*S*T*A*R*F*I*E*L*D* / Starfield

Do we need to explain to you the human concept of preference?

I get that. But "it's better if the games are bad, because you can use your imagination to make them good" is still quite the take.

I don't really understand the "leaves a lot to your imagination" angle. It's a video game - it's audio and visual information. They're literally defining everything that you interact with in the world.

I get it with books, or the meanings behind things or other stories that may exist in the world you're in, but a game, like a movie, is there to show you the developers imagination in building their worlds and fantasies. What are you imaging to be better than the thing you have in front of you?

This works well in, way, isometric games. Character with a few lines of text over his head, like in the original Fallout games? Fine, my imagination basically runs amok.

But the camera zoomed in on a face, fully voice acted? This has to look and sound state of the art. Bad tech leaves nothing to the imagination, it just feels dated.

So you're literally just wandering around the game pretending it's better than it is?

Free rose tinted glasses with every game

Not for lack of trying to fuck it up though, with that Skyrim monetisation thing on Steam that crashed and burned and Creation Club with FO4. It's been possible to ignore so far but I wouldn't count on them not pushing it further into awfulness in some attempt to get a continuous revenue stream.



Either Todd is exaggerating wildly (it's certainly happened before) or they're going to be using a lot of procedurally generated stuff, which we've seen them do before with Oblivion's incredibly boring terrain and the godawful "radiant" quests in later games.



TLOU2 is a highly scripted and linear game where almost everything could be mo-capped and put into specific scenes using specific camera angles. It's not at all comparable technically. It was also apparently made under horrific crunch conditions and that seems to go for a lot of games that try to do similar things visually; you either force the studio to constantly crunch or you farm out the crunch to Asia or something because that stuff is insanely time consuming.



Sticking with the engine makes some sense, but the fact that they've owned it for over a decade and haven't bothered to fix Gamebryo bugs that are 20 years old speaks to them either being incompetent or just not giving a fuck. They largely seem to have bolted ever more stuff onto it rather than fix some fundamentals and rewriting things that desperately need it (like the animation system that's always been bad and looks like it's had some lipstick put on in the latest trailer).

Yeah, actually I agree with this.

I think the "everything has to be voice acted" thing has taken a huge toll on the writing of games. Even if you get past "you can write this shit but you can't say it" factor, even if your voice actors are good, they are also *very expensive*. And the most common way to cut down on that expense is just to... write less. Which is often terrible for an RPG.

Just go back to writing text exchanges, no voice acting. I can imagine their voices just fine!

Doom still tricks me to this day. I know academically that it isn't "really 3D" because it's been stated to a flat 2D world countless times... but shit looks and feels 3D to me!

And looks better/smoother than some of the more really 3d games that followed it

No budget for colors, simple! That check went directly to Liam Neeson.

We used to stare at 8-pixel characters on a screen and were capable of seeing them as complex and engaging characters doing all sorts of things we weren't shown in detail. As long as the experience of playing is engaging in other ways that's absolutely fine. I still like to play old 90s games now and then and don't struggle at all. Dwarf Fortress exists. People still make text adventures.

Some level of abstraction has always been a thing (still is) and hasn't stopped people from enjoying games and other media. I like pretty pictures too, but they aren't and never have been necessary for a game or any other narrative or interactive experience to be enjoyable.

I would agree with that when it comes to games like Kenshi, or Mount & Blade, but Bethesda's games don't fall in that category for me, at all. There's nothing "less" about them.

I used to be a lot more optimistic about Bethesda. The fundamental concept of their games is very appealing to me and I've always been able to enjoy them a fair bit despite them being kind of hollow experiences. I used to think they'd work on their weaknesses, it seemed obvious, and end up making a truly fantastic game some day. But with FO4, and to some extent Skyrim as well, they've just doubled down on the hollow gameplay loop and been rewarded for it with all the money in the world.



Yeah I replayed the first Thief not that long ago. Didn't make it to the end because I got kinda frustrated at one bit and didn't pick it back up, but it has fantastic atmosphere despite looking like absolute arse.