Jauwn is a treat, and he makes such cool intros. He adds a nice perspective to the crypto games market. Open about his views on what it’s used for, but still willing to give it an honest try and look at it as a game alongside everything else.
It can be played almost entirely single player from the beginning now, and the story is really good after ARR (which is serviceable for setting up the world).
There is also a free trial that goes through Stormblood (the second expansion) so you can try without paying anything
It depends what you’re looking for. If you don’t care about story and community, you can purchase a boost right to the endgame (or I guess, start-game of this expansion) and start playing the latest content almost immediately. It’s really not a hard game even at the 2nd hardest content tier. I could regularly out-DPS the DPS players as a healer in pugs.
However, FF14 also famously has some of the best storytelling and communities in the genre. Even catching up to Stormblood would take hundreds of hours and there are like 3 new expansions since then.
Personally the appeal to me was the immersion, working through the story from the start, making bonds and connections with other players and your guild. This takes time and if you have it, the game will show you plenty to do.
I started playing in August of last year and finished endwalker (the last expansion before dawntrail) in January. It’s very “easy to get into” imo but the base game is a slog for sure. If you don’t mind putting in time (or as the other comment suggests, money) then yes, it’s a very easy game to get into. It’s my first mmo btw.
Since they announced that it will be PC and XBOX only- I stopped giving a shit. I refuse to buy a new hardware that once was accessible without having to.
You’re probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.
Don’t even need to get into ranking them, it’s just completely asinine to say Oblivion and Skyrim are not even good at all. Circlejerk nonsense from someone who probably hasn’t played any of them.
I bet I’ve played a lot more of them than you have.
It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t having fun with Skyrim, and I thought it wasn’t as good as Oblivion. The games weren’t getting any better, just prettier. The writing and worldbuilding was getting objectively worse, too.
Morrowind is the only one I keep going back to, it’s the only one that has some semblance of soul.
i agree that skyrim is not as good as oblivion, but that isn’t what we were talking about.
Do you stand by the statement that Morrowind was the last “good” elder scrolls game? In other words, you think Oblivion and Skyrim are not good at all?
It’s gonna take twice as long as Starfield all to contain the same jank in an even larger, more barren, world where nothing is interesting and you’re just going through the motions because that’s what Todd Howard thinks games are.
People have actually made it through Starfield? I tried so hard, but couldn’t make it past 20 hours (which isn’t a lot for a Bethesda RPG). The story is just sodamnBORING.
Oh boy, you’re lucky. I trudged through for 70h out of sheer morbid curiosity. The boring main story goes straight into “icecream on forehead” when the starborn show up. The ending is just a shit cherry on top of that, with Emil Pagliarulo’s best “fuck you for asking questions” ever
It really does feel like Starfield completely killed any excitement for Bethesda games, everything since Oblivion has been a step in the wrong direction IMO.
Including Oblivion. I enjoyed it but it was a huge disappointment to me coming out of Morrowind. Bethesda reputation for me has been on Morrowind credit this whole time.
Even Morrowind was a simplified version of Daggerfall, even though it was groundbreaking when it was released. They decided that the direction to take was to simplify the mechanics progressively, to make the series more appealing to more people, as opposed to adding interesting complications back as their tech develops. They succeeded in their mantra of “keep it simple, stupid”. I don’t have any hope that the next game will be more interesting. It will look prettier, of course.
It’s smaller but I would not say it was dumbed down like Oblivion was to Morrowind. Morrowind feels more or less the same as Arena or Daggerfall, except in how character progressiom works and that you didn’t have to swing your mouse around trying to hit things with your weapon.
It literally still has all the deeper mechanics like performing rituals during certain times of the day/months/year and what not. Just not a procedurally generated world with RNG quests or dungeons. And thank God for that because Daggerfall and Arena both could literally break by generating a dungeon you couldn’t actually finish.
Idk, having only played Oblivion and Skyrim, I feel like (generally speaking) the simplifications in Skyrim were for the better. Take custom spells for example. Only a few spells really even made sense to make and it was better to make them in very specific ways. It’s not like the games are super difficult. Fucking around with spells and more complex enchantments was cool but too easy to cheese.
