I was watching "...why Skyrim?" by Razbuten on sloptube this aft and it's so weird that it finally took Starfield for people to realise. Like Fallout 76 wasn't enough, only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness. It's so wild, like wow they ruined the magic system? The game has worse writing than a PS1 era Mega Man X game??? Skyrim is just shitty Game of Thrones?? Welcome to thirteen years ago!!
Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002, but it'll probably be years before that realisation sinks in.
deleted by creator
The worlds Bethesda designed, outside of Starfield, are truly gorgeous and you can tell whoever made them put a lot of love in. The writing has been done by Emil Pagliarulo, who is an incompetent hack
wait what's wrong with the worlds on Starfield... bahahaha nevermind I can't even post that with /s
The trick is that they're all built on the same tech iteratively, so production load gets eased by the inhouse tools =) but it is still a lot of work to make a trash game...
Do people actually travel the roads organically in Skyrim? Dunno if I ever saw one, just random highway bandit encounters maybe. I love the Living Desert mod for NV so I dig that stuff.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Instead, they made The Outer Worlds 😒
Obsidian are nowhere near the same company that put out new vegas.
Avowed got delayed to Feb 2025, it also looked poor the last time I viewed a trailer
deleted by creator
Josh Sawyer is still making cool games. A lot of the other people who worked on FONV are retired or working somewhere else at this point.
Edit:
I mostly mean Pentiment lol
I'm not a Josh fan, the main writer left to write Horizon Zero Dawn after being forced out of Obsidian, Avelone well he's freelance still iirc.
Obsidian haven't really done anything great in a while and they lack good writing. It's also not a great place to work under as far as i've heard. I don't expect them to do much better after Pillars 2 was disappointing and a lot of their games under performing.
Avowed looks like a skyrim clone and I am not a skyrim fan
This doesn't surprise me at all
I'm pretty sure it's not even going to be a good Skyrim clone at this rate lol
It's going to be a cut down Skyrim, not sure if it's open world. The last reveal trailer looked like it's going to be poor, barely showed off dialog either and that's a bad sign when they crow on about choice and consequence in the marketing spiel.
I'm thinking Fallout 4:Starfield::The Outer Worlds:Avowed if that makes sense (not that I've played Starfield though, lol)
Don't the traveling salesmen in FO3 do that as well?
deleted by creator
Outcasts and traders do in 3. There are a few other roaming npc squads
Bethesda has really good environmental designers, they're the only department (idk if they actually have one organizationally) that has consistently delivered
i feel like sometimes this is meant disparagingly like they don't have respect for their work, but the tiny amounts of 'extra' illusion players see matter a lot for perception. i mean you're talking about it here, and if they'd use less 'immersive' solutions people would probably cite it as reasons they found it unconvincing
deleted by creator
i'm fast travel agnostic, i appreciate well thought out trips between places manually but it's also hard to have patience for back-and-forth tomfoolery, depending on the size of the map. for example Vvardenfel is a pretty good size that fast-travel limits don't feel agonizing but the Tamriel Rebuilt map added on top of it? i've resorted to some mad transportation schemes (custom jump+slowfall spells, tricked out levitates) which also don't feel like you're respecting the journey and care put into the environment as you leapfrog through it
deleted by creator
i like it when its diagetic to an extent but there's good reasons to not put an immersive way to transport at locations but still the player has to go there. balancing that with players not getting frustrated is a big pickle: 2 examples
Mojave Outpost in FNV, the corner of the map makes sense, not having a bus or teleporter makes sense, but you still have to go there a couple times and its a long fucking walk if you do it manually. i'd use console commands if i had to walk down/up that goddamn road more than once to discover the marker
Morag Tong headquarters in morrowind: ridiculous location that makes the finding of them kinda fun, but then your mark is going to live there on pain of going through 6 stupid vivec city areas to get back
deleted by creator
that's a really interesting illustration of how weird the fast-travel conversation is, isn't it? like it's an infringement on "realism" if you can magically zap between locations, but a random convenient trapdoor that doesn't have to account for how big the vault map is or the geology of the area is totally accepted
when i fast travel i just think it's a cut in the film and nothing note worthy happens as i normally made a trip. it generally fulfills the believability for a food meter and game time to change. i can accept that not everyone will find that to be enough illusion, but my point is we're all functioning on a level of it, which has a relationship to real world circumstances. real places take hours to get between, it's completely unfeasible for a videogame, so we're all operating on a plane of 'what am i willing to believe'
deleted by creator
i completely get this but it's felt weird for this to work on a magic-senseless barbarian character yknow? you can buy scrolls but it seems like mechanic creep into the roleplay kinda. i'm sure somebody has played morrowind as a nord magickless strength guy but if it isn't viable for everyone it feels like an imposition. giving me the option to accomplish the game with 4 hours more of walking is not what i consider good game design lol
deleted by creator
That makes me think about how ESO is the best post-morrowind Elder Scrolls content, because despite all its problems it has the creative freedom to do weird things and go to all the cool places that the mainline games rarely if ever touch on, without Emil and Todd mucking it up with their complete and utter lack of vision and taste.