Over the years I’ve seen a lot of articles about former Bioware devs leaving to form their own studios but nothing has ever really come of it. Whatever magic they had in the 00’s just seems to be lost.
Baldur’s Gate 3. I loved it as a cRPG fan who grew up on them. It’s ambitious, innovative and I’m really happy it’s brought the genre to a whole new audience. I hope we see something of a genre revival. But if you’ve been online at all you’ve seen all the praise I could give it already anyway, so lets talk about the bad.
It’s shockingly buggy and it’s weird that it’s always just a footnote in the discourse. I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a game this broken before. I was constantly encountering issues that would cause me to reload a save. There are plenty of posts about the bugs - pretty much every single quest in the game will have dozens of threads about various issues - but when it comes down to reviews people are really forgiving of it in a way I haven’t really seen before.
It’s also made some fundamentally terrible design decisions that wont be fixed by patches. Long resting to progress the story triggers is particularly awful. It absolute kills the pacing, despite the narrative suggesting a heavy time pressure (that isn’t actually there), and encourages you to just nova everything. I found myself just spamming long rests after every narrative beat until the cutscenes stopped triggering just to make sure which was very tedious.
Given every single system in Starfield is already explored and built on, I think they should have just given up on the jump system and gone with a gate system like Freelancer or the X series. You get to fly to every point without menus while still being time efficient. The reason they didn’t go with this is presumably because of the supposed “exploring the unknown” angle, but you never explore anywhere new in Starfield anyway.
I struggled with The Outer Worlds’ really ham fisted centrism. While it’s been awhile, I remember the best result on every major planet was to find compromise between the two factions. It’s done so clumsily that it makes none of the factions feel authentic in any way.
I don’t think I’ve seen any public backlash hitting the developer or publisher for the content of a mod being “offensive to public order and morals” since the hot coffee stuff, and that was only because it was content already in the game. This is almost certainly a lie and the real reason is they’re worried mods will compete with things they’re selling.
Another comment without watching so I might be repeating something in the video, but did they mention how poor bloated the site is? I was trying to use the Forgotten Realms wiki and after a few tabs it would grind my browser to a halt. For something that really just needs to be serving text and a few images it’s wild how badly the site performs.
They game SEO to flood search results with articles that are pure, useless placeholders which most of the time will never be written. Even when they’re more than a placeholder page, they’re often wrong outside of a few games because they’re just there to get clicks. Downvote bots were used against links to competing wikis, and while Fextralife denies it, they were conveniently spared.
There is more shady behavior out there around Fextra, but the most important thing for a user is there is almost always a better wiki that’s being suppressed in the search results. If you blacklist the site you’re a lot more likely to find something useful.