When it rains

 

Even given my time stepping back from the forefront of the news cycle to literally do anything else, somehow I find myself constantly faced with the sheer insanity of the daily goings-ons in this fair industry of ours. And wouldn't you know it- somehow Ubisoft have remained the centre of my ire even after all this time? I should rename the blog into 'The Ubisoft hate circle' for the amount of times they appear on the pages- but I guess I just can't help the fact that, for some insane reason, their management is determined to make themselves a cancer upon the industry. I'm talking- genuine danger to the health of gaming as an artform- that seems to be their biggest goal in life; beyond even making a profit. I don't even know if EA were ever this bad. Or at least, EA did a better job at hiding their active disdain for games and those who buy them.

Of course I'm referring to the recent rumour popping about (big underline with the 'rumour' part of this, the source is unnamed and i've yet to see anyone reputable back this up- it just happens to fit the Ubisoft MO so horrifically well.) Star Wars Outlaws. Apparently Ubisoft have acknowledged the flop internally and expressed a desire, alongside some other unnamed accomplices, (I imagine Sony must be one) to pressure Steam into restricting their API access. Basically they want strict provisions put around the data that the public have access to so that they can keep figures such as Player Numbers private- to what end? All this would achieve is giving Ubisoft the anonymity to gussy up a flop in front of investors- essentially giving them the authority to white lie when they want to. Which is illegal so I'm not accusing them explicitly of lying to investors- just that they happen to want to pursue the very tools that would facilitate such lying.

And I want to impress just how largely useless such a move would be. I know that companies like Ubisoft are so desperate to divest themselves of responsibility for any mistake they'll accept any old scape goat that flies through their window- but it takes a special kind of delusional to think that the observation of player numbers would drive people away from a single player open world game. A multiplayer title? Sure. I'll bet that at least some people considered buying Concord only to see it on the path to crashing and burning and decided against that purchase. Outlaws? Not a chance. More likely they saw the developer, weighed their reputation up and decided to wait for a sale. That's pretty much how I think of Ubisoft- that developer who puts out games that are never worth their RRP. And, well... that's the kind of reputation which is pretty well earned!

But that's not the only story of the day. How about FromSoftware, kings of the Souls-like, currently being hunted by Sony for an acquisition. Oh good lord, why do the horror stories never end. Sony have proven themselves ill partners in the modern age of the live service order, which has already documented at least two strictly single player studios having their arm pulled into spitting out live service prototypes- both of which proved not interesting enough to be developed to launch. FromSoft have their art nailed down to perfection, they've managed to iterate upon their own greatness and reach ridiculous heights- and they seem to be one of the only modern respected studios building themselves to be generational, so that when the current guard inevitably move on- the studio will retain that sparkling standard with the next generation. (take note Bioware.) They don't need Sony stepping on their back.

Now as far as we're aware the Sony acquisition is not entirely their own volition. They're being called to the role, as if they're saviours bearing down from up high. But that doesn't change the fact that their proven track record has been atrocious, they have themselves a FromSoftware game they've bitterly refused to work in the slightest. Not porting it to their newest consoles, let alone to other platforms, the same as with Metal Gear Solid 4 which has been trapped on it's release platform since release. (Although in fairness that one is just as much due to Konami being mean.) I don't want Playstation standing guardian over who gets to play game this big. Heck, it's been under a Sony exclusivity deal that the once biggest JRPG in the world, Final Fantasy, has floundered and failed to make the cultural impact that it- following my actually playing FFXVI- fully deserves to. That game slaps! Sony just aren't the partners they need to be right now.

And the last point of this dying embers of the year is hardly a revelation but deserves mentioning all the same. Bethesdsa just really don't seem to get any of the heat that has fallen their way. Now obviously I really liked Starfield for what it was, not for what people wanted to be or even what I hoped it was going to be. (Although to be fair, I gave up on my hopes years before launch the very second they made it clear the game wasn't going to be 'fun' sci-fi. So maybe that's just low expectations going in.) But the game honestly isn't a patch upon it's predecessors and it has nothing to do with it being a new IP that goes in a new direction that fans aren't sure about. Metaphor Refantazio dropped this very year from a pedigree that mainlined Shin Megami Tensei and Persona for decades beforehand and it might just be the single most complete, thematic strong, relatively lean and mean JRPG of all time. What's the difference? ATLUS gets it. Bethesda don't.

From the absolute barest of the bare faced peep- sure, we can look at the fan dissatisfaction with Shattered Space and conclude that people would have been happier if the game saved up some of it's free releases and dropped them with the DLC (As Todd Howard was said to to have proposed during a chat with Phil Spencer). I objectively believe that would have been partially true, even if buggies actually don't gel well with the DLC's environments specifically. But that wouldn't have been real satisfaction. That wouldn't have been solving a problem. That would be like sticking a pacifier in the mouth of a screaming child- give something to focus on for the next few minutes but not actually addressing the route issue. That issue? Shattered Space just wasn't very good. It lacked a core thesis, I don't know if they even know what sort of fantasy they were working towards providing, I personally think it's visual palette was frightfully uninspired and dull, (which is a hot take, apparently) and it stands as perhaps the least engaging full-blown DLC's that Bethesda has released for one of their mainline games ever. That should be a significant wake-up call. And it hasn't been.

Now at the tail-end of all this is a reminder that no- this hasn't been the end of everything this culture has to offer. This has been such a solid year for games that I genuinely have a dissociative moment whenever I see anyone claim otherwise. If you haven't managed to find at least one game that released in 2024 that hasn't scratched at your best-of sensibilities then I have to be honest- that is a skill issue. Unless you're a sports game fan but those folk should be used to disappointment by now. (Actually, they did get their College Football madden-style game they waited 10 years for- so even that crowd should be pleased.) But it's important to take the lumps with the porridge. To not let compliancy cloud what could be improved, what might not be going the way it should and how next year might grow to even greater heights. And man, for the companies mentioned here today (sans Ubisoft) I sincerely hope that they do. They deserve it all.

Looking towards TES VI

 

With Shattered Space out of the way a lot of eyes are not turning towards the horizon. More specifically, to Elder Scrolls VI. I think the consensus was to follow the Starfield yearly train for a while until TES VI was closer- but considering that is what the team consider billable content for their ailing game, I'm pretty sure most people have finally written off Starfield entirely. The game could be saved, no doubt- but Bethesda aren't interested enough in receiving feedback to do it. They're happy with the small base they got and consider them the Starfield fans, who are content with that level of output and thus do not require any catering to. Thus Starfield probably will never be worthy of being considered a main Bethesda franchise. Maybe when 2 rolls around in 2040- who knows? Either way, now the pressure is back on The Elder Scrolls.

Maybe pressure is the wrong word. Too light. It might be more appropriate to say that the weight of all the stars in heaven are beaming down on TES VI with an expectant glare. Bethesda seem to really struggle with developing on themselves, lovers of one of their games will find something essential missing in the next one along and it's making it very difficult for hardcore fans to stay attached to a developer that either doesn't understand what won them over to begin with, or are simply driven by some inexplicable vision that grows increasingly anathema to the rest of the Roleplaying world. I won't deny that Bethesda games truly are unique, but I'm starting to worry that in times to come that uniqueness will be best described in the way they cram endless monetised content farms into their entirely single player RPG worlds.

I was down for the idea of paid mods a long time ago- but they don't care enough to make that idea a respectable one. They've already grown tired of it and are moving on towards the next implementation of the system in the next game. It kind of reminds me of an irritable creative without expectations and deadlines, free to pick up and drop an idea at the change of the wind- never quite riding great designs and concepts to completion. All of which is why personally, I'm expecting The Elder Scrolls VI to break a lot of hearts when it finally arrive and finally tells us all what we don't want to hear- that Bethesda just don't have it anymore. That special spark which made Skyrim a generational masterpiece- which has been slipping since Fallout 4- might be finally gone from their eyes.

But then the stubborn delusional side of me wants to cast all that aside and say no- Skyrim was such a special game and you would have to be a straight fool not to see why! The tangible world space, living stories, space to paint whatever adventure you could imagine on the canvass of creativity. Even before the word 'mods' enters the conversation Skyrim was so very ahead of it's time. But let's talk about mods for a second. Skyrim was so very accessible to mod in a way that Starfield is proving... difficult on. Lacking official animation tools (cross fingers they're coming) animators are currently incapable of even porting old kits over. (Unless they use a tool that relies on the Script Extender, but Starfield's new paid modding system has literally cut a giant swathe through the community that many mod creators are avoiding third party compatibility tools so they might remain compatible with consoles. It's a whole mess right now.)

What I think The Elder Scrolls could do with, going forward, is a change up in their scenario management. Honestly, I think the assumption that a tight and excellent story can't fit into an open world RPG game in the style of Bethesda's is frank under ambition talking. Get a half decent fantasy writer on the payroll and let them go nuts, reign in the delivered product where needed and squeeze the rest of the simulation around that. The impact of a great narrative isn't just a solid boon nowadays, it's expected to get people through the door. Bethesda's best storylines have been Morrowind, which relies entirely on the quality of the world building, and Skyrim's- which is so simple and straight forward it doesn't have a chance to sag. All the others, their Fallouts, Oblivion, Starfield- all suffer under weak writing, soft scenarios or lacking commitment. They're so afraid of railroading players, when what they should be caring about is giving enough motive that players will give their RPG characters into the scenario. Ultimate freedom sounds good on paper- but few games that pursue that end up in the annals of history. 

