Shit, even Star Trek: Online does what Starfield promised better, and it’s basically just another dime a dozen MMOs with a high profile licensed IP behind it.
For the most part, it’s either going to be missing a few things you’re looking for, or will offer everything but not actually be good/finished (such as with Star Citizen or anything ever made by Derek Smart, and why none of those are in the above list).
I’ve had my eyes on the X series for a long time. But they’re “fly around in your ship and do stuff” games and not “fly around and walk around” games, right? I’ve also heard there’s no learning curve, more of a learning wall.
You’re right, Star Trek Online is close to my ideal game. If only it weren’t a janky MMO…
I looked at Derek Smart’s games. I don’t think I’m cut out for this. But they kinda reminded of a GDC talk by Jeff Vogel where he talks about how he makes a living by making these niche isometric RPGs.
What about it being a janky MMO takes it away from being your ideal game though?
Quite a bit, I think. It being an MMO has some practical consequences, namely the fact that I can’t play it offline and the monetization of the game. It also influences the game mechanics: For example, STO’s combat uses tabbed targeting¹. I like tabbed targeting² but I don’t think it’s the peak of combat systems; a different combat system could/would make the game more engaging and enjoyable.
I can look at the individual parts of the game. There STO shines. But when I look at STO as a one compact package, it doesn’t.
¹ It also has a shooter mode but I remember it being janky as hell.
² I’d actually love to see a sort of “offline MMO” which would use tabbed targeting.
Yeah they gave up announcing new release dates for it like half a decade ago if not longer lmao, but now they’ve started again. Hopefully it’s true this time.
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
I bought myself into sf before you got a hangar, i only had that one person race ship and after a while they added a hangar where you could spawn and walk around it.
After a while i noticed loads of reviews so i tried playing it, but always ran into issues making it unplayable. So i got really fed up with it for a while.
Then a couple years later i could actually run it with some issues, ended up buying a better ship and i’m now basically waiting for it to release and computer parts to be affordable once again.
I would love for star citizen to be my jam, but i doubt i’ll ever be able to put enough time into it. The most i ever managed to do consistently was diablo 4 season 1 to 3 before i dropped it completely.
I mean, they kind of do. It’s just not driven by cut scenes or NPC interaction. Have to read the news and be involved in the off game communities to get into the lore that’s happened in game.
That’s why a lot of people didn’t engage with the lore of Destiny - you had to go to a website totally separate from the game, link your account old-school Bungie style, and could only access the grimoire cards from said site after you went through the hoops. There was nothing in the game giving you more aside from the NPCs and the few cutscenes themselves. Not even a link to take you to the site from the game itself.
Almost every other game has an in-game lore/info screen talking about the world and characters of the game.
Star Citizen will get a story mode called Squadron 42 witch should be feature complete and it has a star studded Hollywood cast. It looks worthwile but it won’t be here for at least a year.
Given the history of these guys, I am not gonna believe it until I see the game released and in the stores. Until then, as everything around star citizen, this is vaporware aimed at milking the whales that keep giving them money.
I love how it gets called “vaporware” when it’s a playable product with more gameplay than many MMOs. I’m also very grateful to the whales for providing the funds to develop the game.
Well, Star Citizen is playable right now (and has been for years), and they recently showed over an hour of supposedly live Squadron 42 gameplay (obviously somewhat spoilery for the start of the game), so there’s some hope at least…
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
Yeah the prologue level they showed looked incredible. I really hope they can give the game all the polish it needs, after so long in development they absolutely need to release something with quality to match.
Now, many years after the game’s original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) says that, with just a year or two of additional “polish,” the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.
I wouldn’t be so sure that SQ42 will be a guaranteed slam dunk as many SC fans seem to be speculating. That’s if it ever does get released or course.
The gameplay in the recent demo is subpar. FPS combat in particular was trash, far worse than HL1; a game released more than a quarter of a century ago. Turret gunning and the platforming parts looked decent but they are not going to carry the game. No example of player controlled space flight was shown.
The space battles looked nice in a b-movie kind of way, but I have my doubts how this will translate to fun space flight gameplay.
From SC, we know that they have a very history of even basic conceptual balance and they are horrible at iterative play testing.
Regarding the Hollywood cast, Gary Oldman sounded like he wanted to get his money and get out of there ASAP. Anderson wasn’t much better. Writing was some high school-level drivel “we must win because we must!” and lots of shouty one liners. There is a very real possibility that the whole thing will be a Wing Commander: The Movie - 30 hours of tedious custscenes. And you just know it’s going to take itself extremely seriously (think the space bulldozer scene in Wing Commander).
