Not space, but it actually just makes me want to play Fallout instead. I love Bethesda games, but it just isn’t grabbing me in the way some of their other games did.
I’ve put in around 12 hours and I’m kind of done. Maybe it’s also because my CPU is limiting me to around ~45 FPS (or lower) in most areas regardless of settings, which isn’t unplayable, but it is distracting a lot of the time because it’s more “choppy” than just like a stable, if lower, frame rate.
I’ll probably wait to play it again until some more performance mods come out like they did with Skyrim.
There’s a solid complaint IGN made that I think is completely true, that starfield has too many of its most fun systems that don’t unlock until you unlock the appropriate skill, and nothing in the game even tells you to do that. Disabling and boarding starships is a big one, or using boost packs; modifying weapons and armour too. Depending on how you ran your 12 hours you might be missing some of those.
Performance is a big one too. There are already some good looking performance mods on nexus iirc
I think, yeah, that’s another issue. It’s got a very disparate kind of approach with a bunch of mechanics that aren’t all related. I mean, that’s not unusual for Bethesda, but I think I also forgot how much I prioritize in their other games and was kind of overwhelmed here and didn’t really prioritize stuff like I do with Skyrim or Fallout.
And yeah, going to your example, boost packs was initially confusing to me. I get one from Constellation, telling me that now I should be able to get some height but then I realized I can’t actually use it until I unlock the skill.
As for how I spent my 12 hours, I absolutely missed out on a lot. The game is massive, but the performance issues kind of prevented me from really getting into it gameplay-wise. Also fucked myself with some of the traits I picked, which I know you can get removed in-game pretty easily, but since you can’t replace them, it feels like I might as well have not used any.
When it comes to mods, yeah. Problem is right now I’m on the Game Pass version, so Nexus has some but not a fortune of compatible stuff. I’ll buy it probably winter sale on Steam, which will have much better support for mods. Hopefully Creation Kit comes out early next year as well. When that happens, the quality and scope of mods is going to explode.
I mean, I might give it another chance before then, but I’m content to wait a while. I’m pretty patient with all games and usually only play them a year or so after release. Only reason I played this on release is because of my Game Pass subscription. If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have bought it until like next year. Might still do that, buy it during the spring sale, rather than winter. No rush.
Starfield has the problem that horizontal progression games like horizontal progression mmos have, which is they have a LOT of things you can do unlocked after a certain point (getting to constellation for the first time) but doesnt handhold you to any of the other features.
People who get sidetracked easily dont have that problem because they like picking and choosing what they want to do. People who need guidance gets lost in the options.
imo the main problem isn’t that there are a lot of things, it’s a major lack of information about game systems really. The game gives you a boostpack and tells you it’ll help, but doesn’t bother to pop up and tell you you’ll need a point in boosters if you want to use it. It shows you how to target enemy engines but doesn’t tell you you’ll need a point in targeting if you want to do it yourself. It’s an obvious, silly miss. I don’t mind that these things need points, but it’s annoying that it doesn’t tell you, especially when they have a place in the game where they easily could.
Lots of places really. Outside the tutorial sections of the main quest, why not have my boost packs say like “basic boost pack - function locked unless you have Boosters 1”
They tutorial the basics of how to fly a ship and loot space items, without informing you that some of its features are locked behind skills (target mode, thrusters for strafing)
Not to mention you have twice as much work to unlock upgrades. You not only need the skill point, you need to research it. Then, and only then, can you actually build it. I don’t know why they needed to lock them behind both the skill and wasting the same resources used to build a thing so you can basically open a second lock on it. It would have been fine with one option or the other; it’s kinda stupid to have both.
I don’t mind the mechanic of the double unlock. I do think a lot of the unlocks themselves are phoned in. Was just ranting about how bad the “install 15 unique ship parts” one is with a friend, like why not something kind of interesting instead of such a grindy one? “Make a ship with only one engine and a top speed of 150” eg.
I posted a shorter version of this elsewhere in here but I’ve thought more and want to expand.
Disclaimer: I really like both no man’s sky and starfield. Gonna be down on both of them but I’ve got hundreds of hours in NMS and I expect to have hundreds more in SF, they are both good games, I have no regrets about buying either of them.
That said, I’ve realized that starfield is actually making me low-key kind of angry at NMS, for all the potential it wasted. It’s showing just how little extra depth NMS could have used (could still use) to be great. There are really only a couple fairly minor ways that starfield is better, and yet for me and I think a lot of people they spell the difference between “fun sandbox” and “awesome game”. Starfield is so shallow on all of these that despite being the first game to really deliver on the promise of an open world space RPG sandbox, it’s like a wish-dot-com version of what nms could be.
