I really don’t want to use this comment to shame people for getting their start in game design.
But it’s really weird to me to see a semi-major internet publication like this highlight comments from a guy with a youtube channel that has 508 subscribers and who has only been a professional game designer for 2 years as head of an indie studio, according to his LinkedIn. Sure, anybody can teach game design and even teach it well. You don’t have to be the next John Carmack to do it properly, but it’s weird that this guy was highlighted for an article in this way.
Also his first game with the indie studio is some sort of indie MMORPG that’s a parody of RuneScape.
Not gonna lie, this was exactly the first thing I looked up, though I changed my mind in posting because it seemed to be a bad faith article in general. But yes, if you’re going to have a person stand by their professionalism and experience, especially when making such harsh criticism over a highly rated game while demanding more media literacy, I think have someone that actual has relevant professional experience would make it far less eye-rolling to read.
Outlets these days are more than happy to signal boost random controversial statements for clicks. Every time I see something that says “receiving hundreds of likes on Twitter”… that’s nothing. That’s practically nothing.
Take it from Cory Rodis, a professional game developer, designer, and educator with over a decade of experience in the field.
Clearly from Linkedin and Moby Games, this person does not have over a decade of experience in the field. If you count teaching as “in the field” (which to me, in the field means not teaching but actually doing.) then they have 6 years of experience. Not counting that, they have 2 years.
Also, and maybe I am out of the loop but this doesn’t seem to be a semi-major internet publication to me. This is my first time hearing of it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Abrams#The_Mary_Sue this is the only information I really found on it’s popularity and it seems kind of weak. Am I missing something, is it a really popular site for something like anime or comics?
I see the site posted a lot so I assumed it’s semi-major but I dunno it’s just an internet news site.
Anyway I agree the “in the field” part is weird. Also the fact that the author knew the “expert” that was cited and the info came from a discord post makes it seem like a bit of a puff piece.
Yeah, that was the first red flag for me too. Even if it’s true, that would mean his experience in game dev is not that much longer than the time it took to make BG3.
But even if we assume years in the industry is not a useful metric, the article makes a bunch of other assumptions. Like saying the player is “punished” by the existence of so many dead end dialogue options. I don’t consider it a punishment to not see every single dialogue option a game has. I intend to make the choices in the game that I think are my best option, and if that means I miss out on some content, so be it, that’s the experience I got.
But to flat out call the game “not good” us laughable. Particularly from someone so green in the industry.
There are nine reviews on metacritic from various outlets that score the game 100/100. I would love for every single one of those reviewers to look me in the eye and with a straight face, repeat the claim that Starfield is perfect and there is absolutely nothing in the game that could possibly be improved on. If you want to know who’s not conversing honestly, that’d be a good kicking-off point.
I have serious questions for anyone who gives a game, any game, a completely perfect score, especially one that is known to have some technical issues.
To me, a perfect score doesn’t (or shouldn’t) mean a game is literally perfect. It means “I recommend this game without reservation. Everyone with the slightest interest in the genre should play it.”
Granted, even by that standard a lot of these perfect scores are pretty questionable
And that’s why comparing different people’s ratings is so difficult. 10/10 can mean “absolutely perfect and impossible to ever improve upon”, it can mean “the best possible execution right now”, it can mean “the best expected result with no major flaws”, it can mean “I had a good time and would recommend this to anyone”, and so on. All of these definitions are valid.
Aggregate scores paper over those differences. That automatically makes them less accurate.
Also, the problem with "perfect" as your standard is that it doesn't exist. Everything is inherently tradeoffs. There are games with better gunplay than Starfield. There are games with better story telling. The games that do that are a lot smaller and more contained. As good as BG3 is at writing and presentation, even that's not perfect, and what they did do was only realistic because it's a CRPG and the story is the overwhelming majority of the development work. There are games that are bigger in terms of absolute size of the universe you can discover and land on, but they don't have the same depth of character development and combat options, the same quality or amount of hand crafted story content, etc.
You're always going to be able to point to games that do some specific element better than a given game, and the more ambitious a game is in providing a huge scope, the more things you'll be able to point to and say "X did this better" (because there are more elements to nitpick). Not every game is for everyone, but looking for failings is a bad way to explore or evaluate a game. It dramatically limits what you see.
