Failing a roll is on you whether you like it or not. The ever looming threat of failure is important in story telling and suspension of disbelief. It’s the opposite of dumb game design. So yeah you either reload until everything gets handed to you or you move on. You’re talking like he’s locked behind a dlc when you’re just pissed a dice roll didn’t go your way at level one.
Consequences of your decisions is what makes this game special. You’re going to have a bad time going forward with this game if you cannot deal with the fomo.
So I’ll reinforce my first suggestion to look into turn-based CRPG as a genre and see for yourself. That’s where you’ll find most of the mechanics you seem to want and you won’t have to take the opinions of strangers as to how much gore is too much for you.
Yes but it’s not all of the stuff, far from it
Is any form of violence or blood a no-no? If you can accept some, Larian (bg3’s developper) was already well known for the Divinity series. Many even say that BG3 is kind of Divinity:Original Sin 3 with a DnD license. You’ll still be killing some people though. Otherwise, I suggest searching for Turn-Based games which BG3 is. You might like Battletech which is a mech warrior themed game or the X-Com series where there’s an alien invasion.
And also, you might have been mislead by the videos. Yes the brain parasite is important but you’re really only directly dealing with mind flayers (the tentacle clad monsters) in the very beginning and very end. The rest is just a classic fantasy setting.
Anybody else experiencing game breaking bugs right now?
Like I can’t sell my stuff now, game will insta crash when I click on an item to sell, doesn’t matter which character’s backpack and doesn’t matter if I barter or trade. Also, it takes like 5 minutes before the vendors items or cash appears.
Characters won’t engage in combat at all and randomly. When I select them to engage an enemy, they teleport to another location and no matter what, they won’t attack. It’s like they are in another game entirely. I also can’t switch back to the characters that are in the fight.
Lot’s of freezing too. I have to save scum before entering any convo now as it might just lock me out of any action for 30 minutes or straight up crash. And my charisma Shadowheart is useless now since it’s always my Barb Half orc with 8 CHR talking no matter what. And this was an intended patch??? Wtf.
I’ve reinstalled the game for the patch and again yesterday with no changes. Any tips? The only thing I can think of is that it’s an old save, hadn’t played since october but it’s late act 3 and I just really want to finish this campaign.
edit: And when I mean crash, I mean the game loads up like it was the first time. All the tutorials are back and all my settings or keybindings are back to default. It just resets the game entirely.
Unfortunately, not a lot of people are that involved in the game to care about OGL and its ramifications. Most only want to play what they’ve seen in Stranger Things or Critical Role, they don’t give a fuck about the rent people they watch and like have to pay to WotC. I believe that’s what Hasbro is banking on. They will not back out of OGL1.1 as they knew some more hardcore players would criticize them. But the way news and stories are consumed nowadays, they also knew this would quickly get buried by the unending stream of “information” people consume and ultimately be entirely forgotten or ignored. Most people don’t care about businesses practices if it doesn’t affect them directly. Mix that with the crazy amount of IP crossovers they made in the last couple of years and you start to see how they are setting up a model so basically anyone who’s tempted to try table top gaming will most likely be funnelled into their ecosystem.
I cannot stress this enough. They are owned by Hasbro. Last year was a massive win for both Dnd and Magic the Gathering yet they still layed off thousands of the people that made this possible. Even Sven Wincke of Larian who developed Baldur’s Gate 3 said he couldn’t even properly thank the DnD people he worked with because they were gone short after release. BG3 is probably the best game of the decade if not more and MTG is more popular than ever yet the people making them still get fired. Meanwhile, Hasbro and WOTC CEO’s personally made millions in salary and bonuses.
So no, you are not supporting workers and artists by buying their products. You are proving them right.
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Todd? Is that you? And I know you will read this, it’s just human nature.
Yes it’s a bad argument. It doesn’t answer anything. You don’t know thousands upon thousands of people not even mentionning gamers that you talked to that actually played the game and have nothing but good things to say about it. It’s just unproven, unrelated statements. It would still be a bethesda game with all the things I’ve mentionned completely fixed. You just got caught by promises and brand recognition.
I myself said it’s a 6. There’s no hatred i just don’t think it’s the product of a great studio growing to be their best as I’ve thoroughly explained three times now. You just respond pointless straw man arguments when we bring forward valid criticism. You have to defend your points also, and they have to address the points others make. That’s how debating work. You can’t just say “but I like it” and be taken seriously.
