OTOH, why not another Ultima VII? I'd settle for a graphically and computationally less demanding 2D immersive RPG... I'd love to see a big studio throw the same resources as it does at, e.g., Outer Worlds, but trading off physics and 3D/graphical fidelity for things like clutter, routines, and diegetic content.
I think the final result would be a more fun game rather than a pretty but hollow, somewhat unfinished compromise. Isn't making a fun game what should matter?
Absolutely! But, again, the problem there isn't the game devs, it's the CEOs above them who control the purse strings. They're not going to go for a 2D immersive RPG, they want The Next Fortnite or whatever so they can buy another yacht. There's tons of game devs (some of whom I know personally) who would spend all day doing nothing but tweaking NPC routines and adding pots, but a) they're never going to get to a finished game that way and b) that's not going to put food on the table either. So you sign on with yacht-guy's company in the hopes that you can maybe put something small in that matters to you. And even when you take Yacht Guy out of the equation, you rapidly run up against *time*. Literally, Skywind is trying to make a version of Morrowind that is the game you're talking about, and, as such, it's probably never going to come out.
(that said, it sounds like the game you want is Deltarune, which you should go play) (or, hell, Daggerfall. more procedurally generated NPCs with routines than you can ever feasibly interact with)
Deltarune... will check it out. I was thinking that the Divinity games did more than okay, and ditto Pillars of Eternity, which suggests maybe there's a viable market. But there probably aren't that many teams that can pull off those kinds of successes, and the risk-reward versus another Gothic or Outer Worlds isn't tempting.
Yeah I definitely wish there were more studios doing these kinds of games, agreed there. Its disappointing to install skyrim or fallout 4, play 2 or 3 hours, and end up with the feeling of “I really love this style of gameplay, but I’ve got 300 hours in this game and I don’t think I can handle doing it all over again.
I was thinking that the Divinity games did more than okay, and ditto Pillars of Eternity, which suggests maybe there's a viable market.
See, the story I heard was that Pillars of Eternity 2 bombed hard, which was precisely why Obsidian made The Outer Worlds instead of another one of those.
The guy who told me that has a habit of talking out of his ass though, so maybe your information is more accurate than mine.
Pillars of Eternity 2 did notably worse than POE 1, Tyranny, or either of the Divinity Original Sin games. Why that is the case is a bit of a mystery, in retrospect it was probably a marketing failure.
There were thoughts that the market segment might have been saturated but IIRC later games like the pathfinders and Wasteland 3 did just fine.
Its a bit odd since POE 2 isn’t objectively any worse as a game than any of those others.
To be fair the Pathfinder games did well because the IP dragged them kicking and screaming into selling. Like Pathfinder fans would enjoy just making characters alone in those games.
The best part of the game is the way they did Turn-based combat, which they didn't even do, it was a mod they co-opted, and they didn't bother to re-scale combat in the game to accommodate it, not even when they made the second one.
In contrast, I have heard nothing but good things about Wasteland 3 and have had some friends tell me it's the best tactical RPG they've played in a long time. I really need to quit fucking around and play it.....
I do remember it being awesome in Morrowind when you first walk in and there’s a whole shelf full of pots and the like you could just steal and walk off with (only to learn that stealing and fencing some random beurocrat’s dinnerware is probably not the most efficient way to make cash).
But by the same token I never really miss having all the clutter that much when its not there. Npcs that do things rather than just stand around waiting is really nice though.
Clutter hits the spot for me in two specific use cases:
1) Immersive sims where a lot of the clutter is actually useful and having names for all the candy bars/canned whale meat/space food you're using for cheap health restores is a fun touch and you might find a passcode for something on a post-it note or journal.
2) Crime (which also is often present in immersive sims). This can of course covers stealing silverware/wine/potions/skooma to fence in Elder Scrolls game ands the various valuable items to loot in Dishonored that would just automatically convert to cash but also things like the many, many objects you can use as improvised weapons in the recent Hitman games. I have probably taken out more guards by chucking the briefcase you can use to conceal guns at the npcs than I have with the guns you can hide inside the briefcase and even more with thrown hammers, wrenches, and bananas I swipe from the environment.
If it's not a game involving a lot of scavenging or skullduggery then I can easily ignore a lack of clutter to interact with but games that do involve them without clutter don't feel the same.
Playing Pathfinder games is like reading stereo instructions.
It's a good thing they have those annotations where you can read up on what each weird fantasy word means but like, half the time I have no idea what the hell everyone's talking about even with them.
PoE 1 was very boring and kept me from buying PoE 2.
But I like the setting a lot and am still excited for Avowed, whenever it gets here. Sounds like there's been leadership changes and reboots and such. Would love a PoE ES game.
PoE 1 was very boring and kept me from buying PoE 2.
But I like the setting a lot and am still excited for Avowed, whenever it gets here. Sounds like there's been leadership changes and reboots and such. Would love a PoE ES game.
For the record, I fell off the first game after 10ish hours, but loved the second game. I should get around to a second run with all the DLC.
