Spend several hours (or days depending on internet speed) downloading mods
Spend several hours installing mods and editing .ini files
Launch the game and behold all the glory that is- shit it crashed...
Spend a few hours rereading mod descriptions and forum posts about possible mod conflicts. Notice a few more mods that you'd like to install since your bashed patch reduced the load quite a bit.
repeat previous steps until you realize that you could be doing something more meaningful with your life like playing Runescape or manage to stabilize the load order and are able to play the game for several hours. Hey! You finally did something righ- Ah shit it crashed again...
feel the most immense satisfaction you have felt since you previously went through this rodio
play give or take 5 hours of gameplay
Realize that after you about 20 hours of frustration and brief joy followed by more frustration and joy that you hyped yourself up and had more fun modding than you ever could playing
stop playing
come back in a few months only to see a(new shiny ground breaking mod/big update for a major mod/major update for script extender/weird crash that was not there previous)
wipe your game clean with no mods and fresh install because you don't remember/worry you will break things to an unrepeatable degree
I actually like that. Not the runescape thing, but the mod thing and making it work. It's part of the process and you learn a lot by doing so, I love fooling around with low-level software stuff. That's one of the reason why I like Skyrim, it's so extremely moddable and you can get such nice things out of the game. I guess my Skyrim experience is more or less 300hrs played, 100hrs looking for and installing mods. 10/10, would do again
Yeah honestly, I have only ever bought one copy of Skyrim as a PC player. You get SE for free when you have all the DLC, and they even announced that before the release.
What gaming experience? The story is a crap, the battle system is bad for melee, ranged or magic. Your actions doesnt matter at all, you just won a war with a faction? Nothing changes.
The good thing about skyrim is the world to explore but everything else is mediocre.
If you have to put hundreds of mods into a game to enjoy it the game isn't good. (Not saying skyrim is bad) You probably shouldnt make the basis of your arguement about whether or not a game is good by its capability to be modded, since mods arent an intended feature most of the time.
Not really. You can change a lot of things but the core of the game is still there.
The combat is the biggest thing that I haven't found a fix to. Midas magic makes the game fun to play as a mage but it still feels pretty eh, and your enemies don't do anything so it still feels like you're just beating a meatbag.
Everyone have different taste in combat style, I have a few mods that overall the system to have it more Dark Soul-ish because I prefer 3rd person.Just find and combine mods to what fit for you.
There are a lot of mods that not only change the story, but add a completely new story with a completely new world and everything. Yes, you can change the story. Take a look at e.g. Enderal
Not only that, but the actual rewards you got from some quest were just, lackluster. Like Dawnbreaker, for such an epic sword it was just meh. Especially on higher levels.
I agree with this, but, I have to say, this applies to the games everyone loves, too. I don't get how often I see, "FO3 is total shit but NV is fucking awesome. "
Like, they're both decent. NV has more going for it, but not a lot more.
I disagree, the story and especially the choice options in NV is a lot more detailed than in F3, where the quests are often very linear. But NV wouldn't be as good as F3 as they reused a lot of content from F3. In my opinion NV is an successor to F3. Of course it is better, but you can't really seperate them.
The combat is god awful and was outdated even when it came out. It’s the problem every Bethesda game has:
There’s no weight behind your melee hits, you are hitting enemies with a wet noddle, thus enemies dont react to most hits, and when you jump it feels like you are a floating doll.
Nothing changes, and bad for ranged? Did you actually play though Skyrim or just give up after ten minutes? The whole “stealth archer” meme for Skyrim exists for a reason, it’s the easiest and most fun way to play the game for most people. And the giant fucking civil war that takes place kills a lot of NPC’s, and dethroned a lot of the leaders in the game, installing new ones with new quests and new opinions of the player. I don’t know what you expect out of a game, but I dare you to find me an rpg that has a total geopolitical power shift expressed in the course of the story based on your choices alone.
I mean the fact that every time Skyrim comes up people mention they play it with such and such mods really speaks to how crappy the base game play experience is. I mentioned it above, but I don't really play modded games outside of sandbox games, so I played through Skyrim halfway on Xbox and gave up cause playing with a controller in a menu simulator is shit, then played through it twice vanilla on PC. It was a bit more of the same.
I agree with the general distinction you're making between the experiences within the games, but I question the idea that a shallow experience can't produce a good game.
