I would be nice if game companies could just keep expectations reasonable, or at least within the ballpark of rationality. I want to sympathize with developers, knowing that it's really hard to make anything, let alone something good, but I often find it hard to place the blame for unrealistic expectations on the audience. Game companies frequently make loud, public announcements about all the features they're going to implement, show off carefully orchestrated demos that purport to show "real gameplay", make explicit promises about this or that, and then they get to release and go "Oops, we only did like a third of the shit we were talking about. Sorry, we, the industry experts with decades of experience, couldn't have foreseen how difficult it would be to make a video game."
The sad part is that, a lot of the time, the game itself is fine, and the problem lies almost entirely with the difference between what was promised and what got delivered. Just promise less! I'm not convinced that the hype of overpromising translates to better sales. Bad games with hype still do poorly. Good games with no marketing at all still do well.
Promising less won't stop gamers from complaining, but at least they won't be right.
I feel the same way. It is why I fully embrace jank in all its forms. Spider is one of my favorite studios for this very reason. An entire studio basically hardcore dedicated to making AA attempts at recreating the early 2000's bioware magic on a budget. ELEX, Gothic, Eurojank... insert the 1984 quote about the proles. Although eurojank became slavjank, and now eastern europe is relatively established. I think with the big slate of games China has on the horizon, and building on successes such as "Sword and Fairy", that Chinajank might be the next thing for people who enjoy games from yet-to-be established sectors of the industry.
SAME, but I have a feeling anyone who wants that has played them. I know for a fact Arcanum is on their list.
any city to any city travel
Funny as fuck now that the restricted travel is considered one of the defining(positive) features of Morrowind.
I've played and completed every mainline Elder Scrolls game from ES1: Arena onward.
Daggerfall, even in its final Bethesda-published build, was a fucking mess.
Fan mods have somewhat improved it, especially restoring the vertical topography on the maps so they actually look like a region with hills and mountains and valleys instead of an undifferentiated blob of averaged-out terrain. Modern
would foam about there being loading screens because of the holy sanctity (and drastic creative limitations thereof) of no-loading-screen dogma, too.Still, the non-story dungeons (and the story dungeons too to some extent) were janky and bloated and full of repeated assets. And many of the "go anywhere do anything" options were puddle-deep and were just a few lines of text apart from each other. Knightly orders in each region come to mind. It sounds cool on paper that the knights of the Order of the Lamp were associated with the Mages Guild, but in practice not much distinguished them apart from the Order of the Dragon or for that matter any of the other knightly orders.
Still, the game had its strengths over Morrowind too. I hate the
cliche of "comparing apples to oranges" but if I was forced to use it, it would be when talking about ESII vs ESIII.
