Tell my wife I said... "Hello".

I'd say I'm agnostic, but my parents also didn't force religion on me, my dad is Catholic, and my mom is Thai Buddhist, and I view the Buddhist ideology to strive for being satisfied without material as an honorable goal. I feel as if I believe that attaining that mindset really is nirvana, and I don't think you need to be particularly religious to think that's possible.

A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. I can keep going, they're all winners.

Probably because Black Flag is fucking revered and people would eat that shit up on the pedigree alone. It's an open world pirate game, which doesn't have much competition.

AC3 stands to gain more from a remake, but it would require some good faith from the community to buy into it, and it's not as unique of an overall experience from the initial premise compared to Black Flag which instantly forms a picture in your mind of a free booting high seas adventure with some light assassination.

It's be disingenuous to say the animations aren't absolutely improved. But it'd also be disingenuous to say all of the little engine quirks aren't still there. It's not about the quality of those animations, it's the slow snapping between them and the amount of time before the NPC is "ready to talk"

They have a whole rube Goldberg machine set up that fires a BB gun into their gut every time they get shot

Pssh, I fucking wish they based combat on that mod. Skyrim's combat is still a little too basic comparatively.

They're very specifically influenced by From Soft's game Bloodborne more than Dark Souls. It's interesting to see them use Pinocchio as an anchor point for the world. The game looks quite polished and as derivative as it seems it looks like it'll be pretty fun.

A lot of that is out of band's hands. Ticketmaster has, essentially, a monopoly on venues. It's already incredibly hard to even make net zero on playing shows, getting picky about venues makes that almost impossible and relegates your band to shitty dive bars.

Where'd you get that Dual Steam Deck prototype from?!

The studio has changed. Just because Fallout 4 wasn't a "true RPG" doesn't mean I didn't have nigh on 400 hours of novel joy with it, maybe even because it wasn't just another core Bethesda RPG but because it was something new, a new kind of looting and crafting experience in that same large, dynamic open world that Bethesda could bring through. Morrowind was over 20 years ago. Bethesda isn't the one making those kinds of games anymore.

Have the games gotten shallower as RPGs? Sure. Fucking pac man is shallow at this point, does that mean everyone should hate on it en masse? If you don't like the direction Bethesda is going that's completely understandable, but it just seems absurd that people come out of the woodwork in these threads to just poop on a game that isn't even out yet. Save that for when it releases and it does or doesn't meet your expectations, as of now it just sounds like everybody is trying to get as entrenched as possible in their prejudice.

Bethesda games are buggy, what an old meme. It's more of a meme than a true criticism now because most games have bugs, especially ones as large as Bethesda games, and even on launch I've played other Bethesda games and enjoyed myself just fine. It's good to be cautiously skeptical and not pre order, you should be skeptical, but swinging all the way past that to being hard-line negative is not the right answer either.

And I know you personally are not reflecting all of these views, your comment just comes off as supportive of both genuine and over the top memetic criticisms due to replying in a seemingly justifying manner to someone confused about the buggy game comments. When it comes to those sorts of comments I'm talking generally about what I've seen from people on this platform.

I'm not saying Starfield will be an old Bethesda return to form or bug free on release, I'm just saying be cautious, not completely pedal to the metal negative, and accept that Bethesda as it was is dead.

Even legends Arceus could've used more time in the oven, even though it got a lot of things right.