The mod team is not happy about this either, and was responsive to me. Enough voices can change things.
If you haven’t play RuneScape - this has been a popular event for years. It’s always high quality fun. There have been stupid Fally protests and chuds but the events have always been really delightful.
Im completelly opposide. Its maybe only AAA game im intrested in long time.
Mostly because of their track record. I have been playing GTA since the very first top down game and every main game in the series has pushed the games further.
Thinking how big leaps every game has done, i cant wait to see what kind of the beast 6 is going to be.
I just want trains to work in this new game. They never make trains work properly they’re always just indestructible juggernauts and are therefore boring. GTA V had submarines but not drivable trains.
I’m the same but I may just be getting older. Last game I was hyped for was Cyberpunk 2077 coming off of the stellar Witcher 3 and having followed both games I loved, W1 & W2. Sometime before it released, I just dropped all hype for it and haven’t felt the same after. Haven’t even played it yet either.
Today, I let myself be pleasantly surprised by games I never thought I’d like. I really liked Death Stranding and I’m waiting for its sequel but still no hype… I haven’t even seen the trailer yet and I doubt I will… I’ll buy it and go in blindly. Just have a PS for Sony’s once a year AAA and that’s it for AAA gaming. Most other days, its just AA or indie games on PC… which is where I find a lot more flavor. As an example, this month, I’ve played Minami Lane, MudRunner and Art of Rally and starting Tactical Breach Wizards soon.
I’m holding out some hope for GTA VI still. Reason being, while Cyberpunk promised to be super duper everything interconnected magic programming to follow an absolutely awesome but technologically realistic game (Witcher 3), I haven’t seen hype like that for GTA VI. The expectation is to get a well polished freeroam game with lots of fun toys to play around with, a story that’s hopefully long enough to be worth the game’s price, and a new Online mode that gets updates over time. Basically GTA V with a new city and a more polished game overall, but no exponential leaps - despite the fact that the budget is much larger than Cyberpunk.
But I mean MudRunner is also awesome. Couldn’t get into Death Stranding myself, just wasn’t feeling it. Should pick up Art of Rally soon. Tons of great AA and indie games out there if GTA VI flops indeed.
Because it will be full of micro transactions and bullshit content no-one asked for, with anti cheat horseshit that will pretty much be a virus on your computer.
Sad thing is that it’ll still sell millions because most people don’t even know when they are being served shit.
It’s just so meh. Another city, you’re a criminal doing crime. There are just games with much better stories or mechanics at this point. I don’t get the hype around it.
It feels like this has disaster written all over it.
Sorry if I’m harshing anyone’s vibe, but I can’t escape the feeling that a group of people whose main involvement in the games industry is as voice talent are basically saying “How hard could it be?” and not understanding that the answer is “Very.”
Ideally they would team up with an experienced studio to build something off of their creative ideas. But if they try to do this whole thing themselves, it has the makings of a Wha Happen? episode all over it.
Maybe it’ll work. They pulled off Vox Machina, so who knows. I’d certainly like to be wrong. But I can’t help but feel like we’ll all be talking about the fallout from this in five years, when eager backers are still waiting for the game they were promised.
Hey, if they’re actually securing funding for this instead of pushing the cost off onto eager fans, good for them. At least they’re doing one thing right. Unfortunately that only increases the potential for this to turn into a trash fire that sinks their whole company.
The potential for this project to sink their whole company would come from them being extremely reckless with the ample cash flow they’ve got right now, which this interview says they’re not, and hopefully they mean it. I don’t get the sense they’re trying to build an Immortals of Aveum or a Callisto Protocol.
Unfortunately with the upcoming FO4 patch in a few days, a lot of those mods are gonna be broken for a few weeks/months. Bad timing by Bethesda on that front.
The show caused me to finally buy FO4, and so I immediately hopped onto Nexus and downloaded the highest-rated mod collection for the game. It has over 700 mods, so something tells me I won’t actually be playing much of the game for a while yet. (I wouldn’t deign to play a modern Bethesda game without mods.)
i cloud game and luckily there’s back ups. but i boot the cloud, boot moonlight and click skse64… about 1.5 months skyrim will update. and its a pita. steam just be like that. it’s honestly why i havent tried fo4 lately. i wanna bad.
What i did with Skyrim was setting the update option in steam to only update when i launch the game. But then only launch the game with the script extender.
You’re gonna have to watch that mod count. I had to axe a bunch of my mods because the game kept crashing every few minutes due to scripts and visual stuff
That’s what I thought when I saw the number of mods in that pack, but after a bit of tweaking (a few mods that cause crashing in Linux) it’s been quite stable. I’m only about 10 hours in though.
