treatment is expected whatever he says. Even if they did do ray tracing it doesn’t matter one bit if game is boring, which it is.
Also, I gave HL2 and Source engine as an example as a joke as well, since game looked awesome and ran on pretty much any hardware. With the release of Lost Coast, which is what you should be comparing Starfield to, it was demonstrated what Source can do. Lost Coast was released in 2005 and looks significantly better and demonstrates many things Bethesda these days boasts about.
In the end, if all that matters to you is what Todd tells people and then pretends he didn’t and number of polygons so be it. I on the other hand like my games to be entertaining, regardless of how they look.
Initial public release of Microsoft Edge. Contains improvements to performance, support for HTML5 and CSS3.
“Minor bump” that fixed 4,000 bugs, and added HTML5 and CSS3.
I suppose ES6, C++11, Java 8, Python 3, etc are also just “minor bumps.”
I didn’t even buy the game, it didn’t seem interesting to me. I just am frustrated by the fundamental lack of understanding about what an “engine” is and the fact that they’re almost always being iterated on in different ways.
Diversity of engines is a good thing, everything shouldn’t be Unreal Engine, Blink, V8, Clang, etc
I’m not saying it to justify it, I’m saying that not having loading screens doesn’t make No Man’s Sky a better game. I think Star Citizen is a better comparison to Star Field in terms of style- and is much more empty.
Except they don’t really? And I didn’t see that much. Starfield to me seemed like it was being advertised as for RPG fans, and that they would have a lot of dialogue. And that space was just a setting, not the main character.
On the one hand I'm always excited for more Witcher. On the other hand Cyberpunk 2077. More seriously, I hope they make a great game and it that lives up to the expectations people are going to have for a new Witcher game, but I'm keeping my expectations in check until I see the finished product.
I’m hoping the initial backlash from cyberpunk actually registered with them. Other than that I’m also worried about what kind of story and characters they’ll use considering the way the last dlc for witcher 3 ended. Not sure I’ll be into Ciri based gameplay. That was my least favorite part of Witcher 3, and I don’t really want them to retcon the end of blood and wine either to continue with Geralt.
I could see them doing interesting things with Ciri’s magic, but there is a good chance they use a different witcher. Or maybe significantly earlier than the existing witcher games? Young Geralt or maybe Vesimir?
They need to go back in time to when all the witcher schools were still going and you can choose which school you’re a part of at the beginning, make your own witcher instead of one playable character.
That sounds really bad on paper, tbh. The cool parts about the player character all stem from how it’s a defined person with an existing personality and place in the world. If it becomes Skyrim: Witcher Edition, we’d probably also inherit the shallow~inexistent storytelling of that.
What if it becomes Baldurs Gate 3: Witcher Edition? BG3 also has a player created character without an existing personality and the storytelling is certainly not shallow in that game.
Yeah but one of the biggest pitfalls is seeing another company catch lightning in a bottle, then thinking that this can be freely recreated. Just that BG3 could do a user-created character with a good story does not at all imply that any other company can do it. Nevermind will. Or even that Larian can do it again.
While I do kinda agree with you, I think CDPR is a lot better at writing interesting quests and characters than Bethesda. Still not as good as larien but I don’t think it would be todd Howard bad.
I’d love that. Sure they’d have to really re-do her combat style since it was only a brief intermission before, but it feels natural to progress to her eventually. And honestly, it’s high time Geralt takes a bow after 3 games as big as they are, and as awesome as those were. Exit before they eventually ruin him. 😅
Cyberpunk’s patching has showed me that ~1-1,5 years after release is a really good time to jump in.
By which time, between patches and mods, the worst stuff is dealt with and the experience can be really nice, if a bit tepid due to bad design decisions that mods cannot fix. Still, enjoyable game after patches and at a discount.
Witcher 3 is probably my favourite game of all time, largely because of the semi-parental storyline with Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri. That said, I think the weakness with the Witcher 1-3 series as a whole is that the plot is too complex. Since most modern AAA RPGs have many, many side quests, I think the main plot of a long RPG should be relatively simple or else risk diluting its dramatic effect.