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
If we're chill with this thread being co-opted into the 'complain about vaguely similar games' thread, I was incredibly disappointed in Wasteland 3 when 2 is one of my favorite games. It was hard for me to start at all because the UI is a massive step back from the clean and clear interface 2 used, so I went to watching streamers play it to find motivation to keep going and just saw horrifically balanced combat and writing that leaned way into "we're wackier than fallout!" but forgot to make it funny.
I went through a whole phase of pain trying to get into the first Pathfinder and the first PoE, which are both extremely unpolished and from everything I've heard the sequels to both are vast improvements. PoE seemed to have much, much better writing, but not having turn based combat whatsoever was a massive pain (even terribly balanced co-opted mod turn based is better than real time in this genre, I have no idea how two games like this got made intended to be real time). The dealbreaker was then the health system that would work great for a game set up like a D&D game where you have a small amount of crafted encounters, rather than a dungeon with a dozen packs of generic spider enemies that whittle you down to nothing because healing spells don't actually restore health.
Pathfinder's wacky sense of difficulty nearly drove me away entirely (don't give a miniboss in one of the first dungeons you can go into +10 to hit, AC, and damage pls what are you doing) but my desire to play as a Tiefling won over so I just rerolled as the broken rogue class and started oneshotting bosses before they could attack. Need to go back and finish it so I go on to Wrath and hopefully see they learned from the mistakes of the first.
I do remember it being awesome in Morrowind when you first walk in and there’s a whole shelf full of pots and the like you could just steal and walk off with (only to learn that stealing and fencing some random beurocrat’s dinnerware is probably not the most efficient way to make cash).
But by the same token I never really miss having all the clutter that much when its not there. Npcs that do things rather than just stand around waiting is really nice though.
Clutter hits the spot for me in two specific use cases:
1) Immersive sims where a lot of the clutter is actually useful and having names for all the candy bars/canned whale meat/space food you're using for cheap health restores is a fun touch and you might find a passcode for something on a post-it note or journal.
2) Crime (which also is often present in immersive sims). This can of course covers stealing silverware/wine/potions/skooma to fence in Elder Scrolls game ands the various valuable items to loot in Dishonored that would just automatically convert to cash but also things like the many, many objects you can use as improvised weapons in the recent Hitman games. I have probably taken out more guards by chucking the briefcase you can use to conceal guns at the npcs than I have with the guns you can hide inside the briefcase and even more with thrown hammers, wrenches, and bananas I swipe from the environment.
If it's not a game involving a lot of scavenging or skullduggery then I can easily ignore a lack of clutter to interact with but games that do involve them without clutter don't feel the same.
The best thing about the clutter in Skyrim is how they changed telekinesis to let it throw things at people, doing damage based on the object's weight. Enemy level scaling quickly makes it nonviable, but it's fun to brain bandits upside the head with their own cooking pots in the early game.
Fallout 4 crafting really brought home clutter for me, and its such a natural idea.
I thought settlements were a bit too much of the game (I’d have been fine with 10 really interesting spots and 10 smaller NPC towns like Big town/canturbury commons/novac etc rather than 30 settlement areas). But between them and equipment upgrades junk went from being “eh this is just whatever stuff to ignore” in FO3/ NV/skyrim to “OH FUCK AWESOME ITS A DESK FAN”.
Fallout 4 crafting really brought home clutter for me, and its such a natural idea.
I thought settlements were a bit too much of the game (I’d have been fine with 10 really interesting spots and 10 smaller NPC towns like Big town/canturbury commons/novac etc rather than 30 settlement areas). But between them and equipment upgrades junk went from being “eh this is just whatever stuff to ignore” in FO3/ NV/skyrim to “OH FUCK AWESOME ITS A DESK FAN”.
Sim Settlements made this whole thing WAY better. On top of making resource managements a lot simpler it gave you the option to just auto manage an area, which is great because some settlements I could give less than a shit about.
Fallout 4 crafting really brought home clutter for me, and its such a natural idea.
I thought settlements were a bit too much of the game (I’d have been fine with 10 really interesting spots and 10 smaller NPC towns like Big town/canturbury commons/novac etc rather than 30 settlement areas). But between them and equipment upgrades junk went from being “eh this is just whatever stuff to ignore” in FO3/ NV/skyrim to “OH FUCK AWESOME ITS A DESK FAN”.
I replayed Fallout 4 a couple months ago and then moved on to replaying Fallout 3. I felt incredibly relieved that I didn't have to care about most of the junk all over the place. Crafting just isn't something I enjoy. It's something I tolerate.
It's so damn good. I'm kind of astounded I just installed 800+ mods by pressing 4 buttons and it didn't crash on launch. I've spent tons of time modding Bethesda games, but it's just so damn convenient.
I'm giving Librum a go, but am also a bit distracted by the New Vegas / Tale of Two Wastelands modpack that was on there. It feels like a completely different game from what I was used to (particularly 3) -- I made a custom re-shade filter and it's so much better without the base game tints. I really enjoyed Fallout 76's scavenging/crafting (it just feels right in a post-apocalypse to be hoarding tin cans), and there's a mod that adds that and a shitton of clutter to the 3 and New Vegas worlds in there too.