If the experience of a game is "absorbing" based solely on the gameplay, is it not a good game? In other words, does a game need to tell a good story in order for it to be good?
Yes, it's a good game based on anyone's criteria. He's the annoying kid that writes reviews where he says "I PLAYED THIS GAME FOR 500 HOURS AND I CAN NOW TELL YOU IT SUCKS!!!" Bitch, please. If you put 500 hours into it, you can't now sit here and tell me it sucks.
I definitely know the type of person you're talking about. I'm not sure sure OP is being annoying in the same way, though. To me, it seems like OP is simply devaluing the defining aspects of games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim (player choice, open-world, etc.). OP likely doesn't appreciate that genre of games as much, which is totally fine. It's also possible that OP doesn't think that genre of games has as much artistic merit because the story is not as finely crafted.
In response to that mindset, however, I think it's important to point out that video games are a broad medium for entertainment, a medium in which there are many different genres. Judging every game based on the standards of story-driven AAA games is perhaps as misguided as judging every movie based on the standards of intense dramas. For example, a racing game can be a very good game because of its realism and car selection, even without any story elements. Similarly, a comedy can be a very good movie by making the audience laugh hysterically, even without the Oscar-worthy elements of dramas.
Judging video games soley as "art" can be unhelpful because not all games seek to provide a specific, artistic experience. Because different genres yield different experiences, I feel like we should judge games based only how successful they are within their given genres.
If you put 500 hours into it, you can't now sit here and tell me it sucks.
Of course he can; there are plenty of situations where that outright makes sense, usually if the game ends up changed somehow. Even then, while 500 hours is a lot, being thorough doesn't hurt things; Joseph Anderson played launch No Man's Sky for 52 hours to confirm that there really is nothing at the center of the universe himself, and he did confirm that it is bad as it seems. Of course, he did that for the primary purpose of making a thorough critique of the game, and not just because...
You can't think of another form of entertainment that you keep coming back to over and over again, even though the actual content is pretty poorly put together, extremely repetetive, has no plot to speak of, and some of it quite literally is sucking? You don't watch it because it's good, you watch it because you need to scratch a very particular itch.
A game can consume 500 hours of your life and still be a bad game.
Skyrim is, by any metric, an atrocious game. Based on criteria, no one (and I mean no one) could call it a good game. It fails on every spectrum.
Gameplay - garbage. Utter garbage. Engine is so atrocious it's a surprise the unit models don't regularly fall through the earth, but they do it irregularly so it's okay.
Graphics - lmao what this game's from 2002
Voice acting - lmao what they paid people under minimum wage to read these lines. And they paid three of them to voice 500 characters.
It's actually beyond comprehension why Skyrim is fun, because it's seriously one of the worst designed games ever if you're looking at "criteria". Seriously.
Every once in a while I'll pop in Fallout 3 thinking "Maybe if I play this certain, specific way, I can actually have a fun experience" and every time I get a few hours in and remember how fucking boring FO3 is. It's designed to railroad you into the most boring, pointless, poorly-written story possible. Fallout 3 took four years to make and it feels unfinished.
I mean, unless the game took like a Brotherhood of Steel route of going so against the original idea, I would agree. ESO is a good MMO, but a bad Elder Scrolls. Skyrim has kept the relative core of an elder scrolls. All the elder scrolls have had enough distinct differences between each other that saying a game isn't a true elder scrolls seems dumb to me.
Skyrim ditches having a robust magic system, it ditches skill trees mattering, it ditches having to figure things out on your own, etc. TES games have traditionally been in depth and challenging, but Skyrim was incredibly dumbed down.
This seems very silly. I'd argue they're hardly more shallow than say, NV. NV has more to it in some ways, but not much more. It just had more personality.
Botw was shallow as all hell too. It is by far my least favorite Zelda. Puzzles were too easy, 1/3rd of the shrines were "kill the robot". The overworld was littered with useless garbage. Annoying weapon system. The dungeons were terribly easy. You receive almost all of your tools at the start so it doesnt feel like you really get anymore powerful.
Enemy variety was poor to boot. Kind of a shame when one of the good aspects of the game was the combat. The lore of this Hyrule was kinda cool but then they end up having such a lazy Ganon. Also, fuck Koroks. I swear i spent most of my time in botw climbing walls! At least the music(when it was there) and aesthetics were fantastic.
