The Best RPG list is basically Baldur’s Gate 3, and four more games to make it look like it has competition. It doesn’t.
I still think TotK is a better game overall than BG3.
For me it came pretty close between the two but eventually BG3 came out on top. Totk was great but after 200+ hours I was done with Totk. I currently have almost 200 hours in BG3 and I feel like there’s still so much more to play. I also feel like most of my issues with BG3 (like the poor performance in act 3 and some questlines breaking) are things Larian will fix while the issues with Totk (no rebinds, not being able to infuse weapons from inventory, menus in general, almost everything related to the sage powers) are unlikely to get fixed.
Completely agree, TotK could really use some serious QoL improvements.
And maybe a less brutally aged console to play it on.
Yuzu is all you need!
I played 25hrs of Starfield out of which 20 felt the exact same
I will admit to carrying most Koroks for several minutes rather than trying to make another vehicle out of bits that aren’t all there.
I can’t help but think they wanted me to be a bit more elaborate than just gluing the poor little guy to a horse harness.
BG3 certainly needed a few extra months to bake. There’s still a bit where you can get trapped in a conversation with Mol in Act 1 because as soon as you come out of the cutscene, you’re instantly in range of her to start the dialogue again.
Apparently they released early to beat Starfield, which is hilarious because I’ve seen few games so shat on this year.
Just an FYI in case you’re still playing. There is a feature of you keep playing that lets you build things without the source objects being there, and spending a bit of the ore you get. This trivialises all the korok things by just sticking them to a hoverbike haha
Yeah, I discovered that quite late on.
I do think ability unlock quests should be highlighted in this sort of game. I didn’t even go and get the master sword for ages, because I thought that quest was the end of the game (and indeed when I went to the quest I thought was the end, went deep down into the actual end game area by mistake, and only got deterred by a giant enemy I couldn’t kill).
BG3 was a buggy mess and the story has much to be desired. They should have kept the Chris Avellone writing.
The fact that this game was actually nominated as “best RPG” with the likes of baldurs gate 3 and final fantasy XVI is ludicrous enough.
to be fair, ffxvi is not really an rpg either.
Yeah, it isn’t the best game, so it doesn’t belong between the nominations.
Also because so many amazing games came out this year.
But that doesn’t make it a bad game though. Had plenty of fun with it.
I’m curious what the design, and reaction to, of Starfield might say about what we’ll expect from ES6. For three games now (Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield), have been marked by Settlement building and Radiant quests.
While radiant quests were there in Skyrim, in these later games it felt a lot like Bethesda were making it a core part of the mission design structure. There are a lot of blurred lines in Starfield that make it difficult to tell them apart. (That’s more a comment on main missions being so generic than the radiant quests being so good, unfortunately).
Settlement building seems to be a core part of Bethesda’s DNA now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrative follows a Kingmaker style where you build up a settlement of rebels over time or similar. I imagine the other ES staples will be tied to this too, Thieves Guild = establishing a branch within your new settlement to attack Big Bad Evil Vs joining an established one etc.
I really wonder how much of this poor reaction to Starfield makes its way through to actual change, but my feeling is ES6 will have a lot of hype, but similar feelings of disappointment. I hope I’m proved wrong.
Ultimately, unless they deviate from the formulaic structure (follow arrow on compass to have awkward uncanny conversation with a mannequin who tells you to go to copy and paste dungeon where you have asynchronous combat against copy and pasted enemies) eventually, people will have the same gripes with ES6 that they didn’t know they had with Skyrim. At this point, Creation Engine games are nostalgic, but Bethesda thinks they’re still the future.
I don’t see settlement building as a core part of Starfield, I am 160h in (NG+3) and have not touched settlement building at all. It is a feature of the game, but it is completely optional.
I can’t imagine Beth cares about game awards as long as their sales are good.
It would get them some more downloads, but it might just be too difficult for them to achieve since their games are all the embodiment of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
The thing is that a lot of players like it that way, but it won’t ever win any awards.
