this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
110 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
30540 readers
143 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I love TES. I played so much Daggerfall that I almost failed out of my undergrad program, and that was one of the most bug-filled games I ever played. I loved Morrowind and I very much got into the lore by playing underclass characters with a chip on their shoulder. I didn’t like the console-inspired simplifications in Oblivion, but again I eventually let that go and got into the game. That goes double for Skyrim. With each release, Bethesda simplified the game and removed functionality that really added to my enjoyment, but I still ended up logging uncountable hours into the games. There’s 2080 hours in a work-year, and I’ve probably spent at least a few of those on Bethesda games, with about half going into TES.
That said, I am waiting on this one. I’ve mostly moved over to playing PC games on the steam deck, and I’ve heard nothing great about that. More than that, it looks like this one whipped with much less functionality than it should have had. Again, that’s typical of Bethesda, but I have too big of a backlog to worry about paying to be their beta tester. They can fix bugs while I finish BG 3 and Stray, and if it looks good at that point I’ll dive in.
I’m at a point in my life where spending $50 or $100 on a game isn’t a tough decision, and I’ve even had to become comfortable with the fact that, even having done that, I might never fire it up. That’s one reason I bought the deck, actually. But I’m not at the point that I’m going to buy a game that I know I’ll find unplayable (by my current standards) just to be one of the multiple millions of people who get to see it “first.”
It's perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.
I'd try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It's a better release than Bethesda's usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven't done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.
It's better than usual because Microsoft put literally all their QA teams onto Starfield, and to wit, it's been probably the least buggy launch of any Bethesda game I've ever played. It's funny because they were getting worse.
Skyrim had bugs, became a classic. Fallout 4 had basically the same bugs, because it was the same engine. Vertibirds are technically recoded dragons. Fallout 76 was once again a copy/paste of the engine with netcode slapped on top and Jesus fuck was that probably the buggiest game I've ever played on launch.
It does get better with time, but it's inexcusable that they need to rely on the community to make it better. Skyrim got re-released 20 times and they never once improved on it in any meaningful way besides deploying it on a newer engine and building a high resolution texture pack rather than addressing the UI or map issues. A solid decade later and I'm still playing with the same UI mods and map mods.
I'm not a fan of Bethesda's reliance on mods to do basic shit, like fix a broken UI and inventory management system, by honestly I also think this argument is overused. People pay for these games because they want to mod the shit out of them, it's like ninety percent of the appeal. Nobody is forcing modders to work on them, either. That argument can only stretch so far. For comparison, No Man's Sky is actively hostile to modding, and as a result I probably won't be going back to it despite loving it. They're not going to add the kind of content I want, they're likely never going to, and they're not letting anyone else do it either. I wish they'd allow free volunteers to finish off some of their 75%-of-the-way-to-greatness features.
With starfield, I'm excited for the mods, and the game is far from flawless goodness knows, but I've had a friggin good time and definitely got my money's worth on vanilla. Now I look forward to spicing it as I like.
That's fine. Allow mods, that should never get in the way of building a proper base product. Many games allow mods and have basic functionality fully fleshed out and the mods are just that, bonuses and modifications. It's not an excuse.
Hey it's me, your cousin. You can just buy games for me and I'll play them for you.