It really sucks for everyone. Not only videos and important company data, reportedly the entire story of Wolverine was leaked and some people are posting spoilers for it. Now they’ll feel compelled to change it.
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.
Just in time for the only game Sony has put out to make owning a PS5 worthwhile! (Fingers crossed Spiderman 2 is as good as its predecessors.)
EDIT - To be clear, spoken as someone who was lucky enough to get a PS5 on day 1 and almost never uses it. I like the Xbox controller and UI much better and… there just aren’t many good exclusives. And a lot of the ones that are good end up on other systems anyways.
You’re not wrong. In a year where there are entirely too many great releases on all consoles, I’ve only played two on my PS5 (Street Fighter 6 & Final Fantasy XVI)
To be fair, FF16 is on my list of games to play… but like you said, too many great releases at once. I figure by the time I get around to it, maybe I can get a price break.
As a die-hard, I bought it Day 1 and got my $70 worth. But after I 100%'d it and looked at my recently played, I realized the only other game was Chicory which I played around Christmas time…
Demon’s Souls is the first souls game that I have ever completed, I think it is an astounding part of the ps5 catalogue. Also, currently going through Ghost of Tsushima PS5 edition and at 4k60 that game is incredible.
Those are 2 experiences that I loved that are only available on PS5.
Are you talking about the original Demon’s Souls? From what I’ve heard, there are so many QOL improvements they can’t really be treated as the same game.
Also, Ratchet and Clank made me happy to have a PS5 (at that time the PC release hadn’t been announced).
there are so many QOL improvements they can’t really be treated as the same game.
there's a few, but it definitely doesn't make it a superior version or anything. Honestly Bluepoint did what Bluepoint does best and fucked with the lightning and color palette too much and the PS5 remake of Demon's Souls loses a lot of what made the original's aesthetic so great.
Why does it feel like every remake messes with lighting? As if making things brighter means it looks better. Halo CE is another that gets blasted for ruining the anesthetic of the original.
"Graphics:" are the only thing consoles can actively advertise on since "graphics" are the easiest thing to showcase in a screenshot or video.
It's why so many gamers whine and complain about "graphics" being the most importnat thing that determines whether they buy a game or not, which I find completely asinine.
Notice I put graphics in quotes a lot. That's because I distinctly and separating graphics/fidelity and art direction/aesthetic. I would much rather take a great game with a unique art style and lower fidelity over a game that has good fidelity, but a bog standard boring art direction and a color pallete of mostly browns and grays where 90% of the budget went to visuals and not the gameplay or content.
It's why I pretty much don't play modern AAA games. Year after year it's just the same crap rehashed in a slightly differnet $60 package. Why would I buy Call of Duty 26 or Open World Collectathon But This Time There's a Spider-Man Coat of Paint On It when I can play shit like Signalis or Crow Country or any of the Yakuza games or Nier or Antichamber or Death Stranding or Monster Hunter
I played through Demon’s Souls on a ps3 emulator and then the PS5 version. The PS3 version with a 60fps+1440p mod is great but the new version is still worth getting a PS5 for imo
What a fucktard. If games were cheaper, more people would buy them. Nowadays a hell of a lot of people wait until the game is updated and on sale to buy it since most games are released broken anyways. That or they just pirate it. No way I’m spending 1/10 of a paycheck on a new video game every once in a while.
I got sick of the constant quick travel back to merchants in BG3 and decided to just install the mod that multiplies my encumbrance by 9000x. the item management in that game is a giant pain and the gold economy plus encumbrance is an artificial barrier to getting them from merchants that simply adds playtime for no actual benefit.
Realistically speaking, if you want a useful encumbrance system, you should be thinking: what is the goal of an encumbrance system in the context of this game?
In BG3, it serves a few purposes:
physical consequences. reduced movement speed, damage from jumping, etc are all part of D&D rules, which is useful when you’re in a kind of situation where, say, you need to get a giant boulder across a huge gap and put it on top of a button that opens the gate while in combat. but outside the context of combat, doing this is meaningless, as the player can simply overcome this problem with time, which is annoying more than fun.
limit access to the number of options a character has when confronting an encounter. it’s not feasible to carry 99 potions of greater healing on you, and encumbrance is a general strategy that prevents this from being as effective. at the end of the day it does not solve this problem
express limitations on what a character can do with their environment. encumbrance affects how much else you can carry, such as throwing a big rock at an enemy to do a lot of damage. this is irrelevant in the context of inventory vs. how much you can affect your environment; it can easily exist independently of an encumbrance system.
