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a real rude dude posted:Something you wont be able to not see once you notice it is that anytime there's meant to be a dead person laid out somewhere dramatically there's absolutely no damage to the body all their clothes are spotless and there's a neat little round blood puddle under them, it starts to look so silly. It's crazy that Starfield is so chaste in every respect except for one or two moments where it's gory as poo poo. It's really weird and I wonder what the thought process was. It does make those moments really shocking, especially since the kid is there for one of them, but it's not like those specific moments were pivotal to the whole game. They were just randomly, shockingly bloody.
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Nov 20, 2023 03:55
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combined with the much weaker violence level and lack of wounding, it seems over half of the dialogue was written with the assumption of expecting the game to have an ESRB T rating, which is honestly pretty loving funny
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Nov 20, 2023 04:43
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If the ESRB didn't automatically give games with drug use an M rating Starfield would be a T for Teen game.
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Nov 20, 2023 04:47
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I saw these two interviews with Todd Howard recently and it's frustrating that, on a personal level, he doesn't seem like someone that would make the bland mess that is Starfield. It's just one more illustration of how large the dev team is, how distributed the effort is, how large and long of an undertaken it is to make a AAA game these days. Also, in the wired interview, I especially appreciate his comment about the difficulty of hitting a moving hardware target in a new engine, that interview contains a lot of remarks on the technical aspects of game design, which can go underappreciated. He says he's played a LOT of Starfield (this is in the run up to the release). I'd really wish we could get some kind of real look at this genuine interpretation of the game. Based on the statements he makes about the earlier titles, he's not blind to their shortcomings.
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Nov 20, 2023 04:53
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What do you people want, graphics on par with far cry 3? they aren't wizards
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Nov 20, 2023 05:00
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To me the jarring thing is that only the introduction with the mineshaft elevator and again when the player wakes up after touching the first artifact has custom animations, so I thought the rest of the game would be like that. The rest of the game instead just has that mannequin zoom-face talking poo poo. Even the ending is you mannequin-talking to yourself. It's like Bethesda just couldn't be arsed after the intro and called it a day. They have the capability to animate characters properly, they just didn't wanna do it.
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Nov 20, 2023 05:23
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:It's like Bethesda just couldn't be arsed after the intro and called it a day. This is true of pretty much everything about this game. 100 systems with interesting potential and no payoff.
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Nov 20, 2023 05:26
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Muscle Tracer posted:This is true of pretty much everything about this game. 100 systems with interesting potential and no payoff. Well, overly broad scope and unrealistic ambitions have led to plenty a game being a disappointment. Some of it does indeed feel like lack of polish --- outpost building controls ridiculously poorly, and while it has potential, trying to put something in the desired spot is too hard to build anything substantial. Similarly some of the mechanics of spaceflight and ship building only seem to be surfaced in loading tips. And of course I had to do web searches to figure out how to shift things vertically in the ship editor. I think it goes beyond that, and the mess of leveling and inventory systems make it really hard for the systems to really hang together, as you need basically infinity points to actually engage with all the systems, as well as infinity cargo shuffling. I seriously doubt there is a coherent vision of how all the pieces are meant to be engaged as part of player progression. I think it's actually good that the base building isn't Dyson Space Program-level, that spacefighting isn't Elite, etc. --- simpler versions can still fit the core fantasy of the RPG and be fun --- but as you said, it's almost as messy to engage with as those things! Extreme contrast: Tetris.
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Nov 20, 2023 06:02
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Its exactly that, Potential, I think they did what they could potential wise in skyrim and FO4, certainly more could have been done, but they showcased most of what they were prepared to do with the engine they had. then of course modders took over and dragged way more stuff out and made amazing things, for instance FO4's sim cities. But, by now, we know Bethesada, they are perfectly happy to release something in a janky state and leave it janky, ignoring stuff thats not on their roadmap to be fixed by dlc's contrast that with companies who have been around for the same amount of time, like EGOsoft, and the Xgames, supporting stuff thats ancient by gaming standards and thinking "oh, we can back port this technology for people who enjoy our earlier games." although they also have a case of "its a success because a lot of ppl bought it"
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Nov 20, 2023 06:08
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Wasn't Starfield in production for a while somewhere else and it got rebooted in house or am I confusing it with another game? Either way like every ambitious space game it seems like it went chasing vibes for a while and struggled to figure out how you actually played it. Clearly at some point that got focused down into the FO4 parts perhaps because it was the easiest way to deliver a reasonably polished experience (for a Bethesda game at least). Whether that was necessary product management or management just being lame who knows. Certainly other ambitious space games have pulled out of their experimental phase too late to deliver anywhere near the coherent experience SF provides for all its faults.