Of course, we also need a total revision to the way combat works. First person melee combat is always a conundrum to solve- but Bethesda have never been there. Morrowind's combat was a mistake that was realised into the fall game for some reason, Oblivion's combat had some small promise but lacked commitment, Skyrim's was a regression of Oblivion's for some reason. Bethesda's latest games have shown a surprisingly solid grasp of their combat, with Starfield and Fallout's FPS touches- we can't go back to the land of noodle swinging come TES VI. It's just not possible. Give us just some of the basics. Dodges, parrying, stance breaking- I know I'm starting to sound like a Souls-nut but to be honest- Souls has established the bare minimum for satisfying medieval combat- this should be the foundation that a game like TES VI builds from. But considering modern Bethesda and their bar of 'quality', I'm just praying they even hit the industry bare minimum at this point...

 And most importantly I think that TES VI could really use some more focus. As much as Bethesda want to pretend they're making vastly different games between their three series- the truth is that Bethesda really carry the same basic bones from game to game, build upon that and then try and squeeze a new genre out of it on the backend. Most early fundamental working is fixing up the allgame under all the nonsense. Which is why I have to beg Bethesda not to get lost sticking in another superfluous settlement builder mode. It just doesn't fit The Elder Scrolls. Hearthfire was limited and focused- it was designed to fit into the world. Starfield's settlements serve little to no real purpose in the fantasy of the game- keep your focus, Bethesda- please!

I am scared for the next Elder Scrolls game, and that's because I've not really seen the hallmarks of the trendsetting Bethesda for a very long time now. But what scares me even more than that is just how delusional they seem to be internally about that. They still think of themselves as leaders within DLC, despite CDPR soundly trouncing them in that department over two of their most recent releases. They consider Starfield the best game they've ever made in some respects- which defies belief. They call Shattered Space the product of veteran talents who's work really shows on screen- which reads like an actual insult levied against them. Is this the Bethesda who has it in them to change the trajectory of their company and become a leader once again? I hope so. I really do.

The final word on Shattered Space

 

Now the reason I struggled so much with getting through Shattered Space after the first few hours of genuine promise that I was really excited for was not because the content was horrible- it was actually the crushing realisation that Shattered Space might have been the single least ambitious pieces of DLC content that Bethesda have put out since Oblivion- and it is galling to see them bold face call this great high quality content worthy of the fee they charge. It's almost as though we're watching a delusional man with a missing limb swear-down that he is completely uninjured as the blood literally cascades out of the giant whole in his body. You can expect this to go on for years until Starfield is behind them before Bethesda will admit they didn't maybe perform to their best- and by then it will obviously be too late. Take it from Fallout 76- they react like a cocky anime villain after the protagonist's music starts swelling: overconfidently and not effectively enough.

Shattered Space felt like cut content with a little bit more on the package, a definite break from the rules that founded their least interesting modern game- procedural generation and small content pockets, but lacking in any overall purpose to define it's existence. Not that purpose is a must-have for every single questline in any wandering Bethesda game but for a major DLC in a recent struggling release that seems like a huge omission! Take us back to Fallout 4- their DLC's both attempted to address a vertical of the gameplay experience. Far Harbour was an answer to those that found Fallout 4's roleplaying options severely lacking, Nuka World was an answer to those that thought there wasn't enough evil play options- therefor Raider-cosplay DLC! And Shattered Space... was to answer those that found procedural generation lacklustre? Is that really all it tries to do?

Okay so sure, that's a purpose no matter how you cut it- but does that really add the gameplay formula? I'll admit- I actually enjoyed seeing the sights of... the new location who's name I can't remember and won't look up: I liked walking about and seeing what was there- even if none of it was exactly Bethesda at their A-game of world building; despite the relatively constricted space they had to work with. (Remember when 'Shivering Isles' did the same and managed to contain some of Bethesda's best world building?) Shattered Space doesn't really achieve the same level of quality, nor the level of scale of a traditional Bethesda game- so it just goes to demonstrate a direction that Bethesda could have gone in if they decided to put a bit more of themselves into creating their worlds and trusted less to the generation machine. Which just makes me feel sad because they didn't.

What about arguably their best title- Skyrim? Heathfire introduced constructable player housing that fed into the simulation loving audience, Dawnguard played into their alternative playstyles and made Vampires the most interesting they'd ever been in the franchise, Dragonborn expanded the adventure- Dragonborn abilities and played to nostalgia. All of these felt like honestly directed experiences with a direction and a goal- I'd even extend the same virtue to Starfield itself- though I feel the direction might have not perhaps hit everything it wanted to. Shattered Space, predominately, feels like content for the sake of content. Like you might get in a live service where a land expansion is mandated for this year even though no one really has an inspired idea on what they want to do with it- that's Shattered Space in a nutshell.

And I think it's apparent even in the name. 'Shattered Space'? Evocative, but empty in the face of context. 'Shattered' is clearly suppose to refer to the incident that befell the the Va'ruun which ended up breaking reality around them and seeping in creatures from some other form of reality into this one. (Don't get excited, this isn't Star Trek. They're just mindless teleporting bugs- no creative imagination required.) As for Space... where? What does this have to do with space? The DLC is rather pointedly landlocked throughout it's duration. With a title like that you would expect some kind of implicit shift to the foundations of the normal Starfield tries to set- that of Space Travel. Something about that has become 'Shattered'- it's wrong, broken and fits together differently now. But what we got feels a bit more like content designed to fit the title rather than a title conceived to label the content. Does that make sense?

Perhaps the enemy design best highlights the sheer lack of heart here- because outside of the teleporting bugs which are fine- not scary like the team tried to build up- they're just fine. We also get humanoid void enemies. Their thing? They shoot and they teleport. Kind of like the Starborn then? Eerily like the Starborn. Not quite. See, these guys are treated like infantry and so you'll come across them in chunks, and they seem to have basic grunt AI which means they charge you- constantly. So yes, the flagship new enemy of Shattered Space are basic grunts with a blue ghost effect slapped on them and the ability to teleport behind you- which they spam endlessly. How does that sound to you? Fun? Honestly, it's a bit annoying. And it becomes more frustrating the higher you attune their deeply unbalanced difficulty scales. At basic 'Extreme', which is one below the highest setting, you feel like you're beta-testing a broken mod from a first year game designer. I feel like how I imagine the testers for 'Fallout: The Frontier' felt- like my brain was melting along with my patience.

Need I even bring up comparisons? The new lord Vampires from Dawngaurd with their crazy cool design, new abilities and an entire league of smaller mob redesigns to buff up their faction. Alongside the creepy Chaurus Hunters. And the entirety of the Forgotten Vale with it's unique Fauna? Shattered Isles entirely unique enemy set (with a lot of reskins, to be fair- but that was back in 2006.) I know I'm delving deep into 'petty' here but it's the only way I can try and identify all the ways in which this one DLC from Bethesda has totally shattered my belief that there is a company I recognise in modern Bethesda. But there has to be, right? There haven't been that many gigantic staff overhauls- the creative powerhouses are still there, aren't they? So what are they doing?

It isn't a total disaster. The beginning mission for Shattered Space is fine, and the finale is actually uniquely cool. One of their better faction finales. But that is pretty much all it was. A fun start, a cool end and a middle so utterly bland I could not tell you what happened if you held me at gunpoint. Terribly boring characters, a script begging for rewrites and cuts, mostly uninspired quest design, (the dam one was alright) and- of course- horrifically short. Vague consequences that are hinted at but displayed nowhere. Shattered Space was the worst it could have been- a total waste of time. For me and Bethesda. And that's all I have to say on it- and it's probably the last I'll think of it too.

Shattered Space: First touch

 

Starfield is a video game, I'm told, which is supposed to be the successor to the legacy of Bethesda, I'd imagine, and contains the current sum of everything that company has learned, I greatly question. Independently I like Starfield and think it is a fun enough title to romp around in, although I do respect how when compared to the state of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls much of Starfield feels rote and undercooked- as though slapped together by a team inspired by what Bethesda achieved in hope of aping that success- rather than the same actual developers. The world feels underexplored, the actually interesting side quests feel too far apart and the main narrative was a solid idea that wobbled on execution. I really did enjoy that main quest- the first time around- I still enjoy replaying other Bethesda titles for their main story much more than I do with Starfield.

But there's hope- because Bethesda aren't yet willing to let this title go down as a sad mis-step on their road without a fight. Heck, they've got a captive audience that are willing to play this game all the way up until Bethesda release literally anything else at which point they'll drop this like a stone- but the B-team are certain they can come up as enfranchised an audience as their previous two franchises if only they give this title a bit more of a hook. Thus comes the support cycle- wherein Starfield will be host to a dedicated team of developers for the first 10 years of it's life with expansions scattered in there now and again. Perhaps yearly though that's a big commitment I'm not sure they're capable of living up to. The first step in this road has been all of year one's support leading up to Shattered Space- and I'll be honest that there has been progress.

