There’s ways to make places feel barren, open, unexplored and still be interesting. I’ve played several games that had sections that were essentially “empty” but still hand designed to be interesting. We don’t need 1000 planets, we need good content.
One of the primary reasons people like Bethesda games is that they give players a large world to explore that’s jam-packed with interesting things to see a do. If Bethesda abandons that and admits that majority of the content they expect players to interact with is going to be boring, procedurally-generated, then why should people play Starfield?
Bethesda isn’t known for deep, complex stories. Their best writing is traditionally their side content with main stories panned. Their combat is pretty basic, but functional. Their RP is pretty sad and NPCs could be a lot better, especially these days. So it seems Bethesda has given away their biggest plus: an interesting world to explore.
If you’re a 3.5/pf1e player, I’m sure you can imagine how high level spells can get really complicated to program in a game engine. And more importantly, how impossible to balance for them it can be. BG3 does a decent job of adapting spells to not be annoying or broken to use in a video game, but some high level 5e spells are way more ridiculous and open ended.
5e at high level sucks because WOTC didn’t bother to actually test any of it. They admitted they didn’t test past level 10 and their inclusion of magic items is so bad that the recommendations for how many to include show the devs are terrified of them; you get so very few by official recommendations.
Save or Suck spells make higher level 5e (and 5e in general) a huge PITA to plan encounters for when players can just get lucky and end things outright. Magic items don’t have a power level listing, just a rarity doing double duty that is wildly inaccurate. Class balance is shit: martials are boring. All they do is swing the weapon most of the time and very few class abilities really alleviate that. Spellcasters are so vastly more powerful and fun that multiclassing is way more popular than it should be.
Monsters in 5e are boring. Most of them are just bags of hit points that swing. Very few have bonus actions or reactions and the ones that do are often just “parry: increase AC once”. They came out with gem dragons 2yr ago and they gave them all the SAME bonus actions: shapeshift and misty step. It’s like they don’t even bother to try, which is evident in recent releases.
/rant. But seriously, I love high level D&D. You can really raise the stakes. I’m DMing a level 12 5e campaign now and my primary way to make encounters interesting is two-fold: firstly is 3rd party content to get monsters that are actually interesting. Secondly I create objectives that aren’t just “murder monster”. I just had a bunch of literal street children hit my party with a net trap and arrow that makes them drop their items that said children tried to steal and run away with. 2 got away but they were able to find the hideout and defeat the boss. Actual stakes besides just getting killed.
This is stealing directly from artists
This is factually untrue. Artists have already been paid for their work and have possibly already been let go. (in many big gaming companies majority of the dev teams are let go on release, they operate on a hire-and-fire cycle) Artists pretty much never have a stake in the company or profit sharing. So there’s no real way the # of copies sold has any bearing on their income.
At worst this is Bethesda having 150 copies stolen. Not even tiny devs would blink at that as they get copies stolen through places like G2A constantly. A huge company like Bethesda is worried more about early copies breaking embargo date that shows bad or buggy gameplay, negatively harming sales. Which, TBH, I am 100% not sympathetic towards. Review embargos any more restrictive than a week prior to launch is just trying to hide something.
Dark Souls 1. It’s tutorial is decent for controls but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It doesn’t explain rolling, weight and stats are only in level up screen, at least for prompting. So many things about the game you need to know that they leave to expensive trial and error.
I like The Backlogs’ video on it. It’s a flawed masterpiece.
I think BG3 is riding on the D&D brand and marketing campaign
With how much they adapted 5e’s rules for a video game (thankfully, 5e can be jank) I’d wager it’s more to do with them riding on the Forgotten Realms setting. It’s hugely popular (see: BG 1-2, dozens of books, most popular D&D setting through the last few editions) so it helps drive interest that there’s a competent game that is both faithful to the lore and excels at storytelling.
For instance I really liked a tiny scrap of paper dealing with the Mines of Phandelver hundreds of years ago. That’s a bit of flavor from the 5e Red Box. Tons of stuff like that calling back to adventures and books in the series.
I don’t really get this argument. Titillation occasionally is nice. Similar to prestige shows. But if it was soft-core all the time or too much, people would lose interest in the plot.
That and there’s quite a few decent porn games now. Ones that look better in the…dongles than BG3 does. Ones with decent stories. If people want interactive porn, it’s there already. And oftentimes cheap or free.
Food prices have skyrocketed and people still go out to eat. What you are proposing is austerity. People denying themselves things because of price point preference and principals will generally not work because people like having things, like having fun, etc. All it does it ensure companies can squeeze people that have very limited time for their limited cash.
I guess there’s an argument that boring space exploration has an audience. I just didn’t think that overlapped much with Bethesda’s audience.