Oh, and the leveling. Holy fuck what an over complicated mess. Where you could accidentally over level but also under level. Insane. Good riddance.
Complex systems are not inherently good. They’re good if they provide meaningful choices and are fun to use. But ES has always been about the story and exploration more so anyways (in my opinion).
Oblivion had quality of life improvements that made it a better game IMO. Yes Morrowind was bigger and deeper, but it was also a frustrating game that didn’t age very well.
Normally, I would say that I don’t care when a game comes out, as long as it’s a genuinely good, complete experience. But knowing Bethesda, it’ll be another 5 years before we see anything, and then we’ll get an embarrassingly buggy title, that hasn’t innovated on anything since Fallout 3 came out.
I used to forgive them for anything, knowing that the modding community would just patch things anyway, but we’ve seen how Starfield was rejected by a ton of people with skills.
I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
That really is a pretty substantial part of it too. Modding at its core requires a good game, and everything else comes from people wanting to change parts of it, that aren’t necessarily to their liking. Bethesda somehow assumed that people would be willing to reimplement half of the game at launch. That just won’t slide anymore, for 70$
Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who’s going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?
Shadow of the Erdtree DLC comes out this month after being developed for 2 years. Even amazing games take forever to develop, I’m certainly not waiting half a decade for another fucking Starfield…
Well, at least they won’t need to make “thousands of planets” worth of “content”, so the game might at least look consistent
Still, after Starfaild, my expectation is for TES6 to have something that kinda almost resembles Dark Messiah of Might and Magic’s melee combat; only Archery, Melee, Magic and Armor skills to level up; Emil Pagliarulo’s “greatest” story yet with double the time travel and multiverse bullshit; twice the amount of stories that get nowhere and that nobody in the world cares about; removal of stealth
Heck, if they went back to Oblivion’s concept of having the npcs with predefined lives and goals and slapped a free version of chatgtp onto the npc interactions, it would be cool.
I hope they’re not biting off more than they can chew. I mean, the scope of the whole project sounds bigger than Daggerfall, which means it’s unlikely they’ll finish on time and, when they do release something, there’s a high chance it’ll be lacking tons of features at launch.
massive, procedurally-generated world with plenty of variety in the environments and locales. Dungeons and cities are crafted to feel unique from one another, offering limitless options for layouts and aesthetics. The world itself is ever changing; cities can grow, deteriorate, or be entirely destroyed by war, and the sky, landscape, and flora change with the seasons.
Unless they’re Dwarf Fortress level masters of procgen, I won’t expect much more than typical single pass “random perlin terrain”
It will be lacking features, this kickstarter is just to fund a year of early access development to shop it around to publishers to get started on the real work
I hope stealth gets a major rework, at least. Or maybe not stealth itself but how the AI handles interacting with it. No NPC should ever guess that it was just the wind when there’s an arrow sticking out of them or their colleague is lying dead in plain view (or even just doesn’t respond when they call to them).
They should use strategies and tactics that work against stealth. Patrols (including their own stealth patrols sometimes), roll calls, better lighting, positioning of guards to cut off entrance points, traps (and not just the dungeon traps, but NPCs setting new traps when they suspect stealth, where the trap could be as simple as a trip wire attached to metal rings that will jingle if someone disturbs them), spells that locate nearby people, using senses other than sight and hearing, dark vision. Sometimes stealth missions should be forced to end and come back later because the residents realize someone is trying to sneak around and kill or rob them and go on high alert with effective tools to negate stealth. Just sometimes, sometimes it should work like it does in Skyrim where a guard just doesn’t want to deal with whatever is shooting arrows at him and maybe just yells threats instead of using a stealth counter (just get rid of that memory of a goldfish thing).
I mean, stealth is fun, but it’s not as fun when every single character I make ends up becoming some kind of a stealth archer because the NPCs are effective at generating opposition to everything but that.
Don’t worry, in five years it will launch with the same physics tick rate bug and the dearth of anything interesting that is customary of any Bethesda Game Studios game.