Having fallen out of the modding loop for some years now, my thought when I read that first line was more like "... compulsively using the Wabbajack on anything and everything?"
Pillars of Eternity 2 did notably worse than POE 1, Tyranny, or either of the Divinity Original Sin games. Why that is the case is a bit of a mystery, in retrospect it was probably a marketing failure.
There were thoughts that the market segment might have been saturated but IIRC later games like the pathfinders and Wasteland 3 did just fine.
Its a bit odd since POE 2 isn’t objectively any worse as a game than any of those others.
I think the added competition was a big factor but in a more convoluted way.
First, PoE1 was riding the first wave of Kickstarter revivals. It was the second gaming Kickstarter I remember getting a lot of hype so that alone inflated the numbers. But that was before other well done indie RPGs hit so there weren't a lot of other choices and just like how the Infinity Engine games were well received back in the day at a time that the prior big names had stagnated. Back then, gamers that strongly preferred turn based games tolerated real time with pause because nothing else was being made with as much polish and actual writing that was entertaining and coherent. But when PoE2 finally came out, we'd already seen the likes of Original Sin 1 showcasing turn based gameplay gamers wished they had gotten in the Infinity engine days and some remembered that they'd only tolerated real time with pause but now didn't have to anymore. PoE2 added in a turn based mode after release and that probably helped its pandemic resurgence given how people apparently enjoyed even Pathfinder's shoehorned-in turn based mode. Larian's success with OS1 and OS2 were incredible shakeups of the genre and player expectations.
Fallout 4 crafting really brought home clutter for me, and its such a natural idea.
I thought settlements were a bit too much of the game (I’d have been fine with 10 really interesting spots and 10 smaller NPC towns like Big town/canturbury commons/novac etc rather than 30 settlement areas). But between them and equipment upgrades junk went from being “eh this is just whatever stuff to ignore” in FO3/ NV/skyrim to “OH FUCK AWESOME ITS A DESK FAN”.
Fallout 4 crafting really brought home clutter for me, and its such a natural idea.
I thought settlements were a bit too much of the game (I’d have been fine with 10 really interesting spots and 10 smaller NPC towns like Big town/canturbury commons/novac etc rather than 30 settlement areas). But between them and equipment upgrades junk went from being “eh this is just whatever stuff to ignore” in FO3/ NV/skyrim to “OH FUCK AWESOME ITS A DESK FAN”.
I replayed Fallout 4 a couple months ago and then moved on to replaying Fallout 3. I felt incredibly relieved that I didn't have to care about most of the junk all over the place. Crafting just isn't something I enjoy. It's something I tolerate.
I related to both of these. I enjoyed Fallout 4's crafting system but am really not a fan of Skyrim's. A big part of that is that Skyrim's is so grindy on multiple levels and poorly balanced. One of the reasons I restarted my SE/Anniversary edition run is that I realized I'd broken my stealth stabber game by using potions of fortifying enchanting to make items to fortify alchemy to make potions to fortify enchanting to make items to fortify smithing to boost my armor and weapons and that even just one round of that was enough to remove all meaningful challenge to the game. My current game has made a deliberate decision to never use items or potions to fortify smithing or enchanting after hitting max levels but even then enchanting invalidates a lot of the the stronger premade items like Daedric artifact armor and weapons and Dragon Priest masks. Meanwhile the process to raise those crafting skills was a lot of grinding out items followed by multiple in-game days of visiting each city and major town to sell the stuff I'd made during said grinding.
Fallout 4 not relying on crafting junk items to in order to be able to make things I actually wanted to use was a big improvement but still needing it to optimize combat abilities is still bound to rub some people the wrong way. A much bigger issue is how the designers/writers relied on crafting settlements to sub in for actual towns and content. Even if I often enjoy crafting, I'm not a builder so my games tended to end up with settlements that had big towers of doom filled with WWI levels of machine gun turrets and near-Ukranian levels of defenders bombarding raiders with small arms and explosives but they all looked really, really ugly and really hurt the immersion and world building.
Fallout 4's immersion was never even really established for me. Someone kidnapped my kid is such an incredibly urgent motivator that the ability to do literally anything else except focus on the main story quest felt wrong. Coupled with the idea that even after 200 years society has not even remotely started to get it's shit together and I just couldn't really believe it. I did enjoy the game despite that though.
Pillars of Eternity 2 did notably worse than POE 1, Tyranny, or either of the Divinity Original Sin games. Why that is the case is a bit of a mystery, in retrospect it was probably a marketing failure.
There were thoughts that the market segment might have been saturated but IIRC later games like the pathfinders and Wasteland 3 did just fine.
Its a bit odd since POE 2 isn’t objectively any worse as a game than any of those others.
I think the added competition was a big factor but in a more convoluted way.
