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It's a weird situation where like. Every single system is broken in some pretty fundamental ways. But it's also got charm, and every single issue I have is both fixable and I expect it to get fixed. If Bethesda really is going to turn this into a Sea of Thieves style game they drop content into every few months, it'll turn out pretty goddamn great. 6 years of content drops plus whatever modders put out likely turn this into the best space sim. It's just not there yet. Some parts ( MSQ/UC quests, various sidequests ) are really good. Other parts ( Rangers/Crimson, other sidequests ) are kinda bad.
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Oct 13, 2023 02:15
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:32 |
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I've actually noticed the companions are various degrees of useful. Sarah can't hit poo poo, also rarely fires her gun. Sam and Barrett are fine, both shoot frequently and occasionally get kills. Andreja shoots very rarely but when she does like 5 targets are dead.
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Oct 13, 2023 05:36
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This game is so weird. Every single gameplay system frustrates. Why are all the skills you can unlock either utterly useless or essential QoL that should have been base. Why is exploration so pointless. Like even when you find handcrafted stuff on the planets, 90% of the time it's got nothing there. No story, no real loot, just a bunch of dead colonists. Great! Why did I run like 5 minutes to this PoI. Why is ship building, outpost building, and setting down furniture still beholden to a literal nightmare of UI issues. Why is the UI this bad. Why is the stamina system so hostile. Why is the weight system so needlessly tight, even compared to previous Bethesda games. Why do most of the guns feel awful to use. Why does an entire half of the game feel like it wasn't finished. And yet I can't stop playing, and I've probably had more fun with this game at this point then I did with Baldur's Gate or Cyberpunk. I've actually really enjoyed the writing in this, as light as it tends to be. MSQ felt really solid throughout, and I actually really liked the ending. Probably the best written Bethesda game since Morrowind. Liked the MSQ here a lot more than I did the BG3 MSQ. UC Vanguard was a really fun questline, and Ryujin was just the Skyrim Thieves Guild again but I thought it was unique and fun enough. Crimson Fleet was actually a lot of fun, and about to do Rangers soon. All the New Atlantis sidequests sucked, but all the Neon and Akila side quests have been pretty solid so far. Once I realized the galaxy map shows you where to find quest hubs in the galaxy I've had a good amount of fun hitting all of those and most of those have been pretty interesting. This game absolutely feels like it's going to be a totally different thing in 4-5 years. With a bunch of PoI stuff added by mods, probably hoverbikes or something for planet travel, some UI tweaks to make ship travel less UI heavy, and some additional content it'll probably be the best Bethesda game. It's just so weird now.
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Oct 18, 2023 14:59
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Yeah, I'm having a lot of fun with it and got my money out of it at least. As I was saying in the Steam thread I'm probably enjoying this more than BG3 and Cyberpunk ( despite also enjoying both ). But also what the gently caress? Every single system is scuffed. How is EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM scuffed. Y'all had infinite money! You've been working on this for twice as long as your other games!
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Oct 19, 2023 14:35
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Thankfully it feels like most? of the problems are inherently fixable. Like, if you open the scanner in space you already get a lot of movement options through it and can avoid menus. Just expand on that, and let you see nearby systems you can jump to, and add PoIs to the planet surface so you can jump from there. Give you more of a space trucker vibe as you slowly hop from system to system to your destination. We do know it loads the entire system, so it's feasible to make a non fast travel/menu heavy option. Add some sort of hoverbike for planetary exploration. 5 years from now worth of modded PoIs, plus whatever additional ones Bethesda drops through expansions. Plus obviously whatever additional content comes through expansions. I think it's pretty obvious we'll get a House Va'runn pack. I wouldn't also mind having a Starborn questline, or alternatively turning other Starborn into psuedo Daedra shrines. Could help flesh out that part of the background lore. The story stuff currently is fine. I actually really liked the MSQ, and the guilds helped flesh out the factions a good amount. I went from finding them goofy caricatures to really enjoying their depth by the end of the game. It all grew on me. It just needs the systems level stuff to actually be fun to engage with.
