The wear on my mouse from clicking on the torrent already wasn’t worth it.

I also pirated it and spent most if not all my time building ships. naturally had to use console codes to bypass the restrictions but that’s all I did.

the game itself? boring. the characters? bunch of god damn nerds. Like seriously your party are some of the most whiny unlikable characters in gaming. I didn’t care for any of them. AND THEN if you decide “oh I want to be a pirate and do bad things” they just whine even more about it.

Youre right, its a game people are ‘told’ to buy, rather than a recommendation. The first thing they see when they start up their console will be an ad for it.

Consoles have always had that market of just buying a few big games a year, they never broke into the indie scene very well.

But PC isnt immune to it, Steam shows ads for launches on startup and both platforms suffer from social media influence. The biggest seller of games has to be Twitch. Get a bunch of streamers playing your shitty game and youll sell loads of copies.

“Harbinger of failure” is the term you’re looking for. Not sure it applies here, though; I think most of these games were commercially successful.

And because I can’t resist sticking my own opinion everywhere, I personally thought Starfield had a ton of potential and squandered it with some highly questionable design choices and poor execution. Some of that may be fixed now, but some of it is baked in. There’s genuinely a lot to like, but as a whole I thought it was really dragged down by some of those bad decisions.

I also liked AC1, though, and was a little disappointed with 2. The first one was imperfect but bold and new and interesting. The second got rid of most of what made the first one unique in an effort to appeal to broader audiences. I still liked it, but it wasn’t special.

A game can be either great or awful, with no more room for meh games.

I think it’s more just that expectations are much higher for a AAA studio like Bethesda. They built so much hype and asked for nearly $100 at launch for a game that didn’t live up. There’s plenty of meh games out there, they’re just priced accordingly. There’s also a ton of really great games out there priced way lower than what AAA studios are asking. I think it’s very fair to hold those studios to a standard that reflects the prices they’re charging.

Even the “big map” thing is done better by other companies at this point.

There’s basically one loading screen in KCD2 (besides pure fast travel) and it’s between the two giant maps in the game. Otherwise, you can walk Henry’s silly ass from one end of the map to the other and go into any number of buildings and never see a loading screen.

And most games do this type of asset streaming now, so when Bethesda rolls up with a “open world” RPG with loading screens all over the place it’s like “what is this?”

But Bethesda aren’t really being punished for it because tons of people are still buying it and might have no idea games like KCDII or even a fixed-up CP2077 exist.

The thing is you can do massive maps without having to use something custom. So they really have no excuse for continuing to stick with their massively out of date wonkfest of an engine

I’m willing to bet that you’ve never actually played Starfield, you’re just parrotting what others have complained about.

Does Starfield have problems? Yes. But anyone who goes “hurr durr ancient engine” clearly hasn’t played a Bethesda game since Skyrim

Still does because they should just continue to wait until it’s there before buying.

USSEP is still around the last time I checked.

Porting a buggy game on a technically satisfactory level does not excuse porting the games with the bugs included.

UESP has existed since like 6 months after the original release of Skyrim and addresses hundreds if not thousands of bugs from minor to quest breaking.

Why go through the effort of a remaster if you can’t address basic gameplay bugs?

The thing that ruined it for me was the story just kinda falls apart and the society they made seems laughably small, like total universe has like 30,000 total people in it. Then you add in the loading into loading to watch a cutscene to cover a loading of the next area and the kinda bad ship combat. Eh the end result is not the worst game, but not a game that anyone should pay more then like $15 for.

This. Bethesda cheaped out on environmental storytelling and fleshed out characters (which is unfortunate since that’s their thing). But the systems they’ve built up in Creation Engine have gotten really good

This sad excuse of wasted dev keystrokes is not even comparable to skyrim and fallout, not adjusted for the time of release or even otherwise

Yes, most.

New Vegas wasn’t a Bethesda game, it was developed by Obsidian and only published by Bethesda. Sure, it runs on Fallout 3s game engine, but Fallout 3 is more stable on PS3 than New Vegas.

I hate Sony, but New Vegas getting cherry picked here for instability is laughable when New Vegas is widely known as perhaps the least stable game published by Bethesda.

Compared to New Vegas, Starfield is a vastly better and more stable game on a technical level. Sure the writing isnt better, but the mechanical parts of the game are. In my experience, I couldn’t play New Vegas for 10 consecutive minutes without the game crashing. Repeatedly. New Vegas crashed more than Cyberpunk 2077 ever did. Meanwhile Starfield only ever crashed once. And thats all on PC.