First, PoE1 was riding the first wave of Kickstarter revivals. It was the second gaming Kickstarter I remember getting a lot of hype so that alone inflated the numbers. But that was before other well done indie RPGs hit so there weren't a lot of other choices and just like how the Infinity Engine games were well received back in the day at a time that the prior big names had stagnated. Back then, gamers that strongly preferred turn based games tolerated real time with pause because nothing else was being made with as much polish and actual writing that was entertaining and coherent. But when PoE2 finally came out, we'd already seen the likes of Original Sin 1 showcasing turn based gameplay gamers wished they had gotten in the Infinity engine days and some remembered that they'd only tolerated real time with pause but now didn't have to anymore. PoE2 added in a turn based mode after release and that probably helped its pandemic resurgence given how people apparently enjoyed even Pathfinder's shoehorned-in turn based mode. Larian's success with OS1 and OS2 were incredible shakeups of the genre and player expectations.
Fallout 4 crafting really brought home clutter for me, and its such a natural idea.
I thought settlements were a bit too much of the game (I’d have been fine with 10 really interesting spots and 10 smaller NPC towns like Big town/canturbury commons/novac etc rather than 30 settlement areas). But between them and equipment upgrades junk went from being “eh this is just whatever stuff to ignore” in FO3/ NV/skyrim to “OH FUCK AWESOME ITS A DESK FAN”.
Fallout 4 crafting really brought home clutter for me, and its such a natural idea.
I thought settlements were a bit too much of the game (I’d have been fine with 10 really interesting spots and 10 smaller NPC towns like Big town/canturbury commons/novac etc rather than 30 settlement areas). But between them and equipment upgrades junk went from being “eh this is just whatever stuff to ignore” in FO3/ NV/skyrim to “OH FUCK AWESOME ITS A DESK FAN”.
I replayed Fallout 4 a couple months ago and then moved on to replaying Fallout 3. I felt incredibly relieved that I didn't have to care about most of the junk all over the place. Crafting just isn't something I enjoy. It's something I tolerate.
I related to both of these. I enjoyed Fallout 4's crafting system but am really not a fan of Skyrim's. A big part of that is that Skyrim's is so grindy on multiple levels and poorly balanced. One of the reasons I restarted my SE/Anniversary edition run is that I realized I'd broken my stealth stabber game by using potions of fortifying enchanting to make items to fortify alchemy to make potions to fortify enchanting to make items to fortify smithing to boost my armor and weapons and that even just one round of that was enough to remove all meaningful challenge to the game. My current game has made a deliberate decision to never use items or potions to fortify smithing or enchanting after hitting max levels but even then enchanting invalidates a lot of the the stronger premade items like Daedric artifact armor and weapons and Dragon Priest masks. Meanwhile the process to raise those crafting skills was a lot of grinding out items followed by multiple in-game days of visiting each city and major town to sell the stuff I'd made during said grinding.
Fallout 4 not relying on crafting junk items to in order to be able to make things I actually wanted to use was a big improvement but still needing it to optimize combat abilities is still bound to rub some people the wrong way. A much bigger issue is how the designers/writers relied on crafting settlements to sub in for actual towns and content. Even if I often enjoy crafting, I'm not a builder so my games tended to end up with settlements that had big towers of doom filled with WWI levels of machine gun turrets and near-Ukranian levels of defenders bombarding raiders with small arms and explosives but they all looked really, really ugly and really hurt the immersion and world building.
Yeah again give me 10 or so big areas like sanctuary, starlight drive in, etc to sandbox in and use the rest of the territory for other stuff. You can have areas like Goodsprings, canturbury commons, etc that coexist with the settlement system. You can have quest areas like covenent without trying to shoehorn the settlement system into them.
Its a bit silly that there are basically 2 real settlements with actual vendors and shit in the whole damn commonwealth at the start of the game.
Fallout 4's immersion was never even really established for me. Someone kidnapped my kid is such an incredibly urgent motivator that the ability to do literally anything else except focus on the main story quest felt wrong. Coupled with the idea that even after 200 years society has not even remotely started to get it's shit together and I just couldn't really believe it. I did enjoy the game despite that though.
I was completely opposite to the point where I never even finished the main plotline despite putting in over 300 hours.
The game failed to make me care about the kid at all so when it kicked off my reaction was "Welp, that kid is fucked, now what's over there..."
Fallout 4's immersion was never even really established for me. Someone kidnapped my kid is such an incredibly urgent motivator that the ability to do literally anything else except focus on the main story quest felt wrong. Coupled with the idea that even after 200 years society has not even remotely started to get it's shit together and I just couldn't really believe it. I did enjoy the game despite that though.
I was completely opposite to the point where I never even finished the main plotline despite putting in over 300 hours.
The game failed to make me care about the kid at all so when it kicked off my reaction was "Welp, that kid is fucked, now what's over there..."
Oh to be clear I said fuck that kid. I knew Bethesda lacked the fortitude of their gonads to actually include anything like a timer.