I feel like CD Projekt Red did a better job with that aspect of story-telling in Cyberpunk, even if the overall emotional arc is less intense than that of Witcher 3. There are lots of cool things to do and interesting side quests in Cyberpunk, but the main arc is pretty simple. You can go off on hours of side quests and still come back to the main plot without forgetting what’s going on.
A step back in what sense? Technically? Yeah probably. Starfield is the first Bethesda game to have working ladders(one slight sort of exception in Fallout 4) lol. But in terms of story, and world building, I think it’s fair to say Starfield is much ahead in that.
That’d be more meaningful if Bethesda had ever managed to create a story with any worth. Sometimes the bones of a decent story are there, but the execution is usually amateur hour.
In my opinion Starfield has the best story Bethesda has written. Not entirely saying much, but the main story and the side stories are at least more interesting and less predictable that Fallout 4 and Skyrim quests.
Assuming you haven’t already, you should give Morrowind a shot. If you can get past the dated graphics and mechanics, the story is by far Bethesda’s best work imho.
Yeah, I have played Morrowind(well actually TES3MP) and in terms of flexibility and story Morrowind is definitely great, my issue is that my least favorite aspect of Bethesda games are the tedious winding dungeons(why NV and Starfield are my favorite because they have the least of that) and Morrowind unfortunately has a lot. One aspect of Morrowind that I really enjoyed actually though, was the opportunity to be given information to actually take notes on(I wrote down directions quest givers gave for example) and Starfield was the only other Bethesda game I’ve played with a taste of that. Although unfortunately much less.
Man, feels like we played totally different games regarding Morrowind. Most of Morrowind’s dungeons are the smallest of any Bethesda game, and honestly it had the least amount of quests that even sent you to dungeons. Still, if you found them tedious you found them tedious. (anychance you installed other mods besides MP?)
All the same, I think the story is by far Bethesda’s magnum opus. (I mean Bethesda proper, since New Vegas was Obsidian and all)
And while I find exploration in Starfield to be extremely tedious, I will say they employed a “Skyrim/FO4” style sensibility where each dungeon should roughly take 10-20 minutes, making for nice bite sized chunks of gameplay.
I completely agree that NV had stellar use of dungeons that almost never overstayed their welcome.
Though if you want real tedium, in both winding dungeons and exploration, give Daggerfall unity a try. Great game, but my god does it go on and on and on.
Luckily only tried it once on gamepass. For sure has some interesting parts to it (I did like the ship designer) but it hit me on the second location I explored - this is pretty much a Skyrim reskin. The are randomised dungeons everywhere for no goddamn reason whatsoever, my goddamn spaceship can only fit like 5 suits… alright. Been there, done that, I’m out.
Looking for a re-release in 5 yrs with all the add-ons and mods, maybe I will get it then.
Pirated it but it wasnt worth the disk space. Tried it for a couple hours but it was so boring. I have done a quest for a bank where I was supposed to collect money. It went like this: Fast travel to the ship. Fast travel to the planet the person is on Talk with them. Fast travel back to ship Fast travel to bank planet Fast travel to bank. Talk to bank guy to get money. Next bank quest. Rinse and repeat
I miss Games like Starbound. So much to see and do. Unbelievable good atmospheric Music under a Sky full of Stars while building you first Base. This was one, if not the, first game to give me a feeling of smallness in comparison to the Universe.
I also loved starbound. My problem was the late game became very gamey, with the linear planet tier progression to get better materials. Once I got past the progression and beat the final boss there was nothing fun left to do, even with all the base building stuff they put in.
I really enjoyed these “Space-Dungeons” where you could Upgrade your Weapons at the End or get a Terraforming Device for an Emerald-Forrest Biome or something like that.
Corporate speak incentivizes bland language. Standing up for as little as possible brings as few enemies as possible, after all. Unfortunately, an empty, bland proposal can only result in empty, bland art.