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Oct 19, 2023 15:22
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Frog Act posted:it's just an impossibly stupid, boring, poorly conceived world. I really think you could give a twelve year old boy who had read a little bit of Heinlein/Bradbury/Heavy Metal/2000 AD access to chatGPT and they'd concoct a world ten thousand times more interesting than BGS could over the course of half a decade I mean I disagree. I think the bigger issue is the game is so utterly difficult to enjoy that a lot of the neat writing is hidden because you've got to wade through poo poo to see it. A really good example of this is the UC. When you first find the UC you probably think, oh great, space UN. Doesn't help that New Atlantis has the most boring side quests of any of the major cities because it's basically tutorial city. But then as you go through the game you realize oh it's actually space fasch hell, and it was formed by the various governments/military of Earth post the collapse and was basically a Super Earth take. But then you keep digging and realize oh, it's actually not quite? the space fasch/ex governments lost the war bad against the Freestar folks, and a silent coup happened where the various corpos silently removed the former government, whitewashed the image a bit, and took over. They've kept most of the service guarantees citizenship aspects but have also largely turned it into a weird space commodity business and have tried to start muscling further into the various corpo wars. It's now largely run by a bunch of business interests. Which also then leads into a lot of weird poo poo you start to uncover/piece together like the UC went from having most of the old Earth Navy but lost a lot of it in the fight against Freestar/coup and basically just has a bunch of junkers. They went from handily outnumbering Freestar to being the minor faction, and are largely coasting on their previous assumed strength. Except that strength is long gone, and they have to use groups like the Vanguard to try and coax people to help fluff up their military. And use the story of how the people of Akila helped push back the UC fleet as their reasoning for this, while secretly the actual reason is because the UC fleet is loving gone. This is also hurt as you start to realize Deimos is loving running ragged and can't keep up, and the quality can't match what other ship manufacturers are putting out these days. It's just rotten all the way down and about to collapse. They tell everyone they've still got the fleet, but they don't, at all. Or how that coup led to the creation of groups like Ecliptic or even in a lot of ways the Crimson Fleet because a lot of the ex military types loving dipped during it and started carving out their own little fiefdoms the new UC can't keep up with because it's in a psuedo collapse and trying to reframe itself. A significant chunk of the Settled Systems issues are tied to the UC being unable to keep things under control in their home turf, and they are desperately trying to handle everything before Freestar realizes it's entirely built on lies. And how the new UC doesn't even realize just how hosed it actually is because it's all a bunch of weird tonedeaf CEO types. Or how said tonedeaf CEOs are currently making things worse because rather than encouraging people to spread and form new colonies, they've decided everyone needs to return to office and are trying to jam everyone into New Atlantis so they can get them on the service guarantees citizenship train. Not realizing this means there is absolutely nobody out there helping get the resources Deimos needs, or actually building up any sort of proper civilization outside of what they've got in Atlantis. And things like Londinium only further make them think the best idea is to isolate and hide in New Atlantis while the other major powers slowly but surely grow and expand. It's actually neat stuff, and a lot of the side quests get significantly more interesting as you make your way to Neon/Akila, and the factions all tie it together in some smart ways. It's just. It takes quite a lot of digging to realize how much there actually is and the quality of it, and why in gods name would anybody dig that deep when the game itself is just unpleasant to play/actively working against you half the time. I firmly believe once this game is actually fun to play a lot of people are going to turn around on the storytelling/worldbuilding because there's some actually really neat stuff here. Especially if they further expand on it by adding more Starborn/Va'ruun stuff. It's just impossible to enjoy a storyline when you constantly get taken out of it because the game needs you to be frustrated again. Rookersh fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Oct 20, 2023 |
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Oct 20, 2023 02:08
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Fun lore bit that I've found on a single datapad. Walter Stroud is one of the top dogs of the Council of Governers. He acts as their voice. Our CEO buddy loving runs the Freestar Collective. Kinda hilariously important thing to have hidden away on a side mission datapad!
