Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.
I think everything you said here is spot on except the idea Starfield will improve pike Cyberpunk at this point because Bethesda’s attitude really doesn’t indicate that they seem to admit anything needs fixing.
With that said I doubt many people expected Cyberpunk to do as well later on so you are probably right and I hope you are for the game and genre. I really like the aesthetic of Starfield and want it to succeed.
I’m just so tired of getting such half baked stuff at release.
One annoying thing about the “make your own stories” concept is that content us going to be recycled. My followers don’t say anything new or have new things to do etc because it’s all baked in but also on this supposedly open RPG landscape.
I would agree with you if Bethesda games haven’t always been saved by modders, rather than Beth themselves. If we had to depend on Beth to fix their own game, Skyrim would’ve been abandoned long, long, long ago, same with Fallout 4.
That’s true and what worries me the most after wanting Starfield to do good. I’ve been playing Starfield for a bit only to find myself moving to Cyberpunk sooner than later lately.
I hope it does and I think it will but again with the reliance Bethesda puts on the community I’m nervous.
Anyway I’ve gotten much of the way through at 100 hours and have enjoyed it - definitely got my money’s worth - but I just sort of hit a wall. To be fair you’ll do that with most games but it seems like Stanfield is just bland.
Yeah, Bethesda games have always been… playable, I guess, but hardly any good, without modding, at least as far back as Oblivion. Morrowind was the last game they made that was just good, out of the box, without needing mods.
So I figured in a year or two Starfield will be good, with mods, just like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 were all bland at best on release, until mods made them good.
100% I actually think Starfield has the best bones, even if it has the worst meat, so to speak, so adding meat gives it a much higher ceiling in a few years time.
The problem is that starfield is modern warfare III of Bethesda but people trying to see it as next skyrim, Bethesda ai generated almost all this game and looped it in roguelite shape, the only things evolved is mechanics as you’ve said yourself, and again as you’ve said yourself, this game will be saved by modders
Oh I’m anti-Bethesda and Bethesda practices, I’m just sure it will eventually be a great game once the community steps in and fixes it. It isn’t an excuse for Bethesda, but rather admiration for the modding community, and an example of why FOSS and a rejection of the profit motive is so good.
i dont know why people shit on bethesda for “letting modders fix the game”
i dont really know any other developer that embraces the modding community as much as bethesda does, and i wish other games had the same amount of modding capability that bethesda games do
I think it’s fully possible to criticize Bethesda’s incomplete and highly flawed game design and praise their willingness to support the modding community with great tools at the same time.
The world is now full of technology that used to have real names, but is now called AI so that investors spunk themselves as they high five each other in shareholder meetings.
The president of Capcom can lick the wrinkles out of my sweat steamed scrotum if he thinks I’m buying another Capcom game after this.
Yeah, games cost more to make than they did on the SNES.
But theres also an absolutely massively bigger customer base buying more games than ever before. So if your big name games are failing to bring in big numbers, that sounds like you and your fellow executives need to step down and let someone who knows what customers actually want run the company. But I bet that thought never crossed his fuckin mind.
Just to add to what you mentioned, Capcoms Street Fighter 6 in my region on steam is $100 AUD, assuming you don’t want the deluxe or ultimate editions (Not that the store page bothers to explain the differences}. On top of that you can buy the Year 1 character pass for $45 which adds 4 characters. The ultimate pass for $75 which adds the previously mentioned characters and some cosmetics for those 4 characters. The soundtrack for $50 holy shit that’s an expensive soundtrack.
And on top of all that you can buy the games in game currency, fighter coins. Which are used to unlock costumes and characters including classic costumes. Wanna buy a character? You’ll never be able to buy just the right amount of coins, coz fuck you give us money.
It’s bad enough these people want to raise prices whilst making record breaking profits, but they monetize their games in so many different and often scummy ways on top of the purchase price.
I want to say thats an example of out of touch executives.
But we both know predatory practices like that wouldnt have gotten this far if there wasnt a plethora of short sighted idiots out there, with more money than sense, refusing to do without their instant gratification and, as a result, not only throwing literally mountains of money at predatory companies, but actively complaining online about how they wish they could get even more financially exploited.
