• abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and I’ll that entails.

          That’s also all we were promised. No false advertising here. Bethesda knows what Bethesda fans want, and they make the game Bethesda fans want. It’s literally the only gaming experience left where I don’t feel like I have to over-research and pirate-demo to figure out if I should buy a game.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I always find it funny that Hello Games over promised and the backlash was such that GOG extended its refund policy, but Bethesda does the same thing every time they release a game and gamers just call it a Bethesda game and that’s the end of it or “modders will fix it”…

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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            1 year ago

            No Mans Sky was nothing like what Hello Games promised.

            Starfield is exactly what Bethesda promised.

            I don’t see the discrepancy.

          • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            What did Starfield overpromise that we didn’t get? As far as I can tell, we got exactly what we expected - Skyrim in Space.

            Take my money, Bethesda, and give me more Skyrim in Space please.

            • Derproid
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              1 year ago

              Bethesda promised Skyrim in space and that’s what we got, a game exactly like the one they released 12 years ago but in space. They should have just called it Skyrim: Space Edition.

              • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                i don’t entirely agree with that statement about it being identical to a 12-year-old Skyrim. But if it were true, what’s the problem? This whole “bleeding edge stupidity” thing was the first reason we all started to hate AAA games 20 years ago.

                Maybe you’re too young, but “can it handle Farcry” was an insult to AAA. Now if it doesn’t use every graphics acronym under the sun at once, and have multi-phased smell reflection when you walk into the bathrooms, then it’s shit.

                Also, for the record, a 2014 Engine (UE4) remained the top engine for basically anyone to make games in until last April. Improvements in graphics have slowed down because we’re getting closer and closer to the limit.

          • Vegasimov@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            You’re sensing a bit of bias? Because they’re telling you that they like the game?

            I’m sensing a bit of bias from you, being completely unable to understand someone else’s point of view once you’ve made your mind up

          • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I get it for “free” because I sub to xbox service. I’d have paid $70 for it, though. As for time, I could have spent it in other games, but it’s the first really fun gaming experience I’ve had in quite a while.

            It’s easy to make accusations against Bethesda fans like this, but they’re unfalsifiable. You could make the same accusations of people enjoying any other game and there’s nothing they could do to prove they actually enjoy the game. Except that they DO actually enjoy the game.

            I’ve played about 20 games this year. If I had to pick only 1 to play (which isn’t far from the truth anymore with my second job), it would be Starfield. And you might be surprised at the names of games that rank below it on the list. Like Elden Ring (which I will never touch again after my cheat-easy-mode run), Hitman WoA, etc. Maybe I won’t be playing it in a year, or two years. Maybe I will.

            I think it’s interesting you brought up Souls Games. Quite literally your first paragraph, I feel about them. I have 100% buyer’s remorse about Bloodborne, and lesser buyer’s remorse about Elden Ring. Neither will I ever touch again. To some extent, I kept trying to convince myself the story is worth their unwillingness to give gamers the controls that would actually make the game fun… and I gave up trying to have fun playing it.

          • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zip
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            1 year ago

            I agree with all your points but cannot disagree more on the inclusion of a difficulty slider for Souls games. I have been very adamant about a difficulty slider “cheapening the experience” or “jeopardising the artistic intent”, but it really doesn’t make a difference - at all.

            If your enjoyment of the game stems from the fact that the game is difficult and the inclusion of a difficulty slider cheapens your “sense of accomplishment”, then you might have to reevaluate your priorities.

            Consider people with disabilities, for example, who are interested in the lore of Souls games and want to experience them themselves but can’t because the games present themselves to be too difficult (for example in the way some bosses in Elden Ring have seemingly endless attack chains that give you no breathing room at all, requiring very precise input on the player’s side), thus gatekeeping the experience from a potentially enthusiastic and interested player.

            Or consider people who are just not interested in a hyper tense and difficult time and just want to experience the story and atmosphere of the game. What’s wrong with that? How does that impact your enjoyment of the game if their experience is completely separate from yours?

            For reference, I have platinumed numerous FromSoft Souls games and would not feel any less “proud” of that if the games had difficulty settings.

            • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Nailed Souls on the head. I’m an older gamer and my reflexes are dead. I never really liked hard games. I like the story. I bought Bloodborne for the lore, and fully regret it. Hours of fighting the same area with zero progress is NOT why I wanted to play it. I bought Elden Ring after I found out there were cheat mods, tried to play it without them and enjoyed nothing, so added the Easy mod knowing I risked screwing up my Elden Ring account (whatever that means to me), having to play offline the whole time.

