Sounds kinda interesting, but the bar to live up to (to me) will be Elite Dangerous, which seems rather high. I might pick it up on sale, but I’m a bit worried at how close this will be to Skyrim; engine, dialog, and quest-wise.
Landing and taking off and all of that is all done in a menu. You don’t fly the ship at all during that time. The only time you fly is during those space combat parts. You don’t fly around systems and planets and stuff.
It’s nothing like Elite, or Freelancer, or even No Man’s Sky.
It’s because Nintendo still haven’t implement server client networking and host their own dedicated servers. It’s why people paid Nintendo Online to play multiplayer Nintendo games are getting scammed.(even Capcom or EA/Epic did batter job on switch then Nintendo.)
That’s why you get no real online plays, blame Nintendo’s internal policy, not networking complexity.
I think I’ve grown past enjoying Bethesda’s wide, shallow ocean design philosophy and bare-bones dialogue trees. There are simply better RPGs on the market now.
I want to agree but... what other RPGs on the market fill this niche of a sandboxy open world that you can practically live in? Skyrim and Fallout feel like proper open world immersive sims at moments. Cyberpunk might be the closest one in recent memory but it fails in so many other aspects. Other than that I honestly can't think of anything.
Yup, they just keep making the same game with a new map and skins. Everyone had such insane hopes for this game, but I always assumed it’d be at best like fallout 3, better graphics in space.
Honestly, most “professional” game reviews are made by average joe gamers who happen to have a platform to broadcast their thoughts. Most of these writers are not expert players nor are they always well versed in the genre of the game they’re reviewing.
I never understand why people put so much stock into them when their opinions are no more valid than any random person on the internet.
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.
Im near the end of BG3, and “stuck”: I’m just unwilling to end it. Happens often with RPGs for me. So a good time to take a break and play something else.
I bounce around between games a lot, so I was never going to be done before anything else came out, but they should definitely scratch different itches, also. They might both be big RPGs, but I fully expect to be able to play Starfield with stuff in the background and there's just too much narrative to do that with BG3. I also just itch for more actiony stuff at times (right now that's a 2D pixel art game called Chasm). Even if I drop 20 hours in a game before switching to the next one, one game isn't going to actually be the only one I play for that long, personally.
Yeah I feel this too with games that really hit me. You get so invested in your character and your playthrough that you don’t want to let go of your save, so instead of committing down the last stretch of main quest you maybe boot it up, scrounge out a fight somewhere or do some small remaining side quest, then run around town mindlessly a bit and shut down the game.
I had that happen with Cyberpunk earlier this year and I’m feeling it starting to set in with BG3. The allure of a second playthrough is stronger here, though, so that might help me stay the course.
"Once we head out, you won’t be able to return to your hometown for a while. Are you ready to leave?"
Yes
No
So many moments like this in RPGs that make it hard to leave just by saying that. I get so sad and I have to walk around saying goodbye to everyone in the whole area before I depart.
I’m in the last act and nearing the big bads… But bugs are getting more frequent. One of them allowed me to traverse the entire foundry without starting a fight. One bug wouldn’t let me remove one of the party members from my group after they got knocked unconscious and I couldn’t help them up.
So it’s been a slog of frequent saves and reloads. Still enjoying the game, though. And can’t wait to start a 2nd playthrough.
Patch 2 came out yesterday and was supposed to address some Act 3 issues. Have you played since then? I’ve also noticed some bugs in Act 3 but nothing gamebreaking thankfully.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun - Edwin Evans-Thirlwell - Unscored
A short, sparky and colourful 2D PICO-8 blaster about a space captain fighting fascist robots.
This one is a parody/joke about someone who put a game on itch titled Starfield. Kind of shitty for RPS to allow. Especially since it’s directly connected on OpenCritic to Starfield the Bethesda game.
It’d be extremely unethical to score it. It’s still pretty bad to have added it to the 2023 Starfield opencritic page. A few reviewers no longer score their reviews because score in general is not a great way to recommend something. A blurb on recommendation is ideal. Like “If you are okay with X, Y, Z and are a fan of the genre then you might like Starfield.” Unscored reviews are becoming more common because of that.
