I was thinking the other day that none of Bethesda’s games are actually entirely good. They can be fun, but they’re also all kind of bad. Fun and good are two different measurements.
Like, they all have a bad system of tracking health and damage. In like all of them, from Morrowind to fallout4, you get the situation where you hit a naked bandit square in the face with a sledgehammer and he doesn’t really react. He’s level 30 and you’re level 10, so it doesn’t count.
They all do stealth kind of badly. Kill a dude, his buddy yells and then a minute later goes back to idly standing there over the corpse. It’s been more than 20 years and there’s been like no innovation from Bethesda on this.
The engine they’ve been using is bad. It feels like 2002. Can’t climb over waist high barriers. Projectiles get stuck on invisible walls because the textures and hit boxes don’t align. Can’t dodge or lean or even really duck. Lots of loading transitions, still. Also fuck off with these hacking and lockpicking mini games. Either make it a player skill check or a character skill check. Both is the worst.
I want a different company to make a fallout game. Larian I’m sure would knock it out of the park. Rockstar would probably make something more “cinematic” than my taste but undeniably good. Even Ubisoft would probably make a solid wasteland to explore. (Yes yes, everyone likes to make fun of Ubisoft and the map full of markers. But be honest: that’s what a lot of fallout3 and 4 are. Going to map markers to collect duct tape. Except when you actually get there in a Bethesda game, the movement and combat sucks)
Bethesda’s engine is wild because while it’s absolutely horrible in some places, it’s unparalleled in others. Item persistence is something they do better than anyone. Go into a house in Skyrim and drop 300 wheels of cheese then fuck off and go do something else. Come back and those 300 wheels of cheese will still be there, exactly where you left them. Now realize it’s doing that for EVERY item in the game. That’s crazy.
On the other hand, you can’t climb ladders because their engine doesn’t know how to handle that.
That is cool, yeah. I had all my neat-but-heavy equipment on display in the fighter’s guild in Morrowind, and they never disappeared.
Though I think Larian’s games can also do that. Speaking somewhat naively because I’ve never worked on video games, it doesn’t sound that hard to persist the state of items in a region if you’re already loading a bunch of stuff.
It also highlights a bit of bethesda jank- an NPC will have a totally sincere, heartfelt, conversation with you while surrounded by 300 wheels of cheese, and not remark upon the cheese at all. To be fair, I don’t think anyone else has NPCs that react to the environment believably, either.
that’s true with an asterisk, the cheese wheels may well clip into something and detonate, scattering cheese wheels everywhere and killing everyone in line of sight
I was thinking the other day that none of Bethesda’s games are actually entirely good. They can be fun, but they’re also all kind of bad. Fun and good are two different measurements.
Like, they all have a bad system of tracking health and damage. In like all of them, from Morrowind to fallout4, you get the situation where you hit a naked bandit square in the face with a sledgehammer and he doesn’t really react. He’s level 30 and you’re level 10, so it doesn’t count.
They all do stealth kind of badly. Kill a dude, his buddy yells and then a minute later goes back to idly standing there over the corpse. It’s been more than 20 years and there’s been like no innovation from Bethesda on this.
The engine they’ve been using is bad. It feels like 2002. Can’t climb over waist high barriers. Projectiles get stuck on invisible walls because the textures and hit boxes don’t align. Can’t dodge or lean or even really duck. Lots of loading transitions, still. Also fuck off with these hacking and lockpicking mini games. Either make it a player skill check or a character skill check. Both is the worst.
I want a different company to make a fallout game. Larian I’m sure would knock it out of the park. Rockstar would probably make something more “cinematic” than my taste but undeniably good. Even Ubisoft would probably make a solid wasteland to explore. (Yes yes, everyone likes to make fun of Ubisoft and the map full of markers. But be honest: that’s what a lot of fallout3 and 4 are. Going to map markers to collect duct tape. Except when you actually get there in a Bethesda game, the movement and combat sucks)
Bethesda’s engine is wild because while it’s absolutely horrible in some places, it’s unparalleled in others. Item persistence is something they do better than anyone. Go into a house in Skyrim and drop 300 wheels of cheese then fuck off and go do something else. Come back and those 300 wheels of cheese will still be there, exactly where you left them. Now realize it’s doing that for EVERY item in the game. That’s crazy.
On the other hand, you can’t climb ladders because their engine doesn’t know how to handle that.
That is cool, yeah. I had all my neat-but-heavy equipment on display in the fighter’s guild in Morrowind, and they never disappeared.
Though I think Larian’s games can also do that. Speaking somewhat naively because I’ve never worked on video games, it doesn’t sound that hard to persist the state of items in a region if you’re already loading a bunch of stuff.
It also highlights a bit of bethesda jank- an NPC will have a totally sincere, heartfelt, conversation with you while surrounded by 300 wheels of cheese, and not remark upon the cheese at all. To be fair, I don’t think anyone else has NPCs that react to the environment believably, either.
that’s true with an asterisk, the cheese wheels may well clip into something and detonate, scattering cheese wheels everywhere and killing everyone in line of sight