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Ursine Catastrophe posted:Starfield, on the other hand, is what you get if you took Skyrim and said "every PoI is open on the map the instant you start the game up, but you can only click on PoIs to move from location to location". The managed to laser-target the One Thing that their house style games had going for them and removed it with a scalpel-- the entertainment value in getting lost, getting distracted, finding an interesting-looking point C while wandering from point A to point B and going over there to see what's going on with it; and they managed to excise that aspect with such scalpel-like accuracy that if you were in Bethesda with a mission to secretly sabotage their next game, it'd be hard to imagine what you could to do kill it more dead. I hit my head against this fairly early. When I first landed on Mars, I thought the atmosphere was spot-on, and I remember thinking while looking at the horizon around the main POI that wow, it's all really out there, I can go explore all that. And then I did, and realized there is no reason to do it, ever. So the horizon became about as interesting as the one in the background of most 80s arcade racers.
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Apr 15, 2024 17:05
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https://packaged-media.redd.it/uaz4...d977c82f332#t=0
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Apr 15, 2024 17:52
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:Did they seriously promise all of that? lol None of that is even going to come close to happening, and that's very much intentional.
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Apr 15, 2024 22:00
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LostRook posted:Yeah, I had very low expectations for Starfield, going into it with the expectation of just laughing at the bugs after Fallout 76, and it still managed to disappoint. i actually pre-bought starfield, and played about thirty minutes before uninstalling it. it's the only pre-buy I've ever regretted. just so, so bland. I'll fire it up again with mods one day so i can at least play through it.
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Apr 15, 2024 22:19
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Time_pants posted:None of that is even going to come close to happening, and that's very much intentional. i think those are pretty reasonable hopes and expectations, and also that they aren't going to happen.
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Apr 15, 2024 22:20
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man its kind of great that an SC release by 2030 counts as a modest dream i have confidence that SC can poo poo out some replacement-level base building/crafting mechanics. there's like a thousand survival games on steam that managed this. I have very low confidence they can make it good or interact interestingly with the rest of the game. the absolute best they will achieve is 'urban areas' in safe zones where people stash an unreasonable amount of poo poo, like happens in every online game with building. probably they'll gently caress it up and let people be too close together and it'll start burning out the servers. exploration will never be good, they still don't know what the gently caress they even want for it. at this point i believe its going to be 'get a mission to explore. go to a designated 'unexplored planet'. press the scan button in orbit. land at the designated poi. press the scan button on the ground. load the scan cube into your cargo bay and return it to ScanCorp. bask in the warm feeling of having paid $500 for the privilege of doing this mission in your constellation
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Apr 15, 2024 22:32
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:man its kind of great that an SC release by 2030 counts as a modest dream hire this goon
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Apr 15, 2024 22:45
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aCE7gxQOVY 
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Apr 15, 2024 23:02
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🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
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Apr 15, 2024 23:43
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Popete posted:... but the fact they don't even have local maps of their major cities is very strange. I did not mind the space travelling loading screens at all. But this is what actually led me to stop playing Starfield. You could just follow the mission markers to move around but whenever you wanted to step out of that just a tiny bit, to sell stuff etc or what not, it was a real pain.
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Apr 16, 2024 08:01
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MedicineHut posted:I did not mind the space travelling loading screens at all. But this is what actually led me to stop playing Starfield. You could just follow the mission markers to move around but whenever you wanted to step out of that just a tiny bit, to sell stuff etc or what not, it was a real pain. Even current day malls usually have minimaps, although they are interactive kiosks rather than on your phone. You could've at least had a classic "You are here" map posters.
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Apr 16, 2024 08:05
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lobsterminator posted:Even current day malls usually have minimaps, although they are interactive kiosks rather than on your phone. You could've at least had a classic "You are here" map posters. There was a mod I installed that actually added such sign posts, but it was still far from ideal. I suspect Bethesda had a reason why they didnt want main hubs local minimaps, I do not think it was just a mistake. but whatever that game design reason was it did not work with me.
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Apr 16, 2024 08:25
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MedicineHut posted:There was a mod I installed that actually added such sign posts, but it was still far from ideal. I suspect Bethesda had a reason why they didnt want main hubs local minimaps, I do not think it was just a mistake. but whatever that game design reason was it did not work with me. Bethesda local maps have been super bad with every game. Especially if you have multi-level locations like FO4 had a lot. It's just everything piled up on top of each other and helps you very little in finding the way. The old Daggerfall style maps would have been a lot more useful. 
