Nah Todd. The base game was boring, and the expansion sounds mediocre. The buggies aren’t the problem.
They should play The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldurs Gate 3 - they all show what can be done with RPGs now.
Bethesda haven’t evolved enough since Skyrim. Starfield would probably have been seen as a great game 10 years ago. But the best description I’ve seen is that’s its as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.
An expansion on one world doesn’t address the fundamental problem with the game. I don’t see this game having a No Man’s Sky ark. Please move on to Elder Scrolls 6 - it’s been 13 years already and it seems Betheasa have a lot to learn from the competition.
I’m kinda surprised at how much people’s opinions of Cyberpunk 2077 has changed since release. Did the DLC really fix all of the issues people had with the game?
Absolutely.
2.0 was 100% not the same game, but it was vastly improved and perfectly playable well before then.
I played at launch, but on PC, and it was… fine. In that, unlike Starfield, it was a game with characters and a story that was interesting enough to carry the buggy world and somewhat less than fleshed out side-quest mechanics.
But, like, there were enough buildings and set pieces and people and stories to actually sit down and spend 200 hours exploring the world without seeing the same stupid PoIs over and over and over again, while trying to care about the least interesting NPC companions I’ve probably ever dealt with.
And Phantom Liberty is fucking fantastic, so they took a bit of a turd at launch and turned it into an amazing game.
I may have missed them but did ppl have strong negative opinions about how the story was written? I saw only bug reports. I played it two years after release on my steam deck with almost no bugs (the few I saw did not mater). It is a great game until you have done all the quests with a story and done all of the endings, after that was it pretty boring and the city felt lifeless and pointless, but up to that point was it great and engaging. But I never played update 2 or the dlc so that can have changed.
There was a LOT of hype that they never achieved too, and tons of content shown off in trailers and previews that never made the game.
The train was very much a playable area in previews, not in the game, taxis were shown, but also not in the game. The population density is much lower, and (of course) emergent npc behaviour (a random NPC actually going to a bar to play pool, or basketball, instead of just standing there. Robberies just occurring) isn’t nearly as amazing as promised. There were supposed to be more classes that never appeared, and the life path system was shown to be much bigger than just the three skill check options in dialogue that made it into the game.
Mostly, I believe that’s just players being super upset and hunting down every “broken promise” because the game was a buggy mess instead of the second coming.
As much as I love BG3, it isn’t really an example of what RPGs can do now. I mean, it’s not much different from how BG1 and 2 play. Different base rules, prettier graphics and presentation. RPGs have been able to be as good as BG3 since pretty much always. It’s just, companies don’t spend time on the writing, logic, or QA and focus entirely on pretty pictures and marketing.
I think with today’s level of computing power, RPGs could be even more than all of these examples, even if they are already good.
Not that I specifically disagree with anything you said. But reviewers loved to call Skyrim “as wide as an ocean, but as deep as a puddle” as well. And while Starfield suffers from a worse case of this, it’s hard to argue this hasn’t been Bethesda’s main problem for a long while now.
Maybe this flaw finally caught up to Bethesda thanks to the march of time. But gotta hand it to em, they had a great run for a team the refuses to change with the times.
No, we wanted a true base game first and foremost.
No its just missing AI. If they add AI in another expansion they can save the game. You can ask any corporate exec and they will agree.