I loved fallout 4 until I hit sanctuary. The second I got there it was "talk to 4 scientists in our confusing ass labyrinth for 15 minutes each about stupid bs" "and you can't leave until you do"
thankfully I had already got as far as I wanted to in the rest of the game and DLC so it was very easy to quit.
edit: sanctuary? I think that's wrong. The place that made synths
For some reason, I felt zero investment in any aspect of the story in FO4, and I bounced off it posthaste. The kid, the synths, ... To some extent, I think both FO and Wasteland are like any sci fi TV series that hinges on a mystery and then goes on for seasons too long, either after the reveal or after dodging the reveal for too long and getting dragged down in its own misdirection and ever-tightening convoluted story knots.
Not all sci fi is like that, some provide a setting rather than a focused story (thinking more cyberpunk here), but FO and WL are based in core mysteries that, after the reveal, only leave us with a pretty thin post apocalyptic setting. The possibilities of those settings just haven't grown beyond "people in resource starved environments are assholes."
I loved fallout 4 until I hit sanctuary. The second I got there it was "talk to 4 scientists in our confusing ass labyrinth for 15 minutes each about stupid bs" "and you can't leave until you do"
thankfully I had already got as far as I wanted to in the rest of the game and DLC so it was very easy to quit.
edit: sanctuary? I think that's wrong. The place that made synths
Yeah, the Institute. I think FO3 and FONV has similar issues, if maybe not as jarring: the late game becomes quite a slog. Though even the Institute gives you permission to return to the cool, fun overworld once you do the obligatory questline, and then you can fuck about for as long as you want as with most other quests.
I loved fallout 4 until I hit sanctuary. The second I got there it was "talk to 4 scientists in our confusing ass labyrinth for 15 minutes each about stupid bs" "and you can't leave until you do"
thankfully I had already got as far as I wanted to in the rest of the game and DLC so it was very easy to quit.
edit: sanctuary? I think that's wrong. The place that made synths
I loved fallout 4 until I hit sanctuary. The second I got there it was "talk to 4 scientists in our confusing ass labyrinth for 15 minutes each about stupid bs" "and you can't leave until you do"
thankfully I had already got as far as I wanted to in the rest of the game and DLC so it was very easy to quit.
edit: sanctuary? I think that's wrong. The place that made synths
Oh, you can leave early.
Just put a hole in Father as soon as he shows up.
I thought about it, but I hadn't put an end to the brotherhood of steel and wanted to do that first
I had a dream last night that took place in Skyrim, sort of; I was trying to get to Windhelm on foot and there was A LOT of snow
Then, randomly, Elvira showed up in a helicopter and dropped toy helicopters (kinda like thomas the tank engine anthropomorphized helicopter fisher price toys?) and said MERRY CHRISTMAS OR WHATEVER YOU CELEBRATE HERE
I post this here because I realized you could probably make that a mod.
For some reason, I felt zero investment in any aspect of the story in FO4, and I bounced off it posthaste. The kid, the synths, ... To some extent, I think both FO and Wasteland are like any sci fi TV series that hinges on a mystery and then goes on for seasons too long, either after the reveal or after dodging the reveal for too long and getting dragged down in its own misdirection and ever-tightening convoluted story knots.
Not all sci fi is like that, some provide a setting rather than a focused story (thinking more cyberpunk here), but FO and WL are based in core mysteries that, after the reveal, only leave us with a pretty thin post apocalyptic setting. The possibilities of those settings just haven't grown beyond "people in resource starved environments are assholes."
Fallout's apocalypse was spelled out really early on in the first game's intro movie. It's never been much of a mystery of how things went wrong. It's also avoided a lot of the usual disaster porn tropes of the genre: In Fallout 1, you leave Vault 13 with the expectation that everything outside is a blasted hellscape but the first location you visit is a small farming community with established trading partners and a resident doctor able to keep people healthy despite the dangers of mutant rats and scorpions. There are dangers from raiders and various authoritarian scumbags, but they're never fully in power. There's a lot of parodies of Cold War era Americana but it was always a setting that looked at how people rebuild and directions a society can take. Fallout 2 especially had its settlements look more urban and developed the further south you got on the world map with NCR and San Francisco especially looking well attended.
Bethesda proceeded to miss those points entirely though and was hooked on the imagery of the setting and not the content. Hence everything still looking ruined in those games and unironic use of small nuclear weapons available early on.
I loved fallout 4 until I hit sanctuary. The second I got there it was "talk to 4 scientists in our confusing ass labyrinth for 15 minutes each about stupid bs" "and you can't leave until you do"
thankfully I had already got as far as I wanted to in the rest of the game and DLC so it was very easy to quit.
edit: sanctuary? I think that's wrong. The place that made synths
So this isn't a secret anymore, and won't matter to most people (at least not immediately) but the guy who made wabbajack has been hired by Nexus to work on collections and vortex.
So this isn't a secret anymore, and won't matter to most people (at least not immediately) but the guy who made wabbajack has been hired by Nexus to work on collections and vortex.
I remember collections/Wabbajack being a huge point of contention in the community when they appeared. I absolutely understand both the "pro" and "against" sides, but it's always interesting to me whenever there's a new hot-button topic like this that generates a ton of discussion and debate (and, I mean, there was even some reasonable and non-toxic discussion and debate, too!), and then a couple of years later it's just... a standard feature, a fact of life, and people just kind of deal with it one way or the other.
