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Avowed is nothing like Bethesda games, other than it being a first person fantasy RPG. It's basically modern day Ultima: Underworld
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Dec 27, 2023 01:04
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Bholder posted:Avowed is nothing like Bethesda games, other than it being a first person fantasy RPG. poo poo that works for me.
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Dec 27, 2023 01:09
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Bholder posted:Avowed is nothing like Bethesda games, other than it being a first person fantasy RPG. I think it could still expose Bethesda for the shallow puddle their games are. I feel like Cyberpunk did this too. It's also doing a First Person thing, but the detail in the world, the depth of characters, the cinematic nature of it. It just puts Bethesda and its lumpy mannequin potato people in the dust. Going from BG3 and Cyberpunk to Starfield feels like going back in time by a decade or more. The stuff Bethesda offer as compensation for their weak characters, thin plots and janky engine doesn't cut it anymore either imo. Exploring empty sterile proc gen planets with identikit caves doesn't give me a sense of exploration greater than rifling through some random corner shop stuffed with cyber drones in Night City. And, at least for me, both of those can't hold a candle to the sort of exploration BG3 delivered. Yeah, Avowed probably doesn't have Bethesda worried too much, the budget and scope seem to be way different. But I really don't think it's going to take much to put another nail in their proverbial coffin and I wonder if they are Sat looking at the plan for ElderScrolls 6 wondering what the hell they can do.
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Dec 27, 2023 01:21
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Alchenar posted:The danger for Bethesda really is Avowed. That game doesn't even have to end up being good, it just has to land with core combat gameplay that does something imaginative and different that exposes Bethesda a bit and they'll struggle to keep people's attention for TES6. I think a big reason why they haven't had great combat in TES is because they didn't need to and I don't think it's that critical of a problem since it's everything else that makes their games. Plenty of games do fun combat, are about fun combat, but that's just one thing you do in a TES game and not even the main one. A lot of people gravitate to stealth archer play style as it essentially removes that aspect of the game in lieu of gathering the gear and skills to one shot everything. Their main issue is a fundamental lack of understanding of what makes what they used to make so good, and overtly trying to design away those good things. Avowed needs to make their world, characters, and emergent adventures fun and something people want to get lost in. There was a fantasy game this year I think, it had better combat than Skyrim and co, but I can't even remember the name now everyone dogged on it and really disliked the characters and world even though all you really had to do was all tied up in the combat loop.
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Dec 27, 2023 02:05
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Immortals of Aveum. A painfully generic name that tells you nothing.
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Dec 27, 2023 02:06
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Haha naw I hadn't heard of that one but I mean it looks like the point still applies from a quick glance. I think it was a one word title, another generic word that could be anything. Avowed they've showed so little of Im not sure what to make of it and this june 2023 already kind of looks fated and only shows off vague combat beats without much hint of what you get to do in the game beyond mash combat. Edit: Forspoken!
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Dec 27, 2023 02:10
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Yeah like Outer Worlds have exposed Bethesda how to make Fallout games. We have been doing this Skyrim killer poo poo for a decade now but all of it misses the point, it is not one thing they need to be better at, it's the whole picture. You can talk about how Cyberpunk did cities better but like the entire game of Cyberpunk is one big city (and even then it's not that interactable and you can only enter a limited number of buildings). You could always point out how quest design and combat and what have you have been weaker compared to other titles, but none of those really gives the open freedom general bethesda games do. I mean you don't play these games for the writing or the challenge. So far every "Skyrim killer" seems to focus on one thing while ignoring the rest and open world games are tend to follow Ubisoft design (even Witcher and Cyberpunk does this), as for what makes Bethesda games unique is the million dollar question but it wasn't recreated yet.
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Dec 27, 2023 02:15
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Is it just me or are you only allowed to go in less and less buildings in each new BGS game?