Then read the text of the review where that should be explained. Stop putting so much stock in scores. Most sites would do away with them if Meta/Open Critic hadn’t screwed up the system so they have to rely on clickthroughs. Eurogamer actually did for almost a decade but recently had to bring them back.
Well, they wouldn’t, because not all of the nine thought the game was perfect. A 100 on Metacritic only means the game placed in the top score for a given publication (4 out of 4 stars in WaPo’s case, for example).
In games criticism, a top score doesn’t always mean a perfect game. It can mean the game met or surpassed the current benchmark in its genre, or it simply was good enough to be in a top tier.
@Ashtear Exactly. The 100% rating is often misunderstood. It does not mean perfect game, plus every publication has their own standards. Therefore one 100% is not comparable to another 100%. And like in your example conversions from 4/4 to 100% (because it can only be 0%, 25%, 75% or 100%), is done so an overall Metacritic score can be calculated.
For the longest time I think Metacritic is a bad for the gaming industry, if they lean too much towards (in example bonuses for developers, if they reach a certain rating).
I don’t think that we need to continue to “think” it’s bad for the games industry. It IS bad for the industry. Period. Very famously, obsidian got less money and lost out on a bonus from the initial release of fallout NV because it didn’t hit 80 on metacritic. We need to stop pretending these scores are objective or reflect anything about user enjoyment of a game. Users maybe, but the critic score is worse than useless. It’s downright misinformation to aggregate critic scores.
Like the entire point of critics is to provide different perspectives on a game. Why would I want their average? The average of their opinion is not the average gamer opinion and it also isn’t the average of the individual readers opinion.
I need no further proof than go look up the last 5 games you played on metacritic and try to guess the critic and user score and get within 5 points each time.
Maximum score (4 stars, 5 stars, 10/10, 100%, whatever they’re calling it) not meaning the game is perfect is not at all a problem to me. There are games I absolutely love and would recommend to just about anyone and even then I don’t think they’re “perfect”.
The thing that bothers me most is how average scores specifically for games are basically never used, and below average scores are just a handful of the most broken things ever.
It’s so absurd that on metacritic for games, “average” goes from 50 to 74%. In movies it goes from 40 to 64. I don’t know for everyone else, but I don’t consider 7 out of 10 an “average” mark. And a game so broken it almost doesn’t run at all doesn’t deserve 5/10 (really, I’ve seen some).
Anyway, review scores are silly. Read the guys’ opinions, see why they like it and why they don’t. Someone’s absolute favorite masterpiece is someone else’s most unplayable shit.
It feels a lot like scores have been artificially inflated for a long time. Like you said, games that can barely run will get a 5, or a 4 at the lowest. It’s like half the possible scores have been lopped off, so there’s no real way to tell what a score actually means. A 7 should be a perfectly serviceable game, but it’s treated like you’ve called a game complete trash for anything below a 8.
Some publishers have been known to threaten publications that give “bad” (ie. even average) scores, mainly with not giving them preview copies anymore in the future.
Did you ask the same question when Witcher 3, Legend Of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, etc etc the same question?
It’s sort of dishonest when Starfield get this sort of treatment when metacritic score has been inflated for ages, no thanks to both gamer, journalist, and publisher.
Stop putting so much stock in scores. That score means those reviewers had a 10/10 experience by their subjective standards, if it doesn’t meet yours, thats fine, but it doesn’t mean the review is wrong. Read the damn text.
I’ve played through all 3 acts. Obviously in no way have done everything, but I never ran into a situation where your character would get killed for a bad dialogue choice. The “Volo’s eye” event referenced is for sure an example of the telegraphed outcome being the opposite of what actually goes down, but I really can’t think of another time that happens. Even that choice did not end in death. Some options end in tough fights, and maybe fights above your level, but I was never surprised by them.
Bringing up save scumming is an odd criticism for a CRPG. That has been a long running discussion, but you can choose not to do it if you don’t like it. It doesn’t mean it is bad game design to include saving whenever you want.
Yeah, ultimately this article reads as if it is questioning the quality of a work on the basis of how the audience engages (or doesn’t engage) with it. Ultimately there is one case where the character dies due to a bad dialogue choice, and that response is very clearly a joke one for if you’re not roleplaying.
I dunno, it just seems as if the article is clickbait, and if this game dev would prefer playing a game 90% ludonarrative dissonance and 10% no meaningful player choice.