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Apr 16, 2024 08:33
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Part of the problem is just how you do open world design when the world is split up into a bunch of discrete chunks (planets) that by nature are very separate (and how you handle the transition between them.) It's not impossible, and other space RPGs- KOTOR, Mass Effect, etc.- have a fairly limited selection of worlds and focus on making each a distinct area. (The major flaw in Outer Worlds is how samey the planets are- which is sort of part of the point, the corporation homogenizing everything, but it's less interesting to explore than the area around New Vegas and the like.) But Starfield also wanted to be a Big Space Game with hundreds of planets. So you really can't design them all. So they went procedural and came up with a lot of samey environments- further limited by them choosing a really bland aesthetic and also deciding "no intelligent aliens." At least in No Man's Sky I can talk to a bunch of weird lizards and machine-beings.
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Apr 16, 2024 08:43
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I always felt like Starfield was going to be kinda meh, as even in the days before release, there was no info on who you are in Starfield and what you do. Their biggest success so far, Skyrim, had the simple hook "You are the Dragonborn and you will fight dragons" that was visible in the very first trailer they released. And that was enough. Meanwhile Starfield had all that info on how many planets are there, on the space building mechanics, that one gameplay teaser with the mission on the planet, shooting , stealth of some kind but still no context. Even the marketing was a lot of fluff without a concrete vision, so I had no hope for the game. It felt like a hodgepodge of ideas, a big pot from which we hope that a delicious dish will emerge, but we just added stuff with no recipe. A purchase well avoided.
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Apr 16, 2024 10:19
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I'm really leaning towards the camp of thinking that there's really no way to make a top-quality space game if one of your features is going to be "hey, we've got a shitload of planets". It just doesn't work. There's too many compromises with procedural generation. It's just so tempting to do that kind of thing when you're presented with the concept of space, but there's a reason no one makes a game where you can go to 3000 different procedurally generated cities in the same world. It doesn't suddenly become a good idea because it's in space. If you're going to make a shitload of planets you really have to lean into it being a space game and completely drop the majority of planetside features I think. Stick with a reasonable number of 'hero' planets.
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Apr 16, 2024 14:16
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Fidelitious posted:I'm really leaning towards the camp of thinking that there's really no way to make a top-quality space game if one of your features is going to be "hey, we've got a shitload of planets". It just doesn't work. Frontier Elite 2 and Frontier First Encounters were absolutely top-quality space games in their days with "hey, we've got a shitload of planets" as a feature. And Elite: Dangerous is arguably one for the players still playing it, even though personally I find it crippled by the multiplayer compromises.
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Apr 16, 2024 14:22
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Frontier Elite 2 I remember worked it out where you could only land on planets that had space ports and then the rest had like orbiting space stations. Which is a system that I think works fine.
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Apr 16, 2024 14:26
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TuxedoOrca posted:Frontier Elite 2 I remember worked it out where you could only land on planets that had space ports and then the rest had like orbiting space stations. Which is a system that I think works fine. Nope, you could land on anything in FE2 (well, not on stars or gas giants obviously, but anything rocky was fair play), even if there wasn't a point to it apart from dropping those kind-of-pointless automated mining machines that you'd come back and collect later. FFE was the same, except they had gone further with the surface procgen, so you'd get some flying around low-poly mountains and rivers(!).
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Apr 16, 2024 14:31
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Huh, interesting.
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Apr 16, 2024 14:34
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FishMcCool posted:Nope, you could land on anything in FE2 (well, not on stars or gas giants obviously, but anything rocky was fair play), even if there wasn't a point to it apart from dropping those kind-of-pointless automated mining machines that you'd come back and collect later. FFE was the same, except they had gone further with the surface procgen, so you'd get some flying around low-poly mountains and rivers(!). Landing on planets without spaceports was manual, if I remember rightly, you couldn't autopilot it. Which generally made it a huge pain in the backside not worth doing.
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Apr 16, 2024 14:40
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Fidelitious posted:I'm really leaning towards the camp of thinking that there's really no way to make a top-quality space game if one of your features is going to be "hey, we've got a shitload of planets". It just doesn't work. I honestly think you could, and I think maybe Starfield is the one that had the biggest opportunity to pull it off (though hampered by being bethesda). I think the formula is something like "make mass effect with a bunch of extra planets", but at that point you're wondering why you're making essentially two different games, and one of those appeals only weird space nerds, so why bother.