The biggest issue with Starfield has been all the pain-points of the core gameplay experience- tedious exploration that doesn't feel worthwhile, needlessly segmented space travel that fails to sell the illusion of travelling the cosmos and a lack of that iconic Bethesda coat of old-school exploration across a land with purpose and secrets to uncover. These are not solved problems and I wonder whether or not Bethesda has the tools to fix everything like they say. But there have been steps taken. The biggest talked about was the new buggy which improves exploration speed- through I found it's implementation a little inelegant. You simply buy it up at a ship techie and then it plops down wherever you land awkwardly. They couldn't even add a 'vehicle bay' module for transportation? Mass Effect this is not...

The biggest game changer for me, and genuinely my favourite update which literally no one talks about, is the difficulty mode changes. Right now difficulty is handled completely modularly where you turn on what you want to be hard and get a direct modifier to EXP earned for ever module you turn up and a debuf for all you twist down. Already a fantastic evolution upon typical difficulty balancing models that Bethesda have famously struggled with- but with this actually came new features that change the way I play this game. Food, drink and sleep survival modes, (which are super rudimentary but it's something to start with) a really involved ailments systems that hits you with injuries that don't just vanish after 2 minutes and need to be balanced with prolonged explorative bouts- requiring the use of salves and careful gunning so as to not be too disadvantaged in every fight: the tools to make Starfield feel unique and interesting are there- you just have to turn them on yourself.

But Shattered Space is the big on that everyone is going to be talking about- the big first expansion that was actually planned before the main game launched and all the critique was levied which means as much as people want it to be- this won't actually be the course correction they were hoping for. Shattered Space does however, happen to be a return to the more directed exploration of Bethesda's past games- no generated landscapes and apparently no leaving the planet you step foot on- once you reach it. Almost as though even within the studio themselves the team realised that Starfield lacked the special sauce of Bethesda past and they wanted to try and bridge the gap.

Shattered Space follows one of the most egregious flaws in the world building of the first game- the giant void of information regarding all of their enemy factions outside of the Crimson Fleet. I suspect that House Va'Ruun were supposed to be this mystery box we were supposed to be tantalised by such as with the Dwarves of Elder Scrolls- but whereas one established mystery the other just told us that the house were recluses and gave us nothing to work with. I don't care what the recluses are up to- I didn't even realise they were in trouble over on their home planet. I'm just trying to tell the difference between the Freestar Alliance and the... United Colonies to enough of a degree to make them interesting. 

Having started it a bit for myself- there is little doubt that House Va'Ruun actually has more of a personality than any other faction in this game- even if that is based on religious zealotry that one would expect to have little space in an advanced space faring society- but that's the kind of dichotomy which breeds interest. Their home planet is a little monochrome objectively, although something different to look at is appreciated in a game like Starfield so I won't knock the overabundance of purple too heavily. I just wish there was a bit more weight put into to joining a faction beyond just having the carpet rolled out the moment you show up. I feel like factions haven't meant anything since Skyrim, and haven't meant anything on a gameplay level since Oblivion- but whatever, I guess.

Right now Shattered Space does feel like more traditional Bethesda and to be honest- I kinda love traditional Bethesda. Taking your time, exploring at your pace, just walking around town and talking to people who slowly bring the world to life is what these franchises should be about and those were the strongest aspects of the base game too. I do like that these societies are full of people with a bit more too them as well, outside of the squeaky clean bore-bags of the Settled Systems. Would've really liked Aliens, but I guess we're still doing baby steps right now. If what I'm feeling now is any indication however- then Starfield isn't as much of a shot in dark as it felt and Bethesda at least know where their strengths still lie. For what that's worth.

Bethesda screwed up paid mods... again

 

Every now and then we have the very kings of the modding scene slap down the biggest face-palm worthy screw ups that make me just want to scream. If anyone should be championing the mod industry it should be Bethesda- but their weirdness around Fallout London, their handling of updates and the ever ongoing war with the free modding world just seems so utterly bizarre. And I know this comes from a place of love, and that's what blows my mind up even more! There are some absolutely certifiable morons out there who twirl their tiny minds around and go "Yep, Bethesda want to ruin modding so that... people don't mod more." And though I suspect those people lack the ability to turn on a computer let alone read- let me spell it out in simple words. A healthy modding community makes people buy their games more- they aren't stupid. Or at least, they aren't stupid in that fashion.

Bethesda's stupidity more spawns from their frank inability to get literally anything right when it comes to making this space better for mod authors. Providing a way for modders to turn their passion into a career choice. Something that should be lauded by anyone who has sat down and played an incredible mod and went- wow- that should have been a DLC released by Bethesda! Those kinds of experiences should be championed! Heck, if I were running Bethesda I'd be looking at ways to make deals with some of these mod authors to get some of these mods published as semi-official DLC. I bet console Fallout players would love a go at Fallout London! You know, if they didn't have to deal with the 4GB modding limit...

This all began when Bethesda tried their hardest to build a paid infrastructure into Steamworkshop- allowing modders to charge whatever they please in order to recoup the investment for the work that they put in. Now Steamworkshop is already an iffy platform for mods- it's designed to be as convenient as possible and that means it really works best with games that have very specific styles of Modding support. Despite being some of the most modded games of all time, Bethesda titles are actually somewhat atypical when it comes to the way they handle mods so most even somewhat interesting and complex mods can't even be sensible run off of Steamworkshop. What that meant was that the very first foot forward into paid mods was price tags stuck onto armour mods or retextures or basic fishing systems. Stuff that would go up free anywhere else being charged for eye-brow raising price tags that really coloured the kind of person who is quickest to these sorts of systems- the opportunists.

Now I understand the desire to make money as much as the next man, but there is always a balance to be struck between exploitation and potential for good and I find that those most predatory tend to lean the scales the bad way. If paid mods were to become regular for high quality productions that would really blow open the field for great mods to suck in even more development fundamentals for the hopes of real returns. Like indie game development only in a much more condensed field to a much more receptive audience- this really could be the shot in the arm that Bethesda games need to get back to their modding heydays. But you really need to create a division between those that actually want to make something and those that want to make a buck.

The next version of paid mods was the curated Bethesda mods offered via the creation club, wherein Bethesda worked hand-in-hand with mod makers in order to develop specialised pieces of mini content that would slide into their existing games. Good in theory but I think Bethesda severely overestimated how much work they would need to put in just to make sure that all of these mods were up to shipping standard across all platforms. Bethesda really are in the market for one of those passive profit generators and having to dedicate an entire department to working with content creators to develop their mods and ship something worthy of the Bethesda stamp of approval is not. But to be honest- that might just be what they need to do.

The latest iteration of mods has been a Bethesda self-hosted system wherein anyone can download mods directly from their servers and it is... well it's messy. The service hosts Bethesda's own mods, mods from their partners and mods from the public all on the same disorganised page with pretty much no filtering options whatsoever. (Someone doesn't want to code their Dictionaries, and to be fair- I don't blame them. Coding Dictionaries sucks.) And in that mess comes an old problem in a new form- because whilst Bethesda are partnering with certain mod authors once again in order to decide who gets monetisation privileges - they aren't policing what actually gets monetised. Thus we're right back to square one.

You have mods that are reshuffles of Nexus offerings now being sold for a premium on a storefront, you have retextures with price tags, single outfit packs, basic cheat items. And then you have an entire fully playable and ludicrously robust faction built for Skyrim, fully voiced new companions for Starfield that are miles more interesting than the base crew. All of these mods are stuffed in the same melting pot and treated with the same level of respect by a terrible sorting system which relies on the free market to raise the best to the top but lacks any review metrics with which to make a system like that work. Atop of that- there's this little thing wherein in some mods disable achievements and others don't and Bethesda refuse to be consistent about what makes one achievement friendly and what makes another not.  High quality non-Bethesda mods that add new playable content- can't be played with Achievements. Which, for a game that is built to accommodate a single save file across multiple years of content, is a bit of a deal breaker for some out there. Me included.

Bethesda want the rewards for as little effort as possible and I just don't think that's how paid mods are going to work. I think this latest system is so close to being good and with just a bit of oversight and improvement we could finally have a system for paid mods that are worth a damn. Single outfit mods costing $5 is a bit ridiculous, but we can't even have conversations like that when someone else is genuinely flogging a weapon mod that boosts your max health when equipped. Literal 'I fooled around the creation kit for five minutes' level work with a price tag underneath it is wild! Nothing ever comes of nothing, to quote Lear- and Bethesda really need to speak up lest they end up miring those fortunes that so blind them.