Nowadays you can pick a collection and install it without having to worry about compatibility, someone else already figured it out! I think that’s worth using vortex
Wabbajack is even better! If you’re playing Skyrim, Nolvus is amazing and has its own installer, even installs an enb for you, you can choose between 4 or 5 of them
Can they please not? I’d rather not have Blizzard stay Blizzard, seeing what they did to WoW, SC2, D3, D4, DI, Overwatch and worst of all, Heroes of the Storm.
He is the one that still wanted to make Project Titan work. Overwatch was the crawl, PvE was suppose to be the walk and then they’d have the run with the MMORPG.
Have they done something to SC2? I quit playing that game years ago, but it seemed like they were done touching it, and it was still in its original glory.
The most recent expansion for WoW has been really good. Blizzard has been transparent with their changes and have been listening to the community. Recently the alpha for the next expansion has released and seems very promising with positive response from the community.
So I disagree, I’m glad microsoft is letting blizzard developers do their own thing. After the tumultuous expansion Shadowlands, a lot of the old guard for blizzard were removed and the current executive producer Holly Longdale has been doing a great job.
Oh I had not yet heard that they’re turning the ship around. That’s really really cool. After all this time I just stopped following stuff around it since it got so depressing over the years.
She was working on classic before being promoted to her current position. Regardless, the entire wow dev team has been incredible these past few months. There has been such an influx of news of upcoming content these coming weeks its almost hard to keep up. Hoping that they can keep on the gas as The War Within comes out.
I can’t speak to your preferences as there are multiple different ways to play an mmo. I can, however, speak to the community’s perspective and I have not seen the wow community be more positive about the current expansion since modern wow.
Its hard to judge community response for wrath or vanilla for a game made 16+ years ago (lots of people tend to looks things back with rose-tinted glasses).
I’ve been playing since MoP and started doing high end content in WoD. So from this perspective, I can say that I haven’t seen a more community response for the game since then, including legion. No endless grind for power, blizz being transparent about changes, and they are also listening to feedback.
Additionally, Shadowlands did a number of Dragonflight’s sales but recent reports indicate that more subscribers are coming back to retail wow and the expansion does not have the post-expansion drought of subscribers.
Not Wrath or Legion good, if the numbers are any indication. While the community has generally been positive, Dragonflight simply hasn’t sold very well.
The expansion’s over, anyway. They have officially moved the expansion cadence to only two major patches from three.
DLed for posterity, so once it’s down I can still share it with those interested in actually enjoying it, rather than letting Nintendo continue to ruin shit like the whiny babies they are.
It’s less Nintendo and more shitty trademark and IP laws.
If you don’t aggressively go after anyone that is transgressing your IP, you can lose it.
IP really needs major and comprehensive reform. It’s not going to happen anytime soon as too much is built up around the status quo, but it really should be done.
Edit: Also, it’s a bit more complicated in terms of IP, but it is relevant to future works.
For example, fictional characters.
Let’s take Mickey Mouse as an example. Steamboat Willie is entering public domain, so the protections on the character as defined in that work is entering the public domain. But characterization of the figure in works still under copyright that have added unique details are still protected.
But the test for infringement of a fictional character is twofold. (1) Can the figure be copyrighted? (2) Is there infringement of unique characteristics?
That second part becomes much more difficult to enforce if you’ve been allowing millions of variations of your protected character when you initial work defining the character is no longer enforceable.
So if LoZ on the NES enters the public domain making ‘Ganon’ as a pig usable by people, but since that game there’s been tons of spinoffs by others having Ganon as a human before Nintendo had Ganon as depicted in OoT, then they’d have a much harder time enforcing copyright on Ganon being depicted as a human even if Ganon as a pig was no longer under copyright.
No lawyer is going to say “yeah, let 3rd parties use your IP willy nilly, I’m sure it will be fine and not bite us in the ass later on.”
For example:
Copyright protection is effectively never lost, unless explicitly given away or the copyright has expired. However, if you do not actively defend your copyright, there may be broader unauthorized uses than you would like. It is a good idea to pursue enforcement actions as soon as you discover misuse of your copyright protected material.
If you have experienced copyright infringement, you have the right to pursue a lawsuit. However, you only have a limited time frame during which to file a claim. This legal principle is called the “statute of limitations.” Ensuring that you file a claim to enforce your copyright within the statute of limitations is crucial. If you wait too long, you will lose the right to enforce your copyright and obtain your deserved damages.
