Honestly even without the dice buffs, it's pretty easy to break - Expertise is another big culprit. At T4, with regular proficiency, you can get up to a +11 modifier without magic items or spells, meaning your average is going to hover in the ~20s, ~25s if you can get advantage, but the range is still bounded from 12-31, only a 10% chance of achieving the 'nearly impossible' for a character representing the pinnacle of ability and adventuring prowess. Makes sense.
With expertise, the modifier goes up to +17, average roll 27, 32 with advantage, range of 18-37, which gives a 40% chance of achieving 'nearly impossible' DCs. Makes less sense. If you happen to be playing a rogue with expertise in Thieves tools and sleight of hand, and wearing gloves of thievery, your skill floor is 32(!!!) - You literally cannot fail to pick a lock or a pocket unless the DM creates a scenario that breaks bounded accuracy. And then, of course, you can throw BI, guidance, etc. etc. on top of that...
If I had to homebrew a quick fix, I'd suggest something along the lines of "When making an attack, check, or saving throw while under the effects of a spell or feature that allows you to add additional dice to the d20 roll, such as Bardic Inspiration, you may only gain the benefit from one feature on a single roll. If multiple features would add dice, you may choose which feature to add the dice from when you roll."
Totally ranting at this point - I think 5e's got good bones but there's a lot of problems inherent with simplifying down to a single scaling number. Saving throws swing the opposite way - depending on the creature you're facing, it can be literally impossible for a PC and/or NPC to make a saving throw against DC 20 and up if you don't have proficiency, and by design you won't have proficiency approximately 2/3 of the time (this is also why named monsters get legendary saves in 5e.) Not saying we need to go back to 3.5/PF with like a dozen different sources for bonuses, definitely not that, but proficiency needs to be less binary for a more balanced and playable game, especially at higher tiers.
When I started at the company I currently work for, my then manager saw how hard I was working and negotiated an 11% raise on my behalf during my first annual review, and another 10% following. She was cool as hell and protected me from the upper management bullshit that was going on at the time. She left because they had her working 65+ hours every week for a CEO who was/is pissing away the company's capital and goodwill with clients.
My current manager is the bullshit, I haven't had a raise since my old manager left three years ago and I've been looking off and on for something else while I steadily lower my effort to be commensurate with my effective pay.
Makes me wish Google hadn't canned phonebloks. Can you imagine how much waste we could have cut down on if we decided to standardize every component like the usb-c port?
I remember that event in the Rose Bowl. It was maybe the first and only time I actually felt any hope for this godawful country. The next few months completely shattered it as I realized just how much the old money completely dominated the political landscape.
I know that not everyone is greedy and stupid, but the people that are get to make the decisions that pull us further and faster into catastrophic ends for their own personal gain and the average person is completely unable to stop it at this point. Everyone knows the next ten to twenty years, we're going to see cascading failures, if we even have to wait that long. Droughts, food shortages, desertification, algal blooms, melting ice caps - these things have all been snowballing for decades already and we're doing nothing to slow it down because to do anything would harm the economy rich people's bank accounts.
This is it. This is the great filter. The rich killing the planet and everyone getting firsthand experiences of the old cree proverb.
I've been emulating for years, but the first and only game I've pirated is Starfield, because I was certain the game wasn't worth the asking price and I wasn't going to shell out $70 and risk a 2 hour time limit on the refund with a studio that's infamous for long intros.
Turns out I was right, and I've already deleted it. If at some point in the far future the modders make something good of it, I will buy it at a heavily discounted 'GOTY Starborn splappy boom blappy edition Mk VII' price.
There are nine reviews on metacritic from various outlets that score the game 100/100. I would love for every single one of those reviewers to look me in the eye and with a straight face, repeat the claim that Starfield is perfect and there is absolutely nothing in the game that could possibly be improved on. If you want to know who's not conversing honestly, that'd be a good kicking-off point.
Sometimes I pick through homebrew content other people have made and offer comments and suggestions. I used to float around on /r/UnearthedArcana before I jumped from Reddit, I'm kind of hoping something similar pops up in the federation. Either that, or on the really bad days, I play an old game that I've played a bajillion times before. I know the routes and strats, I can kind of go on autopilot while I try to decompress from the shit that happened. System Shock 2 is a favorite.
I trust the scores that come after release over the ones that came before, because post release scores aren't concerned with biting the hand that feeds re: getting future review copies for titles down the line. It's telling that a lot of the earlier ones are higher but just say "great game, Bethesda's knocked it out of the park again" with a sentence or two, and later, lower ones are a lot meatier with specific criticisms.
