If you liked Skyrim, check out Enderal - it’s a total conversion mod, but in Steam as it’s own game. It’s much more linear than Skyrim - the world still feels open, but it’s much more dense, and it’s scaled more like a traditional RPG, so if you wander off the intended path too far, you’ll get your ass beat by mobs that are much higher level than you.
Side quests are meh, with a notable exception of the Rhalata line, which is kind of like a combo of thieves guild and dark brotherhood. Main quest line is fucking wild.
If you skip the vast majority of side quests, you might have an issue with scaling, since you’ll be missing out on all that xp. If you run into that and don’t want to do the quests, just use the command console to cheat some in.
Honestly, as a stopgap that just releases out of nowhere for the sole purpose of building hype for the actual Witcher 4, kinda like how Bethesda did with their random vault dweller mobile game, I’d be all for it.
There were multiple endings depending on the choices you make throughout the game. Same for the two DLCs.
The ‘good’ endings were in the base game she confronts the winter and succeeds, returns to Geralt as a father figure, and lives on as a witcher. Then in the Blood & Wine DLC, Geralt basically retires in his own vineyard.
They need to release a fake “Witcher 4” that’s just an older Geralt moping around his vineyard bitching about how his knees hurt. All of his quests would be things like pestering his workers about how badass he used to be, going to town to return a watermelon to the fruit vendor because of a mushy spot he didn’t notice when he purchased it, shit like that.
All the while, the townsfolk would slip idle chatter about crazy shit that Ciri’s doing off camera.
Star Citizen looked so fucking cool when it was announced like 15 years ago. Since then it’s dipped lower and lower every single time new info comes out.
Like, the hopeful dumbasses that got burned initially like my dumb ass did with No Man’s Sky, I kinda get… but how the absolute fuck are they still getting sales?? Are there seriously still people that don’t know it’s a scam?
Buggy is forgivable to an extent. Hell it’s part of the charm in some games (looking at you, Bethesda).
It comes down to whether or not the game that was delivered actually lives up to the game that was sold, especially regarding gameplay footage and features/concepts promised in things like interviews.
Back to NMS - the game they advertised and the game they delivered were barely even comparable: it what dishonest, and that’s ultimately what pissed the gaming community.
Witcher III… buggy mess, but it still looked and felt like the game they promised, so we say whining about bugs, but that was kinda it.
Cyberpunk… kinda in between. No where near NMS levels of false advertising, but also failed to live up to gameplay demonstrations; so the community’s reaction was predictably more angry than what we saw with Witcher III’s bugs, but without the torch-and-pitchfork response that NMS got.
I’ve had 4 - the 1st was around 2012 I think, and it was fucking amazing.
The second was around 2016, and even before plugging it in, it felt cheap. Actually using it, problems started popping up like measles in a red state - one of the side buttons stopped working, scroll wheel was janky.
The 3rd was around 2016, after exchanging the second via RMA. The L-click button was super fucked up right out of the box - it’d do this annoying thing where you push it down once, and like multiple clicks would register (the internet called it the ‘double click issue’ but was was WAY more than double… happened when I was using some art software and I’d have to ctrl+z like 10 times to clear all the actions it registered from a single click).
4th was around 2016, after exchanging the third via RMA >_< it made it a couple weeks without incident, but just when I thought I was in the clear, the cursor started jumping upwards a shit-ton randomly, which was hell trying to click-and-drag on anything. Then the internal LEDs went out (oh well, don’t really care if it’s pretty, but did like being able to see it in the dark). Then the double click thing started again.
Dealt with that for a while cuz I couldn’t afford to replace it and was tired of dealing with Razer’s customer service.
Then I joined the Air Force and didn’t have any time at all to game, so kinda fall out of the scene for a bit.
Separated around 2020, got myself a Corsair Scimitar, and lived happily ever after. Doesn’t come in lefty though. :-/
I almost jumped on the Cyberpunk bandwagon just because it was CD Projekt Red. Kept telling myself they wouldn’t stoop to Hello Games’s level. …and they didn’t stoop quite that low, but for CD Projekt Red to put out something as shitty as Cyberpunk was a shock.
Fortunately I kept reminding myself about NMS and never did try Cyberpunk without first seeing reviews from real players… and holy fuck. Sounds like they’ve fixed a lot and the price has dropped, so I might dive in some day, but I definitely dodged a bullet with that one.
Just goes to show that NO company is worthy of your loyalty, regardless of their history.
They showcased a LOT of features that only existed in a demo version, stated plainly that they existed in the full game (as opposed to “this is something we WANT to add but right now it only works in the demo…”). Same in interviews: he went into great detail about features that didn’t exist.
NMS was like being advertised a brand new Lamborghini, charged for a brand new Lamborghini, then being given a 2003 Honda Civic.
That’s not something early access or beta would have fixed. Might have reduced the scale of community’s negative response simply by limiting the number of purple who would have bought it, but those who made the purchase and then realized they were scammed would have been just as upset.
In the case of No Man’s Sky specifically, probably still pretty bad. It wasn’t “lackluster” it was straight up false advertising. What they did was deceptive and intentional.
They’ve done a TON since then to try to make it right, but that doesn’t excuse their initial crime.