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Iacen posted:I think the copy-pasted POIs is my biggest issue with Starfield. There’s no desire in exploring. If they had a random system of parts being cobbled together on the fly, with interesting loot tables and whatnot, I might have stuck around, but I hard bounced immediately upon the second visit to an Abandoned Robotics Facility with the same scientist smeared by a fallen catwalk. Yeah, this is what did me in for a while. I decided to the furthest system I could get to and see what’s to be seen, probably get annihilated by enemies I was underleveled for, etc. After a lot of jumps I got there, picked a planet, and landed, and… The first POI was easy for me to recognize, because it was a carbon copy of the first outpost I ever explored. I had been under geared and it took a lot of effort to clear, and I felt good about it at the time. So I beat my head against enemies I wasn’t supposed to be able to handle … again … got some satisfaction out of clearing it a second time, and went back to doing some quests to see some new stuff. The Elos Retreat wasn’t too far, let’s see where they send me… …ah. Of course. To confront some dudes hiding out in what is getting to be a very familiar base at this point. At least this time I have the option to not murder them? I imagine it’s pretty unlikely for a player to hit that exact result, but still. I really felt like my face was being rubbed in it and I needed a break for a while.
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Feb 13, 2024 16:10
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I think I disagree - "more content that is better written" would do a lot to dilute the impact of some of the existing stuff that is unfixably dumb, and is assuming less of a can opener than would be needed to fix boring gameplay. While a lot of the setting's blandness comes from being a pretty generic pastiche of space scifi tropes, a lot more came from just plopping them down without really using them for anything but window dressing. It's not just that parts of the story and setting don't hold up to scrutiny, it's that lots of it goes unexplored entirely, or we're just told about it and never shown it. Like, Constellation (and the main quest) is boring in substantial part because the stuff they have you go do boils down to an antiquarian artifact-hunting romp with a side of time-travel plot holes, and doesn't match with the grandiose glories of exploration of space rhetoric the game tries to throw at you. The artifacts are either somewhere in a hole, in the hands of people doing modern people things, or in implausibly undiscovered temples near modern people doing modern people things. If we must hunt macguffins, they could be in the hands of a society of silicate-based crystalline life forms that don't understand gender, a gestalt consciousness that formed in the energy of the artifact's handwavium field, be a part of the horrifying truth behind the Chunks main flavor chem production facility, held by rogue robots with entirely alien priorities and morals, on the surface of a planet that's cracking up, and so on. Lemme run some of those Stellaris Astral Rifts in first person to get the loot. And it didn't have to be all about a macguffin hunt. We could have had to take readings from near a black hole, gone poking around the aftermath of a system whose star just went nova, or other cool space poo poo that would involve looking at something massive, wondrous, and/or terrifying. On the other end of the scale, they could include small things like just talking to people about Constellation and what relevance it has. Even the general apathy of "Oh, you guys still exist? Huh." could have been fodder for some compelling commentary, paired with an ingame reason to get people to care - I'm sure some NASA folks who were around for the winding down of the US space program would give a writer an interview that would be some interesting material to work with, there. Same goes for the spacers and a bunch of other underbaked parts of the setting. There's compelling stories to be told there, they just ... didn't do that. edit: I guess my point is that they could still throw content like that in with what they have. Chillmatic posted:This is called bikeshedding, and even halfway decent studio leadership knows--and is empowered--to prevent this at all costs. I've seen enough of it on big and small projects that I'd go as far to say that widespread bikeshedding is probably the first and most reliable sign of project/studio collapse. I have nothing to do with software development and am not a patch-notes-connoisseur, but to my inexpert eye a lot of those notes read like this. Multiple "fiddled with position of item in location" bullet points rather than a single "adjusted positions of various items." eviltastic fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 20:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:The problem is that even if they made a kick rear end expansion it's not going to be so grand in scope that the game as it currently exists is basically an introduction to it. It's going to be a good expansion tacked onto a direly awful base game. I agree, and I think what Ursine Catastrophe said is apt - the game has a bunch of parts that don't mesh well and none are good enough alone to carry the experience. But with the writing, specifically, I think the issue isn't so much that it's rotten to the core, as it is that it's vapid and so the flaws in what's there stand out glaringly. The game as it currently exists is, itself, a lousy introduction to the game world. Cyberpunk comes up as a point of contrast because it's just dripping with cues to contextualize the setting. By the time V and Jackie first go to grab a bite to eat, we've already been shown a whole lot of how society they live in functions, in ways that directly inform subsequent key scenes. Starfield will never be Cyberpunk, but they could backfill in more content and make the