I think it's worth noting that there are a lot of irrelevant low reviews from the review bombers too, as well as zeroes from the people who are upset that you can choose your pronouns. I've played the game. I don't like the game - I think it's bad on its own merits, or lack thereof. Where I think FO4 was a 'meh' because of the less impactful character building and stripped-down dialogue system, doubling down on the clutter looter aspects, I call Starfield bad because the same clutter looting and character building with a new coat of paint is now gated behind repetitive tasks and mostly barren procgen maps. There's more layers of obligatory fast travel between the parts of the game that are enjoyable, and that's in service of the parts of the game that aren't. The game is objectively worse than FO4 for those reasons, and in the case of the leveling system, it didn't even need to be.
And you know, while I'm airing my grievances here, I also think it's fair to have higher standards in the eight years between the two games - Bethesda doesn't get to hide behind their own old engine the same way Obsidian gets a pass for the issues FNV runs into - it's their engine. They should know from the get-go whether the game they want to make can be supported with a system built over a decade ago, and if it's not, they should be prepared to go back to square one. They had plenty of time; I don't believe for a second they couldn't have made this game right, but they were hell-bent on getting one more game out of the Creation engine, and by god did they, for better or (much, much) worse. So when people say "It's Bethesda, what did you expect?" I will answer, from the top of this hill where I'm already carving my fucking epitaph, "Something more and better than what we got last decade." And people give shit for that expectation? I'm supposed to be impressed that they plugged the random number generator that puts cartons of cigarettes in trashcans into a random planet generator? That in the eight years between FO4 and this samey, shallow, mediocre mess, two more than the development time between Daggerfall and Morrowind, that arguably set the standard for this kind of game with its masterfully crafted world, with huge setpiece cities full of bespoke characters and encounters, they've managed to stretch the disappointment of randomized containers full of vendor trash and blocky bases full of raiders over thousands of empty maps? Give me a break. Game bad. Emperor Todd has no clothes and I'm fucking calling it out.
I mostly stopped using it when RIF announced they'd drop support. Deleted my account and everything, although I do still pop into subs that haven't migrated over.
I mean, to be fair, Starfield doesn't do it well either. In the 15 hours I played, especially toward the latter end, I ran into plenty of texture pop-in, bad culling, bodies without heads and arms, heads and arms without bodies, bad shading patches, t-posing, stutter, lots of other goofy shit. And granted, my rig's not the best but I'm playing on medium with a 9600K, 3070, 32GB RAM, and the game's installed on a Samsung 870 SATA.
Sure it is, if, as always with articles talking about 'the economy,' you substitute 'the economy' for 'rich people's bank accounts.' Then it all makes way more sense.
Honestly even without the dice buffs, it's pretty easy to break - Expertise is another big culprit. At T4, with regular proficiency, you can get up to a +11 modifier without magic items or spells, meaning your average is going to hover in the ~20s, ~25s if you can get advantage, but the range is still bounded from 12-31, only a 10% chance of achieving the 'nearly impossible' for a character representing the pinnacle of ability and adventuring prowess. Makes sense.
With expertise, the modifier goes up to +17, average roll 27, 32 with advantage, range of 18-37, which gives a 40% chance of achieving 'nearly impossible' DCs. Makes less sense. If you happen to be playing a rogue with expertise in Thieves tools and sleight of hand, and wearing gloves of thievery, your skill floor is 32(!!!) - You literally cannot fail to pick a lock or a pocket unless the DM creates a scenario that breaks bounded accuracy. And then, of course, you can throw BI, guidance, etc. etc. on top of that...
If I had to homebrew a quick fix, I'd suggest something along the lines of "When making an attack, check, or saving throw while under the effects of a spell or feature that allows you to add additional dice to the d20 roll, such as Bardic Inspiration, you may only gain the benefit from one feature on a single roll. If multiple features would add dice, you may choose which feature to add the dice from when you roll."
Totally ranting at this point - I think 5e's got good bones but there's a lot of problems inherent with simplifying down to a single scaling number. Saving throws swing the opposite way - depending on the creature you're facing, it can be literally impossible for a PC and/or NPC to make a saving throw against DC 20 and up if you don't have proficiency, and by design you won't have proficiency approximately 2/3 of the time (this is also why named monsters get legendary saves in 5e.) Not saying we need to go back to 3.5/PF with like a dozen different sources for bonuses, definitely not that, but proficiency needs to be less binary for a more balanced and playable game, especially at higher tiers.