STARFIELD: I didnt buy a Bethesda game to not have any bugs

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > STARFIELD: I didnt buy a Bethesda game to not have any bugs

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

About 15 hours in so far (been sort of sick the past few days so just sat at home all day on this long weekend) and enjoying it, just a shame about the completely broken gamma/contrast/lack of HDR (whatever you want to call it) and FOV sliders. The fast travel aspect doesn't bother me too much - I pick up Star Citizen now and then whenever a new patch happens and frankly I don't feel like taking 5 minutes to get inside my ship and flying to orbit before I have to manually fly somewhere else, and then wait another 10 minutes in cruise. It feels like a more curated No Man's Sky so far.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2023 06:35

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 12:35

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

ChrisBTY posted:

I need to go back and unlock the master safe there. Even though Master level lockpicking sucks between the complexity of the locks and the sparsity of digipicks.

Also: First Contact Quest There doesn't seem to be any resolution here that doesn't cost me more than it makes me. Also how big of a bounty would I accrue for unaliving 2/3 members of the board of directors because gently caress those capitalist scumbags. They didn't even pay me for my services.

the resort colonists got there a century before the earth colony ship, and that ship really didn't have any real claim to the land versus the people who actually were living there. i guess killing the people who were already settled there in favor of new colonists is somehow ok by goons if it's a resort planet now?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 02:56

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

FuzzySlippers posted:

The abruptness of fast travel in space would be alleviated with some pretty quick Privateer style cutscenes of your ship flying towards the planet. it'd get old after playing for a zillion hours if they were at all long, but I recall those were like < 10 seconds in Privateer and it made you feel like you weren't teleporting from space to a planet.

They kind of do have them for travel between planets but yeah it they just hid the loading screen behind these it would be far better

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 03:29

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Ms Adequate posted:

There's plenty of different accents in Starfield, which means not only did a bunch of people from outside America get off Earth, but they did so in enough numbers to each sustain their accents over the last several generations.

Is what I would like to say was Bethesda's intention, but we all know very well that they didn't put that much thought into it.

That said the fact there was an explicit homesteading proclamation, and people like Solomon Coe could go off and found their own settlements, is evidence there was plenty of spaceflight outside of the government's, so I guess you could say the UC was racist and classist as gently caress about it, but a lot of other people did escape Earth.

it kind of feels like Africa had its day as world hegemon in the mid 2100s before the evacuation

# ¿ Sep 18, 2023 07:38

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

TremorX posted:

I kinda get the feeling Bethesda only specializes in Dead Worlds because making them feel like people are alive in them currently is too difficult.

All those big, fascinating events always happen in the past. Their game worlds - TES, Fallout, and now Starfield - feel like they were all lived in at one time, but are all currently being occupied by squatters who have barely figured out how to get their poo poo together. This COULD'VE been about colonizing space, but nah, it's about rediscovering all of these places that are largely still operable after a major war.

For instance, stuff like the automated farms on Akila that don't move or do anything make it feel like you've stumbled on a long-abandoned civilization, not one that's thriving some 400 yards away. In fact, there's very little movement in any of the setpieces -- aside from Cydonia, which has not much else going on.

My son pointed out that Bethesda makes environments that look lived-in, past-tense, but not lived-in, present-tense and I can't unsee it everywhere I go.

edit-

Accelerationist techbro destroying Earth on purpose is the most believable plot point in the whole game

Pretty simple because making a game world that actually felt like it had billions of people is far, far beyond what any game engine or computer could handle

# ¿ Sep 18, 2023 23:33

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

my guideline for if a game is good is if i hang onto it for more than 50 hours of playtime. if i hit that without hating the game? it's good imo

# ¿ Sep 18, 2023 23:40

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Father Wendigo posted:

Emil had an infamous not-TED Talk with some pretty great moments like 'You could write the greatest story ever, and players are just going to skip conversation to pick up more bullets. So why bother? I don't!' and 'This four dialogue option tree looks pretty cool, huh? Well let me tell ya, it's a bitch to code and write dialogue around! But it looks cool, and that's all that matters.'

