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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I haven’t played Starfield yet, but from what I’ve read it seems to be the next step in the procedurally generated games that Bethesda is heading towards, and I really hope it makes them rethink things for their next game.

    While I’m sure that there are people out there who enjoy the fact that there are infinite fetch quests in Skyrim, it’s hardly a feature that anyone really raves about. In fact, the Minutemen quests in FO4 were often the subject of ridicule when the game came out. But at least in those two games, the Radiant quests had the possibility of taking you to an interesting location you hadn’t been to before.

    Like you said, one of the key features in any Bethesda game is the exploration, but the more they rely on procedural generation, the less interesting exploration becomes, and the gameplay and writing of their games just isn’t strong enough without the finely crafted world-building they’re known for.





  • I never owned a NES, but had a SNES and my brother also borrowed his friend’s Mega Drive (Genesis for those of you in the US) from time-to-time. All of us would blow the connectors on the cartridges, regardless of console. If anything went wrong with a game, the first step to troubleshoot was to take the cartridge out and give it a good blow.

    It was never about how the console actually worked, a five year-old isn’t going to logically think about that. It was all about a perceived performance increase by doing it.





  • If it helps, there’s very little that carries over between the two games. Without any spoilers, you lose your gear at the start of the BG2, most of which doesn’t carry over anyway. You will start with the level you finished BG1 with, but BG2 boosts brand new characters to a certain level anyway. And I don’t think the games track decisions made throughout like modern RPGs do.

    That said, I played it years before Beamdog released that interlude DLC, so maybe things have changed in their Enhanced releases of the games.






  • That’s an oversimplification. All works are derivative to some extent. There’s a huge difference between taking inspiration from something, to taking the characters and setting from something. Particularly if you’re intending to make a profit.

    If an author makes something that a large number of people enjoy, why shouldn’t they be able to make money off it for the rest of their life? Why exactly should an individual give up the rights to their creation simply so that someone else can use their characters and their worlds?

    To be clear, I’m talking solely on an individual level. I think the system we have where a corporation can own an idea is very broken. I’m also talking about this from a perspective of the world we currently live in. In an ideal world where money wasn’t the endgame for survival, ideas would flow more freely and nobody would need to care. But that’s not the world we live in.