I said in 2008, after playing the first Fallout game by Bethesda instead of Black Isle: “Only Bethesda could manage to make a post apocalyptic prostitute boring.”
They’ve always been boring, they’ve always had ugly character models, and the writing has always been bad. You get what you paid for. A Bethesda game.
I’m fine with their writing and their overall gameplay. It’s just that they managed to make space feel boring and tiny. All those little areas in-between the loading screens really don’t feel like a vast space opera at all.
Also I wish they would just invest into some new game mechanics. Proc gen planets look great and exploring them could have been so much fun 🥲
Skyrim is literally one of their worst-written games and only has a saving grace of a wide open world that is interesting to explore.
Personal opinion, Morrowind was still boring, but had the best writing, best style, and required the most from the player. Morrowind was peak Bethesda and that was over 20 years ago.
I played Morrowind after playing Skyrim and I found it much better.
It’s much less accessible, but the writing is actually good and it has the best ‘R’ in RPG of any game I have ever played. The character progression is amazing and there are so many fun ways to build a character.
Morrowind is a role-playing game, and in this role, you needed to be able to do things like research the world you’re in to figure out what to do, not have a rando who has a big fancy exclamation point above him telling you exactly where to go with a waypoint. It’s just different ways to approach the game. One is functionally role-playing within the world you exist in, and the other is “Fuck all this, I just want to play a game, I don’t want to think hard.”
I don't know why people pretend they actually enjoyed sitting there deciphering all the text/journals/notes/etc. to get directions and navigate the world and enjoyed it.
This was you saying the way you don’t like is wrong.
Really. You’re gonna pull the people like different things argument after telling this person that they’re just pretending to enjoy Morrowind? That’s some next level hypocrisy right there.
That companies will change things, even when people love those things?
You should look into dmc Devil May Cry, or any other number of failed entries in well established successful series that completely departed from what people enjoyed.
You said you never said that. You literally did. Unless you claimed it to be Opposite Day in an earlier comment I don’t think there’s much room for disagreement.
Either way, I think I’m done. It’s clear that you have no interest in actually talking about this. Just know that companies are more than willing to change things, even when people love them.
I’m sorry my one sentence off hand comment caused this to be a whole thing.
I don’t think the dude was insinuating that they thought people were “brain-dead” because they enjoyed Skyrim more than Morrowind - it’s literally just the way the games are.
Like you said yourself, waypoints were added for a reason. Morrowind can be pretty bullshit at times with directions, and the game does straight-up lie to you a few times, but you also can’t deny that Skyrim is literally telling you to go that arrow on your compass for every single quest. One’s not better than the other, but with Morrowind, you do get the sense of being on an adventure since you have to figure stuff out and encounter weird people on the way, whereas with Skyrim it’s waaaaay easier to get into because you can legitimately turn your brain off and let it relax a bit.
Starfield at launch is more compelling than Fallout 4 or Skyrim, but falls short of Morrowind. It’s in the mix somewhere alongside Oblivion and Fallout 3, IMO.
As an enjoyer of both Oblivion and Morrowind I’m going to say that I think it’s more likely that the people at Bethesda who were key at making their past games good have either been promoted beyond their positions of expertise or simply left for greener pastures. Bethesda hasn’t always been trash, and people are quick to forget transgressions from nearly a decade ago (yes! It’s been that long!)
It’s been 21 years since Morrowind, and 17 years since Oblivion. Been longer than a decade. Two in Morrowind’s case. I would put Morrowind down as “peak Bethesda,” and their games have been slowly turning to crap since. I agree, I think they lost a lot of key players who worked for them, and they’ve never been able to regain their footing.
I think the fundamental problem is that people had different expectations for a game set in space, both because Bethesda stoked them (all of that talk of having the idea decades ago / first new franchise in however many years / Microsoft bought the company just to get it as an exclusive / etc) and because after No Man's Sky people kind of expected that with their budget / resources they would manage to fix that game's problems and create something richer + more seamless.
In retrospect, if they'd simply sold it as "Skyrim in Space," admitted to the limitations up front - same underlying engine, limited amount of variety to procedurally-generated content, loading screens instead of seamless takeoff/landing, etc - and not pretended that it was something new, the response would have probably been much more uniformly positive.
But they kind of already did say most of that stuff.
They said long before the game came out that there was no seamless takeoff/landing. They said they upgraded their Creation Engine for Starfield, AFAIK they never said it was entirely new.
The only people I have seen complaining about it are here on Lemmy. Which honestly, the more time I spend here, I almost feel like its more negative than Reddit was. Maybe its the low population, maybe its bot astroturfing, I dont know. But its really unfortunate this place has really gone downhill.