world more vibrant and interesting to explore. It's small things and not (just) big things that are missing. It's easy to talk about flaws, so I'll pick something that mostly* works as an example. One of the first things that happened when I was initially exploring New Atlantis, Cydonia, and Akila City was some kind of NPC encounter showing something about the experience of moving into the town. On Cydonia, it was economic migrants who came expecting work, and might be in dire straits upon not finding it. We learn that it's a place where people go out of desperation. In both New Atlantis and Akila City, I bumped into a kinda sketchy person from Neon with money wanting to own property. From that, we learn that Neon's a place where money talks and is the expected tool to grease the gears of society. New Atlantis shown to be a place where social status and property rights are a function of legally defined social classes that are explicitly enforced in ways that bribes can't gloss over. Akila City is a place where what matters is your bloodline and pedigree, and that results in unwritten social codes that money also can't fix in an old money / new money way. That provides context for other things we encounter, like nervous colonists leaving New Atlantis to start a settlement or Sam Coe's decision to gently caress off and go roam around space with his daughter in tow being the defining factor in his relationship with his dad. A society where a will from some blue blood twit who died forty years ago can resurface and upend who owns what, but somehow isn't (or maybe it is!) rampant with document fraud seems interesting and I'd like to learn more about it! The problem is that I had to sit and think for a bit to come up with that example. Cyberpunk would probably have something within any random five minutes of gameplay. Tons of Starfield is instead introduced like Eleos, where we are explicitly told and not shown who goes there and why and what their problems are. The result is half the people in the game come across as though they're sitting around waiting for a player character to show up so that they can give their speech, get their murder/fetchquest needs handled, and get on with whatever we're shown of their lives. One of the most egregious examples I saw was an encounter with a brother and sister off in the wilderness of I forget where. One of them was wounded and needed medical attention and...that was it. The whole encounter. I don't remember learning anything about who they were, why they were there, or what was supposed to happen to them afterward. I sat around staring at them for a minute because it seemed like there had to be something more to a life and death situation off in the wild...but nope. They were just there, waiting for me to show up and help, then they sat there, waiting for me to leave. That's jarringly bad but it's fixable with, like, a handful of lines of dialogue and maybe a followup quest to bring them back to a civilian outpost. More POIs that aren't just another outpost clogged with dead scientists and faceless space orcs and more NPC interactions that aren't just Telling The Player How It Is won't fix the game mechanic reasons that exploring dungeons is unrewarding or "just loot and reboot 'cause lol nothing matters" being a key plot element, but it'd help a lot with making the moment to moment gameplay compelling. * I don't really think the resulting context for Constellation itself was at all intended; we're invited to live for free in a mansion built by a megarich dude that is literally built on top of the city's destitute underclass so that we can help him track down space curios, and this was never examined at all before I bounced off. eviltastic fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 18:56
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infernal machines posted:I played it quite a lot over the span of three months, I enjoyed it plenty, it's just that there's a lot of it that's very frustrating/bewildering because it's not there, or like, half there and dangling off the side. Yeah, I think a lot of why we keep talking about it is because it's not that the game is terrible, it's that it has so many flaws that chain it to mediocrity, and you can't help but ask "what if". Of course, another big part of that is Bethesda's fault for the themes they tried to build and market the game around. If the selling point is appealing to people's sense of wonder and stirring the passions of their imagination with the majesty of space, they can't really complain when the customer applies those tools to the game itself and find it wanting. crazypenguin posted:The endgame I wanted was to reject unity, and build Constellation into a known-space spanning navy dedicated to wiping out every starborn that enters your universe. starborn delenda est. NONE SHALL PASS I'd really have liked to see a rejection in the exact opposite vein. The thing that really makes starborn special isn't the space wizard shouts, it's that they have foreknowledge that no one else has. One way to completely tell off both the Hunter and the Emissary would be to just let 'er rip, go public with everything, and shove anyone who asks into the Unity. This is kind of suggested by one of the endings...but they did nothing with it, natch. Imagine if, instead of yet another universe where the constellation members are all dropped from the story for whatever reason, we wound up in an entire universe full of starborn. What would that even be like? How would society wind up functioning when everyone's basically a genre-savvy isekai protagonist on their umpteenth life? Is everyone a jaded sociopath like the Hunter, or do some still find meaning in having a family and raising a kid? What even happens to kids in a universe like that? It'd be too much work for just an alternate universe ng+ option, but I'd play that expansion.
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Mar 26, 2024 20:28
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