I’ve been hesitant to play it because I heard it’s existentially depressing and I don’t think my mental state is in a good place to deal with that. Otherwise I’d probably give it a go. I loved Return of the Obra Dinn and many people who love one of those games seem to also love the other.
I watched some videos on it after it released and for about a week after my whole YouTube frontpage was full of Starfield-bashing (many with several hundred thousand views) so it’s definitely out there.
For me, it’s the vast expanses of procedurally generated nothingness in Starfield that turns me off the most, especially combined with the menu-based fast travel heavy way you get around.
The magic of Bethesda games comes from their handcrafted open worlds, always full of things to see and explore and get sidetracked by. Its the feeling that kicks in when the horizon first opens up after you exit the sewer/vault/customs office and you realize that you can just pick a direction and start walking and you’ll come across something interesting.
Starfield doesn’t do that. You can’t just pick a direction and go, it’s all fast travel. And if you’re down on a planet you can, but there is no magic to be found because it’s all procedurally generated emptiness between copy-pasted points of interest.
In their ambitions to have a bigger scope than ever they sacrificed the very thing that made their games so compelling to begin with.
There are some decent ones where you can find fragments of stories told through letters and/or environmental storytelling, but most of the question marks are just mindless monster nests, bandit camps and buried treasure. Skellige in particular is notorious for all the question marks in the water that are just vendor trash flotsam to collect.
In general exploration in TW3 would be more rewarding if the itemization wasn’t so scuffed. The only gear worth using is the Witcher sets (which you craft), which really lessens the excitement you feel when looting. There were so many times where I found a guarded treasure, defeated the boss and looked at a cool unique sword, only to realize its stats were beyond atrocious.
Much like Elden Ring last year, BG3 is a usually-niche game that actually broke through into the mainstream on the back of its sheer quality. I imagine it stands a good chance of winning, though I wouldn’t be surprised if TotK takes it (only disappointed).
I think Welonz is great. She’s played Alan Wake 1, Control and the AWE DLC before so is well familiar with the story and always pays close attention to story games.
I’ve been hesitant to buy it out of performance concerns and have been watching her instead.
Forgot to mention I have a gaming laptop. So not equivalent of the 2060 in performance, although it contains the mesh shader support so it won’t literally refuse to run. But seeing as the desktop variant is minimum spec I’m not optimistic.
I wish I could play it, but I don’t think my PC could handle it, being right at the edge of minimum specs. Has anyone played it on a 2060? I can live with 1080p and no Ray Tracing but I’m scared of sub-30 FPS.
I was too young for this at the time, but I have fond memories of Dark Forces II and its FMV cutscenes, which blew my mind at the time. I hope they remaster that one too (though I’d love a full-on remake, if allowed to dream).
I bought Dragon Age: Origins on the recent GOG sale, and after spending a week or so assembling mods, setting up a load order and creating and fine-tuning a ReShade preset finally got to start playing it.
I’ve only done the prelude so far, but I’m really enjoying it. I’m hoping this series can keep me busy until some more content patches are released for BG3 for a second playthrough. It’s definitely scratching the same itch right now, with the added benefit of being unfamiliar to me. I’m actually quite impressed at how it holds up, though the difference in voice acting quality is definitely noticeable.
I like watching Let’s Plays for the same reason as you, and while it isn’t a group channel I heartily recommend Welonz. She is very thorough and approaches every game with great respect, usually giving a summary of her overall thoughts at the end.
I found her because of her VTM: Bloodlines LP, but her Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk ones are also fantastic.
I’m also a little sad that REDengine is getting scrapped after seemingly finally getting to a pretty decent spot, and I definitely wish there was more competition for Unreal.
That being said, it’s a very understandable decision given not just the capabilities and ease-of-use of UE5 but also its popularity, which means finding new developers competent with it is easier and onboarding is faster.
And as you say, it lets them focus on actually making games.
It took me two hours to read through that thing but it was well worth it. Fascinating article with some great insights into Chris Roberts, and seemingly as relevant now as it was in 2016.
If this was written by the Devs it would seem to confirm that Deepened Pact stacking with Extra Attack is intended. Seems absolutely insane to me but what do I know.