You also don’t seem to understand bias. I thought about things I didn’t like and why. Contrary to you I explained with multiple examples why I came up with my opinion of Starfield but you just answer “It’s a bethesda game”. How is that a proper answer? And don’t go with whataboutisms about how the map size is big though, Tell my why the AI got better. Tell me why the quests and choices are good and deep and why the 230000 voice lines make the game better. You go, that’s how you debate. But no you only go back to “but I love it an millions do” on a post about a video (out of dozens) deep diving into the flaw of the game and studio. Tell me why my arguments are bad and why your NG+or whatever they worked so flaming hard on is correcting them.
Also don’t pretend I’m not civil because you disagree and bring forward evidence of your claims. Address the criticism instead of hiding behind your fandom. Don’t use straw man examples like the Beatles vs Cradle or NG+ addition bullshit unrelated arguments. It’s such a bad faith argument you cannot be really believing it’s in your favour. You are free to love it but this was a post about the flaws of Starfield and Bethesda as a whole and, most importantly, why. If you cannot bring anything more convincing than “it’s a bethesda game what did you expect” then you are actually lying to yourself and you know what we are talking about. You just can’t admit it to yourself, because you have to be Todd Howard himself or this doesn’t make any sense.
Stop using “it’s a bethesda game” as an argument. It’s weak and biased. It also deflects the fact that Bethesda games are actually marketed as RPG’s so they have to be compared to what available from other studios when talking flaws and features. You might think it’s enough but it’s not a valid argument. Bad AI and meaningless quests are not stylistic choices, they’re weaknesses. Also you have to address the criticism instead of pointing out other aspects of the game. Trying harder might not have been specific enough but what I meant is they don’t seem to work on the major issues they get criticised for over and over again. And by “they” I also don’t mean the individual devs but the company as a Whole. The presence of NG+ does nothing to improve on the abysmal npc AI or astonishing amount of loading screens and fast travelling.
In all honesty, I’ve never heard or read about the issues you are talking about. Even when googling about the NG+ addition it just talks about Starfield, post-release anwyay. And the complains were not “basically not an Outer Worlds sequel”. It was a let down that it isn’t closer, but the complains are about the lack of meat on Starfields large, dry bones. Outer Worlds is just used often as comparison because of the whole Obsidian/Bethesda past collab that make them very similar at their core especially since both are space themed. Nobody not fanboying was actually expecting Outer Worlds 2. The more optimistic were hoping some step forward but unfortunately, the pessimists were right.
That brings to your next point: bigger does not equal better. Bigger is actually a trap. The bigger the map, the harder it is to populate and bring to life in a meaningful way and Bethesda sucks at this. Here it’s once again just large inaccessible buildings nobody lives in and NPC’s just going nowhere 24/7. New Atlantis is the best example of a “big” map that feels completely dead. Nothing happens anywhere in any city that is not scripted anyway. Everybody is patiently waiting the player crosses the trigger that pushes “play” on the tape. I’d be way more excited if Betheda announced a game that brought back the scale to something like Fallout 3.
And you can’t be honestly saying it was polished and optimized. Todd Howard himself has been consistently caught saying it was optimized in interviews post release when the game still didn’t work properly on XBOX. He also blamed the gamers for poor hardware and told them they’d need to upgrade. This is bullshit, they simply didn’t take enough time, they rushed the release. They also repeatedly said they know the modders will fix for free what their billion dollars microsoft backed studio can’t be bothered with. And nobody is asking for more hand holding. It’s actually a common complain on many AAA rpgs and openworld games that everything is a freaking waypoint on your map and you end up looking at your compass more than the scenery. Starfield is no different here, it’s worse since you can rarely reach any waypoint without multiple loading screens and fast travels.
So yeah, I still believe if they listened and tried harder in bettering themselves, you would still get your “bethesda game” experience but better. Their games feel designed by a consulting firm that did a market evaluation and chose the easily added features instead of the core rebuild of their engine and expansion of the writing team. Shiny graphics and large maps are vague enough to hype up the people to pre-order while not actually having to improve gameplay experience, character building and meaningful world events which are hard to showcase pre-release, not to mention to actually do.
Hey it’s totally fine if those games are enough then, more power to you. I still think you’d enjoy it even more if they did try a bit harder. And I’m not saying genre=lazy, I’m saying there is no such genre as a “betheda game”. The lazyness is in the repetition and lack of meaningful gameplay improvement over the years.
