SAILERIUS'S PROFILE

I hope they announce a patch that makes it fun.

author=Liberty
Saw the new Fallout 4 trailer. I quite liked what I saw. People are already complaining about the graphics - go figure. People are too invested in graphics over gameplay. I don't want to see the beads of sweat on my characters' chin. I just want a game where I can tell what is what and that plays well with a lot of cool content and interesting story.

They're complaining about the graphics for good reason: it looks worse than most decent indie games do nowadays. But the real issue is that it made it clear that they're still using the exact same buggy, broken engine that they've been using since Morrowind. It's an ancient pile of hacks that has made their games increasingly unstable and poses significant limitations on the kinds of content and stories they can author due to needing to work around its massive bugs and hacks.

After Skyrim made boatloads of cash, they're still phoning it in and delivering the same broken garbage they always have because they know their fans will eat it up. After the huge windfall they got from Skyrim, there's no excuse for them to not reinvest it into their games and produce something better than merely par.

Worse still, the fact that they went to all the effort of porting this engine over to the new generation of consoles means that a new engine probably isn't even in the cards for them, so you can be confident we'll see them use it for TES6, too.

I am also strongly against allowing you to rate games without leaving a review. It makes games extremely susceptible to temporary waves of drama. For instance, you can guarantee that any time a polarizing game wins a spotlight or the Misaos that it'll get a wave of negative scores.


For that reason, I'm also against "this review is helpful Y/N" as a feature because it tends to be used as "I agree with this" instead, which basically amounts to the above happening.

Three months later:

"So I caved and closed my tumblr account..."

author=kentona

author=Sailerius

When exploring, say, a cave, a player has to weigh the risk of missing something vs the risk of dying. Without the risk of dying, they only then fear missing something, which means that they will tediously explore every nook and cranny with no real tension (just potential frustration). But I suppose that if your only goal is to get them to explore, then yeah, opt for the risk-free tedium.

If you have lots of pointless nooks and crannies that would be tedious to explore, then your first manner of business should be removing them.

Then you are just treating the symptom of your underlying choice of tedium. "Make it less tedious" is something worth pursuing, mind (ie- you've reduced the risk of dying to 0, thus reducing reducing the resultant tedium becomes your focus, to the point where you just give players reward for no effort). But then, suddenly, exploration is no longer part of the game. Just do a better job of balancing risk/reward in the first place instead of just dropping risk to 0 across the board. If the rewards are good enough and evident enough, people will explore to get them.

The games with the best exploration (the Myst series) had zero risk whatsoever and there was never any tedium whatsoever in exploring. Everything you could find was interesting and beautiful, so looking around was one of the main allures of the games. The supposed choice between risk and tedium is a false dichotomy. It posits that any game that has no risk is necessarily tedious, which is the opposite of true. In fact, some of the games I've played that had no risk involved in the gameplay whatsoever were some of the only games I've ever seen with no tedium to them.

A game is tedious if you have meaningless, tedious content. If you don't want it to be tedious, don't put it in.