It’s not a terrible game. I still inexplicably have hundreds of hours put into it. (according to Xbox achievements I’m one of only 6% to bother reaching level 50)
Their comment about being a different experience each time is disingenuous, though. The only major questline that “feels” any different is The crimson Fleet storyline, which I loved and legitimately had a tough decision about which way to go.
But Vanguard, Rangers, etc… are all variations on the same missions with a different faction slapped on them. It’s all pretty generic stuff with the occasional cool mission tossed in. (Ryujin, for example was far to easy and uncreative until the very last mission, which was legitimately fun)
Settlements and outposts are entirely pointless. You can ignore them completely. And you never have to visit a random mining/civilian/science outpost if you don’t want to. Which to me seems like a negative. If a major feature of your game can safely be ignored, you haven’t integrated it properly into the larger narrative.
But yet somehow I still have just about 250 hours into it. I don’t know why. Probably the ship building, which is fun as hell.
(according to Xbox achievements I’m one of only 6% to bother reaching level 50)
When everyone gets to try it for free via Gamepass, you’re going to get very different statistics than when everyone has to shell out the money for the game and fight through the shit gameplay thanks to sunk cost fallacy.
This doesn’t strike me as a bad move on their part. From the way the responses are worded, this feels very much like it’s intended to counterbalance negative impressions specifically for potential buyers who might otherwise be swayed by negative comments.
If I’m on the fence about something, I can be pretty easily swayed by a negative review that enumerates things that I’m specifically on the lookout for. Like if I saw one of those reviews that said bad story and boring gameplay, I would find myself think “sounds like the Bethesda formula hasn’t updated enough for me,” but I could be swayed back then other way by a dev response that enthusiastically mentions the exploration and crafting. “Maybe there’s enough here for me that I don’t need to bother with the story.”
Is it underhanded? Maybe. But it seems like a no-lose scenario either way for Bethesda.
I would agreeish, but from a different perspective. However,
“consider the amount of data needed to load procedural assets in under 3 seconds” is a laughable response considering the very real criticism of having so many god damn menus, all of which revolve around picking things on a map.
They have the tools to make the game however they want. I find it pretty insane that there’s no consistency in how the game allows you to fast travel in space - sometimes you can select a solar system/planet and travel right from there, no map required. Other times you get to a planet and then you can’t land on the planet until you open the map and “fast travel” to it, even though you’re right there.
And the response says “consider” no, no I won’t consider something you should have optimized before release lmao. It is how it is now and that’s what I’m considering, and I’ve decided that it’s got potential and in it’s current state it sucks.
And I actually liked the game. I did not like NG+ whatsoever though. Disappointing
The game isn't bad, but it does feel like it came out of a time capsule from over ten years ago with a bunch of features they tried to implement that their engine couldn't handle. If you have to tell your customers, one on one, why your game is actually fun, you're doing something wrong. Hopefully Microsoft finally makes them throw out Creation and start from scratch for ES6 on Unreal or something, taking a hard look at what their competitors are doing better than them in the RPG space.
The main thing I want from ES6 is the same level of modability as Skyrim. I’d love for it to be as stable as Starfield.
I didn’t think the need to dump creation to make a great game, they just need to stop trying to polish the rust. Some aspects of Creation aren’t amazing but the staying power of Bethesda games has been about modding a compelling world in a well supported way. They need to ensure that whatever they do that they don’t lose that.
I think Starfield has a lot going for it but I don’t find the world compelling enough to want to spend time in the way I did Skyrim. I enjoyed the time I did spend but I don’t see that itch coming back. Starfield made me want to play a space game with magic, but I’ve I got it’s magic unlocked I didn’t feel that desire was fulfilled.
I don’t blame the engine. There are other studios out there with custom engines that evolved over time. Also Creation Engine evolved a lot.
That they work with many connected scenes instead of a continuous world also has advantages … it allows them to easily change the “world” between scenes by simply linking you “back” to a different scene (for example city under siege which before the dialog was not under siege). It’s how they work. They could do the same shit with Unreal if they wanted to and if they believe this kind of game design is the only feasible for their story telling, they would shove it into another engine as well.
I also don’t think the game feels “old”. I do think it feels like it is conceptionally unfinished. They had many ideas and you can see a lot of different systems in the game (space fights, planets with different biomes, ship building, base building, and so on and so forth). Each of these systems in itself has some kind of concept, but all these systems together are missing a clear concept, IMO.
From what I know, game dev typically works in modules that get thrown together. And this also seems to be the case here. However the “big picture” wasn’t refined or they realized that it needs a ton of small adjustments all over the place (conceptionally AND technically) to make sense of it and it looks like they were not able to deal with the complexity of that.
As a result we have a game that is okayish. It tells some stories, and offers a lot of content, but it feels not nearly as stunning as it should have and it’s not on a single front ground breaking.