I guess I’m one of the few people who thought Witcher 3 was a bit bland. I was already getting very bored at Novigrad and at Kaer Morhen I totally lost interest and have been unable to pick the game up since.
What do people like about it so much? I’ve read all the books, and generally speaking thought they were good, so I’m not exactly lacking in lore either.
I liked the alchemy in Witcher 2 more but the game mechanics with 3 and the RPG elements were amazing for me. And on par with Skyrim imo. In some aspects I liked Witcher more like how it affected the world building based on your actions.
I played the full game and the dlcs. Only the 2nd dlc and the baron stories are good. Id suggest people just play the blood and wine dlc, its really great. The game isn’t very fun, but I do love the atmosphere and city design. I was totally sick of looking at wet horse ass. Gwents more fun than monster hunting though sadly
I really liked monster hunting as a potions guy. I felt like a real Witcher. I’d have to track them down, read up on them, then drink potions and apply oils that would be strong against them, then finally take them out. That preparation and build up made me as immersed as a Witcher as I felt as Batman in the Arkham games.
The story telling is what really did it for me. I consider witcher 3 to be the greatest game I’ve ever played. The quality of that game is still extremely high even to today’s standards.
For me it was too long. I finished it with all the DLC for the first time a few days ago. I generally enjoyed it but was also quite happy to be done with it when I finally finished it at around the 110 hour mark. I actually took a break after Hearts of Stone and played a couple of shorter games before I came back to finish off Blood and Wine.
I haven’t yet played a single player game that I thought needed to be more than 60 hours no matter how engaging or well made it was.
Keep in mind that the main comparison point for it was Skyrim, which was pretty much the previous RPG people got sucked into.
The story was pretty good and it had a good number of meaningful side quests. Gwent was also a lot of fun, and the Blood and Wine DLC was another step above to keep the hype alive for longer. The combat can get fairly involved without feeling overly complex. Rather than the blank slate of many games of the era, you play as Geralt, who actually has relationships in the world to draw you in.
Basically, rather than the unfocused sandbox of random stuff in Skyrim, it was a more involved story-rich experience that a lot of people appreciated.
That said, the hype was ridiculous. It’s a very good RPG, not the second coming of Christ. It didn’t really do anything new, it was just a solid experience.
It’s a very good RPG, not the second coming of Christ.
That just shows what people want. Just a solid game, playable from start to finish. Due to time constraints i never finished Witcher 3 and barely made it past the prologue of BG3. But both those games are highly celebrated.
They don’t reinvent the wheel. They are just very solid games and come without predatory pricing.
I remember going into the first sandbox, and then going forward with no xp very fast. Then it was just me being weak as hell and rolling around to dodge and using a cast to make a shield around me to avoid dying. Then I stopped. Load time were horrible. But I want to try the remaster on ps5.
Storytelling/quests that surpassed anything its modern contemporaries had to offer. Add in a beautiful open world with alright combat and it’s a hit in my books. Time also wasn’t an issue back in those days as I were still in high school when it launched.
Skellige Island and the two expansions were actually great. Blood & Wine had an amazing flow. Otherwise I agree. It was a rehash of The Witcher 1, but not as charming.
Unpopular opinion: Many hyped up games fail immensely at some parts. But due to the social group effect criticism gets drowned out. Currently playing Elden Ring and while it makes a massively great impression all around it shows really bad game design cracks after more intense looking, especially in the boss and arena encounter design as if they were inexperienced. Cluttered, glitchy arenas impeding gameplay, just annoyingly specific roll tells, bad hitbox choices and the requirement to memorize full boss combo routes like a multiplayer fighter add to that 1-2 kill combos and it is terrible at times to me not we the effort. I am at Leyndell with almost all available side content/areas done. Waiting for the obligatory git gud chads storming in.
Well, yeah… that is so vague that it cannot help but be true. Almost all games fail in some way (especially more complex ones), they can all be improved by making some changes somewhere especially when everyone has different preferences for how things should work and what annoys them.
