I haven’t played Starfield yet. That being said, I think I will enjoy most planets being rather dull (as long as you still occasionally have reason to go there). I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.” One of the bigger reasons (aside the gameplay usually not being quite to my liking) why I don’t play MMOs anymore is, because about every MMO culminates in 80% of the people wearing “the armor of fabled legends” and being “Slayer of Demonlord and Demigod Sckholzhlak”.
I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.”
Counterpoint: it doesn’t make everything/everyone unremarkable, it just raises the standard and the bar for what remarkable is. Imagine using that argument for modern graphics, game design, etc, and that you want things to be lackluster because it really highlights the occasional times that they aren’t.
I kind of think it does apply to modern graphics and game design in the same way. A fast paced action shooter still needs moments where you catch your breath, it’s never just an endless constant flood of enemies. A visually beautiful game still has bits that aren’t particularly interesting or you’d get an overdose of visual information and wouldn’t be able to identify what was important.
Similarly, starfield has a lot of small barren moons that don’t have a lot of resources. They are boring compared to the green worlds (there are tons of these too though, which every repeat of this thread has glossed over), but they still have stuff going for them. I spent my evening last night exploring a smuggler base that I randomly fell into while looking for a place to put an aluminum mine on a barren moon. The night before it was a (very cool) mission on an abandoned mining platform.
However, in the process of going to and from these sites, I definitely felt like I was travelling across a barren, dusty moon. That helped the feel. Both those quests had storylines that were inherently tied to the fact that the setting was a barren, dusty moon, rather than a teeming, thriving planet.
Bottom line, I think this one over-shared article says nothing of importance. If you go to one of these ‘boring’ moons there’s lots to do, just not ‘explore and identify the planetary life’ kind of stuff. you can tell at a glance which planets are more likely to have settlements and things from space, and there’s more of them than any one person can explore, so it really doesn’t matter that there are also a bunch that aren’t like that.
Fair point. I would agree to say there should be a healthy middle ground. I think coming across theme park-like spectacle around every corner would remove a lot of immersion and most authenticity (specifically trying not to default to “realism” because then we’d specifically want 99,999% of areas to be lifeless rock) not only from Starfield but many many games. Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption and the Metal Gear series would be incredibly different games, if it was just from one action sequence to another and then a beautiful story cutscene immediately and with only loading screens separating them from each other.
I guess I’m trying to say that immersion into and attachment to a game is increased if you give opportunity for (or sometimes force) the player to calm down. Red Dead 2, for example, does this masterfully by its generally slow and deliberate pace for most actions (cooking steak by actually making you hold the meat over fire for a couple seconds, making you walk/ride for long passages to get somewhere even during missions, etc.) and by sprinkling in quite a number of relaxing quests, like watching a movie with your girlfriend, in a game that’s mainly known for shooty tooty cowboy action.
To wrap up that wall of text, I guess I’ll see if the ratio of interesting tidbit for every dull landscape is too low for me in Starfield once I get my hands on it c:
Update: Game’s good, if your expectation was “Space game made by Bethesda”. I like it and am very happy with the amount of barren planets for every lush world. Sure, they lack the “discover flora and fauna” activities but there’s still plenty fun stuff to do.
there are definitely dull planets, but there are also planets i have explored just for the hell of it and found a lot of cool stuff, like a facility run entirely by robots and the robots tell me not to interfere with their work or i will die
The extreme is already a hard sell over the deck. It is barely more powerful for much larger price, and it is considerably less frame-time consistent than the deck. Buying anything less powerful is a waste.
Tbh I'm not really a fan of this stance either. If I'm buying a sequel I expect meaningful improvements, otherwise you're just ripping me off for something that could have been a dlc or expansion to the first game.
Tbh, a large part of payday2’s problems stem from being built on a racing game engine. Redoing pd2 on unreal straight would be of course a lot of work, but the end result would be a better product that I would pay for. Payday3 on the other hand doesn’t look like something that I would enjoy based on the fact unlike pd2.
Didn’t play it but I had to drop PD2 with about 200 hours on it after all the microtransactions got too much to deal with. Coupled with the fact that hosts could leave games in the middle of a heist with no punishment and risking your account being banned for accidentally getting on a crew with a hacker, the game lost a lot of its appeal.
It is basically impossible to be banned at all from playing payday 2. The worst you can do is equip invalid stuff, which marks you as a cheater and most people kick marked cheaters.
Idk my account was banned for about a month within the first year of the game coming out because a hacker started spawning infinite money bags on the Harvest bank. It took about a month of emails with support to get my account unbanned. It’s possible that they’ve since slacked off on enforcement, but I haven’t played the game in easily 5 years at this point.
Payday 2 did two things that drove me away: fundamental changes to the gameplay long after release that did not improve it (heavyhanded stealth nerfs), and an absolute mountain of DLC, complete with power creep.
I will be waiting quite a while before touching Payday 3 because I want to see how they will monetize it. Remember, it’s up against the likes of Deep Rock Galactic which is not at all abusively monetized. We do not need to suffer that shit again.
I mean, to be blunt, the game was never going to beat PAYDAY 2. PD2 is years of updates and content additions to make it fun despite the shitty engine, PAYDAY 3 is a brand new game with a lot of potential but all of it unrealized.
Appreciated but strange. Did they look at the sub cost and went nah or something else? I mean could have just wanted it for the beta but idk seems overkill (heh heh).
I don’t understand why anybody would pay for it while it can be cracked… sure its likely only one person in the world can crack it atm but if she wants to crack it she can and then it’s gonna be uploaded and repacked by multiple people.
I used to play PD2 with international friends, but latency being what it was I could only really play loud missions. Here’s hoping modern netcode somehow solves the issue of being spotted by guards that are behind a wall from my perspective.
Didn’t a mod get it kinda working not that long ago? The trains were still moving and the stations were there on release, CDPR just put walls up or disabled the doors to the stations/trains. They’re a little jank to ride but it was doable. Felt like CDPR just decided focusing on cool cars was more worth the effort
So, do people actually play Pay Day? All I know is that it’s a game. Haven’t seen trailers, haven’t seen anyone play it on Twitch, it’s like a “fake” game that’s a joke that’s been going on for a really long time
I mean the last one was released in 2013, it’s not exactly super relevant but if you’re that unaware of it I assume you were playing habbo hotel or whatever little kids played 10 years ago.
Holy shitballs. It feels like just yesterday we were firing up payday 2 on release day with a bunch of friends and risking having a seizure at any moment on the “start heist” page.
I figured yeah payday 2 was like 5 years ago, time for a new one. 10 fucking years… i need a drink!
Oh man, I feel old now. It was so fun when it came out. I remember the first time I solo stealthwd the nightclub. I kinda got burnt out when it went more absurd. Like after John wick.
Some people, like me, are probably just waiting to see what happens. Payday 2 was awesome, but after release it got microtransactioned and piecemeal DLC'd to high fucking heaven. I don't care if the beta is good, I want to see what it'll become before I get invested.
Seeing most of the fixes go towards that instead of immersion kinda… You’d think they highlight those immersive aspects more. The mods are sure as hell all about immersion including working stock markets and such.
Does anyone have any suggestions for horror games that aren’t frustratingly difficult? I feel like with most horror games, the scare factor wears off after the second restart because game developers think that one-hit enemies and no weapons makes things scarier, but I disagree.
The last real horror game that I played was The Iron Lung and while it was great, the total game has almost no replay value and can be completed in under an hour.
SOMA is pretty good for that, it's got a mode where the monsters can't hurt you. I played on that mode and enjoyed it immensely for its story and environmental merits.
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Aktywne