Going to dump my initial impression. Note my bias, I love clutter looters and this is a Bethesda clutter looter in space with a bunch of additional systems resting on top of that genre.
It’s a space clutter looter
Played 8 hours last night so this is a very early impression. I love clutter looters and didn’t expect much else from Bethesda’s Fallout/Scrolls main studio. The Bethesda crafted areas are excellent if you are looking for what I call a Fallout / Elder Scrolls clutter looter. Lots of stuff to loot, the FPS combat is much better than Fallout 4 or 76. Don’t expect a space sim like SC or NMS this is a Bethesda Fallout/Scrolls style game with a bunch of additional systems on top of it.
First person combat
I’ve played both SC and NMS. While exploring a station in Starfield I thought to myself… this is what SC should have been for their foot exploration. The derelict stations in NMS are rather static environments and never cared for them much. What surprised me about the Starfield AI is they will “flee” or “flank” by running past you at times. I’ve lost track of enemies at times because of this and have had to go hunting for them. If I had to compare a more recent rpg shooter I’d say the combat is sort of close to Remnant 2 but where Remnant 2 combat is more deliberate and paced, Starfield fire fights are more erratic and frantic. I did find myself enjoying hunting down the AI that will run off and setup elsewhere.
Ship travel
There is fast travel. If you are looking for a space flight sim this is not for you. I don’t have an issue with fast travel as I get no thrills from traveling in space 1:1. There is simulation and there is stupid… SC leans a bit too heavy into the latter. Don’t expect 1:1 space travel in Starfield, it isn’t made for that.
Ship combat
Again this is not a space flight sim. Most recently coming off Everspace 2 I do miss the strafing controls and pedal usage, but that game is star fighter like combat. Starfield does have a ship editor and seems to be more about load out than fighter style combat. Think a bit more like Expanse style combat. I don’t have much time in this area of the game so I can’t say a whole lot more about it.
Additional systems
I haven’t played enough to have an impression on the other systems but they are there: ship building, research, resource gathering, surveying, and base/output construction.
Initial impression
I love Bethesda clutter looters and this one is in space. The first few locations are fantastic in their detail, interactivity, and clutter; I going to eat up the Bethesda crafted clutter looter areas. The 1,000 worlds will likely function as a massive canvas for future mods.
Yeah, also getting strong “not for me”-vibes. Looks like a less grimey Fallout in space. Graphics seem to be far less amazing as I imagined from trailers.
Edit: Buuut I think lots of people will have fun with this and that’s cool!
It is exactly as shitty as I expected it to be. Another crappy bethesda game in a long line of garbage. I think the last game from them I truly enjoyed was Morrowind. I don’t think New Vegas counts. Fallout 4 was depressing being so close to good. Every moment in that game screams half baked. That quest where you help the robots out with their ship showed me just how possible it was to make the game good, but then it was the only good quests besides maybe the silver shroud one.
Seems like roughly Skyrim/Fallout in space. Even though I’d have wanted something different, I can’t say I’m not a sucker for their formula so I’ll just wait for a sale and have a blast with mods.
I wouldn’t call it scary. One of the creatures is a mimic and turns into the props that surround it, like a cup or a plate, or radio or cone (for example) and when you get near it, it lashes out at you. So there’s some startling moments, but it’s not a horror game by any means. There is tension, due to the subject matter and setting, but the intent isn’t to be scary.
Ok thank you, that’s what I’m not into. :p Also, I have enough stuff in my backlog to wait for Starfield to have 1K mods and be at 50% off with all DLC :p
I mean, if it was gonna be anyone, the Pinkertons would be it. I imagine they’re just waiting for the US to become corporate-owned enough that they can operate on US soil without getting in trouble again.
Watched the Digital Foundry video and was really impressed on the fact it is so segmented. I thought it was aiming to be like No Man’s Sky but I guess I might have misheard at some point
I was surprised at the 7 scores until I caught the bit about how it’s all fast travel. You can’t just start on a planet, take off in your ship, point it at a moon or something and fly there.
OTOH, how boring would it be having 1:1 space travel?
“Considered by Penn to be the “best part” of the collection, Desert Bus is a simulation trick minigame and a featured part of Electronic Gaming Monthly’s preview. It is the most notorious minigame in the actual game. The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in real time at a maximum speed of 45 mph (72 km/h). The feat requires eight hours of continuous play in real time to complete.[2][3]
The bus contains no passengers, there is little scenery aside from an occasional rock or bus stop sign, and there is no traffic. The road between Tucson and Las Vegas is simplified compared to the real highways: it is now completely straight. The bus veers to the right slightly, and thus requires the player’s constant attention.[3] If the bus stops, or veers off the road it will stall and must be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, one point is scored. The player has the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point, a decision which must be made in a few seconds or the game ends. Players may continue to make trips and score points up to a maximum score of 99 points, which requires 33 days of continuous play. Although the landscape never changes, an insect splats on the windshield about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light fades, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights.[2] The light eventually returns at dawn, but due to a programming bug it will cycle endlessly between dawn and night for the remainder of the game. The game cannot be paused.”
