Yes, unironically. It doesn't stop happening. If we get too desensitized and passive they'll keep inventing more ways to be terrible.
It used to be that any monetized cosmetics were already seen as a gross cash grab, now people are thankful it's not gameplay related. But there is also plenty of gameplay related ones too. The gaming industry is just so bad now.
Exactly. This defeatist “iTz jeust opshunal” and “shaming them is a waste of time” response is asking to get fucked over more
Remember Battlefront II when the community got fed up and shamed EA into removing loot boxes?
How about RuneScape recently? Who was slammed so hard they first dug in their heels and then finally relented and pulled their pay to win battle pass?
Also those developers and publishers bitching at Unity need to be quiet because….”capitalism has been complained about enough”
Yes, in all these situations, we consoomers should all just shut up and take it because “it’s been talked about enough already”
This attitude is why Madden players get what they get every year
Keep that attitude up and you’ll see Bungie release an “upgraded” $30 battle pass on top of the current one and take all the cool and useful rewards out of the first paid track just like what Activision did with “Blackcell” for Call of Duty.
I hate that it gets dismissed as just being cosmetic. I love making cool looking characters in games, it’s really fun and is part of the content for me, especially if it’s multiplayer.
That’s not really getting me to try again either :p
World Tier 3 monster kill XP has been buffed by 5%
World Tier 4 monsters kill XP has been buffed by 15%
Also keep in mind this joins a bunch of other XP-boosting patches in the past. Last week, Blizzard also buffed the XP gain urn in Season of the Malignant to go from an 8% XP buff to a 20% XP buff, making seasonal play by far the fastest way to get your characters to the highest levels in the game.
I’ll play the seasons up until the game gets boring and then stop. I believe that, over the next couple of years, that they will make the ENTIRE game fun to play. Until then, I’ll play until I’m bored and quit.
I’m definitely not in the camp that D4 sucks completely, but so far I never kept playing after reaching Tier 2. Thanks to the betas I have done that a few times… I’ve played Diablo 1, 2, & 3 for so many hours, but yes, I haven’t lost hope that D4 will eventually also turn into something that I want to played longer. “Stay a while and listen” ;)
I sat down to play it last night, got destroyed by spaceships I’m trying to kill to level up my piloting skill and access class B and C ships, went to the simulator in the UC base to get some free kills and realised I wasn’t having any fun with the game any more, so I closed the game and started playing High on Life. Had way more fun.
After the
spoilerStarborn
reveal
spoiler(which I saw coming as soon as the Starborn were introduced)
I realised it’s just not fun. I can’t get into the roleplay as all the characters are bland cardboard cutouts with weird facial expressions, the only fun I was really having was the shooting which grew stale once all the enemies became bullet sponges.
The lack of city maps, the boring cutscenes for everything, clunky console first interface, drab colours, bafflingly hideous item designs, lifeless procedural planets. The factions are all boring. Permanent skills, with no respec options?! And for god’s sake, let me eat food on the ground by long pressing E.
It’s actually worse than Fallout 4, and that’s 8 years old.
I’ve been noticing that too recently. I’ve been hooked on the game, but not really in a good way. I’m not having fun, I’m checking boxes for quests or leveling and it scratches an ADHD itch where I can’t get off it until I finish what I’m doing, but there’s always a new thing that I’m doing. They have done a good job singing missions together so that it feels like you’re always doing something.
But it doesn’t feel fun. They have less than 10 unique buildings to discover throughout the 1000 planets, to the point where I had seen the same two buildings within the first 5 hours of the game. They somehow couldn’t come up with more than 6 different types of plants that repeat across planets. Running to buildings from landing spots is a real bore.
Progression is a real grind. 32 hours in and I’m only level 22, AND I feel like I don’t have skill points in basically anything compared to how big the skill tree is.
I’m disappointed in how shallow the game is. 1000 planets wide, an inch deep. I’ll probably finish the main story missions and be done with it.
Progression is a real grind. 32 hours in and I’m only level 22, AND I feel like I don’t have skill points in basically anything compared to how big the skill tree is.
Thank you. I’m in a similar situation and finding that the grind is really annoying with not a lot of payoff. And then you’ve got so many skills to invest in and you never quite know if you’ll actually need some of them.
