“keeping track of lots of variables” doesn’t cost CPU time though, since nothing that isn’t on the same map as you is ever relevant for anything. Their engine just fucking sucks.

It doesn’t matter if you are on Jemison right next to New Atlantis, the capital of the universe, or on some random moon in nowhere, you’ll get the same abandoned buildings with spacers/pirates/mercenaries in them. And literally zero of them will have any sort of story or writing attached to them. Walking around on random planets is unbelievably repetitive.

There are no “levels of simulation systems” in Starfield. NPCs don’t even have schedules in this game, they literally just stand around in the same spot 24/7.

First game to just have constant crashes on my seven year old RX480, which is great since otherwise the game runs completely fine. Support doesn’t seem to want my crash reports either, I guess in Todds world, I should just throw the thing in the trash for a game that does literally nothing special in the tech department.

This is something that other games by much smaller companies (like NMS) have already solved. Seems frankly ridiculous that Bethesda can’t fix up their damn engine and their big space game consists entirely out of instanced bubbles, with no way to move between them besides loading screens. Even within your owns ship there are loading screens.

Halsin will literally confess his love for you after you ask him about his romantic life once. It’s ridiculous. And it is way too easy otherwise to have maxed out affinity with everyone in your camp, everyone loves the player being a good-two-shoes. Seriously have no idea where these articles come from that praise the companion mechanics in any way.

Except you can’t make it wider than five slots and not taller than ten. Considering you can easily have hundreds of items in there it’s terribly inadequate. The whole inventory management is terrible, is it really too much to ask to have tabs for different item types? This is stuff I really can’t believe they kept through three whole years of early access.

One really cannot underestimate how important presentation and production values is to the vast majority of players, even those taking the hobby seriously enough to read reviews and post on serious gaming forums. If a game is all textboxes, doesn’t feature decent enough graphics and isn’t fully voiced people just won’t be impressed with it or won’t even give it the time of day.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is just a CRPG with AAA production values, which we haven’t really gotten since Dragon Age: Origins, which is 14 years old at this point. And there is something to it, going into some random cave and starting a questline with unique character models, voiced dialogue and cutscenes is kind of more fun than only getting textboxes, even if the actual things you do aren’t any more involved or deep.

What happens if you take a well done video college course, every subject, and train an AI that’s both good working with people in a teaching frame and is also properly versed on the subject matter. You take the course, in real time you can stop it and ask the AI teacher questions. It helps you, responding exactly to what you ask and then gives you a quick quiz to make sure you understand. What happens when your class doesn’t need to be at a certain time of the day or night, what happens if you don’t need an hour and a half to sit down and consume the data?

You get stupid-ass students because an AI producing word-salad is not capable of critical thinking.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the living proof that - at least as far as RPGs are concerned - absolutely nothing happened in the last fifteen to twenty years of gaming. Make one good AAA RPG and people lose their minds over it. I mean it certainly is better than the slob Bethesda served up in the last two decades.

Nah.

There is still stuff in here that other games have managed to fix like a decade ago, like being able to access all your characters inventory in the camp, having a place where all the books and texts you’ve read are collected, automatically picking up gold or merging the inventories of enemies when their bodies are close together. The quest log is just a void filled with text, without any flavor or convenience whatsoever, no way to click on a quest and see where the quest marker is or anything like that. Same with the map, there’s no worldmap that shows the location of the individual maps on some larger scale that would help you orient yourself, no way to even switch between the different maps and all the fast travel points are just in one giant list. Also even in singleplayer I’ve not found an actual way to pause this game. For a game that was in early access for three years, these feel like basic things that never got the second round of polish they deserved.

I don’t question the quality of the game, I just don’t feel that just doing Baldur’s Gate again, twenty years later, really warrants ALL of the hype. Like the games from that time people still talk about, like Planescape Torment, Arcanum, even something like Fallout 2 or somewhat later Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines are games that are just a bit more “out there”. Baldur’s Gate feels comparably more vanilla compared to those. It’s full of tropes and it does them well, but as far as I’ve played it doesn’t always manage to rise above them and even from a design standpoint it is not that much different from original Baldurs Gate games.

I guess this is more of a lament about the state of the industry right now, but the fact that twenty years of gaming evolution leads to just doing the same types of games again but doesn’t really fill me with that much excitement.

Really seems like they hit a nerve with this game, which seems to be that people want these giant RPGs with tons of quests, choices and companions, but also want them to have actual cutscenes and not just textboxes as far as presentation goes. Probably helps that this is like the first AAA CRPG like this since like Dragon Age: Origins, which came out 14 goddamn years ago. I don’t quite think the overwhelming praise the game has gotten is quite warranted, since it just doesn’t seem inspired to be more than a good DnD campaign, but at that it is really good and manages to be just polished and streamlined to be a hit (even though parts of it feel undercooked and janky, like the map or the inventory system).