I'm definitely pro Wabbajack! This modpack (Librum) is crazy, and more of a complete overhaul than I've ever attempted on a Bethesda game.
It's still Skyrim at its core, but looks amazing and has too many gameplay altering mods to count.
I'm doing a mage run, but in Librum you start with 0 spells and vendors don't sell spell tomes. Instead, you break down alchemy components (and eventually research spells) to gain experience in one of like 30 different spell schools, write theses about your experience, and then combine a few and hope you get a spell out of it. Combine that with realistic needs, frostfall, and a few other things, and it's been an awesome "being a mage/scholar from the ground up" experience. I spent 3-4 hours running around Whiterun and the areas outside doing almost no combat (I used my starter fire wand that I can't recharge yet to kill an elk and skin it Hunterborn style) gathering alchemy reagents to try to be less poor, while also using them to gain the research experience to write my first spell. It's honestly a lot of fun! You have to approach it in a different way than base Skyrim, but the need to sleep, stay warm, eat, and drink while doing all of that makes it an immersive and fun experience even without the combat.
I'm happy to say I finally crafted my first spell, and I can actually kill stuff now! It's some kind of novice level health/magicka drain DoT but dammit I love it. Now that I've figured out how the research works it's moving a lot more smoothly; it's awesome to be able to have my playthrough revolve around wizard stuff so fully though. Inns and towns are packed full of people, and it just looks so damn pretty with DynoLOD and all of the texture/shader stuff going on:
Man, I will just never be into modding. To me there's a good reason that dev teams have a core group of artists who confer with each other and design textures and objects in concert. Mods always have such conflicting looks and tend to mesh horribly with each other.
I get that individual objects and effects look better than the vanilla game, it's just than in practice I never find it a convincing whole. You get stuff like one guy committing to accuracy to the base game so he includes wooden beams that look very similar to the original ones and are low-contrast so they don't dominate the scene, and then another guy who has a vendetta against roofs and photoshopped a striking high-contrast shingle texture with baked in deep shadows that look strange when other shadows are cast across them in-engine. Both of these are in proximity to the lower res stone wall of the building, whose darkest areas are not as dark as the shingles, even though it's below the roof and generally ought to be darker. Repeat similar incongruities throughout the entire game.
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Absolutely! But, again, the problem there isn't the game devs, it's the CEOs above them who control the purse strings. They're not going to go for a 2D immersive RPG, they want The Next Fortnite or whatever so they can buy another yacht. There's tons of game devs (some of whom I know personally) who would spend all day doing nothing but tweaking NPC routines and adding pots, but a) they're never going to get to a finished game that way and b) that's not going to put food on the table either. So you sign on with yacht-guy's company in the hopes that you can maybe put something small in that matters to you. And even when you take Yacht Guy out of the equation, you rapidly run up against *time*. Literally, Skywind is trying to make a version of Morrowind that is the game you're talking about, and, as such, it's probably never going to come out.
(that said, it sounds like the game you want is Deltarune, which you should go play) (or, hell, Daggerfall. more procedurally generated NPCs with routines than you can ever feasibly interact with)
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
See, the story I heard was that Pillars of Eternity 2 bombed hard, which was precisely why Obsidian made The Outer Worlds instead of another one of those.
The guy who told me that has a habit of talking out of his ass though, so maybe your information is more accurate than mine.
There were thoughts that the market segment might have been saturated but IIRC later games like the pathfinders and Wasteland 3 did just fine.
Its a bit odd since POE 2 isn’t objectively any worse as a game than any of those others.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
The best part of the game is the way they did Turn-based combat, which they didn't even do, it was a mod they co-opted, and they didn't bother to re-scale combat in the game to accommodate it, not even when they made the second one.
In contrast, I have heard nothing but good things about Wasteland 3 and have had some friends tell me it's the best tactical RPG they've played in a long time. I really need to quit fucking around and play it.....
Clutter hits the spot for me in two specific use cases:
1) Immersive sims where a lot of the clutter is actually useful and having names for all the candy bars/canned whale meat/space food you're using for cheap health restores is a fun touch and you might find a passcode for something on a post-it note or journal.
2) Crime (which also is often present in immersive sims). This can of course covers stealing silverware/wine/potions/skooma to fence in Elder Scrolls game ands the various valuable items to loot in Dishonored that would just automatically convert to cash but also things like the many, many objects you can use as improvised weapons in the recent Hitman games. I have probably taken out more guards by chucking the briefcase you can use to conceal guns at the npcs than I have with the guns you can hide inside the briefcase and even more with thrown hammers, wrenches, and bananas I swipe from the environment.
If it's not a game involving a lot of scavenging or skullduggery then I can easily ignore a lack of clutter to interact with but games that do involve them without clutter don't feel the same.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
It's a good thing they have those annotations where you can read up on what each weird fantasy word means but like, half the time I have no idea what the hell everyone's talking about even with them.
