this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
6 points (100.0% liked)
PC Gaming
54 readers
1 users here now
Discuss Games, Hardware and News on PC Gaming **Discord** https://discord.gg/4bxJgkY **Mastodon** https://cupoftea.social **Donate** https://ko-fi.com/cupofteasocial **Wiki** https://www.pcgamingwiki.com
founded 2 years ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think what gets me is aside from a few neat things like space combat and building spaceships, it just feels very paint-by-numbers at this point. It's pretty (in parts), but feels kind of hollow. Maybe after 20 years of playing Bethesda games, I'm just over that style and there hasn't been enough evolution on the core gameplay.
There's no one else who makes anything like Bethesda does. It's not going to be cutting edge technically. It can't be when you work on the same game with that much content for that long. But it's huge, you won't see it all in a playthrough, and you can play the same game a completely different way every time.
There are common elements, but compare it to other big 3D open world games. Far Cry and Assassin's creed ship the same game every year with small tweaks. There are smaller budget ones by smaller studios, but they're a lot less polished mechanically than Bethesda and don't have anywhere near the scale. Bethesda is reusing something like gun mods or base building, but with completely different themes and adapted to completely different gameplay. They're not cloning. They're iterating.
Absolutely. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it also feels like their series haven't evolved enough in 20 years to hold my attention. It's the scale of things that I love about their games. Exploring random caves and tombs in oblivion and skyrim and finding factions battling it out, or a new trap i hadn't run into was hundreds of hours of entertainment (probably 1500 total?). I'm sure this will have all of that.
Even compared to skyrim and oblivion though, each dungeon, cave, tomb felt unique. But this seems to be a lot of copy-paste to service the procedural generation.
It's fine if it's not for you.
They still have a lot of hand crafted content, though. There are definitely some things that don't have the intense attention to detail, but it's not No Man's Sky where it's overwhelmingly procedural and randomly generated with very little that stands out.
Some stuff should feel slightly repetitive. There are military and other heavily planned facilities, and those types of organizations would genuinely be standardizing a lot of things for cost and other reasons. They really would reuse base designs for small to medium buildings in worlds where the parameters were similar and they didn't have space constraints. Earth feels organic because of how much less advanced we were when all of those areas filled in, and how many cities were already crowded with people before they decided to build modern stuff.