Mods are a different beast and not representative of the game, devs, or player base. Mods like this often get removed from big modding sites like Nexus, forcing them to be mostly in their own spaces. (There is/was a bg3 mod overhaul that makes every black npc white, some lesbian npcs into men so they are straight couples, the ability to change your gender and lock it to the body types. Etc and so on. But you can’t find it on Nexus. I remember the white Wyll mod but it got removed within 3 days)

It’s another matter entirely when a developer bakes this kind of shit into the game. Not every game has mod support and not everyone mods.

This is why I wish linear/act structures games would make a comeback

They care more about putting a dumb whatever the heck on some random ass mountain with nothing else on it and boring exploration so you can claim your game is “an open world xxx% bigger than Skyrim/red dead redemption/etc”

Red dead is one of the only games I think does open world well because the story was still linear and had acts. You could have just released the prologue and the valentine area as early access and people would have tested everything out and have fun with it. Similar with bg3 and act 1.

The other one is genshin impact actually, but that game is live service and released the world in parts. So each part of the world feels like it has meaningful exploration since there’s more than just a korok on this random ass mountain. There will be at least 5 puzzles, the zones have their own stories, quests, and plot lines, and doing that let’s you explore a good majority of the zone. If you were to speed rush the msq on a lot of these open world games you would only really explore 10% of the world.

The older I get the more I hate these open world games. They feel directionless. In terms of world building the newest (open world) pokemon game was easily the worst. The gym leaders and rival gangs had no agency wnd very little personality and impact because you could “defeat them in any order*” (*not really)

When I saw the Witcher 1 remake was not going to be linear anymore I pretty much lost all interest in it.

Gabe won’t live forever and usually someone new wants to put their vision up, and make their changes and feel special and then bam.

Mess.

Nintendo is famous for never going on sale. Used can be hit or miss, game may not work at all depending on how the store vets it.

Nintendo isnt the only company that never puts their games on sale, just the biggest one. They also don’t reduce the prices of the game after xx years. In fact, when they re-released older games, they priced them the same as newer ones. I really think Nintendo is sleazy and their games are mid-to-bad but everyone loves them so. /shrug

Then, there’s mmos. If you like mmos and care about them, you can’t wait for sales if they price hike. By the time it is on sale, the expansion is nearly over and it can be extremely difficult to nigh impossible to catch up. After all, there’s like 1-2 years of content you need to do. These sales are only to bring new and returning people in. Not to be viable options for anyone that actually plays the mmo endgame.

This is going to be the new price point eventually. Because most people can’t wait and most people aren’t paitent. It does make the game pass more valuable to me, I suppose. Because I can’t really afford $70+ games. Games haven’t really inflated like everything else has but we really just need to raise wages because we are being priced out of affording anything.

What if you like Nintendo games?

Most AAA games are being priced at this now. And since people are buying it, it is going to continue.

Bruh, its the beginning of November, cat is telling you to put that shit away for another month and a half.

I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.

Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going “you’re not SUPPOSED to guy every pack”. Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn’t get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don’t even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don’t do anything without cottage living. And they already didn’t do much WITH it)

The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it’s such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can’t control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn’t have fairies somehow but there’s rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but… you won’t be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.

So, it’s not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one… for that’s about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like “what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?” They barely add anything new.

I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.

But there is no a problem. There’s nothing wrong with him. Makeup “fixes” vitiligo but there’s nothing wrong with it. You should be proud of what you look like.

It doesn’t affect his quality of life or his health, it doesn’t make him deaf or anything that would be fixed by both ears being the same. All it does it make him look like a mutt and disqualifies him from any dogs shows. Which are just superfluous standards that promote actual, debilitating deformities. Look at showdog German shepherds as an example. Poor things can’t even walk because of “aesthetics”. Bulldog and flat faced dog breeds are another famous example. They can’t breathe. They can’t swim. They can’t even reproduce normally.

Your dog isn’t broken. There are no problems. And I’m afraid of any children you may have if you seriously hold views like this.

Because its adorable and there nothing wrong with him. You don’t “fix” this like you don’t “fix” heterochromia or vitiligo.

Creation engine is a double edge sword, on one had, it is super moddable. The mods you can put in for skyrim are insane. You can turn it into a completely different game.

I would say that the game isn’t unpolished because of the engine though. Not in the ways I’m talking about anyway. The quests, dialog, locations, animations are all just a bit off, unpolished, and stiff. None of these really have anything to do with the engine aside maybe animations and locations. And given the eldersouls mods that give very animated combat animations, the combat mods that add wound systems and combos, etc, I don’t think that’s what’s holding them back.

Yes creation engine is old, but I dont think it’s what makes the game feel unpolished for me.

Starfield is the classic Bethesda experience but the hype around it implied it wouldn’t be. The classic Bethesda experience is fine, it’s a good base of a nice, free-form game that lacks polish. They are also games that need at least a few mods to actually be good. Vanilla Skyrim, etc sucks after you start modding it. Even if all you download is an end, a weather, the unofficial patch, and the better dialog and message box controls mods. Playing starfield I was immediately like “where is better dialog and message box controls?”

The game has potential but a thing that bothers me is landing on a planet and it says I explored 90% of it before I even exited the ship. I went to earth and there was no evidence of there ever being life and major cities. No ruined homes, no cities, no like… Mt Rushmore head that broke off and found where it isn’t supposed to be, no statue of liberty torch. Nothing. They could have crafted a really cool ruined earth and instead it was just… sand and rocks. What do you think is behind that rock? Another rock. And when it comes to Earth, you don’t need to have everything be where it needs to. The tip of a pyramid in Egypt makes sense but I see nothing wrong with finding the broken Washington monument in the middle of what was the Atlantic ocean. Or the broken big Ben in the middle of what was Japan. If any planet should have gotten randomly generated assets of ruins or even just manually crafted, it should have been Earth.

Most planets are empty and give you almost no reason to explore them. The game is about exploring planets, but playing this game makes me want to play Starbound instead.

I also don’t know why everyone compares it to Skyrim when I feel like I’m playing Fallout 4 instead of Skyrim. Skyrim would have been an improvement, I wasn’t a fan of FO4.