I can’t get a handle on the gameplay. It is kind of broken in turn based mode, which is a shame because I’m not good at real time tactics mode.

I’ve only gotten through like half the game, and that was after a lot of struggle.

Designing coherent spaces is useful for game world designers to think about, but it could have been 5 minutes long and gotten the point across.

The atmosphere, taken moment to moment, or at individual locations was good. The coherency of the explanations behind a lot of things and the coherency of the world as a whole was pretty disjointed.

Both games do environmental storytelling, but with vastly different goals.

Obsidian approach is very constantly supporting a consistent tone and overarching setting. It is more desolate and feels more desolate because that’s what a lot of these in-between little areas are supposed to be. But the details in each area that are there so tell a story about what the area is like and how it function, they give a history to what you are seeing but it often isn’t over the top and full of little cute mini-stories you can follow. It isn’t bad storytelling, it’s telling a story you’re not into.

The Bethesda approach is often much more varied. Each settlement or location can have all these environmental stories, often will little miniature running plots. The variety extends to tone, and type of story. This does come at the expense of some coherence if you step back and start putting a critical eye to everything as a whole.

They are trying to give players different experiences. FNV a player can travel through a bleak desert, maybe only with hostile encounters as the Jungle Jangle radio plays until they finally hit a settlement and it feels like an actual refuge from the sun and rad scorpions to the player. The desolation builds that. Fallout 3 and especially 4 don’t want the player getting bored, so there is something interesting and different every ten feet to check out.

I suppose it says a lot about me that my Fallout 4 modlist turns the world into an extremely dangerous, ghoul filled place with dark nights, and rad storms. All of which makes travel on the overworld terrifying, and settlements feel extra secure in contrast.

I have a lot of left over hobby kit bits that I pick from. I also buy cheap toys from the dollar store. The Final Faction brand of dollar store toys has been a goldmine, the gun on this car is from that line. I make many other parts out of plasticard sheet and tubes, along with random items like the insides of discarded electronics.

Oh as a consumer I, personally, am not touching this thing with a ten foot pole.

I think the people who do continue to fund this thing are sucked in by the dream of what it could be and have developed a kind of personal ownership of the project in their heads. They are psychologically invested in seeing it succeed and you can’t convince them it’s never going to. And the developers are cynically sucking money out of them like cult leaders.

Well, you’re shifting from a fan POV to a developer POV here.

From the developer POV, it’s not wasted time. They are getting a constant stream of money. As long as they can tread water and make their motion look like progress they have an endless source of income.

Its supporters bounce between “It’s already out!” and “Developing such a huge game takes time.” depending on which stance is more convenient in an argument.

I dunno, seems incredibly competent to me.

It’s a different kind of beast.

NMS released. They put it in a box and said “This is the finished game”. It was then torn to shreds and the long road of updates was a redemption story for an already released product.

Star Citizen will NEVER be done. It will always exist in some weird development alpha-beta limbo. It’s never going to go on Steam or shelves as a finished product. This allows the developers cover to always say the game is in development as a shield against any and all criticism. From their perspective it’s kind of perfect. Fans throw money at it endlessly and the development never really needs to reach a coherent state of being finished. Why would they ever want to actually release a finished game?

The most recently purchased game that I beat (aside from multiplayer only stuff like Deep Rock Galactic) would be Black Mesa. Motivation to see the overhaul of xen at the end of the game really kept me going.

I recently beat Fallout 1 again, but I was using a high intelligence, high luck gambing critical hit sniper so it was more like an experiment to break the game. I’m in the middle of a 1 intelligence playthrough and its challenging but becoming a bit routine now that I’ve overcome early hurdles.

There are decades worth of great games already out. People should be open to trying out older games, even if it means slight hurdles in downloading compatibility mods or patches.

Part of why I like Deep Rock Galactic is that the traversal and objectives still require a constant level of critical thinking, even if it’s usually pretty simple. There is more going on than twitch reflex shooting. The guns feel good and the fact that it’s crowd control means you usually aren’t snap shooting but thinking about how to best control the enemies.

They have very different approaches to designing worlds. Fallout 3 and 4 have much more tangential and almost self contained wackiness going on that can be tonally all over the place, and FNV tends to be built all in support of a single tone and while it has wacky elements a bit more grounded.

Different approaches. What this means for me is that while I find the Fallout 4 main quest incredibly poorly written, I can largely ignore it because there are so many unrelated tangent stories that I do like a lot, and locations to explore in a kind of themepark of a game world. Whereas FNV doesn’t quite have that themepark level of variety as it is building a world that’s trying to be immersive in support of the main story.

Grey? I supposed Fallout 3 is very dingy, but Fallout 4 is very colorful. In fact I personally find it too colorful and end up making more depressing with mods.

The game is kind of a chore at first when you have to manually water your crops. Once you’re more established and have sprinklers you can really put a lot of the farming on autopilot.

Is Hong Kong supposed to be played last?

I’ve played Kenshi quite a lot. I enjoyed it and might replay again, though I’m kind of after something a little more structured. Kenshi is a great “forever game” to play in small spurts though.

That’s somewhat on my radar. I have constantly debated trying it out.

Classic Fallout-likes are more in the CRPG vein. Overhead view, turn based combat, dialog heavy, multiple solutions to things.

I dig Borderlands, but it’s a straight up lootershooter.