Can't believe it's not in here yet, but Monster Hunter. I find the eventual understanding of the gameplay loop to not actually be as complex as I thought it'd be, but getting a good overview of all what you want to do and use isn't really possible even in the latest entries, just specific information about specific mechanics.
Well, sure, it sucks at teaching you. But you can learn enough through the tutorial and checking stat and item descriptions to be able to learn and discover the rest on your own, you won't get to a spot where you have absolutely no idea what to do, and if you do, you havent explored the available space.
Part of that game's specific appeal when it released was that most other games at the time treated you like a child that needed every detail explained for you to learn and enjoy yourself, they grabbed your head and said "go RIGHT here, right now". It both sucks as a tutorial, but succeeds at establishing a baseline level of expected effort, resilience, perseverance, and experimentation from the player.
That game specifically is not trying to thoroughly teach you how it works. Its job is to provide a world and mechanics that provide a sandbox for you to roll around and suss it out for yourself.
They won't go away, but you will eventually learn and see where they are. Sometimes you'll have to engage them, a lot of the time you can get around them.
They're not in all areas, but you will be able to understand how to deal with them and once you can fight back you can handle them.
I was terrified by them in the beginning and didn't want to have to deal with them, but now I really think they're cool and enjoy taking them down. You really go from helpless and confused to knowledgeable and prepared.
As a kid I endlessly replayed the original trilogy and never wanted to try Apollo because "I thought his hair looked dumb", so after trying it now and realizing that even with a new character it's still Ace Attorney I won't be skipping any other games.
So yes, I'll be doing the Edgeworth Investigations next! I'm excited. Eventually I'll make my way through the 3DS titles and then to Great Ace Attorney too.
Funny, I've been replaying the Mass Effect trilogy as well (through Legendary edition), and I'm also on Mass Effect 2. ME 1 holds up more decently than I expected with the LE changes, but ME 2 is just such a better game in almost every way. Really enjoying spending time with these characters again. Even with other games going on you can always hop back in and do a mission or two in ME 2, the save system lets you make some good progress even if you don't have a ton of time. Femshep for life.
I'm a PC player so I probably won't get to play the second one for quite a long time, but I'm excited as well. Kojima doesn't usually iterate in a straightforward manner in sequels, so it's hard to know just quite what we'll get out of it.
Death Stranding was already one of the most novel and interesting games I've ever played in both story and gameplay, so I'm glad we'll get to see some more of it.
Continuing my first time playthrough of Apollo Justice on my way through the rest of the Ace Attorney series.
And returning to Death Stranding since I beat the game to max out the prepper shelters (mission givers) and to slowly work towards Legend of Legends (completing every single repeatable mission on "hard" mode).
Now that the story is over Death Stranding is a fantastic "throw on a podcast and grind" kind of game. Very soothing.
Still working through side quests in Borderlands 3 as well. Really enjoying the shooting in this one. As acclaimed as 2 is, I just couldn't stand the shooting model until at least Pre Sequel, but 3's shooting genuinely feels quite good now.
Emergent gameplay is a big part of what makes video games unique as a medium. I'd say a good example I've played recently is Death Stranding. One of my favorite games of all time at this point, it really is best and worst described as a walking simulator. Or moreso, a delivery simulator. At its core, you'll take on missions involving the delivery of different amounts and sizes/weights of packages to destinations near and far. Sometimes there are invisible ghosts that want to kill you, sometimes there's visible, inanimate landscape that wants to kill you.
What takes it from 'walking simulator' to 'walking simulator' is the fact that the walking is complex. The smoothness or roughness of terrain can directly influence the stability of your character. Even small rocks can be marginally trickier to traverse than truly flat ground. You may find pavement, dirt, rocky terrain, snow, or deep rivers, which require considerations. You can brace yourself for stability to help, and your movement speed, momentum when changing direction, and whether you're standing or crouching all affect your likelihood to slip or trip. Many items help you to move off the beaten path and find shorter routes, with ladders or climbing rope & anchors allowing the scaling or descent of steep cliffs.
