It's not as critical for Bethesda's series, because the stories don't intertwine, but one good reason to update some series is that the games span a really long period of time, to the point where only players who grew up with the series will have played the whole thing. Otherwise, players can only play the later games in a series.
If you consider that A Tale of Two Wastelands -- where people forward-ported the Fallout 3 world to the Fallout: New Vegas engine and ruleset -- was successful, that could be pretty solid. I still think I'd forward-port Fallout: New Vegas to the current Bethesda engine before I'd forward-port Fallout 3, though. Fallout: New Vegas was a better game.
Tale of Two Wastelands is a total conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that merges the entire content of Fallout 3 and its DLC and New Vegas into one game. The mod implements features introduced in New Vegas into Fallout 3, such as the Companion Wheel, crafting recipes, and weapon mods. Players can freely traverse between the two games on a single save file, keeping all of their items and their progression between game worlds.[76][77][78][79]
Also, most Fallout: New Vegas mods worked with Tale of Two Wastelands, which was pretty cool.
Can we just… not get remasters and remakes anymore?
I'd like to have HD versions of a number of older 2D games that I enjoy re-released.
Honestly, I'd like to have HD versions of some newer games that were originally done with low-resolution graphics, like Binding of Isaac and Caves of Qud. Nothing wrong with low-resolution graphics -- I think that it enables shifting resources to developing gameplay, and that that's often a good tradeoff -- but those games did well, and I'd be willing to pay for flashier graphics.
If you look at Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, it's gone from ASCII to graphics to significantly-prettier tilesets. Dwarf Fortress did something similar. I think that that shows that there's demand for it.
I appreciate that not everyone wants that, but I would.
The new world has to be pretty similar to the old, given that the article says that one can flip between the modern and original graphics.
Talking of nostalgia, all three games are being released with an option to switch between the original blocky polygon graphics, and lovely patched-over modern designs. If it’s anything like the Monkey Island remakes, this means I will spend the entire time obsessively switching back and forth, unable to cope without knowing how every scene looks in each incarnation.
It looks like that's what they're doing. The bugfixes are out now, and they're saying that they're providing post-release updates for the FoV slider, HDR calibration menu, and DLSS.
Honestly, this was something that Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 could have benefited from. There were people who used Nuka-Cola for healing instead of stimpaks, especially with Fallout 76's Cola Nut perk, but one significant benefit of using stimpaks instead was that you had a binding for them when using a controller instead of a keyboard.
Console players don’t have hot keys so I’d like to be able to choose what’s on the right d-pad button Since it’s the only instant use button I have available. I’d actually prefer if you could bing any item to that button. It would make using the cola nut perk way easier.
It's apparently coming out shortly (like, this month or next). But, more to the point, the delay apparently wasn't because a platform vendor purchased it to be an exclusive, but because the dev team hit some kind of technical problems with the port. That is, it's not in the group of "Mario and Sonic" exclusives used to sell a platform, and Microsoft's acquisition was to make Starfield one of these.
EDIT: Split-screen on the XBox Series S is apparently where the problem is:
Larian has been struggling to get Baldur's Gate 3's split-screen co-op feature running smoothly on the Xbox Series S. Despite the feature working as intended on Xbox Series X, Microsoft policy demands that Xbox Series X versions of their games cannot have any features that Xbox Series S editions lack. This means that canning the feature on Series S simply isn't an option for Larian.
Huh. I was just watching a review for No Man's Sky that made virtually the same point about that game, down to the 50 hours. The review said that the first couple hours were very boring, but once the intro and early game was out of the way, it got way more interesting. His pinned comment reads "I have now sunk in 50+ hours into this game. It keeps showing new stuff. Please help me. My family hasn't seen me in days. "
Maybe open-world game developers need to see if they can streamline the intros somehow. Even if the intro isn't a large percentage of the time you play the game, it does make the first impression.
I don't disagree that the mods for Bethesda games are cool, but problem is that the barrier to getting a massive mod list set up and working after years of mods have come out is considerable.
I feel like, given the sheer size of the mod library, mod managers need something like a list of base, curated set of mods to start with, kind of what Wabbajack does, but then have the ability to add mods to it. That way, to get you most of the way to a heavily-modded game, you just pick from among a few popular modlists.
Choosing that curated set to start with would let you avoid spending hours poring over reviews of different mods and culling obsolete information to determine what you think the current-best, say, lighting mod is.
And have the ability to update to the latest version of the modlist, or roll back to an earlier.
Once that's up and going, then if you want to go tweak it or add or remove a particular mod, you can.
I would guess that any platform-exclusive game is going to have some level of that, just because you've got fans of Platform A and fans of Platform B. And Starfield was purchased by Microsoft specifically to have an X-Box (well, and PC) exclusive, so...
Go back to the 1980s, and it was "Mario sucks" or "Sonic sucks".
I play games almost entirely on the PC, so the Starfield acquisition (as well as the other recent acquisitions by Microsoft or Sony or whoever that have been driving the antitrust concerns) haven't really been on my radar, but if I had a popular game coming out on my platform and then someone paid to ensure that I didn't get it, I'd be kind of irked.
I did use a Mac, many years back, and I remember being annoyed when Bungie -- then a major game developer for the Macintosh, in an era when the Mac wasn't getting a lot of games -- was purchased by Microsoft in 2000. Halo did come out for the Mac, but Halo 2 didn't, and I imagine that a lot of people who were on the Mac then were probably pretty unhappy about that.