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You keep asking this in this thread. What answer do you want? The game has a shitload of content in it. I’m 35ish hours in and I have so many random quests and things to do. I’ve spent hours wandering around planets. Around cities. In space stations. Scanning things, reading stuff.
It’s completely fine if what the game has to offer doesn’t appeal to you, but if you truly cannot comprehend how anyone could enjoy it, then I’m afraid you just don’t have much perspective.
This is, objectively speaking, a large scale open world game with hundreds of hours of content. It should be self evident that what it has to offer will appeal to some and not to others. How can you think that because it doesn’t appeal to you, it shouldn’t appeal to anyone? That makes no sense.
Somewhere in the vast chasm between “these are the best gameplay element ever conceived” and “this crap cannot be enjoyable with these left in” lies the actual description of their impact for a normal person.
They are perhaps marginally tedious. It bothered one modder enough that he modded them out with a mod that has about 7600 unique downloads. It bothered millions of others so little that they…just played the game anyway.
It’s the same shit across every industry. Successful company goes public, investors demand yearly double digit growth, and after a few years they are imploding.
Investors do not care about the future, sustainability, or anything except immediate profitability. What you described is exactly what happens, in gaming and everywhere else. It sucks.
Nonetheless, it didn’t really feel finished, y’know? That part wore on me, and I think is what undermined my enjoyment the most. It really was released too early.
The performance issues seem to be what every article and blog post focuses on because it’s the easy thing to talk about, but I think this right here is what the actual biggest issue was and the real reason people shat on the game.
I didn’t hate it by any means. And I, like you, ran it without issue. I just sort of lost interest because it was janky and super unpolished. Like I was playing an early access game. It wasn’t big bugs as in the game breaking and not running. It was just lots of little annoyance that felt unfinished or half conceived, or like they didn’t undergo full play testing.
The massive performance issues experienced by some just compounded those issues that existed even when it did run perfectly well.
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
- It was straight up broken for many console players.
- Some PC players had performance issues.
- For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
- Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
- I’m not sure why I should care whether the engine is outdated or not
- I keep hearing this but it runs fine on my mid tier rig
- Writing quality is subjective. It’s good enough for me so far
- These feel like a Bethesda calling card at this point, they have a quirky charm to me
- This is EASILY the least buggy Bethesda game I can recall
- Why should this bother me? It’s running fine for me without it.
None of those add up to “shit game”, in my mind.
I’ve played the switch more hours than I think any previous console. For all its flaws the switch is home to so many quality Nintendo experiences at this point that if someone finds that this is the generation that they’ve tired of Nintendo then it’s possible they simply don’t like Nintendo style games anymore.
Mario Party indeed was a pile of shit. But there are so many incredible games.
I don’t think I could pin down a universal number. I really enjoy when a game understands the staying power of its gameplay loop and finishes up before it gets stale.
I’ve got 180 hours into TotK and I’m not sick of it yet because I discover something new every time I play.
Conversely I 100%-ed Dredge in 20 hours and that felt like the exact right amount of time. Any longer and I’d have been sick of it.
Or we can go even lower with something like Untitled Goose Game, which was under 10 hours and also finished up just as it got old.
So yeah. I’m all about the self awareness of a game with regards to the experience. Whatever amount of time that takes is cool with me.
I’m late to the party, but just wanted to say that your list of purchases and recommended to purchase are just monumental lists of games. So many amazing choices.
I want to add two more if you have room.
Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2. They won’t get you as much in the way of epic set pieces, but they are dripping with charm and very well crafted games with some of the most interesting levels I’ve seen.
I don’t care about Bethesda. As I said I didn’t even buy or play this game. Sorry about the wording.
I just feel like it’s asinine to say things like “is this the best they can do?” when literally no company puts out their best. And it’s asinine to say things like “but they own id software” when id isn’t the developer making this game. And it’s asinine to expect a company whose games have made gobs of money and sold tens of millions of copies not being a graphical showcase having above average graphics, because why would they suddenly spend time and effort on something they haven’t had to do before and still had success?
Focusing on wording is nitpicking. I’m quite sure you understood my point.
No it is not the best they can do. I haven’t played starfield yet, but it should be obvious that no company with shareholders to whom they need to answer is ever going to do “the best they can do”.