Star Citizen is the **** that will do whatever you want, but she’s bloated and extremely dysfunctional, riddled with bugs and falls over drunk and passes out constrantly.
This was solved 30 years ago in Star Control 2, with a non-Newtonian Hyperspace that kept vast distances still feeling vast and made fuel important, while in-system travel was still free and newtonian. There are plenty of options between “fast travel all the things” and “1:1 model of the absolute terrifying emptiness of space” – and even then, the “1:1 model of vast emptiness of space” is still kind of doable, if you’re willing to make the hyperdrive flexible for the various increments of in-system/interstellar travel. The hard part actually would be modeling the surfaces of planets in a way that makes the player forced to land at the “interesting” parts of the planet instead of letting them explore the entire surface of boring procedural-generated landscape without making it feel restrictive.
Not recommending a VPN here. But there are many open-source anonymizing networks out there that need more attention. I know speed and avoiding blocks and captcha’s are important to you, so this answer is not geared toward your use case, but for those looking for a free alternatives to VPN’s and don’t care about the speed and want to help out the network, there are
lokinet: (github.com/oxen-io/lokinet) (Based on the LLARP, low-latency anonymizing protocol, basically tor 2.0).
(My personal favorite): i2p. A network within a network. Downsides are you can only download torrents within the network, but the upside is there is a solid community and there are more and more torrents that exist. Mental Outlaw has a great video about i2p
There are some VPN’s you can trust, but in the end of the day, I trust encryption and the decentralized network better than any centralized corp.
Sure thing matey! I am happy to chart a course as you sail through these waters.
In short, i2p is a network within a network. Think of it as being it’s own seedy town within the larger city of the internet. Any information that enters this town is end-to-end encrypted. Now, in this town, to preserve anonymity, people pass along information in paper notes. Each person accepts notes from different sources, encrypts a bundle of it, and passes it along in a chain. (hence the name “garlic routing”. When it hits your “inbound tunnel,” or a set of (usually 2-3) people that have been assigned to pass messages to you, they incrementally un-bundle that message until it hits you, and since you have the private key you can unencrypt the message.
Information that stays within this network are automatically anonymous. These people in your inbound tunnel do not know that the messages are being sent to you, nor do they know any information about the source. They only know that they’re passing these messages along.
One way companies figure out that you’ve been torrenting is that they would torrent a public pirated movie file. Then, they would target the ip addresses that would actually send them that information, because they know they are seeders. These companies cannot do that in i2p, because everybody in i2p is just passing along information!
There are different options for installing i2p:
For windows, there’s the i2p easy install bundle that bundles a firefox profile and automatically installs the i2p router. This uses the java implementation of i2p.
For linux, there’s a java (i2p) or c++ (i2pd) implementation of the i2p router. Basically the same program but in different languages, and i2p routers can still communicate with i2pd routers and vice versa. I recommend starting with java i2p, and after trying it for a while try i2pd. There’s more GUI in the java implementation, but the i2pd version is faster because cryptographic functions run faster in c++. Mental Outlaw has a good video on running i2pd on linux
Fair question, matey, although I am but a humble pirate meself and have not yet sailed those seas. Those waters still need to be charted by a swashbuckling pirate. Here’s a lead that I found: reddit.com/…/how_to_setup_radarr_and_sonarr_for_a…
Kind of interesting that the vast majority of negative/mixed reviews are regarding gameplay/story rather than complaining about major bugs (although jank has been noted in a few, and I’d honestly be a bit disappointed if there wasn’t any).
We’ll have to wait until release (Cyberpunk’s bugs weren’t that prominent in reviews either), but I really hope this “lol Bugthesda” meme can die.
Regardless of how buggy it is, I expect Dunkey to somehow break it as soon as he boots it up, which should be entertaining.
Skyrim for PS3 is in an unacceptable state to this day. The longer you play a save the worse the performance gets. My cousin finished the game at like 5 fps.
Fallout Nee Vegas has crash on startup issues day one on PC. Lots of folks couldn’t play it and I believe an unofficial patch came faster than an official.
Watching a few people play it on stream, they didn’t come across any bugs but the AI was making really silly choices still. Like Rushing a gunner with a melee weapon from far away. It’s essentially still the “Gary” AI. From everything I’ve seen, it’s going to be Fallout but you can drive the alien crashed spaceship to another planet.
As much as I love them, I’m about to be a hypocrite and say I don’t know if Bethesda will ever have non-janky AI. It’s the one thing that’s been fairly consistent over a very long time now.
