The Bethesda Problem

[Sly Reflex]

What you @one-armed dwarf said there with the bits and bobs is something I would have talked about if I had done the thread. There's so much you can pick up in the game that has zero purpose.

 

In TES case, look at the food. You have all this food all over the place. There's fucking loooooads of it. Yet the mechanical reason for it being there is terrible. Truly terrible. You have all these food stuffs and none of them are worth the effort. Look at this.

 

Venison is a meal you can cook. There's various pots all over the world, all you need is a piece of venison and a salt pile. The weight of venison weighs 2 and the salt weighs 0.2. When you combine these you get an item that weighs 0.6 and heals 5hp.

 

On the flip side you have alchemy. For a potion that heals you you're looking at a few ingredients. You can take any two from Blue Mountain Flowers, Blue Dartwing, Blisterwort, Imp Stool, Wheat. Imp Stool weighs the most at 0.3, Blisterwort weighs 0.2 and the rest of the ingredients weigh 0.1. All of them are readily available, you just pick them up when you see them. Depending on the location you might see more than one than the other, but they're all really popular. You should never run out of them. Combining 2 of these will bump the weight up to 0.5 and give you a restore health potion that will heal 22 points of health before spending any points in the alchemy tree.

 

So why bother with cooking at all? Why bother with the food at all. Stuff like cheese weights 0.3 right through to 2 which I think restores 15 health. That is shit. There are meals that you can craft that give you a boost in stats for 12 minutes. For reference a day in Skyrim is over 1 hour real time. 12 minutes is fuck all time in the grand scheme of things, especially when you consider what a fuck about it is to find all the ingredients you need and then throw them in the pot when the equivalent potion wouldn't even be half as much hassle and be much more potent.

 

Instead of making cooking super beneficial to partake in it's just sort of there. It does a worse version of what Alchemy does instead of doing it's own thing. The mod I used during my last few Skyrim playthroughs made it so that food and drink provided bonuses across the board. Cooked meals provided bigger bonuses while weighing less. I realise that this isn't everyone's cup of tea, especially with people complaining about RDR2's core stuff, but you don't really need to do it if you don't want. It just allows you to stack a buff on top of your build, as well as providing options for facing the cold and stuff to the liqueurs.

 

It's stuff like that that makes you wonder why they bothered with what the vanilla game did. TES games are full of stuff like this, and if I ever get around to it with the big thread/post I'll unpick it all and show you how completely terrible some of the design is.

[mmmark]

Thx @Hendo

[Duck]

Skyrims' scale is impression. But the only "quest" I can remember/ felt any sort of emotion in was the invasion of your old home city (I can't remember the name. It was an achievement too.) But i refused, so i put it down. 

[Sly Reflex]

You could say that about a lot of open world games. For instance GTAV's not really that great at anything, but it's the only place where all those things are done to a level that feels acceptable when they're all in the same game.

[Bigkopman]

Fallout 3 blew me away, back in the day. I fell in love with the atmosphere and played it to death plus the DLC. New Vegas was overkill for me,  just too soon,  so I never really got into it but according to many, it's the better game. When the Witcher 3 came out I was stunned.  That is one huge game and looks incredible and arguably has to much to do but still an incredible feat for a much smaller team.

I was excited for Fallout 4 but as I got it,  it just felt like a mod for Fallout 3. The overall look of the game really didn't seem that different on a PS4.

I left it for a while but recently went back to it and got quite into it. 

The quality of the Witcher gave me high hopes for Fallout 76 as BGS would have had time to create something special. When they announced that it would be online my heart sank and immediately lost interest and i feared that they had lost their way but the trailer for the game actually gave me a bit of hope.

Man,  they really fucked up.  If you watch the Danny O'Dwyer doc on BGS you can see how happy they were to get the IP for Fallout but after all this promo bullshit they end up with 76.

Granted,  I've not played it for transparency,  but there is enough general feedback from gamers to guide me on this.  @Blakey , glad you can enjoy the game yourself and I may pick 76 up one day bit only when it's £10 just to see what it's like.  

Just so disappointed with BGS that they could have come up with something special...

 

[AndyKurosaki]

That’s the thing. The people that enjoy this say the same thing “I played it with friends”. 