Josh Sawyer said back in 2020 that PoE2 had a weird resurgence during the pandemic and finally was turning out a profit.
But I like the setting a lot and am still excited for Avowed, whenever it gets here. Sounds like there's been leadership changes and reboots and such. Would love a PoE ES game.
For the record, I fell off the first game after 10ish hours, but loved the second game. I should get around to a second run with all the DLC.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
I went through a whole phase of pain trying to get into the first Pathfinder and the first PoE, which are both extremely unpolished and from everything I've heard the sequels to both are vast improvements. PoE seemed to have much, much better writing, but not having turn based combat whatsoever was a massive pain (even terribly balanced co-opted mod turn based is better than real time in this genre, I have no idea how two games like this got made intended to be real time). The dealbreaker was then the health system that would work great for a game set up like a D&D game where you have a small amount of crafted encounters, rather than a dungeon with a dozen packs of generic spider enemies that whittle you down to nothing because healing spells don't actually restore health.
Pathfinder's wacky sense of difficulty nearly drove me away entirely (don't give a miniboss in one of the first dungeons you can go into +10 to hit, AC, and damage pls what are you doing) but my desire to play as a Tiefling won over so I just rerolled as the broken rogue class and started oneshotting bosses before they could attack. Need to go back and finish it so I go on to Wrath and hopefully see they learned from the mistakes of the first.
The best thing about the clutter in Skyrim is how they changed telekinesis to let it throw things at people, doing damage based on the object's weight. Enemy level scaling quickly makes it nonviable, but it's fun to brain bandits upside the head with their own cooking pots in the early game.
I thought settlements were a bit too much of the game (I’d have been fine with 10 really interesting spots and 10 smaller NPC towns like Big town/canturbury commons/novac etc rather than 30 settlement areas). But between them and equipment upgrades junk went from being “eh this is just whatever stuff to ignore” in FO3/ NV/skyrim to “OH FUCK AWESOME ITS A DESK FAN”.
Sim Settlements made this whole thing WAY better. On top of making resource managements a lot simpler it gave you the option to just auto manage an area, which is great because some settlements I could give less than a shit about.
I replayed Fallout 4 a couple months ago and then moved on to replaying Fallout 3. I felt incredibly relieved that I didn't have to care about most of the junk all over the place. Crafting just isn't something I enjoy. It's something I tolerate.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
It's so damn good. I'm kind of astounded I just installed 800+ mods by pressing 4 buttons and it didn't crash on launch. I've spent tons of time modding Bethesda games, but it's just so damn convenient.
I'm giving Librum a go, but am also a bit distracted by the New Vegas / Tale of Two Wastelands modpack that was on there. It feels like a completely different game from what I was used to (particularly 3) -- I made a custom re-shade filter and it's so much better without the base game tints. I really enjoyed Fallout 76's scavenging/crafting (it just feels right in a post-apocalypse to be hoarding tin cans), and there's a mod that adds that and a shitton of clutter to the 3 and New Vegas worlds in there too.
I think the added competition was a big factor but in a more convoluted way.
First, PoE1 was riding the first wave of Kickstarter revivals. It was the second gaming Kickstarter I remember getting a lot of hype so that alone inflated the numbers. But that was before other well done indie RPGs hit so there weren't a lot of other choices and just like how the Infinity Engine games were well received back in the day at a time that the prior big names had stagnated. Back then, gamers that strongly preferred turn based games tolerated real time with pause because nothing else was being made with as much polish and actual writing that was entertaining and coherent. But when PoE2 finally came out, we'd already seen the likes of Original Sin 1 showcasing turn based gameplay gamers wished they had gotten in the Infinity engine days and some remembered that they'd only tolerated real time with pause but now didn't have to anymore. PoE2 added in a turn based mode after release and that probably helped its pandemic resurgence given how people apparently enjoyed even Pathfinder's shoehorned-in turn based mode. Larian's success with OS1 and OS2 were incredible shakeups of the genre and player expectations.
I related to both of these. I enjoyed Fallout 4's crafting system but am really not a fan of Skyrim's. A big part of that is that Skyrim's is so grindy on multiple levels and poorly balanced. One of the reasons I restarted my SE/Anniversary edition run is that I realized I'd broken my stealth stabber game by using potions of fortifying enchanting to make items to fortify alchemy to make potions to fortify enchanting to make items to fortify smithing to boost my armor and weapons and that even just one round of that was enough to remove all meaningful challenge to the game. My current game has made a deliberate decision to never use items or potions to fortify smithing or enchanting after hitting max levels but even then enchanting invalidates a lot of the the stronger premade items like Daedric artifact armor and weapons and Dragon Priest masks. Meanwhile the process to raise those crafting skills was a lot of grinding out items followed by multiple in-game days of visiting each city and major town to sell the stuff I'd made during said grinding.