Fallout London

 

With the age of the Fallout TV show it was believed that we would be waiting many years until the renewed fandom of the Fallout world would be rewarded with fresh content in this most fertile of a playing world and- well, we were all very wrong. As it would just so happen the inbetween game was just around the corner. You know, 'the In-between' game, just like Fallout New Vegas bridged the gap for us all those years ago now we have Fallout London, the fan-made mod, and it- yeah, it really does feel like the official leap between games that Bethesda has refused to provide us with. Developed over the course of four to five years, Team FOLON has slapped together what might just be the most acutely fitting mod into the existing Fallout world ever created and I genuinely wonder what impact this is going to have on the lore community at the very least. (Never before have I wondered if a mod was good enough to be considered canon!)

Fallout London has come out with the help of GOG on the pre-next gen version of Fallout 4 proving the Bethesda truly have put out the single most inferior edition of their seminal game which can't even access the best mod of the game's life span with headache inducing role backs. (Seriously, they need to mix that stutter bug they made, what are they doing?) Now, if you are wondering just how easy is it to jump into this thing and give it a shot- I'm sad to say that Steam versions of the game have a couple of hoops to jump through- annoying hoops at that. Otherwise I really would recommend downloading all of the suggested mods presented on the Steam page that vast swathes of the community seem to be ignoring- they're mostly all plug-n-play and if the grumbled early impressions are to be believed one in particular will save you from dozens of needless crashes. (I've had 1 crash in my 8 and a half hours of playing. It really has been a stark contrast to the early experiences of the under-prepared)

Actually sitting down to play the game I'd say that the biggest initial shock to me has been how different this game feels from the base Fallout 4. Surviving in London is the absolute other end of the spectrum to Boston. In that base game, as has been much discussed, you are introduced to a minigun and the over-abundance of power armour within the first hour of play. In London I was yet to find my first gun until about the second hour- and I'm only just getting comfortable enough with the amount of Ammo I have to enter fights shooting first. Scavenging for supplies feels essential, fights feel like tooth and nail scraps against the desperate and hungry, power feels like a commodity scrounged up and spent in bursts of precious ammunition. I feel bare.

And yet I don't feel totally starved of the tools to have fun- which is a very careful balance to maintain for a lot of the games that veer close to the, shall we say, 'survival horror end of resource proliferation. Trading bullets in a gunfight feels desperate, but rewarding- in a way that kind of loses it's lustre all to quickly with the base Fallout 4. It's a very particular approach to design and I somewhat respect it- particularly given the greater emphasis on exploring the ruins of post-war London and not just shooting through it. Team FOLON spared no expense with brand new assets, fresh world spaces, easter eggs and references and general paraphernalia literally all across of London- again, this is the kind of effort a paid team of developers would throw in. This team were real serious about making this here demo reel of their talents.

What intrigues me most of all right now is the amount of genuine British references that persist throughout the game. I always imagined that this would a case of American's staring at another country through the lenses of 'exotic weird other place'. Some of these 'escapades' can easily fall into deeply out-of-touch tourist dives into somewhere unrecognisable to the locals. How many times have we seen modern day Egypt represented solely by the 'solitary figure' of the ancient ruin Pyramids as though an entire modern city doesn't surround them these days. The very idea of that 'Fallout London' concept felt borne from distinctly vapid tourism, but I'm glad to say I was wrong.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the amount of genuine and authentic references to actual England has convinced me that a significant portion of this team must hail from ol' blighty. It's the only explanation! Seeing the famous graffiti references to 'Killroy was here' is so delightfully British that most of us just recognise the weird little guy without even knowing where he comes from. I honestly don't, but I'd know him anywhere. Then there's our national supermarket chain Tesco, which becomes 'Fesco' in this universe with all the expected signage twisted on it's head. They even went so far as to replace Deathclaws with horrific monsters called 'Wombles', named after a supremely old school children's show from back in our day. It's pitch perfect.

All of that is of course on top of the more obvious references. The Red Postboxes that turn into killer death-bots when you approach, curiously redesigned red busses and even a certain blue telephone boxes in back alleys. And to tie it all together- the voice actors they picked for the game seem to be genuinely British- which puts them one over Ubisoft who somehow struggled to pull that off when making Watch_Dogs: Legion. Their performances are generally pretty decent as well, with decent snappy writing that I somewhat consider more true-to-the-nature of Fallout than the strangely horny TV show. It seems professional. Which is the highest plaudit I can muster.

There have been some that have gone so far as to call this the best Fallout since New Vegas, and that is where I agonise. I think I would have to go through the entire game before I can put this up against Fallout 4 as a whole and declare a victor, but the fact that I've even giving that consideration the time of day should speak wonders as to how quality Fallout London is. When everything is working and the crashing is toned down, Fallout London delivers an authenticity rarely found within the modding scene to such a high level of quality that I'm just wondering how long it is before Bethesda start trying to box this up and ship it to consoles. 

Bethesda's biggest gap

 

With Starfield out of the way and now in the hands of the content delivery team who are said to be on the game for the next ten years- at least until the going gets rough and they decide to abandon the game at year 3 and then pretend they never said 'ten year plan' to begin with- (Bungie flashbacks galore) we can look unto the future. With Todd Howard pretty firmly declaring that he doesn't believe in spin-offs because he believes all those gameplay verticals can fit into a main line Fallout game (which he is horrendously wrong about, by the way. The day a Creation Engine game produces a half-decent stealth experience is the day I eat my hat.) the next title is most definitely going to be that Elder Scrolls VI game that was announced last decade, and with that comes my concerns, once again, that Bethesda are going to drop the bag.

Now to be very clear with you, I would consider myself a Bethesda fan. I think they have been extremely instrumental in establishing an identity to the entire western action RPG genre and have revolutionised the way that many games function as a result. Meaningful RPG visual customisation through the equipping of armour sets, fully immersive simulation worlds to experience loosely guided open worlds that let the curious explore- they wrote the book on all of that. And unlike many others out there, I don't actually believe that Bethesda has at all regressed from what they once were. What I think people are observing but not quite clocking, is the rest of the industry jumping forward by leaps and bounds whilst Bethesda hang around with their tackle out wondering how to proceed.

One manner in which Bethesda has consistently failed to make a splash, for which they absolutely must revise should they wish to have any remote foothold in the current RPG market- is combat. Fallout 4 enjoyed a total revision to the way Fallout 3 and New Vegas played in order to make it a half decent shooter. Starfield doubled down on those improvements to become a mostly decent shooter. But that's different. The path to making good shooter games is mostly linear and very well paved by the leading shooters of the games industry before them. Call of Duty. Destiny. Wolfenstien. There were models for Bethesda to base themselves after and shoot towards aping. Not so much with fantasy hack and slash,

There are dozens of ways to bring such combat to life and it just so happens that Bethesda have tried a few throughout the Elder Scrolls life-cycle... and none have been really all that good. Arena and Daggerfall had an innovate but quickly depreciating click and drag weapon swinging system that aged worse than the Nazi's before the Ark of the Covenant. Morrowind had a 'hit or miss' calculation system which ran in the background and basically made the early game unbearable and simply failed to account for anything late game- being overall useless. And Oblivion and Skyrim just went for simplified wet-noodle slap systems which got the job done, but never felt satisfying to play. But there's no real excuse for experimentation anymore.

As much of a predictable cliché it might feel to read- fantasy melee combat has largely been solved in the modern age and those plaudits belong to the very successful Souls genre. The tight hit-box, swing and dodge/parry/block foundation presented by Demon Souls presents a tactile and dynamic system of combat which has been remixed and iterated on incessantly over the past half decade without growing tired or style. It is a foundation to base a genre off and honestly should probably expand outwardly. Maybe not to the extent of totally ripping the tactical core out of previous tactical party based RPGs- but I suppose that ship has already sailed seeing the gutted out remains of 'Dragon Age: The Vielgaurd'.

Now of course I'm not saying that The Elder Scrolls VI should be a souls-like, absolutely not! But there are fundamental lessons of control that could be built upon from the basis of how those games play- but iteration is definitely key in this discussion. One of the key-most pillars of how Elder Scrolls games is the fantasy of power which Souls-style games actively work to downplay in the way they play and control- so there are certainly some liberties that would need to be taken on Bethesda's end to make a game like this feel as good as it can. And in that vein, I actually might have an idea of what kind of game they could also learn from- although you're gonna have to bare with me for a second as I explain myself.

So the best third person action games for selling into that extreme power fantasy has to be the Devil May Cry games- for the way they present a challenge of combat mastery with a reward of total combat control. I'm not saying that we should be able to literally juggle our enemies around like putty in Elder Scrolls VI, that would be taking it too far- but there's a level of combat complexity present in Devil May Cry that is achieved with precious little controller real estate. Most of the extreme content that each of the Devil May Cry weapons offer are achieved with two buttons and sticks flicks- and the wealth of combat value they add fuel an entire franchise. I don't expect Elder Scrolls VI to rival the deep thought-out complexity of DMC's best- but capturing some hint of that level of intrinsic combat mastery, combined with a more ground Souls-Like basis, would create a unique vision of gameplay that both fits the Elder Scrolls mission statement and evolves so far beyond the basis to shoot this franchise back into the headlines.