I think the problem with player choice is that you are often not presented with the choice that you or your character would normally want, or that the game intentionally hides the information from you that you would need to make an informed decision. Also this is subjective, but I don’t like being pranked by the dungeon master, I quit tabletop rpgs due to this reason as a kid.
And the case about the game being interactive fiction instead of a “game” game is not entirely unfounded either. Not that I would consider that a bad thing necessarily.
(edit: I wrote this 1h into Act 3. Since then I finished the game & I found Act3 the best part of the game & rather amazing on the whole…)
But ist that not part of it? Being put in situations where you don’t have all the information, where you don’t know the potential outcomes and where you can permanently fuck things up? For me at least, that was a big part of the pull in playing TRPGs and CRPGs. It is, after all, not a strategy game.
In a good rpg, having a couple of these is fine, but in my opinion in Baldur’s Gate 3 these intentionally undecipherable decisions are overabundant. I’m not saying BG3 is bad, in fact many and perhaps most things are absolutely incredible. I just feel that that presented choice options & some parts of the big plot could have been done better.
I’ve absolutely died as a result of bad dialogue choices but that’s just role playing; sometimes something you might choose to do can only logically result in your death and I, for one, am happy to be given that choice. I’ve straight up deleted a character profile with lots of progress because there was no in-character way not to do the thing that would kill me in dialogue. That game over is just that character’s canonical ending as far as I’m concerned. He couldn’t not shit-talk that god, that god couldn’t not erase him from existence out of spite. If the game had not provided me with an option to shit-talk the god, I would have been annoyed that none of the dialogue options were true to my character.
I feel like in some ways that’s a limitation of the RPG though. Like the game is clearly stating you will not have a character that shit-talks gods. A good DM would see your RP choice and play into it rather than stomping you cold for a simple character personality. It’s equal to saying “you will never play a dumb comic relief”. Where in a lot of good RPGs the dumb comic relief is the best option. In the same way I’ve seen a lot of people want to play god-worshiping characters that lose faith in their god and switch.
I know of three instant game end dialogue options. One with Astarion, one with Volo, and one in the House of Hope. I think there might be a few more as well.
If you’re counting the one with astation that I’m thinking of, then I think the one at the very beginning after truly starting act 1 with the mind flayer could count
spoilerit’s when the ship crashes and you find the dying mind flayer in the wreckage. he will attempt to control your parasite and make you give yourself unto him and if you fail the checks to stop it, he’ll eat your brain and if you don’t have any other party members then it’ll game over
a situation where your character would get killed for a bad dialogue choice.
I think this is a ridiculous thing to criticize too. Dialogue is important in a game like this and it has (sometimes lethal) consequences.
Imagine if this argument were applied to combat. It turns out that it is impossible to beat some encounters by role-playing a loner wizard who refuses to cast spells. Nobody in their right mind would actually believe that is a valid criticism.
I absolutely agree. It’d be like if in RDR2 the “rob dialogue” was criticized for enacting combat. That said I haven’t played BG3 so I can’t know exactly what they were talking about or how it feels unfair.
Exactly. I literally don’t understand why people even care about save scumming (and the name is ridiculous to me too lol). It’s like my favorite part of the game. I love being able to relax and know I can mess around without completely fucking my game over. I get to explore everything to the fullest. If someone wants to be a hard ass about it, they can just…not reload?
There’s one dialogue in the Githyanki creche where your entire party is instantly killed if you choose the “wrong” option. There’s nothing to indicate that the choice will lead to that outcome. I’m not aware of any other dialogues like that, however.
She’s ultra authoritarian, for you to reach that dialogue option she knows you have something she desires, and she is a literal god while you are not even lvl 15, god killing is lvl 20 stuff, not 12 which is the cap, of course that she will kill you and grab what’s theirs instead of letting you go, wtf?
There’s nothing to indicate that the choice will lead to that outcome.
Who would’ve thought that saying fuck off to a literal god had consequences? Why do you think the game triggers an auto save when you enter the room? It’s safe for the game to be able to do that when it just auto saves for you right before, meaning you lose no progress. You’re ignoring a lot of context here, and it absolutely indicates this outcome lol
I read this as someone being real mad that the game is chaotic, and it’s like, that’s the best part about the game to me? There’s no ACTUAL DM, so the next best thing is what in my mind I’m calling the “death loop” system, just being able to go back and load a different save. At a game table the DM would, within reason, find a way to work with PCs being ridiculous; since it’s not possible to truly replicate that, the game just embeds chaos in the decision trees instead. That’s literally what makes it so fun. Most of the time the game is telegraphing what the real dumbass choices are, but I like how it’s not always immediately obvious. It keeps me on my toes. And sometimes I just save before choosing the stupidest option simply because I want to watch that shit play out.