The whole situation is blown out of proportion as is tradition in the modern world everybody can agree with that. But the complain is warranted in my opinion. What you might describe as a “genre”(it’s a style) can also simply be arguments against a lazy studio that doesn’t really progress in a meaningful way. Most of the issues people have with Starfield are the same they were having with almost all the games Bethesda makes. They simply ignore criticism about design. Of course it sells so they have an argument for continuing but that attitude made them stagnate as a studio. They never improved dialog choices. They never improved performance and optimization. They never improved npc AI. They never improved on UI design… They’re just painting by the same numbers every time just with the latest new tech in paint. So while the core is kinda dumb fun most of us like, it’s getting old now and we have every right to hold that against them.
We also cannot ignore all of the other studios making games in the same genre. CDprojeckt released Witcher 2 and 3 which are great example of progress and Cyberpunk which had a rocky start but was still miles in front of anything Bethesda story and role-playing wise. Obsidian themselves made a better Starfield since space exploration is a letdown in both. We just got Baldur’s gate but Larian made both Original Sins that were already chock full of what makes BG so great. Add to that Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Dark Arisen, Breath of the Wild, ALL the Souls games except for Demon. All of that in between Skyrims and Starfields releases. That’s a lot of competition, the genre changed and matured just like shooters did and so many other genres since. You just can’t slap a new coat of paint and then act offended by the criticism. Bethesda has shown many times now that they either ignore or simply don’t understand why they are getting negative feedback. Instead they rely on brand name, overpromise/lie, meme about their weaknesses (which is why I think they are lazy, they know) and then deflect criticism or blame players for being too picky.
That being said I also have over 100 hours in Starfield and I’m not saying it’s a guilty pleasure. It is fun to roam around being a half god everybody fears or love and everything being entirely without meaningful consequences. But I can’t ignore the shortcomings. And when I do so I keep remembering I’ve had the same for a decade.
Edit: I also don’t think the game is a 1/10 or whatever. I’d say it’s a 6 or so.
In that way games are very similar to musical instruments like Fender and Gibson. Both have been selling the same thing for decades, their new stuff is pretty much just a shiny new version and the older the better.
Don’t overthink it. You are not immoral because you ate half a teaspoon of sour cream you didn’t want anyway. I would’ve done the same as I personally think it’s more harmful to throw away otherwise perfectly good food. You also said yourself that they don’t cater to vegans so the harm was done way before you went in the door and is going to continue. So who is really immoral here? No need to self-flagellate yourself over a sip of sauce that is produced by the million gallons. You did your part, you asked and they messed up because they don’t care about veganism they just want the business.
Surprised monk rogue is so low. It’s been the most brutal dps build I’ve experienced so far. Three levels of rogue with thief for bonus actions and two levels of fighter for action surge ( always use two levels of fighter almost every time) is devastating. My strenght build monk puts out twice the amount of damage my ranger does, hits 100%of the time and doesn’t need any form of advantage apart from melee range. First turn usually means 8 attacks dealing 30+ damage each with the appropriate bonuses. That’s over 240 on first turn then +/-180 for at least the nex two turns if you don’t channel ki. Casual numbers right.
Edit: yeas it also needs tavern brawler which is a broken feat afaic.
They’re not thinking about these things as games, generally, but specifically how they’ll be perceived by the Xbox audience. It looks to me like they discounted BG3, at least in part, because it couldn’t split-screen on series S. They’re thinking about games you play on the couch, in a group, maybe during a party - not games you play solo for hours or days on end.
And that’s what I mean. They are wrong on all counts because they don’t understand what makes a game successful. They only consider the monetary success of their own. They also think “xbox” audience is somehow different and want something else than other platform users. Sure couch is cool but let’s not pretend that this is really how people are gaming nowadays. People like all games when they are well made, complete from the start and just fucking work. Throw a bit of good writing in there and you have a GOTY contender. BG3 is just far above that only and that’s why I’m saying if anyone an MS looked into BG3 and Larian and chose not to sign, they are incompetent idiots.
How could joysticks replace keyboards apart from forcing you to use a virtual keyboard with a joystick? Is everything else about computing the same or is it some form of fantasy joystick centered computer? Anyway what’s more important is that joysticks already exist in computing and we know they serve a specific purpose and really suck for the rest cause we tried. We designed the computer after all so we control how we interact with them. Not like we found them in the wilds and they somehow only had a joystick.
Losing Gale due to a failed dice roll is nothing like a dlc that’s an absurd claim. You can’t just reload a save to unlock a dlc. It was that simple for Gale.