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Dec 27, 2023 03:38
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mitochondritom posted:I think it could still expose Bethesda for the shallow puddle their games are. I feel like Cyberpunk did this too. It's also doing a First Person thing, but the detail in the world, the depth of characters, the cinematic nature of it. It just puts Bethesda and its lumpy mannequin potato people in the dust. Going from BG3 and Cyberpunk to Starfield feels like going back in time by a decade or more. The stuff Bethesda offer as compensation for their weak characters, thin plots and janky engine doesn't cut it anymore either imo. Exploring empty sterile proc gen planets with identikit caves doesn't give me a sense of exploration greater than rifling through some random corner shop stuffed with cyber drones in Night City. And, at least for me, both of those can't hold a candle to the sort of exploration BG3 delivered. Anyone who cares, already knows that bethesda rpg's are shallow. It is comfort gaming and turns out, the gaming equivalent of Friends reruns, sells really really well. TES can always lean back on past games and lore to give the illusion of depth. Starfield.. not so much. The more you try to make sense of the world building the more you realize how thin the narrative bones are and how little they cared about any of that except for when it works as an excuse for the immediate game play. Bholder posted:Yeah like Outer Worlds have exposed Bethesda how to make Fallout games. We have been doing this Skyrim killer poo poo for a decade now but all of it misses the point, it is not one thing they need to be better at, it's the whole picture. You can talk about how Cyberpunk did cities better but like the entire game of Cyberpunk is one big city (and even then it's not that interactable and you can only enter a limited number of buildings). There's a bit of magic sauce in Skyrim where Bethesda hadn't stripped out everything even slightly resembling a living thought-out world, also it is densely populated with things of interest. There's something about exploring a natural environment that just tickles the human brain right. But exactly what the parameters are is hard to define. I do enjoy a lot of Skyrim every now and then. It is probably a happy medium that they won't return to. At this trajectory, TES6 is going to be a game engine, crafting and base building mechanics and an empty open world - a build-your-own adventure 
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Dec 27, 2023 09:08
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Bholder posted:Yeah like Outer Worlds have exposed Bethesda how to make Fallout games. We have been doing this Skyrim killer poo poo for a decade now but all of it misses the point, it is not one thing they need to be better at, it's the whole picture. You can talk about how Cyberpunk did cities better but like the entire game of Cyberpunk is one big city (and even then it's not that interactable and you can only enter a limited number of buildings). I do see a lot of parallels with Cyberpunk and Skyrim really. There's this dense open world environment to explore (yes, it's a city vs a country, but still). There's a main quest to follow, but there's numerous side missions / gigs. But you can also ignore all of that and head off in any direction and see what you find (cave full of orcs or a Walmart containing chooms). There's freedom in how you make your character, crafting systems etc. To me, it feels very fair to compare them. Even if you give Bethesda the free pass and accept that what they do, no one else does, I still think that by and large people will compare their games to contemporaries whether that's fair or not. I'd honestly love to be a fly on the wall in Bethesda HQ now. Because everything about them screams hubris and I'm sure they expected Starfield to be this smash hit. Although with hindsight I think it's absurd that they'd neglect their prize IP which everyone loves and is clamouring for this.
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Dec 27, 2023 09:31
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if I'm ever a billionaire I'll buy Rockstar and demand they make an open world fantasy game. That oughta do it!
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Dec 27, 2023 11:24
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Robobot posted:if I'm ever a billionaire I'll buy Rockstar and demand they make an open world fantasy game. That oughta do it! Just play Assassins Creed : Unity, it has the same vibe as the modern rockstar games, where you are prohibited from killing the right people, repeatedly make the wrongest decisions and someone calls you pisspot for the entire game.
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Dec 27, 2023 13:06
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Khanstant posted:I think a big reason why they haven't had great combat in TES is because they didn't need to and I don't think it's that critical of a problem since it's everything else that makes their games. Plenty of games do fun combat, are about fun combat, but that's just one thing you do in a TES game and not even the main one. A lot of people gravitate to stealth archer play style as it essentially removes that aspect of the game in lieu of gathering the gear and skills to one shot everything. The problem is that Skyrim combat isn’t just not fun, it’s actively boring/annoying because everything takes so long to die and barely reacts to getting hit. Starfield at least did better on the damage sponge problem for human enemies but alien critters could still sometimes facetank an idiotic amount of damage.
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Dec 27, 2023 13:23
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Alchenar posted:The danger for Bethesda really is Avowed. That game doesn't even have to end up being good, it just has to land with core combat gameplay that does something imaginative and different that exposes Bethesda a bit and they'll struggle to keep people's attention for TES6. lol
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Dec 27, 2023 14:22
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mitochondritom posted:I do see a lot of parallels with Cyberpunk and Skyrim really. There's this dense open world environment to explore (yes, it's a city vs a country, but still). There's a main quest to follow, but there's numerous side missions / gigs. But you can also ignore all of that and head off in any direction and see what you find (cave full of orcs or a Walmart containing chooms). There's freedom in how you make your character, crafting systems etc. To me, it feels very fair to compare them. they know that they released their games too early and didn't fill it to the brim with characters from nexusmod named bigtiddy goth milf. The general crafting system is both too restrictive and has too many required hoops to jump through.
