I'm fully expecting to go pretty hard at both, and BG3 might have me engaged enough to not jump straight into Starfield at launch, but I need immersive 3D games, too, and except Elden Ring which is it's own thing (even if it does pretty comfortably check the boxes of ARPG), I've been waiting for something of comparable scope to Skyrim that doesn't have a fatal flaw for a long time. Even as old and janky as it is now, it's still a scale that's only matched by a handful of games in the decade since.
Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
They're pretty different games. They're both RPGs, and there's some overlap, but turn based is ultimately very different gameplay than action, and one isn't going to scratch the itch for the other to a lot of us.
I didn't love fallout, but mostly because of the dinky crafted weapons and their handling and the fact that you almost had to use VATS to make it work. They're damn good at making giant worlds worth exploring, and the gunplay looks a lot more fluid than fallout. I like the premise of highly customizable shipbuilding a lot more than fallout's settlements, too. It's far from guaranteed to be great, but "sci-fi Skyrim with enough engine improvements for guns to feel OK" is extremely promising to me. There's a reason Skyrim is still selling copies a decade later when the mechanics are super limited by age, and if they're able to bring the same world building to space exploration I'm all for it.
It does run on steam deck (though at lower settings with FSR to get 40 mostly stable).
Open world games with some complexity generally take a decent amount of power. You have to load a good number of surrounding objects at any given time, with a pretty wide view on the zoomed out view. There are also other characters/animals doing stuff, environmental effects, and a healthy dose of passive checks on the environment against various traits of your party to see if your character identifies any of the secrets all over the world.
A lot of the storytelling is through 2D scenes giving the illusion of being animated by moving pieces around (which does the job perfectly fine), and a lot of the side quest stuff is just plopping one character without any impressive animation in one spot just dropped in the world.
In BG3, there are a bunch of minor side quests where there are several characters interacting with each other in the 3D world, and your decision making branches branch harder. Just the sheer number of otherwise "minor" interactions with fully animated, voiced, and narrated actions is crazy.
Frankly I think that's laughable. The Witcher 3 is fine production quality wise, but it's not even sort of competitive with BG3. The main quest line vs BG3 side quests, maybe, but there's a huge step down to the animation quality of anything else.
Only if you dramatically lower your standards for what backwards compatibility means. PS3 emulators might be progressing, but they're far from the native hardware in actual functionality, especially with games that actually used the features of the hardware that made the PS3 a powerhouse.
Emulators can wave that away as "it is what it is". Sony advertising backwards compatibility couldn't.
I'm skeptical of any article like this on its face. The whole beauty of a well done RPG, especially a CRPG, is that you get choices on how to build your character and how you handle encounters and can be successful with many of them.
If bard is the most fun for you, awesome. If it's "objectively better", the game is flawed.
I still won't buy stuff there, but this is a far better way to make a storefront interesting than Epic. Instead of locking everything behind exclusive deals to try to force people to use your platform, they're adding actual meaningful benefits to using their storefront. Cross ownership is nice. Game pass is nice. That's how you provide competition.
The little mermaid side story was sad. Then, I spent the entire second act just grinding along to get the best character in my party back only to end up super depressed about it when that didn't happen.
What they need to do is utilize steam's branch feature to allow smaller installs for low resolution assets and with minimal language support without an opt in to other languages needed.
The steam deck really has me wishing Steam had pushed for that as part of fully verified (or have "great on deck" be a tier above and only for games that do the extras like that). So much space is spent on things I don't need at 800p
I meant sticking core functionality like the suggestions I responded to. "Oh, it's so sad your pokemon got injured and will be out of commission for 6 weeks. Luckily for you, if you get in line at a Starbucks then stay in the shop for 10 minutes, or go through the drive through, he'll be feeling good as new." "Your pokemon laid an egg. It will hatch in 9 months, or you can spend an hour inside this concert venue to get it now."