I know planets don’t all have to be super interesting, but I dread landing on anything now, because they’re just… so boring to me.
Running to buildings from landing spots is a real bore.
Don’t know if you know this already, but bringing up your scanner and pointing it to your ship icon lets you fast travel to it.
Also, you can skip the whole “return to ship” thing altogether and open up the star map or whatever it’s called and immediately jump to space and set course/land on another planet. I think it only works if you’re unencumbered, though, but I’m not certain.
Edit: Lol, I accidentally misread that as “running from buildings to landing spots”, so ignore that last bit. Hard agree on running to the buildings. At least in TES/FO there’s interesting stuff along the way. Here, it’s just rocks and minerals and maybe a few animals.
You know it’s bad game design when the most useful superpower the game has is the one to let you keep sprinting so you can try to waste less time (Personal Atmosphere).
The factions are all boring. Permanent skills, with no respec options?! And for god’s sake, let me eat food on the ground by long pressing E.
Apparently that last one is being added with an update soon.
I think the factions are okay, but not nearly as good as their counterparts in previous games (eg. NCR > Freestar Collective, although that’s probably more thanks to Obsidian than Bethesda).
It's likely a far cry from shutting down, but shutting down is inevitable. Most online only games you only lose access to when they die, but Destiny deletes stuff while it's still alive.
Nah this is all we got. It was so infuriating trying to talk about this at launch.
I got constantly talked down to with stuff like “uhh yeah there is a map lol. You can see the whole universe. What more do you need?” or they would say how that shitty topographic map is all you’d need.
It was also funny seeing people say to stop complaining because it’s like morrowind now. They completely missed that morrowind had a fucking local map for the towns too.
It might be, although I’ve read of some freezes happening even on the fastest SSD in the world so… idk, I think they might have fucked up somewhere. I also suspect there might be some memory leaks, although this comes solely from my experience, I have no data to show.
Ohh yeah, this article. I've only personally witnessed about a half second stutter on occasion in the cities, I could probably count the occurrences on two hands with about 30 hours in, but that sounds about right because even Oblivion whose own optimization bottlenecks itself gets "traversal stutter" for me on PC.
Memory leaks are possible for sure, especially since Digital Foundry confirmed there's still save game load time bloat after a long playthrough.
I’ve played Starfield (PC) a good bit by now and I’d say that mid 80s is probably fair.
The gameplay is great fun - the combat, gear, etc. is really quite similar to Fallout 4 (though without the VATS), with a Skyrim style talent tree.
The base building and ship building is quite like Fallout 4, though much improved (thankfully!) but still a bit janky.
The worldbuilding is immersive but the world itself is just okay - it’s really predictable, they play it a bit too safe, every faction is nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times before, and society hasn’t advanced at all ~400 years in the future apparently.
Characters are exactly what you expect from a Bethesda game - a bit two dimensional, but nice enough.
Graphics are good, sound design is good, music is nice but a bit too similar to Skyrim IMO.
The story is also really quite safe and derivative, reminds me simultaneously of Mass Effect and Skyrim.
The exploration is cool, but does get a bit repetitive after a while. I think more interesting “random” locations would be really good - after a few abandoned, flavourless civilian bases, you’ve seen them all.
I’m a sucker for customisable bases/houses/etc. especially for space ships, giving me all those building blocks and letting me loose in the sandbox (starbox?) is honestly hours of entertainment.
Space combat is fun, but IMO the space part of the game would be way more immersive if I did all of the ship piloting stuff in-character rather than in the UI menues, seems like a big oversight - why not have something like the galaxy map from mass effect, or have everything on displays in the cockpit? It would be much more immersive, but I guess it would have delayed the game quite a bit.
A lot of the game is juggling menues and interfaces which aren’t the best designed. very similar to Skyrim - I imagine UI redesign mods will really shine once they start coming out. It’s pretty tricky trying to figure out what stuff in your inventory is junk you accidentally picked up (looking at you, Fire Extinguisher!) and which items have a surprisingly good value-to-weight ratio (like some - but not all - of the books, or the deck of cards, surprisingly)
There are occasionally little bugs and glitches, but it’s not too bad for 2023 - nothing that makes the game unplayable or breaks major things, it’s just been stuff like glitchy animations, containers placed in the wrong place/orientation, weird physics behaviour, and I’ve noticed a couple missing textures here and there.
