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Rookersh posted:I'll point to something more modern. Bethesda isn't making Elder Scrolls Online. That's Zenimax Online Studios.
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Nov 4, 2023 17:18
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Bholder posted:Thing is most ideas are basically "Starfield would've been a better game if it was a completely different game" This is the kind of problem you run into when every element of your game is half-assed or incomplete.
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Dec 30, 2023 01:02
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Giving any one of the systems or subsystems that compose Starfield the attention and care it needed to be engaging or even worthwhile would mean changing the play and focuses of the game itself. Starfield was trying to be many things at once, and ended up being none of them. I would assume there are ways you could improve it or even make it a better game, but the final product is only going to bear a superficial resemblance to itself, like NMS and 2077 ended up. At the very least they could remove gating everything behind doing Challenges to be allowed to spend your Perks, and maybe make more things (like jetpacks and crafting) baseline, and do some patching and adding of items/weapons to make the more-useless ones worth taking. And let you keep your drat ship between universes. As it is the game feels like an early-access alpha they polished rather than improved or iterated upon. I've been criticizing BGS games (and practices) for almost two decades now, but there's always been something positive I felt I could say about the things they produce, even if it's just that they made what they were trying to make. I can't say that about Starfield. It's hard for me to imagine a deeper nadir of concept and quality. Edit: oh hey, 2077 got mentioned while I was writing this. 2077 then and now are entirely different games, I played the thing at both ends.
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Dec 30, 2023 02:18
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2077 had a solid story with memorable characters on launch, and that's pretty much it. Everything else since has been torn down, rebuilt, or replaced--in some cases, twice. The game as it is now plays and engages you in its modes of play entirely different from then, including the addition and expansion of systems. It's all but been three years of early access people paid full price for, but it's at least you can say it's a fun game now. Which brings it back to Starfield. I don't really know how well the same sort of approach can work for it. 2077 knew what it wanted to be, Starfield is halfway to several different games and integrated very little of them together. And it doesn't even have an interesting narrative or characters to fall back on in the interim. Nor do I really have faith in them to put the needed effort into righting the (space)ship, considering their first reaction to being criticized was to send their PR team into Steam comments to tell negative reviews that they were wrong, actually.
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Dec 30, 2023 14:07
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Azhais posted:And even tho they "fixed" that all the NPCs and the narrator give you poo poo for it if you don't follow The Vision "You can mine! You can loot! You can fly! You can shoot!" is something I'm never going to forget as a bad PR move.
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Jan 2, 2024 04:06
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Truly we deserve the games we get.
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Jan 2, 2024 19:57
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Herstory Begins Now posted:vestigial memory of when game loading screens were like 3 minutes Soul Reaver being hailed as astoundingly innovative because it had none. Soul Reaver rules, though.
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Jan 2, 2024 22:58
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infernal machines posted:What if we made Fallout 4 but with less personality? is certainly a vision. Also an achievement, in a way.
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Jan 4, 2024 19:00
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:On the one hand, sure, projectile weapons are always going to be lower tech and easier to make than energy weapons This is why it being called NASApunk by some people doesn't sound true to me. It has some ship interiors that look vaguely similar to what could possibly exist in a plausible real-world space travel environment, but everything else outside of some of the space-suits just resembles generic sci-fi crap, and it makes no use of the actual environments, hazards, or plausible complications in-space, on-the-ground, or political that could arise.
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Jan 10, 2024 19:45
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ephori posted:Remember that time they had characters talk endlessly about the mechs during the war, sent you to the mech planet, had you explore POIs in mech graveyards, had NPCs go on and on about how badass the mechs were, had a long quest line that culminates in battling a former general of the mech battalion, and never had you either face off against or pilot a mech? Remember how they talk about how the planet is a mech graveyard, then the graveyard you go to is three crashed ships surrounded by a wasteland of nothing?
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Jan 13, 2024 07:23
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I still don’t understand what the UC and freestar were fighting over given that there’s so many wide open systems with tons of stuff Presumably spurious reasons out of concern over being out-competed through expansion, think the catalyst was Freestar settling a system that the UC had said was off-limits, despite having a charter saying "people can leave and settle elsewhere." At some point in development I suspect the idea was that the UC and Freestar were both rumbling at each other for paranoid, nationalistic reasons and the peace they had after agreeing to limit themselves to three colonies each was ultimately unsustainable. But Bethesda is very, very bad at building that sense of tone, and more than that they never really integrated that element into the story in a way that matters. It all seems a ridiculous conflict when the respective capitals for these 200-year-old interstellar polities are four skyscrapers for one, and a shanty town for the other.
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Jan 14, 2024 21:54
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Wait, I thought that agreement was why the colony war was fought. What was the war before the colony war fought over then? Freestar wanting avocado colored bathroom fixtures? It was. The actual cause was Freestar settling a place the UC said they couldn't. It's stupid, but it's the kind of stupid I buy from a nationalistic society that doesn't like the idea of it no longer being the big force in this region of the cosmos.
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Jan 14, 2024 21:58
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Enderal exists as proof that it's not the game engine that's holding Bethesda back from making good games. Though I also have memories of endlessly spinning around enemies to try and fight them with how combat was tuned, so I suppose it doesn't help.