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Oct 22, 2023 04:40
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Yeah Sarah being the face of the game is hilarious because she's by far the worst of the 4. Barrett is just high off his rear end 90% of the game and doesn't give a gently caress in most situations. Even when he does, it's usually a "well I wouldn't have done it that way, but whatever.". Sam is actually a decent character if you take him the entire game. He's got a lot of poo poo to say about the UC and FSC both. Sadly he's also as plain as white bread. Andreja is frankly the only "good" companion. She doesn't care 90% of the time, she's the only one you can do the right UC Vanguard Choice for and not get negative rep, and as long as you aren't too actively hostile to her weird cult poo poo she's chill. Or Vasco, but Vasco sucks in combat. Compared to Piper, Nick, or Curie they all kinda suck. Hell, even the weaker companions in 4 like MacCready, Cait, or Danse are more interesting than the Starfield folks.
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Oct 25, 2023 05:14
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Inspector Hound posted:...what's the Right Choice for the vanguard quest Joking, but if you choose the Aceles all other companions have a problem with it, and you will get negative rep no matter what you choose. Andreja will get negative rep if you say "it's my choice deal with it.", but if you explain your choice she either gets no rep change or will gain rep.
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Oct 25, 2023 05:51
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Coldforge posted:You're not wrong. Someone will probably point to Morrowind having better characters, but anyone who still remembers Morrowind's characters probably can't remember what they had for breakfast today. I'll point to something more modern. ESO. ESO has extremely good companions. Ember and Isobel are extremely high quality. Mirri is fantastic. As is Sharp-As-Night. The writing is also generally the best part and the reason most people keep playing. Expansion storylines can be hit or miss ( High Isles kinda stank, Elsewyr got some character issues ), but the side quests/general stuff tends to be very good. The Daedric War arc is probably the best thing Bethesda has put out in recent memory. Like we have a recent pipeline of Bethesda actually caring about it's writing/worldbuilding, and it just got another expansion in June that's actually been pretty good. They -can- do good stories/writing, but they seem to lock all the writers up in the TES rooms and Fallout/Starfield stuff gets written by basically an intern.
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Nov 4, 2023 15:30
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Jack B Nimble posted:Starfield's lead designer, Emil Pagliarulo, has said he doesn't believe in design documents because there's too much time spent updating him. Todd Howard, like Gabe Newell, doesn't like to think that he's the bottleneck through which all ideas pass, but he is; furthermore, he used to have an open door and was easily reachable on a day to day basis but now he manages three different branches and there aren't enough hours in the day for him to maintain that level of openess. I find the name and blame thing people do with devs to be really weird. We've got no idea why things are hosed, but saying it's totally this guys fault because I heard from my brothers ex's favorite youtuber that used to work at Bethesda doesn't inspire confidence. It reminds me of the Rob Bartholomew stuff with Total War. Guy was the front facing marketing guy for the games, came up frequently, and there were always rumors that he was a dipshit from the Youtube rumor mill. People ran with it and memed on the dude, and when the recent DLC sucked and he came out to defend his team a torrent of outright hostility got poured onto him by capital G Gamers. His family got threatened, the school his kids were going to needed to get closed, his wife got threatened at work. The whole nine yards went down for this dude, because he was the name people could attach their angst to. Whoops, bunch of ex CA guys have now came out and said no. He was awesome. He was the guy who greenlit the bigger monsters for 2 by sidestepping marketing. He's the one who always gave the teams more time and encouraged them to make cool poo poo. He's the one who lied to corporate because he trusted whatever his team was making would wow people. He was the good one, and spent most of his time getting his teams what they needed. He had nothing to do with why the recent DLC stunk or any of that. But he got all the poo poo for it, and it sounds like he got fired as a scapegoat for it potentially. Emil falls into the same category. Kirkbride has come out a few times and said Emil was an excellent writer who always pushed people and wrote some of the most unique stuff in Oblivion and Skyrim. He's the guy who made the DB questchain in both, he's the guy who wrote the weird Danse Synth stuff. His stuff has always been pretty solid/weird, but he said "keep it simple stupid" once and now he's also the one who personally made sure Starfield was terrible. Because of course he would, he's this mystical gremlin figure that exists to make Bethesda games more casual. All this poo poo does is encourage folks to go harass the person off weird rumors and hearsay. It's not helpful.