Of course I speaking on supposition and dreams here- but in my mind you're really going to need to shoot big to be competitive in the modern world. Bethesda no longer offer the biggest or most detailed open worlds, they no longer offer the most reactive feeling RPG spaces, they no longer achieve unparalleled world simulation and I'm argue they no longer have the benefit of the doubt to flub their way through despite all that. The next Elder Scrolls need to be competitive in real terms, and I somehow don't expect the company to suddenly bridge that gap with world-tier storytelling or graphical aplomb. Something core has gotta give. And that something has to be Bethesda's lacklustre approach to putting the sword in their fantasy player's hands.

Falling out

 

This ain't one of those pleasant everyday topics. This is a rant. A complaint against the powers that be that touches on merely the extent of my own burnished ego. No one is made better or whole by my whining, and accepting that in full public is how I'm going to get over the fact that I know Bethesda are working on this, but good lord am I just not in the mood to be understanding. It takes a special kind of idiot to do what Bethesda does so often and so fully, so I am going to rant, I am going to be upset, and there's nothing that logic is going to do about it. Because to be fully honest, it reflects so badly on Bethesda as caretakers that this was ever a conundrum to begin with, and perhaps we should start moving to a future where we tell the big B no! Work on your new damn games for once!

Fallout fever was going haywire for a while, and whilst the knock-on effect is going to be alive for a while- I'd say that the fever pitch has faded somewhat. People are knuckling down and waiting for the second season, passing away their rampant excitement into that box they bury under the church and then slather in concrete next to the emergency sledgehammer should it ever need to be recovered. The production may be talking big talk about how they are rushing to bring the next season "as soon as humanely possible", but considering that now it's not uncommon for a season of a show to take three years of production to bring out- that is straight meaningless. We'll still have buried this show and it's characters long before anything new can be shown off. And do you know what Bethesda did during this golden period of the show? Sabotaged themselves.

Your average gamer flocked to the properties they love in gusto, partaking in all the great vanilla games and stories kept therein, delighting in the eccentricities that the game developers laid out for them. The rest of us are well and used to all of these mods. We've been there, we've gone through the motions, we're fully done with them. We use Bethesda games as springboards to canvass out our adventures through mods- and that concept alone has kept Bethesda RPGs at the very top of single player RPG play charts for years creaking into decades at this point for some. I'd argue it's a core pillar of the company to develop with Mod Making intelligently included in the equation, which is why all the utterly brainless cries to move their new games onto Unreal Engine 5 so they'll look more 'conventionally pretty' always scrapes at my very mind. Unreal Engine games have never, and will never, be as accessible to mod as Bethesda's own propriety engine games, that would be literally the worst move that Bethesda could possibly take towards their future. That being said, that doesn't mean Bethesda don't sabotage their modding scene in other ways...

Fallout 4 has endured so very much, and us with it, in the struggle to be 'recurrently profitable'. The eye-wateringly bad 'Creation club' early days- where Bethesda tried to sell us various recolour mods for every shade of the rainbow, still stings in my mind. And even though they've largely moved past that, and reserve their paid-modding efforts for the largely substantial leaps- we're still scrapping at the dark ages. Make no mistake that this is no the breadth of Bethesda's ambitions, and I suspect what the team really want is to try and get one of those truly seismic mods on their service. Which in actuality would be great for console modders- it would essentially just be a brand new DLC for them to buy. As for everyone else... I shudder to think of the prices cooking up in that twisted head of theirs.

I've said before how insanely 'Bethesda' it is to have Fallout 4's mod-breaking modern version come out directly during the most profitable period for the franchise ever- but I could hardly have predicated just how badly they screwed things up. 'Just wait for the F4SE' I thought, 'as soon as that is updated- we'll have all the mods we need available'! Little did I know the extent of how bad things are. First off, Buffout 4 is AWOL. That near-essential mod that fixes engine problems and provides crash logs- hasn't been updated and no one knows if it ever will be. The creator just can't be found and given that the last time the mod had to be updated was four years ago- that's no great surprise. Who the heck is going to be Fallout modding 4 years down the line- we still don't get any new companion mods in the Fallout modding space!

But what if it gets even worse than that? What if they somehow managed to ship with a mod specifically detrimental to the best the community has to offer, large scale mods? Of course I'm not asking hypotheticals- Fallout 4's current version has a seemingly inherent bug wherein the game stutters whenever an NPC's data is updated- which covers quite a lot of mod types out there. Anything that updates enemies to keep them competitive with the levelling system, for instance, or maybe a mod that changes visual data. The stutters build with the more NPCs added- and though I don't think anyone has been brave enough to try it and post the results online- one could only wonder what big faction remixes do. The more NPCs loaded into the vicinity there are, the worse the stutters become. If you had a Brotherhood remixer and stood under the Prydwen the game would probably crash.

And that has just persisted. Bethesda left that in the final patch. And guess what- the only way it's getting fixed again is if the team go out of their way to patch the game on more time, which means another arbitrary round of updating script mods! In fact, I suspect the only reason we haven't already got the update is because the maintenance team are smartly waiting until they've figured out everything they broke with the latest update so they can safely fix it all with the next one. Because that is just the cursed cycle that all of us live within under the white sun that is Bethesda. Not to imply that Bethesda is dying- I'm sure that Starfield latest DLC reveal went great and we're all talking about how Bethesda is back right now. I don't know because I'm writing this blog literally 15 minutes before Summer Games Fest- but Bethesda wouldn't let us down again... right?

So this was a rant to basically say- good god does this company have it's hand firmly on it's ass recently- they can't even accept a free PR moment correctly. The only net positive thing they did was maybe update Fallout Shelter- oh wait- I forgot that Fallout Shelter has been abandoned for the past few years on every device that isn't a mobile! So that update didn't touch the Switch or PC version! (Yes, the PC version is the un-updated one! Kill me.) I just want to grab at the team and shake them by the shoulders- desperately pleading for them to nail something. Anything! I want to talk about how much I love this studio again but by god- they really don't want me to! I love their games but it's getting harder to convince myself of that as the years go by...

The Outer Fields

Very many years ago, when the moons were still young, I remember remarking about how strange it was that the two best Western open world RPG makers in the industry were both striking out to start their space-game franchises in the same moment; as though the stars were aligning. Obsidian's The Outer Worlds was going to be their grand return to action RPGs after the seminal Fallout New Vegas totally rocked our worlds, and although Bethesda had yet to officially announce that Starfield was in development- this was back in their 'leaky ship' days when we knew practically every move the studio was going to do several months in advance. (In fact, it might very well have been those leaks that led to Starfield not being unveiled during that one star-themed Bethesda conference they did at the time. Remember that?)

And, fool that I was, I remember gawking at the fact that The Outer Worlds was going to be with us so soon. "Too bad, Bethesda!" I remember thinking (and maybe writing, but that is far too vague a sentence to go scrubbing through my early years of this blog to prove.)  "Obsidian got you beat!" Because after living with New Vegas bouncing around my head rent-free, knowing how much it ran circles around Bethesda's home grown sequel, I was all in my fandom feelings- celebrating the space opera that was to come. I couldn't imagine a world where the future of these beloved companies wasn't creating vast and impressive space games that brought back all those wonderous emotions of their heyday in a totally expansive playspace unlike any they had made before. And now I kind of wish they went back.

The Outer Worlds was a good game, I attested to such at the time, but it wasn't the classic sequel to Fallout New Vegas that I desperately wanted it to be. Starfield too was a good game, I very much enjoyed my time with it- but to call it a pale imitation of the kind of roleplaying grandeur Skyrim, Oblivion and even Fallout 4 brought to the table feels like a no brainer. (Can't believe I'm calling Fallout 4 superior at roleplaying! God, that hurts!) So now that both those games are out there, I'm starting to feel like maybe I just don't like space games because neither did it for me. Although I am trying, largely because I want to know what was so good about The Outer Worlds that it deserved a sequel and what is so apparently enduring about Starfield that so many people play it day in and day out. I would love to slide into either one of these head spaces. Which is probably why I'm playing both of them.

Yes, I'm finally going through the Spacer's Choice Edition of Starfield (which will be my first time experiencing the DLC packs that came with the game, despite having bought them.) and I'm picking at Starfield's newest update and gawking about just how much more I'm enjoying what was ostensibly a tiny systems update. Both games have some sort of hold on me, it would seem- I just need to decide which is the better all around experience- and therein lies the conundrum. Of course I wish success on Starfield's DLC which is getting revealed in the coming couple of weeks and if The Outer Worlds 2 can really leapfrog my expectations I will be a thrilled as anyone else; but neither will dissuade my opinions on the here and now.

Much has been said about how Spacer's Choice Edition does a number on the original game, and I don't know if any fixes were implemented but personally I don't seem to be having many problems on my end regarding performance. (There's some truly odd stutters in the Groundbreaker, but that's about it.) Most noticeably on my end, however, is the changes to the visuals done with lighting and though there are some sceptical comparison screenshots online, when the set-up is done contrast and gamma are done right, (instead of just set to defaults like I'm sure most people automatically do) Spacer's Choice The Outer Worlds looks darn gorgeous! Too dark in some areas, to be sure- but like a dream in those twilight/dawn hours. Starfield looks good too, in the right instances, but I've never seen a sunrise and paused to take it in like I do for Outer Worlds. Maybe that's the benefit of being able to tailor-make your background for the environment, but The Outer Worlds visually holds up better.