So a fan project that you don’t enforce against for three years which eventually monetizes as competition without infringement trademarks would be a potential concern.
...You realize that none of that is setting precedent, it just means you can't pursue, right? You still can't lose the IP even in the worst-case scenario, and the first example you gave even says that.
Copyright protection is effectively never lost, unless explicitly given away or the copyright has expired.
You seem to just really strongly want to justify Nintendo's actions, which are not the norm across the industry for how IP issues are handled....
Like yeah there's shitty IP laws, and shitty trademark laws, but they don't justify Nintendo's specific reactions.
which are not the norm across the industry for how IP issues are handled…
Go ahead and cite whatever you think the ‘norm’ is then.
Where else do you see publishers turning a blind eye to unlicensed remakes of their games?
The difference isn’t Nintendo being more legal trigger happy, it’s that their stuff is way more often being used in unlicensed ways so they come up more often in stuff like this.
But there’s a ton of examples of the same being the ‘norm’:
-Everything related to Bethesda's mod scene
-The entire Touhou doujin scene, even including sold games/music
-Sonic games which included fans being brought in for sonic mania
-Megaman and Street fighter have huge histories in modding. Pretty sure megaman has an entire fan-game for Zero's orgin story
So...That gives us Bethesda, Sega, and Capcom at minimum for big players, and Touhou pretty much shows you aren't going to lose your fucking IP over this.
No, Nintendo really does just do it more often than everyone else. You don't gain that rep absolutely everywhere just on hearsay.
Bethesda is owned by Zenimax, and an officially licensed mod scene is completely different.
If you want to run the mods for Bethesda’s games, you need the retail software to do so.
I guarantee that if a group was creating a Morrowind remake that didn’t require owning some Bethesda core game that was being modded to achieve that, Zenimax’s lawyers would be quick to be on top of the issue.
It’s not like there’s not examples where Bethesda’s lawyers caused mods to be shut down where it involved redistribution of Bethesda game assets without needing to buy the game.
It’s *less about shitty trademark or copyright laws, and more about Nintendo.
First off, in all of your posts, you really don’t seem to realize that trademark has nothing to do with fan fiction or recreations. Not a single project that anyone has referenced has attempted to mimic Nintendo’s name and brand to sell a product. Zelda is trademarked, yes, so people can’t sell video games with “The Legend of Zelda” name- which has no bearing on this article or the work cited.
Second, the statute of limitations doesn’t go back three years to some arbitrary date, it goes back to when the alleged crime or infringement occurs. So if someone begins selling a TLoZ knockoff game, they have no grounds in court to say something dopey, like “well actually I started thinking about selling Zelda knockoff games five years ago, so even though I just started last month it is out of the statute of limitations”.
Third, from your list of shitty companies making it the norm, try Valve, who actively gives permission for people to mod and remake their games, and even allow the selling of remakes on their own platform. Or try Capcom, a Japanese company who has never attacked a fan game and still has full control over its IPs. But I digress, not being the norm has nothing to do with this.
If the laws surrounding copyright were suddenly and drastically changed today, Nintendo wouldn’t change their stance or their scare tactics. They don’t have to do it, they aren’t losing out on sales from it- and if modders had the ability to stand up for themselves in court, I don’t believe Nintendo would win even a notable amount of cases.
Two: Actually, per Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s supreme court decision, damages are limited to 3 years prior to the suit being filed with no recovery for earlier infringements.
After one week I said fuck it. Yes there is a ton of exploration, yes there are spaceships, but the whole thing is just slow, confusing and boring. Hell, if I want to play “Life”, I can just go outside.
The tons of exploration you’re talking about are copy-pasted identical POIs, too, with the same enemies and objects in the same locations.
I honestly don’t understand what they expected us to be doing for the hundreds of hours and years they they hoped we’d be playing the game for. It’s certainly the most “ocean wide, inch deep” game for what it was marketed to be.
I think they expected a Skyrim style modding community to spring up over the next few years. To be fair, I think they might be right, since there are already Starfield mods and I'm still playing Skyrim 10 years after it came out.
And that’s what I like about it. Instead of sitting you down at telling you a story they give you a world to tell your own stories in. I like having the freedom to be creative, and I like seeing and exploring the creative ideas of other people. It’s not something I’ve seen other companies really do.
That's the problem with criticizing Bethesda games. The aspect of mod compatibility and creation is at once one of its greatest strengths, and also its most obvious and provocative criticisms, and the line between the two is very difficult to distinguish from an objective point of view.
