Tag: Bethesda

Why the Video Game Reviewers need to stop proping up bad or mediocre games

There is general idea among regular gamers that professional reviewers are basically being bribed to push game sales. While we cannot say that this is the truth in every instance, it is clear that there many journalists are no longer able to review games without trying to use them to prop up their factions in culture wars.

It seems to me that the video game reviewers have become more like political activists rather than people who are actually trying to play the games and show their thoughts on it.

Some of it is a cultural change in our culture. The video game industry was seen as a not serious industry by many governments. It was simply part of the entertainment industry, which in the highly technocratic era of the Post-World War 2, was not seen it as a threat to their power. However, more recently, people have started to take a closer look at video games.

Politics and video games do not really mix as video games unlike movies, were truly seen as diversions not were taken up by the avant-garde. This means that video games have been more a product of middle-class values and concepts

However, more recently, people who tend to be more political have been getting more interested into video games. With this attention, they are bringing along the baggage which has been hurting the industry and its ability to make games.

What we need to is to return to when Video Games were made for people playing games.

We do not need activists in our games. Neither should they be in any form of media. Activism in this age seems more of a way to help one’s side of an oligarchical system in America.

Video games should return to being about entertainment and telling an inspiring story that matters to people of all ages, races and abilities.

When the video game industry and its critics manage to stop being so elitist, then the industry will be able to make great games that people will purchase and cherish.

Is Civilization VI still worth playing in 2025?

I think that Civilization VI is superior to Civilization VII in many ways. The game is simply lacking in respect for the formula which gave the series so much staying power. Civilization VII simply does not understand how to harness the goodwill of so many fans across the decades and instead decides to go after people who are casual players who are not interested in actually playing a complex game where you have to use your brain. Many aspects of Civilization VII, from its UI to the 3 mini games hiding behind the base game, Civilization VI simply outshines it.

Civilization VI is better than Civilization VII and it is also cheaper in comparison to it.

Starfield and the prospects for 2025 and Steam

Starfield and Steam have an uneasy relationship to say the least when one looks at the reviews. When I bought the game, the Space RPG was sitting at Mostly Positive. After people began attacking the game because YouTube’s algorithm was boosting such negative videos, the rating went to Mixed. People often call it a mixed bag and there are many reasons for such a change in the ratings that I have already talked about on here. Generally, the negative reviews are understandable however many of such criticism can be stated about Skyrim or any Ubisoft game. However, the blandness of Starfield which many people talk about is more of a product of Bethesda’s emphasis on realism. However, I strain to see how one can call it bland when one can go to Neon, which has a clear visual style in comparison to New Atlantis. These criticisms stem from a culture of stagnation in video games that are more interested in rehashing visual styles of old games on the NES and SNES then in accepting that nothing everything is going to made in that style.

Steam players are truly passionate in way that most people in Modern Western culture are not. However, they can be quite myopic with how they review games. Reviewing a game on Steam sometimes gets tied up in one’s political ideology. Another is that many people are in a nostalgic mode which I have often tried my best to avoid. I enjoy respecting the past, but video games are inherently not a media that lends itself to a style of art that stagnates.

In 2025, I hope that the developers of Starfield and the Modding community continue to improve the game. They should take what they see on Steam into account, but they have to remember that this is only slice of gamers. There are many players of Starfield who were Xbox gamers and some who also use Xbox Game Pass. Steam gamers are truly passionate about games but they can also be elitist and try to be myopic about game styles

What we see in Starfield’s reception is an industry in stagnation.

When the gaming industry was in the sixth generation with the rise of the Playstation 1, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. The games were changing quickly in the graphics. The SNES glory days of 1992 and 1993 had been transformed into the 3 dimensions of palaces and creatures in Mario 64. One can see a clear change in graphics in modern games from the early 1990s to the late 1990s. Even the early 3D games of 1992 were charming but crude by the late 1990s.

MechWarrior 2 by Activision was released in July 1995 and was a stunning game but one looks at MechWarrior 3 and MechWarrior 4, it looks as if thousands of years have past in development of gaming graphics. MechWarrior 2 was also more advanced than the original MechWarrior game of the late 1980s. However, the change between 2 and 4 is huge.

When one looks at older RTS games such as Dune 2 and then looks at Science Fiction RTS games such as Starcraft and then the Star Trek Armada games, the difference is striking. While Star Trek Armada II looks uglier than the original, a product of cutting corners to allow players on their 2001 Computers to support having hundreds of ships on the screen, the graphic fidelity is a huge canyon. While Dune 2 was a monumental game in the creation of the RTS genre, rather being more of an experimental game such as the Atari 2600 Game, Utopia, it was still a crude game that isn’t easy to replay in the current age. However, by the creation of Starcraft, RTS games had become more formalized in their designs and now one can see the current way in which RTS games appear to the player. In my view, RTS games have largely looked the same since even the time of Blizzard’s classic Warcraft I, when the company was more interested in breaking boundaries and not just relying on the IP in order to make money and sucking its creativity out of people working at the studio and ruining their own company’s visions.

People are used to what they have been seeing for the past 15 years. When it also comes to the transformative Sixth generation of consoles, many gamers grew up in that time and have fond memories about it. These people have grown up and are now writing the articles in magazines and the sites have a bias towards those games. There were many other games released in the 1990s; many such games were not that great; however some were trailblazers in new genres. Instead we are stuck on the old games and styles that were once innovative but are now preventing the industry from being able to embrace creativity or even revive old franchises that should have been given another look instead of being abandoned by the companies.

Thankfully, Starfield was made and we have the foundation to continue improving it. I hope that 2025 has many successes for Starfield and the modders who are making it more interesting and unique in its styles.