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Dec 27, 2023 14:31
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The more I play, the more clear it is that Starfield is a puzzle assembled from dozens of pieces belonging to other puzzles that were all sanded down at the last minute so they'd at least sort of fit together. You like Firefly, right? Well this piece here has a few background extras from the movie poster in it. Oh and next to that, this piece here is a screenshot of the HUD element from 7DTD that tracks conditions. It's all meaningless, it just exists to remind you of this other, likely better, media. It's annoying because I think there was a way to make most of these pieces fit together, but it would have taken a strong and centralized creative vision. Worse, I'm not sure Bethesda is even aware what they hosed up. It seems like they still believe their nonsensical puzzle of mismatched images on perfectly square pieces is actually a bold and misunderstood revolution in puzzle design.
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Dec 27, 2023 18:05
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Pinely posted:The more I play, the more clear it is that Starfield is a puzzle assembled from dozens of pieces belonging to other puzzles that were all sanded down at the last minute so they'd at least sort of fit together. You like Firefly, right? Well this piece here has a few background extras from the movie poster in it. Oh and next to that, this piece here is a screenshot of the HUD element from 7DTD that tracks conditions. It's all meaningless, it just exists to remind you of this other, likely better, media. That's pretty much it. They have been making games like this since... Skyrim? Maybe earlier. It does work in some sense, like this is similar how Valve was run, but there is a reason Valve haven't released many games since... Fallout 4 had the exact same issue, the whole game was basically throwing things together and see what sticks. I think Starfield works better than Fallout 4 because parts of this game are not straight up contradictory but they still don't work that well together.
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Dec 27, 2023 18:36
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fallout 4 with survival mode is more coherent than starfield.
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Dec 27, 2023 18:41
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The thing that annoys me most is that Bethesda have (in my view) been pretty successfully managing two parallel approaches to character progression in an RPG: TES says that it is mostly continuous with occasional power spikes, Fallout says that it is about discrete moments where the player gets something shiny and new. The only thing Starfield seems to want to say about character progression is that it should be long and and take multiple playthroughs. The only thing levelling up says about your character is that they did a repetitive activity enough times to unlock the next perk level.
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Dec 27, 2023 18:42
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Tankbuster posted:fallout 4 with survival mode is more coherent than starfield. by ignoring half of the game, yes
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Dec 27, 2023 18:45
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Alchenar posted:, Fallout says that it is about discrete moments where the player gets something shiny and new. Except Fallout 4 which is mostly about discrete moments where you pay a perk point tax so that later you can actually buy the perk you want. Hel fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 27, 2023 18:58
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Bholder posted:by ignoring half of the game, yes what half of the game?
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Dec 27, 2023 19:43
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If someone took all the content from starfield and put it on one map it would be a better game.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:32
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pretty much. Bethesda sacrificed the thing they are the best at. It sucks because floating around in zero g is kinda fun.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:39
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Hel posted:Just play Assassins Creed : Unity, it has the same vibe as the modern rockstar games, where you are prohibited from killing the right people, repeatedly make the wrongest decisions and someone calls you pisspot for the entire game. What does the Slur/Gameplay Hour ratio look like?