The AAA market seems to be chasing a business model that isn’t there any more. I don’t know why game developers still chase photo realism, it isn’t what makes money.
There are still good AAA releases, it’s just that 95% of AAA games are not worth the price.
I would argue the old business model still works, it’s just that most AAA games studios don’t follow that model anymore. Back in the day, a full priced game didn’t have DLC or MTX, was an actual complete game, and focused more on the fun than the profit making. Games tried new ideas, they innovated instead of chasing whatever fad is popular at the time. It’s the modern AAA game business model that is the problem and doesn’t work anymore.
If 95% of the games aren’t worth the price, then there is something wrong with that business model.
Yeah, a full priced game might not have had DLC or MTX, but it was more expensive adjusting for inflation and didn’t have nearly the quantity or quality of in game assets as current games do.
And old games definitely chased fads, they were just different fads at the time fed in part by the differences in game economics.
Not to mention until it's actually photo-realistic, it looks uncanny. It's better to find a style and use that than to chase realism imo. But then again, these AAA games just add a bunch of foliage, some god rays, maybe a sprinkle of rain and people are oooh, aaah-ing and coughing up their cash.
This is all software, companies keep finding excuses to tack on “features” that increase development cost which eventually lead to necessary price increases.
In the professional world you will rarely ever hear project managers and leaders ask the question “would our customers rather pay extra for feature X or save money by sticking to their simpler feature set?” This is because development is nearly always started with the long term goal of incorporating a feature into the product to increase the overall “value” of the product. This increased “value” of the product then means that the company should charge more for it.
To be fair, while unreal isn’t FOSS, it’s source code is at least openly viewable so devs would find it easier to make easily transferable alternatives
Also if theirs a engine bug you can crack it open and fix it yourself, handy if you’re not a AAA studio who has epic Devs on speed dial. Though I believe you do have to share any code alterations with epic if it’s hosted on a private repo
I can see why you would think that, but there’s alot of stuff unreal just isn’t that good at, things like 2d games are a massive struggle to work with in unreal, so it’ll gain more popularity, but mainly from devs making 3d games with a focus on high graphics
My issue with it in Starfield (and any game in its genre) is that the game seems to be confused about how it feels about encumbrance. Am I supposed to be looting everything I see? If not, then why is it the major income source, why are so many random objects worth selling and taking? If so, why do merchants have such low credit stores? Am I supposed to be collecting cool stuff to display? If not, then why all the display objects? If so, why have my companions constantly nag me about bringing junk? Why make ship storage so low? Or, am I supposed to be carefully considering what I want to bring as loot? If so, why is there so much of it and why isn’t there some way to quickly see what’s worth taking? Am I supposed to spend an hour after each combat carefully weighing what to take home?
It’s entirely unclear what they want. If they want looting to be less of a game loop, junk items should have no sell value and missions should be more of a reward, and item value/kg should be easy to assess. We should be quickly able to discard valueless items from inventory. Otoh if they want looting to be a bigger part of the game, I should be able to readily carry and sell my loot and doing so shouldn’t make me so rich it breaks the economy.
It’s one of my main complaints, not so much about starfield, but pretty much anything in this genre. It feels like they can’t tell if they want me to loot everything or not, the design is fundamentally at odds with itself.
I have a friend who says it needs to go one of two ways - either encumbrance matters hard and is super realistic, where you can reliably carry 30-60 lbs of gear for long distances, and that’s it, or it just doesn’t exist and you can lug around as much shit as you want and abstract out the rest, because the middle ground where PCs can carry like 250 lbs of shit leads to a game where you’re constantly just sorting through your inventory about the best vendor trash you think you can packrat to sell while moving through a dungeon, and that’s slow and unfun. The low carry weight turns every interaction into “is it better than my current gear?” which is really easy to answer in the moment, and when weight doesn’t matter, you just hoover it up and sell it when you get a chance.