I just feel like they’ve fundamentally misunderstood the point here.
This is such a absurd statement I’m inclined to agree about the trolling.
Maybe you love the characters, maybe you love the world, or maybe you love the character creator. That’s all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that all of those things—and a good many other aspects that Baldur’s Gate 3 has been praised for—are poor measurements of evaluating a game. If these subjectivities were the most important aspects of games, then we could say that chess or soccer are bad games. And I don’t think I need to explain how absurd that statement would be.
I mean, what does he think makes a good game, if not sorry, characters, and world? Must a game only be evaluated by it's rules and systems? Then guess what, BG3 is built on DND 5e, arguably the most successful RPG system of all time. What even is his complaint?
It sounds like his teacher thinks games should be evaluated for their development of tension and consistent messaging. It sounds like they would penalize a game for having a story with twists and surprises, because those either break messaging consistency or deflate tension. And, of course, quicksaves are evil.
I can kind of see where they’re coming from, but it feels like a very academic, navel-gazing place, akin to pretentious art critics talking about color, composition, and allusion to past masters, or a film critic talking about Dutch angles and long takes. Things that may contribute to the artistic quality and even the enjoyment of a piece, but are not components that us rubes actively look for. The fact they try to lump BG3, soccer, and chess all together under one system of evaluation tells me that they’re going to use some really bizarre criteria.
I agree with them that it isn’t an objective measure of quality, but who rates any form of art or entertainment by objective measures only? The whole point of them is to be subjective.
Gaming media has a difficult time differentiating their thoughts on games as a consumer product and games as art. For the former, it's useful to have objective measures. For the latter, subjective.
But what is an objective measure for game quality? You’ll often see things used like total hours needed to complete it and things, but those are not measures of quality. Enjoyment per hour should be, but then it’s back to subjective. There isn’t an objective measure for a game being good. You can look at things like framerate and such, but it still doesn’t measure quality you can make your game very simplistic and get high FPS, and graphical quality is mostly subjective.
Viewing games outside of their context as a product for entertainment, which is inharently subjective, is always flawed.
Those are in fact all objective measures of a game's quality. FPS on certain hardware, game length, frequency of crashes, the presence of microstuttering, lists of features, these are all things that can be quantified, and by being quantified they are made objective. You can take this information and compare games against each other to make purchasing decisions, critique them, etc. Those decisions are subjective, yet they are based on objective data.
But I didn't say that we should only use objective measures to evaluate games, nor do I agree that we can only evaluate games subjectively. We need both, gaming media should give us both, but we both need to be able to distinguish between them.
Yes, those are objective, but if we run a PS2 game in modern hardware it’ll have high FPS. What does that mean for quality?
There are objective measured, but they’re useless without context that requires subjectivity. Do you like retro-asthetics? You may like the PS2 looking game with high FPS. If you don’t then you might not.
Bugs existing I guess is a useful objective-ish measure. It depends on what happens, how often, and when though, not just the number of them or them existing.
I agree we need media looking at both, but purely objective reporting should not be giving a game a rating on overall quality.
(I’m nit arguing with you. I’m pretty much agreeing. I just wanted to clarify what I meant.)
Even as a consumer product it’s not really possible to boil it down to objective measures. Just like clothing follows tastes and fashions that are inherently subjective, or books, movies and TV shows etc.
Is it possible to block a domain without blocking the OP? I'm sure they're a nice person, but they post the dumbest rage bait articles, and I'm sick of seeing them in my feed.
I think the ones that bother me more are the ones that are rage bait for a thing that the OP hasn't even experienced themselves. Maybe everyone else enjoys X and you find an article that summarizes your feeling on it, so you post that article and say how you share that position. That's all well and good. But posting an article that's angry about FFXVI's depiction of slavery, even though OP has no first-hand experience with the game to say if the article is full of shit or not; that bugs me. I don't know how many of the topics the OP has first-hand experience with, but I know they have none with FFXVI, and all of these articles are just designed to get people angry about something. Plenty of games have slavery in them without having to make their story about slavery being bad; we know slavery is bad. If OP has a problem with it after playing the game and that article sums up their thoughts, then it's okay to post that article. If OP is sincerely as pissed off about every one of these things that the articles they post are pissed off about, then maybe I should block them, because they'd have to be a miserable person. We also don't need 3 slightly updated posts about Baldur's Gate 3's split-screen not working on the Series S.
