While this headline is true, I don’t think it’s the fundamental reason for the game’s success. Having characters that feel alive is awesome, and part of what elevates BG3 over D:OS 1 and 2 for me. But what makes it great is the amount of control you have over the narrative; how the game responds to your choices. There is nuance. There are permutations. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than any rpg Bethesda ever put out (fite me).
A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.
Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.
Yeah, this is true. I think Bethesda games have just felt really empty and lifeless to me for a long time. I enjoyed Morrowind a lot. Oblivion I played for a while, but never finished the story. Don’t even remember if I ever finished Skyrim, which was obviously massively popular. Same with their Fallout games, it’s just been diminishing returns for me. Different strokes, and all that, obviously, they just don’t have that secret sauce I crave.
I think part of it is that your character doesn’t have any personality; you’re some total cipher of a Chosen One, which makes it difficult to form an emotional connection to them, and by extension to any of the NPC’s. Some of their NPC’s have well-written dialogue, but I sure don’t remember any of them.
Bethesda's "good stories" have always been moreso the player's stories of cobbled together mechanics as a a result of their playstyle/current abilities, gear, and motivation.
Most of the time it might be rote open world questing with some enjoyable grind loop, but there are a lot of particular memories I love, like robbing the Red Diamond jewelry store in Oblivion's Imperial City, "casing" the place by day as a customer and purchasing a necklace, purely to experience the joy of breaking in at 3 AM and robbing it blind.
The joy and hilarity I felt when I came back the day after I'll always remember. Entering the store to see the shopkeep, beaming at his new customer, all of his shelves and cases completely fucking empty, as he vacantly grinned at me, buck naked as id stolen the clothes right out of his sleeping pockets.
I've stolen a lot of shit in that game, but that one was good. It's incredibly rare for me to remember Bethesda's actual character moments that fondly, as they've always come off plastic and rehearsed in some combination of writing, voice acting, and rigid animation. Sometimes they almost reach a good story, like some popular side quest chains, or Paladin Danse's personal quests.
So, I think these two games tell their best culminational "stories" in different fundamental ways, and I think it's neat how each one's best potential narrative, whether written or otherwise, is a marriage of the game's possibilities and the player's motivation and intent. But you're probably right, BG3 can tell a lot more, better stories than my idiotic repetitive Bethesda adventures, but I do like some pulp.
Yeah, I think you’re right, and maybe my waning enjoyment of that style of rpg says as much about my lack of imagination as anything else. I’m just a sucker for a story I can get caught up in, with characters that I can somehow relate to, and I’ve nearly always felt let down by Bethesda games in that regard.
I would say subscriptions are bad because they are proven to make people spend more money then they would have normally. That’s why most big companies do it now. Someone buying a game for 30$ and playing it for 1000 hours over a couple years isn’t very interesting for the big guys.
But then how would you apply that logic to things like GamePass, where you will end up spending way less if you are a prolific gamer? I spent $120 for a year of PS+ Premium and it paid for itself in 2 weeks with the cost of buying the individual games vs just having access to the catalogue. And not just things I downloaded, played for 10 minutes and removed. There was plenty of things I would have out right paid $40-70 for and have put 40-100 hours in that I didn’t have to buy because they were on the subscription service. It would have cost almost a $1000 for the value of time spent playing games I got access to for only $120.
You probably pay more if using a gamepass, but you also try a lot more games.
If you played as many games without a gamepass as with one, you’d pay a lot more.
But without a gamepass, you usually restrict yourself to fewer games.
Whether removing such restriction is worth the (not as significant) additional cost is subjective.
So there’s an actual case for subscription in cases like this.
(The reason subscriptions make some sense here is because digital items are artificially limited. With physical items or services subscriptions are almost always a money grab. But with artificially limited things, such as digital items, subscriptions can definitely be reasonable.)
If you only ever play games or watch movies/shows once regardless, it’s just a cheaper way to get content. The only reason I don’t use Gamepass is because it doesn’t work on Linux. That’s it.
I have Netflix and Disney+ because it’s way cheaper than buying the movies and shows I watch on it, movies and shows that I’ll only ever watch once.
My ADHD prevents me from focusing on just one thing. Does anyone have a good game to play in tandem of watching a movie or show? Ideally something turn based or strategic, but not something complicated enough to require undivided attention.
Slay the spire and crafting in MMOs has been my go to lately, but I'd love something tower defensey.
Riftbreaker isnt really turn based, but it has a lot of base building tower defense style gameplay and its 40% off right now. Super fun and addicting gameplay and a pretty extensive tech tree. Also they have a planned multiplayer patch coming out eventually
I've put way too many hours into Kingdom New Lands.
It's a satisfying tower defense game, with a very simple loop once you're used to it. Great to keep your hands busy while watching something.
Yesssss! You are very much in my wavelength, I have played a ton of kingdoms! Super clever game, I never thought side scrolling city builder would be a thing.... But there it is! Great background game, another good suggestion.
If you haven’t already tried them, I had a great time with Vampire Survivors and Loop Hero. Both give the player the ability to check out a little bit, though in different ways. Loop Hero is easier to walk away from than VS, but both games require the player to do little to nothing in order to engage in combat. Loop Hero is a little more involved while VS is a bit more arcade-y. Both very fun
I wonder if the devs are or rather the folks who set the vision that were skilled at keeping such a complex beast going since 2016.
The end product is wonderful, but the sum of something that long in the making had more than skilled devs. It had a chain of people with faith in them that what was being created in their creative process was worth trusting, for a long time.
GDC is always exciting because it’s a big conference of devs, mostly AAA devs, telling the technical details of their algorithms and systems. It really helps the game industry as a whole.
And yet I can’t help thinking that a lot of the extreme side character content could have been aided significantly by AI.
The main 80% of the voice acting is outstanding.
But particularly in Act 3 there’s something disconcerting about every other pedestrian you can talk to who spouts a quip using roughly the same voice with mediocre delivery.
It’s a perfect use case for the AI voice tech available today. The main parts and actual side characters should still have been bespoke acting and mocap, but the random pedestrian in the city might have been notably improved with using generated voices to broaden the variety.
BG3 has been very strong evidence to me that hybrid approaches integrating AI for filling in background content are going to be the standard by the end of the current console generation.
I thought Lae’zel looked like that because she is a githyanki, but after seeing the actual actress I’m not so sure. Her nose looks unreal. They mocapped her way too well.
It’s not a link; i was saying the Internet connection is only even mentioned because of the Bethesda.net service and access to the Steam Workshop; both are for getting mods, and Bethesda.net is also where you’d get paid cosmetics and whatnot if they have them. It’s not required to play, which is why it’s only in recommended.
Some of my friends were laughing at me as the 30-series was about to release when I got the 2070s. I was the one laughing when none of them could even get a 30-series a year later, without paying scalper prices! It’s done me really well, feel like we got in just at the right time before prices went nuts and availbility dropped.
Seems to be better now, last time I checked the prices weren’t overly-insane and there were plenty of units available.
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