First, combat. Nms has all right space combat, nothing great but acceptable, but there’s no excusing its ground combat. There’s effectively one enemy, they’re not really designed to be fought most of the time, and they’re almost never involved in battles of any meaning. The combat overhaul added some mechanics but didn’t solve the problem… in a way it’s worse now because fighting seems like it could be interesting. How come when I find a trading post it’s never a ruin overrun by pirates, with scattered notes from the lost inhabitants, written in their native language so that if I can speak it I can read their sad story? Why don’t I ever find a detail of gek security bots defending the inner chambers of a crashed frigate? Why can’t I have a shootout with the crew of a frigate on board its procedurally generated interior?
That leads into the issue that there’s no story at all. People complain about the main quest of SF, but nms has one of the flimsiest, poorest written central plots of any game I’ve ever seen. That would be okay, but there are also no side quests. You can’t stumble upon an abandoned mine, or have a spacer randomly ask you to help break a blockade of their home system. There are a tiny number of very shallow fetch quests, but nothing with even a hint of effort in the writing.
I get a bit annoyed at starfield for systems not interacting. Like, i have a house, but I can’t build outpost buildings around it, eg. However, NMS takes that to extremes with how outpost building, village building, and frigate building all seem like they’re actively hostile to each other, as if coming from different games. IIRC even some of the outpost components won’t properly snap together if they’re from different ‘styles’ of outpost, although I may be misremembering.
Add to that that there’s also not a lot of gear collecting mechanics, minimal ways to display loot, minimal character customisation, and so on, and it’s just… sigh. Everything nms does feels like it falls just short of being amazing, but they get bored right before completing the last step to bring it all home and then they go work on another system that they’ll get 3/4 through and then abandon. I wish it had mods.
Meanwhile, starfield doesn’t do any individually thing particularly well either, but unlike NMS, it feels like I can do stuff with what I make. I can build a ship… and then take it smuggling! Or fight pirates! I can have NPCs on board and they’ll chat with each other while I’m flying around, and help run the ship! They’re not all well written, but they’re actually written, and do more than just stand around saying one line back at me. It’s frustrating, because honestly, taken on its own, starfield isn’t particularly remarkable (see how bland space travel is eg) but there’s nothing out there that’s actually gone the very obvious extra mile of “okay we have beautiful worlds to explore, what if now we put some things to do on them”
Really wants to play Starfield but probably won’t have the necessary hardware for at least a year.
Is an old Bethsoft fan, having played, and thoroughly enjoyed, every TES game from Daggerfall to Online, excepting only Battlespire and the phone games.
Has been jonesing for some space sandbox for probably a decade at least.
I’m not sure. It’s a good game, but the fun you can have in it is more Minecraft style than Bethesda style. If you want that, then it’s probably worth a try
I love NMS but I’m so afraid to log in. I’ve had a huge underground base (max terrain manipulation) for like 5 years even though people say never to dig out a base because eventually it will get filled in. So I feel like I’m rolling the dice every time I load in. I have hours of videos of me just running around my base across the different patches, where the flora/fauna in the connected cave system changed each time.
The only thing that would really need to happen desperately to make it accessibly is to either have a fun and easy to digest primer or to make the language much more layman friendly to start and introduce technical or slang terms as you go.
“There is a sequence of N unsorted and unknown numbers. You can compare, whether any number is greater than any other one by specifying their positions in the sequence. You can swap two numbers, save copies of them on a stash, and replace any number in the sequence with stashed ones. Try to sort the sequence of unknown numbers with as little operations as possible.”
I know what this means, but I had to read it 6 times to get there. Though I think this wouldn’t be task 1.
Love me some Bioshock. I was in the middle of a replay of Bioshock 2 when Armored Core 6 came out and got sucked into that. Will definitely go back and finish it after I beat AC6
I grabbed Death’s Door on a whim for $8 and I’m blown away. It has so much charm, the music and atmosphere are amazing and it feels great to play. If you like the old top-down Zelda games, don’t sleep on this one.
I have heard great things about the game. It’s on my backlog, but with all the games I am playing don’t want to start another one before finishing at least one or two of these.
Having gotten it in the Steam Summer Sale, I'm on the verge of achievement completion for Hades - just reached the epilogue of the story after my 100th run, so I only need to get the last Cthonic Companion to get my last achievement.
On the side of the future, I've been thinking of replaying New Super Mario Bros. 2 for a few weeks now. Not because of Wonder's fairly imminent release; I just feel like revisiting the game again. Pretty sure I never even saw all the game's levels despite getting through the post-game World Star when I first played through the game, so that's probably a goal I could aim for if and when I finally decide to start this replay.
There’s an Expedition going on for the next 6 weeks in NMS. It’s like a self-contained mega-questline. Start a new single player game and choose “Expedition”. They give you lots of upgrades along the way and you’ll see bases and messages from other players along the same path.
As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.
I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I’ll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I’ve been missing for the past few years.
I was really surprised by Titanfall 2. Looks like an ordinary mech shooter (okay there is nothing ordinary about that these days), but the story was solid and the level design amazing.
