The aesthetic of Starfield is excellent. The planets are beautiful but you can only access one small square of surface at a time. The ship flight and navigation is simplistic but the combat and boarding is fun. In fact I can’t really think of a better game for ship boarding.
But overall Starfield somehow is less than the sum of its parts.
As an Elite Dangerous Enjoyer (I enjoy Star Citizen too, but SC is more “rule of cool” than “rule of real” than Elite) I appreciate the more or less “grounded in reality” setting that Bethesda created with Starfield. Most planets are giant, empty, desolate rocks or iceballs, which is exactly what one would expect from real life planets. And I suppose this may be a big reason why many people were disappointed. It seems that many expected the game to be “Star Wars Skyrim,” but Star Wars is very unrealistic with regards its planetary depcitions. Planets are varied and generally not shown to be mostly empty, desolate space rocks. Full world cities, jungles, magma, gas storms, etc. Likewise I more or less find the gameplay enjoyable, even with its annoyances (most of which are fixable with mods that are available right now).
However, I actually found myself very disappointed with the visual aesthetics of the game. When Bethesda marketed the game, they described it as “NASA-Punk.” But I suppose my disappointment comes from them failing to communicate what that meant to them, since it obviously meant something different to me.
When I first heard the term “NASA-Punk,” I became excited to see an abundant use of white and black, with copius amounts of shiny gold foil. I expected to see exposed mechanics and rocket piping. Basically, a mood board of NASA created technology from the beginning of NASA up until now. Ships inspired by the Lunar Landers, Lunar Rovers, etc. Bethesda on the other hand, seems to have created an aesthetic of “what would NASA look like 1000 years from now?” Since the two are so drastically different, you likely can imagine my disappointment at what I see as a weird, ugly aesthetic for many of the ship designer parts and space suits.
Well said. I adjusted my expectations and found myself liking the game. I didn’t find the planets lacking in anything, really. I expected things to be barren as it felt more realistic. The game is photographiclly beautiful. While a lot of the gameplay and writing critique is valid, I didn’t think it was a fundamentally bad game, just mediocre in some parts and excellent in other parts many people simply overlook.
My impression of Starfield (after release, at least) was, that it was a bunch of pretty well intended and implemented subsystems (as is, to my knowledge quite common in game development; each team works on a different one), but they just don’t fit really well together. All the subsystems are good parts of a theoretically good overall big picture, but the complexity seemed too high for them to actually flesh out the big picture.
Technically it all works, but IMO you feel the conceptual gaps whenever you transition (UX wise) from one gameplay mechanic to the next. It just doesn’t (or didn’t) feel like a cohesive game.
Dark cloud is one of my favorites, I go back and replay it at least once a year. The second one was good too but it doesn’t quite have the same vibe as the first
Good question! I found it more complicated because you have such a wide variety of resources needed to build everything and only so much storage on your ship so multiple trips and not as convenient fast travel if outside your system.
More than that though is the ridiculous cargo system. You have to create machines to pull out the resources from the ground then a machine to store them and a transport one to get it to the cargo link then it only goes to one side of the cargo link as an outbound resource. Just needlessly complicated and poorly explained in my opinion.
If you consider their hacky approach to 3D cheating (they didn’t support one part of a level to be above another, and implemented looking up/down by just distorting the image, so all corners were too pointy), then you’d have to wait a few months for Quake.
The first actually 3D first person game was Quake, released June 22nd, 1996, and it let you swim:
Also, Wave Race 64 (1996) is sort of entirely based on that… but the water physics were pretty cool at the time, and there were even parts where you could take a jump and dive under obstacles.
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Aktywne