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Pinely posted:The more I play, the more clear it is that Starfield is a puzzle assembled from dozens of pieces belonging to other puzzles that were all sanded down at the last minute so they'd at least sort of fit together. You like Firefly, right? Well this piece here has a few background extras from the movie poster in it. Oh and next to that, this piece here is a screenshot of the HUD element from 7DTD that tracks conditions. It's all meaningless, it just exists to remind you of this other, likely better, media. The Steam reviews where Bethesda PR / employees were replying to people who were leaving negative comments and getting huffy about it in replies answers this. Starfield is perfect. We are all wrong. BGS is the exemplary studio with genius writers, visionary management and was unjustly robbed at the game awards. Clearly those philistines don't appreciate auteurs who are masters of the craft. There will be no course corrections.
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Dec 27, 2023 23:17
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Khanstant posted:Space blows. It's the stuff that isn't space that is interesting. It’s almost how impressive the degree to which they made space blow when there’s a ton of games out there they could have straight up copied that have better space exploration/combat. Freelancer is 20 years old and managed to have combat that was far more fun and exploration that was far more involved (in that it existed at all, while running on weaker hardware than my phone and being super approachable for casual players. How goddamn hard would it have been to just copy most of the systems from that?
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Dec 27, 2023 23:23
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fat bossy gerbil posted:All those barren rocks in space? Give us a few points of interest. A little research base, a crashed ship, whatever as long as it’s interesting and was made by a person. We know it’s a mostly barren rock and we shouldn’t expect to find jack poo poo outside of what we scan from orbit, but at least we know that what the scan shows us is going to be worth checking out. It literally already does this though?? Repeating PoIs is one of the most complained-about features!
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Dec 27, 2023 23:25
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webmeister posted:It literally already does this though?? Repeating PoIs is one of the most complained-about features! "Made by a person" is doing the lifting there.
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Dec 27, 2023 23:38
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webmeister posted:It literally already does this though?? Repeating PoIs is one of the most complained-about features! I would suggest that the points of interest in the random seed generator are in fact not all that interesting. And what is there comes in an incredibly limited array of copy paste. After you inspect a few and realise they're all just set dressing with few to zero points of interaction it quickly dawns there is no reason to deviate from your 700m run to the mission marker.
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Dec 27, 2023 23:42
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Ugly In The Morning posted:It’s almost how impressive the degree to which they made space blow when there’s a ton of games out there they could have straight up copied that have better space exploration/combat. Freelancer is 20 years old and managed to have combat that was far more fun and exploration that was far more involved (in that it existed at all, while running on weaker hardware than my phone and being super approachable for casual players. How goddamn hard would it have been to just copy most of the systems from that? Apparently pretty hard since Star Citizen can't do it with infinity years and a bazillion dollars. I didn't play them at the time and they don't look worthwhile today (lumping in basically all the old space games that I assume were the siren song to trick SC backer types sharing the same general space fantasy). I am skeptical they are fun if it's not 20 years ago and not using a 20 years younger version of a less spoiled imagination willing to fill in all the gaps. Doesn't seem like anyone's sorted out vast space and the niche most into what there is of it seems to want things most people are never gonna be interested in doing, while also not being entirely clear on what they themselves want - let alone if ever actually getting what they think they want would ever be a good game.
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Dec 27, 2023 23:58
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Yeah I'm not saying they're good, or even interesting for the most part - and I didn't really bother with them beyond the first few, like most people. But they do exist and they're already in-game - the problems with Starfield run way deeper imo
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Dec 28, 2023 00:03
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I think it regressed a little bit if anything. It’s mostly let down by the absolute dogshit weapon variety that gets further constrained by the skill system. Am I going to invest skill points in laser weapons when there’s only two of them? No. Am I going to use them when they don’t have stacking +50 percent damage bonuses from skills like my ballistic guns? Also no. So because they poo poo the bed on creating a variety of weapons and they didn’t think through how brokenly powerful some skills are, there’s multiple categories of weapons (lasers, melee, EM, anything that’s not a particle weapon for spaceships) that basically may as well not exist because the game gives you no reason to use them. Also 'why does almost every gun use a different kind of ammo?'