Whether it’s enemies or your followers, or just pathfinding weirdness with NPCs, it’s like their AI is just kind of… there sometimes. If had a conspiracy theory about it, I’d say they’re doing it on purpose to get you to explore the world by finding your missing followers (of which I’m sure we’ll see many get stuck on different planets entirely now).
I mean it wasn't a meme. Bethesda games are buggy on release. The PS3 edition of Skyrim was notoriously not fit for release, I honestly do not think that level of bugs would ever have been tolerated nowawdays. It's also something that Microsoft's QA team really ought to be credited for because it seems they are the reason this game stands out amongst Bethesda releases in recent years.
That said imma wait till a few days afterwards just in case. And the story getting bad reviews is not unsurprising as Bethesda has not really had a good one since Morrowind, or maybe Point Lookout in F3.
You are right, but I just get tired of it sometimes as a “predictor” or that they should be lauded for not releasing something that falls apart at release.
Bethesda have a reputation for a reason, but the lack of QA (or at least publishers willing to listen to QA) in a lot of modern gaming has made some of Bethesda’s previous issues seem almost normal.
I guess that’s more an indictment of modern gaming than really a defense of Bethesda, lol. And for all the shit they get about “modders fixing their games”, they were the ones who actually went and fixed a lot of FO76’s issues after that launch disaster.
Either way, regarding the story… Yeah. I find that oftentimes the side quests (particularly faction quests or the FO4 follower quests) tend to be way more interesting than the main quest in some of their games.
The lolbugthesda meme exists because it’s true. There aren’t many games I’ve had to completely start over because of a game breaking glitch in a side quest, but that was Skyrim and the infamous thieves guild glitch.
They’re good games but pretending there are no bugs, either funny cosmetic ones or serious progress blocking ones, helps no one.
Sure. I don’t think I was pretending there weren’t any bugs. I think it’s more the dismissive approach toward their games before release that gets a bit tiring, even if it is often warranted in some respects.
Creation Engine is buggy as fuck, and I’ll always expect their games to have a fair amount of jank at the very least. Even Obsidian had troubles with it (though some of those bugs could also be attributed to lack of time and testing).
But I hope that if this does prove to be have better release than their others (admittedly, it can be a low bar), that it sticks.
I played from 5 pm yesterday at release until 5 am today, and I literally encountered one single bug, which was that I managed to get a big enemy’s pathing hung up on a rock, so I could kill it.
Can uBlock also skip redirects? The whole time I’m using it, it doesn’t skip them at all. I use FastForward to skip redirects and it’s been working really well.
I didn’t know FastForward but it looks great, in fact Skip Redirect didn’t work on many sites. And I do not know, it is a comment that I have read a lot but I have never been able to confirm, I only know that at least in my case sometimes the counters of some pages go down to 0 suddenly but I do not know if it is because of uBlock.
I didn’t know FastForward but it looks great, in fact Skip Redirect didn’t work on many sites.
I’ve been using FastForward for months and every single time it successfully skips redirects. Though the addon is not on Firefox for now due to some miscommunications. You’d have to install it manually here. But if you’re using Chrome or Edge, you can install it directly from the store.
I have been using it since I read your comment and it is absolutely great, not only because of piracy, but also because of the links attached to some Youtube channels.
Well look at that, I did learn my lesson with Anthem. Cheers to whoever did not pre-order or get game pass for it. I’ll check again in a year when they might have made a good game out of it.
The publications I trust describe it as sterile, overly ambitious and with no heart. Definitely not the level of fuckup as Anthem or CP2077, but not worth my time for the moment. Anthem was just the moment I said f%#k them, no more buying mediocre games before they come out and I know they are good
You are getting down voted, but I definitely agree that most people should wait till they know the game is going to be good. A year after launch isn’t a bad idea.
Not the epic space saga similar to Mass effect Trilogy I was hoping for but not a bad game either. Exploration is fun enough, base building is good, ship combat also felt nice.Quests are a mixed bag, some feel really dated and mundane. Performance is pretty bad i.e the game is very demanding. Struggles to maintain a steady native 60fps on the 3060ti at 1440p even on low or medium settings. Maybe patches will make a difference. Honestly this feels like something I would pick up during a sale or play on game pass, not worth the full price for me at least.
Ooh, that was the thing I was really curious about – too many “space” games are just conventional FPS games set on various alien worlds and space stations, with only minimal nods to interplanetary vehicles.
Endgame of Devil tickled me for a bunch of hours this week. It’s a neat little auto-battler / deck-builder. You are the devil and need to protect your treasure from adventurers. To do so you fill up your dungeon and your deck with lots of evil minions and set off insane combos. Slime deck! Rat deck! Ghost pirate deck! Burst worm toxic fog death loop deck!
I love these types of casual experiences in this genre.
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