all-knight-party

Tell my wife I said… “Hello”.

We love you, Bender!

Absolutely. There are a few studios I love so much that I know what they produce I’ll enjoy well enough to find it worth it, and so I’ll watch a gameplay trailer or two to get a baseline understanding of the type of game I should expect, and as soon as I’m satisfied by the premise, that’s it.

I wait for release and explore around the possibilities myself and wonder things, and test things, and get mad that I didn’t realize I could do a thing the whole time, but it’s really just an awesome way to experience a game.

Of course, this only works if I trust that the studio will put out a baseline of quality and expected type of gameplay. If a game is of questionable quality money becomes a larger issue than ideal experience.

Absolutely. A huge reason why soulslikes are so beloved. Through a huge combination of deliberate decisions touching nearly every facet of the game, an ethos is crafted all for the sake of intriguing the player, challenging the player’s mind and physical execution, and then triumphing, with discovery of several forms peppered throughout the way.

The lack of a map, enabled by a well designed and memorable world is one of the best examples for me. Nothing else I’ve played quite matches navigating Dark Souls without a map. You’re in one spot of this large, interconnected, seamless world. You just finished grinding an item in Darkroot Garden, and you want to return to Firelink.

Mentally, a collage of images appears in my mind, laying a pathway, a map of the world, the different paths and elevators I must take to get to where I need to go, and I begin walking, and I follow my own directions. That experience is all over the place in that game, and for all the obtuseness that’s in there, it was still so worth it to commit to that design so hard.

I’d love to live in a world where I could just install everything and never struggle for storage space.

Its not necessarily a kid’s game, but that is their primary demographic and player base out of some fusion of being easy to run, simple games being easier to create, the art style, the accessibility and short term gratification of easily jumping between experiences.

I think the effort towards changing that starting with Fallout 4 shows, it seems like it’s now a priority for them. Their engine has always been their greatest asset in terms of gameplay possibility, world object physics, immersion through radiant AI scheduling, an open and very moddable design, and it’s obvious specialization towards open world format (less of a big deal for an engine nowadays).

It’s also been one of their greatest weaknesses, with stiff and awkward animation and movement/combat on both NPCs and the player, the inability for crouching to allow you to pass under certain objects, poor pathfinding and scripting on NPCs in combat and for your followers who constantly get lost or hung up on geometry, the radiant AI which through complication of scripting can cause quest NPCs to be in the wrong locations or be missing the correct dialogue.

Ever since the creation engine rebrand I partially lamented that they didn’t scrap the engine, but over time I’ve come to accept that it’s not just Bethesda that makes Bethesda games, it’s the gamebryo engine. To remake an engine with their unique systems, mechanics, moddable format, and familiar console commands would be an enormous undertaking and I understand why theyve chosen to dig in and modify it further instead and their acceptance of those pros and cons.

I think any true lover of Bethesda games has to understand what they’re really good at, and what they’re really bad at, and you have to want them to get better, or else that’s not love at all.

I found Fallout 4’s shooting night and day better than NV and 3’s. It’s a shame you didn’t feel that. It’s still definitely RPG shooter territory which is a lot harder to make feel satisfying than a conventional FPS, but the movement still didn’t feel very good, certainly.

Moment to moment feel is definitely a strong issue from previous Bethesda titles. I’m confident Starfield will feel better, but how much better is impossible to tell until we can get our hands on it or there can be some common discussion about it after release. The manicured, manufactured movements of pre release gameplay make it very hard to tell how that stuff has changed aside from their claims of redone animations systems.

A lot of that is out of band’s hands. Ticketmaster has, essentially, a monopoly on venues. It’s already incredibly hard to even make net zero on playing shows, getting picky about venues makes that almost impossible and relegates your band to shitty dive bars.

Yeah, I have no idea what this game is or how to help OP. Just based off the screenshot it’s a sort of multiplayer turn based game in which each player possibly has a time limit to make their turn in order to keep the game moving and OP has dramatically less time to make a turn than other players without obvious reason.