this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
289 points (94.5% liked)
Games
32112 readers
1826 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think this means ES6 is doomed. Did anyone play the Civ space game? It was an offshoot one-off experiment that wasn't really well recieved and they quietly moved on.
My guess is that this game pivoted during development and they ended up with something that didn't really work and shouldn't have shipped. The failure to find something good in this experiment may be isolated to this game.
The fact that they released it in the state they did could be more about their workflow and project pipeline/target milestones they need to hit than it is about their ability to execute.
The failure here is in design, ES6 has a tried and true design to follow.
The problem is Starfield isn't a one off. It's the latest in a line of progressively worse games. Every game they've released since Skyrim has been worse than the one that came before it.
Since Skyrim? I'd say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn't that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.
Skyrim was at least an improvement over Oblivion. It showed they had the ability to recognize and fix the mistakes of Oblivion and still create an interesting world.
Story and worldbuilding wise, ES6 has a very bleak future ahead. Emilio Pagliarulo, the de facto director of Starfield and lead writer, has shown that no hole is deep enough that he won't dig it further down when it comes to lack of quality and consistency. Not that Skyrim's main story was good, but it was certainly better than Starfield's. There's also the disturbing indifference of "the world" to everything happening around it. Literally nothing you do in Starfield affects anything outside its own storyline. Hell, shooting up in the air or using fucking space magic in the middle of a city generates no reaction from npcs if nobody is hit.
If ES6 is just a refreshed Skyrim I really see no reason to buy it. There are much more interesting RPGs than the Bethesda style nowadays.
I actually liked beyond earth 🥲
I think ES6 will have the advantage that it won't be a procedurally generated world, or at least I don't hope so.
But it will probably still run on the shitty Bethesda engine that they cling onto for dear life for some reason.
I think it will never actually live up to the hype, expectations are so insanely high, and the longer it takes the higher these expectations rise it seems.
And I bet it will turn out to be another half-assed game that they hope modders will fix. Like the last bunch of games, they all require mods to be even remotely playable, but even mods can't fix core issues.
My expectations for Bethesda dropped to bare minimum with everything that came after Skyrim.
It definitely will be running on the same old tired engine. It's listed on the wiki as the engine in use already.
Honestly, if anyone actually has high expectations for ES6 at this point, it's totally on them.
My sister loves Beyond Earth; I still prefer Alpha Centauri.
What we wanted: Alpha Centauri 2
What we got: Civilisation in a $2 shop Halloween costume.
Yeah they need to get rid of that cokehead.
That sure didn't stop the marketing department, as this game was being shoved in our faces left and right as if it was the end-all-be-all game we'd be playing with our grand children in 50 years.
Which one off Civ space game? Alpha centari or beyond earth?
Beyond Earth but I see your point, Civ has had several of these https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civilization_(series)#Spinoffs
Point being that they can experiment and do something a little different, I don't think that the quality of the spinoff indicates the quality of the main franchise.
Nah, the game matches pretty well with what Lyin' Todd said he wanted to make almost 20 years ago
It's also very clearly their usual design decisions but in a new setting
If anything the issue is that they stayed stuck in EXACTLY their usual development methods: no design document because Emil doesn't like them, their writers make their quests too, and use an engine that's absolutely not meant for the kind of game they're making ON TOP of being ancient and garbage