Top front page post on reddit right now is complaining that people are misrepresenting why people are disappointed with the game. Basically, arguing that the game is disappointing and that people should be accepting critiques of it.
Hmm, I missed that about seamless takeoff/landing. But as @dingus mentions, you can use cutscenes and animations and other things to make that feel more immersive / continuous even if they are temporarily dropping you out of the engine.
Everyone recalls, but they also recall Hello Games spending the next several years fixing the game and fleshing out to be closer to their original vision, which is what they were selling to people: their vision. They should have been selling the game, not the vision, but they took their fuckup on the chin and risked a lot. There was no gaurantee they would appease gamers and they essentially had no income except for continued sales of No Mans Sky.
Also NMS was Hello Games’ first real big game ever, so you can give them a little slack for having no idea what they’re doing.
Bethesda is a 30+ year old juggernaut who waits for modders to fix their games and has been re-releasing their last successful game for a full decade now.
Hello Games made NMS better because they felt bad. Bethesda made Skyrim better to re-release it and get more money.
Also, Hello Games is just 26 people and Bethesda is 420 people and owned by Microsoft.
I think the difference here is Hello Games took a big risk taking 2-3 years to fix it while asking for nothing more in exchange. What they did is basically unheard of because its hard to pay people without known future income.
Do you think Bethesda will take 2-3 years to “fix” this? I don’t.
The setting lowered my expectations. Modern sci-fi has this weird obsession with being sterile and boring. Compared to the magical fantasy of Elder Scrolls and the zany retro-futurism of Fallout, it was guaranteed to be boring.
after No Man’s Sky people kind of expected that with their budget / resources they would manage to fix that game’s problems and create something richer + more seamless
That was basically what I hoped for. NMS type game, but with Skyrim/ fallout level modding, stories, quests and deeper meaning to it.
And with better procgen. They have the manpower and expertise to do that.
I haven’t bought the game yet, waiting to see the initial responses. Now… I’ll probably pick it up on sale sometime, when bugs are fixed and there’s solid mods.
I mean, it is extremely polished. I have encountered a total of 2 bugs over my entire playtime. By this time in fallout 4 I lost track of the number of bugs I saw, things jittering atound, people’s faces acting wonky, nome of that here.
Honestly I still think waiting to buy a Bethesda game is smart if you aren’t a huge fan or something. Skyrim was pretty crap at launch and all the praise it gets now is mostly referring to Skyrim well after launch when patches and mods turned it into something good.
I think you’re on the right track, but I think it’s also because recent games did better with similar ideas. People shat all over Mass Effect Andromeda, but it hid loading screens behind interplanetary and FTL travel that was actually visualized. In my brain, I know they’re cutscenes to cover for loading data, but it’s enough to take you out of it being a “game” and allowing you to suspend your disbelief. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when there’s a loading screen constantly in front of you.
Yeah, but you can do the same thing in Star Field, just takes a bit of learning. You get the exact same cut scenes for loading even, ala Mass Effect. The reality is the game offers fast travel, as essentially jumping 5 times and loading and seeing the cut scenes is the same thing as just loading to the end.
This game feels more like a test, do you actually want to explore, or do you want to hop point to point for the quest. You can do either. It just seems to offer fast travel as the first option, but you can take the slow way around too
Strongly disagreed. Pre-Oblivion their games were great. Hoping for a return to engrossing stories taking place in a rich, expansive universe was not entirely unreasonable.
Morrowind was their best, but I would say 21 years on, it’s really tough to be like “Yeah, this time they’ll get back to their roots.” No, it’s time to move on. All the people who made those games what they were have retired, moved on, or died.
Well, I’d argue that Daggerfall was their best game, story-wise, but Daggerfall is even older. And that’s the point, isn’t it? More time passed between Skyrim and Starfield than between Daggerfall and Oblivion. A lot can change in so many years, and I do believe that hoping for something new was not entirely unreasonable.
Then again, the keyword there is entirely, isn’t it. I personally didn’t expect very much from Starfield, and, also personally, I can’t say I fully understand the amount of hype surrounding it.
Surely there’s an element there of rose tinted glasses? All of us were 21 years younger. There were less games coming out and they were harder to get for many of us.
You didn’t need to work so damn much to keep your head above water, or were below working age altogether. It was a lot easier to find the time to really immerse yourself in the lore and it required a lot of reading both in-game and out.
It was also all new to us, truly novel experiences with every leap in gameplay, graphics or mechanics being applied to brains that weren’t completely immune to dopamine and over-stimulated constantly.
I played Ultima VII so much that my friends and I would quote the game to eachother at school…we were fully immersed in it and it was bloody huge for its day.
