Demnogonis Saastuttaja
Magister
I have noticed how reviewers usually praise these games for their polish while simultaneously calling the good games rough diamonds (or rough shit, depending on the reviewer). This may hold true on a purely technical viewpoint, but otherwise - these games feel shoddily made, cheap products. No attention to detail, no fleshing out anything and never a moment where you raise your eyebrows and think "What the fuck?".
Think about how many lines they bothered to write for the mercenaries in JA2 for all kinds of situations, or the odd way that thief Witless talks in Arcanum (name one non-main villain from ME that you can remember in any way), stuff as obvious as agriculture in Fallout - mostly absent in Fallout 3, replaced by completely nonsensical gimmicks like child town (don't even think where the new kids come from. Heck, don't think of how any of the communities in the game could ever function, your brain will just break.). Small stuff, but apparently too much work.
Just think of Mass Effect, a 90+ AAA product, supposedly well polished with some complaints of it's copypaste sidquest worlds. Well, in addition, it has copypaste enemies like those zombie-things that were used for something like four different enemies without even changing anything in their appearance - impaled geth things, diseased people, alien mind control thing infested people, people with multiple organs - all the same zombies. The weapons are mostly the same weapon copied 30 times with names as original as "Dragon VIII", the people don't have any distinguishing features, and so on. I tried to replay it but I found out that I just can't, it's all just too sterile and there are no good parts to look forward to. One big problem is the superfluous loot, it's like they just couldn't be arsed to test when it would be a good time to give the player some new and shiny guns, how to make the game flow, instead they just had "free guns always everywhere a lot".
This goes for Fallout 3, too. You can expect that there's something cool there, but you'll be always let down, there could be potentially exciting situations and some drama but the incredibly shoddy execution always fails to deliver.
I don't think you can just ignore the small stuff and get the big picture right, nor do the small stuff right but somehow make it generally bad, so a design philosophy like that of Bethesda's - draw a really big picture and leave it at that, quantity and screw quality - will ever produce a good game.
Think about how many lines they bothered to write for the mercenaries in JA2 for all kinds of situations, or the odd way that thief Witless talks in Arcanum (name one non-main villain from ME that you can remember in any way), stuff as obvious as agriculture in Fallout - mostly absent in Fallout 3, replaced by completely nonsensical gimmicks like child town (don't even think where the new kids come from. Heck, don't think of how any of the communities in the game could ever function, your brain will just break.). Small stuff, but apparently too much work.
Just think of Mass Effect, a 90+ AAA product, supposedly well polished with some complaints of it's copypaste sidquest worlds. Well, in addition, it has copypaste enemies like those zombie-things that were used for something like four different enemies without even changing anything in their appearance - impaled geth things, diseased people, alien mind control thing infested people, people with multiple organs - all the same zombies. The weapons are mostly the same weapon copied 30 times with names as original as "Dragon VIII", the people don't have any distinguishing features, and so on. I tried to replay it but I found out that I just can't, it's all just too sterile and there are no good parts to look forward to. One big problem is the superfluous loot, it's like they just couldn't be arsed to test when it would be a good time to give the player some new and shiny guns, how to make the game flow, instead they just had "free guns always everywhere a lot".
This goes for Fallout 3, too. You can expect that there's something cool there, but you'll be always let down, there could be potentially exciting situations and some drama but the incredibly shoddy execution always fails to deliver.
I don't think you can just ignore the small stuff and get the big picture right, nor do the small stuff right but somehow make it generally bad, so a design philosophy like that of Bethesda's - draw a really big picture and leave it at that, quantity and screw quality - will ever produce a good game.