Eh, it’s more that fun should be restricted to your own website. Not an aggregator website meant to show facts at a glance. Thus you are potentially ruining the factual glance.
The best review, as always, is to watch the first 20 minutes of gameplay to gauge whether you like it. I’m optimistic, and more than a little surprised at only a singular mention of glitches from a game developed by Bugthesda.
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’ll just be playing it on Game Pass and then probably buy it when it goes on sale on Steam in a few months. Probably Winter Holiday sale or whatever.
By that time, maybe the Creation Kit will be released (though, that’s more likely to be next year) as well, which makes for much more in-depth mods. Also any script extenders (which will very likely only work on the Steam version) and unofficial patches should be a bit more stable early next year.
Until then, I don’t really need it on Steam.
I keep forgetting to preload, though, which I should do when I get a chance, just to get the initial ~120 GB out of the way.
I’ve downloaded it on two devices already. It’s on the Starfield - Standard Edition page, not the premium edition one. The usual play button will say “Pre-load install”.
exploration in the game is unfortunately weak in many aspects; This is due to the large reliance on procedural generation of environments. Also, the role-playing elements do not have a strong presence or impact.
I was really hoping proc-gen would be just for the terrain and surrounding areas and the interesting setpieces would be as handcrafted (or as close as possible) to a regular TES/Fallout experience. I guess they had to trade in a lot of these to make the big universe happen though...
That’s how they described it, too. Oh Todd you done it again!
Looks like there’s not much to do on the planets. One review even said the classic “get lost on the way and end up doing ten other things” just doesn’t happen in this game anywhere. It can happen in a city, but then they also said the cities are pretty meh.
I really hope I’m wrong about this in five years, but it looks like No Man’s Sky did even more damage to the space sim genre than we thought. We’re in a year with great handcrafted experiences that still feel vast: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, even Everspace 2 in a similar setting (and Everspace 2 wouldn’t have had the same, fatal loading screen issue if it was a AAA game). Starfield went the other direction.
By chasing the procedural generation dream, from everything I’ve seen, Bethesda really hamstrung the space exploration to get there. Fortunately I really like the old Bethesda formula, so hopefully the Skyrim/Fallout experience that’s still there will be enough for me to want to put hundreds of hours into it. I’m just hoping developers don’t keep trying to do this for games in space settings.
It sounds like No Man’s Sky. You’re supposed to be able to explore the whole galaxy and see many creatures, environments, etc but they all end up being the same so exploration is boring, at least to me it was
I felt similarly. Exploring is just another thing to "do" to get credits/nanites. It was cool to see genuinely new things like the huge Dune-styled worms but once you see one you've seen them all.
That extends to base building too. I have no reason to build a base anywhere else in the galaxy once I have a capital ship that does all my crafting for me. Except resource collecting, I guess. But meh, different strokes for different folks. I don't think there's been a non-MMO continually-updated game that I've come back to as often as NMS but coming back is usually pretty short-lived.
This is the core issue with all procgen games, IMO.
You are promised "infinite exploration", but in truth there are countable variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you've effectively seen everything. Sure, you'll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants... but when you see all the "tricks" the veil falls.
variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you’ve effectively seen everything. Sure, you’ll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants… but when you see all the “tricks” the veil falls.
That’s what makes this even more of an issue. The game isn’t procedural. They used procedural tooling but everything is set in stone now. They could’ve gone through and cleaned up and tweaked everything so it didn’t feel bland. Doesn’t sound like they did.
I knew the writing/rpg aspect was going to be shallow like all of Bethesda games but, they always had fun exploration so this is unfortunate to me. It sounds like they reuse assets a lot, even in the main quest line. Like same buildings with the same enemy placement just on a different planet.
It's definitely a Bethesda game. Their dialogue choices and roleplaying has always been shit. People like Bethesda games primarily because they're given a large open world to explore. But they made most of this one procedurally generated so they've lost their main good quality. I really hope the players are pushed by the stories and side quests to the hand-crafted worlds and the procedurally generated are mostly in the background for players that want to go off the beaten path.
Edit: I just read one that played 70+ hours and even two characters. I was afraid these people were rushing through the game to get reviews out but glad to see that isn’t the case.
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