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Nov 20, 2023 06:23
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I don't suppose there's some way to find a list of the abandoned space stations varuuns might be using as hideouts, unless it's just the one
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Nov 20, 2023 06:39
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The game was never going to be anything more than OK while they're still saddled down with totally not gamebryo, son of gamebryo
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Nov 20, 2023 09:16
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Yeah the engine really limited their crappy writing, piss poor lore, poorly thought out quests, and wonky skills system. Their Gamebryo actually does adding content and supporting quest designers better than anything I can think of. There's a reason modding their games is the best around. Fancy UE5 rendering tech wouldn't have made anything bad about the game good and they would've spent years trying to have anything like the content pipeline already established in Gamebryo. That kind of thinking is actually what hosed Bioware in their later years. People get the idea backwards about the hat train because it's actually great there was any way for quest designers to hack together a train with the tools and scripting rather than needing to block out serious programmer effort.
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Nov 20, 2023 10:03
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Wait, people actually care about the hat train in any sense other than "lol that's kinda clever"? A huge amount of the scripting for World of Warcraft is/was based around invisible bunny creatures, because it's just easier to use the existing NPC system than program something from scratch. I think the engine for Starfield is definitely looking its age, especially compared to other in-engine cutscenes we've seen over the last few years. But you're right - Starfield has way bigger problems than that. I feel like there's a pretty decent game buried in there somewhere, but the skills, the economy, the ship and outpost building, and the perks all need a bunch more work.
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Nov 20, 2023 13:06
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The things that are bad about this game aren't the game engine, they're a bunch of 2/3rds implemented mechanics that just sort of hang off the sides and either do nothing or get in the way, and quests and characters that seemed to be expecting a few more passes in editing. The jank is real, it exists, and it's no worse than any of the FO or Elder Scrolls games. The frustration isn't watching a character t-pose between animation states or just spawn halfway into the ceiling, it's trying to engage with a game that seems to expect you're going to play the main quest 30 times over to unlock it, or seeing the outline of something really cool that just isn't actually there in the game as it exists. infernal machines fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 14:07
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There's a reason they were able to sell goddamn Skyrim a bunch of times, (don't ask me, I'm not insane) but the foundation being based on pretty decent lore, revisiting a certain area despite them "never going back to a place" and it being an upgrade in almost every way graphically deffo helps. I agree 100% that Starfields issues are only partially engine based, but making LoadingScreenField integral to everything does not help them, otoh, I don't really see how else they could have accomplished this. aside from making everything streaming continously and having live planetary landings and atmospheric flight somehow. Although, I got to say, everytime I check out the nexus, people are finding wild stuff to do. staberind fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 14:40
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I think the engine is fine, especially now that it gets post-launch performance improvements too. With proper lighting the characters are good and environments can be really pretty, it's just that Bethesda undermined it all with bland, barren rocks making up the vast majority of the areas you will "explore", their use of LUTs is really hamfisted or downright terrible and they made the dumb design decision to have all convos in Oblivion closeup mode, making the faces look godawful. All Unreal 5 would do is running even slower for a bit more eye candy you can't see on icy moon #278 while probably making it impossible to quickly fix/cheat the most egregious issues by players right after launch.
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Nov 20, 2023 14:43
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The only time I was bugged by the Starfield engine was fully-new stuff like the ship editor interface. It was more the problems like "you can obsessively scan every plant animal and mineral you run across and spend all your skill points on Exploration, but then if you need to find a plant/creature that drops Adhesive or Sealant there is no catalog or search in-game." It felt like every actual gameplay system was gotten to a 10%, just-barely-passable mode and then never advanced.
