Thalestr

Microsoft has so many spinning plates up in the air right now and they have no idea how to handle them all. Eventually they’re all going to come crashing down and smash on the floor and it’s not going to be pretty.

Most of the beloved Arkane team had left long before the closure.

I do not have hope that this developer will make another good game let alone one that respects the TES IP or in any way lives up to expectations.

The title made me think they were responding to users that needed customer support, but no. This:

Meanwhile, when another user lamented the amount of loading screens, the support team replied imploring the reviewer to “consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under three seconds”.

is just pathetic. This is nothing more than low-effort damage control. Which, funnily enough, is rather fitting for Starfield in general. It’s not a terrible game but it absolutely fell flat on its face on its biggest selling points. Procedural exploration will always have drawbacks but No Man’s Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department and it came out nearly 8 years ago and made by a team a fraction of the size. And I don’t expect Bethesda to put in the same effort as Hello did and make Starfield live up to its promises

Yes. Especially when it’s only like 2 or 3 years after first release. It’s just double dipping at that point.

• The option to skip puzzles and not get punished for it.
• Independent difficulty options for things like exploration, combat, crafting, etc. Whatever the game has.

I stopped playing ESO years ago after around 10,000 hours of playtime. It’s nice (or perhaps unsurprising) to hear that they still haven’t addressed how badly they messed up the story structure and pacing. Rather than have the expansions be an accessory to the main story and tutorial - they acted as replacements. A game design choice I’m 99.9% sure was made by management and not by any actual dev team. It was a confusing, convoluted mess with only a few expansions but I can’t imagine how bad it is now with even more.

I cannot trust any publication that “reviews” a product like this without taking at least a little time to go over the legitimately harmful business practices against the customer.

People with lots of money want even more money. Less employees means less money that has to be paid out which means more money in the short term. Makes line go up for a while. Makes suits happy.

You can hit the big round turn-based button in bottom right of your HUD to activate turn mode at any time, even outside combat. This effectively pauses the game. The game even makes a sound effect of a clock slowing down and stopping.