That’s the vibe I get from many of the reviews. It’s a very large game with a lot of features and a lot of genuine improvements from previous Bethesda games, and a lot of the reviewers seem like the grudgingly need to give it 90 to 95% on that basis, because otherwise it would make a nonsense of the scores they gave…

Down to 87% at time of writing, and I expect it to go down further, given most of the 10/10 and 100% reviews are from lickspittles, rather than serious gaming outlets.

The fairly in-depth video review I watched said the first 20-30 hours of the game were significantly more polished than usual, but after that, it’s back to full-on Bethesda jank and bugs. One of the major questlines in the game he couldn’t complete, even reloading far back, because every time he tried to talk to the…

From the actual reviews, not so much. It’s a game where you’re going to be seeing copy-pasted (literally) content over and over and over and over again in a way that’s just true of Skyrim or FO4. One reviewer kept a spreadsheet and even in the first 20 hours had seen a lot of cut & pasted places 4-7 times already -…

So we’re only talking about MMOs and a couple of other games suddenly? That seems like a bit of a jump from “PvE live service games” in general and ARPGs specifically, I guess because it’s not true of ARPGs, generally?

That’s just not true.

Yeah the fanboy passes Bethesda gets are absolutely insane.

“PvE games have boosters and other ways to accelerate your character’s progression”

I mean, that’s part of the point I’m making - Diablo 4 is unquestionably a live-service game, but they vary quite a lot in how aggressive they are with your time and how much players tend to dig into them. I don’t know is CS:GO is aggressive with your time, but I do know the players seem to be “a breed apart” as it…

I guess I’d separate the CS:GO crowd from other live service games, even. All live service games do do it a bit, but like, most of them there’s sizeable crossover with “normal” gaming. Like Diablo 4 players, for example, almost none of them play just Diablo 4 or just Diablo 4 and PoE, or even just ARPGs. Likewise, in…

Bots would be a possibility but sadly the actual answer is that revenue is what counts, and because Valve takes a percentage on each sale/re-sale of an item in CS:GO, and people keep buying, selling and re-selling items, CS:GO makes them insane amounts of money.

They do, but it’s worth noting one of the main benefits to Valve of CS:GO is that they they take a percentage on every single item sale. And items can be sold and resold. So as items move around from player to player in CS:GO, even if people aren’t buying items from Valve, they’re just making absolutely bank.

“Or, basically, anything No Man’s Sky did, you can expect Bethesda to copy in a way that feels like it SHOULD be better, but somehow isn’t.”

I don’t think that’s the main issue.

I can’t find any evidence that happened, but it’s from that era where virtually everything on the internet is just gone now, and it absolutely sounds like something that would have happened with NYPD Blue.

Oh boy, Gangs of London, that is a terrible, really shockingly bad, very close to actively unwatchable show. All it’s really got going for it is that Sope Dirisu is a really large good-lookin’ dude who isn’t bad in fight scenes, but boy are there a lot of fight scenes and they’re just wildly…

I didn’t know there was a DC of Hellboy, I’ll have to take a look out for that.

Honestly those both seem like fair suggestions to me.

“My understanding is that the main reason Herbert wrote the later novels is because he saw the advances Heinlein and Clarke were getting for their new books in the late ‘70s, when SF publishing was becoming big business, and was like, okay, I’d better get in on this.”

They definitely are. There has never, as far as I know, been a movie or show so bad you couldn’t find a bunch of people willing to say it was between “Good” and “BLEW MY MIND AMAZING” as reactions.