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Apr 16, 2024 14:44
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Fidelitious posted:I'm really leaning towards the camp of thinking that there's really no way to make a top-quality space game if one of your features is going to be "hey, we've got a shitload of planets". It just doesn't work. I think it comes down to, what is the main gameplay mechanics of the game, and does that gameplay mechanic work well with a shitload of procedurally generated planets. There's lots of types of space games where absolutely just a whole bunch of planets with just the range of differences allowed by modern procedural generation could be fun to go to. You just need to have a good idea of why are they going to be fun to go to. Why would a play want to visit a random planet of 3000 rather one planet of the five that you have all handcrafted. Starfield's basic mechanics were still all geared towards the enjoyment of playing coming from playing in handcrafted content. The quests, the character conversations, fighting enemies in handcrafted
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Apr 16, 2024 15:04
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"Playing" Starfield felt more like doing dev testing, where I was just using tools to move my character directly between POIs. I'm not sure I visited even a fraction of the places on the starmap, and I had no desire to. They failed to set off the basic explorer instinct of "I wonder what's over there" by the very design of the game already answering that question: "a procedurally generated area that will pull from a pool of assets." It's an accomplishment in its own right to short-circuit the basic human instinct of curiosity.
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Apr 16, 2024 15:37
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Desolate space games needs to be, you know, desolate. It's incredibly immersion breaking that in starfield, no matter how far into the galaxy you jump, anywhere you land is going to have 2-5 populated outposts within walking distance. Same with E:D spawning in pirates when you mine at remote sites.
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Apr 16, 2024 15:41
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To be fair to E:D, when you get about 100 LY out of the bubble there are no more pirates.
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Apr 16, 2024 16:34
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Instead, the stars try to kill you (and are better equipped for it than the pirates). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72tamMH57Is
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Apr 16, 2024 16:57
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How is Underspace? Is it good to play even in Early Access?
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Apr 16, 2024 21:39
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I said come in! posted:Is it good to play even in Early Access? This answer should always be no.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:33
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I am feeling desperate for a new space sim. Burned out on Elite Dangerous, and X4. There is nothing currently available that I feel like playing.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:43
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Worf posted:hire this goon Sorry, TheDeadlyShoe is one of our deep cover agents, goes by the code name of "Urine Feline" we've managed to control the narrative of the faithful for years with just a timely post here and there!
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Apr 17, 2024 01:59
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I think it might finally be time for a refund.
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Apr 17, 2024 06:14
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I said come in! posted:I am feeling desperate for a new space sim. Burned out on Elite Dangerous, and X4. There is nothing currently available that I feel like playing. How sim:y, space:y and new does it need to be?
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Apr 17, 2024 06:26
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Tippis posted:How sim:y, space:y and new does it need to be? Ideally the game big time encourages the use of flight joysticks, and leans more on the realism side, while pretty much only taking place in space. Elite Dangerous is my favorite space sim, so something like that.
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Apr 17, 2024 06:38
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This guy still works there and is on payroll. He still posts on twitter nonstop about wing commander script translations. I remember when he told everyone hauling people would earn so much money in the ‘verse that they had to price the Genesis Starliner higher than other ships at $400. Then TonyZ wrote a huge article about mixing drinks with the mixmaster. The ship isn’t in the game. The gameplay doesn’t exist. Nobody knows what either of them do at the company.
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Apr 17, 2024 06:39
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I said come in! posted:Ideally the game big time encourages the use of flight joysticks, and leans more on the realism side, while pretty much only taking place in space. Elite Dangerous is my favorite space sim, so something like that. That's a tough one, there really aren't that many games that hit that sweet spot E:D does. In terms of new modern space sims all I can even think of are Everspace 2 and Chorus, which are about the furthest from realistic possible.
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Apr 17, 2024 06:46
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Sardonik posted:That's a tough one, there really aren't that many games that hit that sweet spot E:D does. In terms of new modern space sims all I can even think of are Everspace 2 and Chorus, which are about the furthest from realistic possible. Yeah, and those two games are really good! But not really want I am craving right now. Ooh well. Been hoping something is in development to look forward to, but as far as I know there really isnt. Everything right now is leaning heavily into crafting/survival in space with a big emphasis on traveling through space to land on planets and then build. They all want to be the next No Man's Sky.
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Apr 17, 2024 06:53
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I said come in! posted:Yeah, and those two games are really good! But not really want I am craving right now. Ooh well. Been hoping something is in development to look forward to, but as far as I know there really isnt. Everything right now is leaning heavily into crafting/survival in space with a big emphasis on traveling through space to land on planets and then build. They all want to be the next No Man's Sky. Sounds like you need a dose of the 'verse commando! o7
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Apr 17, 2024 07:05
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I will forever lament the premature death of Rogue System. 
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Apr 17, 2024 07:08
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queef anxiety posted:Sounds like you need a dose of the 'verse commando! o7 Reported
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Apr 17, 2024 07:08
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