I can’t get a handle on the gameplay. It is kind of broken in turn based mode, which is a shame because I’m not good at real time tactics mode.

I’ve only gotten through like half the game, and that was after a lot of struggle.

Designing coherent spaces is useful for game world designers to think about, but it could have been 5 minutes long and gotten the point across.

The atmosphere, taken moment to moment, or at individual locations was good. The coherency of the explanations behind a lot of things and the coherency of the world as a whole was pretty disjointed.

Both games do environmental storytelling, but with vastly different goals.

Obsidian approach is very constantly supporting a consistent tone and overarching setting. It is more desolate and feels more desolate because that’s what a lot of these in-between little areas are supposed to be. But the details in each area that are there so tell a story about what the area is like and how it function, they give a history to what you are seeing but it often isn’t over the top and full of little cute mini-stories you can follow. It isn’t bad storytelling, it’s telling a story you’re not into.

The Bethesda approach is often much more varied. Each settlement or location can have all these environmental stories, often will little miniature running plots. The variety extends to tone, and type of story. This does come at the expense of some coherence if you step back and start putting a critical eye to everything as a whole.

They are trying to give players different experiences. FNV a player can travel through a bleak desert, maybe only with hostile encounters as the Jungle Jangle radio plays until they finally hit a settlement and it feels like an actual refuge from the sun and rad scorpions to the player. The desolation builds that. Fallout 3 and especially 4 don’t want the player getting bored, so there is something interesting and different every ten feet to check out.

I suppose it says a lot about me that my Fallout 4 modlist turns the world into an extremely dangerous, ghoul filled place with dark nights, and rad storms. All of which makes travel on the overworld terrifying, and settlements feel extra secure in contrast.

I have a lot of left over hobby kit bits that I pick from. I also buy cheap toys from the dollar store. The Final Faction brand of dollar store toys has been a goldmine, the gun on this car is from that line. I make many other parts out of plasticard sheet and tubes, along with random items like the insides of discarded electronics.

Oh as a consumer I, personally, am not touching this thing with a ten foot pole.

I think the people who do continue to fund this thing are sucked in by the dream of what it could be and have developed a kind of personal ownership of the project in their heads. They are psychologically invested in seeing it succeed and you can’t convince them it’s never going to. And the developers are cynically sucking money out of them like cult leaders.

Well, you’re shifting from a fan POV to a developer POV here.

From the developer POV, it’s not wasted time. They are getting a constant stream of money. As long as they can tread water and make their motion look like progress they have an endless source of income.

Its supporters bounce between “It’s already out!” and “Developing such a huge game takes time.” depending on which stance is more convenient in an argument.

I dunno, seems incredibly competent to me.

I was just saying the Deus Ex thing.

It’s a different kind of beast.

NMS released. They put it in a box and said “This is the finished game”. It was then torn to shreds and the long road of updates was a redemption story for an already released product.

Star Citizen will NEVER be done. It will always exist in some weird development alpha-beta limbo. It’s never going to go on Steam or shelves as a finished product. This allows the developers cover to always say the game is in development as a shield against any and all criticism. From their perspective it’s kind of perfect. Fans throw money at it endlessly and the development never really needs to reach a coherent state of being finished. Why would they ever want to actually release a finished game?

Do you have a single fact to back that up?

My god, it’s 50% movie/TV ads. The rest is clickbait with thumbnails for idiots.

Wow. I thought the frontpage was bad back when I made a choice to consciously curate years ago, but I had no idea this is what it turned into.

It’s just a small multi-time fee of 500 morbillion dollars, jeez, just pay the redditorino CEO a fair price, you 3rd party bullies.

The Mass Effect series, specifically Mass Effect 2. The atmosphere, the scale, the characters. It’s the kind of thing where a AAA budget really bring to life things that AA or indie would have had to cut down.

Fallout 4. I have a lot of problems with the story, worldbuilding, and endless minor nitpicky complaints about this game. However it is an amazing accomplishment and when it does something right, it does it very right. The game is the foundation of mods that make it amazing, and while the game didn’t create the mods, they wouldn’t exist without the game. To me Fallout 4 is “I played this game for 800 hours and there’s nothing to do!” kind of complaining.

DOOM (2016). Wow. What a game. It took the mantle of the most iconic FPS in history and made it’s mark. DOOM (2016) is to the original DOOM what Fury Road is to Road Warrior. It distilled what everybody liked and remembered (or thought they remembered) from the original and pumped it up to 11 with insane confidence.

The most recently purchased game that I beat (aside from multiplayer only stuff like Deep Rock Galactic) would be Black Mesa. Motivation to see the overhaul of xen at the end of the game really kept me going.

I recently beat Fallout 1 again, but I was using a high intelligence, high luck gambing critical hit sniper so it was more like an experiment to break the game. I’m in the middle of a 1 intelligence playthrough and its challenging but becoming a bit routine now that I’ve overcome early hurdles.

I had multireddits for my subscriptions, but I liked discovering new things. With the extreme amount of trash filtering I did to r/all, it allowed me to discover interesting places I’d have never found on my own.

There are decades worth of great games already out. People should be open to trying out older games, even if it means slight hurdles in downloading compatibility mods or patches.

I download a lot of videos when I watch on desktop. This gets rid of ads. It also preserves them, since videos can get taken down for very esoteric reasons.

I actually ended up getting a really nice and thoughtful gift.