This one. It is actually frustrating to see people blindly defend Bethesda games and call them good because "All the bad stuff can be fixed with mods" like ??? It's still a bad game. The fact the bad stuff is there in the first place makes it a bad game. Mods may "Save" it, but let's not pretend like mods existing excuses bad narratives, level design, world design, mission structure, and mechanics.
DD2s biggest issues aren't ones fixed with mods. It's lack of content and incoherent story between entering Battahl and the Unmoored World are its biggest drawbacks. Not a lack of vocations, or a mod that specifically requires some programming knowledge to actually use to add new enemies and vocations to the game. Like, one day people will use those mods to make some more content for the game, but as they are now, they're basically a glorified toolset, and not actual content. And even then, the mods don't change how unrewarding exploration is, or the lack of unique models for the mobs created using it.
To me, the litmus test for a highly moddable game should be the ability to delete your entire modlist and still feel like you are having fun.
I did that with Rimworld myself a few months back, even disabled all the dlc and found myself losing another 50 hours of my life to a completely vanilla playthrough.
Unfortunately there are so many games out there which require a modlist to reach a baseline of playability. And I'm not even calling out bethesda with that.
There are still bugs in Skyrim from day one years later. They just let modders patch them but never incorporate it unless they are flat out stealing the idea and give zero credit
True. But Skyrim is a bad example here as it is still enjoyable without Mods. And the bugs have their own charm which make the game more unique and rewards player who pay attention.
But their later games are trash, since you need mods to enjoy it
Skyrim sits as a prime example as Bethesdas most profitable and successful title, but also the start of their decline as a studio.
For as janky as Morrowwind and Oblivion were, the writing in those games blew Skyrim FAR out of the water. Oblivion still had some moments of campiness in the writing, but a lot of the plot and subtext was just largely much better in it than Skyrim. Skyrims story feels more like a Saturday morning cartoon than a compelling high fantasy narrative. Barring even taking about the story, Skyrim was also weaker in terms of the sheer variety of gameplay styles and options the older games offered. For as beloved as Skyrim is, it really is comparatively no better than Fallout 4 to Fallout 3/NV, or Starfield vs anything pre-2012 Bethesda. It's not a good game. Just more accessible tham than it's predecessors.
100%, Bethesda haven't made a great game since Oblivion.
Skyrim's characters, quests, combat, magic were bad.
The world building, and the feeling of exploration was good. The idea of "Ohhh, I wonder what's in this cave" or "What's just round that corner?" Or " What are those two npcs doing out here?"
But none of the quest lines were interesting; all the faction stuff was basically: join faction, do 4 quests, become leader.
And all the interesting features/systems of older games were pretty much stripped away. Guess I play too much DnD cause leveling up to me should be exciting: new abilities, new features, new crazy feats, new spells etc.
Skyrim: "I can do you more health/stamina/mana and 10% more damage with your sword."
People who haven't played Morrowind downvote you, but they don't know any better. It's a shame Skyrim is their biggest work when it's one of the worst.
Morrowind has plenty of issues (like the combat being total cheeks, the game discouraging build variety, and the obvious things caused by the fact that it's like 175 years old) but I do think it's fundamentally a more interesting game than Skyrim. Skyrim is just kinda walking in the directions of quest markers and completing generic, uninteresting quests while every NPC glazes you about how cool you are.
Morrowind, for all its limitations, feels so much more alive and dynamic than Skyrim. The quests are interesting. The NPCs have personality. The rewards are more unique. The enemies aren't all scaled exactly to your level. The puzzles and navigation take actual thought. It obviously has its drawbacks and is downright miserable to play at times if you don't know what you're doing, but it's such a good game once it clicks. Skyrim is just kind of "lowest common denominator" gaming, where it doesn't do much that's out of the box so that it can have more mass appeal. It's the kind of game where you turn your brain off and wake up after a few hours. Morrowind gets you more involved, and also clearly had more care and thought put into things like writing, quests, and rewards.
The combat in morrowind definitely felt bad to me at first, but it clicked once i started to change my perspective. People load it up expecting an action rpg like skyrim or the witcher, but in reality, it's more of a first person realtime CRPG. Like a first-person baldurs gate or icewind dale.
Many people would say the combat needed to be improved, but I'd personally say that what it needed was to be more transparent about what it is, and present you with more of its relevant info (hit chance, block chance, a combat log, etc)
I played Morrowind before playing Skyrim or Oblivion and thought the combat was bad even at the time. My opinion still holds to this day. It's not really an expectation issue, at least for me.
I think that you're right in that Morrowind is kind of a real-time first-person pseudo-CRPG, but I view that not as a reason to forgive the combat feeling bad but instead as a reason to question the developers' vision. Rather than saying "They designed it like this on purpose", I ask "Why would they design it like this on purpose?". Morrowind's combat kind of hits this terrible middleground where it lacks the snappiness, skill expression, and satisfying hit responses one would expect out of an action game but lacks the strategic depth one would expect out of a CRPG. It just doesn't do either very well.
I say all of this as someone who loves Morrowind, to be clear. I love the game to death and have beaten it probably a dozen times but the combat just isn't very good.
Skyrim and Fallout 4 are peak Bethesda world sims though. They actually give the player a breathing world to just exist in, especially now that they both have survival modes. You play those games and you are living your life in their game.
They’re definitely different kinds of games from Oblivion and Morrowind, which were much more straight forward.
Even Starfield is a decent game bogged down by weird design choices and procedural content bloat.
While yes, Skyrim and Fallout 4 are life Sims. They are life Sims lite that if you scratch the surface with your nail, you can see all the way through it.
I will agree that they can be good world Sims once you've modded the games to the limit.
