I’ll be honest, I had never even heard the name. Neither of the company, nor of any of their products. Still sucks for the employees of course, the current downturn is huge and as it accelerates and more and more investors pull out, the money the C-suites care about disappears and they panic even more about their bonuses so they fire and shutter even harder.
The made-up money that is the stock market can sadly have very real effects on employees’ livelihoods. :( But of course not on the CEOs who happily cash their 6-/7-digit base salary and then just fuck off to the next company they can drive into the ground.
It’s crazy impressive. Especially on a technical level. But it feels like a tech demo more than a game almost. It’s still fun to idle time away in, but it’s not engaging. At all. It’s brain idle time. In a positive way, but also no more than that.
In this case I’d call that a positive statement. That’s what I was looking for when I decided to get the game… I’m not going to shell out my dimes to Bethesda hoping for disco elysium, I basically want something that makes demands of my brain just a little more than solitaire or minesweeper.
I don’t really agree with it not being ‘engaging’ though, I guess depending on what you mean. I’m not staying up at night wondering what’s gonna happen next, but I’m staying up past my bedtime designing space ships and then running out of cash and going and doing a fun loot-and-shoot mission to get more money to build more space ships. That ain’t bad.
Not necessarily but yea it trades the bespoke environments for generated ones that aren’t so dissimilar.
I think it makes for interesting comparison. Both space traveling games, one comprised of specially designed levels navigated by menus, the other less variety but you actually journey to them and given the sheer number you can actually discover and name a planet no one’s ever been to.
Both valid but I think starfield shouldn’t really advertise in exploration. Unlike NMS it’s far more narrative based.
Both valid but I think starfield shouldn’t advertise really advertise in exploration. Unlike NMS it’s far more narrative based.
Yep. There are three space games on the market that are not too far apart: NMS, Elite: Dangerous, and Starfield. They have similarities, they have differences, and they have different target audiences.
I told my buddy the other day that it was Bethesda Menu Simulator 2023, and I wasn’t wrong. I was working on my outpost, so I’d place some stuff, go to star map, select the planet with the material, pick a landing spot, land, get up, mine ore for 5 minutes, fast travel to ship, repeat 2-3 more planets, choose the outpost, land, place some more stuff. Then repeat.
i find it less headache to just sit in UC distrobution and fast forward 24 hours to keep reseting inventory to get all the mats I need to build, at least my starter shit.
Or, and I know this is a crazy idea, Bethesda could have made a game that has enough content to fill the space (pun intended) they created. Yes. I can run back to my ship through the mined out area I just cleared just to prove a point that the game is as flawless as you’d like to believe. Or, I can offer one fair critique of the game.
I’m looking forward to what modders do with the canvas Bethesda has provided.
Nah I mean you can just fast travel off the planet without first having to fast travel back to your ship, a few less loading screens and menu interactions right there.
Honestly, I didn’t even think to just go to another planet without stopping by my ship first. That’s somehow… worse? I thought it was super weird when I realized I could do it from the outpost without a ship nearby, but hadn’t thought to just fast travel everywhere all the time.
coming from elite dangerous, flying in NMS feels incredibly simplified. landing is literally “push a button to land”. either way, they both beat starfield in that department
Totally it is but that’s the style. The game isn’t trying to simulate complexity, it’s more a kick back and relax game masquerading as a prog-rock album cover. Pressing X to let your ship land itself gives you just enough time to hit a joint and make a plan.
that may be true, but starfield has some fun quests and interesting characters, which makes the world feel real and not like im the last human being in the universe
Also I saw that cutscenes once before making it as far as you describe, I don’t even remember how, pretty sure it was midway through act 2. But it’s definitely a semi generic cutscene for when you lose in a particular type of way.
Did this game focus on anything in particular and do that well? Exploring isn’t it.
I’m tired of being negative gamer. This game looks fun even if it isn’t mind blowing, but seeing as I’ve never played a Bethesda game I think I’m just as likely to play one of the older games because they look about as good.
Personally it feels like a lot of the promise of Mass Effect: Andromeda was channeled into Starfield and they took the launch version of the story in No Man’s Sky and ran with it. It definitely stands on the shoulders of other games but it is a reasonably solid iteration.
counterpoint: there’s not a single “amazing” game of this genre. Elite Dangerous does the space sim perfectly, but it’s boring apart from that. No Man’s Sky has the wonder and exploration, but every planet is functionally the same. Starfield expands on No Man’s Sky with a comprehensible story and actual gameplay. Star Citizen will never come out. Did i miss anything?
There does seem to be some people out there who are just radiating negativity about this game even more so than most.
I played a good few hours last night and it’s Skyrim in Space which is what I wanted.
I don’t know if it’s the Xbox console exclusivity that’s bringing fanboys out the woodwork or just that people like to attack a big, hyped up release like they did with Cyberpunk, but it’s brought out the worst in people.
Only the bugs are gone. Weird design decisions and some horrendous mechanics are still here. It’s still isn’t an incredible game, but not a bad game either.
I have MSFS2020 and enjoy completing long haul flights. literally a whole workday spent where I see nothing but cockpit controls and the sky through the window, with no interaction needed due to autopilot. then I bring her in to land 10 hours later.
Very different games and very different expectations of effort spent. I’ve space trucked a lot in Elite, spending hours going back and fort. But it was never dull, more of a relaxing experience.
That comment stems from games failure to live up to its promises.
This game was marketed as an explorers game with 1000 planets to see, for example.
None of those planets have even the half of the content Skyrim/Fallout has. None of those planets are barren as Elite’s planets, either. You can’t traverse them more than 30 minutes, so it doesn’t even scratch NMS itch. People that liked the exploration of any of those four games would dislike this games exploration very much.
The person above was probably expecting a more lively game, like any other Bethesda game and got whatever this is instead. It’s completely justified to be disappointed.
Game engine limitations, apparently. Say a thread on exactly this earlier today.
Agree it is much poorer for lacking them. It’s immersion breaking being in the far future, zipping around on an interstellar craft, yet being forced to explore slowly on foot. I really can’t even use the ship? Cmon.
I’m not sure the article convinces me this’ll be more than a reskin of stellaris, which is my most played game of all time, but given that this is my favourite IP of all time…? Can’t say I won’t buy it on launch day.
My ideal Star Trek game would be a first-person immersive sim where I can just be a random citizen in the galaxy and just… Live there. Maybe I join Star Fleet. Maybe I join the Marquis. Or I could be a Klingon or a Borg, or one of the Dominion’s warrior slave dudes addicted to drugs.
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?
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Aktywne