What are folks playing this weekend? (Sept 9th, 2023)

Just finished half-life, onto half-life 2. Kicking myself for never getting the valve bundle during the sales because I want to play opposing force and blue shift

All this Starfield hype got me wanting to play... Fallout 4. I found an interesting mod collection on NexusMods (A Storywealth) and I've been having fun.

I'll pick up Starfield later after DLC and fixes and mods come out.

BG3

I've been trying to play Starfield but I'm just not feeling excited about anything that I've seen so far. I'm still playing through BG3 on my second character. Also been playing Sea of Stars, which has been surprisingly good.

Yeah i'm excited to play Sea of Stars. Everyone seems to love it!

I got my ass back into Cyberpunk 2077 of all things.

I recently upgraded my rig with a new GPU + Monitor combo and wanted to check out a more graphic intense game. I somehow got hooked after that, especially since I love the mantis blade combat style (which seems to be unique).

I kinda wanted to just play BG3 since it released, but I guess that can wait for a while, especially since I might have to fully replay CP77 once Phantom Liberty drops lol

I think I'm going to try to get Splinter Cell: Blacklist working on my Linux media PC. Or maybe some No Man's Sky.

Factorio. Wasn't really enjoying the AngelBob mods tedium and was recommended to try Krastorio 2 mods. So far, so good. It has the right balance of complexity, so far.

Starfield.

It's exactly what I was expecting and wanted it to be so far. I don't have the time to be 50 hours deep or anything, but it very much has the Skyrim/FO4 DNA but with less painful gunplay and a space setting.

I'm mostly confused what the people who feel let down expected. It's not BG3 because you can only do that in a CRPG, and they didn't claim to be. It's not No Man's Sky with unlimited procedural generation to fill in every planet, but again, they never claimed to be that, and there are several substantial areas that are built out much more than anything on NMS.

I watched the direct and so far, it's pretty much exactly what I expected. I really like the variety of choices for building out your character. I like the modern/sci-fi guns a lot better than fallout's plinky pipe guns. They feel better to play. I like the way they use to boost pack as a thematic movement perk. I don't think the spaceship combat is great early, and am not sure if more ship choices will feel more interesting there (though like the options of modularity and customization). I've looked at way more perks than I did after the initial direct and it looks like a healthy variety of different ways to play the game.

It's a Bethesda game, for better or worse. That's what they told us, and that's exactly what I wanted. Throw in mod support that's much less limited than most other games, and I can absolutely see this having the longevity Skyrim did.

I think what gets me is aside from a few neat things like space combat and building spaceships, it just feels very paint-by-numbers at this point. It's pretty (in parts), but feels kind of hollow. Maybe after 20 years of playing Bethesda games, I'm just over that style and there hasn't been enough evolution on the core gameplay.
- There's no one else who makes anything like Bethesda does. It's not going to be cutting edge technically. It can't be when you work on the same game with that much content for that long. But it's huge, you won't see it all in a playthrough, and you can play the same game a completely different way every time.
  
  There are common elements, but compare it to other big 3D open world games. Far Cry and Assassin's creed ship the same game every year with small tweaks. There are smaller budget ones by smaller studios, but they're a lot less polished mechanically than Bethesda and don't have anywhere near the scale. Bethesda is reusing something like gun mods or base building, but with completely different themes and adapted to completely different gameplay. They're not cloning. They're iterating.