To be honest I barely even try with these type of games anymore. I know it isn’t going to satisfy me. I tend to enjoy mastering movement mechanics and skill based competitive games. Sure, they also release the same game every year repackaged, but there’s usually enough of a tweak to movement mechanics and gun physics that it’s a challenge to get gud again and I get a real kick out of genuine competition.
I played Starfield for several hours on the weekend and I do my best not to judge too harshly given what I’ve said above but I feel as though there will never be a game ever again that grabs me enough to make that genre worth paying the money. It’s me that’s changed moreso than the lore being watered down. “Damn you, Avatar!”
I grew up with Skyrim and mod it religiously - that’s where my nostalgia comes from. And even I’ll say that Morrowind completely blows it out of the water on nearly every front.
Skyrim’s a lot more accessible, and I love it for that, but that’s about it.
I’d recommend you go back and read some critical reviews of Arena and Daggerfall. The complaints are exactly the same: the graphics engine is out of date, the characters are lifeless, the writing is just okay, the story is shallow, etc. Bethesda has scaled back the RPG mechanics since Morrowind, for sure, but their games ultimately have the same Bethesda DNA, for better or worse. For what it’s worth, I’m enjoying Starfield at launch much more than Fallout 4 even now, updated, expanded and modded.
My friend, I don’t need to go read the video game history about Daggerfall: I wrote some of it. :)
And I stand by my statement. That game was the height of storytelling that came out of Bethesda in a bunch of small but important ways, although Morrowind is not far behind, in a somewhat different fashion. And there is a definite shift in the series from the moment Ted Peterson left the team. Patently, not a shift I am personally very fond of, but to each her own.
I can’t remember all that well, I was a child at the time, lol. I go back to Morrowind once in a while, and I do find the writing to be more immersive, as opposed to the more recent games where it’s a series of linear, ham-fisted novellas. So far, Starfield seems much improved over Fallout 4 or Skyrim in that regard, but I’m not all that far in.
Look, when I said “another Bethesda game”, I was pretty specifically referring to either the Quake reboot, or Prey 2. I don’t know how everybody misunderstood that.
I think we were all expecting them to rebuild the engine sometime between fallout 4 and now instead of just duct tapping a flashlight (new lighting system) to it.
It’s such a bad engine the Phil Spencer came out and said every QA tester at Microsoft is working on Starfield:
The Creation Engine itself is just Gamebryo with a flashlight duct taped to it. IMO the engine is a huge part of what makes Bethesda games so fascinatingly unique.
The engine should be rebuilt from the ground up though. It’s full of problems and it’s fundamentally dated, for example one of the most obvious things a new version of the engine should include is making the world completely seamless - no more loading instances, no more loading screens entering interiors, etc etc. But all the other problems with the engine need addressing. And they can do a huge amount to make it better for the mod scene if they rebuild.
Continually slapping more and more fixes on this engine fundamentally ignores the fact it is impossible for it to get around several issues it has at its core without a rewrite.
This engine is already great for modding, but I suppose it can always be better. Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can’t be made seamless? There were open cities mods for Oblivion & Skyrim, so it seems like it’s probably technically possible. Seems like that may be more of a compromise related to memory allocation on consoles.
I dunno, I don’t expect Bethesda to write a new engine from scratch, no one does that. They made New Atlantis seamless to an extent I haven’t seen in previous Bethesda games, so as long as they keep making incremental improvements, I’ll be satisfied.
Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can’t be made seamless?
I don’t know the technical details but I know that when you attempt to add new map area to any existing map (for example the overworld) the physics engine does not engage for those spaces. You have to create new map areas for anything new.
There are also hardcoded limits to the number of entities that can be loaded in-engine at any one time. When you go over the alotted number of NPCs for example it starts spawning them in the sky, this causes the infamous flying horse bug everyone has seen in modded Skyrim when they’ve added too many new NPCs to zones. I think newer games have had some bandaids slapped on the engine to increase this but it’s still there.
Open Cities works because the cell already exists, so they just took everything in the city zone and moved it into the existing world cell, which is identical in size. So there’s no problem with this causing issues. This can’t be done for a lot of buildings (to create interior/exterior) because of various issues such as NPCs not knowing where their house is unless it’s a defined place you go through a loading screen on, so taking houses and slapping them into open world would completely break scripting for their daily routines, same for every building in the game. Some of them are tardis design too, bigger on the inside than the actual building is on the outside.
I’ve put about 200 hours into Oblivion and 180 into Skyrim, 150 each into Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, all without mods. Been happy every time. I think the whiners need their attention spans checked. Go watch Paw Patrol if you need constant action, you big babies.
