Much like Bethesda games, they take quite a lot of work to make for what is essentially a position that has been unchallenged for years. Very high risk, but only like somewhat high reward.
Like just breakdown what the Sims into its fundamental components. The characters, the fashion, the homes, the skills, the jobs, social interactions, possessions. It's a lot of work.
That's awesome! Elianora's mods have been basically a mandatory download for me for years because the quality is always incredible. She absolutely deserves this.
I wonder who they hired to do the facial modelling. The environments look really good but the faces look like games from 15 years ago. I really expected more from the game that Microsoft has been making so much fanfare over.
Bethesda have owned id Software, the best graphics engineers in the business, for a decade. They now even have Microsoft money. This is still, somehow, the best they can do.
I've sunk 20 hours into it so far and it's amazing. You people just have your expectations up the ass for a company that is great at one formula and expect them to do the other when they never said they would. It's ya'lls fucking fault for expecting No Mans Sky to be the greatest fucking game of all time at release over a company that made fucking Joe Danger.
Cyberpunk 2077 I can understand more as it was made from the guys who made The Witcher 3, so feature wise I can understand the betrayal and they fucked up by lying to us. But it's still ya'lls fault for expecting it to not be buggy and broken as fuck when it was delayed 3 fucking times. The red flags were there, and you STILL bought it.
Oblivion and Skyrim have the same basic formula with little differences sprinkled in here and there mechanics wise that make it feel different, but familiar. Starfield is the same way and I fully expect ES 6 to do the same. But that's fine. I don't want anything groundbreaking. I just want Skyrim but with modern graphics, animations, different setting, and some new mechanics.
In Fallout 4 and Skyrim, modders did ultimately put out high-poly-count heads, high-detail eyes, etc. I imagine that if tradition holds, there will be modders doing the same in Skyrim.
TBH the faces look fine for me. At least on major NPCs that have a role. All of the NPCs out in the cities are the ones that look wonky. I give it a pass though considering you'd have to be fucking staring at them immensely to actually notice.
Either way, modders will take care of it. That's the beauty of these games. Anything remotely dumb that Bethesda overlooks, (which is every game) will be fixed.
But eventually they lose all credibility and everyone abandons the Xbox platform. It's really getting to the point where Steam is the only one worth using. And I've bought every Xbox at launch, except for the Xbox One. Playstation tends to cater to people who like turn based games, aka interactive slideshows. Xbox has just been stagnating for the past few years, and this was supposed to be the game to finally prove to us once and for all that they can put out a good modern game. Overall the game itself is pretty good and I'm not seeing much bugginess at all. But the way the devs speak about this game, I really expected something they could actually be proud of. They can always improve things with patches, of course. But at this point Starfield is a first party game, so I really expect it to showcase what the Xbox hardware can do. It's as if Microsoft has nothing to do with the QA process of all of the studios they've acquired.
Meh, being able to build your own ship like Skyrim and kerbal space progran had a baby sounds like it makes up for that but I haven't played the game so idk. Most space games are either a massive ripoff (think Star Citizen) or a major grindfest (Elite Dangerous) so it's good to see someone try to make a space game that isn't like that.
No Man's Sky and Stationeers are almost similar games that are good but in those games the space ship game mechanics and functionality just aren't there.
I've been playing it and it's a great game. I just wish they could have gotten the faces good enough for the game to showcase what the Xbox and PC are capable of. The environments even look great. They really dropped the ball considering it's Microsoft's biggest first party launch in something like 5 years.
The shipbuilding is limited in order to try and not break the game.
You can only have one cockpit, warp drive, fusion generator, and shield generator. You can't have dual core and double shielded guns with an cockpit strapped to them that obliterates anything in sight.
It is more like Fallout meets Cyberpunk 2077 in space with a complex loading screen mini game that doubles as a remote inventory, which you can spend hours customizing somewhat.
NMS's use of ships is far better, like being able to fly around from place to place instead of loading screen around. NMS's ship flying with SF's shipbuilding would have been ideal.
Hopefully modders will be able to fix the shipbuilding.
Have no real interest in playing it, but do they still do the Skyrim thing where they have like 5 wildly different voice actors, so it feels like the guards are following you from town to town?
At a recent talk at Exilecon, one of the creators of Diablo 1 and 2 said that the best thing you can do to get into the game industry is to mod, the first thing they look at is modding experience.
No, that's why I think Valve is so supportive of the mod scene. Team Fortress and Counter Strike among others started out as mods that the studio hired.
The only mods that Bethesda has ever gone after are those that re-use audio from other games. It's a licensing thing. They've been basically a top 5 company in terms of supporting mods in general. Hate their formula if you like, but they don't threaten original modders with legal action.
In 2050, when Bethesda releases TES 7, it will be just a launcher to Creation Engine editor with half-assed models and a single empty map where modders collaborate to make the game themselves.
In 2127 with the early-access TES 8 it will be just a README file where they say that game should be ready for Christmas of 21XX, if modders won't fuck around and finish making the damn engine.
You joke, but I think a collaborative game project like that would be interesting. Maybe not good, but I'd love to see what would happen with such a thing.
Ooooh... What if the SCP community collectively build the best damn SCP game possible? 🤤
I was on an icy moon today orbiting an orange gas giant that had full sun. The colour of the planet was reflected in the dark blue ice - it was stunning!
Ohhh I knew there was something different about the clutter placement in Starfield! There's so much of it I catch myself triple checking areas to make sure that I didn't miss anything worth picking up.
There are those of us who finished highschool, graduated college, and started careers in the games industry since Skyrim was released. I'm sure there are plenty of developers who cut their teeth on Skyrim mods now working for Bethesda.
Like Frito Pies and Hot Dish, some people love their jankiness. I was actually comforted by my adoring fan getting stuck in the chairs and table in my ship.
Classic Bethesda bugs make me feel right at home. Also, having the spell system repurposed was classic BGS.