• 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.

      • 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.

                • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  I’m not talking about a game specifically, I’m talking about the way the studio works in general.

                  If you go back to the comment chain the original complaint is about a lack of quality control (releases full of bugs, missing features, bad UI, bad optimization), the other complaint is about a design choice (the game is hard because the devs intentionally made it so). My point is that it’s two different things and saying “Your complaint about Bethesda’s game is the same as complaining about Fromsoft not including a difficulty setting.” is a false equivalency.

                  • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    The major complaints people have about Elden Ring are endemic in every Fromsoft game. Janky controls, Rhythm-Game fighting with terrible balance, QOL features that are missing not only out of negligence, but out of design.

                    And except a couple “releases full of bugs”, I don’t really agree with those criticisms. You can find people who hate the featureset or UI of most games, and their optimization hasn’t particularly been terrible.

          • 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.

                  • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    I’d love to see a summarized list of the one you (or others) find truly important. I am not sitting through 30 minutes of his annoying voice.

                    I did spot-check through and every complaint he brought up was inane and subjective, like not liking the design of the space suits, or just plain cherry-picked.

                    I have nowhere near a bleeding edge gaming rig, and I get 60fps on High and 30fps on Ultra. I also have a decent experience playing it on XBox’s cloud streaming, nice and cheap. And the bugs he’s depicted? I haven’t seen them, so I’ll just have to trust him on that.

              • 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.

    • 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.