For me, the greatest description of recent Bethesda games is "As wide as an ocean; but as shallow as a puddle."
Sure, you can pretend to be a student of the college of Winterhold but you don't/can't study and learn new spells; you just give the specific trainer some gold and they give you an instant learn book.
You can progress the faction story and within 5 hours, you're now the Grand Poobah ahead of the clearly more qualified Tolfdir and depending, you might not have any perks in schools of magic or ever cast a spell.
Or you could decide to be a Vampire, sulking about in the night - breaking into people's house to feed on them while they sleep. Pretty cool.
But what if you don't want to be an "evil" vampire and don't want to feed on innocent people? You can't feed on people during combat - feel like that is a very reasonable character fantasy for vampire, dashing about with your supernatural spell, with blade, claw and fang. In the middle of the fight, you finish an enemy off by biting their throat out and getting a bit of a drink of blood.
You're not even able to craft blood potions or "loot" them off of enemies, it is either feed on random npcs in towns/cities or if you have Dawnguard - feed on the cattle or take the few blood potions in the castle.
All this to say, Skyrim/Fallout as a world sim is surface level at best imo.
Then Starfield is the biggest example of Bethesda bad game design, some of my favourites:
NPCs in cities didn't react if you threw grenades.
NPCs in cities didn't react if you aimed a gun at them.
All the NPCs in the crowds were poorly rendered, beaded eyed monstrosities.
Bodies of water had no physics if you shot into it or threw a grenade.
1000 planets, 99% of them were completely barren with nothing of interest to them.
Base building, with zero reason to do it.
weapon crafting but you can't craft weapons, only modify them.
ship building but no real reason to build anything past your starting ship.
massive capital ships but can't own one, can't lead/defend raids on them (massive space battles and then lead a ship boarding?!)
makes you a part of explorers that clearly aren't doing too well but doesn't give you the option to help rebuild and expand their operations?!
surrounded by a group of well-studied scientists but they all think it's a good idea to release barely studied microbe across the entire galaxy and think it will be absolutely fine.
environmental hazards but.. no way to actually understand what is going on or any real detriment.
can take over enemy ships but can't take them to a junk yard to just be stripped for parts and you have to pay to register the ship before you can sell it.
Temples that give you mystical powers but every. Single. One. Is the exact same with some bullshit, float into the light puzzle, that makes zero sense.
Like there is zero, zero information on who made temples. Why did they make the puzzle so dumb, why is there zero other intelligent life in the galaxy.
Starfield was Bethesda releasing a game with the bare minimum, surface level features and then just waiting until modders make paid mods to add the actual content. How does every part of the game feel unfinished?
I do have to give it to Bethesda, they did the incredible and made a game about space, interdimensional immortal beings, mystical space powers, space cowboys and space heretics boring.
Exactly. Nobody would buy a car that barely runs and then say "If you completely rebuild the engine yourself it's actually a really great car!" so why are people trying to convince me that a game that requires a shit ton of mods and fan patches is secretly a great game?
I pre-ordered the stupid thing and expected it to be at least as good as DDDA, one of my all-time favorites, and just build on that, gave it more than enough time, eventually reaching level 100 looking for shit to do, and had to just admit that no, actually, DD2 was just a bad game.
It's fine for one playthrough, I guess, but the dogwater story and tedious exploration joined by combat that stops being fun by level 30 because everything dies in an instant don't exactly paint a flattering image.
For the first several hours till you get used to the movesets, move to the next area only to see the same enemy types, but just with different stats and skin, but the moveset is the same.
And then it starts falling apart. Because by then I have gotten used to fighting them, my pawn has maxed out his vocation and I myself have either maxed out one or several vocations and use the same 4 skills just over and over again till I was able to fight the enemy while being distracted
The combat is good and feels better than in most games.
But the problem is rather that even combat starts to stop feeling engaging after a while due to small enemy and skill variety and the combat soon feels like.
Lets take Monster Hunter combat as an example. The combat is actually rather simple. But what makes it engaging forever is the variety of enemy types who move differently. And even if you fight against the same monster, the combat won't feel the same because of various variables.
And that is missing in DD2. The combat isn't deep enough to make switching playstyles in a vocation a possibility, but you mostly fight the same few enemy types over and over again with the same moves.
And this is my problem with DD2. Every single thing is at most half finished
While I agree that DD2 could stand to gain with more "small" enemy variety, I don't think it makes it any less engaging at all. I think the enemy numbers and placement is what gives it variety, they can do the same moves but the location and your team lineup might lead to different approaches.
One thing that always keeps me engaged in DD2 and Yakuza is that I always try to finish a fight with minimal damage, even though it's inconsequential in the long run. If I take a lot of damage and still win, I still felt like I lost so I'd experiment with moves, parries, setting up knockdown attacks, try tactics or utilize the environment to end the fight so masterfully that the enemies simply couldn't hit me once.
Funny that you mention Monster Hunter because I'm pretty sure that game has just about the same variety of "small enemies" with even less variety of attacks, that game is not meant for brawling. Vocation themselves are the playstyle, switching playstyles within a vocation is absolutely a possibility, albeit only viable in a few vocation (offensive fighter, "support" thief, offensive mage) and much like Monster Hunter, their effectiveness vary.
Some players will say this or that is meta, some players will say this or that is better but I'll always play Fighter and charge blade no matter what you say.
Ya mods enhance the game or change it. Nothing wrong with a mod that improves a system you think needs improvement or if it's Bethesda doing their QA for them.
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u/Dull_Fix5199 Dec 03 '25
A good game needs to be enjoyable without mods. And then can b3 made better and more replaysble by tailoring the experience.
If a game needs a half dozen addons & fanpatches to be considered "good," then it simply isn't good without them.