I post things that I think can get people talking and spark conversations along with things I think are interesting. I posted this, for example, because of the way it was talking about how gamers can get tribal and make it so you can’t seriously talk about a game when that happens because of how some folks lose their shit when you try.
It starts conversations because it's designed to get people angry. It's the kind of engagement-driving Twitter nonsense that the fediverse doesn't rely on. Try shooting from the heart with your own opinion in a self post rather than just posting the most outrageous thing someone said on the internet today.
I mean if you look at the post history, OP has posted a LOT of things, but also posted two mary sue articles with kind of inflammatory takes on BG3, and Starfield. So I would not say they specifically have been posting rage bait.
They are just a super poster, they post just tons of gaming articles that strike their fancy, which is cool it keeps this community fresh, but it’s not always good, just is what it is, I won’t complain really because it’s not like I’m much of a poster.
Is it possible to block a domain without blocking the OP?
You mean, block the domain of the link? Maybe you could do that with a keyword filter in an app. Unfortunately it’s not a native Lemmy/kbin function (yet, AFAIK).
No doubt. Enjoy your video games the way you want to enjoy them. I picked up RDR2 again recently, got to the point where you’re supposed to break Micah out of prison, and I’m just like, fuck that guy. I’m going hunting and playing dress-up.
It's a mechanically reasonably modern (it feels very comparable to Deus Ex or Cyberpunk gunplay/stealth wise, with better perk/level-up design) Bethesda RPG. You have to fly around more because it's set in space and most of space is empty, but there are still a lot of places to go and it's easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole.
My complaints are pretty mild. I'd like some kind of speeder for the empty "run a mile" bits, I miss the aimless wandering of terrestrial maps and kind of wish there had been some places set up to feel like that, and I occasionally see issues with texture loading. But it's the game the direct said it was going to be, and I'm personally very happy with it (though if it could get cleaned up enough to run a little better on my steam deck I wouldn't complain).
Exactly. I went in blind. No trailers, no interviews, no hype. All I knew was it was a Bethesda space game. It started off slow, but after about 12 hrs (half of which was me goofing off and gun running for money), I’m starting to really like the game.
Seeing a trashcan explode into a tesseract-can is pretty funny, albeit a bit concerning about what other props have multiple copies embedded in them. I do hope Bethesda seriously re-evaluates their stance and does some optimization and scrubbing. The game runs ok on my system, but my card should not be screaming as hard as it is.
From what I’ve seen and heard, Starfield is on par with Fallout 3. I can’t imagine being upset about that. Fallout 3 is great. Seems like some people wanted it to be No Man’s Sky + Star Citizen + Cyberpunk and like… no, it’s a Bethesda game. You know what that means already. I’m looking forward to picking it up and playing it, as I’ve always enjoyed their games for the weird sandboxes that they are.
"if you just take it for what it is without thinking what you wanted it to be"
Why would I do that for any video game? With that mindset, you could claim any game is good, because you aren't actually engaging with its content on the level that it deserves.
I had no expectations going in (wasn’t planning to play it) and came out having fun. I don’t know what expectations you or anyone else had, but maybe those expectations are what ruined the game. I don’t think anyone’s claiming the game is perfect (anyone who is probably is trolling), but it’s pretty dismissive of its strengths for people to say it’s unplayable (unless you legit can’t run it, which is fair). If all you focus on is what the game doesn’t do well, then you might as well only ever play perfect masterpieces because all other games will be a disappointment. If the price is a concern, it will probably go on sale eventually anyway, assuming you don’t find alternatives before then.
I do think there are a lot of flaws with the game, but those flaws have already been elaborated in great depth by others. Despite those flaws, game is still fun and has a lot of room for mods to come in and make it better.
I wanted it to be a big Bethesda RPG in space, and I got exactly that and I’m happy. People seem to have convinced themselves the game was going to be all kinds of things it never ever hinted at and now they’re upset it isn’t.