              I regret buying Elden Ring because I don’t want to have to almost pirate the game I bought just to play it because they want to make it hard.

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Thing is you’re trying to compare two different things, one is the (lack of) quality of the product in general compared to what was promised, the other is a design choice.

              • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                The irony is, I feel that sentence is more applicable if “lack of quality” is assigned to Soulslike games and “Design Choice” to Bethesda games.

                  • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    Could you quantify “riddled with bugs that need to be fixed by modders” regarding Starfield?

                    Every complaint I’ve seen so far has involved bullets, physics, or the AI. In my own experience, I’ve seen exactly 1 bug (the outpost-won’t-respond bug) and it only hit me once and was easy to fix.

                    My first issue with Elden Ring was crash-bugs and screen-stutter. It didn’t like my monitor streaming (all my other games were fine, including games using raytracing). And crashing every couple hours sucked. I haven’t had one Starfield crash yet.

                    Also, have you ever ridden torrent across the sky? I have.

                    I don’t claim my experience is everything, but I’ve seen far more bugs in Elden Ring than in Starfield.

              • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zip
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                1 year ago

                I meant to discuss Souls games’ exclusion of difficulty sliders in a vacuum, separate from the Garfield discussion.

                As prefaced in my comment, I agree with your points about Garfield: the developers should definitely be held accountable for their shortcomings and for hyping up a product that falls flat of its promised contend.

                But I don’t agree with difficulty sliders being shunned by the “hardcore” community. I feel like this nurtures an elitist environment that doesn’t do its fanbase any good other than gatekeeping and separating fans.

                Again, just a separate discussion altogether, not related to the Garfield discussion.

                  • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    I love how people keep asking this question, yet nobody is answering us when we do. Almost like they can’t name a single thing Bethesda promised that we didn’t get.

                    But OMG, the landing sequence isn’t seamless. Let’s burn the game to the ground.

                  • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zip
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                    1 year ago

                    I haven’t played the game myself, tbf - just mirroring other people’s opinions of the game. The game could be amazing for all I know - I just know that the reviews haven’t been stellar and that the community response to the game isn’t all too great.

      • Ser Salty@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it’s an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to “Go there, kill guys”, but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.

        And that’s not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.

        • EldVrangr@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I’ve done has been:

          1. Go to this random place
          2. Gun down everyone in sight because my mandatory companion can’t stealth.
          3. Talk to the named bad guy.
          4. See if I win a coin flip. 4a. Walk out with a McGuffin. 4b. Gun everyone down again, then walk out with the McGuffin.

          It’s nothing but, “Go there, kill guys,” as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.

          And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.

          • Ser Salty@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Half the damn quests don’t even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don’t know, I wasn’t there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It’s not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you’re either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.

            And if you don’t believe me and don’t want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.

            • EldVrangr@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I’m curious, you mentioned the hostage scenario at Akila. Does talking down the Shaw gang give you a peaceful method of obtain the artifact near the end of that quest? I try not to save scum so when that whole ordeal went south I had to gun my way through everyone outside of the cavern, then of course only after half her people were dead did Shaw bother striking up a conversation. Not trying to be an ass here, I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not that would’ve actually changed with prior gameplay.

              I tried a few side quests and none of them were at all compelling, though I’ll admit I didn’t bother going too deep with most of the factions. I don’t know, each one I tried consisted of walking back and forth and listening to people talk about trees being too loud or some shit I couldn’t care about. Maybe if I’d gone to Space Tokyo or signed up with the space pirates that would’ve been different. But following the main storyline and tooling around the first few planets was repetitive and just more Bethesda-style gun in, then take the shortcut out after getting the thing. I gave up on the game after around 20 hours of not enjoying the experience.

              If you’re liking the game then good for you but my experience was that none of the choices I made actually mattered and the world Bethesda built was bland and cliche. And the game mechanics themselves were nothing ground breaking at all, except maybe ship building but that took way too much effort to grok. I tried to like the game but couldn’t.

              • Ser Salty@feddit.de
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                1 year ago

                I don’t know. I didn’t manage to talk them down on my first playthrough, so who knows, but I don’t think so. But I also don’t think every game or even every RPG needs to be designed with a complete pacifist route in mind. The Shaw Gang mission is also about the only one I can think of that actually fits completely with the “formula” you described, outside of maybe the tutorial.