Fallout 4 not relying on crafting junk items to in order to be able to make things I actually wanted to use was a big improvement but still needing it to optimize combat abilities is still bound to rub some people the wrong way. A much bigger issue is how the designers/writers relied on crafting settlements to sub in for actual towns and content. Even if I often enjoy crafting, I'm not a builder so my games tended to end up with settlements that had big towers of doom filled with WWI levels of machine gun turrets and near-Ukranian levels of defenders bombarding raiders with small arms and explosives but they all looked really, really ugly and really hurt the immersion and world building.
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PSN:Furlion
Yeah again give me 10 or so big areas like sanctuary, starlight drive in, etc to sandbox in and use the rest of the territory for other stuff. You can have areas like Goodsprings, canturbury commons, etc that coexist with the settlement system. You can have quest areas like covenent without trying to shoehorn the settlement system into them.
Its a bit silly that there are basically 2 real settlements with actual vendors and shit in the whole damn commonwealth at the start of the game.
I was completely opposite to the point where I never even finished the main plotline despite putting in over 300 hours.
The game failed to make me care about the kid at all so when it kicked off my reaction was "Welp, that kid is fucked, now what's over there..."
Oh to be clear I said fuck that kid. I knew Bethesda lacked the fortitude of their gonads to actually include anything like a timer.
PSN:Furlion
thankfully I had already got as far as I wanted to in the rest of the game and DLC so it was very easy to quit.
edit: sanctuary? I think that's wrong. The place that made synths
Not all sci fi is like that, some provide a setting rather than a focused story (thinking more cyberpunk here), but FO and WL are based in core mysteries that, after the reveal, only leave us with a pretty thin post apocalyptic setting. The possibilities of those settings just haven't grown beyond "people in resource starved environments are assholes."
Yeah, the Institute. I think FO3 and FONV has similar issues, if maybe not as jarring: the late game becomes quite a slog. Though even the Institute gives you permission to return to the cool, fun overworld once you do the obligatory questline, and then you can fuck about for as long as you want as with most other quests.
Oh, you can leave early.
I thought about it, but I hadn't put an end to the brotherhood of steel and wanted to do that first
Then, randomly, Elvira showed up in a helicopter and dropped toy helicopters (kinda like thomas the tank engine anthropomorphized helicopter fisher price toys?) and said MERRY CHRISTMAS OR WHATEVER YOU CELEBRATE HERE
I post this here because I realized you could probably make that a mod.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Fallout's apocalypse was spelled out really early on in the first game's intro movie. It's never been much of a mystery of how things went wrong. It's also avoided a lot of the usual disaster porn tropes of the genre: In Fallout 1, you leave Vault 13 with the expectation that everything outside is a blasted hellscape but the first location you visit is a small farming community with established trading partners and a resident doctor able to keep people healthy despite the dangers of mutant rats and scorpions. There are dangers from raiders and various authoritarian scumbags, but they're never fully in power. There's a lot of parodies of Cold War era Americana but it was always a setting that looked at how people rebuild and directions a society can take. Fallout 2 especially had its settlements look more urban and developed the further south you got on the world map with NCR and San Francisco especially looking well attended.
Bethesda proceeded to miss those points entirely though and was hooked on the imagery of the setting and not the content. Hence everything still looking ruined in those games and unironic use of small nuclear weapons available early on.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
<Logan 5, did you find Sanctuary?>
https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14768
It's still Skyrim at its core, but looks amazing and has too many gameplay altering mods to count.
I'm doing a mage run, but in Librum you start with 0 spells and vendors don't sell spell tomes. Instead, you break down alchemy components (and eventually research spells) to gain experience in one of like 30 different spell schools, write theses about your experience, and then combine a few and hope you get a spell out of it. Combine that with realistic needs, frostfall, and a few other things, and it's been an awesome "being a mage/scholar from the ground up" experience. I spent 3-4 hours running around Whiterun and the areas outside doing almost no combat (I used my starter fire wand that I can't recharge yet to kill an elk and skin it Hunterborn style) gathering alchemy reagents to try to be less poor, while also using them to gain the research experience to write my first spell. It's honestly a lot of fun! You have to approach it in a different way than base Skyrim, but the need to sleep, stay warm, eat, and drink while doing all of that makes it an immersive and fun experience even without the combat.
I'm happy to say I finally crafted my first spell, and I can actually kill stuff now! It's some kind of novice level health/magicka drain DoT but dammit I love it. Now that I've figured out how the research works it's moving a lot more smoothly; it's awesome to be able to have my playthrough revolve around wizard stuff so fully though. Inns and towns are packed full of people, and it just looks so damn pretty with DynoLOD and all of the texture/shader stuff going on:
I get that individual objects and effects look better than the vanilla game, it's just than in practice I never find it a convincing whole. You get stuff like one guy committing to accuracy to the base game so he includes wooden beams that look very similar to the original ones and are low-contrast so they don't dominate the scene, and then another guy who has a vendetta against roofs and photoshopped a striking high-contrast shingle texture with baked in deep shadows that look strange when other shadows are cast across them in-engine. Both of these are in proximity to the lower res stone wall of the building, whose darkest areas are not as dark as the shingles, even though it's below the roof and generally ought to be darker. Repeat similar incongruities throughout the entire game.