hoilst

It wasn't really meant to be a game, it turns out. It was just a Hype Delivery Vehicle.

I was expecting Witcher 3 in Night City,

So was I, and it was nothing like the Witcher III. It sucked. Dull missions, one-dimensional characters, no atmosphere.

I guess we know all the people who made WIII took their severance and ran.

The bugs were the best thing to happen to that game.

Why? Because it distracted every insufferable zoomer and stole all the oxygen away from the completely lacklustre gameplay, narrative, and design.

My favourite example of Bethesda going quantity over quality is when they looked at New Vegas, saw that every gamer and their (cyber)dog said they loved the dialogue, and Todd's takeaway from that was "Soooo...we should fully voice the player character...twice over?"

Oh, and there's a reason they went to a dialogue wheel...

I'm not worried about the bugs so much as I'm worried about the half-arsed mechanics Todd slipped in here that Bethesda really doesn't know how to do properly (crafting, base-building, romance) that's outside the scope of their skills.

I fear it's gonna be "Todd Howard Tries To Clone No Man's Sky, Mass Effect, And The Sims - But In SPACE! - And Fails Miserably".

Yeah, it's easy to have a bug-free game if everything is hard-scripted to play out exactly in one way. COD SP campaign set pieces are bug-free because literally everything was hand crafted to play out exactly the way it does for every player, in every instance.

They're not games so much as they're movie sets, and the player is just the lead actor. Acting simulators.

This. They're selling an experience, not just...a game. It's a fuckload of sizzle for a relatively tiny and bland sausage.

It's funny how you get the mainstream gamer crowd lose their shit over a lot of Nintendo games for selling well - despite the "bad" graphics and "kiddy" themes, and I'm just like..."The gameplay is solid. That's what makes games good."

I had to expand this post to get to the bottom of it.

Inland taipan? Yes. Regular taipan? No.

Same. A few years back when there was a big shift to make reddit Social Media™ (which it is not) because that's what gets money from investors they started clamping down on anything non-circlejerky because they were trying to grow subs and promote it as the Happiest Place On The Intarwebs.

Disneyland with the death penalty.