                Also, yeah, Space Pirates might actually be a quest for you, or rather being an undercover agent in the space pirates. You just get straight up thrown out of UC SysDef and have them as your enemy if you run and gun those missions, so you have to sneaky, use your persuasion and actually look around your environments if you want to stay with the good guy faction. The part on the cruise ship is especially good for this. Your choices there definitely matter in that regard.

                Maybe it’s just a game for people that are really into space in a specific way. Like, sometimes I’ll just look at pictures of the surface of Venus or Mars and think about the fact that there’s billions of these worlds just existing with no observer. Just rocks, dust, storms, rain, volcanoes, all types of things being there and happening, even though no one can see it.

                • EldVrangr@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Yeah, okay, between you and Dudewitbow I’m halfway convinced to give Ryujin and the Crimson Fleet a try.

                  • Ser Salty@feddit.de
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                    1 year ago

                    Haven’t done Ryujin yet myself, but I hear it’s great. Supposedly lots of covert stealth stuff. I personally also enjoyed the Freestar Rangers quest. It’s got more political intrigue than the others I’ve done. (Also leads you to the Porrima system, which has one of the more interesting and bigger sidequests in it.)

                    One compliment I will also give the factions as a whole is that you don’t immediately become the leader or second in command. Hell, you stay a Deputy until the end of the Rangers quest and only then become a full ranger. It actually feels like an earned promotion.

              • hightrix@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I’m not them, but yes you can talk you way through that encounter not firing a single shot and still get the artifact. Many quests are like that.

          • Dudewitbow@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth

            • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The Ryujin quest line could be done by running straight through it.

              Stealth in the game is an absolute joke.

            • EldVrangr@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You’re absolutely right and if I can muster up the energy to start the game back up then Ryujin is probably going to be my first stop.

              • GreenMario
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                1 year ago

                You’re expected not to kill anyone during the entire Ryujin storyline as it’s “bad for business”. It’s all social and sneaky stealth.

                • Dudewitbow@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  its sorta the same idea as like metal gear solid (5 in particular). You COULD kill people during missions, its just not the optimal option for rewards. You 100% could go guns ablazing if you really hated stealth, but it kinda ruins the point of the game.

            • Derproid
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              1 year ago

              Have you actually read the dialogue? Have you even played Morrowind?

              • GreenMario
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                1 year ago

                Morrowind treats NPCs like theyre hyperlinks in a Wiki. Click on Balmora on any NPC and get the exact same blurb.

                There’s like 10 characters that are actually unique and most of em still pull from the wiki when you click on a generic talk option.

          • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            my mandatory companion can’t stealth

            So tell your mandatory companion to “wait here” when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the “stealth archer” meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you’re complaining because it isn’t working well for you.

    • AlecStewart1st@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Plenty of people have enjoyed this game and found things to like even if it’s not perfect.

      “People enjoy the slop so the slop must not be that bad.”

      but you can’t dictate to other people that they also shouldn’t enjoy it.

      Yes but we can absolutely point out they’re enjoying slop and are probably the biggest contribution to mainstream games becoming more and more soulless slop.

        • AlecStewart1st@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I only sample the finest 10/10 works of art

          No? I’ll admit that something like Enderal: Forgetten Stories, while very fun and better than Skyrim in a lot of ways, is still like an 8/10 even though I like it a lot. If we’re going on the game alone and not how great and generous the developers are to the community, Deep Rock Galactic is a 9/10.

          have no time for lowly 7/10 slop that the peasents enjoy.

          7/10 for Starfield is incredibly generous. It’s a 5/10 if we’re all being honest and not circlejerking about Bethesda.

          If only they’d accept that I know better what they should be allowed to enjoy

          You can like and play whatever you want.

          But if you share the opinion that overall quality of games, especially triple A titles, has gone down in the past 10-15 years, and you can sit here and give Starfield: Yet Another Wide as an Ocean but Deep as a Puddle + Boring Experience from Bethesda ™️ is a 7/10; I don’t think you really have the right to complain about the declining quality of video games when you’re essentially contributing to it by claiming incredibly mediocre games are above average.

          If you feel good that you paid $70-100 for what’s really feels like a $40 barely out of early-access game, hey, I can’t change your mind.

          • Renacles@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            My opinion is fact and everyone else is wrong. I also watch a million essays over the decline of gaming on YouTube so I am very informed.