In terms of gun and gameplay there's a bit more nuance here. Both games try at first person shooting in a decent stab, pulling tricks of the trade and giving a satisfying combat experience. I genuinely have no serious qualms about either. Both feel good to shoot, offer satisfying guns that sound and kick great- The Outer Worlds generally has a much more sensible TTK, but with Starfield's newest update that can be totally within the hands of the player with the best adaptive difficultly set of features I've ever seen! (Speaking of- did you know Starfield just added a survival mode secretly in it's difficulty settings? Seriously, they went unexpectedly hard with that update!) In terms of raw shooting gamefeel, I think Starfield just about edges it out for simply how versatile you feel as well as the sheer range of weapons you can collect which are all so much fun to use- although The Outer Worlds still gets points for having actual Legendary weapons instead of the mess that Starfield goes for! 

Story is a bit more nuanced, especially since I don't think either game does an outstanding job here. Both create stories tailor made for their style of game, meaning Starfield's is more open-ended allowing for free exploration and The Outer World's is a bit more hyper focused on it's singular thread. I'd argue both work to the detriment of the overall scenario and though I personally like Starfield's twist after chewing over it a bit, The Outer Worlds does certainly feel like a lot more of a coherent narrative with substantive plot threads and set-ups with arguably satisfying resolutions. Still think neither studio was exactly working with their 'A-game' so-to-speak; but The Outer Worlds certainly leans closer towards my personal preferences with an open world game narrative.

So though it absolutely confuses me to say this, I might think of The Outer Worlds as the better game, when comparing the two in their raw un-DLC state. Seeing everything that Bethesda put into the update for Starfield actually really slapped me around the head and said "Hold on- they are actually paying attention to what people are saying!" Seriously, if Bethesda work a bit more on improving the feel of space travel and improving world generation as well as providing satisfying DLC content- Starfield may have more legs to stand on then I thought. And The Outer Worlds has been keeping me invested in my current playthrough again, not enough to care about the world but just enough to recall how great most of the character writing is. Except for Felix. Felix is boring. I really hope neither one of these studios prematurely throws in the towel and we get to really see the pinnacle of Western Space action RPGs at some point down the line. Any game that can make me feel as many butterflies as Rogue Trader would do me just fine!

A smidge of hope in the Wasteland

 

It hasn't exactly been a fun couple of days to engage with the Xbox ecosystem, and by extension engaging with Bethesda has felt a little awkward. Theirs was the home to the award winning studio that Xbox callously murdered for no discernible reason before immediately coming and declaring they needed more studios just like the one they destroyed a few days earlier. Incredible. And within that debris questions have been asked about who would be next, what other legends would find themselves jobless for the foolhardy whim of having worked with Microsoft? How much more grandly could Xbox damn themselves before a seemingly inevitable exit from the console market that seems all but confirmed at this pace- regardless of whatever, increasingly futile, lip service the team constantly feeds our way. But through it all, I hear that Fallout seems to be doing okay.

I mean it should be, right? Fallout is the face of video games breaking into the mainsteam right now and the surging player count's for the entire franchise are a startling example of that. Fallout 4 is getting updates again, that break all current mods but it's the thought that counts, people's twentieth New Vegas playthroughs are kicking off with gusto. Fallout 76 is actually seeing a rise in players that are somewhat galling about all the hate the game received back in the way, blissfully unaware of all the actual pain they missed getting involved so many years down the line. They don't even have to experience the dead Wasteland before the 'return to Appalachia' update. Truly they are the winners of the Fallout fanbase. But all of that only really goes so far, now doesn't it?

When The Last of Us dropped it's series the creator's were ready with a rushed and messy port of the iconic game finally coming to PC after all these years that people absolutely wharfed up with abandon- rocketing the game up the charts despite it's shoddy QA work. That is a tangible boost in profits that can be traced directly back to the show. And Fallout? Well, I'm sure they've made a pretty penny from people catching up with the games- but there isn't anything new in the Fallout world, is there? You can't really get away selling even Fallout 4 for full retail after all this time, so people are picking up inexpensive collections for a fraction of 60$ and filling themselves up on all the Fallout hype. I would call it an unexploited marketing opportunity.

What Bethesda really needs is a fresh product they can sell the heck out of. A remaster would be nice, but what they need is a fresh new game that soars in the spotlight- a great game that is rocketed into superstar status by merit of association. What they need is Fallout 5.  Which is ironically the only thing that they can't have. Fallout 5 isn't on the docket until after The Elder Scrolls 6, as probably Todd Howard's last game before retirement. Which means we won't be seeing the Wasteland again until at least the 2030's. What we need is something in the interim to keep people busy. An in-between game. A 'Fallout 4.5' so to speak. And whole could possibly be employed to create a little something like that? Oh yes, the rumours have started once more.

Obsidian have been sitting patiently on the sidelines for what feels like half their lifetime. Gone are the days when they were pushing the boundaries of the Classic RPG genre, reviving it with a gusto- now are the days when it feels like they're pushing what's possible from a AA perspective- proud work, to be sure, but not enough to get their name in lights for the new generation. And dammit, they deserve to be! Obsidian have yet to put out a bad game, even if I think The Outer Worlds wasn't really what I wanted, it's still a cracker of a title! Whatsmore, they've always demonstrated a deeper understanding on what makes Fallout special than Bethesda ever has- we need them back around again!

Fallout New Vegas was their last go around, given the tools that made Fallout 3 and given a little over a year to smash together those elements into something new, Obsidian put out the single best game the franchise had ever had, and still has ever produced. The created an RPG of choice and consequence, a world of purpose and weight and value and the tools to destroy it all as much as you wanted. New Vegas put Bethesda to such shame that they attempted to ape it's systems with Fallout 4, to honestly somewhat amateurish (in comparison) results. Give them the Fallout 4 engine and who knows? Obsidian might even be able to make a real RPG out of it! And what a way to send up the Fallout franchise, than giving it back to the people who made it to begin with!

Of course there's nothing real in the works yet. Xbox have declared that they're aware of the feelings about Fallout, particularly given the popularity of the TV show, but playing it coy is the name of the game so that no hopes are drawn up. However, I would say that recent happenings may end up expediting the process a bit. Xbox is desperate, looking for a way to justify itself underneath a parent who is placing ever more attention on their goings ons. In fact, following the surprise layoffs of Bethesda award winners, one might say that the next few projects might end up being influential in deciding whether or not Xbox even makes it to the next console generation or not. It's times like these, you need to start cashing in the chips at your disposal.

The stars seem to be aligning. Xbox is too desperate to say no, Bethesda are too busy to multidevelop, Obsidian are reaching the end of work on their current RPG and Chris Avellone has been cleared of all those misconduct allegations he had thrown his way. This is the time to bring the band back together for one last go around, smash out a Fallout game like the world has never seen before and give this franchise the absolute rocket high it deserves! And if ever it was going to happen, it's going to be now! I usually don't fan the flames of speculation, I'm usually the first to douse cold truth over it all- but today of all days I'm daring to dream. Bring us back to Fallout, Obsidian- I know you have it in you!

Starfield's first update

 

And with this the game is afoot! After months of unending nothing out of Bethesda regarding what it is they intend to do about their much maligned recent game- Starfield has finally got some details regarding their first update due out later May. With the main team already pivoting to hard work on the Elder Scrolls 6 there was some question about whether anything would be left over for Starfield's development, regarding the several years worth of 'support' that Bethesda apparently have planned for the thing. I can't exactly speak for the future but I can say this: we're at least getting competent responses to Starfield's issues. Now whether or not you call this an appropriate enough time frame for such issues to be addressed, why that's really up to you- now isn't it? 

Firstly and most significantly for me- we're going to get the ability to run Starfield at 60 frames per second on Xbox. Which is surprising given that the team made it very clear such was simply impossible for how much went into making Starfield work- but then that always seems to be the way of the technical team- isn't it? Such and such can't possibly work there, and then it can after a few months of working on it. Makes you wonder if perhaps the game was pushed out a little before it's time? Quality and performance modes don't really feel like they should be tough asks in the modern generation of gaming, but maybe that's my constructive inexperience talking and they're actually such substantial leaps in development that an entire extra half year was needed to figure them out for every product. However... I mean the PC version launched with graphics settings, right? (The bigger the company, the slower the developments, it would seem.)

Of course the 'biggest' addition, though we use that term liberally, is going to be the new maps that are coming to Starfield which I find... questionable. At a glance the 3D map generation, like a more zoomed in version of Skyrim's map, seems very appealing to look at- and I'm sure we'll get a lot out of our bird's eye glimpses of the world spaces we trudge around in- but does this really improve city navigation? I mean, giving us a 3D model that is cluttered with icons and locations isn't much better than a 2d map with the same issues, which is why I was expecting something more along the lines of a district-to-district style map like out of Skyrim. But hey- I've not had a chance to deal with the thing yet- maybe it solves the clutter issue more than I could imagine. We'll just have to see, won't we?

