I played each Mass Effect as it was new. Waited in line at midnight for 3 (and won a promo display!), carried my save file through all three games, was super engrossed. The ending was fine before they added to it.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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Adding ancient eldritch gods into Fallout, with such large and sprawling plot lines was a huge mistake.
People will say, "Yeah but what about the ghost in Fallout 2?" Yes FO2 had one side quest with a ghost. It was a one off, with no huge backstory propping it up, it wasn't constantly revisited. It didn't change the whole vibe of the world. It was one side quest that made you go "Huh that was weird." and was quickly pushed aside.
In comparison, including eldritch horrors in a front and center way, with quests like the Cabot questline being the most egregious. There is also the Dunwich building, the Dunwich mine, the cult and eldritch creature in FO76, and more.
Any one of these, one their own, as a one off isolated thing might be alright. The Dunwich building especially works as a weird unexplained oddity. It is the dose that makes the poison though, and now there is so much Lovecraftian stuff packed into Fallout that it has changed the texture of what Fallout is. The more the Lovecraftian stuff is added, the more of the original "an apocalypse of our own making" 1950s militarist, corporatist setting gets diluted.
Hello Games's release of No Man's Sky was a massive gamble that was more likely to fail than not. They shouldn't have been forgiven for the false advertising and broken promises. Half the gaming industry seems to have gotten the idea that it's okay to release a half-baked mess for $30-$70 and then maybe fix it later.
Spicy, I like it. On one hand, that's all true. On the other hand, we rarely get games that are even as good as No Man's Sky is now.
On the other hand, we rarely get games that are even as good as No Man’s Sky is now.
I liked the original pitch where you were supposed to be exploring this strange, empty, hostile galaxy. Now it feels like the game just got turned into Fortnite in space. I don't want to need a base or anything.
Starfield is actually a good game.
Starfield has excellent gunplay. Difficulty levels get unbalanced in late game without mods. If you enjoy feeling like a superhero cool, otherwise download a simple mod to rebalance things. It has weapon customization too. The only other space game that has weapon and spacesuit customization that I know of is No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky's ship combat is half decent, it's ground combat isn't for me. There's like 1 "gun" in the entire game and there's not enough diversity in what little ground combat there is. I want to have to infiltrate a station full of bad guys not shoot at an occasional angry girrafe or flying drone.
Elite Dangerous has excellent ship combat but that is it's only strength. It's a compete grindfest, they regularly patch every new way of making fast money, and I cannot fucking stand it. Maybe the lower playerbase has forced them to be more generous recently but I'm not booting up the game to find out. Starfield's ship combat is basically the same, maybe a little better balanced, or at least balanced in a way that's more enjoyable.
The rpg elements of Starfield are actually enjoyable except for a few dumb quests. Starfield is the only Bethesda game I've completed the main quest in and I thought the multiple universe thing was executed well. Starfield's ship customization is superior even despite the No Man's Sky ship customization update. I think they missed the mark on the different part classes (why is a large reactor 3x as large as a small reactor the same amount of power for example) but that's easily fixable with mods.
Tldr all games of this genre have problems but at least most of my issues with Starfield can be fixed with mods. I just hope theu continue updating Starfield despite the internet constant rage. I'm glad we got Starfield instead of Elder Scrolls 6 and I'm not sorry.
The multiverse thing seemed at odds with Bethesda's insistence on being able to do every faction quest in the same playthrough; it was the perfect opportunity to lean into changing the world state and still allow you to do everything by making that first playthrough much shorter. I think a lot of us had issues with the game that were very much unable to be fixed by mods.
Honestly, good take. I think Starfield is overhated. It definitely isn't Bethesda's best work, but it has its strengths. I just wish they had someone actually advocating for QoL and immersion, like letting you navigate more without the map in ships and masking the warp loading screen better.
Pixel graphics is not a selling point. I will tolerate pixel graphics if the gameplay is good (Deadcells, Stardew Valley, The Last Spell), but if I see pixel graphics that is already a mark against the game.