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Dec 11, 2023 22:17
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moist turtleneck posted:What did they end up doing for Andromeda because I think one of the dlcs became "poochy died on the way back to his home planet" Andromeda's whole shtick was it was colony ships sent to another galaxy. Each ship held a few races that were generally fine together. So humans, turians, asari, and krogan all got their own ship. But the Quarians got shuffled into a ship with the hanar. This was all done at the behest of a mysterious benefactor. In the base game you find all the ships but the Quarian/Hanar ship, and you don't learn who the mysterious benefactor was. These are led into with very serious "this is the DLC" tags during the epilogue. Then the DLC got cancelled, so they redid the Quarian DLC as a comic? Which was not great. The actual reveal of what was going on DLC also got canned, it didn't get a comic.
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Apr 16, 2024 18:22
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Honestly I disagree that the game isn't fixable. It's very fixable, it's the question of whether or not Bethesda chooses to invest in actually fixing it. The gameplay loop needs work. Skills are anemic, there isn't enough gun variety, and getting around sucks. All of these things are fixable. Skills are likely fixable through basic modding. Guns could get fixed through a mix of modding and DLC. Getting around could get fixed by some sort of planet vehicles DLC. A greater focus on heavy weapons/airborne style weapons would make things feel much more interesting. The exploration loop needs work. Getting around is annoying and fiddly and way too in menu. Planet transit basically forces you to spend all your initial skills on movement speed/stamina so you can get around quicker. There aren't enough things to actually do on planets. Most of these things are fixable. Rehashing the space travel UI so you can do it all from cockpit view would be a huge help. Taxi options between colonized worlds, including outposts you build that get large enough. More PoI are obviously going to come with DLC. The aforementioned ground vehicle based DLC. The story and setting is fundamentally flawed. I'll argue in favor of the MSQ, Constellation is largely bunk and I don't care about any of the companions. But the actual main thrust of the MSQ is interesting, figuring out what happened to Earth, figuring out the nature of the Starborn, the Hunter/Prophet etc. It's just surrounded by lovely companion writing, and some deeply shallow factions. It also needs to lead into something more interesting than "isn't space crazy". This is also fixable. DLC add 1-2 companions that are somewhat more interesting then the current crew, add in the House Va'run? DLC with it's own story. Have another Crusade kick off which adds a whole bunch of PoIs to various planets, or big fights between the factions. Add in an antagonistic alien race like the Ur-Quan or Shivans coming into the picture, and a further explanation for the whys/whats of who created the Starborn and why/what they really are. Get out of the current writing head up it's own rear end in a top hat that leaves everything vague and spend some DLC time further fleshing out each of the factions. Corruption/family power in the Freestar, dealing with Batu? in Neon, and more normal life poo poo for UC. They could also drop a DLC with a variety of new hand crafted PoIs attached to Outposts, go down the Morrowind Stronghold/NWN Crossroads Keep angle and have your first Outpost start getting settled as a proper "new" city and have a expansion about people moving to it and trying to build a new 3rd or 4th faction. As your settlement grows larger, more people move in with actual names who have actual quests that tie to the other factions/open planets. People moving from New Atlantis that could help flesh out what life is like in the UC as they want you to help get them settled here and creating their new life. Add actual story to the loving around and exploring parts of the game to give further encouragement to engage with these systems. They could drop a DLC that goes deeper into NG+ alterations that more firmly alter the MSQ. They could add DLC that gives further stuff to do in space. They could add DLC that fleshes out factional quests and responsibilities, further fleshes out trade, adds minigames, adds an alien language mechanic, space hulks, etc etc. Starfields problems aren't insurmountable, especially for a companion like Bethesda. It's problems are frankly not even core, it's just death by a thousand cuts. Transit sucks, but it's made worse by the skill system, but it's made worse by the lack of reason to explore, but it's made worse by the