Yeah I absolutely adored the concept and would love.to see it picked up. I discovered it after pitching to a friend Tony Hawk’s Borderlands 4 and gradually realising the proof of concept existed.
I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.
A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.
I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.
I can’t really check my overall playtime but once again I’m being sucked in by Minecraft.
As a teenager it was my default game and if I could see my playtime I recon it’s 5 times higher than my next biggest game which was Skyrim at about 500 hours across both editions. When I was a teen, I’d adored how I could just get lost in this peaceful, lonely world.
For the last 6 years, I’ve been trying to play more innovative indie games that I can broaden my love for the medium, but every now and again I yearn for the mines. It’s basically the only game I can enjoy after day of work too.
I picked up En Garde recently because I absolutely adore the tone, setting and swashbuckling duelist vibe.
It’s a little flat for me, I don’t feel like it has achieved the character fantasy of being a swashbuckler in the mechanics, instead I’m basically kicking boxes into people and stabbing them again and again.
With GTAV, the original release was 2013, the next gen was 2014 and PC 2015 so I forsee it being the same and being even later.
The upside was that the PC port was really good at release and I’m pretty indifferent to if I pick this game up in 2030 when it’s actually a good value on PC.
I paid for star citizen a decade ago and honestly enjoyed it enough for about 2 days. It always felt exciting to see how ahead they were of early Xbox 1 / PS4 games in their scope with volumetric effects etc.
The trouble is, 90% of their innovative content has been long overtook by general game progression, they’re making a game that could have probably launched with the PS5 and been innovative and are already falling behind there. I genuinely believe that they were Innovating their game slowly over time and there were amazing things in the works, but they missed the moment that it was exciting and new by so many years.
I’d recommend Photopea for casual use that’s not miserable to use. It’s in browser only and is basically a photoshop clone with slightly less features, but it’s amazingly close to Photoshop when I need it to be, even with things like using a pen or a really specific option menu.
It does generate it’s revenue via banner ads but I’ve never seen them with my adblock, if I’m needing to quickly whip something up and utilise my Photoshop familiarity, it’s my go to.
I didn’t realise Skyrim blocked achievements when modding, I’d definitely didn’t back in the day, it’s one of the few games that I have all achievements on and I’ve modded it to hell basically every time.
Unity spent a long time being unplayable in an are where that was unforgivable than it is now. I picked it up just before the big patch where they also threw in the first DLC for free as an apology and I ran pretty well on my device, but nobody cared because nobody was playing it.
I feel it also had a pretty lackluster story, I opened strongly but generally but then just became blander as it progressed. I really wanted to like the characters, but they never landed for me.
The last game that I feel had a great plot was black flag, largely because everything since origins has been enormous in scope in a way that’s just directly detrimental to a linear cutscene style story. Also as historical RPGs they’re good but Assassin’s Creed has something really special that has been forgotten, and I was hoping this game would reignite it, but it seems not.