From what I played of it,playing on your own is a tedious experience. You’ll almost never see the randoms on your server,due to how big the map is. When you do,either they’ll join in with you,or try to kill you. Which they can’t really,unless you fire back at them.

 

I’ve played far worse games. But my experience of 76 was “meh”. I didn’t feel compelled to play it,as every quest ended up feeling pointless. Everyone is dead,there’s nobody to talk to.

 

It didn’t help that your inventory was pitifully small. It soon filled up,faster than it did in F4. The base building mechanic returned,but I hated that in the previous game. It was poorly explained,and I couldn’t be arsed with it. And in this,it’s even worse,because if someone decided to build near yours in your abscence,your base disappears. Making your efforts a total waste of time.

 

I don’t have a problem with reading  the “story” through holotapes and books. But that just doesn’t work in an online game. If you’re playing with friends,you’d have to stop chatting to listen. Or on your own,as I was,either the sound of battle nearby drowns out the audio. Or,enemies rapidly respawn and start attacking you,interrupting your attention.

 

So despite Todd’s assurances at E3 that “you can play 76 on your own”, it’s really not recommended,as it’s a boring experience. And I’ve no intention of ever going back to it,because there’s so many games I’d rather play. 

 

If people enjoy it,good for them. But it can’t be denied that there’s a lot of people that don’t. And it’s definitely done damage to the Fallout brand. All because Bethesda wanted to cash in,thinking they could get away with it.

[mmmark]

On 12/01/2019 at 23:00, Blakey said:

As for Jim Sterling, I got off that gravy train long ago and am all the better for it. I still watch a few of his videos but my respect for him waned after he repeatedly lied in numerous videos or misrepresented them to boost his own viewing numbers. He knows what kind of video his audience expects and he plays up to it. I personally don’t want Sterling’s sensationalised hysterical faux-controversies pushed to me anymore and I’ll make my own mind up.

 

 

You controversial bastard @Blakey ? I love you.

[one-armed dwarf]

That's just an odd fight to pick. Offline games not working or expiring because of network issues is a load of rubbish. It's why MGR is no longer on Mac.

 

It's why I never beat Inside. Got it on PC and had a network drop for a week and it wouldn't let me start it up. Never picked it up again out of spite lol.

[DANGERMAN]

Marvel vs Capcom 2 on ps3 had a hidden online check. It is came out 2 weeks before the months long Playstation network outage which is how I found out. Absolute bullshit 

[retroed]

I bought DOOM and signed in to my Bethesda account and started playing DOOM.

 

It is rubbish that it needs a Bethesda account to play in the first place, though. There's not even any online modes.

[Craymen Edge]

Good old corporate defender Blakey! ?

 

Yeah, you fucked it there.

[Rikzilla]

As much as I enjoyed personally taking the piss out of @Blakey last night for the Twitter abuse he was getting he, in fact, did not fuck it. 

 

 

[mmmark]

I don’t like that fella. It’s people that have cult like groupies that rub me the wrong way. 

[Maf]

Sterling has always been a fucktard as far back as the Destructoid podcast 

[HandsomeDead]

Get out of here.  The Destructoid podcast when Sterling, Max Scoville and Jon Holmes were the line up was some avant gard treasures.  I've not come across a gaming podcast as surreal as that since. 

[Maf]

I don’t know who those people are but I remember listening to a few episodes of that and the combination of Sterling’s voice, opinions and shock-jock try-hardery left me real bored real quick. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Jim is a boring try hard who's never grown up or had a real job, yes.

 

Back on Dtoid he was just this super prolific troll baiter. He wrote the most and drove the most traffic because nerds would get so angry over his takes

[Maf]

I don’t know about his overall image of the time but I know in a few short episodes of that podcast I had enough of his persona to know I wasn’t a fan 

 

EDIT: Not that I get mad over it then or now but just couldn’t or even listen to it

[DANGERMAN]

I find him a bit irritating ("triple AAAAAA", his videos in general are becoming very very samey) but he's generally right on these issues, or at least I agree with him. At least he's willing to admit he's fucked up here to be fair to him

[HandsomeDead]

He may have fucked up the specifics but overall the point still stands.  They added pointless DRM that does nothing but make the service side of things worse for the player.  And for what end? I don't even know. 

 

As for Sterling again, I see him as a reflection of how obnoxious the AAA is.  I can't fault him for shining a goofy light on what the industry does/is.