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Dec 28, 2023 00:17
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Khanstant posted:Apparently pretty hard since Star Citizen can't do it with infinity years and a bazillion dollars. I didn't play them at the time and they don't look worthwhile today (lumping in basically all the old space games that I assume were the siren song to trick SC backer types sharing the same general space fantasy). I am skeptical they are fun if it's not 20 years ago and not using a 20 years younger version of a less spoiled imagination willing to fill in all the gaps. Skies of Arcadia managed to pull off exploration via three-dimensional skyship travel back at the turn of the century.
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Dec 28, 2023 00:22
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Skies of Arcadia looked so cool in the Hollywood videos I got to see it briefly and in magazines back then. We didn't have a Dreamcast (or was it Saturn?) So I never got to play it. Does it actually hold up today on PC?Alchenar posted:Also 'why does almost every gun use a different kind of ammo?' Also why are they all so unclear. It's all made up, you can call them whatever you want. They aren't the only ones guilty of this, but why do they insist on giving you measurements of whatever dimension for the ammo as the name? The game isn't to any kind of realistic scale, the guns don't accurately attempt to model gun physics or mechanisms. Just name it "shotgun ammo" and "big machine gun ammo" or give it an easy to associate name. Khanstant fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 00:58
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fat bossy gerbil posted:The thing that makes this game so awful is how boring the actual content is. The campaign should absolutely have been the hippy-dippy space explorers of Constellation blundering into a shadow war between UC Black Ops and a mess of GenerDyne Skunkworks teams/gold-rush prospectors/stubborn colonists all united by the fact that messing with them means picking a fight with Freestar. Then when the Starborn turn up, you have a dynamic situation between the two factions that can escalate or serve as a way to unite them, secrets that can be revealed, all sorts of potential.
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Dec 28, 2023 01:03
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Khanstant posted:Apparently pretty hard since Star Citizen can't do it with infinity years and a bazillion dollars. I didn't play them at the time and they don't look worthwhile today (lumping in basically all the old space games that I assume were the siren song to trick SC backer types sharing the same general space fantasy). I am skeptical they are fun if it's not 20 years ago and not using a 20 years younger version of a less spoiled imagination willing to fill in all the gaps. It’s less that it would have been an amazing experience and more that it would have been better than the absolute nothing they ended up with.
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Dec 28, 2023 01:07
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Bholder posted:The quests, the settlement building, the main plot... Lmao what? the quests/settlement building and plot all matter more in survival mode. Settlement building lets you drop save points over the map and a place where you can recover/recuperate over time. Hell even the minutemen quests become more useful because the removal of bullet sponges mean that having more milita you can quickly call for as backup lets you take on weird random encounters. Siding with the bad guy has an actual mechanical point where you get actual ingame benefits from siding with the bad guys instead of rambling philosophical dicksuctions.
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Dec 28, 2023 01:10
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ImpAtom posted:"Made by a person" is doing the lifting there. man gently caress off. Their POI system sucks because there is a limited pool of dungeons designed by actual people instead of tiny 3 shack dungeons on a permutation.
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Dec 28, 2023 01:12
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I'm not convinced something is better than nothing given everything else they made for the game. Khanstant posted:Just name it "shotgun ammo" and "big machine gun ammo" or give it an easy to associate name. Wow, it's worse than I remembered and I have to walk back trusting them to name things as easy to associate and they should absolutely just stick to universal ammo of some kind. The ammo all have arbitrary numbers and acronyms that blur together, but the named gun types are equally nonsense and you could pretty much swap em around for all they seem to tie in to whatever each gun is. They even use some that even my gun-oblivious rear end knows is meant to be a certain type of gun. If I'm handed a gun called "Peacemaker" I know to expect a goddamn cowboy pistol, not a weird melted shotgun assault rifle horseshit thing. https://hardcoregamer.com/db/starfield-all-ammo-types-and-their-id-codes/470460/
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Dec 28, 2023 01:17
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Talkie Toaster posted:It's so weird that they just ignored all the potentially interesting bits of their own setting. Like, the UC absolutely has a Black Ops division that knows Artefact experiments destroyed Earth. That then explains their obsession with research, and authoritarianism - both to prevent it happening again, and to prevent people learning that the space exploration program that 'saved' mankind was the same thing that doomed it.. Freestar are supposed to have been founded by reckless independents who wanted to colonise the galaxy free from central control, but in-game they're just 3 very inwards-looking planets. Freestar is a bunch of private corporations in a trenchcoat and the most interesting part of the UC is that they are a straight up paper tiger that almost had a 1920s japanese style coup. They will probably expand the space colonization at some point with LIST. The game's biggest problem is the lack of exploration - which seems to be a problem with space games that attempt this kind of scale. It really never does feel you are going on an adventure like it does with even a slightly modded skyrim or fallout 4. Even a survival mode will only address that partly.