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Dec 27, 2023 20:43
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I don't think Oblivion and Skyrim are all that different in many ways. Having replayed the vanilla versions of both in the aftermath of Starfield they're very much of a piece, but Skyrim and Fallout 4 both show clear and obvious mechanical and aesthetic improvements over their predecessor, and Starfield doesn't. I don't think the gunplay in Starfield is meaningfully advanced past what we have in F4? I think the only areas I'd highlight for compliments are the visuals and audio. The graphics and aesthetic are good, but I've always thought that in every Bethesda game. The music, while not great, is an improvement over F4, and it very much seems to be the previous composer and team just learning and improving, so that's very good, and then the sound design has some real stand outs, whoever made the lift off thrusters and the punchy bark of the Odin has nothing to feel bad about.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:44
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There was one part of this game I thought exceeded other Bethesda titles: the voice acting. It still pales in comparison to other recent AAA games, but it was at least better than FO4 and Skyrim. It was a nice departure from having the same 10 people do everyone's voice across the game. We even got a few other cultural dialects mixed in there. It wasn't exactly dripping with pathos and emotions, but it was a far shot improved over the wooden delivery of Preston Garvey.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:47
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Jack B Nimble posted:I don't think Oblivion and Skyrim are all that different in many ways. Having replayed the vanilla versions of both in the aftermath of Starfield they're very much of a piece, but Skyrim and Fallout 4 both show clear and obvious mechanical and aesthetic improvements over their predecessor, and Starfield doesn't. I don't think the gunplay in Starfield is meaningfully advanced past what we have in F4? The thruster sounds are the best part of the game. Makes me wonder if they just took recordings of real rockets.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:50
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Jack B Nimble posted:I don't think the gunplay in Starfield is meaningfully advanced past what we have in F4? They don't even really get credit for that since they had iD software come in to help them make less of a mess of their gun poo poo. I think Starfield was only possible because of that since they didn't seem to want to port VATS type system into their new thing, and evidently people thought non-VATS gunplay was passable in FO4. I never tried it because it sounds like cheating and I'm here for the psuedo turn based action.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:54
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Jack B Nimble posted:I don't think the gunplay in Starfield is meaningfully advanced past what we have in F4? I think it regressed a little bit if anything. It’s mostly let down by the absolute dogshit weapon variety that gets further constrained by the skill system. Am I going to invest skill points in laser weapons when there’s only two of them? No. Am I going to use them when they don’t have stacking +50 percent damage bonuses from skills like my ballistic guns? Also no. So because they poo poo the bed on creating a variety of weapons and they didn’t think through how brokenly powerful some skills are, there’s multiple categories of weapons (lasers, melee, EM, anything that’s not a particle weapon for spaceships) that basically may as well not exist because the game gives you no reason to use them.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:55
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Jack B Nimble posted:I don't think Oblivion and Skyrim are all that different in many ways. Having replayed the vanilla versions of both in the aftermath of Starfield they're very much of a piece, but Skyrim and Fallout 4 both show clear and obvious mechanical and aesthetic improvements over their predecessor, and Starfield doesn't. I don't think the gunplay in Starfield is meaningfully advanced past what we have in F4? the general combat is improved somewhat by the jetpacks but at the same time the enemy variety is lower and the map design is far worse than fallout 4. The outer parts of neon where you fight and get to maneuver around the other weirdo gang is probably the best designed part because you can clamber on to everything and approach targets in a variety of ways.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:56
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Tankbuster posted:the general combat is improved somewhat by the jetpacks but at the same time the enemy variety is lower and the map design is far worse than fallout 4. The outer parts of neon where you fight and get to maneuver around the other weirdo gang is probably the best designed part because you can clamber on to everything and approach targets in a variety of ways. That's a good point; the Jet Pack and Zero G are interesting additions but they're not well used. I played 180 hours and never shot anyone on the exterior of Neon. Though, thinking back to Walter's quest, I did jump pack from one walkway to another and then dragon shout a security guard out of my way, and it was more dynamic and fast paced than most of the game. Notably more so than that mile run at that bar, in retrospect. I did have a few times where I was clearing interiors with a shotgun and I could one tap enemies and that felt very, very good, but that was with a highly lethal mod that didn't really work once the sightlines got longer and doesn't count.