Looking at the UI/UX of SC, it’s not unreasonable to assume SQ42 will suffer the same sorry fate. Very flashy ironman-style UI visuals that are nigh unusable in a video game.
As much as I’m a fan of the project, I don’t think SC/SQ42 would scratch the same itch that somebody who just got done playing Starfield or Mass Effect would feel. Star Citizen is way more on the simulation side and light on RPG elements.
Everspace 2 (first one was a rogue like, you don’t need to play it to enjoy the sequel)
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (also a sequel, the first one doesn’t have a Y axys so you may not like it)
Chorus
All three are a lot of fun, neither are AAA games so they lack a bit of polish but aren’t vanilla as hell either. I enjoyed each one better than Starfield but neither as much as ME 1-3.
Cowboys in space is not my favourite trope, but I’ve heard good things about the first Rebel Galaxy. How was the switch from 2D combat to 3D combat in the sequel? (And is the story any good?)
Why not? Seems like a fun adventuring game that lets you travel from planet to planet solving problems/doing tasks for people. Seems similar to what the OP is looking for.
Throwing Elite Dangerous in there as well. The learning curve is steep, and story is not driven by anything but you. But oh my god does it satisfy that “fuuuuck space is so big” feeling. The one thing that was fun in Starfield was the gunplay, which is the only thing missing in vanilla Elite, but they have an expansion that adds that. I haven’t played Odyssey, but supposedly it has gotten much better over the years.
You have to read the news in game. There is an evolving story line about the thargoids invading known space. There are new colonies that are being formed hundreds of light years from known space that need protection and supplies. There are communities like the fuel rats that are constantly coming to the rescue of stranded explorers. It’s a really big, open, beautiful galaxy that has a lot going on. It’s a shame it always gets overlooked because you have to search the story out instead of it being served to you on a platter by npc and cutscenes. Don’t get me wrong, I looooove a good story driven game. Elite is probably, in my little opinion, the best execution of a true open world game. You just have to really search for the story, and I can see how that could be a barrier for entry for a lot of people.
Adding to the other comment, I feel like you can get a taste for all that by visiting the game’s subreddit. Seeing all the cool things people do and how the community moves the story forward really motivates me to play the game. I guess you could also watch a youtube video to get up to date on the story and different ways to play the game.
It is a great game but you really do need to look stuff up to fully enjoy it, unfortunately. Also, space trucking is only one way to play it.
The E:D devs shit in every existing player’s mouth when the first paid expansion dropped, and they’ve never fixed their abusive pricing model. You’re actively punished for being a legacy user.
I probably would have bitten the bullet and kept playing if the game wasn’t incredibly shallow, though. Somehow it manages to still be that way after several content expansions… Everything is a novelty that gets repetitive the second time you do it, and the variance between systems is frankly embarrassing. PvP is the only facet that has any real replay value, and I’d rather dogfight in Star Citizen.
Glad you acknowledge the major problem. I found that once you realize how little there actually is to do in every system, and how similar it all feels, the illusion is destroyed and there’s very little besides PvP that’s still interesting. If they could somehow roll in some of the bigger systems from EVE Online that would be sick, but the expansions have shown that mostly what they care about is having an easily maintainable product, not an exciting one.
The Outer Worlds is pretty much what Starfield could and should have been and was made by Obsidian, the developers behind a ton of other great games such as (in chronological order, with the best of all games ever bolded)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
Neverwinter Nights 2
Fallout New Vegas
Pillars of Eternity
Tyranny
Pillars of Eternity 2
There’s even a sequel to it coming out some time this year so you don’t run as much of a risk of running out of game any time soon!
Hard disagree. They’re both equally boring as shit, but Starfield at least had decent ship flying/building mechanics. What did outer worlds have? Nothing.
It did? Outer Worlds was just an over-exaggerated parody of capitalism, Starfield at least had some somewhat-believable world building in terms of how the tech progressed, how/why did humans start to live among the stars, conflict between different religions or factions, the xenomorph threat...