That isn’t even their target, at least not overall. Their target is maximum profitability. Putting forth maximum effort for the best graphics is not going to result in max profits, so they were never going to do that.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that graphical showcases just aren’t what Bethesda does in the first place. No one should have expected that. This isn’t an id game.
Yes, it stands alone fairly well. There is a LOT of subtle fan service in the form of tiny references or call backs to things so I think it’s a deeper experience having played the original, but it’s by no means necessary. I think you could easily get away with watching a story recap of the original.
It’s not treading new ground from a genre standpoint.
But the combat is a style that isn’t really very common in open world games, and the commenter you are replying to specifically was talking about the story, characters, and world building…all three of which set Horizon apart from other games, IMO.
I think what confuses me most is that the majority of posts knocking TotK say things like “it’s exactly the same as BotW” or say it’s using the “exact same map”.
Having poured over 100 hours into each I just don’t understand this take. It’s objectively untrue. Yes, the core topical map is largely the same, but the content of it is extremely different. Having put so much time into BotW I’ve been very surprised at how few things are the same and like you have enjoyed seeing what has changed and where.
And that is to say nothing of the sky or the depths. The sky is somewhat limited but has such a sense of verticality and focus on flight that BotW didn’t have. The depths are gargantuan and chock full of things to explore, including some fun ties to the upper world if you can find them.
I’ve also found the enemies to be more varied, and more difficult to defeat across the board. This has been a fun challenge for me as well.
So yeah. I don’t know. It’s just a much, much larger game. If people simply don’t like it, or played BotW too recently for the core mechanics to feel fresh, then I kinda get it. Similarly if you are more into discovering more and more map and don’t care what’s in the map, then I can see how it could be a bit boring also. And overall maybe the open world style just isn’t for you. Fair.
But I don’t understand the criticisms I see most often about limited new content vs BotW because that is just very untrue.
My argument would be that one doesn’t transcend over the other. It’s probably obvious but I also think numbered review scores are inherently flawed, because the metric is subjective and meaningless.
I much prefer a tiers system. These are both top tier games. Anyone can agree they are of exemplary quality and represent some of the best their genre has to offer. Any argument beyond that very quickly devolves into squabbles over subjective preference and that is a bit pointless to me.
As an example, a few of my favorite games of all time are Earthbound, Half-Life, Super Mario World, Metroid Prime, and Skyrim. I would rank all 5 of these games in my top tier. But what point is there in trying to rank them amongst each other? They have nothing to do with one another, so I have no meaningful way to compare them. If I use numbering, would I rank Earthbound a 9.7 and Metroid Prime a 9.5 and that means Earthbound is a better game? 2 tenths better? What does that even mean? I just don’t find value in that kind of arbitrary comparison.
My daughter just turned 6!
She loves watching, in no particular order:
- Horizon Zero Dawn (when I let her)
- Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart (rivet is a strong female co-lead)
- Bugsnax (lots of characters of various genders)
- Tears of the Kingdom (Zelda is her favorite)
- Metroid (she’s watched Prime Remastered and Dread and loves that Samus is a girl)
- Mario Kart 8 (so she can be peach or Rosalina)
- Kena Bridge of Spirits
She also likes playing Pokemon and Drawn to Life now that she can read.
To directly answer your question, no. They really aren’t all that similar. I mean, they share the same “Mario” DNA. But being that one is in 3D and is a rather large hub/spoke world design while the other is a 2D linear stage based experience, they are dissimilar gameplay wise.
I would really urge you to try Super Mario World in particular though. This game is damn near perfect and holds up incredibly well today. It’s just an amazing achievement and a must play title for everyone who enjoys games.
SEO centric content farms are a cancer on the internet and on information in general. We have the capability of democratically crowd sourcing the absolute best quality information out there, and make it available to anyone in the blink of an eye.
Instead we have an army of bots lazily rehashing half-content found on forums and reposting it as misconstrued fact, while battling with other bots for the top third of google’s increasingly godforsaken, ad-ridden search results page. All so us poor sods can be interested in something, search for it, and be consistently disappointed in the results we get back while our data is sold to people who will actively work to make the situation worse.
It’s truly a sad thing to behold.
Even the way the cars moved in this video looked…floaty. These ultra photorealistic graphics are really cool but I think you nailed it talking about facial expressions, mechanics, and I would add animations in general. It will be even more jarring when everything looks so real.