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Dec 27, 2023 21:03
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Tankbuster posted:what half of the game? The quests, the settlement building, the main plot... Lucid Dream posted:If someone took all the content from starfield and put it on one map it would be a better game. uh, no. For one, one of the main issues is that most of the content of starfield are copy-pasted so we would see the same thing over and over again. Another is that the entire point of starfield is... well, the stars, it's space. Getting rid of space from a space game goes against the entire idea. It bothers me how everyone here thinks the best way to fix Starfield is to make it into a worse version of Outer Worlds
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Dec 27, 2023 21:16
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The thing that really gets me is they picked the least interesting and, most importantly, least useful parts of other science fiction to copy. They just had to have warp drive so they could brag about how big their game is. No you idiots. Do it like The Expanse instead. Humanity had to make an exodus from a dying Earth. They sent a sublight ship to Alpha Centauri and colonized the system but oh? What’s this? A few alien ring gates? But only one of them works? And it takes us to another system with more of these gates, also mostly broken. We spread out via these gates until we couldn’t anymore. How do we fix them? There’s a whole galaxy out there if only we could make these things work again. That’s what constellation is trying to do. This gives you a narrative reason to limit the amount of systems and manage the flow of exploration. It gives you a goal for the story that isn’t boring. Give us a couple dozen systems with three or four habitable worlds for each faction. Fill them with interesting flora and fauna. Give us interesting climates and biomes. Show us life on planets that are wildly different than Earth. Use art direction to make us feel like we are on an alien world. Use procedural generation to make them feel lived in when you set down anywhere on the surface. Give us quality hand crafted content in the major settlements. All those barren rocks in space? Give us a few points of interest. A little research base, a crashed ship, whatever as long as it’s interesting and was made by a person. We know it’s a mostly barren rock and we shouldn’t expect to find jack poo poo outside of what we scan from orbit, but at least we know that what the scan shows us is going to be worth checking out. Forget the stupid space cowboys. Save that Firefly bullshit for the DLC after we finish the main quest and unlock some more gates. At least rough and tumble space cowboys would make sense on a new frontier. You’re telling me they are established enough to fight and win against the main interstellar power but they still have a space sheriff in their main city? Who thought this makes any sense? Va Ruun? Make them the second major power. The secular capitalist UNC fought a civil war with the separatists religious collectivist alien cult. The UNC might be extremely generic, but that would make Va Ruun all the more interesting in contrast. Show us their crazy space customs, their whacky space beliefs, make them more than just a death cult in space. Give this conflict more gravity than “we no like space civilization, we go be space cowboy now”. The thing that makes this game so awful is how boring the actual content is. Even if the layout of content was exactly as it is now but what’s there was actually interesting we would all be willing to overlook the outdated gameplay and Bethesda jank because we could go out there and find something, anything at all, that is actually fun to see. Bethesda is using “but space is mostly empty” as an excuse for making a game filled with bad content. If anything, the emptiness of space should be used to make us feel like we’ve stumbled across something special out there when we do find something to investigate.
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Dec 27, 2023 21:18
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Bholder posted:For one, one of the main issues is that most of the content of starfield are copy-pasted so we would see the same thing over and over again. The entire "point" might have been the stars and space, but it made it a worse game. I find exploration to be compelling when I see something interesting from far away, and get lost along the way. They've been dumbing these games down since Morrowind, but I could always fall back on the immersive worlds that I can get lost in. In Starfield, I only ever get lost in New Atlantis because it has an unhinged layout (partially, I think, due to the fact that you're never supposed to leave it on foot because there is nothing outside of note). I can see what they wanted to do, but they spread it way too thin and it sucks as a result, like butter scraped over too much bread. Lucid Dream fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 27, 2023 21:47
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Lucid Dream posted:In Starfield, I only ever get lost in New Atlantis because it has an unhinged layout (partially, I think, due to the fact that you're never supposed to leave it on foot because there is nothing outside of note). The cities in general have this problem where there’s not a lot to them, but they wanted them to feel big so they spread stuff out. This actual spreading out of stuff was apparently done by a person who has never been anywhere that humans actually live and it’s impossible to get a sense for where anything is because there’s no thought to why anything is where it is.
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Dec 27, 2023 22:00
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fat bossy gerbil posted:The thing that really gets me is they picked the least interesting and, most importantly, least useful parts of other science fiction to copy. They just had to have warp drive so they could brag about how big their game is. No you idiots. Do it like The Expanse instead. Humanity had to make an exodus from a dying Earth. They sent a sublight ship to Alpha Centauri and colonized the system but oh? What’s this? A few alien ring gates? But only one of them works? And it takes us to another system with more of these gates, also mostly broken. We spread out via these gates until we couldn’t anymore. How do we fix them? There’s a whole galaxy out there if only we could make these things work again. That’s what constellation is trying to do.
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Dec 27, 2023 22:03
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Bholder posted:The quests, the settlement building, the main plot... Space blows. It's the stuff that isn't space that is interesting. Outer Wilds is the only game where space travel is cool and interesting, challenging and fun. And that only worked because it was a teeny verse that shrunk all the miserable vastness of space away. We also know what Starfield's ship physics are like and they stink. As bad as terrible UI quick travelling was, it's not as though leaving in some extra steps of getting to lovely copy pasted content would have improved the game on any level. It would only draw more comparisons to it being a much worse NMS.
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Dec 27, 2023 22:59
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Did they fix the absurdly broken cluster bomb coachman yet, or is the gunplay still a joke?
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Dec 27, 2023 23:01
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Bholder posted:Avowed is nothing like Bethesda games, other than it being a first person fantasy RPG. Now I'm very interested.
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Dec 27, 2023 23:09
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