If you look at what he says and use the past 3 games he's credited as designing (Fallout 4, 76 and Starfield) he is either burnt out or checked out.

I thought that was supposed to be Pete Hines.

he's right. i ain't playing games for great story or plot. i skip dialogue most of the time anyway, just let me get to the fun parts. if i wanted a good story i'd watch a movie

# ¿ Sep 23, 2023 07:02

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

when you new game + do you have to rescan all the planets?

# ¿ Sep 25, 2023 06:49

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Pakled posted:

Yes. The things you keep when you do NG+ are level, skills, traits, powers, and research. Everything else is reset, though you are given powerful armor and a powerful ship to start out.

good to know, should be easy to grind out more cash next run then given i maxed out that scanning skill and can scan anything within 20 light years or w/e

# ¿ Sep 25, 2023 08:40

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Macichne Leainig posted:

That user has made the same post like 6 times in a row. Please just ignore them

Frankly the scale of Starfield just doesn�t seem believable at all. Are you telling me we left a planet with however many billions of people and all we have colonized for major cities 300 years in the future is a futuristic oil rig, cowboy town, and a Star Trek larp?

Like yeah there are plenty of other places colonized like Cydonia, New Homestead, Red Mile, etc. but one per planet? God we suck at loving in the future.

okay but the game would literally never come out if they tried making it feel like billions of people were alive

# ¿ Sep 26, 2023 10:06

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

skooma512 posted:

It actually is, the tram is a convenience and the map is contiguous above ground surprisingly.

Which is why it would be kinda cool to ride something like that, but alas.

play star citizen once and you'll be cured of thinking that. having to take a real time tram ride for 3 minutes just to get back to your ship sucks after the first few times

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 08:55

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Hel posted:

Finally finished the Ranger questline and lol at anyone saying this game is pro-CEO, the story telling isn't high art, but it's pretty hamfisted in showing how the leadership of the big factions are corrupts as all hell. Someone screaming "I'm important, you are nothing" at you isn't how you show sympathy for CEOs. So unless the non-Vanguard UC is completely different from all the other questlines, I'm very much doubting the basic media analysis/reading skills of some posters here. The only CEO with any sympathetic presentation is Walter and that's mostly because he doesn't actually do anything, he's functionally one of the idle rich, even his wife goes a bitFYGM while pointing out the irony of looking down at everyone from a tower, when you ask her to consider helping people in Neon.

goons want everything to be like reading cspam and aren't happy when it's not

# ¿ Oct 6, 2023 09:38

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

If you build an outpost on Bessel 3-b in the right spot you can overlap 3 biomes and get Al/Fe/Ni/Co all in the same outpost, so you can just build a ton of storage and then a crafting bench and spam the everloving poo poo out of the craft button on adaptive frames and isocentered magnets. Bam, free XP farming and you can sell that stuff off as a bonus.

I'm at level 160 now on NG+ and I started the NG+ at level 68

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 22:24

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

DarkHorse posted:

Bessel III-b also has an absurdly slow rotation, so sleeping 1 hour local time is 60 hours UT, and UT is how the game counts tics for resource production. Just lol that BGS coded things that way, circadian rhythm what?

I mean I get why they did it that way, just imagine time-delaying for 3 days if you wanted to see the night cycle (or in the case of Venus, 100 24-hour sleep cycles) for some reason. But it's again a case of them doing nonsensical poo poo to avoid creating any friction whatsoever for the player.

Anyways the guy that found Bessel III-b is apparently making a new video on outposts that should be pretty exciting

This makes sense though. Why wouldn't you count real time for resource production?

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 00:16

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Jack B Nimble posted:

Why, why, WHY wouldn't the rest timer just be on universal (earth) time?

because where else am i gonna sleep off 700 hours to fill my massive warehouses quickly, come on

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 01:39

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

BigRoman posted:

Is scanning skill worth it (with regards to using a planet scan to pick a potential base locations to get as many resources as possible in one base)?