Through experimentation, sliding helplessly down a mountain, and having all your important shit get washed away in a river as you scramble around like an infant, you come to understand your mobility and limitations. Enter: the packages and your hubris. You can accept multiple missions at a time. Some missions require few or relatively light packages. Some ask you to move an amount of goods that ought to be palletized. Through understanding your limitations, and attempting to slap different amounts of cargo on your person, you can possess Icarus and fly as close to the sun as you want.
But, there's more than just your person. You can use floating sci fi wheelbarrows that trail behind you, carrying a large amount of goods, but restricting your ability to use climbing ropes or ladders. You could use a motorcycle, allowing for speedy traversal and some light offroading with small storage on "saddlebags", or even a huge ass truck which affords incredible storage potential, at the cost of a squirrelly and incline averse driving model.
And I haven't even really gotten into all of the equipment or strategies required to handle the "ghosts", whose unique abilities and behavior provide an interesting additional challenge where being caught by one could easily mean the loss of your cargo, or even your life. Even in the big ass truck, you aren't truly safe. The intermittent and locational time-accelerating rainfall means even cargo you haven't dropped or bumped can have its durability rusted away given some time.
Though the game, of course, has a story, it sits alongside a story of the player's experience, limited only by the bravery and recklessness with which you, essentially, don't want to make three trips to the car to bring groceries in, so you load up yourself and two linked floating carriers to carry nearly 1,000 kilograms of cargo, and make a winding, manually waypointed journey through the desolate and oppressive landscape, stopping to deliver parts of your massive load as you come to each post-apocalyptic shelter in your list of deliveries.
Your successes and failures within are unique to the way you chose to plan and execute your trips. Shit, man, I like this game.
Oh wow, a fixed economy? I suppose that depends just how many places there are to actually trade with. I'm curious how much this game can hold up as a "space sim lite", and hearing that the prices are fixed is a little sad.
Using custom modules to block ship scanning is interesting, I'm hoping those module slots are limited and you can't just hide from scans on any ship by using the same module.
I agree with everything you said. Though that's certainly not everything, that's a lot of the major issues that hold Bethesda games back from their potential.
I am actually glad that with Starfield radiant quests have been expanded to dynamically place quests in different locations. I think that, if it's taken advantage of, will go a long way towards the potential criticism of "1,000 planets and nothing to do on most of them" that I see as a possible issue with their scope.
Bethesda continually evolves and changes their radiant system with each release, but from Skyrim to Fallout 4 we saw the felt effects of that system stagnate and become padding instead of adding dynamic experiences as its original intent.
And since I didn't specifically mention the bugs in my other comments, Ive played plenty of non-bethesda open world games with plenty of bugs long after release, I feel they're a part of the whole deal and I excuse most of them unless they truly cant be worked around (things like losing your companions or getting stuck on geometry if you're a console player). I cease to excuse those bugs as soon as the gameplay requires things of you that the bugs prevent, such as the game being too janky to support the strict save system of vanilla FO4's survival mode, which is inexcusable.
I also worry, though, about mods. Because of how many players use mods extensively in Bethesda games it becomes tricky to know which bugs are inherent, which are from poorly made mods, and which are from conflicting mods. It muddies the waters of really pinning down what's going on. Just something that contributes to the bugginess of those games in a way that isn't very calculable, unless you're unmodded on console.
But if anything remotely as problematic as the survival mode stability is a factor in Starfield, I'd be much much less willing to forgive some bugs here and there. We'll just have to see.
I understand your position as well, I think we just need to have more moderate discussions and less going to extremes.
I didn't address the writing and dialogue of the games because those are absolutely getting the short end of the stick in terms of what Bethesda is spending their resources on, but I found the systems that they put work into in Fallout 4 worthy enough of that time spent instead, and I think that says more about my preferences of what I like in a game than it really does about if Bethesda games are "better" or not this way.