Convenience is a bad thing. Or, at the very least, convenience isn't useful while inconvenience is.
The most recent discussion about it is about pause buttons; having a pause button isn't bad, but it doesn't add anything while being unable to pause can. Fast travel is a classic, it stomps over gameplay and enables bad design from developers, it's actively detrimental to many games. Weapon degradation is another big point in favor of inconvenience; when done well it gives a steady resource sink and forces you to plan ahead.
The obsessive need for everything to be quick and convenient is down right counter to the very idea of a video game and over stimmed children need to chill out.
I agree with the fast travel but not the pause. There has to be a pause. Stuff happens in real life. What if you get a phone call, someone rings the doorbell or you have to take a shit? Unless you're doing really basic quick stuff like a sudoku puzzle or an online match that only lasts a few minutes, or playing a really really slow game, that's just not reasonable. It may not be realistic to have a pause function as we don't have a pause in real life but sometimes liberties have to be taken be taken to make it more accessible to people.
having a pause button isn't bad, but it doesn't add anything while being unable to pause can
I was playing a game recently and was fighting a boss whose gimmick was controlling time. I paused the game and the boss quipped at me and then unpaused the game. It was impressive and amusing in the moment, but very quickly became an issue of "no seriously, I need to be able to pause".
If work calls, someone knocks on my door, or my cat knocks something over I need to be able to set the game aside and not have it demand my attention. Having pause doesn't add anything because we've become accustomed to it, not having pause is noticeable because it subtracts, not because it adds. I've never had a gameplay experience that would have been better by not having pause available to me.
Gameplay should be about overcoming challenges, not overcoming inconvenience. If my equipment degrading just means I need to stop playing the game for 5 minutes to do the digital chores of collecting wood and stone that is not adding to the experience, it is just padding the playtime.
When World of Warcraft removed portals to "make the world feel big," which ultimately results in players pointing their flying mount in a direction and waiting longer to get somewhere that doesn't improve the game. It is ultimately a design problem, but the fault is not in the convenience tools, it's in the lack of meaningful gameplay without them.
Miyazaki hasn't really innovated since Demon Souls. The other games are slight variations on the same gameplay and design. Sekiro is the biggest change, but the overall design is still very similar. The rest are just "more aggressive / faster" or "open world/metroidvania" in comparison. There are other differences, but the core experience is basically the same.
Fumito Ueda, while similarly iterating on similar ideas, was far more ambitious in his game design between Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. Ico was very different to mainstream gaming at the time. SOTC pushed animation and scale to the limits of the hardware while doubling down on "design by subtraction". Guardian, while similar in concept to Ico, was a bold move in relying on a "true to life" creature and developing your relationship with that creature as gameplay design. Each were far less mainstream than Miyazaki's design which is why, as acclaimed as they are, you will find more division about them from so called "core" gamers.
He's the more important auteur in the medium. You don't get Dark Souls without Ico.
The dark souls games aren't as hard as people think they are. Or they're differently hard than people think.
I'm not saying they're easy. But I think people think they're all lightning fast twitch or die. A lot of the game is more "you took a corner at high speed and fell into a hole in the ground, and then rats ate you while you panicked".
Sometimes there's speed, but a lot of it is staying calm and aware.
When one of my friends started playing Dark Souls, one of the first areas he went to was somewhere that was extremely difficult at his level and skill (he went to the catacombs straight after firelink). He found it exceptionally difficult in a not-fun way, but he continued pushing forward, because he had heard about how gruelling and difficult Dark Souls was.
He told me about this when I was first playing the game, as a way of explaining how the game isn't necessarily difficult in the way people make it out to be. He needlessly struggled because he was inadvertently listening more to how people talk about the game than what the game was actually communicating to him, via it's in-game mechanics: namely the skeletons weren't reviving because the game is unfair and mean, but because there are some mages reviving them; said mages are often difficult to reach, but ranged weapons exist; divine weapons make the skeletons stay dead and can be obtained by explaining other parts of the game; clubs are better against skeletons than swords.