Just to go on the other side, you're clearly a substantial poster of interesting content on the gaming Fediverse, even if it ends up as articles about the latest large games. You also participate in the comments sections with pretty level opinions, and it blows my mind that that person was calling this a "nothingburger" of a post even though they're obviously bookended by tons of engagement.
Yeah i’m with the other guy. On one hand lemmy need content, so talking about the lastest exciting thing makes sense, on the other hand there’s that dude whining about content they don’t like to see instead of keep scrolling.
Well so did I, but I also bought into whole ecosystem for this game (Series X). So I'm actually pretty disappointed in how its turned out. First it was the 30fps thing, got over that then saw the reviews and thought this could be great. Then I started playing and hit all the load screens. Thats when I realised I was not going to align with the 10/10 reviews lol. I personally have it somewhere between 6 and 7. But parts can be a 4 to me (immersion) and parts can be an 8 or even 9 (working through a 'dungeon' picking locks, sniping, setting up ambushes etc)
What I’m saying is that if a game doesn’t look interesting then don’t buy it. If you’re on the fence then at least wait a little bit for the reviews to “simmer down” if you will. I’ve seen it with basically every AAA game of the past few years. Some people hate it, some people absolutely love it, so they bombard reviews with those going in both directions. Wait til you start seeing more reviews from normal people, rather than those trying to seek attention and you’ll see reviews that weigh both the pros and the cons.
But yeah I mean if the game really doesn’t look that interesting to you then just don’t buy it! I’ve never been interested in RTS games, so you know how many RTS games I own? Zero!
If you're struggling to find "substantial" conversations on topics you want to talk about, maybe you should be the one to initiate those conversations.
Come on man, I’ve seen you around a lot and I know you post a lot of good stuff, but to be fair, you’re not blameless here. I get that you’re not interested in a game and it’s frustrating to see lots of posts about it dominating your feed, but clearly the OP is interested and excited about it, and basically telling them to shut up about their interest just because it’s not what you want to hear about is a mean thing to do. It would be different if they posted spam links to their own blog every single day or something like that but they post all sorts of relevant news links to various communities so I think they just share stories they’re interested in, and that’s valuable to the community too! We all should be working together to build a nice friendly community to talk about what we enjoy and sometimes that means we have to tolerate others quirks and discussing things we don’t particularly care for.
Not really sure what response you’re looking for here. Perhaps the same one as going into any community and saying “I’m so tired of hearing about [major thing that happened recently related to the community].”
“God damn I’m so tired of hearing about the Super Bowl, it’s been a freaking week can y’all just get over it?”
is it impossible to have a balanced conversation about starfield in particular, or does the internet ad economy tend to exclude the middle of every conversation in favor of loud antagonism and engagement bait?
I feel ya, OP. I bought Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, played the hell out of it and loved every second of it. Then I tried to find honest discussion about it and it was threads full of nonstop bitching or substance-free fluff from the low sodium crowd. There wasn't a place to find balanced talk where people could share their experiences about the game while also being civil and open minded about things.
If you are just looking to create discussion, I guess this thread has been successful as it's gotten a lot of replies already.
It looks like they’ve made a LOT of fixes to some of the base mechanics, so hopefully that’ll make the game closer to what it was envisioned to be. It might make the game feel fresh for a replay.
Yeah. I started one a few weeks ago but I paused it when I heard that 2.0 is coming out. I'm gonna pick up the expansion and just play a new run all the way through, maybe watch Edgerunners again too.
Open world games can be played in a lot of different ways depending on your playestile you might care or not care about it’s limitations. So just because feature X is missing doesn’t mean it would matter to everyone or it’s automatically a bad game.
In those Reddit threads almost everyone seemed like they had second hand information or it was just a meme that was constantly repeated.
There felt like a lot of people who really wanted CP to be GTAV and were extremely upset that it wasn't.
There was also a lot of angst from people who saw the words "open world" and expected it to mean some Second Life-esque escapist experience, rather than the actual meaning of open world, as in there is a big environment where you are free to roam around and do stuff in.
Misled expectations from the marketing hype absolutely played a key role in all of that furor, but at least for me, I tune out most of it since I like making my own opinions on things.
There's a TON more that could be said but those are the three standout points from my perspective.
Yes that was the loudest portion of the complaints for sure.