Additionally, Bethesda apparently want to work on making their over-the-top building mechanics somewhat useful. Settlements require so many blasted resources I would be amazed if anyone seriously managed to get around to dedicating themselves to that game mode, what with all the time spent travelling for basic building resources of the several hundred different types of materials- dealing with carry space- parsing the unfortunately convoluted storage systems- it was a giant mess. But now we'll be allow to put these talents to use within the actual ships we travel around in through inner ship customisation- and finally we're seeing sense prevail as this mode is put to task. I'm not overly excited about this mind, because I've already exhausted my fun with the builder system just decorating my apartments. I doubt this will make these systems suddenly more dynamic and interesting.

What we also got was a glimpse at the future of Starfield once they've actually reached the point of putting out real content. The first vehicle was teased, putting to bed all those rumours that Starfield actually couldn't handle land vehicles whilst raising the concern of why they were never shipped with the title from the get-go. I mean- surely they had to know their play areas were so sparse that there's literally no reason to go exploring on foot. Also, if they really wanted to improve exploration they would turn up the extreme angles of the world generation so we'd see more valleys and gorges over flat wetlands literally everywhere. That's what Minecraft did, it worked for them.

And beyond that we have the Shattered Space DLC which still remains as a mysterious object on the horizon of questionable value. Much to my chagrin the teaser image we were shown appears to be a slightly corrupted version of the monuments from the base game, arguably their least interesting content vertical- which likely means we're looking at a DLC that expands on the whole 'Starborn' aspect of the story instead of one that expands on the rather damp and boring world they've already built. I was really hoping this would delve into House Va'ruun and provide a little bit of ammunition to those who blindly declare it the game's most interesting faction despite the fact they have no presence in the main game whatsoever and are characterised by their lack of detail.

Seriously, if Bethesda could hire an actual writer to slap together an interesting character or two that would be fantastic. It would really wake up those people who call 'Andreja' one of the best companions Bethesda have ever written for merit of her eye-wateringly basic secret-agent narrative which touches practically nothing on her character growth whatsoever. Not that any of the other companions are any better but good god- if Andreja is your gold standard than for sake of everyone you need to pick up 'Like a Dragon' or 'Infinite Wealth' or 'Persona 3 Reload' or anything with real characters in it! There's a gulf of wasted potential just sitting on the sidelines!

I sit in hope, vain though it may be, that I end up being proven wrong and Shattered Space totally transforms the Starfield experience. I would actually love for that to be the case because I would supremely enjoy playing this game a hell of a lot more- but Bethesda have had a bit of a problem with even meeting expectations these days, let alone surpassing them. And my expectations aren't exactly through the roof as it is. Starfield will have had 12 months worth of feedback by the time of it's first expansion, and if their team is reactive enough to be able to address all of that, maybe we might get a No Man's Sky style comeback, rather than a 'Suicide Squad' style drowning.

The reawakening of Fallout

 

I doubt anyone is really surprised about what is currently transpiring within the Fallout brand following the success of the Amazon show. I mean it's just the way of things, right? A half-dormant brand is unveiled upon a brand new audience and everyone flocks to the source material hungry for more, exactly what happened after the Netflix Witcher show's first season, exactly what happened after Cyberpunk Edgerunners, exactly what happened after The Last of Us. (I wonder if 'Arcane' had the same effect, considering how narratively lacking that franchises' source material is?) Of course, this means that the old games are selling like hotcakes on hotcake appreciation day in the middle of Williamsburg Virginia- the Pancake capital of the world. (Hotcakes are Pancakes apparently, who knew?) And with that comes a thrist for a new Bethesda first person shooter game to fill the void that has been in our hearts since 2015- yes, I know what I said.

Of course that is a little bit of problem given the fact that Bethesda's next title is going to be The Elder Scrolls Six- (Not a problem for me, baby! I LOVE Elder Scrolls!) which means people are going to have to gorge themselves silly on what's already out there. Luckily considering the Fallout franchise has been going strong for decades at this point- that isn't exactly an 'exhausting well' of content by any stretch of the imagination. The Classic Fallout 1, the empire building Fallout 2, the reimagination of Fallout 3, the sheer majesty of New Vegas, the modern gameplay of Fallout 4 and the ongoing meandering of 76 is enough to drive any new fan drunk on the brand before they ever get to the stage of withdrawals the rest of us are at. But what about existing fans? What do they have to look forward to? 

Well Fallout 4 is on the verge of getting it's biggest mod ever, a total conversion of the base game to fit the locales of London derived totally from scratch by the hands of countless talented artists, landscapers and programmers. Fallout London is one of those projects you hear about being worked on and promptly forget about, reasoning such a grand idea would never make it to market. But London turned out to be one of those rare few that actually sucked in a crowd of the interested and the driven to take over the project with actual potential once the 'dreamers' vacated their infant idea. Right now we're sitting on the verge of Fallout London's launch, as long as Bethesda don't screw up Fallout 4 too badly with their next gen launch, because we're all currently crossing our fingers praying their isn't a new FormID for mods about to drop. (Just love how Bethesda frankly refuse to warn us about this stuff until it happens. Real nice of them.)

But there's only so far that fans can go to keep the Fallout franchise churning with new stuff to do. And I'm sure there are a lot of modders now interested in making some Fallout stuff- even I actually want to try my hand at Creation Kit coding, which I've never done before but given my new hobbyist programming stuff I figure I might be able to make something cool with a little bit of imagination- what the average layman wants is a new product. Most people don't know how to Mod and are afraid of trying it out. Understandably. So how do we bridge the divide of new content for Fallout despite the fact Fallout 5 is probably looking at a mid 2030 launch date? How do we make people happy? And scoop in some of that juicy cross-medium profiteering money? (I use the royal 'we'. I ain't Bethesda.) 

The obvious is laying right in front of us but I'm going to spout it anyway. Hire Obsidian to make an in between game for you. Seriously, Bethesda- if you trust Johnathon Nolan with your franchise, why not Obsidian? I'm sure anyone would be happy to make a Fallout RPG right now, but Obsidian are the only guys who really get it- and that's including Bethesda themselves! Sure, the team are currently slapping up their latest Pillars-world title, Avowed, but after that... I'm sure they have room to fiddle around with one last Fallout before Sawyer retires or whatever it is the man is planning to do. (I still half suspect him to try and bring about actual Fallout through some under-table dealings with Zetans from the stars.) But the chances of that happening are so damned low, I won't hold my breath.

Alternatively, there are so many studios out there who could expand the Fallout licences out even more to other styles of game! I cannot comprehend how Bethesda haven't tried to launch a proper Party based RPG version of either of their flagship franchises, but with the rise of CRPGs currently upon us- this would be the time! I'm not even talking about anything as fancy as Baldur's Gate 3 (because that would be a wholr dealing of it's own!) But what about a small scale adventure from a purely isometric angle, taking advantage of the low-poly models you can get away with from that angle? Give us a brief version of one of the Wasteland games set in the Fallout world. Tell the story of a bunch of Wastelanders trying to escape the advance of the Legion across Arizona, or a wayward squad of NCR soldiers following the second battle for Hoover Dam trying to make their way back home. Something linear, short and sweet that keeps the fanbase churning!

And from a more scattershot and wild perspective? Why haven't we got a factions-style Hearts of Iron Fallout game? A Total War style game? A Dynasty Warriors type title? (Okay, maybe Dynasty Warriors is taking it a bit far...) Fallout has travelled for so long at this point you'd have really thought some of the more niche communities would have been fed with some decent licenced titles over the years that expand the universe out. Don't get me wrong, I'm not campaigning for Fallout to 'Warhammer' their franchise, or anything! (God knows that would be a disaster!) I just think Fallout would make a damn fine 4X strategy game if Bethesda were looking to expand. Heck, if bloody Divinity can do it- why hasn't Fallout already?

There really is money on the table with the Fallout brand, and I don't mean in that in the cynical and grim way a marketing executive would. By making a series Bethesda have already established that Fallout is bigger than it's Open World games, and that should pan out to the games. Every non open world Fallout game has been made non canonical and for a world as vast as this one that just seems nigh on non-sensical! Are we really content with letting Fallout 76 be their franchise's only canonically recognised step out of it's comfort zone? Because I certainly am not! Don't let Fallout fall back to sleep, Bethesda! Feed the beast!

Screaming into the void

 

I sat down thinking about what it was I had to write today. What it was I wanted to write today. And what it was I was going to write today. And to be honest I ran aground with all three scenarios. Why? And do you know what I felt? I felt anger. And frustration. Why? And where were these inexplicable feelings directed? I'm glad you asked because the answer is pretty direct- I was LIVID at Bethesda game studios for scuppering my latest attempt to play through Skyrim by just being their unfathomably annoying selves. What do I mean by that? I mean that the company won't stop making it difficult to be a fan of their older games! I know, this is hardly the first time I'm kicked up this exact same fuss, but damn it if it won't be the last either! I'm going to explode if I don't talk about the damned updates- so sit back and grab a bag of chips as I unload my hated upon this rake-stepping machine of a developer.