I'm glad you're enjoying it. I tried it and decided it wasn't for me. I'd been spoilt by Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield feels like ancient by comparison.
It's kind of the same thing for Minecraft but you can still play Minecraft vanilla and have a good time because there's plenty in there to do and explore. The difference for me is that Minecraft provides a foundation to build upon whereas Starfield is hollow to begin with so just lacks its own identity.
Yeah but dont you already have skyrim for that? What new stories is this giving you the option for that skyrim couldnt handle, except this one doesnt start with magic and does start with guns?
And did the world need to be bone dry in order to be moddable? I dont remember skyrim being devoid of interest at all.
That'd be if you're crazy enough to not do any of the major quest chains or general side quests, those almost entirely take you to unique areas with their own exploration outside of the random exploration ones that you find just by exploring the galaxy.
I think it points to a larger issue with the game, which is being able to to distinguish and access the kinds of content that you want. You could easily randomly explore and end up seeing the same installation three times, or you could also randomly find other quests and go explore three unique locations and dungeons in a row instead. There is absolutely a large amount of unique content to play, though, it's disingenuous to say otherwise.
Your point is fair and works really well on its own, but in the context of the entire game, its systems, mechanics, and the entire experience they come together to create, I just can’t help but feel genuinely bored and disappointed regardless. The writing feels uninspired and generic; contrary to what some people have been saying, the writing isn’t a product of playing safe by the outsourced writers Bethesda used - it’s just bad, like a bad paint job on your car or poorly written software.
Even trying to side with the supposedly lowlife immoral inhabitants of the game’s world, you constantly hear either that they’re all family and friends (despite seeing one murder another because they got ripped off), or that they didn’t have a choice and still try to be “good”.
This isn’t what people expect from a Bethesda game in general, and from a game with ESRB rating of Mature (17+).
Again, ignoring my expectations that the game’s marketing specifically built to be centered around me being able to tell my story and stuff, it’s just poorly written and executed in the vast majority of aspects that matter in a game like the one Starfield is trying to be - the motifs aren’t clear, the storytelling is the most basic straight-up lecture in every quest that never tries to adhere to the “show, don’t tell” principles, the tasks you have to do are just boring and generic, too; it’s 2023, Bethesda has published and made tons of games of various genres st this point, many of a larger caliber, yet they still purposefully choose to go with the cookie-cutter quests that involve no unique one-time mechanics or animations, rely on mostly generated animations that feel out of place most of the time, and have you feel like you’re playing a game from pre-2010 that you should be able to play on a toaster, but are somehow told to upgrade to the latest hardware because the company couldn’t be bothered to develop and optimize a proper experience.
The pain scratches off at way more places than just exploration in Starfield.
Two things I really like are the artstyle and building my own ships with actual interiors, but the latter actually falls short due to massive restrictions in terms of said interior designs and the fact that space is basically a big mostly empty room to teleport to and from, akin to many other places in the game; no wonder an SSD is required to play, and for the worst reasons possible in a modern AAA title of that ambition.
I loved the game at first, but a lot of that was due to my huge interest in the niche it could cover, space, and science fiction, and white unfortunately, I’ve discovered way too many prominent flaws while simply trying to have fun like I always managed in similar games, even from Bethesda.
I hope that mods and DLCs may save the game, but none of that is ever going to fix the game’s broken carcass of poor writing and uninspired practices.
Overall pretty valid criticisms, I am able to enjoy the game pretty well because my expectations were very tempered, and I still find it to be enjoyable in most of the Bethesda ways I've come to expect, which is really a culmination of too many small touches for me to exert the effort of writing down and cataloging.
The only thing I'll say to all of that is that when you said that the writing quality wasn't what we expect of Bethesda or a mature game, that's a bit silly. I'm a Bethesda fanboy, basically, and even so I've only ever expected serviceable to middlingly poor writing out of any of their games, and that's about what I feel the internet expects as well, not that that makes the criticism invalid, the writing is... well, serviceable at best or middlingly poor at worst, and I don't really come in with any expectations for good writing out of a game rated mature, either.
All a mature rating means is whatever specific traits are listed on the rating, leisure suit Larry box office bust is rated mature, and that game's writing is not emotionally mature by any means.
You are correct about most of these issues, though. Somehow, by sheer amount of story content and stuff to acquire and build, I'll probably still spend about a hundred hours in it before modding, and modding will probably take it to unknown lengths. I do believe when Todd Howard says the game was made to be played for a long time that he's indirectly talking about the mod support and the game's premise and interplanetary setup being the most ripe for user generated content, and I believe that that'll add much beyond the game's natural life, in an even larger ratio than older Bethesda games, which is its own possible criticism.
