It feels like when Fallout 3, 4 and Skyrim came out you couldn’t escape people posting about them for weeks, especially with Skyrim. Now the most I’ve seen are complaints about how disappointing Starfield was.
Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days? On the other hand, I do feel like there was a lot more enthusiasm for other games like Elden Ring, and sometimes you get an Among Us that just completely take over the Internet.
Yeah. Nasapunk is an incredibly generic aesthetic. The factions are all different flavors of liberal so there’s nothing really interesting about them. The constant loading screens break up the exploration people loved in Skyrim and previous games. There’s a dearth of hand-crafted stuff to find. It’s all very bland, generic, and stripped down from prior games. Really embarassing, but Cash Rules Everything Around Me.
I refuse to play games with the illusion of choice when the choices that are offered are all apathy-liberal “improving society somewhat is impossible” interactive sermons.
I don’t need to improve the entire world but I’d like to help people and make things better locally without some smug concescending narrative rails saying “actually that was stupid and wrong and you went against the Witcherino Code, you simpleton.”
The concept of “moral choices” (to use the term games studios usually use) in games has been so underdeveloped for so long. I think the limiting factor comes directly from the people writing the scenarios.
Besides just lib cultural hegemony and capitalist realism, i think the writing is either too informed by other games that it limits the imagination of the kind of choices that tgeir could be, or their idea of good writing is PRRESTIGE-ified to where only to most cynical choices are “good” and “adult.”
Either way the writing is stuck in an very adolescent place. Either a dearth of understanding of things outside games, or a fixation on what is “adult” and “serious.”
I think writing in games overall has gotten better, but theres generally still some limitations, especially when it comes to “choice”
I wholeheartedly agree. Typically, in a lot of TRIPLE AYYY mainstream video games, your choices are “goody two shoes unscratched liberal” or “edgelord scratched liberal” with the implication that killing anyone in a moral dilemma moment (no matter how much killing happens before and after that moment) is immediately an edgelord scratched liberal choice and that status quo maintenance is the goody two shoes choice.
The Bethesda Moral Binary(tm pending). Its in a lot of games, but Bethesda in particular is so bad about that being the entirety of the moral world. Or you can be “neutral” and block yourself out of basically doing anything in the game lol.
Mass Effect Games had their own awful version of those narrowly distinguished choices between acceptable colonialist outcomes, especially in Mass Effect 2 where you must play along with the human supremacist space nazis no matter what.
I played through the whole ME trilogy like three years ago. I like them, but the story is so militaristic/fascist, not even going the “renegade” route or anything just the story no matter your choices. The incredibly lib space government are ineffectual, and only the honorable military men (adults in the room) can cut through the red tape to save the galaxy (by making hard choices).
DAE LE BASED WHEN PUNCHING UPPITY REPORTER… MAYBE TWICE?
Also the space government makes no attempt to even appear democratic. Humanity is the only council species that is nominally democratic, the Turians are literally outright called an empire, and they decide which species get full rights based entirely on arbitrary vibes. Plus they have secret police who are above the law and answer only to them.
The series doesn’t even get to a place where criticisms of bourgeois democracy even apply, thus shit feels like it shouldn’t even appeal to libs. But it does coast so hard on libbrain Defend Existing Power Structures shit
I was still a lib when I played Mass Effect 2 and this still bothered me. I was like… I was shooting these guys on sight in the last game. Where is my shoot these guys on sight option???
I think NASA aesthetic can be super cool if well executed but Bethesda hasn’t been able to pull off a world’s vibes since Morrowind