I just started last night, but that was immediately the vibe I was getting. Not a bad thing so far, but I never did finish Skyrim, so I guess I'll see if this goes the same way...
Bethesda didn’t evolve over the past 10 years. They just added some ambient occlusion and increased the resolution of their textures. The game engine was OK when when Skyrim came out, but it’s really kind of embarrassing that the exact same issues still remain in 2023.
I’ve only finished eg. Skyrim or Fallout 4 both once, but I’ve got gods know how many zillions of hours in them, especially after installing Sim Settlers 2 for FO4. I like the worlds, I just don’t care much about the story and the games don’t make me care about the story
Starfield sounds like an okay game but all the PR responding to complaints sounds like an absolute disaster. Stop letting Todd answer these things directly
So far, Starfield is exactly like Skyrim in space to me. There’s as many carefully crafted cities, and quite a few carefully crafted locales. There’s just a lot more space in Starfield (estimated about 500x more. Skyrim is 15sq miles, and those 1000 planets are each a couple square miles ingame). Sounds like there may be less hand-crafted content in Starfield than Skyrim, but that’s hard to tell.
I’m definitely not finding Starfield to be claustrophic. On the contrary, a bit agoraphobic.
I had agoraphobia growing up. I know exactly what it is. And I had moments of it exploring the planets. I found myself hugging to keep buildings in range and not wanting to stray out into the great wide open. For some odd reason, I got more of that in Starfield than in NMS.
I’m also still fairly early into the game, so perhaps I’ll spend more time indoors than I have so far.
EDIT, also, it kinda is the opposite of claustrophobia in some ways. There are some overlaps and nuances (both fears sometimes include fear of crowds). I had a grandparent with really bad claustrophobia who never used an elevator in her life. Ironically, we could relate on a lot. But they were still opposite issues.
I don’t know, been agoraphobic for quite some time. Never had problems in elevators (alone), but trains or tunnels are the worst. Guess that’s why it’s hard for me to imagine how a game could ever transport that.
I’m approaching that, but I have to admit I take my time and revisit towns a lot.
I’ve only gone to a dozen dungeons so far that were hand-crafted. There were literally hundreds of them in Skyrim. I’d love to get real numbers.
So far, I am enjoying the hell out of the game, if my lack of twitch reflexes is hurting that a lot. I keep having to juggle between ship upgrades (my Mantis keeps dying to small fleets more than 10 levels lower than me) and face-to-face. Usually by now in other Bethesda games, dying is rare. I’m too stubborn to drop the difficulty, though, so I suppose that’s on me.
There’s a pirate fleet in orbit around the planet I want to build my first output. Last 5 times I tried to go there, fleet keeps showing up and killing me. That’s somewhat annoying.
Save in space often. There’s a semi common bug I’ve just run into that will cause your ship to vanish and it somehow retroactively removes it from all previous saves. No recreateable way to get it back. The only thing that saved me was a previous save where I was in orbit, still lost a few hours of progress.
Sadly, this may mean the days of homebrew programming for the 2600 are at an end. AtariAge is where all those programmers sold their wares, along with homebrews for other platforms like Intellivision and ColecoVision. I’ll have to head back over there for the first time in a while to see what they say about it.
Atari acquires massive Atari archive (AtariAge) after revealing a ‘new’ 2600 that takes cartridges recaptures their intellectual property rights over former abandonware
From a hardware perspective, that's been true since just after the 1983 crash, when it was sold to Jack Tramiel's company -- even before the Lynx and Jaguar. The software side was split into Atari games which has an even longer history of being passed around.
They have a tiered system where important NPCs can't die until conditions are satisfied, wonder if the condition to die was satisfied but dialog still got delivered?
Sniping pirates and leaving them sitting in odd poses is oddly sad. Sometimes they freeze in place sitting on a couch or whatever. Low G has some weird stuff going on when you kill someone too, although watching dead bodies slowly float down is a neat touch.
He has pinned a comment on the first video saying audio won’t be a problem going forward. Not sure if that’s for the videos already out, or for a new batch of videos though, haven’t seen the first batch yet.