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Dec 28, 2023 01:18
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The problem that Starfield has with exploration is that Bethesda has has already done exploration games and people had an idea of what they wanted from that. It doesn't loving matter that in the TES lore Skyrim is settled and known or that the capital city is more or less the best mapped place in the world. The player has no loving idea where anything is, and exploring that map and finding out the contours of that world is the whole point. You get a quest to go see Jarl Tightbritches about this whole execution-crashing dragon, and even just following sign posts down a road is - from the player's perspective - exploration. You've never seen this poo poo, you don't know what's around the bend, and as you stumble across small towns and taverns and caves etc it's all new poo poo to poke your nose into, grab a side quest or three, and spelunk for look. With Starfield you just don't have that. You can "explore" a planet by scanning it then dropping to the surface and clicking each type of rock or creature three times, but there's just loving nothing interesting to get pulled into. Worse, the exploration is just as in-universe pointless as it is in Skyrim. Much like Tamriel, all of these planets are already well known. You're not blazing new paths or jumping into new systems. gently caress, a good chunk of the planets you're scanning and "exploring" are ones that other people had already done that centuries earlier, up to and including the loving earth and moon.
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Dec 28, 2023 01:31
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Khanstant posted:I'm not convinced something is better than nothing given everything else they made for the game. The railgun ammo naming is loving baffling and the fact I’m also expected to remember which gun takes 7.7mm caseless vs 6.5mm caseless is almost as annoying as their boner for caseless ammo in the first place. Terrible choice for a gun that might be used in a vacuum or thin atmosphere since you’re throwing away a major way to sink heat from the gun.
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Dec 28, 2023 01:43
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I will say this for Starfield: it was really good at putting me in the mood to do another modded-to-the-gills Skyrim run
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Dec 28, 2023 01:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:I will say this for Starfield: it was really good at putting me in the mood to do another modded-to-the-gills Skyrim run Starfield makes me wanna play Stalker Gamma again. Much rather be tense and on a hair trigger about everyone and everything could potentially kill me than being bored out of my mind having to walk through another empty world for 15 minutes again just to get to a mission objective and having to run another 15 minutes to get to a different objective so some bland quest giver can, checks notes, gets a cup of coffee.  VVV I gave the game every opportunity to impress me in any way and it just kept finding new way to disappoint me. Back Hack fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 02:54
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it appears that Goons universally hate this game. that's okay, I'll keep playing that garbage
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Dec 28, 2023 03:21
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there are many legitimate criticisms of starfield but if you can't remember what ammo a gun takes that's a skill issue lol
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Dec 28, 2023 04:01
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FistEnergy posted:it appears that Goons universally hate this game. that's okay, I'll keep playing that garbage I don't hate it, I enjoyed most of the ~70 hours I played it but the longer you play the more its flaws stand out. Though I only played the free Gamepass version - I probably would've been much more annoyed if I'd paid for the $80 deluxe version or whatever. Probably also helps that I hadn't played BG3 or the Cyberpunk expansion first either
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Dec 28, 2023 04:41
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Problem is people really wanted this game to be Fallout 4 but white and space-ship fast travel or Bethesda made Elite Dangerous and the game and the game is kind of halfway there, half-assing both. Still I do think the answer shouldn't be getting rid of the one unique part of the game.
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Dec 28, 2023 04:53
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VostokProgram posted:there are many legitimate criticisms of starfield but if you can't remember what ammo a gun takes that's a skill issue lol
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Dec 28, 2023 04:56
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FistEnergy posted:it appears that Goons universally hate this game. that's okay, I'll keep playing that garbage I thought it was fine and I had a good time, but I feel like the 'bethsoft games are garbage swill' internet thing has been bubbling up for awhile and a disappointing game right next to BG3 has turned it into open season.