Even still, I'd have to say that the game lets down on enough critical fronts that it'll be my least favorite Bethesda game, with the top two spots going to Oblivion and Fallout 4, for me, personally. I do also have to admit, when I look at the big picture, getting more than a hundred hours of enjoyment out of a game, even for the full $70, is good value for time spent, to me, and I do enjoy the game. I don't enjoy it massively, but I can spend time in the world and accomplish tasks and feel satisfied, or enjoy the gunplay or conversations enough that I can't complain.
I've bought other games of higher critical opinion that I spent far, far less time in, and didn't get the same amount of cumulative enjoyment out of, because they just don't tap into my brain in whatever primal way that Bethesda games fit in, even Starfield, puzzlingly enough.
It was incredibly disappointing when I was exploring a world and landed near a factory, killed everything then I pick a random spot and I land once more near a factory, to my surprise EVERY SINGLE THING was completely the same the same Vaa Run loot hidden in the vents, the exact same food in the living quarters, the same locked weapon rack and the same enemies at the same positions. This is the laziest fucking game I’ve seen in a while.
“These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year.”
I never quite understood, why it’s not more popular among big publishers to create smaller games throughout the year. You can have risky AAA titles in development and compete in the AA market at the same time.
It's just easier to advertise a single big game rather than several smaller ones. Even if you are interested in games it's impossible to keep track of everything that's being released. More casual players are aware of even fewer games. That's why AAA games still sell so well because they are the only games a lot of people are even aware of.
If the companies have to split their marketing budget between multiple titles, they would reach a much smaller audience. And even if one of the smaller titles would be a hit, it probably sells fewer copies for a lower price.
Half the cost of the game is marketing. And marketing is an effort that builds upon itself
The more smaller games you have, the more you have to market to niches from scratch. And niches are generally more inclined to be informed users. And it takes a developer with vision to make a satisfying niche hit. Well it always takes vision but…
Meanwhile one big bombastic game will get a bunch of mainstream folks hyped over qualifiers of scope instead of quality. Yes, I am saying hype culture is primarily an idiot’s hobby, but idiots still got cash.
Plus, plus, most studios don’t really see their junior devs as something worth fostering. Better off burning them out and replacing them.
Because the first job of anybody who is responsible for green lighting game development at these huge publishers is to not get fired. Making a game that only just breaks even or even worse makes a loss puts you at risk of getting fired. Even a relatively small game from a large publisher costs a ton to develop and market and has increased risk that nobody will actually buy and play it, at least in the most profitable first few months.
Franchises are so popular with this crowd is because they do not have to worry about name recognition. Hardest thing about getting a brand new title out is just getting people to know it exists and then to be excited about it. Franchises you hardly have to to do any work for that, you know you are going to get press and gamer interest, they sell themselves right up until they release and people get the chance to see if its a house of cards or not.
Its that front loading of sales that they are after, the shops having to buy in stock, idiots who pre order or buy before its clear if the game is broken in someway. Its the most profitable time as the game is at its most expensive, and it enables rapid repayment of the development costs. Games that start slow and have a very long tail of sales do not interest them anywhere near as much as they have already moved onto the next project and already been judged on the initial (under) performance of the game.
Our first data point is Monitors Unboxed. They found the Switch 2 returned an average pixel response time of 33 ms at 60 Hz.
Jesus Christ Nintendo. That’s absolutely horrendous. But on the plus side I’m glad the screen undervolting let you improve the battery life to an impressive *checks notes* two hours!?
all for the power of selling the device at profit and not at a loss.
when currently last gen pc handheld like the lenovo legion go is being sold at 500$ and has both a higher fresh rate resolution and 20ms pixel response time conpared to the switch 2s 33ms.
UI is incredibly complex under the hood. Cryengine is also difficult to work in. There are tons of reasons games with distinct outstanding features don’t switch engines, though, and it’s usually due to the specific features said engine provides, no matter how difficult it becomes to work with as a legacy system over the years.
There is NO reason for hunts UX to as fucking terrible as it is. They literally took it from bad to straight up awful. Believe me, I know how hard to design and implement a good UI can be, I’m a software engineer. I’m not just handwaving “make it better, duh”. It’s flawed from the user requirements up. It’s like they never used their own ui before. It’s stunning how thoroughly they don’t comprehend how people have a terrible time navigating the game menus.
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