I does indeed start out slow, but it gets better after a certain point in the main quest. It’s a fairly standard Bethesda open world game, so just don’t be expecting something more and you should enjoy it. One thing I’ve appreciated as a hoarder is that your run speed doesn’t decrease even when you’re hugely encumbered, your stamina (oxygen) just goes down as if you were sprinting.
Probably if you’re okay with a sci-fi theme and don’t mind that you have to load into most locations rather than being able to run to them. It has more in common with Fallout than Skyrim.
Just everything, i played it and went: “nah ain’t it” and then i played it more hoping i would like it eventually as it was bethesda, but my opinion never changed.
So if i have to give it a name: the reason i don’t like it is because it isn’t skyrim…i guess.
The game has incredibly bad performance issues and dogshit politics.
For a game they’ve dubbed “Nasa punk”. There’s no punk at all. It’s 98% corporate fantasy wish fulfillment for musk-brained techbros and 2% punk. The criticism of capitalism is so paper thin that you can barely notice its presence anywhere at all.
The space pirates use guns with anarchist symbols on them and say anarchist slogans but are clearly not anarchists in ideology and instead are straight up thugs and raiders.
The UC military is presented as real professionals, which is not really correct. If they accurately represented the US military that they’re based off of then they’d being jarheads, except for the recruiters and media where the professional show is put on. This is fantasy wish fulfilment at best, or propaganda at worst.
There is no bigotry, patriarchy, etc in this universe and it’s absolutely absurd. The universe would have these, capitalism provides an incentive to exploit. Marginalised people are the easiest to exploit. Capitalism has an incentive not to solve marginalised people’s problems fully and the further away you get from states enforcing laws to try and mitigate these problems the bigger they would get. So in space and because of the colony wars these issues would have gone through the roof.
It is bizarre that there are wars occurring and yet there are no space refugees anywhere? Where are they? Also there’s no homeless people which is fucking weird again. Also no slums or self-constructed accomodation on the periphery of the cities which really ought to exist given that the player can do just that. It’s all so idealised to a ridiculous extent.
Everyone doesn’t have the money for a starship, there is one absurd mission where you apply for an admin assistant job. You’re expected to fly into space and to a space station with your own starship to apply for an administration and assistant job? There should be a private shuttle company that people use to taxi around space for things like this.
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In short, the politics are dogshit and the performance is bad. But, the gameplay is good if you like other bethesda titles it plays just like them. Additionally, I think it’s probably the strongest ever game they’ve released for modding… And probably their best title since Oblivion (not counting New Vegas which they didn’t make).
I literally spent my entire Labor Day weekend playing this game so anybody that says it’s boring I’d really don’t understand what they’re talking about
If I had a dime for every dumbass who says “the engine is old” or something like that I’d take all of you to Popeyes, asking you guys kindly to stay under 12$ per order.
We’re going into ship of Theseus territory here, but do you really know the extent to which they overhauled the engine? Because when I hear blocky terrain I think of LOD generation which all modern engines use to save processing power. Unreal engine itself is still the same propeitary engine based on C++, which similar to CE, has been overhauled over the years. Really what I see is you getting into the semantics of what makes a new engine without understanding the changes to the back end.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a horrible gameplay style, the action is constrained and clunky, the stories have too many rails. It doesn’t feel free and open. It’s basically just Grand Theft Auto with better stories.
No Man’s Sky seems endlessly pointless (or pointlessly endless?). It’s a cool idea but I enjoy Starfield a whole lot more.
I don’t get people stanning NMS over Starfield. I mean No Man’s Sky is alright as a tech demo sandbox but even with the latest update, I get bored so quickly. Even the stations and civilization hubs feel dead, the plot is just so haphazard and slapdash. Starfield feels so much more cohesive and…has actual characters. But they’re also just very different games. Starfield is heavier on story content and NMS is heavier on procedural generation.
I loved Cyberpunk’s story but I’ve found very little reason to come back outside of the main plot. GTA5 was a technical achievement under sweatshop conditions and while I hated the story, the world felt alive and full of things to do and places to explore. Cyberpunk feels like GTA if it was made with half the team and with one less year of development (because it was).
And you stanning Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky as polished games is hilarious to me.
It took several years of fixing No Man’s Sky before it was anything more than a boring tech demo. Cyberpunk took years of bug fixes and a popular anime to break people out of the hate circlejerk and actually experience the fucking game. Starfield hasn’t even officially released yet. People need to chill the fuck out.
Also what are you talking about with “the engine is showing it’s age?”. This is a brand new fucking engine. I’m playing the game on my Xbox in 4k and it looks better than anything I’ve played this year.
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