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Dec 28, 2023 05:00
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webmeister posted:I don't hate it, I enjoyed most of the ~70 hours I played it but the longer you play the more its flaws stand out. Though I only played the free Gamepass version - I probably would've been much more annoyed if I'd paid for the $80 deluxe version or whatever. Probably also helps that I hadn't played BG3 or the Cyberpunk expansion first either Don’t worry it wasn’t 80 dollars. It was 100.
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Dec 28, 2023 05:19
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Anime Schoolgirl posted:they even actually improved it from what it could have been if they released in 2022, 7.77mm used to be 3 types in development judging by the game's files (7.77mm flechette, 7.77mmx37, 7.77mmx27) I do like that your weapons just transparently convert ammo to the obvious typing used by your mods instead of needing to juggle at this prerelease level of granularity. That's a good example of smoothing things out. The ammo selection seems fine how it is to me.
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Dec 28, 2023 05:29
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Bholder posted:Problem is people really wanted this game to be Fallout 4 but white and space-ship fast travel or Bethesda made Elite Dangerous and the game and the game is kind of halfway there, half-assing both. I'd prefer that they kept space in, the problem is they half-assed it (quarter assed it?) so badly that it's not unreasonable to view it as fundamentally unfixable (or, at least, assume that they'll never decide to put in the time to fix it). Compare intra-system and on-planet travel to: - No Mans Sky - Elite Dangerous - X4 - Space Engineers - Outer Wilds (not Worlds, haven't played that one yet) - Astroneer (?!) and it's really apparent that they started from a baseline of three things: - we want space combat - we want pirate boarding - we want actually realistic space-distances and just never wanted to sit down to come up with a way to make traversal a meaningful thing in that context, just fast travelling to "the exciting bits"-- even if that results in fundamentally stupid things like "you literally can't travel to an empty point in a system even if you want to, there will always be some NPCs there to yell at you or start shooting at you because it's be boring otherwise" I bring up Astroneer because while it doesn't have space combat and does have "select planets and landing areas via effectively-a-menu", it makes the decision to switch planets compelling via cost in fuel and materials, so the "compelling gameplay" aspect is having to pre-plan your traversal... and it sounds like they literally planned to have that and then just changed their mind at the 11th hour for ?reasons? Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 06:48
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I think they probably found the more survival focused gameplay either not fun or too hardcore for the player base they were going for so hastily cut it out.
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Dec 28, 2023 07:53
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Flowing Thot posted:I think they probably found the more survival focused gameplay either not fun or too hardcore for the player base they were going for so hastily cut it out. Or maybe they kit-bash random things from what each of their separate teams throw together into a game with very little oversight because they infamously don't use design documents which makes solving complex problems near impossible and also makes it very difficult to have unified goals, ideas, and strategy.
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Dec 28, 2023 09:09
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Flowing Thot posted:I think they probably found the more survival focused gameplay either not fun or too hardcore for the player base they were going for so hastily cut it out. I mean "hastily cut out" is nearly guaranteed given that voiced dialogue all reference He3 usage being required for grav jumping and extra-system outpost shipping still uses it, it's just absolutely bewildering to me that seemingly the only real reason to have outposts at all (setting up and possibly defending gas stations as you "expand" to further points eastwards on the map so you can refuel without building a ship made entirely out of gas tanks, with higher level systems and harder-to-establish-outposts-on planets being the carrot for taking outpost ranks in the first place) was something that they decided to cut late in development and effectively make outposts, and by extension a large chunk of their skill tree, and by extension a large chunk of crew passive bonuses, retroactively vestigial right before the release date. I guess if the upstairs says "release the game before christmas come hell or high water" then it is what it is, but...some of the way these systems (don't) interact with each other really feel like they're on par with "we can't figure out how to tune difficulty, gently caress it, just enable god mode and ship it" e: I also guess that the "no fast travel" challenge in this game would just be flipping a mod-switch on to remove the infinite gas tank cheat e2: With this gas tank empty, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed ship you have created Ursine Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 10:10
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The game has autosave on travel, so I feel like being able to strand yourself would be an okay mechanic to have in the game, because it's no worse than any other game-over state. I have no doubt there are reasons why half these mechanics are limply hanging off the side of the game, but it is a lot less of a game for it.
