this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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I think you are confusing my term for complete with big and shallow. BG3,DOS2, Disco Elysium did well with their confines. The world felts very reactive to your decisions as a player and there is connecting sinew to most of the game with itself. Starfield and Bethesda's game are in a way glorified puddles they may be miles wide but typically underneath there is very little depth to it. Typically modders are the ones who add the depth that Bethesda didn't want to deal with. So you basically have a game where the puddle dips in an irregular fashion. This was honestly the biggest problem of CP2077. It was just a huge puddle, it had a fantastic writing for its main and side stories but almost everything else was pretty meh. I rather they just had a smaller world but pack it fuller with far more cool stuff than have vast spaces of nothingness.
No, I thought you were saying that a game was incomplete just because they added an expansion pack to it at any point, ever, which is a definition I find to be pretty absurd but plenty of people use. In this case it sounds like you're saying that some games are incomplete just because you prefer a modded, remixed version of the game rather than the one they actually made, which is a definition I'd also disagree with. Large swaths of empty space, particularly in Elder Scrolls and Fallout, is an aesthetic and design choice, among other things, and more or less reactivity may or may not mean that there isn't as much depth in the story, but those games have other strengths, like build variety, exploration, and such.
I would argue no, its more the systems in place feel like a first pass. For instance, the civil war of skyrim feels like a very unfinished concept. Its something that was slap together to just say they have it as content. You do a few side missions then a siege and repeat. There is little ebb and flow to it, it is a straight line, you as a player are on a monorail. Your actions have little impact on the world besides what arbitrary flag is being flown. Also build variety of Stealth archer? There is very little reason to change your playstyle compared to DOS 2 or BG3 where your different classes/attributes do have a major factor in how you solve encounters. The teleportation gloves of DOS 2 are the perfect example of how equipment can easily change how people interact with the game. Sure we don't need games where there are exclusive routes but the common Open world approach is keep it as open as possible. Like cyberpunk 2077 suffered from problems with the empty space that Witcher 3 didn't because you are on the hunt for recipes for new armor sets and witcher potions.
Hell even some of the games I recommended do suffer from some mechanics not hitting well. Pathfinder Wrath of Righteousness had some issues like the crusade minigame since it feels like the devs said hey would it be cool if we had a HOMMlike minigame in our already packed crpg. That sounds badass but the minigame wasn't that fun however everything around it was phenomenal like the troop recruitment even though it didn't matter had some very interesting talking points and choices. Like you pick the lich route, should you use death row inmates as undead meatshields to liberate your nation under assault of demons. Like it didn't hit well but it felt like the mechanic was thought about and had effort put into it from other sections of the game. It isn't some isolated system that is just there.
I am not a fool who thinks expansion packs are the devil. Hell I am in favor of hefty expansion packs since I remember when you got 1 or 2 and that was about it for the game.
None of what you said makes those games incomplete though. It's just something about it that you didn't care for. The systems are hardly a first pass; they've been making that game for about 15-20 years before Skyrim, and they're not going to deviate too far from the formula for Starfield either, I'll wager. It doesn't mean they didn't finish making it. They've finished making games that way over and over again.