And by definition almost any hyped up game is going to fall short of expectations. Hype is born by imagination and has no limits, but games are delivered in reality where compromises need to be made, especially when time pressure is involved. And by nature the more hype a game is the more likely it is going to be over-hyped and fall far shorter of the expectations.
I am wary of any hyped up game. Hell, I would be wary of any AAA game on release day these days. Wait for real reviews to come in and not what the prerelease hype says about it. And even after remember that what games one person enjoys a lot another might absolutely hate.
I would not say it is as broadly self defined and I tried to give specific reasons. Elden Ring itself at its very core is about the core difficulty and yet I had way too many deaths caused by jank (the difference on how much better my experience with the same bosses in a cleaner arena speaks volumes, or the terrible twin fights) , not just some side nitpicking on minor mechanics. And so many reviews giving it excellence and yet there is apparently quite a bunch of people rating it below many of their other titles as at the last part of the game the problems pile up to an even worse degree.
I do enjoy it for most of the other aspects and I understand and agree what it is why people rave about it so much , but I would have loved to see scaled down boss damage, especially combos and twin fights to bridge the fun-defying issues, although a different design philosophy would be the better solution.
Movement and combat in every Witcher game is so unpleasant for me that I find them unplayable. I’ve literally gone through YouTube “Choose Your Own Adventure” style videos of the games because the stories are great but I hate how Geralt moves.
Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.
I think everything you said here is spot on except the idea Starfield will improve pike Cyberpunk at this point because Bethesda’s attitude really doesn’t indicate that they seem to admit anything needs fixing.
With that said I doubt many people expected Cyberpunk to do as well later on so you are probably right and I hope you are for the game and genre. I really like the aesthetic of Starfield and want it to succeed.
I’m just so tired of getting such half baked stuff at release.
One annoying thing about the “make your own stories” concept is that content us going to be recycled. My followers don’t say anything new or have new things to do etc because it’s all baked in but also on this supposedly open RPG landscape.
I would agree with you if Bethesda games haven’t always been saved by modders, rather than Beth themselves. If we had to depend on Beth to fix their own game, Skyrim would’ve been abandoned long, long, long ago, same with Fallout 4.
That’s true and what worries me the most after wanting Starfield to do good. I’ve been playing Starfield for a bit only to find myself moving to Cyberpunk sooner than later lately.
I hope it does and I think it will but again with the reliance Bethesda puts on the community I’m nervous.
Anyway I’ve gotten much of the way through at 100 hours and have enjoyed it - definitely got my money’s worth - but I just sort of hit a wall. To be fair you’ll do that with most games but it seems like Stanfield is just bland.
Yeah, Bethesda games have always been… playable, I guess, but hardly any good, without modding, at least as far back as Oblivion. Morrowind was the last game they made that was just good, out of the box, without needing mods.
So I figured in a year or two Starfield will be good, with mods, just like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 were all bland at best on release, until mods made them good.
100% I actually think Starfield has the best bones, even if it has the worst meat, so to speak, so adding meat gives it a much higher ceiling in a few years time.
The problem is that starfield is modern warfare III of Bethesda but people trying to see it as next skyrim, Bethesda ai generated almost all this game and looped it in roguelite shape, the only things evolved is mechanics as you’ve said yourself, and again as you’ve said yourself, this game will be saved by modders
Oh I’m anti-Bethesda and Bethesda practices, I’m just sure it will eventually be a great game once the community steps in and fixes it. It isn’t an excuse for Bethesda, but rather admiration for the modding community, and an example of why FOSS and a rejection of the profit motive is so good.
i dont know why people shit on bethesda for “letting modders fix the game”
i dont really know any other developer that embraces the modding community as much as bethesda does, and i wish other games had the same amount of modding capability that bethesda games do
I think it’s fully possible to criticize Bethesda’s incomplete and highly flawed game design and praise their willingness to support the modding community with great tools at the same time.
The world is now full of technology that used to have real names, but is now called AI so that investors spunk themselves as they high five each other in shareholder meetings.
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