The thing that he, and later I, loved about the souls games is how the challenge works. I like how they foster an environmental awareness in me, both for lore purposes, and figuring out if there are any sneaky mages hidden around. I like being very autistic and getting attached to certain weapons, leading to some enemies being much more difficult than if I were more flexible (and occasionally, I like changing my play-style when the game's systems are screaming at me "WHAT YOU'RE DOING ISN'T WORKING. TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT — LITERALLY ANYTHING DIFFERENT, YOU HAVE SO MANY WEAPONS")
Most crafting mechanics suck and feel grafted on. This is especially true if crafting isn't the main point of the game.
Breath of the Wild was a much needed change in a series that had started to go stale. While I like Zelda games, the formula of go to the dungeon, get item, defeat boss, go to next dungeon and repeat was getting worn out, with exploration taking a backseat.
There are too many Pokemon. I don't know if that's a hot take, but I'm including it anyway.
Having parts of the map blocked off at the beginning of GTA games is garbage and the in game explainations even moreso. Part of the fun is walking around doing random stuff, I want to be able to do that from the get go. Thankfully GTA V got it right.
The GameCube controller is overrated. While I like the giant A button and the shoulder triggers, the D-pad is too small, the X and Y buttons are oddly shaped and easy to mix up, and there should've been a shoulder on the left side too.
I agree except for the crafting lol. I love being able to be like "you know what, fuck society" and building up my skills to find ways to make my own stuff without paying in-game money for it. I guess too many games have crafting mechanics that do suck though so you are right about that.
My hot take on games like BOTW and TOTK: when the game is so open ended you can invent your own answer, the answer to every puzzle ends up being the same.
In BOTW the answer to every puzzle is “balloon”. In TOTK it’s “big stick”. In Scribblenauts it’s “invincible deadly flying rideable friendly ”. No, I don’t mean literally every puzzle, but it works often enough that I feel like I’m just wasting time if I try doing things any other way.
The handful of times I’ve actually felt creative in TOTK were when I was just messing around. Creativity is rarely useful in meaningful progression.
More traditional metroidvanias (including traditional Zelda’s) give you bits of “huh I don’t think I can get there now but clearly I’ll have some way to get there later” and “I just got this thing I wonder what I can do with it”. That kind of puzzle solving is completely absent from many newer Zeldas (BOTW, TOTK, ALBW).
Any puzzle that requires exceptional levels of creativity to solve is going to leave some players stranded
Which is not only fine, it's what a game should strive for
Sure in a specialized puzzle game maybe.
Ghost of Tsushima is one of the most overrated games of all time. It's a perfectly fine experience carried by solid combat and high polish, but far from being one of the best games of all time. The writing and acting is monotonously dour and the quest design is uninspiring, which wears you out because the game is also way too long for what little variety it offers. The open world is also your bland, boring, garden variety Ubisoft style.
Romances in BG3 are poorly written and realized and detract from the quality of the game. BG3 in general is merely "fine for a video game" in terms of writing. People also let the game get away with murder in terms of how much it falls apart in the third act.
Cyberpunk 2077 - despite all its flaws - is CDPR's best game.
Cyberpunk 2077 - despite all its flaws - is CDPR’s best game.
Brave and accurate.
Agree about the romances in BG3, they feel pretty shallow. While I can maybe see your point about the writing in general what I think makes BG3 great is that it felt like playing tabletop dnd. New bad guys every week, silly fights and absurd coincidence, maps with minimal markers and characters that are there for the party to use to progress as heros (biggest thing to me that didn't feel like tabletop dnd was having to loot every box VS just saying I searched the room).
Haven't played other CDPR games. Guess I don't need to bother lol.
Meanwhile the Sly Cooper series was among the best games, for the man hours they sunk into Ghosts they could have made have made the most amazing Sly 5
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