Bethesda did not over promise anything, didn’t over hype. They said they wanted to create Skyrim in space, and that is exactly what Starfield is. For better or for worse.
Starfield being a disappointment to some is only because those players over hyped themselves.
Don’t worry Bethesda, you can try again at next year’s game awards after you’ve fixed the bugs and modders have added the features!
I really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don’t need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren’t even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.
And year after that, and the year after that, and so on for the next 15 years as they re-release it.
They don’t need to rerelease it.
Skyrim Special edition released in 2016 and is still one of the most played games on Steam. (place 69, nice)
after
you’vethe modders have fixed the bugs
Jankfield’s poor technical and creative debt have come full circle.
I read a reviewer that said “It’s a beautiful game about space exploration that has no space exploration” and they were completely right. It’s just fallout in space. Who thought Quick Travel the game would be compelling space exploration
But it’s not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.
It’s okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it’s like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.
That’s what I found really interesting about Cyberpunk 2077.
It took me a long time before I even started using fast travel in that game. I actually enjoyed walking through the city. Even on later replays and when I’d finished almost all the side quests.
Far from perfect game even after all the bug fixes, and kinda empty after the end game, but I can’t help thinking it illustrates how Bethesda’s been left behind in many ways. It’ll be interesting to see what the next GTA’s like. If they manage to make a more immersive world to explore.
I gave up on Starfield to try Cyberpunk again with the new fixes and I’m now probably 150 hours in and I think I’ve only fast travelled once? Maybe three or four times if you count the mid mission moments where you’re riding in a car with someone.
It’s kind of wild that Neon had to be split in half by a loading screen, but you can go from one end of Night City to the other with none, and Night City is way more detailed, and quite frankly probably has more unique geometry to load and render than Neon + entire surrounding planet.
The reason for that is because, yet again, for the three hundred thousandth fucking time, Bethesda is using, still, a modified creation engine.
There is an argument to be made that Half-Life: Alyx runs on a “modified Quake engine”. At no point was the engine completely rewritten, though it went through several major evolutions and presumably none of Carmack’s original Quake code still survives… probably.
What matters is that Valve made several major overhauls over the years and is well aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of its engine and taylors its games to them. I mean, you couldn’t run Elite Dangerous on Source 2, but nobody asked. Seemingly, nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of multiplayer (hence Fallout 76), and nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of half the shit that Starfield would have to provide for exploration to be compelling in the way that it is in Skyrim.
Everything is way better and more detailed in Cyberpunk.
It feels like everybody is so generic in Starfield. They don’t feel like they have personalities.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Cyberpunk and you’ll be dealing with an entirely new set of gangs with their own slang and their own backgrounds and their own heritage.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Starfield and you’ll either find nothing or an entrance to another procgen cave with the same spacers as everywhere else.
For me it’s not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.
It’s just so bland and formulaic. Against deep RPGs like BG3, it just pales in comparison.
The funny thing is, I think the fact that the RPG mechanics are finally better than the last game developed by Bethesda, instead of worse, highlights just how mediocre Bethesda games are.
I still think once mods and DLCs come out in full force it will be remembered more positively.
The difference between a Ubisoft game and a Bethesda game is that Bethesda employees still enjoy coming to work.
Sure. I think big budget gaming needs to die, and games need more dev time for less work and higher pay, with worse graphical fidelity and better art styles.
If Bethesda games are so mediocre, why are they so popular among players who love to put hundreds of hours into them? I can’t imagine them all playing total conversion mods.
It’s become such a custom to poop on Bethesda for making “shallow”, “uninteresting” games that still everybody talks about. As if there weren’t enough real flaws in their games to give them heat for.
Because mediocrity and popularity go hand in hand, it’s the profit motive at work. Being largely inoffensive and generally palatable is profitable.
That’s not the definition of mediocrity. Trying to appeal to a bigger audience doesn’t make a game mediocre in the same way not every niche game has the potential of being a masterpiece just by not being that much likeable.
Some games are popular and good.