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Feb 3, 2024 19:35
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DancingShade posted:The only science the creators know is modern star trek. Being chastised for "not trusting the science" by the entire crew for picking reintroducing a recently-extinct livestock species as a reliable and sustainable solution to the murderbeast problem, over the untested murder microbe that is meant to proliferate across all settled systems without guarantee of being mutation-proofed, is easily the most insulted a game has made me feel.
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Feb 16, 2024 09:02
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socialsecurity posted:If those things had already been hunted to extinction then obviously re-introducing them is a safe bet as if they get to much a problem they can be culled, the resolution to that just made no dam sense. Boggles my loving mind that the narrative "good" choices in a story about how ignorance of the environment can lead to damaging gaffes and how that ignorance will be exploited by those with nefarious intent, is to destroy a plant that exists on one planet without study, not reintroduce a species that humanity had blindly eaten to death which caused the terrormorph problem in the first place, and drop a hastily-engineered bioweapon across all settled systems and leave it at that.
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Feb 16, 2024 09:11
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DancingShade posted:It was clearly a heavy handed clumsily written "go get your covid shot" message but arrived about 2 years too late. It arrived late and was insultingly backwards, since its equivalent to "go get your COVID shot" is to unleash a potential interstellar plague, and to ignore performing scientific rigor on heatleeches, their reproduction cycle, and the way the plants supercharge it. It is the least scientific solution unless your idea of science is solely that it involves using terms like "microbe" and words that end in -ion.
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Feb 16, 2024 10:56
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Tiny Timbs posted:I 100% believe the stories about studio leads mad at being compared disfavorably to BG3 and I will not be convinced otherwise I'd say it's unfair to compare a game to BG3, which had the benefit of a studio with over a decade of experience, the backing of two well-known IPs (Baldur's Gate and D&D), and significant support over a long early-access period. But really, if there's any studio and game to compare to in terms of content, experience, financial backing, and time to produce, it would be Starfield and Bethesda. And Christ is it a stark comparison.
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Feb 26, 2024 17:39
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What jumps out at me about New Atlantis as how it doesn't feel at all like the capital of an interstellar society and the first extrasolar city that's existed for the last 200 years. It's incredibly small and there's hardly any residential space or signs of civilization at least diffusing more across the planet's surface area. It feels like a section of EPCOT, not the future EPCOT tried to predict or promise.
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Feb 28, 2024 16:41
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:It was weak in areas and a bit cringe in places but I enjoyed it. That final DLC was loving lit. The final DLC felt like they'd finally found their footing on what the setting should be in terms of tone. Hopefully it carries over to Outer Worlds 2.
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Mar 1, 2024 03:17
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Talkie Toaster posted:It’s amazing how dedicated they were to just not exploring the setting. Sam’s story touches on the tension in how Akila’s self-image as bold pioneers is at odds with their stagnation into a new aristocracy… and then just ignores it. Daddy issues, babymomma drama, he doesn’t want to settle down, nothing that really meaningfully interacts with the setting. Just Find->Replace spaceship for horse or car and it could be anywhere. What stood out to me in this regard is the accents. The galaxy is 200 years out from the destruction of earth and the eradication of most of its art and culture followed by a resultant consolidation into a primary culture, yet New Atlantis is filled with peoples who've kept their foreign accents. I kept waiting for them to reveal the why of that, if there are various learning softwares people internalized growing up or social enclaves keeping the languages of earth alive. And nothing.
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Apr 16, 2024 13:47
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dr_rat posted:Future accents is always going to be a difficult issue, and honestly I don't fault them for just having the voice actors use what ever now days accent. inventing new accents while it could be interesting would most likely sound a bit weird and distracting. Sorta like when sci-fi and fantasy stuff just make up a new "future" word that is just a direct one to one replacement for a regular one from now. This is more a problem with novels. I'm not complaining that they didn't invent accents, I was waiting for a worldbuilding explanation as to how these elements of earth have persisted for the last 200 years despite the obvious sources of erosion. Because that would be interesting and reveal more of the setting.
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Apr 16, 2024 14:04
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Caeser's brutal rule was a response to a brutal and chaotic land. And it's an effective response, being the most brutal and horrifying force is an answer. The problem comes from people assuming that because it worked that it was both the best method and entirely justified. Arizona's pacified, but you bet your rear end someone shits their pants if they end up walking down the same street as their regional governor for fear of losing their head. Anyway how about those space cowboys or snake people?
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Apr 24, 2024 00:37
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dr_rat posted:I mean that just goes to what do people mean by "saved". If Bethesda put out a Far Harbor quality DLC -which isn't impossible, I'm not holding my breath, but in the past they have managed at least one really good piece of DLC per game- than sure it might be tacted on but it would still be some fun to have in the game, and as it's on gamepass than you know Starfield might go from recommending not to play, to yeah if you have gamepass yeah maybe spend a weekend going through that good DLC bit or whatever. This hope's already dead. Gamepass makes you buy DLC you want to play. They aren't included in the subscription.
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Apr 24, 2024 11:17
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:08 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also see also: how poisoned the Bioware writers got by paying attention to the gigglesquee waifu contingent of their forums. Bioware's writing had been poisoned for a long time before that. Their head writer was on their forums defending how the rapist he wrote and had confess to rape wasn't actually a rapist as far back as 2009. Some of their games just stopped being fun enough and competently-made that it stopped being as easy to overlook how narratively shallow and paper-thin things were. It's an apt comparison for Bethesda right now, though Bethesda's writing has always been far, far worse.
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May 4, 2024 06:46
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