The author’s arguing that BG3 makes Starfield look like a shallow RPG by comparison. Their broader point is that Starfield is behind the times compared to most RPGs released in the last couple decades, even compared to something like Fallout 3.
It's even better when Bethesda themselves describes Starfield as the "next-generation of RPGs". It's the same type of Bethesda game that I've been playing for 15+ years just with a new coat of paint. If this is the next-generation, then the future has no ambition whatsoever.
The game seems (to me) to essentially be FPS, Sci-Fi Skyrim, with some space fight minigames. There’s a lot of stuff you can do, but the main storyline is pretty short, the AI sucks, and most of the appeal is side content and looks.
That’s what I expect from Bethesda, and that’s what they delivered. It’s only really “next gen” in the procedural generation department, so it’s basically a regular Bethesda game, with a little bit of experimentation thrown in. That’s what Bethesda delivers, and they deliver pretty consistently.
I’m guessing there will be a ton of cool mods in the next few years for a deeper story, interesting space combat, etc.
For sure. That’s just how articles have to be titled to get clicks unfortunately. It can be annoying, but it helps keep journalism alive, so you take the good with the bad.
Everything time this dude opens his mouth, I get an urge to wear an eyepatch. But hey, if he’s as rich as he alludes here, that shouldn’t be a problem, right?
Disclaimer: My comment is a reaction to the stuff Todd and his minions said in the article, not necessarily about the game itself. I haven’t played Starfield yet. I just find the statements really weak and want to express why I see it that way.
Yeaaahh that’s nice for maybe a couple of hours, but then it starts to get boring. That’s not how you keep players engaged, although there are of course those who don’t find that boring at all.
We’re not astronauts, we’re not there. Astronauts had the thrill of the voyage through space, stepping on the moon and feeling with ones own body how it is to walk on the moon’s dust in low gravity. Also astronauts had and have a shitload of scientific equipment and experiments to carry out, i.e., a purpose beyond the mere jolly walking.
If they were just there for walking and that for days, weeks, months, they would get bored pretty fast as well.
Take a look at No Man’s Sky. Similar problem. The procedural generation algorithm made planets look familiar after you’ve seen a couple. There is nothing new. Exploration became unrewarded. But Hello Games has massively improved on that over the years and produced a game where you can sink dozens of hours without getting bored so easily.
No Man’s Sky still has the same problem it began with, although the landscapes are vastly improved. It doesn’t matter what planet it is, there’s nothing to distinguish it from the last planet other than what species owns the system, the flavor of hazard present, and the overall color.
No Man’s Sky honestly has not enough planets with just dead barren empty planets. At least in Starfield, there’s some magic in seeing actual fauna. You don’t get that feeling in No Man’s Sky because you’ve seen fauna and flora on the last 30 planets you’ve been to. You need those empty planets to make the planets with life actually feel special.
No Man’s Sky still has the same problem it began with, although the landscapes are vastly improved. It doesn’t matter what planet it is, there’s nothing to distinguish it from the last planet other than what species owns the system, the flavor of hazard present, and the overall color.
Regarding the variety and interesting features of the bare planets, I tend to agree. My point was rather that there is more to do now and the fun with - even familiar planets - lasts longer.
No Man’s Sky honestly has not enough planets with just dead barren empty planets.
This is not correct. The amount of more dead planets immensely depends on - spoiler alert -
spoilerthe galaxy you’re in. NMS has different galaxies with different distributions for lush or dead planets. This also has some effects on the difficulty.
You don’t need to. There are different possibilities for switching galaxies. The simplest ones would be to use portals which is accessible very early in the game.
Okay, but from my understanding, in order to change galaxies, I have to find a portal, figure however to use the portal, and then switch galaxies.
For someone whose put in a few hours into the game multiple times as the game has been steadily updated, I didn’t know about portals or even that switching galaxies was even a thing. So telling me I’m incorrect because it’s NG+ COULD have fixed it for me is pretty disingenuous. How am I suppose to know that after going through 6 more galaxies that I can get what I wanted from the start?
Okay, but from my understanding, in order to change galaxies, I have to find a portal, figure however to use the portal, and then switch galaxies.
As soon as you can use the space anomaly (which happens very early) you already have a possibility. But apart from that, sure, it still takes a bit of effort and is not an option available when starting the game. The latter would be a nice idea though.
