CALIGVLA
NON·SERVIAM
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bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
No, Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator, engine has never had anything to do with it, it never has. They don’t need a complex RPG system with a ton of flashy new things; New Vegas wasn’t complex, it was fairly streamlined as far as RPGs go, what they need is better writers and better game designers that know how make interesting worlds, quests, characters and gameplay mechanics.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
Because they’ve been dumbing down their games since forever, bring back more robust roleplay with more actions and consequences, fully fleshed out mechanics, get better writers. Just look at Fallout: London, despite the bugs everyone that has played it agrees it’s the best “Bethesda game” since New Vegas, another game that wasn’t actually made by Bethesda. I’ll repeat: the problem was never the engine.
then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games
Obviously. The problem with Bethesda was never the damn engine, they’ve been consecutively dumbing down their games ever since Oblivion. The only anomaly was New Vegas made by Obsidian, which are actually competent at making RPGs and even with the dated FO3 engine at the time they managed to make one of the best games ever. The problem was never the engine, it’s their game design philosophy.
I probably would’ve already gotten it if wasn’t early access, the possibility of having to restart a game that requires a lot of time commitment is a deal breaker for me, so I’d rather wait until it’s finished. On another note, I’m kind of tired of so many Stardew Valley clones, I wish there were more games like Rune Factory instead with less farming and more RPG and dungeon crawling. I think the only one like that that comes to mind is Sun Haven(?) and that one has been in my backlog since forever now…
There’s this concept in game design called game flow, which in simple terms is essentially what happens when a game is both engaging and challenging at just the right amounts to the point where you get immersed in the experience. You can’t have good flow without both some challenge and reward.
That’s why games that are too simple and/or easy are boring. I feel like that’s a very fine line you have to walk if you want to make a “cozy” game. How relaxing is relaxing enough without being boring? You need a minimum of challenge and stakes, because that’s makes good games good.
This is less a sign of “the devs don’t trust the player” and more just plain out bad game design. Maybe the game itself is very obvious (I don’t know, i haven’t played nor do I intend to), but this kind of thing is usually done when the game is obtuse and the developer wants a quickfix instead of actually reworking the entire thing. Then again, if your game is for little children and they can’t figure out how to play it, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with it and maybe you should go back to the drawing board.
You don’t even need to go that deep, just have a quick look at literally any Chinese game on Steam and you’ll notice the vast majority of players are also Chinese. Many times I was like “Oh, why does this game I’ve never heard about has over 10,000 positive reviews on Steam? Oh, game’s Chinese and so are basically all the reviews”, seems to be a trend with these games.
I have many of these colony sims sitting on my Steam wishlist, some from many years ago, but ever since Dwarf Fortress got that graphical rework and launched on Steam they mostly lost their purpose for me. They always felt like “Dwarf Fortress at home” with the advantage being that they had better graphics and were easier to get into than DF, now that’s not case anymore, at least for me, and I really struggle with reasons to ever play some of these instead of DF.
Must suck being one of these devs that wanted to make their own more accessible version of Dwarf Fortress, then a few years later Tarn and Zach announce the update, and now you not only have to contend for attention with RimWorld but also Dwarf Fortress on Steam.
And you’re not supporting a godawful abusive company such as Nintendo.