Recent reviews by AmbientNomad

This is A LOT of game. Maybe a bit too much. But it's still worth playing.

Forbidden West is probably the most graphically impressive open world game to date. The story is a lot of science-fantasy cheese, but it's a lot of fun.

I wish the enemies were a bit less aggressive, but that's just the current trend in enemy design in pretty much every game. Even still, fighting robo dinos with a bow and arrow never gets old.

I really wish they had an option to turn off Aloy's constant talking to herself. Ashley Burch is a wonderful actress, but the devs really went overboard with how much information they decided to convey to the player through just random talking by the main character. It can be grating sometimes. Try not to let that ruin your enjoyment of an otherwise excellent game.

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It's fine if you want Oblivion to have more polygons and brown colors. But this is a bare-minimum remaster in every sense of the word.

Bethesda convinced you that the bugs left in from the original game are good because that's part of the game's "identity," or some lazy non-sense. But, that doesn't excuse them ignoring all of the other ways they could have improved on this game.

Unique item levelling and scaling? Nope, part of the "identity."
Bandits in glass armor? Nope, can't touch a classic!
Imperial city streets with more than 6 people? Nope! Can't change perfection!

But really, if you like Oblivion for being Oblivion, this is a good upgrade and you will probably like this, too. But this isn't a remaster. This is a coat of paint.

Kudos to them on the level up system, though, at least that was changed and it's pretty good.

This is not the game I wanted, but it's still a good game. And frankly, it's a miracle that it even exists.

In a time where companies are being shut down because of poorly performing live service games (RIP Firewalk studios, among others), it can be helpful to remember that Bioware narrowly avoided that fate themselves. Sure, it was never big news that they were on the verge of closure (maybe they never were), but after Anthem was a massive failure, and Dragon Age 4 was originally slated to be a fully live service experience, it feels like we might have lost Bioware forever if things had gone a different direction.

That tells us a lot about the game we did get. It feels like the remnants of a live service game turned into a single player experience, because that's what it is. This game was halted mid-development, as an entirely different game, and had to be salvaged and turned into a "prestige single player experience." That doesn't happen without a great cost, and that cost is a game that is neither as deep nor as well made as Bioware's best games, but at least the result is that we get to keep the Dragon Age series, and it's still a fully single player game.

Perhaps if this game does well enough, the next Dragon Age will be able to meet all of our expectations. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 rose the bar far enough that RPG studios can start shooting for the moon again. Maybe, after this game, Bioware will return to making connected trilogies where you feel the weight of your choices. I don't know if this will happen, but I would rather be an optimist than an always online whiner.

Good times.

It's fine. It might be among the worst Finals Fantasies, but it's fine.

Squeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaak.

As a certified Skyrim obsessive and sci-fi fan, I fully imagined a far-futute Bethesda RPG becoming my favorite game of all time.

This ain't it, chief. This game is boring as hell.

Soooo gooood!


Several weeks later:

Still sooooooooo goooood!

This is a flawed masterpiece, and truly a unique experience in gaming.