What’s good and what’s popular do not necessarily align. Removing “complicated” features for the sake of mass appeal makes the game worse, but more profitable, much of the time.
Also not true. Complexity alone doesn’t make a good game / movie / book / piece of art. And lack thereof doesn’t make anything worse.
Why is it that when many people like a thing because that thing appeals to masses, it’s automatically categorised as lower quality?
Nobody seriously claimed Starfield to be the game of all games. It’s good. It’s fine. It’s not perfect. So what?
Removed by mod
I’ve lost a bit of respect for Bethesda. It’s become clear to me that with Starfield they made many very shallow systems in hopes that modders step in and expand on those systems.
I’m hoping this is because the engine is in its last legs and they’ll do a better job once Elder Scrolls VI comes around. (Won’t be buying that on launch tho)
I enjoyed it for about 70h, then i got sick of all the loading.
I just need properly updated skyrim. Better graphics, similar amount of loading screens, better npc’s, better mechanics but the same old fantasy setting.
Oh and all the mods, something about sculpting my own vuloptuous barbie doll character to turn into the ultimate killing machine.
What I don’t understand is why it even has loading screens. Surely it would be possible for them to level stream that stuff, after all the actual handcrafted environments are not that big, The rest of the planet is procedurally generated.
Partly the engine.
Consoles. I blame most of starfields issues on Microsoft and the need to have it work on garbage Xbox. I just wish we could get a game like this without having to cripple the shit out of it so it will work on some shit hardware console… But I get it, most people don’t have a PC that can play most games if they even have a PC at all…
I’m not bitter, you’re bitter! :P
Given the cost of GPUs nowadays I don’t blame them. It used to be reasonable…
Bloody hell. I don’t even think i have that many hours in most of the games i consider my favourites
I finished the story and did some sight seeing and tried to build an outpost to make fat stacks but somehow i couldn’t find the right location after 4 hours of searching and that’s when i ditched the game.
I enjoyed it for 3-5 minutes and then it crashed before hitting a save point.
It got a best audio nominee at the golden joysticks and a best rpg at the game awards. Taking up air that could have been used for actual worthy contenders but big money’s get the auto nomination
It definitely doesn’t deserve best RPG.
It might win the most “it’s alright I guess”, game of the year award.
I played it and really liked it. I did everything I could do with my first playthrough. I started ng+ but just couldn’t continue. A bunch of cool systems in theory but just not enough substance. The copy and paste assets gave me fatigue. It scratched that Bethesda game but I am a bit disappointed. I really wonder why it took so long. It sorta feels like a bunch of reused elements from fallout. Like did they scrap a bunch? I’ve seen many more in depth games from smaller studies lately. On a side note I started playing Cyberpunk with new dlc afterwards and damn I really like that game
It’s real nova, choom.
Starfield was 60 pretty ok hours on game pass, I personally have nothing against it, don’t care about it much. But those who actually give a shit about The Game Awards: why? Slim list of nominees, several categories total bollocks anyway, judges vote worth 90% against 10% crumbs to the public vote ( see ‘how are winners selected’ https://thegameawards.com/faq )
Why would you want extensive public participation in an award ceremony? If you want a popularity contest just look at sales numbers. What purpose do awards even serve if they aren’t curated beyond validating your own preferences?
this is fair but then why hold a public vote at all when it has next to no chance of affecting the outcome anyway?
It’s an excuse for me and some buddies to get drunk and yell at Geoff keighly for a couple hours.
I put very little stock in them as a true reflection of quality in the industry, though it’s occasionally nice to see Indies and smaller devs get some recognition.
Played my full version demo before purchasing. Was bored on day one. None of this surprises me.
Bought Starfield, still can’t play it. Linux, nvidia no MUX switch. Starfield won’t use the discrete GPU. Doesn’t even know its there. Thrown every launch option I could find at it. Uninstalled and hidden now. Worst purchases I ever made on a game.