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Nov 20, 2023 14:46
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webmeister posted:Wait, people actually care about the hat train in any sense other than "lol that's kinda clever"? Oh, yeah, a fair amount of reaction to that was "lol loving bethesda what hacks"
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Nov 20, 2023 14:47
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The only engine upgrade I would ask for is asset pre-loading in the background during ship cutscenes to minimize load screens. That's like 80% of the load screens you'll see right there, the other 20% are interior areas which could be handled differently in some places but ultimately aren't a huge deal in comparison.
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Nov 20, 2023 14:51
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I do enjoy the single room instances for certain shops and houses, weird callback to how Skyrim handled them out of left field.
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Nov 20, 2023 14:52
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The engine also runs like poo poo on modern hardware now, though it sounds like they might have addressed some of that finally My computers aren’t top of the line but a 3080 should be able to pull a consistent 60fps at normal gaming resolutions
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Nov 20, 2023 14:54
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Man, I really need to go do some more of the main quest line before I continue interacting with Starfield threads on the internet. LOL. I'm having too much fun hammering on dumb ship mods, building bad outposts, and (I ran out of inventory or ship inventory space a long time ago), I guess. I made it to level 31 and only have 3 of the 4 core Constellation companions. Is that counter productive? tadashi fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 14:59
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^^^ Not so much, I know for certain a bunch of people just cba with Sam, I make a beeline for Andy, no matter what, Sarah's "eh", and Barrat is always welcome to chill on the ship/run around with me. due to the layout of stuff, its super easy to ADHD off for a few days doing crap ignoring the MQ, despite their attempt at "mysteries of the universe! lets investigate right nooooooow!" theme. honestly, you are enjoying it, so afaic, you are playing it the "Right Way" *shrug* Oh poo poo, and by the way, the safe in your room back at the lodge is bottomless, the only must have on your ship really is "jank you want to sell/ship repair bits".Magmarashi posted:Oh, yeah, a fair amount of reaction to that was "lol loving bethesda what hacks" At the end of the day, despite being wacky bollocks, it functioned absolutely fine at what it was supposed to do, which is essentially the odd thing about gamebryo, we have now reached the brick wall of have to load areas peacemeal, BUT. even if its not made obvious, all the cities (let's ignore neon for the moment) you can turn tf around and wander around outside them. inside them you can boost jump to all sorts of places, ok, you cannot just start building an outpost in the middle of New Atlantis, and I dunno how far you have to run away from it after doing something wacky like diving off the waterfall into their open sewer/lake, to make an outpost, but you can make an outpost not so far from N.A. compare that with the instanced cities of everything preceeding StarField, I'll admit I'm fairly impressed. staberind fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 15:09
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staberind posted:^^^ Not so much, I know for certain a bunch of people just cba with Sam, I make a beeline for Andy, no matter what, Sarah's "eh", and Barrat is always welcome to chill on the ship/run around with me. due to the layout of stuff, its super easy to ADHD off for a few days doing crap ignoring the MQ, despite their attempt at "mysteries of the universe! lets investigate right nooooooow!" theme. honestly, you are enjoying it, so afaic, you are playing it the "Right Way" *shrug* It works really well with cloud gaming. I wasn't sure what to expect because this dumb post-COVID lock down push toward "efficiency" meant a lot of companies have been trying to take shortcuts to keep the cost of cloud hosting down. The lack of loading screens between the cities and the rest of the planet is really drat cool. My guess is they could have made the loading screen during ship take-off optional if they had wanted to but I understand not expecting players to give a drat about that since the game lets you skip most space flight, anyway.
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Nov 20, 2023 15:26
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I really don't think the Starfield game engine is the albatross it's made out to be. BGS is a stable team of devs that work with the system they know how to use; I think dragging them kicking and screaming to Unreal wouldn't solve anything. It's increasingly rare these days, but devs can make their own game engines and it can work fine; Remedy did it with Control and Alan Wake 2 and it's given them some impressive results. I've always thought BSG makes technically impressive games; they've just historically had the misfortune of being compared to other FPS games that are much, much more limited in scope.