xyz. Fix even half these issues and the game suddenly becomes a lot less miserable to play. Most of the talk otherwise just feels like doomerism for the sake of doomerism. Bethesda has dropped stinkers before and spent inordinate amounts of money fixing them up. ESO was garbage at launch, but they did three separate full game overhauls until one stuck and they've turned it into one of the most popular MMOs out there. Fallout 76 equally got multiple huge game changing drops before it became profitable, and it's only recently gotten people to change their opinion of it from it's launch. Starfield will absolutely get massive alterations to almost all it's core systems, because Bethesda has made it very clear they consider public opinion of their IPs to be extremely important to them. Like gently caress, if they make it so you can actually do everything from the cockpit without having to choose a fast travel location from a goddamn menu I think a solid 60-70% of the games problems straight up vanish on their own. This isn't an insurmountable unbreakable problem. This is extremely doable. Rookersh fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 17:19
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:32 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:What you are describing is basically re-making the game. Bullshit. I edited my previous post, but I'll say it again here. If Bethesda only changed the galaxy travel map to be something that wasn't a separate menu you had to fiddle with, but instead was something you could just do as soon as you entered the cockpit through facing/cockpit skew it'd fix the vast majority of problems this game has. And it already HAS this feature, it just needs to be expanded upon. You can already start flying in your ship and if you point in the direction of various nearby galaxies it'll ask if you wanna fly there. It just needs a quest drop down menu that lets you choose your next quest in cockpit, and maybe a small scale galaxy map that pops up so you can see where you've already been. Maybe add some cockpit view notes about the planets in a system once you arrive to encourage not going to the menu map again. Every other problem listed is minor to that singular problem. Exploration sucks, but outpost creation isn't the worst and there's like 70-100 some odd unique PoIs out there already. It just sucks utterly to go to any of them due to the aforementioned awful loving travel map. We've got plenty of games with meaningless exploration that do fine because going too and from isn't as painful as pulling teeth. NMS is a great example. It's a game that's as shallow as a puddle, but it's beloved because getting around is a functional system. Gameplay loop isn't interesting, but it's functional. Story is weak, but again, it's functional. MSQ is fine. Guilds are -fine-. Skyrim wasn't the height of writing either but it worked. I'm just not going to fly out and do a dumb quest when getting too and from actively makes me want to die. New quests are obviously coming with DLC, and even just a few additional guilds/quests in the major cities could really help make the game more fleshed out. Most of my post was things they could do to make Starfield get even better, but "fixing" it is not a mountain of work. An update to the galaxy travel map and some sort of ground vehicle based DLC dropping at the same time and for 90% of the playerbase Starfield jumps from a 4/10 to a 7/10. Why shouldn't Bethesda do that? Why make a new game for an IP people currently have no interest in? Who is going to trust Bethesda if they don't actively work on Starfield? Who is going to buy Starfield 2 ( or TES6 ) if they don't do the bare minimum to make Starfield more interesting to play. All this navel gazing about how Freestar being so shallow is the real reason Starfield failed is just that, navel gazing. Most people don't care. The thing that killed this game for most people is the fact that getting to and fro is actively aggravating, and even getting from bland procgen PoI to bland procgen PoI is a mess. It's a game of menus, and the menus aren't very fun. You talk about how they'd have to "redo the entire game" to make it worthwhile, but then list the most basic DLC features as "redoing the entire game". New quests and PoIs will come with DLC. NG+ types that vary the MSQ are already present so the triggers are already there. I'm sure they could whip up some neat scenarios/weird MSQs to play with. New non human enemy types will almost assuredly come with the DLC. Alien enemies, House Va'run getting weird, more unique poo poo for PoIs. This is stuff they already have in the pipeline, it's just a question of when it gets added.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:01
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