Not to mention that like 99% of Starfield depends on any sort of instant communication not existing. I don’t even mean interplanetary, FTL communication, even cell phones and walkie talkies are completely missing from the game. I think the only time a character speaks to you via radio while you’re on foot, is during that “mandatory stealth mission” in Neon with billionaire idiot.
Oh, a significant portion of the stories also rely on portable cameras not being a thing. You know, the thing that every cell phone has had for well over 10 years now? That went completely missing 200 years in the future. Photographs? Video recordings? You speak funny, spaceman.
My biggest gripe with the quests within Starfield is that everything feels absolutely pointless, every story, every quest, is completely isolated from everything else. I’ve never played a game that gave me such a strong feeling of “you’re achieving absolutely nothing”
Seriously, what is there to explore at all, in the first place? It’s always an uneventful time-wasting jog to whatever point of interest you want to go. When said PoI is a dungeon (building with enemies to kill and loot), you can tell from the outside how the inside will be, 100% of the time. No unique loot, no unique quests, no unique anything
Scanning flora and fauna? What for? The slimmest exp gain, a “completed” thingy item that you can sell, it’s one of the saddest attempts at padding. Besides, whatever drops you could get from them, you can buy straight from vendors.
Earth Defense Force. You can probably get 4.1 on a sale really cheap and that could be a decent introduction to the series as a whole, it also has the best overall story tone in my opinion, made of 110% grade B cheese
If you two enjoy it and don’t feel burnt out, you can later get EDF 5, which has several QoL updates compared to 4.1, but tends to have a higher price.
Street Fighter 2 popularized and pretty much set to stone what a tournament fighter game should be. Mortal Kombat came first, but its single-player progression was this weird “tower” with some gimmick fights thrown in, like you vs 2.
Thinking about it, I’d say Mortal Kombat popularized the “REALLY fucking cheap sub boss/final boss” that many other fighting games have (looking at you, SNK) - I mean, good luck getting close to Goro in the first place.
I wonder which korean mmo could be considered as the one that de facto popularized pay-to-win as an integral mechanic.
Diablo hands down popularized not only the action RPG genre, but also having enemies as loot mystery boxes. One lucky kill and you could get your hands on a really great piece of equipment. The amount of clones speaks for itself.
I think Gran Turismo popularized the “carreer mode” of racing games.
In a way, I’d say World of Warcraft (2004 onwards) popularized that.
Here’s your starting place. Here’s a bunch of easy quests and monsters.
You quit the starting area. Everything feels huge and really, really fucking far away. One step in the wrong direction and you’re assaulted by an enemy with a 💀 for a level. Not only that, most people would only see the loading screen once before doing an hours-long playthrough and that also increased the sense of “fucking huge world”
I know the “hold a button to lock-on to an enemy” was in Mega Man Legends, but in the first game you had to stand still for the lock to work. On MML2, you could lock and run around freely, but that game came after OoT
Not the first one on the PSX, that’s for sure. Also, getting some extra stuff for 100% a game wasn’t new by the time of Spyro, both Donkey Kong Country and Crash Bandicoot already did that
My old PSP3000 is one of my favorite pieces. It hasn’t seen any action in 5+ years now, but it will probably get some around september.
Mandatory jab at the switch. Not awful but cmon, the controls suck
cries in 3 left joycons with drift
Another of my least fave is my laptop’s monitor. It’s an ASUS ROG whose screen sucks major balls. If it ever gets over 40ºC, it starts showing some “scanlines” or something like that, with horizontal lines that don’t refresh correctly or something, kinda hard to describe. In any case, if I ever game straight on it without anything blowing cool air on the screen, games will become unplayable because it’ll reach a point where I literally can’t see shit, because the screen won’t be refreshing correctly, several lines will be “stuck” for 1 second or more. The keyboard is also a piece of shit.