No not really. It shouldn’t be objectively worse to take the stealth approach - if anything the opposite should be true.

“Off the top of my head: Deus Ex: Human Revolution/Mankind Divided, Dishonored 1&2 and Prey. Combat in those games is entirely viable and really not all that difficult (and I finished them all on their highest difficulties, as I did Cyberpunk). By the halfway point of those games, you’re pretty overpowered and…

Sorry, you’re really stretching and you’ve completely overstretched.

I don’t think many people pretend it’s perfect.

Yeah there are several fixer/gig missions where there is are genuine immersive sim approaches available, but like, there’s usually nearly zero incentive to do them. You don’t get all the loot and XP you’d get from shooting your way in. The cops aren’t going to come just because there’s a gunfight (which is not…

I mean, absolutely, but I think there’s a little more to it than just “stretched thin” being an issue - which does weaken it. It’s more like, about 30% of proper missions are genuinely well set up to be approached in a clever, thoughtful, multiple-real-solutions immersive sim kind of way, and about 70% (and this is…

“That’s like calling Fallout 3 Oblivion with guns.”

I mean, you don’t have to patch if you have an unfinished playthrough. Depending on the platform you might even be able to play an older version.

Yeah it’s a bit of a half truth. It’s now a genuinely good game with a bizarrely underrated story and characters, but on launch, it was a buggy, glitchy mess even on PC, it’s just you could play through it if you wanted to.

Oh wow okay, you wanna talk about Destructoid?

Fuck. Damn. Shit. So angry at myself right now I should be the one called Mr. Furious!

A lot of games go pretty hard on it - and MS-backed games normally do. It’s a bit weird that Starfield thus doesn’t seem to really care.

Everyone loves a conspiracy theory.

There’s some truth in that but there are also a lot of reviews who are absolutely in love with that kind of game. It won’t usually get you 5/5 at Eurogamer (I mean, they gave BG3 4/5!), say, but it will get you 10/10 at a ton of smaller review sites which nonetheless count on Metacritic.

Which writers would you call “new emo kids”?

I suspect it’ll be... fine, based on the reviews, but nothing more.

But it’s not amazing.

The ship-building and design seems to be one of the few generally well-regarded things about it. That and the gunplay. Apparently stealing ships, you can’t sell them for shit, but what you can do is reconfigure them in really cool ways.

That doesn’t really seem to be true.

LOL that won’t happen, but solely because TES6 is going to take at least 6 years. Hell that was Todd Howards’ optimistic take, so probably longer, because that guy lives in hope.