Hacker News Reader

Comment by robswc | Hacker News Reader

I feel the "reaction" is over blown. Especially when I see what some people complain about.

There's tons of legitimate criticism, pretty much pertaining to bugs but damn... I remember Skyrim being just as "buggy" but I don't recall the reaction being nearly as bad.

I'm bias though as I've played on PC and had a phenomenal experience. Last gen players should 100% get a refund. Beyond that though, I just don't see it. There's some other viable critisim but when I weigh that against what the game is I just don't get it. Its objectively the most detailed city in a first person action/RPG. It objectively has the most detailed quests:quantity. I can excuse the bugs... again though, talking from a PC experience with 0 real bugs. I can see how it would be annoying with bugs but I've played GTA and Skyrim, I can survive them lol

View on HN

> Its objectively the most detailed city in a first person action/RPG. It objectively has the most detailed quests:quantity.

Sure, it's gorgeous and the on-rails scripted side-quests are fantastically written and animated, but driving around the city just makes me realize how empty it all feels because only the handful of vendors actually programmed to have an inventory are capable of interacting with you. But then on the other hand, they didn't animate half of the immersive shit you actually can do, like buying a drink from a bartender. It feels like a game that wants to be an immersive sim, but the second you try to immerse yourself in it you realize that it's just a massive facade.

This is far and away the biggest letdown of 2077 for me. There's no emergent gameplay. The world is simply a beautiful aquarium filled with schools of mindless, swimming NPCs.

Think about the rich interactions in Skyrim: you arrive in the town of Whiterun. Your inventory is full of junk so you drop some. A beggar picks up a discarded sword and excitedly asks you if he can keep it. Just as you say yes, a brood of vampires attacks! Peasants run for the hills, but your new friend and the nearby blacksmith joins your side and smashes them to bits with her majestic warhammer! The fight resolved, you decide you want that warhammer. So you wait for her to end her shift, head home, and fall asleep. In the dead of night, you steal into her home and snatch it for yourself. But her husband was awake and saw your robbery! The guards are alerted! You escape town with your life, but just barely. You decide to sleep off your wounds in a bedroll outside of town. But when you wake up, your eyes glow! You have fangs! You've become a vampire! So you decide...

I could go on. (Hell, I probably went on too long there.) Point being, Skyrim is flush with these unique experiences. Given CDPR's claims, I really, really hoped we'd get at least a few mechanics for unique encounters. But the world CDPR created is a beautiful corpse.

Nice description of the captivating nature of Skyrim. It had that promise at release but it took a year or more and the DLC to create the experience you actually enjoyed.

At release + 6mo? I forget... it was still captivating but had ragequit annoyance bugs and far too many crashes, still. I'm figuring "No Man's Sky" is about ready to look at, myself.

We must have played a different Skyrim...

I’m surprised the unavoidable progression breaking bugs are not the talking point. That isn’t acceptable in a fan creation from 2002, why is it acceptable for a AAA game in 2020? It isn’t. That’s why I returned the game. Animation bugs and unpolished gameplay are disappointing, but not over the invisible, constantly moving line of “what is acceptable behavior for game publishers”.

I really think it's mostly the issues with having advertized it for last gen consoles and then not actually delivered a playable experience on them. It sounds like there are indeed a lot of other bugs, but those seem like issues they would have been permitted to patch their way out of over time.

COD Cold War is another big title this year and is quite buggy, but it is playable in spite of those bugs on all the systems it was advertised to work on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com