Creation is built on code over 20 years old at this point, and it shows. If they could have upgraded it to handle modern needs, I think they would have. Sarah Morgan looks like plastic in just about every lighting environment I've seen so far except for the room you meet her in. The conversation system may be an upgrade over what they were able to do with Daggerfall, but compared to its contemporaries from the likes of CDPR and Larian (even BioWare's old Mass Effect trilogy), it really feels lacking when they can't implement proper directed camera angles or performance capture.
Their side quest designers (referring here primarily to "activities" and non-faction quests) are either terrible at their craft or confined to an engine that can only easily spit out fetch quests where nothing interesting happens on the way to fetch the macguffin, once again, like their contemporaries can and do; the bar has been raised since the days of Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
When flying, the game loads you into an area where you always have to fly the "last mile" and dock, and the only reason I can imagine you would build it that way is that they couldn't make their engine load the space they need to load in a seamless way, like their competitors making other space games.
Creation is built on code over 20 years old at this point, and it shows
You can just as easily say the same thing about Unreal Engine, Frostbite, CryEngine, etc… all of these engines are built on decade(s) old code to some degree. The problem isn’t Creation Engine, it’s Bethesda. Unreal isn’t a magic bullet. The results if they used Unreal at this point would likely be worse, not better.
The trend for a long while was to have an in-house engine to save on costs, but many of them, including the RPG companies we've been discussing, have moved off of those engines and onto Unreal.
If you ask me, a lot of the systems they built for open worlds like Elder Scrolls and Fallout make far less sense when you're an interplanetary space traveler, like waking up a person at your home base to give you a tour of your new club, because they're on a day/night schedule where they walk between their room and the living room. And it's not like open worlds or even Bethesda-esque RPGs haven't been built in Unreal before.
I totally agree. However, when looking at the bigger picture I think Microsoft wouldn’t want to be so dependend on Epic after spending so much money on their game service, Bethesda and Activision/Blizzard. I don’t expect them to actively consider switching engines and I don’t think it would solve all that many problems anyway.
I think it’d be really cool, and they could always make it so that the data never leaves your computer looks at the title and realising it’s EA we’re talking about Oh wait…
I don’t understand what market the PlayStation Portal was designed for.
You’re basically paying £200 for a DualSense controller MacGyver’d on a tablet screen that can only remote play PS5 games or stream from PSNow. There are both cheaper and better options which support not just Sony’s ecosystem but also other gaming platforms.
Not to mention that cloud gaming in general just sucks.
Cloud gaming doesn’t suck though. As long as you have good Internet, it’s awesome. I have several thousand hours with cloud gaming and couldn’t have played any of those games otherwise, very rarely have any issues.
Same here og 2020 stadia user here although I wouldn’t necessarily call cloud gaming ideal
pc gaming is the way to go nowadays with Cheap games on steam and free games on epic games sometimes on gog plus playing online is free and nowadays you can build yourself a very cheap rx 480/570 miners are trying get rid of there stock i5 4450/i7 3770 pc for very cheaply pair that with a 60gb ssd and above for a boot drive and a 1tb hdd and your gaming
Cloud gaming doesn’t suck. You can literally play Half Life Alyx on a Quest from a cloud PC and it works great. This all depends on your location and cloud pc of course.
I was under the impression it was a lot more than $200, but that still seems costly for what it does. For $100 more you can get an AYN Odin 2 which does a hell of a lot more stuff for the price.
I mean it’s an 8in 1080p touch screen display at 60hz, the panel is probably around $60, the hardware is probably like a pi zero so $20, and a controller $70. So just on hardware this is probably around $120 after taking into account supply chain discounts. Then, manufacturing costs, and they probably don’t even have that high of a profit margin on the device. Add in a $100 for the actually chip set and yeah you get more features but it’s not that crazy imo. Just a niche market for sure.
I see articles about ex-devs standing up studios and then they never have anything to show for it, even years later there’s nothing to show. This has been happening for years and the first game I’ve seen from any ex-dev team is stormgate from ex-starcraft devs.
I’m fine with remasters that allow us to play old games on modern hardware. I’m somewhat ok with remakes to an extent. I’m not ok with the constant remakes of games that aren’t old enough to need a remake or the original game still holds up. Most recent remakes aren’t needed and feel like cash grabs
The original got a PS5 update to 60 FPS. I think what we’re actually seeing is the remaster that will hit the PC. Same routine as the first game which saw a remaster for the PS5, then the PC and eventually the TV series. No doubt this will fall in line for season 2.
I believe the original is just PS5 enhanced, similar to running it on a PS4 Pro. But it’s still a PS4 game running on the PS5.
I don’t know the ins and outs. But most games like that have an upgrade that makes them into actual PS5 games (like you can only play it through the SSD for example).
eurogamer.net
Aktywne