If you’re looking for more of a story/RPG game, I’d suggest something more like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic.
For exploration and space combat, I think No Man’s Sky is better, but with much less customisation.
For more customisation and sandbox style gameplay - but less action-oriented - Space Engineers is probably a better choice.
All in all, Starfield is a fun game - Skyrim in space is a good starting point for describing it, but it’s a lot closer to “Fallout 4, but the bombs didn’t drop”, though the game has a lot of cool extra systems beyond that. I’d be happy to recommend it to someone who would enjoy a single player sci-fi themed looter-shooter sandbox game with some mild RPG elements and player-constructed ships and bases, and I’m sure there are hundreds of hours of enjoyment there, and, as with the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, it’s likely a game that I will return to for many, many years to come
One of the hidden elements of travel is the scanner; if you travel within a system and can "target" the location via quest marker or the like, you can just travel to it from the pilot seat and land at the location, no menu needed.
I think there are other caveats, but the number of "different" ways travel can occur makes it hard for me to keep the details straight. It may just be within system, you may be able to grav jump. You may need to have a quest marker there so it "displays" the planet surface location, or you may be able to select from a few "local" options. I just can't remember what the restrictions are to that method off the top of my head lol
I thought so! There are a lot of little quirks with travel. Usually I get scanned by the Feds landing at New Atlantis, other times I don't. Sometimes I can jump straight to surface other times I need to go from orbit. Just little things I haven't paid attention to so I can't say definitively what the criteria is. But, jumping from the scanner is a way nicer way to do it. I just got in the ha it of traveling from the quest menu because I can go from planet surface -> new system -> planet surface with one action (usually).
How i see it is al alternative falllout timeline aet in the future. A lot of the basic game mechanics are straight upgrades from Fallout 4, with slightly better faction writing than 4, and slightly more rpg checks to make an experience feels better than 4. IMO i dont think its better than New Vegas, but its a direct upgrade from FO4
I’m loving starfield and I’ll agree with this. It’s a mid eighties score kind of game. If it’s what you want it’s amazing, but the people calling it game of the century and whatnot are buying their own hype.
On the other hand, it’s likely to have serious staying power as an all time classic game, Bethesda is great at that and there’s a ton of room for people to use it as an incredible mod canvas. I don’t think that should affect launch reviews though.
I remember when I thought that Bungie self-publishing would make them less evil. But no, they’ve actually become innovators in being the actual shittiest company that isn’t Plarium Games. Maybe they have their eyes on the top spot though? Is that what they’re building up to?
I’ve been really enjoying the game, just past 70hours on Xbox and starting the 2nd main story mission quest. Planning on starting new on PC shortly after I complete my current character. I don’t understand the console hate. I was upset when Spiderman on PS4 was an exclusive, but later I got a PS4, played/beat it, had a blast. Hate for something because you can’t play it is just wild. Just like people hating on huge houses or seeing expansive cars just because they don’t have it. Underline jealousy. If you really hate it that much because you can’t play/have it, work towards obtaining it and appreciating it. I’ve been really happy with most of the games that have come out/still planning on coming out this year, best in a long time for me
Making excuses as to why the game isn’t reviewing as highly as they think it should be. Not understanding that sone people just don’t like the game as much as they do.
I was upset when Spiderman on PS4 was an exclusive
Exclusives are actively hurting the consumer, being upset is normal.
Hate for something because you can’t play it is just wild
If it’s because someone decided they can milk more money by making it exclusive, it’s not that wild.
Just like people hating on huge houses or seeing expansive cars just because they don’t have it
It seems your world view is dominated by jealousy a lot and you project it onto others. I hate huge houses and expensive cars because it’s just to show everyone around how rich you are and serves no other purpose. All that while other people suffer and struggle to survive.
I mean, I get where you're coming from. But this didn't start with Starfield, and Sony has a great track record of even more restrictive platforming than Xbox does. Microsoft games are now usually accompanied by some kind of PC access.
Not an excuse, but expecting Microsoft to extend an olive branch of non-exclusivity to Sony when they have historically been incredibly averse to it themselves is not really a realistic expectation.
forbes.com
Aktywne