So I understand how much of a privileged position we sit in as lovers of a game that has an evergreen footprint upon the gaming landscape. Skyrim was foretold to me as a game I could play for the next ten years, and I'm still trying my hand at the thing coming close to year 13; the hype did not lie. Not everyone could get abroad the train, and that is their loss because as far as I'm concerned there are only a couple of games with a modding community to match the sheer ferocity of Skyrim's, and those are the Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 teams. Actually, for the rest of the month I'm going to call New Vegas the most extensively modded game currently doing the rounds... that hasn't already spun off into it's own standalone. (Let's not bring DOTA and DAYZ into this- muddying the waters and all that.) And that privilege can make us a bit protective.

At this point the amount of modded reconstructions that the game has renders literally every copy of the game as personalised, right out of the Mario meme. We decide the way that the game plays, where it starts, how combat works, the flow of the economy, the make-up of the enemies, the distance of the engine LODs, the visual hue, the extent of the God rays- and it's not uncommon to throw a few body mods and skimpy armour mods ontop of that for literally every other Skyrim player in the world because I remain the sole being in the universe that still only plays a male character when they boot up Skyrim. It's actually a bit worse than that- I always end up playing roughly the same male character, no matter how much I force myself to change their race, hair colour, anything- it always circles around to the same archetype. (Not someone who looks like mr, thank god! I only do that in Fallout 4...)

What I'm trying to say is that the game is functionally ours at this point, more so than 99% of other games in the market which developers feel likely totally within their rights to throw in a little change here and there to keep the product running smoothly. (But if it's Rockstar knocking up to try and rip licenced songs out of my GTA game- they can go dunk their head in a river! Starting the beginning of Vice City without 'Broken Wings' playing is tantamount to committing a war crime!) When it's one of Bethesda's old games, however, they're more like deadbeat parents kicking their way back into their abandoned children's lives to screw everything up, beg them for money and then leave them broken and non-functional. That is the state of Skyrim every few years after a Bethesda visit.

Here's the damage- Bethesda recently added a brand new storefront from which they instead to flog mods. But through some strange trick of fate- Bethesda decided to kick off this new initiative with a worse slate of mods than what Creation Club launched with. (I think you can tell that a lot more planning and build-up went into the Creation Club. All of this kind of feels chucked together.) This new attempt to centralise the modding scene by integrating official mods into the in-built Bethesda.net organiser is misguided, but well intentioned. It speaks to a decision making committee that doesn't quite get what the personalisation of the game means, but I know all they're trying to do is make modding easier. They have done the exact opposite though, so my understanding can only stretch so far.

First off, obviously, the change to the version number broke the SKSE which breaks every game that uses scripts. But of course it's a bit worse than that. Waiting for the still-active contributor team to fix the SKSE download is par for the course- but not every mod connects through SKSE. Some of the significant gameplay changers have to perform their own version checks, and those mods aren't typically maintained in a timely manner. Some aren't maintained at all. Every frivolous update for nonsense is a strike directly murdering large swathes of mods that would otherwise work fine, all to add another house mod from Eleanora. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate her work- but why couldn't this have been a creation club update?

But you want to know what grinds my gears? Oh this is the cherry on top of the cake, let me tell you! Part of providing access to a modding site through the game is having the functionality to run those mods- and that means having to build in basic features into the game such as a load-order manager. (Basically it tells all mods what order to load in- which prevents code running in the wrong order and mistakes from occurring.) But uhh... yeah, we've all already got our own one of those in our personalised mod building set-ups. Every modder in the world uses LOOT with inbuilt special-case exceptions, right?  A delicate placement of orders and rules to make sure the 500 mod mega pack runs precisely as it should... and the Bethesda tool overwrites it.

That's right, if you load Skyrim with enough mods to make Bethesda pause- then their new manager kicks in to disable all plugins and require you to switch, and order them, manually like an actual madman. I don't know what sets it off, I'm yet to see anyone manage to circumvent this, which means I'm functionally incapable of playing Skyrim again unless I manage to book an entire evening off to figure out how to hard-code my load order back into Skyrim and... I just don't have the heart to jump through more blasted hoops just to play this game. We shouldn't have to keep playing this endless pointless game of Cat and Mouse with the developers- when will they just give up and make Fallout 4 their cash cow which they never leave alone? When will us Skyrim fans finally be left alone to mod in peace? When will the beast of Bethesda be overcome?

How about that Character creator!

 

One of the most intimidating first bosses that any Role Play gamer has to contend with is the character creator- that moment when you are well and truly confronted the limitless potential of eternity and told to whittle everything down to split second- life changing decisions! Anyone who doesn't spend a good ten minutes looking over the options available before even seriously getting started making their face will never understand the sheer horror of looking back on the toil of a thousand petty slider movements only to realise- oh my god, I've created the most boring/horrifying creature ever conceived- back to the drawing board! And with many games that you wouldn't expect getting surprisingly varied and approachable character creators in recent years, I wonder about the philosophy behind what such creators are even supposed to achieve.

The spurring of these thoughts came at the insistence of Dragon's Dogma 2 to launch early it's character creator for the purview of the curious. Through this we've been able to enjoy one of my favourite iterations of a slate of creation tools that I've seen in a game to date. Versatile and varied, Dragon's Dogma 2 enters into the nitty gritty of miniature slide management whilst bridging the gap for those that can't be bothered for the granular improvements by a wide slate of pre-set options making the art of coming up with a unique face a matter of a few moments work. Which I suppose is what empowered the team to fill the world with, reportedly, up to 1000 NPCs that seem to be hand-made- not just generated! I always love when the players get their hands on some slither of the full breadth of creation tools- because that is when the sky is truly the limit in character creation.

With Dragon's Dogma you start with 6 pages worth of pre- generated faces, and when you click one you'll receive a new page of faces similar to that choice, and after that selection you'll get another page of subtle facial structure alterations to pick from. From there you'll have your default character, and that is the canvass upon which you'll make the subtle tweaks to the rise of a cheekbone or the curve of a nose- as well as enjoy the decently robust scarring and tattoo system which allows for mostly free-form placement along the entire body so you can create the image from your imagination to a tee. It's this perfect meeting of complex and approachable which I can see really getting aplomb from all sides- a solution few were actively seeking but I feel that most all can readily appreciate.

Bethesda are well known for their character creators, ever since Skyrim decided to do away with the honestly mediocre systems of Fallout 3 and Oblivion and instead cobble together the most really robust slide-based system. That slide system was limited in it's functionality afforded to the player, however, which is why most people consider the commonly available mod that unlocks those sliders to their fullest potential an automatic download on even a casual playthrough. But there's a problem with that- with it's full potential unlocked, and even to some small degree in it's vanilla state, the Skyrim slate of options are just so vast- it's a bit overwhelming to be honest.

When you get to the sorts of games that offer several hundred slides for each slight tweak of a nose it can get to the point where you're just testing out what a slide does, figuring out you don't like it and immediately going back to defaults. Unless you have a crystal clear idea of exactly what you're going for, it's hard to maintain a unified design philosophy that guides your process. And when the options overwhelm you and you can't get a handle, you'll be less inclined to experiment which will lead to more generic creations. God knows I give up pretty quickly everytime I try to make an interesting player character in a Souls' like game for this very reason. Too much choice can be a curse in itself.

Baldur's Gate III on the otherhand veers into the direction of simple to such a degree that it is shocking how successful the character creator turned out! You literally only select between a small collection of faces and chuck some hair on top alongside some racial features- there isn't a slider in sight when it comes to building your character. Which to be fair is a lot more than they really needed to do given that this was supposed to be an isometric game- but Larian's obsession with making a fully cinematic RPG masterpiece necessitated high quality character models so I guess they were stuck between a rock and a hard place- and choosing to make every single character creation choice a curated 'body part' or 'extra feature' was certainly a bold choice indeed.

This could easily have turned out as utterly pathetic as Destiny's character creator (which still doesn't have any option to change after the tutorial despite this franchise closing in on over a decade old later this year.) Larian really honed in on all the character appearance choices that also crossed over with class building, including race and Class options, and threw in as many high quality assets as possible to give as much variation possible. Scales, Horns, pigmentation, there are even selectable genitals are in the game for some reason. The result is perhaps on the best simply character creators of all time, lacking the range of Dragon's Dogma 2, perhaps, but creating no less as memorable and unique love dolls for lonely BG3 players to vicariously find companionship through whilst convincing themselves that they'll also fall madly for some hyper interesting personality one day. 

 At it's very least a good character creator should give us the ability to conjure some rough approximation of ourselves to self-insert into a video game for the truly imagination deprived. But at it's best character creators invite players to launch themselves into tailor made shoes of their own conjuration, dreaming up a whole life to roleplay. Those who spend all those hours getting someone just right, as generic or fantastical as they ultimately end up, feel that pull of the other letting them step out of the shoes of the mundane into another life for a brief few hours. Maybe those who simply can't connect with that would be considered healthier individuals in a traditional setting- but name one mentally healthy person that's fun to have drinks with! Exactly!