Like seriously, let’s look at this: in Mass Effect the player is a high-profile military careerist who’s about to become space James Bond complete with the license to kill, starts hallucinating weird portents of doom after finding an inscrutable alien relic, gets their legal murder license, follows their hallucinations to find more weird alien shit, has to chose which of their crewmates dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with revelations about what’s going on and an elaborate multi-stage boss fight.
In Starfield the player is just some random asshole who’s decided to take up space mining for no clear reason, hallucinates something cool and neat after being told to grab the weird thing by their chortling coworkers, gets to join a country club of amateur astronomers who think those weird artifacts are kind of neat, goes on an adventure to look for more sort of neat artifacts and hallucinate some more, has to chose which of their fellow country club members dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with the revelation that everything going on is fucking stupid and pointless and there’s an elaborate multi-stage boss fight that’s buggy as absolute fuck.
Meanwhile the aesthetics are just Mass Effect blandness taken to a whole new level of blandless. If Mass Effect was oversanitized corporate slop Starfield has been further boiled into a completely flavorless mush. Same for the overall plot: Mass Effect had a generic eldritch horror plot that pivoted from being a climate change allegory to just being “so yeah turns out the eldritch robots are just really stupid, like absolute buffoons, and their whole mission is literal nonsense and even they know it but because they’re just big dummies they don’t know how to stop doing galactic genocide, whoopsy!” thanks to corporate meddling, but Starfield skips the pivot and goes straight to the vapid “so yeah it’s all just meaningless accumulation of pointless nothing, nothing’s going on here and there’s nothing at stake at all, just lobotomize yourself and join the race to accumulate meaningless accolades!” which uh, framed like that actually reads like a call for help from the writers.
Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed with every open world game that I’ve tried in the past decade. Had a friend get me to try Horizon Zero Dawn a couple years ago after talking it up for a long time and I was sort of enjoying it until I realized it’s just Far Cry with robot dinosaurs, I read the Wikipedia article to get the rest of the plot.
Disco Elysium also lays bare just how dogshit all other video game writing is.
I don’t think anything holds up to that standard unless you go all the way back to the original planescape. Even then, disco is better.
Its sad because Horizon could have been so much more. But no you’re not old and crotchety most modern open world games after far cry 3 suck
I felt the same. I thought the world building and the robot dinosaur miniboss stuff was neat but then I climbed a tower to reveal a new map segment and went “…Ah” and haven’t played it since. Seems like a neat setting but I’m really tired of that kind of design.
Really enjoyed Dave the Diver recently though.
assassins creed and far cry really just shoehorned that into everything. at least in assassins creed it felt sensible because youre a weird dude in an alien sissy hypno machine that turns you into a greek girl that can jump off skyscrapers and be fine
No HZD is just an incredibly mediocre game
Kenshi is pretty cool