I don’t like encumbrance in games in general. It makes games more fiddly, and forces the player to engage the system with no real addition to the fun of it. Limited inventory slots are similarly frustrating in games to the scale of Baldur’s Gate. BG2 solved both of these problems by giving the player a billion bags of holding, which also had the added benefit of making inventory organization easier in a system that was largely left the same from its predecessor since it probably was built on the same codebase. BG3 had no such codebase restriction, and its type sort system sucks (the search bar is a lifesaver). Encumbrance very much feels like a “This is how it works RAW in 5e, so we’re going to do it this way” decision, which is funny because in plenty of other situations the devs decided to stray away from RAW to make the game a lot more approachable.
I don’t know if the goal of encumbrance is to prevent players from taking everything as much as possible or not - but if it is, it utterly fails at that goal
BG3 does give the ability to send stuff from lootable locations directly to camp, which solves half the problem. If I could sell stuff directly from camp the other side would be solved.
There is a valid argument of part of thee reasoning being determining what is really important to you prevents you from picking up literally everything and breaking the economy. But Starfields economy already seems pretty broken in my favor. I significantly upgraded my ship on both my first and second visits to New Atlantis. So I’m having a hard time feeling overwhelmed by the encumbrance.
An inventory management button that would automatically distribute wares to the character with the least carried stuff would already hope a lot - especially if we would be able to save that every cup, fork, etc would automatically be marked as wares and if there was a way to mark multiple things as wares at the same time (and if " sell all wares" would sell everything from all inventories present and not just for the talking character)
Selling wares remotely that are in camp and having an option to automatically send everything marked as wares to camp would also help a lot
I feel as if BG3 could do a lot more with the “wares” marker to make the weight limit less annoying
Moving cups and plates from one char to another just isn’t fun
If Volo is in your camp you can sell him your stuff. It’s not a dialogue option but the button on the bottom left. His gold and potion supply seems to refresh as well.
I finished my first run the other day and had no inventory issues. I did stop picking up every single thing not bolted down about halfway through the game and still ended with a surplus of 25k gold. You can select multiple items and send to camp/stronger party member or add to wares for quick sell. I was a low STR sorceror so just sorted by weight and sent it all over to lae'zel whenever I was carrying too much. Didn't really go out of my way to go to merchants
I’m 10 years into my games career and one of the main reasons I’m still in it is that I’ve worked for indie studios for most of my career.
I’ve worked rarely for AAA studios and they are soulless and long hours. It’s not fun, it’s not creative, it’s not about creating personal art. It’s about creating a product to make profits. They’re really fun games a lot of the time but they get there by limiting who can contribute to what.
An engineer trying to give feedback on design gets shut down. A lot of smaller studios are the opposite and people wear multiple hats daily. I love wearing multiple hats and it helps me understand my own art creation process.
Some folks in the industry as well only see this like a job not an expression of themselves through art. That’s fine but limits them to studios who only want workers not artists.
That said, the average has came up. About 10 years ago that average time in the industry was 5 years. Now it’s 7. People are finding the industry more and more stable but the industry does have a problem keeping juniors. I almost left the industry several times but as I got over 5 years I started to see a change in job offers. Lots more recruiters contacting me. At 10 years I’ve started to see a lot more people wanting to pay me for an hour talk. It becomes easier to stay in the industry as you gain experience but those first 5 years are really rough.
I see where he's coming from, as when cross-play isn't available niche online games can die quickly and exclusives are annoying, but if there was only one platform holder, that status would quickly be exploited with high online fees and tighter controls of how games are purchased/resold.
I jumped ship from Switch to handheld pc. The pc game prices was a big part, especially older games don’t hold value. For example I got Middle Earth shadow of war for like $6. I still sometimes miss my switch but I will definitely wait a while before I decide on a switch 2.
Yeah it’s a hefty price tag but I wanted the extra battery. The Z1 extreme has pretty much the same performance and come with 500gb storage, with a better price tag. You can always upgrade your battery and ssd if you want to later down the line.
I love the device! The fact that I can play pc games in my hand is a huge win for me. I work in front of a pc the whole day. Last thing I want is to sit in front of a pc for gaming. But you must understand it is a pc and not a console. You have more setting and things to tinker with setting to get best performance unlike a console where it is just plug and play.
I never do but I know you can. But once again it is not as easy as casting. You could for example get a dock and have Xbox remotes which could emulate a console feel. My suggestion is to do research before you buy and see if it caters for your needs. Is it a good device? Yes. Is it super user friendly? Depends on the user.
I am genuinely surprised that they’re suggesting physical games that act as keys for digital downloads. What is the point of getting a physical cartridge if you can’t play the whole game offline? I guess they’re just trying to kill physical media, and this is the first step in this direction.
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