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Nov 20, 2023 15:48
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Yeah, we all kinda take a lot of the things we Can do in BGS games as an iteration on stuff we could do before, and the comparison with other, sometimes slicker looking/feeling games is weird to me; they might be good at a bunch of things, but bsg games scratch that certain "here's a massive palette of stuff: go wild" itch that modding gives me.
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Nov 20, 2023 16:00
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tadashi posted:Man, I really need to go do some more of the main quest line before I continue interacting with Starfield threads on the internet. LOL. I got to like level 40 without doing any main story quests past arriving at The Lodge. There's a wealth of content in the game you can engage with without the powers or whatever, and it was pretty fun. IMO, the main story is the least engaging part of the game so far. e: Not the least being that the payoff for the whole thing is basically just do it again infernal machines fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 16:08
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infernal machines posted:I got to like level 40 without doing any main story quests past arriving at The Lodge. There's a wealth of content in the game you can engage with without the powers or whatever, and it was pretty fun. There are powers in this game? J/K, that's the first spoiler you find in any Starfield content. Jack B Nimble posted:I really don't think the Starfield game engine is the albatross it's made out to be. BGS is a stable team of devs that work with the system they know how to use; I think dragging them kicking and screaming to Unreal wouldn't solve anything. Is there a non-Bethesda game with FPS combat meets RPG skills where the player ends up carrying a thousand items around in their inventory? I thought the main thing with the BGS engine was it just is what it has to be because FPS engines don't handle inventory well? Is that just old information? tadashi fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 16:34
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tadashi posted:There are powers in this game? The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games come to mind, but those are old. Oh, Apex Legends has a great inventory, and most BR games have had to solve that problem.
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Nov 20, 2023 16:41
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Sooo how's the game now? Are mods necessary? I haven't actually touched the game even though I had it installed day one due to BG3 and the lukewarm reception to it. Also is rushing to NG+ still recommended? I remember that being a thing mentioned by people.
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Nov 20, 2023 16:46
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Likesay, the game is surprisingly good at allowing you to to just collect a vast amount of dreck, at some point, with modding, we should be able to turn much more of that dreck into other more useful dreck, we can already upgrade stuff, we should also be able to disassemble stuff and rebuild our "stuff" into other, for us, more valuable stuff, crafting and so on right now suffers from the same dumb thing that FO4 suffered from early on : the only place you can combine thing a and thing b to get thing c is cooking or chemistry, you cannot dissasemble a bunch of crap and make a single useful gun with all the bells and whistles from the ones you took apart, Yet. the sheer amount of stuff, again, builds up, there is probably a hard limit on things eventually, and lets not forget all your outposts; machinery turning nothing into something and making number go up. the result of that is bloated save files, and eventually everything chain collapsing. Lets compare an apples to oranges thing : Stalker, the most advanced iteration of the xray engine is a hack job x64 version of the xray engine, the gunplay and weirdness it can handle is excellent, and yeah, the crafting elements all modded in are pretty wild again, but, its limits are a lot harsher, the hard limit on "stuff that exists in the game world, and thus affects your save" is way way way lower. E: Lol, we both think of stalker. poe meater posted:Sooo how's the game now? Are mods necessary? I haven't actually touched the game even though I had it installed day one due to BG3 and the lukewarm reception to it. With mods you can sort of sidestep the need to spin through so many of them, https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/4978 for instance, makes blatting starborn more interesting. reducing your need to NG+ gives you a more hybrid approach to "imma stay in this universe and do some outposts and do more of the side quests etc & my shouts improve independant of swimming around in space dandruff." plus there are a bunch more QoL mods as well, I mean, its early days, no CS, However, I keep getting sucked back in to try out new wacky ship ideas or "did i do all the side quests over here yet?" staberind fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 16:53
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IDK if it's funny or just sad that the one and only result for killing universe hopping star children is a temporary buff to regenerating your power meterstaberind posted:I keep getting sucked back in to try out new wacky ship ideas or "did i do all the side quests over here yet?" Same
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Nov 20, 2023 17:17
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infernal machines posted:IDK if it's funny or just sad that the one and only result for killing universe hopping star children is a temporary buff to regenerating your power meter LOL, I am in process of playing the game, and upon looking at the mod above I went "what does that drop do anyway?" and googled it.
