I know people do like it a lot and maybe I just don’t get it. I kind of enjoyed the Outpost mechanic until I realized you can’t just have one main outpost to which you can funnel all your mined and gathered materials.  The max amount of landing pads you can have at one place is 3, and you need 1 pad for each…

“This idea that it’s just Fallot in space is dumb. It’s more than that.”

For some reason, they’ve been obsessed for many games with randomly generated content. They think it’s some magic formula that will give gamers infinite content to play (and ease some of their burden in creating it, now doubt).

they outsourced the development to Very Accomplished Game Devs who made cubes with 126,720 triangles, sandwichs with 70,799 triangles.

Everything I loved about, say, Morrowind or Fallout 3, Bethesda seems to be intent on removing.

Also! I recall seeing quotes from Todd and his buds about how ambitious this game was going to be, and they said something to the effect that they thought they were making “the most important videogame ever” or something.

The single most apt word I’ve seen used to describe this game so far has been “unsexy.”

Bethesda botched the only thing they’re good at... building vast and meaty environments that are fun to explore. Remove that, and you’re left with dated mechanics, poorly written dialogue, and badly designed quests.

What you’re feeling is a simple lack of competency at the top. Todd Howard and his cabal of leads are some of the most creatively bankrupt people currently working. There a ton of incredibly talented people at Bethesda, but they’re largely among the rank and file. The people leading big picture systems design just do…

“Where locations in the best open-world games feel like places that permanently exist and are situated within a living world, Starfield’s galaxy feels like a file structure in my computer’s operating system.”

The problem with Starfield is that it is the worst thing a product can be - mediocre, mundane. It has things it does well, and things it does poorly, but its the exact same game that has been released by this studio so many times over, with all of the familiar jank that comes with their products.

Never in my life have I tried so hard to get any sort of enjoyment out of a game. But every slightly positive thing is marred by a bethesda formula that has not only been shattered into pieced but gets watered down more and more with every new game they make.

Are we really supposed to just buy the idea that this company that has more money than God and owns several of the biggest things in gaming isn’t just laying people off because investors want more money/the lines to go up? If they were spending more money than they were bringing in, and have been this entire time, then…

Yea, threaten the pirates. That always goes well for the multibillion dollar studios, I’m sure it will work great for one small man.

This has been my impression with a lot of the game’s systems; I feel like a lot of them weren’t coming together to make the game fun so they just dialed it all back. Things like fuel, environments, etc all feel like they were intended to be a lot more meaningful than they really are. The game frequently feels…

Thank you so much for the article, Zack. This is my GOTY this year! It really is fantastic.

Quantic Dream games are my guilty pleasure of all guilty pleasures. David Cage is such a bag of shit, the games inevitably veer into unintended absurdist comedy with how poorly they stick certain aspects, and yet I can’t help but to love them.

Youve never played a Quantic Dream game before, huh?

I am struggling with this game. It is not a bad game by any measure. But it is not holding my attention nearly as much as Skyrim or Fallout 3/4. Even with my beast of a PC, the constant loading screens are just obnoxious and annoying. Who knows. Maybe I am just getting old. 

I’m simply blown away that the mainstream media actually pointed this out and to their faces! For a brief, shining moment, they were journalists!!