4 skill points is a lot, but I am wondering if being able to choose better landing spots can save me time finding a perfect outpost location.

i'd say so, it's pretty good at lv 4 since you can see where everything is and you can also scan everything within like 30ly of you so rack up XP quite quick just from scanning

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 05:52

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

FuzzySlippers posted:

lol the end of the UC secdef / Crimson quest is harsh if you go UC. You walk through like the terminator slaughtering all these people you got to know while they panic about each other getting shot. The Crimson people you meet are mostly annoying assholes, but still harsh.

It's really dumb that there's no option to say gently caress both these terrible groups I'm taking the money. Or take over the fleet. People were able to restructure the FO4 quest lines so maybe modders will add it. Or at least fix the issue with outpost spawns being friendly. I didn't *want* to help the lovely cops

"you got to know" lol they were all shitheads, hard to feel sorry for any of them seeing what else CF's done in the game

# ¿ Oct 9, 2023 06:02

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

I said come in! posted:

Coming in with an extremely spicy take here, but the Outer Worlds hyper focus on RPG first was a better design choice, regardless of the problems with the writing. I just wanted more of that, but with bigger areas to explore and more quests. Handcrafted only content will always win out.

Outer Worlds also ended in like, 20 hours tops

# ¿ Oct 19, 2023 21:40

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

FuzzySlippers posted:

Their universe is just really underwritten. It's about the same level of vague terrible world building that Bethesda did in their original stuff in FO3/4 as the interesting details were from the old Interplay games. It's the same situation with TES where the interesting lore is from old writers who setup everything in TES1-3 while the newer ones don't seem to know how to put together an interesting and coherent world. They get by on the work done in earlier games while in Starfield they don't have that luxury. The writers just shrug or handwave away most of the universe's details.

Though I was thinking today that despite criticisms is there any other 3D space sandbox game with anywhere near this much actual directed content to do? Other space games (NMS, the X games, Empyrion, any of the Elite games, etc) all have a lot of random stuff you can do if you like (build a trading empire, collect random space crap, build bases), but you rarely have much reason to do so. Any quests/story is minimal and even overcoming specific challenges are rare as you just motor around the universe bumping into things that are of varying difficulty. I enjoy making my own fun to a degree, but I still need something to really pursue or I get gaming ennui. Starfield hits this balance way better than the other 3D games and closer to some of the classic 2D space sandbox games (like Escape Velocity Nova or Starflight).

it's probably just insanely difficult to actually flesh out a space-based civilization in a satisfying way without resorting to procgen that feels samey. sci-fi has always struggled to properly convey a sense of scale that actual spacefaring civilizations would be (trillions, if not quadrillions of people in a single solar system let alone interstellar scales)

# ¿ Oct 30, 2023 01:46

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Khanstant posted:

Idk, are games ever really held back in popularity because of the reading level of the writing? It's not exactly Disco Elysium is it, you can play through all of Skyrim without reading a word. If Skyrim had the best writing in human history, engaging with it is writing is optional and you can mash through all dialogue if you want. They'll stick a map marker telling you where to go. The writing is so bad this is what you end up doing anyway.

i just don't pay attention to writing or plot in games. my rule is pretty simple: is the game mechanically fun to play? if so then i'm happy

# ¿ Nov 4, 2023 04:17

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 12:35

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

AndrewP posted:

Yeah I understand "why". It's a space themed RPG, not a space flight simulator. I get it. It's just that we live in a post Elite/NMS world and it's a little glaringly obvious when you can fly the ship a little but can't really get into outer space.

it's funny, all this thinking about Starfield has kinda made me want to reinstall it again and give it another go. gotta see how the parents are doing

No man's sky does the same thing with flying to space starfield does though. It's not a seamless transition either.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 05:37

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > STARFIELD: I didnt buy a Bethesda game to not have any bugs