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.
The title made me think they were responding to users that needed customer support, but no. This:
Meanwhile, when another user lamented the amount of loading screens, the support team replied imploring the reviewer to “consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under three seconds”.
is just pathetic. This is nothing more than low-effort damage control. Which, funnily enough, is rather fitting for Starfield in general. It’s not a terrible game but it absolutely fell flat on its face on its biggest selling points. Procedural exploration will always have drawbacks but No Man’s Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department and it came out nearly 8 years ago and made by a team a fraction of the size. And I don’t expect Bethesda to put in the same effort as Hello did and make Starfield live up to its promises
but No Man’s Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department
I had high hopes for No Man’s Sky based on how people talked about it but was left underwhelmed. I found it boring and repetitive.
Starfield took a lot longer before it started feeling that repetitive (to me.) I put many more hours into Starfield (than NMS) without even thinking about it.
I just rolled credits on Starfield last night and went back to keep playing because I have a ton of unfinished quests and some goals for building my spaceship. With No Man’s Sky I felt like there was nothing else to find.
(All that said, I do find a lot of the writing pretty lackluster, the planets now feel boring to look at and now predictable as to what will be there, and I do not particularly enjoy running around trying to find the last things to scan for very little payoff.)
I agree about NMS, I can’t bring myself to try it again. The original feeling that everything is the same is still with me, even after reading reviews of updates.
The best summary for NMS I have read is “huge but shallow”. There is so much stuff to do, but everything is so shallow that it becomes boring very fast
Yeah, I ended up feeling the same about Starfield as I did about NMS. A huge universe that’s wildly unrewarding in every way possible. And getting to the end of Starfield, the NG+ feels exactly like getting to the center of the galaxy in NMS. Completely pointless.
The main quest of Starfield had literally no impact on the world at large. And don’t get me wrong, that’s totally fine. As long as it has an impact on something. But it doesn’t. It all boils down to “no one can know about this” and where you stand on the issue, which in itself its meaningless because no matter where you stand, the outcome is exactly the same. You just run in circles and your choices have no effect on anything.
The side quests and faction quests are pretty good. But that’s about it. The ship building system is painful, the outpost building system is so fucking bad I don’t even know where to start, and it takes hours upon hours to go through levelling up, doing skill challenges, as well as research, to even get to a point where any of it is rewarding, and even then it isn’t actually rewarding. At least the settlement crafting in NMS felt like building a cool house and a rad looking planet. Whereas Starfield, settlements are just massive pain in the ass mines and manufacturers.
An issue is that Bethesda might be getting deluded into thinking that Fallout 4 on its own was fantastic.
It is, on its own, very boring. The story is bland, characters left unexplored. But the mods make it amazing.
Sim settlements alone revitalizes the game, changing settlement building into an optional and story driven thing, particularly in its version 2.
The vertibirds mods which not only fix the abysmal default abilities, but even let you call one in as air support.
Various mods that add travellers on the roads and paths, so you encounter other people.
The mods that let you turn the feral ghouls into zombie hordes.
The list goes on.
Yeah, at the beginning Fallout 4 was just Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it. And especially since the game really pushes you into the Minutemen faction, for a new player, the annoyance of constant settlement building and rescuing settlers and setting up new settlements completely overwhelms you and makes the game extremely frustrating. After my first playthrough I put it down and didn’t come back to it for over a year because it pissed me off so much. Realizing you could just ignore the Minutemen made the game so much better. And then when mods came to the consoles, it completely changed the game. Made it so much more enjoyable.
Like, yeah, there’s loads of YT channels now devoted to FO4 content, but only because mods allowed people to transcend how lackluster the game was at the beginning. The love of it now is despite Bethesda. And they definitely spend way too much time smelling their own farts thinking they hit the ball out of the park because of all that.
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 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 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’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
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.
Adding “vita compatibility” would require including a psvita inside it. As well as extra inputs on the back. All for games people didn’t actually ever want. You can however play (some) ps1 and psp games on the thing via the ps5
Hardware-wise, vita is nothing special. It’s just an arm cortex device, which means Sony will have much easier time making the runtime works on newer arm processor. They don’t even need to port the whole os, just the runtime would be enough. If a bunch of volunteer can make vita runtime from scratch on their own free time (and managed to get various Android games running on vita runtime too), there is no reason Sony which have access to the source code can’t do it with less time.
No need for extra touchpad in the rear either. Vita TV didn’t have it and work fine without it too.
it’s not a “nothing special” device, it literally has a psp encoded into the soc package…
It’s nothing special anymore today because current arm processors are fast enough to fully emulate PSP, unlike the time when vita was still in development.
this is just flat out incorrect, a huge amount of games just don’t work on the vita tv because of the lack of touch interactions
Only a few dozen out of hundreds of vita titles, and mostly due to the lack of touchscreen, not the lack of the rear touchpad. Most vita titles that use the rear touchpad only use it as a workaround for the lack of R2/L2 buttons (and many of them already patched to recognize R2/L2 on vita tv), which the portal has. If the portal has vita support, it’ll support more titles than vita tv simply because it has a touchscreen.
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