Marketing also hit the create overhype button one too many times. Maybe given the topic, genre and time of release it would have create overhype anyway, but its a moot point at this point.
Basically just memeing to death how bad is was… it actually had valve like store policies, really good latency compared to other cloud options (even now) to the point it felt local even on a shooter, false information that you had to pay a subscription to play your purchased games, etc
I had the same experience with CP. 50 hours put in at launch and had a good time. Yet you’d think the game killed players dog the way the chatter online went.
The inventory system was acceptable 20 years ago when 1024x768 was a good resolution. Today it’s bad, and I don’t understand why some people can’t just admit that. It’s kinda telling that after an hour or so of play I started to look for mods to fix my pain points. Nearly 400k people are using the mod StarUI Inventory. I have an ultra wide monitor, and I have to configure my FoV in an ini file. It’s also an HDR monitor… I have to disable HDR on because it’s basically unplayable right now. Flashlight reflections on anything close to shiny are blinding.
The procedural generation doesn’t deserve the praise it’s getting. It’s no where near as complicated as people think. It’s not generating the terrain, it’s just picking from a set of giant pre-made tiles and dropping some rocks and trees on them. It’s not generating the buildings, just picking from a set of pre-made buildings. It’s not even filling the buildings procedurally… I had 2 quests in a row that used the same building. Identical building map, same robot you could reprogram near the front door. Same barricades, same small safe on a desk with the same 2 digikeys on a table just around the corner… There’s only so many cave maps too, but it does look like they block off some of the tunnels with rubble so it feels like more. I explored 2 caves in a row that had the same map, with the same safe up on a cliff you have to jump to.
It’s not ‘bad’, but it’s not as good as it should be. Once you start seeing it, you can’t un-see it and the vast amount of content shrinks. It makes me a little sad knowing how many people worked on this, and how long they worked on it, that we didn’t get more out of it.
Nearly 400k people are using the mod StarUI Inventory.
I love the overall experience, the vibe, the story, etc… but just like Skyrim the UI is trash. Bethesda sucks at UI, especially inventory UI. SkyUI was mandatory when I played Skyrim. I feel the same about Starfield. Same shit inventory mgmt. I still love the game. Hate the UI. I’m on the gamepass version and haven’t even looked to see if I can mod it yet (I’m assuming I can’t).
Eh to each their own. I very much prefer the inventory in a tabular format with all the useful details, up front, that I can sort by. And I’m very much a fan of the value/weight column.
Its a great game, if it was released in 2013. Now its just average. They have doubled and tripled down on the formula, chucked a coat of paint on the engine and called it a day. Whats astonishing is that they spent so long doing it. I've done the MSQ, one faction questline and half of another and I'd say thats at least 1/3, probably closer to 1/2 of the curated storyline content of the game. All of it was ok I guess, but nothing in it jumped out as particularly well written, let along consequential and meaningful. I'm struggling to see how it ate so many dev hours.
I think these days we have a much more mature gamer audience, and Starfield seems squarely targeted at teens. There just isn't the depth of more modern game storytelling. Some I blame on the engine (well alot tbh) but some is squarely on Bethesda for playing it so safe. Does not bode well for ESVI.
I’m struggling to see how it ate so many dev hours.
Lots of stuff got added: space combat, ship building, the new research system, the rank challenges stuff, new lockpicking, and I bet loads of stuff besides that I forgot. Adding all of that stuff to a new game from scratch would take a good chunk of time, but I can imagine patching it all in to an ancient game engine that’s probably barely hanging together honestly it’s surprising they got some of it working at all
an ancient game engine that’s probably barely hanging together
I think Bethesda is a company full of people at the terminus of their careers - they don't know how to make any other kind of game than "Bethesda RPG," they don't know how to use any other game engine, and they are unable to learn either of those skills. Many other game studios have learned to evolve and shift their resources and assets - Naughty Dog doesn't still use the Jak and Daxter engine, From Software went from making mecha games like Armored Core to defining an entire genre with Dark Souls. It seems like Bethesda doesn't have the capacity to change like other companies.
That’s actually a bad comparison. Elden Ring and AC6 use the same engine, which is at least a heavily modified Demon Souls engine. FromSoftware is much closer to Bethesda in how they reuse tech than you realize
I was referring to the Armored Core games that From developed starting with the original PlayStation in 1997. But to your point, it speaks to their flexibility in using the same engine to make games of two fairly different genres.
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