I used to be a Dragonborn like you, but then I got a fire arrow to my dedicated graphics card.
Now nothing newer than Oblivion will ever run on that machine.
In Morrowind I like the story and the music. But as I explored the battle mechanics, I couldn’t stand the randomness.
Also in a later retries after Oblivion and Skyrim I missed the real talking more than the graphics enhancements.
A bit unfair, I know. Maybe I’m not that game connoisseur myself.
yeah but the talking was annoying af. it felt like they had like four people voicing the entire game. meanwhile a small independent studio like supergiant makes a much smaller game fully voice acted but doesn’t feel exhausted as quickly as Skyrim, with thousands of lines both written and performed fantastically. i can’t excuse anything Bethesda is doing anymore. they’re getting worse with every game, both in terms of writing and gameplay.
Yes, mostly Wes Johnson with a bit of a very annoyed Sean Bean.
But I have a soft spot for the over the top Sheogorath, the unnecessarily aggressive guard shouts and the calm voice of the Khajiit women.
Some of the other few voices I can’t stand, especially the blacksmith of Chorrol (“A pleeeeasure to serve you”).
I want to be positive and I’m trying to remain optimistic, but somehow I just know it in my bones that they’re going to further Fallout 4 the franchise and strip away even more skills and attributes. Hell, maybe they’ll get rid of dialogue entirely.
Indeed. I would love to have a “modernized Morrowind” experience – an RPG game that really nails the role-playing part of RPG, but without the cheesy parts of Morrowind like the unintuitive combat system – but all of us know that it’s just not gonna happen.
Not quite. It’s just harder to disconnect the 3D visual of a sword or mace swing very clearly hitting a creature and said hit missing entirely, especially as you’re in direct control of when and where the attack happens. For comparison, it’s much easier to accept misses in Neverwinter Nights because you’re not directly controlling the attacks. The fact that you can also look at the log of dice rolls helps a lot, too.
Hell, even in Arena and Daggerfall, where you’re also in direct control of your swings, it’s easier to accept when it doesn’t hit thanks to the slow animations and 2D graphics of your equipped weapon and the enemy sprite.
but all of us know that it’s just not gonna happen.
Certainly not by Bethesda, but in truly typical fashion, Bethesda games are are held together and made fun by modders (and sometimes, even fully built, as is the case with Enderal). Only trouble is that can take a wild and/or completely unknown amount of time.
Stop, do not proceed with the unlifening of my entire family. Please, if you do it may awaken some mystical power within me that I have to read carvings on walls and talk to some old monks to use properly.
100% they’re going to try to do AI NPCs and you’re going to get cartoonishly awful dialogue that will be great for memes and terrible for any kind of actual gameplay.
Got to do better than Star field and come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring. Chances are they hit the reset button after it became apparent they couldn’t coast on the mod community
Doing better than starfield shouldn’t be hard for them. Getting on par with the quality of Divinity Original Sin, much less Baldur’s Gate 3, is likely beyond bethesda’s ability, tho.
Just hire Kirkbride back goddamnit. I installed Immortals of Aveum and saw that Kirkbride is the main writer and got pumped on the game but that damn thing keeps crashing on me. So I’m back to just playing Diablo or Minecraft for the time being.
All of these were lovingly crafted bespoke characters and story arcs, with god only knows how many hours of real human thought put into the story, the setting, and the dialogue.
Bethesda execs don’t want any of that shit. They want a big button that says “MAKE NEW GAME” that they can slap and then a new game that pops out of a slot on the other side of their computers.
The mod community is so vital to these modern games because its real humans having real human ideas that go into them. Business only gets to latch on after the fact, once a DOTA or CS:GO has already fully taken off and left orbit.
After the reviews on Starfield, maybe this is for the best.
You really want to see what shameful AI slop they try to shoehorn into this game? Or how much of it is shamelessly cribbed and rehashed from Skyrim, the last good thing Bethesda ever did? Do you really want to play “Morrowwind But If It Was Designed By Houston’s Urban Planning Team?” Enjoy an hour and 30 minute commute to your next quest, plus traffic, you stupid idiots.
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