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Even beyond the smash hits, 2023 was one of the best years ever for RPGs
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this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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While there are a ton of articles like this, most of which are low-effort, click-bait garbage, this at least makes a more compelling case by limitting it to RPGs. Maybe I'm just uninformed since I don't generally like RPGs, but it seems like there have been a lot more quality RPGs released this year (esspecially in the "double A" budget class), and the two triple A releases both actually felt like a notable step forward (BG3 in design and content, Starfield in tech).
Starfield did nothing to advance tech
It begs the question, did anyone at Bethesda see No Man's Sky?
Uh how did starfield advance techn in a big way? Pls do elaborate on that one, cause i didnt see it
More just that Bethesda is the biggest maker of Triple A RPGs and they're finally updating the creation engine in a significant way. That said, to my knowledge, its still one of the more technically advanced RPGs (even if it doesn't do much with that tech) and could hopefully at least work as a proof of concept to more ambitious developers.
so technologically advanced it didn't have DSLR until a month in
Sorry, but Starfield is built on the spit and glue that is creation engine and it shows painfully
So basically, priority on gloss and glitter filters and complaining about it because they implemented it, just too late.
This ... is where you place your criteria ... out of the mountain of issues you could have brought out ...
It's a simple basic feature of modern games that's easy to point out to the layman as a blatantly missing on launch feature
Not every argument requires avoiding the low hanging fruit
So Lethal Company doesn't have it so it sucks? Bad logic is bad, in doesn't even need to be a feature for half the games listed in the PC Gamer article this post is about ... But you do your "basic features".
My point wasn't that it was well made. It was that Bethesda is at least trying to update and expand their tech far beyond what they've been willing to commit to in the past. Compare the difference between their older games vs Fallout 76 vs Starfield. A lot more is clearly re-written and updated rather than just tacked on unlike their previous "updates". The widespread use of procedural level generation, for example - something that wouldn't have been possible before regardless of the amount of duct tape. To my knowledge, no one else is currently putting that much effort into trying new mechanics and tech in RPGs, and certainly not with a triple A budget. I guess you have something like Mount and Blade: Bannerlord, which is using their tech improvements to significantly increase scale and complexity of their battles, but thats a very different type of game, and I can't think of anything else that is using newer tech to add to gameplay.
Oh you're trolling, gotcha
Or maybe you are just toxic, given that he made it quite clear where he was parting from in his original comment.
Well, give me an example then. I acknowledge I don't play many RPGs, so maybe I am missing something obvious, but I have seen almost no innovation in big RPGs esspecially when it comes to integrating it with gameplay. All the examples that come to mind are more at the edge of what is considered part of the genre, like Mount and Blade, or RDR2.
Creation Engine is a great engine for Bethesda style games, no doubt about that. But it is not a particularly innovative engine. The main innovation was just how moddable it was. It's basically a pretty SQL database, with the formids being primary keys. (Have you ever screwed with xEdit? It's so easy to mod!)
BUT that being said, widespread use of procgen was in Dagger Fall. Aside from a few key dungeons, everything was procedurally generated, and that was in 1996. Hell, I'd venture that it had better procgen, because they had roads. And before that, Rogue was procedurally generated. Procgen just isn't an innovation.
Their engine is getting better, but unfortunately, it still suffers from the lack of proper cinematics (zooming into faces isn't it) and it makes things like the lack of proper procedural generation make it seem more lackluster. Even Daggerfall did it better, and even if Starfield could approach it, Daggerfall also had the benefit of a lower quality threshold, which makes it even harder to make procedural environments seem more unique.
I actually enjoy Starfield and will eventually go back to play it like any other Bethesda game, but I sort of feel that Starfield makes it obvious that without some major change, like implementing truly in-depth AI generated levels to cope with the demand of the scale they want to go for, they will still fall short of expectations using the same technology for their next Elder Scrolls. They basically have to combine Daggerfall procedural generation with Creation Engine focus on tailored content and create the next evolution of both.
But considering that Starfield is the Arena of its universe, not bad.