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Nov 20, 2023 17:22
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New patch https://steamcommunity.com/app/1716740/eventcomments/3976177262470571442/ quote:Added the ability to eat the food placed in the world. Gettin' those high priority changes in pre:Fixes and Improvements Performance And Stability Addressed a number of memory related issues and leaks. Added some GPU performance optimizations, which will be more impactful on higher end cards. Improved renderer threading model, improving CPU usage most notably on higher end systems. Various stability and performance improvements. Gameplay Added the ability to eat the food placed in the world. Adjusted stealth to be a bit more forgiving. Fixed an issue where Andreja’s head would stay permanently cloaked. Fixed an issue that could prevent players from firing their weapons. Fixed issues where some NPC could be seen not wearing clothes (Note: This issue may resolve itself over time). Fixed an issue where already in-progress skill challenges could stop progressing after reaching the Unity and starting a new game. Fixed an issue that could temporarily prevent opening the inventory or saving after entering the Unity. PC: Fixed an issue where mouse movement could be choppy. Fixed a rare issue that could cause the home ship to be lost. Fixed an issue where the ship services technician might be missing. Fixed an issue where occasionally the camera could shake incorrectly during Traveling, Grav Jumping, Docking, or Landing transitions. Graphics Addressed an issue with how ambient occlusion appeared in ultrawide resolutions. Optimized initial shader compilation that occurs on start-up. Added the ability to adjust Brightness and Contrast in the Display Settings menu. Added the ability to adjust HDR Brightness provided that the system supports it. (Xbox & Windows 11 only). Addressed a number of materials that could sometimes present an unintended pattern under certain conditions. Fixed various visual issues related to the new FOV slider options. Improved the appearance of the eyes on crowd characters. Addressed a number of minor visual issues related to lighting, shadows, terrain, and vegetation. PC: Addressed additional visual issues related to DLSS. Quests All That Money Can Buy: Fixed a rare issue where players couldn’t sit during the negotiation with Musgrove. Blast Zone: Fixed an issue where the hard rocks that need to be cleared out by players will not appear on Ngodup Tate’s land. Echoes of the Past: Fixed an issue where the Grylloba Queen could sometimes not be reachable during the objective “Secure the Shuttle Bay”. Eye of the Storm: Fixed an issue where players' quest progression could potentially be blocked due to a missing docking prompt. Grunt Work: Addressed an issue where progress could appear blocked if “Supra et Ultra” was completed while returning to the Lodge during “High Price to Pay”. No Sudden Moves: Fixed an issue that could prevent the entrance door to the Scow ship from being opened again. Operation Starseed: Fixed an issue where the key that is needed to exit the facility could sometimes not be present. Sabotage: Fixed an issue where David Barron could potentially not be found by players. Short Sighted: Fixed an issue where players could rarely become control-locked while speaking with Vladimir. The Heart of Mars: Fixed an issue where players might not be able to mine the “The Heart of Mars”.
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Nov 20, 2023 21:17
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So, I wonder what happens if I update the game before we have an update for SFSE and / or the community patch?
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Nov 20, 2023 21:22
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Your SFSE mods and anything that relays on them won’t work until SFSE updates.
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Nov 20, 2023 21:52
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Flowing Thot posted:Your SFSE mods and anything that relays on them won’t work until SFSE updates. I think if the mods depend on the SFSE address library then you just need the library to update, not sfse itself
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Nov 20, 2023 22:26
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Can outposts make credits for you, or do they just get materials so you can craft 999999 adaptive frames to sell door to door? Also, how do you sell things worth more than the ~5000 credits vendors have? (I know there are 1-2 vendors with 12k credits, but cmon)
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Nov 20, 2023 22:29
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Azhais posted:New patch So did the beta patch with frame gen and stuff get rolled into the main game now?
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Nov 20, 2023 22:38
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