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Dec 28, 2023 15:15
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The other problem with space combat in Starfield is that it's loving bad. The basic tension in space/flight combat games is if you're going for a sim or an arcade experience. There are satisfying ways to do both. And you can see the influences in this of what they were cribbing off of. But goddamn it's just so half baked that it feels like the placeholder v.1 system that you'd throw in while the rest of the game was getting built out. In rough order of how serious the problems are: 1) the combat arenas are all identical. There are next to zero obstacles to maneuver around or in, almost never a big capital ship to manage (attack, defend, avoid as an obstacle in a dogfight, etc). The planets are meaningless because they're just a part of the skybox. You've got a spherical void with enemies who turn and pew pew at you. There are a few set pieces that are a tad different but they're far and few between. Usually a lot more satisfying, too, because you're having to deal with an asteroid field or something. 2) energy management is basically meaningless. It's there, sure, but you really don't need to actively swap between shields, weapons, engines, etc. 3) the enemy AI is terrible, between the perfect aim and the brain dead piloting. 4) Missile lock on is a terrible mechanic as it stands. There is nothing in the way of counter measures, your only way to break lock is to go 90 degrees off your current axis and boost. Even then I don't know if that evades missiles already in the air. Also nothing in the way of ECM components etc that i"ve noticed to increase enemy lock on times etc. 5) The boarding mechanic is cool, but terrible as implemented. Why in the hell does everyone take a time out to let me shoot their buddies in the head and then only start shooting again when we finish our fight? Compelling and fun space combat has been a solved problem since the days of loving OG Wing Commander 1. They just used an extremely half-baked implementation. Basically, think of this: imagine you bought a new space combat game and the core gameplay was what we got in this for space combat. You'd be loving pissed, because it would be a terrible game.
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Dec 28, 2023 16:33
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Starfield is the epitome of the old phrase ‘Jack of many trades, master of none’
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Dec 28, 2023 16:44
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I just cannot grasp how the game that was Todd Howard's lifelong passion project turned out with no discernible artistic vision whatsoever. I seriously hope one day someone gets the inside story on how the development went down.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:02
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Cyrano4747 posted:
2 is a real problem because the second you realize that particle weapons are far, far better than any other option you’ll always just have shields/engine/etc maxed because you only need to feed one of your weapon systems. I’m not balancing my power between lasers for shield and ballistics/missiles for hull because particle shreds both. It’s not even a “well, it’s a balance between shield and hull damage” because as near as I can tell it outdamages matching lasers to shields or whatever. The missile lock stuff is annoying but it never really matters because enemies are so fragile that I don’t get tagged too much since no one lives long enough to shoot at me. What really annoys me is my own missiles- they don’t do enough damage to make waiting for the lock worthwhile and since all my guns lock on to enemies it’s not like I ever need to use them to get a squirrelly little fucker that’s maneuvering too much for me to put my nose on them.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:15
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Ugly In The Morning posted:2 is a real problem because the second you realize that particle weapons are far, far better than any other option you’ll always just have shields/engine/etc maxed because you only need to feed one of your weapon systems. I’m not balancing my power between lasers for shield and ballistics/missiles for hull because particle shreds both. It’s not even a “well, it’s a balance between shield and hull damage” because as near as I can tell it outdamages matching lasers to shields or whatever. What's even better is when you have weapons that are not missiles still "locking on" - EMP weapons in the 3rds lot do this. I have no idea if the lock on makes my ship disable bolt track better or what, but I still have that lock on queue.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:What's even better is when you have weapons that are not missiles still "locking on" - EMP weapons in the 3rds lot do this.
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Dec 28, 2023 17:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:The other problem with space combat in Starfield is that it's loving bad. I never noticed the "enemies pause space combat when boarding" because I always blew up all but the one ship that I wanted to board because of course it would be stupid to leave yourself undefended from attackers in the middle of a fight Turn-based combat would have been a good idea I think for space combat. It would've given a chance to make lots of power management changes actually useful: power to engines to boost away from missiles, power to shields to tank some lasers, power to weapons to alpha an enemy. As-is you just slam the biggest reactor you can and power everything
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