dreiszen

I realized that Bethesda games were good once I realized that I should stop playing the game they sold me and make it into the game I wanted.

That's a smug answer but I also really mean it. You were right, Austin, straight up fuck being the Dovahkiin. I had no interest in learning the words of power or whatever and fighting a big dragon that drops meteors on you. I just want to break into peoples' houses at night, steal their pots, transmute them into gold and put them back as priceless jewelry, all while trying to keep the fact that I'm a powerful witch a secret from the street urchin I took in when she asks for an allowance and all I have is gems and bars of gold.

Honestly, playing like that reminded me of when I was a kid playing Super Mario 64. Sure, I can rush through that game in an afternoon now, but I only really "beat" it as a kid after several years. Most of the time I spent playing that game was just hanging out in the castle, seeing what I could interact with and talking to NPCs, even if they said the same things over and over. When I think about it, I had way more fun burning my ass on the torches in the castle basement and trying to carry a tiny wiggler around a mountain than I ever did killing thirty bandits in a dark fort so I could press E over their box and manage my encumbrance. I'm not saying that to mean "fuck new games" either- I also enjoyed that more than Super Mario World, where the world map is just a glorified list of action stages.

Honestly, sometimes I worry that there's a strange disconnect between immersion and freedom nowadays. Skyrim tries to give players the freedom to do anything they want. but instead of leaving things open-ended it provides you with possibilities that are many but ultimately finite. Despite my best efforts, in interacting with the plot, my character is written in a certain fixed way, and I feel more locked in than when I was playing as characters that couldn't say anything. It reminds me of a strange complaint I heard a few years ago when The Evil Within was released- people weren't feeling immersed because their character wasn't reacting to the monsters.

This ended up being longer than I intended and I don't know if it went anywhere, but I guess that's my answer. Any game's an open world game if you try hard enough though, I guess is what I'm saying.

Palmer Luckey doesn't look like someone who plays music so much as a character in a musical.

There's a necessary implication that Dan has previously attempted eating a taco and managed to somehow fail at it.

A game that I think about a lot but that never seems to get mentioned anywhere is Body Harvest. It's an N64 game by DMA Design, who would later go on to become Rockstar, and it's notable for being an open world 3D game where you steal cars to do drive-bys on aliens. GTA3 is the predecessor of the modern open world game, and this game is its prototype in a lot of areas. It's also really bad in a lot of ways, and it's clear that a lot of ideas that they tried weren't going to pan out, but it's... interesting to look at, if nothing else.

I think the only other person I've ever heard mention it is Jeff Gerstmann, actually.