I don’t agree with that dichotomy in a game like this. Certainly in the deeply simulationist roguelike I stan (cataclysm dark days ahead plug), that’s appropriate, but this game is fundamentally silly and arcade style so I don’t think the trouble has anything to do with realism. The solution I’d have personally in something like this is to eg. allow you to carry up to 6 weapons, 1 of each wearable type of item, and a certain amount of aid items in your “active” inventory, and then have everything else you loot automatically go to your ship inventory which is huge or infinite, but restricted in how you can access it (personally I’d still have ship inventories be finite, but enormous). Let perks increase your number of slots in a particular category, rather than increasing carry weight. Have resources and ‘notes’ go to the ship automatically as well, since it doesn’t really have any impact on the game to be carrying these on your person. Plus, I’d do what modders have been doing for a while and make decorative junk items have no value or weight. Let me pick up as many blenders as I want, I’m just going to use them to decorate my juice bar and play house, who frigging cares.
I’d also remove vendor credit caps, but make the amount of cash you get from loot pretty trivial compared to what you get from missions, so it’s just not that appealing to sell 15 cheap machineguns. And while I’m wishlisting, I’d love to be able to set up an auto-sell filter, eg. ‘sell non-unique weapons below a particular dps’
Yes and it flows through to the skill system too. 8 points for carrying more crap across yourself and the ship, and 4 more for increasing companion inv. Even more if you include pockets upgrades on suits.
Are these good skills? Not for the player to choose but to be available in the game. What’s the balance here? What’s the decision, carry more crap at the expense of doing more damage? Is that good choice to give the player? How do you balance encounter difficulty around that? You can’t the player has to choose encounters based on their gimped pack rat skills.
Every part of the game needs a single big mod overhaul to pick a coherent direction.
My local game store had Starflight for Sega Genesis for $80 in 1991 when I was just out of high school working minimum wage at an ice cream parlor in Pismo Beach and I found a way to make it happen.
The classic CEO fanfic… They also learn everything they need to be a successful businessman by selling lemonade in a stall
From what I found, the minimum wage in California (where Pismo Beach is) in 1991 was $4.25/hour. If he worked 20 hours a week, that’s $340/month before taxes. He almost certainly would’ve been a student at the time since he would’ve been 20 that year. I don’t know what funding he would’ve had, but it honestly sounds doable for 1991
Not to mention Randy didn’t have the same alternative high quality games to buy for way less than $80 back then. The price of top games was the price, now there is so much good stuff for less. Why should we pay $80 for yet another borderlands?
His father worked for the U.S. Intelligence as an engineer, I really doubt he had any financial problem that the “I found a way to make it happen.” is anything different them “I asked for daddy’s money”
Can’t say I know either. It’s definitely tongue-in-cheek and I don’t believe ActiBlizzard has managed to make their game fun on purpose for a second. That said, patching out the fun would imply they know what they’re doing when I’m unconvinced they’re good enough at game to purposely make a game tedious.
Accidents happen. Your finger slips and suddenly your game is full of Nazi symbols. Happens all the time. Also, I get the gist of Garriss's response, but mentioning that he had men and women at his house and his mother was always present just makes things sound weirder than a simple denial. Sounds like a horrible situation all around.
Sear the name Aspyr into your mind, and look out for them when they redo old star wars games like this. An underwhelming experience is what I've come to expect from their attempts at Jedi Outcast/Academy and Republic Commando on Switch.
The best you can expect from them is bare minimum passably running games, sort of the antithesis to Night Dive
Sear the name Embracer into your mind. This is what’s going to happen with any studio owned by them. This is what ruthlessly taking a blowtorch to all of your studios headcounts gets you.
Generally speaking, game devs never like putting out a bad product. It’s a creative industry, and one that people go into because they love games (otherwise they’d be working in fintech where the pay is much better). I guarantee it was Embracer who made the call to launch this product in its current broken state, and probably also Embracer who put so little money aside for server infrastructure.
The industry did this to itself, and while i cannot imagine the pain and stress of working 80hrs+ and hitting dead lines…no one pulled the brakes on the train, covid revealed how absolutely deficit heavy the gaming community was operating under. this happened once before, history isn’t repeating but its dropping and spitting hell fire rap bars
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