My only complaint is that it’s way too short of a campaign. It’s very easy to beat over a few hours, but it’s fun the whole way through and I just want more.
I really hope starfield lights a bit of a fire under the NMS folks to fix some of their half-finished systems along those lines. NMS has procedurally generated ships, we’re just not allowed to tinker with the procedural generator to make our own for some reason.
I totally agree. I do genuinely enjoy NMS too. Plus the procedurally generated appearances also have different stats so you have to be twice as lucky to get what you want.
Needed a break from story-focused games so I decided to pick this one.
Considering it’s originally a WiiU game it’s surprising how well 3D World fits in the Switch - the ~5min levels are very friendly to short playing sessions, so you can just pick it up and get a couple stars whenever you stop for a coffee break. I only played it casually until I finished the main story with ~210 stars, but will probably to back go it from time to time to get the remaining stars and the work on the post-game content.
Also had a ton of fun with Bowser’s Fury, which I think has more in common with Odyssey than 3D World due to its more open-world nature. It’s fairly short and not as polished as the usual Mario games, in particular when talking about the camera work, but definitely worth playing.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on Lemmy before, but I’m a huge fan of the Atelier games, having finished all that were released in the west. For those unfamiliar with the series, it’s a long-running JRPG franchise centered around slice-of-life stories, with a huge focus on crafting - I’ve spend countless hours in these games just playing in the workshop trying to get the perfect bomb, or optimizing iron ingots to make stronger gear.
This one is a remake of the very first game in the series, from 1997. It’s a fairly simple game compared to the recent entries, but has the same relaxing feel, and the remade visuals are adorable, looks like they tried to keep the same “chibi” look as the original PS1 version.
Like most of the older games in the series, this one features a time limit - you have 5 years to complete assignments, explore the world and make friends, at which point you get an ending based on your achievements. Exploring, crafting and battling constantly move the clock forward, making “time” one of the resources you have to manage. This mechanic was always divisive and has been largely abandoned in recent entries of the series, but it’s never really bothered me.
The main thing preventing me from recommending this game is the price tag - at its core it’s a 25-year-old game, and while the improved graphics and QOL changes are quite good, it’s fairly short (I expect to finish it in 10h or so), and it’s too simple in both story and mechanics to justify the $50 they are asking on the eShop. That being said, if there’s a good sale it might be a fun game to pick up.
I have come to realise I like 3D Mario games much more than 2D ones. If they want to make different style of Mario games, I would choose 3D game and then instead of 2D Mario I would go with 3D world style games. Though, there are chances Wonder will change my mind.
I have been following Atelier games for quite a while now, but haven’t played any yet. Though Atelier Ryza is on very top of my wishlist.
I was also interested in playing the Marie Remake, but I didn’t know it has time limits. How forgiving are these limits? And what do you suggest I play first Marie Remake or Ryza?
On Marie they are very, very forgiving. I have more than one year left with Marie at almost max level, max knowledge and reputation, only one item left to craft (the Philosopher’s stone, which requires an item that I can only get in one specific day later this year), already killed two special bosses, already made an Elixir to cure Schea… I haven’t checked the ending requirements but I’m pretty sure I already fulfill some of them.
Generally speaking from my experience with Atelier the time limits are only a problem in two situations:
You want to 100% the games, in particular if you don’t want to use a guide or go into NG+
You are playing Atelier Totori
Time limits in Totori are rough, the only game I had to reload an earlier save because I ran out of time and could not get at least a “good” ending. It’s still one of my favorite games in the series though.
Worth mentioning that Marie also does have an “unlimited” mode you can choose at the beginning, but given how forvinging the limit is it’s probably not necessary.
And what do you suggest I play first Marie Remake or Ryza?
Between those two, Ryza.
Marie is cute and fun game, but it’s lacking in depth compared to other entries in the series. If it was $20 it could be an interesting entry point to the series, but for $10 more than what they’re asking for that game you can get a far more complete experience by going with one of the recent games like Ryza or Sophie 2.
I should preface this by saying that I am extremely underwhelmed with starfield, but I’ve been going back to playing space engineers for my sci fi exploration cravings. Everything i was looking forward to in starfield seems to be compromise after compromise, tied together by loading screens. And the setting looks good on paper but really can’t draw me in.
At least in SE, outdated and poorly optimized as it may be, I am loading into the map once and then could fly from earth to the most remote planet without a single interruption (except real life sleep maybe, because it would take literal hours to make the trip without a jump drive).
Se for me has exactly the same issue as NMS. No story, no person-to-person combat, no side quests. Just an empty world you’re expected to populate yourself I guess. Starfield definitely doesn’t do that as well, it isn’t as much a Minecraft style sandbox. If nms or se had quests and story, I might not like starfield this much… but they don’t, and there really isn’t another space sim that also provides a decent shooter and rpg while having a nice open world.
Depending on when you player, it’s generally a very different game every 2 years or so, but it’s still not perfect. I actually just posted a big rant about it upthread.
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