I didn’t know about portals or even that switching galaxies was even a thing. […] How am I suppose to know that after going through 6 more galaxies that I can get what I wanted from the start?
By using an internet search engine of your choice.
But I get what you mean as this is not clearly communicated right from the beginning in the game and something to be discovered. So your best chance to know this, besides doing the story missions, is to talk to other players or by curiously clicking on some suitable links in the NMS wiki.
The planets being mostly empty is fine. In fact, I think they’re too full if anything. You’re not meant to travel on the planet’s surface for long. You explore a bit if you think you want to build an outpost there, but otherwise you just move on. Most of the “content” is in pre-built areas. Enemy encounters almost always take place in hand crafted facilities, and usually it’ll be for some kind of quest so you land right near it.
The outpost system is where the procedural planets come in. You need to explore some to find the right spot to build with the resources you want. The content there is the building, not the planet. The landscape will effect it some, but mostly it’s whatever you make of it.
That said, the outpost system fucking sucks right now. You have to send resources between outposts with “links”, which take goods into a container and store them in linked containers. All solid goods go in one type, and the same for liquid, gas, and manufactured. I have all of my resources trickling into a main base, so I have all resources available there. This has caused my storage to back up and there’s no way to filter out items you don’t want. Then no resources can come in so you have to go to your storage and clear whatever is clogging it. There’s also no way to delete items as far as I’m aware, so you just dump the excess resources on the ground where they’ll remain forever. It’s really stupid. This is my storage solution for now.
All the crates flow into the next one, so it’s functionally one massive storage container, but with 15 seperate inventories I have to go through to get anything out. There’s also no stairs object you can build, or anything like it, so I stacked cabinets into a sort of access staircase. It’s really bad, but it’s what works for now.
Just a tip if you start playing and build a main base, build it on a low gravity planet so you don’t have as much of a problem if you stack stuff like this.
At least if the Telvanni got their way I’d be able to levitate up to my crates! (I just realized, I may TCL to use the crates because there isn’t a good alternative built into the game systems.)
Yeah, outposts seemed to me to be the thing that Starfield was designed and marketed around, but it’s so jank. So many basic things missing and so many quality of life failures. It’s like they didn’t even test it themselves first.
There’s one part in the story that you need to build a thing in a shop or an outpost, but it doesn’t require you to really build an outpost. I did it so I can have any supplies for upgrading things without too much effort. I think that was a mistake, but now I’m too invested. Lol.
That reminds me of how annoyed I get with Satisfactory as well…
As a Factorio player, this could all be handled so much better in both games, but Starfield is particularly bad. It’s like they never even tried building outposts before launch. So many basic functions are missing.
Yeah, and without any way to actually manage the resources. I want to like it, but I see so many issues that should be easy to solve that they just didn’t. Sure, it’ll be fixed with mods and maybe DLC, but that shouldn’t be required for basic UX.
Another one of my big gripes with outposts is that there is no way to view your existing outposts. There’s not a list, and definitely no way to view what an outpost is producing. Hell, you can’t even view what an outpost is producing when you’re there. It’ll tell you the total quantity produced of everything combined, but not of what. It’s bad.
I’ve played Starfield and it’s fantastic. There’s so much story. The world-bulding is different because there’s literally 1000+ worlds and they’re mostly uninhabited. I’m not sure what else you would expect. There are some huge, in-depth cities and some beautiful landscapes. But there’s also empty deserts and plains, just like we see everywhere in space.
Yeah, the first thing I did when getting to the core was to generate an ancestral galaxy so that there would be more dead worlds. Didn’t like having every place overrun with life.
This is getting a lot of flak, but I mostly agree. I have enjoyed the exploration of random planets as a pleasant aside to quests. Yes, they’re dull. It’s a lot of scanning flora and fauna, if they exist. Wandering slowly around.
But in that sense, it’s actually one of the most immersive activities in the whole damn game. If Starfield has an issue with anything, it’s immersion.
One thing I didn’t like about NMS, frankly, is that every planet seems to be teeming with life. It makes that life feel uninteresting when you find it, because there is no yin to the yang.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne