Thread by @MameHaze

@reidrac games certainly have higher production values, are they better games? that's questionable. you can't really review relative to previous generations of games, or we'll be stuck at a point where every game gets a 10 because of better graphics.

@reidrac although I agree with your main point, you can't dock points for framework. If the 'maker' results in less interesting games due to maker limitations, or being too similar to existing games then that should be factored into the general review, not as an automatic penalty.

@reidrac In some cases engine weaknesses do ruin games for me, the Bethesda games for example, I'd struggle to give Skyrim a 3/10, at least on consoles. You're playing game but having to actively think about the engine, and planning your play as not to break (on top of all the other bugs)

@reidrac However, again those points are docked because the games are *broken* the issues caused by the resource management in the engine and system limitation are ruining all the good in the game. Having to plan to clear out items+corpses so you don't get a corrupt save is a fatal flaw.

@reidrac Along the same lines, the areas were more divided in Skyrim, there were no normal airbourne enemies. This was clearly because the engine didn't scale. It degraded the experience, more load times, less variety. The dungeons too were less interesting because they were copy+pasted.

@reidrac but again here I'm not docking from my own personal score *due* to the engine, but it is due to problems the engine has caused, that the developers were unable to work around (or the workaround were obvious and made the game worse) This can be a source of confusion.

@reidrac don't get me wrong, I love the world, the lore, the characters etc. but the main emotion I felt playing that game was the fear of what was going to break next, anxiety over if I was managing my save data in a way that wouldn't corrupt itself.

@reidrac anyway, that's going off on a tangent, and was somewhat based on me studying that game, and starting to understand why certain things had been done as they had, and realising that without wholesale replacement of the underlying tech, they couldn't have done any better.