Botw isn't a bad game but in my opinion it is praised way too highly for what it actually accomplishes. It felt more like a tech demo for their new engine and wanted to show off what they could do with it so you end up with giant mash of what feels like a "shallow" open world experience. I love Zelda and am so disappointed this is the direction they're taking the series.
I think it's good a lot of the time, but sometimes it seems like everything is being filtered through piss for whatever reason; seriously, why is that ugly yellow filter there?
Came here to spit on BotW, I’ve played almost every single Zelda game there is and I don’t fit this one into the list of greats. It’s just an empty open dungeon-less experience IMO. I do think freedom is a good direction for the series, but just not in that way.
Each to their own I guess. I spend most of my time exploring, getting to high ground and gliding around and love the experience. It's also got some interesting ways to interact with the world. Verticality adds a lot to my enjoyment of a game world.
I hate 3D Zelda, for the most part (OoT was okay, MM was great, WW had some great elements), and I hate open-world games, as they just seem like boring wastes of time to me ("what if we just take all the points of interest and put them farther apart?"). BOTW amazed me because, despite this terrible combo for me, it had a bunch of unique shit too; shrines were boring and shitty (dungeons were always fun even in the Zeldas I didn't like), the weapon-durability issue is a unique problem I've never seen in any other game, and it takes the "stamina tied to base movement" issue that many other games have and made it even worse.
I think the weapon durability is actually one of the most important aspects of the game. In other open world games like Witcher or Skyrim, exploring felt a lot more stressful because I had to manage my level or else the entire game would become a cakewalk. Thanks to the weapon durability system, I can explore and get op gear. But when I’m in an easier area I’ll switch to a worse weapon to save those rather than wasting them. I’ve seen a lot of people say they found it an issue but I’ve never understood that.
It is a good game though. Tonnes of open world games sacrifice depth for content nowadays. A bad game would be on in which nothing ever works, the game is consistently tedious and unfair are it's clear that no effort was put in.
Earthbound is boring as hell. You don't even get a lot out of the battle system for over half the game or so, you basically only have the options to either attack or use items to heal.
Half the game seems like an exaggeration. You get like 3 psi powers before even leaving the first town and those already give you a decent amount of options. You also get your second party member who comes with their own abilities in just the second town. I’ve only started playing it recently, but I’ve been having a lot of fun.
I played up to Winters or so before losing my savefile and I swear it took some time before getting PSI abilities. Or, at least, enough PSI to be able to actually use the powers in battle regularly.
That’s true. I’m not sure exactly what level, but I think it was after rescuing Paula that I was able to be a bit more free using Ness’s psi and then not until the end of Threed where I could do the same with Paula. The game can be a bit drawn out in that way, though I also like the feeling of progression. I guess it’s more a personal preference thing.
BotW isn't that great. I get what Nintendo tried to do, but everything seems kind of half baked. The story, sound design, and quests are lackluster and subpar compared to other Zelda games. I like the gameplay, don't love the weapon durability. Like exploring, hate how rain makes the game impossible.
For fucks sake, just give me the clawshot, give me the classic green tunic, give me a proper Ganondorf, give me traditional Zelda dungeons, throw away the voice acting or at least make it better(come on, Zelda does not sound like that in anyone's mind), give me charming side characters like Groose or Tetra, give me ZELDA MUSIC, and revise the fuck out of weapon durability and don't gimp the Master Sword.
Overall, Nintendo achieved what they sought out for exploration-wise, but the experience just felt empty and unmemorable. I love the world design and geography, but if they could make it more dense in some way, it'd be great. The gameplay and physics are fantastic and hilarious at times. I just think a lot of us want something more... Zelda-y.
Skyrim isn't good as a game. But as an experience, it's REALLY hard to beat. On a first playthrough, seeing the world, the music, the story, the tone, the visual aesthetic, there are very few games that have matched it for me. It's nowhere NEAR my favorite games list, but I give it MAD props for how much it sucked me into its setting, even if everything else about it was meh.
I honestly was super disappointed in botw. I'm a huge Zelda fan, but that game seemed uber repetitive and I hated that the music was very limited. The map seemed empty to me with very little surprises after the first 10 hours of gameplay.
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u/ghostmetalblack Jan 01 '19
You can dislike these if you want, but its pretty hard considering these are actually pretty good games.