Oldrim and Starfield are the only bethesda games I didn’t buy on super sale. I’ll never make that mistake again. I even purposefully bought it without waiting for sales to throw some support to the devs for building the majority of my favorite games I’ve ever played.
The up side is that after about two weeks of tinkering I bought Baldurs Gate 3 on a whim. Been playing it non stop ever since. I might not have bought BG3 if bethesdas didn’t have such a shity unpayable game at launch, so in a way I thank them. BG3 has far exceeded my every expectation. What I thought would be a mediocre time waster turned out to be the best game I’ve ever played.
…why didn’t you just refund it?
Even if you passed the 2h window because of troubleshooting, Steam Support would probably still allow it if you explained you couldn’t get it to work at allI tried, steam said NO!
That sounds more like a issue with your proton configuration then a fault of the game.
Have you tried to change the proton configuration, to force it to use the discrete GPU?
Nvidia GPUs are known to be problematic in Linux, not only with Wine/Proton
Yes I’ve done so much tinkering to everything I can possibly do. Like 5 hours of 2 minute game time testing. Enough to negate a steam refund!
Telling proton to use prime-run. Custom protons, every launch option that matched my specs on protondb.
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command%doesn’t work at all.It’s not just a Linux issue. I read on steam, a guy only got Starfield to launch in windows after disabling his primary GPU in bios via MUX which sadly isn’t an option for me.
I’ve tried everything but Wayland. If you’ve got some magic to try I’m all ears.
If you have a newer Nvidia card, Wayland works just fine, and more optimally than X in multi-monitor scenarios, as X locks the refresh rate to the lowest monitor’s setting across the board.
I have a 3090 and Wayland lets me use all three of my monitors at their native refresh rates.
It’s funny that you’re bitching about the game being bad because it doesn’t run on an OS it wasn’t designed to run on. That’s kind of a silly thing to get up in arms about. Linux gamers are lucky that Proton works as well as it does the majority of the time, and I think you’ve taken that aspect for granted.
It’s funny that you’re removed about the game being bad because it doesn’t run on an OS it wasn’t designed to run on. That’s kind of a silly thing to get up in arms about. Linux gamers are lucky that Proton works as well as it does the majority of the time, and I think you’ve taken that aspect for granted.
Maybe so. Seems like there is a bunch of removed about the game to go around even on windows using nvidia though. And if Larian can get it right you’d think bethesda could. Even on windows.
Also I have no idea if the game is bad. I cant even play it so I cant say if the game sucks or not. Here in a few years when it’s playable if it’s playable I’ll make that decision. By then the modding community will have had a chance to do their thing and hopefully make the game an even better game.
Nobody has ever respected Bethesda for their quality work on engines.
Larian also has not been famously known for the last three decades as the studio with the most bugs on AAA titles.
Modding will kick off more next year when they release the official kits and tools. Surprised that wasn’t priority number 2 after ironing out the bugs.
Also, what distro are you running? I didn’t have problems getting it to work on Endeavour, once I got a Steam copy. You can’t run the Xbox launcher games properly AFAIK and they’re markedly worse for modding anyways.
I’m using Garuda.
You have it running on a muxless optimus laptop? What launch options are you using and what proton?
Bought SF through steam as well.
Tried EOS before Garuda. Following the asus-linux instructions they recommended manually installing nvidia drivers. Following the arch wiki I bricked my install a few times before moving on. Like I said in another post I give no shade to EOS as it was defiantly operator error. I think I was trying to use mkinitcpio to rebuild initramfs and if I remember correctly EOS uses dracut. At least thats what I think I remember causing my issue, been around a year ago.
Yeah EOS uses Dracut, that’s probably the issue there.
I’ve had success using the Nvidia-DKMS package on both a laptop (with a 1650) and the aforementioned 3090 machine.
I’ve never had to manually rebuild initramfs, whenever a major enough system upgrade happens the package manager is designed to automatically rebuild the file, which typically happens every time you update the Nvidia drivers.
Does Garuda have the option to use the DKMS package? I think that’s what made the difference for me.
