Hieronymous Alloy wrote: ↑September 26th, 2018, 7:58 am
Here's the thing: you can't ever go back to 1985.
The problem that these sequels and "spiritual successor" games have is that they're not trying to duplicate a game from 1985; the challenge they face is
making you feel like you did when you were playing a brand new game in 1985, which is different.
This was hashed through on the Bethsoft forums, with the attempted Fallout sequels that Bethesda released. The same argument was tossed about (and accused with), but no Fallout fans wanted a clone of Fallout 2, they wanted a Fallout 3 that was built upon the series foundation...
I'd hold that the same was true for the fans of Bard's Tale (except for
Krellen).
...to base it on the series notable features of appearance, gameplay intent, and mechanics.
Interestingly, Fallout (a Wasteland derivative title, where Wasteland was a Bard's Tale clone) had similar standout features like the animated detail faces during encounters; all three of these games had that. A modernized version could have offered faces par with the
Nvidia head demos.
Bethesda wasted that option for FO3, by using the regular heads on the NPC combat/world models, instead of a high-poly detail face—despite them pausing the game world, and having a much larger polygon screen budget during conversations.
We could have had something like this:
But instead we got this...[crap]
And where we should have gotten something similar to this:
...we got this [crap].
FO3 totally ignored all that made Fallout —Fallout, and focused purely on dressing up an Oblivion 2.0 with the iconic aspects of the Fallout IP; a re-skin that offered nothing of the series' experience, and held none of its tenets—while contradicting many of them. It was a terrible [ie. servile] RPG, whose main purpose was merely to simulate an extrapolated sandbox for the customer.
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With the new BT, it's not as bad as FO3 was at being a sequel, but it still looks and plays like a reskin of a different game; and equally discards the series' tenets... and like with FO3, the question is 'Why make it at all—if you are going to make it something entirely unrelated?'.
The sad answer is mass-market-appeal, but a BT sequel—funded by BT fans that paid in advance— is not a project that should consider alterations for better mass-appeal; its design process should have only considered the fans of the original games.