Like I'm not saying any of these were done well, but it did have decent worldbuilding and some neat ideas, it was just the execution that sucked. OW might have some better parts than SF, like companion writing (although it was pretty cliched and cheesy there too) so I'm really surprised you use world building as your example lol
im just salty about starfields world building shouldve chosen different example
OWs world building was fine. nothing special, just fine. there were stupid things but they were either a joke or there to back up a point (“we moved this dangerous animal to this planet to make a deodorant and now its killing us” 👈 this shit is supposed to be funny and anti corporation. does it work? dunno, its stupid, might be funny to someone, its fine, little cringe )
starfields world building just grinds my gears. when there are stupid things, they are there because someone at bethesda thinks its coool as heck or didnt think it through. fucking space cowbois. fucking colony war. why add mechs into your world and ban them? why artificially limit the number of star systems the nations can control?
Totally agree the dlc really made it one if those “it gets good after x hours” sorta things; All different vibes for the dlcs too. The raider one was lonely but it felt like it was supposed to be.
Thank you! Felt like I was I playing a different game than everyone else.
Everyone mocked Starfield’s Neon for being Discount Cyberpunk. But at least they played it as straight as they could. Like, I could believe people live there and had a life.
It felt like Outer Worlds kept trying to make jokes about how cruel capitalism is versus tell a real story. Like, “Oh boy time to go increase shareholder value!” Or “I love Space nuts. I have to say that or I die.” Like wtf, where’s the subtlety?
It’s not Borderlands 3 bad, no where near it. But it’s pretty bad.
In this genre of “big space games”, The Outer Worlds stands near to Mass effect, because it follows “the Bioware formula” pretty closely: The player and a group of followers visit several semi-open worlds, where they look for a MacGuffin related to the main story while solving local problems. (I’ll write a short essay about the Bioware formula someday…)
The Outer Worlds was a good game (not great) and I look forward to the sequel. I’ve played most Obsidian games and I wish they wrote more sci-fi.
Starfield was much better than Outer Worlds IMO. I enjoyed my time with Starfield, it’s not perfect of course. I’ve tried to get through Outer Worlds three times but it’s just not fun, I also strongly dislike New Vegas. Just ok writing doesn’t make up for shitty gameplay.
I don’t have a lot of experience with roguelike games. Before I even knew about the genre I played quite a bit of Spelunkey. As someone who loves Super Mario Bros I thought that game was great. I recently found Vagante and am having a lot of fun with it. It gives off Spelunkey vibes, but is more traditional fantasy.
I too wish for a game like this but apparently it's impossible to do it, either due to lack of vision, budget or expertise (or all of the above). Starfield sounded perfect on paper and it was a good studio to attempt it but in the end it was just a bland, soulless, boring mess of a game.
As for my suggestions, I just got smaller games, not larger ,and in that vein honestly: FTL. It's a 2d sprite roguelike and yet it's the best game at giving me the feeling of being a scrappy starship captain on the run, trying to scrounge together resources in order to complete my trip despite overwhelming odds.
The second closest game is Starbound but your mileage will vary, it feels unfinished and there is no real story to speak off, although the ship you continually improve and build in over time as you explore the universe does start to feel cozy and homely. It is also basically a worse Terraria in space so if you don't like gameplay like that, skip.
If you like Mass Effect you ought to try KOTOR1 and 2, oldies but goldies, but they do have the same weaknesses you already outlined for ME, it's very much a set story.
Faster Than Light’s my jam! For me, it was dethroned from the throne of roguelite games by Slay the Spire.
Starbound was the first and last game I pre-ordered. I wish they would have stuck to the original vision with the survival mechanics. Thinking about it, Starbound is basically a proto-Starfield. The both promised an experience based on a different game (Terraria in space vs. Skyrim in space) that was undercut by the overuse of procedural generation. (Someone please create an 8 hour video essay about this.)
Yep, there are definitely many comparisons between Starbound and Starfield, it is why I was excited about SF in the first place - it looked like a big budget SB made by an experienced veteran team! The joke's on me I guess lol
In a similar vein, if you want to try something new check out starsector. You have to get it from their website currently but it’s a great game, lots of potential, lots of mods.
You can try to revive the sector, build your own mega corp, become a pirate, be a slaver, be an anti-slaver, gun running.
I've heard of it and tried to get into it a few times but I think I just lack the time/patience of my youth to get into something like that anymore, its a steep learning curve and you have to make most of the fun yourself / RP.
I enjoyed Starfield, but it wasn’t anywhere near good enough to put the same hours into it as most Bethesda games. It had such potential, but they dropped the ball.
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