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hawowanlawow posted:I honestly think it is supposed to be kinda bland  I had to finally admit to myself that I'm never gonna finish this thing and uninstalled it. I'm normally a sloppy glutton for open world games with lots of dumb busywork, but there's just nothing. The universe is so awful and boring, and even by Bethesda standards this is some of the worst writing I've ever seen in a narrative work (both in an overarching plot sense and in a character and dialogue sense). I could probably look past that if the gameplay loop was satisfying, but I spend three quarters of my time in menus and a quarter of my time walking from place to place - shooting bad guys, picking locks, exploring PoIs and vacuuming loot are a rounding error, and every other system demotivates any sort of chase because they all vary from "laughably incomplete" to "actively hostile to the player." I think my last straw was walking into a bar in Neon, taking sixteen steps from the front door to The President Of All Crime (who immediately grants me a personal audience), and then hearing him slowly explain the concept of crime to me like I'm an expat from Candy Land with a fresh head injury. The doors are very good though, I do have to admit that
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Jan 4, 2024 20:28
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Mendrian posted:With regard to SF though I almost have a hard time putting my finger on what makes it bad. The cities look neat, the characters (on paper) are interesting, the premise isn't original but it's not beat to death either. I'm still trying to figure out what is missing. I have a hard time getting immersed in it. I found parts of the Outer Worlds more interesting (though I think it's a worse game overall). In a lot of ways I feel like SF doesn't use the setting it has, sending you all over the galaxy every time you pick up a quest, or worse, giving you a quest to just kind of walk around town for a while in which nothing happens. What you're feeling is the total lack of coherent vision or spark behind any decision made in the entire game's development. Wherever someone needed to make a creative choice what they instead went with is the explicit absence of a creative choice. It's a game comprised entirely of sucking wounds. They could have made a colorful universe full of imaginative flora and fauna, instead they made a series of dead rocks. They could have made impossible empires of chrome and crystal, instead they made the shining gem of the empire be Space Newark, NJ. They could have had the players drifting through infinite multiverses lead to narrative revelations, instead they made a reality where some people wear fun hats. They could have invented any incredible food you could possibly think of, instead everyone eats loving cubes. They could have done something, instead they did nothing.
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Feb 2, 2024 02:09
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Chunks are actually a pretty good representation of a lot of my problems with the game's world building. It occurred to me while I was playing how it bothered me that the universe felt like whatever memories Earth could shove in a duffel bag alongside three billion miles of dust and nothingness. Making interesting food would mean making interesting ingredients, which would mean doing actual world building to explain where they came from and what they look, smell and taste like. Boy, that sounds like a lot of work, and you might need to have a meeting coordinating different department, or even just any sort of central vision for anything. How about Cube: The Second Shape After Round? I'm willing to accept this as entirely personal but it stuck out to me back when I was still really trying to engage with this thing.
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Feb 2, 2024 05:10
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Punished Ape posted:Think I've said it before, but all I really want is for future games to take dialogue cues from Cyberpunk 2077, where you can usually move and look around and do other stuff while NPCs speak to each other and you in a way that feels natural. Like you're sitting in a bar meeting some people, you can look at them, or take a drink, or just people watch as they talk. No crash zooms to a dead eyed character, cutting to another for their line, then back to the first. That, and just body language in general. The last two big single player games I played before Starfield were Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2, and the one I played immediately after was Cyberpunk 2077. In those games people pace, they shift, they fidget, they sit down and stand up, they talk with their hands and eyes, they occupy their setting. Just having someone walk across a room to get something or take a bite of food between sentences goes a long way towards making things feel more immersive, and makes the characters feel more human and less like robots that just serve to vomit exposition. Tiny Timbs posted:The faces are definitely better in a lot of ways than previous games but increasing the fidelity of the faces kind of worked against them because they jumped into uncanny valley territory with the issues Chillmatic cited. This kinda gets to the crux of the problem with Bethesda's dialogue system, doesn't it - the more real it looks, the less real it feels.
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Feb 27, 2024 18:56
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This all does bring up a good point - with a lot of games that have gotten better with time, either from first party patches or third party mods, there's an "anchor" or something about the game that's solid enough to build everything else around. With Cyberpunk the anchor was the pulpy paperback story and detailed world, the technology was broken and the gameplay was botched but years of relentless patching have improved things so the blockbuster setting can shine. With Fallout 4 the anchor was the exploration, immersion and settlements, the main plot was a tire fire but with enough mods you could have something heavily leaning on survival, scavenging and building. What's the anchor for Starfield? What do you keep and build around?
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Mar 1, 2024 03:41
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Chronojam posted:Like I know it's an RPG but surely with spaceships they could work in some kind of "gee you keep finding all these ships where the VIN is registered to somebody else, are you the pirate here?" and maybe you need to find pirates to sell to if you want actual cash but they aren't exactly giving you a square deal. RDR2 did this 5+ years ago - stables make a big deal about having a horse's legal papers and such, but there's also Some Guys located in A Field that don't pay a lot of money but also don't ask a lot of questions
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Mar 1, 2024 18:44
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The lockpicking minigame was one of the only parts I actually liked and thought was an improvement over past BGS games  Now I would have preferred there to be something worth experiencing on either side of the lock but, for those few moments where I wasn't clicking through a lovely menu or aimlessly wandering through anonymous corridors, it at least felt like I was playing a videogame for the purposes of recreation
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Mar 6, 2024 21:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's never really about the mechanics or the crafting or the combat or anything else. I mean, it's what we latch onto to gripe about after six months because its' what we've got to chew on, but that was never the real problem. I mean it's a salient point - my first playthrough of Witcher 3 was last year, and I actually didn't care for the combat very much (I felt it got better in the late game but by then I was an overtuned murder monster so that might've helped) but once I started I couldn't put it down because holy poo poo
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Mar 9, 2024 00:47
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spacetoaster posted:Is there any hope? Major patches coming? When you start tugging on this loose thread you ask yourself, "so what things would need patching to make this game fun?" and if you keep tugging that thread you'll start building a list of all the things that need changing or improving, and by the time you've unraveled the whole drat sweater you'll have come to the same conclusion the rest of us have: the amount of work they'd need to put into this game to make it even adequate would be the same amount of work as just making an entirely new game, and nothing thus far suggests that they're up to the task And that's why this thread oscillates between days of navel gazing and weeks of silence - it always ends up at the same conclusion 
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Apr 25, 2024 17:31
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 01:44 |
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Style is more important than fidelity, there's a lot of lower-tech games that I would say have much better graphics than Starfield but I'm also grading "better" by "has a unified art style that is good to look at" as opposed to "has the most triangles and largest textures"
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Apr 30, 2024 20:27
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