Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith explained that Larian’s success is an “exception” to the last decade of gaming trends, but one that shows a shift in desire from gamers.
There’s been no shift, we’ve just been ignored and under-served for around two decades. But, sure, keep ignoring us.
You’d think the sensible business decision would be to see an under supplied gap in the market and fill it, but God-forbid they do something sensible.
but that gap has less potential revenue than a sucessfull live service gacha horse armor battlepass.
so we need to take another shot at the monetisation jackpot,
surely this time we will make it big.
did you know:
99% of devs quit before they make a sucessfull live service
“Streamlining” has been their mantra since Oblivion. TES6 is going to be even more watered down than everything else, but also crammed full of useless things. I’m willing to bet they’ll let you build a town. But the town will do nothing and won’t have any impact at all in the game.
It will do something. It will be a resource sink for a while, and then it will become a resource faucet. Nothing more interesting than that.
Nah, you just described Starfield. They’re going to decide that was too easy and gate building behind even more story/skills/tasks for less reward.
That’s not how Bethsoft works. They make everything easier than the last game. They’ll decide Starfield was too difficult, and streamline from there.
Yeah, it will be bad. I don’t really understand how some people can be excited about it.
It will be passable, it will have a few moments, but in the end you’ll be left wanting and it will set in just how disinterested the owner of the franchise is in any problem that doesn’t preclude sales. It will sell well enough in preorders just because it’s a Skyrim sequel.
The Magic System was simplified, but was made more reactive with things like igniting oil spills
Man, fuck oil spills. You walk into the first dungeon, you set fire to an oil spill with a spell. Then you’ll try dropping one of those laterns, which are always conveniently placed above the Exxon Valdez. And then, that’s it, the fun is over, the joke is told, that’s all you can do with oil spills.
I’d also really like to know what other examples there are of it being more reactive. You can’t freeze the ground to make enemies slip. You can’t zap a river to fry some fishes. You can’t set fire to wood.
It really feels like some dev thought to themselves, we’ve got oil lamps, maybe we could have some of that drip out, and then the Sweet Little Lies guy said fuck yes, put lakes of oil into every dungeon, so I can claim we’ve made the magic system more reactive or some shit.
It can be too reactive as well. I love BG3, I did 3 full runs. But I never used the grease spell again after the first run. They made it flammable to the entire puddle. What that means in practical terms is every tiny candle can turn the entire puddle into a small amount of fire damage. The prevalence of flame sources also means this will nearly always happen. So instead of getting a bunch of prone enemies that are easier to hit, I have mildly annoyed enemies.
So now that question is in the back of my head whenever I see this. What kind of damage and reactivity are we talking about here?
The larian games have some interesting interactions beyond just oil. You can make people slip on ice.
The old Magicka game also had some fun interactions that more games could learn from.
Yeah, playing Magicka when I was young certainly set me up for disappointment. I thought by now, all sorcery games would have ways of combining spells. Alas, the need for high-fidelity 3D graphics has nipped that in the bud, because creating good-looking animations for so many combinations is nigh impossible…
Oof. I liked character stat screen in morrowind. I hate tjat newer bethesda games hide it.
Baldur’s gate 3 characters aren’t even that complicated. You pick stats at the start from a limited range of options, and then make very few choices when you level up. Some levels you don’t pick anything at all. This ain’t path of exile.
I got a mod for bg3 that gives you a feat every level and holy shit did that make it more interesting.
To WotC’s credit, making character choice really shallow is probably why the game succeeded so well. A lot of people don’t really want a lot of choices, especially when some are traps.
Yeah, I quickly installed a Containers mod to deal with items. They automatically grab the items (based on how the item is tagged in the backend) so your inventory is just sorted into “melee weapons”, “jewelry”, “books”, etc… The only downside is that encumbrance can sneak up on you, because your inventory doesn’t look full when you open your character sheet. Luckily, sorting by weight still works, so you can see which containers are the heaviest and start with those.
