Is the story lacking?
Don't work at Bethesda. Not going to claim this is in anyway accurate. Maybe the reason they left was because they weren't allowed to design interesting quests and thus were tired of being railroaded. I say this because any quest designer is essentially a storyteller so for quests to be so bland to lack character has to be intentional.
Fredselfish@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Chet_Awesomelad@kbin.social 11 months ago
The writing is the strongest part of the game in my opinion. But the writing almost NEVER translates to interesting gameplay.
As an example, there's a quest where you're tasked with tracking some bad guys through a labyrinthine canyon, then you need to search for clues to find out where they came from, who hired them, etc. The gameplay for the quest is about the least imaginative way to interpret that story - the tracking is just following waypoint markers on your screen; the combat is just shooting four basic enemies; and finally the "search for clues" is just looting one item from the enemy leader's corpse. Then you fast travel back to the quest giver and get some credits as a reward.
Nearly every quest is like this. They present an interesting story via the dialogue, but then the actual gameplay for the quest is always just travel to a location, shoot some bad guys and/or pick up an item and/or talk to a person, then fast travel back and get some credits.
distantsounds@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yes, it is a lifeless game in its current state. The framework is there, but everything has the feel of a shopping mall that’s going to be torn down in couple months
BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee 11 months ago
i personally find the main quest to be bethesdas best. lots of great quests i just played one a few days ago that left me speechless
Epicmulch@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s what I’m saying. Almost all of the main quests are some of Bethesdas best ever. I really don’t get all the hate for this game. It’s not perfect by any means but to say it’s garbage is just wrong. I’m pretty new to Lemmy and I can’t help but compare it to what I see back over at reddit. More hive mind bull. The Internet told me I need to hate this thing so I hate it.
BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee 11 months ago
yep exactly, everything about bethesda has been shit on ever since fo4 release, and 76 made it much worse. its like nobody actually enjoys gaming anymore, its just a side picking insult throwing cult
PoopMonster@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Agreed and much like skyrim this game is better enjoyed with minimal fast traveling, the problem is that fast travel is just too convenient and people will complain that it’s just talking and loading screens without actually enjoying the exploration.
baropithecus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m intrigued, how the hell do you explore in this game? I thought the only way to get from system to system and planet to planet is to click through menus. The only choice seems to be whether I’ll go back to the ship and click through menus or stay where I am and click through menus.
BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee 11 months ago
when i first played skyrim i fast travelled everywhere. then years later i did a no fast travel playthrough and wow, the sheer amount of quests i had never seen before was astounding
echo64@lemmy.world 11 months ago
maybe, but also they were a /lead/ so should have had some level of agency there.
rockerface@lemm.ee 11 months ago
in an ideal world, maybe
echo64@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m more trying to be realistic, It’s difficult to imagine how you would hire a lead anything and not give them any agency into what they are doing. That’s the whole point of lead, to lead the others in the goal of whatever that thing is.
I think that you can be marginalised and restricted, but it’s pretty unlikely this person, as a lead, had no agency about quest design
That also does not mean that they couldn’t do something better elsewhere. Just that assuming that they were locked down by bethesda into writing boring one note quests seems… like a reach.