I tend to prefer moment to moment gameplay and I found Fallout 4's complex interlocking loop of wanting to build a settlement and modify my equipment, leading to tracking down certain materials and identifying where they may be logically found, to going there on foot, to looting the place systematically and engaging the enemies with the weapons and armor I modified and have personal attachment to, to managing my inventory with an investment and thought that never mattered as much in previous Bethesda titles, etc.
That whole loop and set of mechanics that play into each other added an incredible wealth of what I consider more moment to moment gameplay depth than just enjoying the wider possibilities of dialogue options in past Bethesda titles.
Even at its best good old days Bethesda writing doesn't really compare to other games much more focused on writing (not going to mention New Vegas here because Obsidian is one of those devs better at writing than Bethesda). Bethesda games are always more than the sum of their parts.
My point about Pac Man is more that you don't dislike the game's lack of depth in certain areas just for its own sake, but because you're comparing it to the studio's past. When Pac Man Championship Edition and DX released, those
had favorable receptions because they took the arcadey roots of the franchise to their logical conclusion instead of swapping to more accessible gameplay trends as Bethesda did.
Not an invalid criticism, but not the only thing people should be mentioning in some of these comments as if that's what makes the game "bad".
And if you really think Starfield is going to be Fallout 4 with just a new coat of paint... That's just disingenuous. There's already more than enough changes in new mechanics and systems that didn't exist in FO4 aside from the entire new universe and premise that's more than simply a coat of paint.
I do hear what you're saying though and I appreciate acknowledging some of the parts people skip over thinking about just to hit the low hanging fruit that have been brought up in every thread about a Bethesda game since time immemorial, adding nothing new to the discussion.
Man, I haven't played Frontier Defense in ages. I really liked that mode but I felt like it needed some more gameplay time on foot before everyone gets their mechs. It felt like 10-90 split of on foot to mech time.
It's a different game. I go back and enjoy FNV still and FO4 as well because it scratches a different itch. The looting, crafting, settlement construction, etc. are executed much much better than FNV or 3, or otherwise are entirely new mechanics. It's a whole different thing, it's the studio pedigree and franchise the games belong to that allow these criticisms to continue on even when you're comparing games that are radically different beneath the surface.
The studio has changed. Just because Fallout 4 wasn't a "true RPG" doesn't mean I didn't have nigh on 400 hours of novel joy with it, maybe even because it wasn't just another core Bethesda RPG but because it was something new, a new kind of looting and crafting experience in that same large, dynamic open world that Bethesda could bring through. Morrowind was over 20 years ago. Bethesda isn't the one making those kinds of games anymore.
Have the games gotten shallower as RPGs? Sure. Fucking pac man is shallow at this point, does that mean everyone should hate on it en masse? If you don't like the direction Bethesda is going that's completely understandable, but it just seems absurd that people come out of the woodwork in these threads to just poop on a game that isn't even out yet. Save that for when it releases and it does or doesn't meet your expectations, as of now it just sounds like everybody is trying to get as entrenched as possible in their prejudice.
Bethesda games are buggy, what an old meme. It's more of a meme than a true criticism now because most games have bugs, especially ones as large as Bethesda games, and even on launch I've played other Bethesda games and enjoyed myself just fine. It's good to be cautiously skeptical and not pre order, you should be skeptical, but swinging all the way past that to being hard-line negative is not the right answer either.
And I know you personally are not reflecting all of these views, your comment just comes off as supportive of both genuine and over the top memetic criticisms due to replying in a seemingly justifying manner to someone confused about the buggy game comments. When it comes to those sorts of comments I'm talking generally about what I've seen from people on this platform.
I'm not saying Starfield will be an old Bethesda return to form or bug free on release, I'm just saying be cautious, not completely pedal to the metal negative, and accept that Bethesda as it was is dead.