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.
For some reason, something as simple as using the F5/F8 as quicksave/quickload keys felt like a blast from the past. Maybe it’s been around the whole time and I stopped noticing, but it reminded me of playing old RPGs.
F9 was used in most Bethesda games for quickload. Not sure if this was a typo but AFAIK I only used quicksave before but it still counts as a hard save in BG3 which I appreciate.
Not only does it count as a hard save but there is 25 fucking slots for quick saves by default. And you can increase it. And you can quick save and quick load in the middle of a conversation, save scumming whatever skill checks you want if you’re a loser like me
Ubisoft is a textbook example of what happens when you pin your companies revenue on a small handful of IPs and milk them to the absolute fucking limit. I like assassins creed, but I’ve played enough of them for the rest of my life. Make something new my dudes.
You cheer this on, but what are the odds that saudi arabia buys them up?
How many things do you want owned by the worst country bar none for human rights? (yes I am aware the US is racing to catch up, but is nowhere near as bad per capita).
I’m not sure how much I should care. I haven’t bought a Ubisoft game in decades anyway. They don’t make anything I need, so it’s not like it’s an inconvenience to boycott.
Where did you read me saying it was their fault, or that I expected them to stop it?
I said neither thing.
All I am saying is it’s something to pay attention to, and its not good when media sources are bought by the saudis.
Why keep this in mind? In case there is ever somewhere that does make this relevant. Like maybe it should be in the eyes of the public more such that its a political talking point so regulating agencies are less happy with letting companies be sold to SA.
You took a leap from someone being excited about a company they hate hypothetically being bought, down their throat because they’re not as worried as you are about the hypothetical odds of the buyer being Saudi Arabia, and what downstream effects that might have on American culture.
You took a leap from someone being excited about a company they hate hypothetically being bought, down their throat
I’m just going to stop you right there. You’re reading in a whole lot of malice into a pretty benign comment pointing out why someone might care in spite of not caring about their games.
and what downstream effects that might have on American culture.
I don’t believe any specific country was named in the context of that point. The USA was only brought up to preempt comments derailing the point of my comment by bringing it up.
You underestimate my level of cynicism at this point. You also underestimate my disrespect for the average gamer. If they’re not lapping up one form of propaganda, they’re lapping up another.
Absolutely the case, but we can’t throw nuance to the wind just because bad things will continue to happen. SA propaganda is definitely note worthily worse than many other forms.
Whats more, I feel that gaming generally is more focused on trying to use marketting dark patterns to encourage spending than pushing any messages typically. This makes them, in my mind, even more vulnerable as they won’t even be expecting it as their viewpoints change over time.
Every now and then someone calls for a boycott, and I say that I’ve already been boycotting them all my life, and didn’t even know it.
Alternatively, sometimes there are calls to boycott something, and it turns out I’ve been boycotting them for years over some old atrocity. For instance, United Airlines gets boycotted regularly, but I’ve been boycotting them for decades, for lots of other shitty behavior (destroying guitars, beating up doctors who refuse to give up their paid-for seat, etc.), as well as having the highest fares in the business.
Honestly? I believe it. It was just a huge hodge podge of conspiracy theories and activist/terrorist groups that folk had vaguely heard about that would never have worked together. And said conspiracy theories tended to have a VERY fragile basis in reality. But also… shit like FEMA being an evil organization that is giving us all a plague has totally been a conspiracy theory for as long as FEMA existed… and just as questionable for why FEMA would be the org doing that. People see what they want to see and ignore what they don’t.
It is similar to how… based on a lot of the references he has used and his comments in interviews, I 100% believe that Kojima mostly wrote the MGSes apolitically. I firmly believe someone on his team actually cared, but those games are mostly just a bunch of action movie tropes (or outright scenes) combined with a very surface level understanding of nuclear weapons and reciting encyclopedia articles to sound smart.
Stuff like this always makes me think we need a “poe’s law but for politics”. And it always reminds me of Austin “Papa Bear” Walker shitposting in the Remap twitch chat during one of the keighleys. Trailer for the Call of Duty where you are fighting for The Gipper (?) and invading Generic Middle Eastern Country and blowing shit up for US interests and Austin just said (paraphrasing) “if I were in charge of marketing it would be this exact same trailer but you would know I was angry about it”.
I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.
I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”
Yeah, I believe Warren Spector has said before that the premise of Deus Ex was literally “what it every conspiracy theory was true”, and not really anything deeper than that.
I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.
It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).
I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.
That is one of those tell me without telling me deals.
All the “ai will take over a post truth society” bits and the focus on mercenaries was all over sci fi for decades by that point and a lot of the former goes back to a mix of the Frankenstein complex (which is literally creation myths) and the Reagan Nixon debate.
It is why there is so much truth in the torture Nexus memes.
Maybe? Any military presence on a mountain trail would make me break out the wipes and the poop bottle.
My point is more that it is one of those things that goes against “Kojima is a much less neocon version of Tom Clancy” that goes around.
The idea of Metal Gear as a tool to fire undetectable nukes from anywhere on the planet (that a giant walking mech can get to…) completely ignores that submarines are already doing that. And there really isn’t a defense to an ICBM unless you have Trigger themselves in the area of operations when the sub surfaces. The “defense” to an ICBM is to fire off all yours before it hits and make sure everyone dies. MAYBE Rex gives you one or two first strikes before the missiles start launching but… again, see “submarines”. The moment the first hit, President Solidus would say “ah no you di’n’t!” and have the subs surface and fire off their ICBMs and the end result would be exactly the same.
That also doesn’t get into how bad an idea any form of walking tank is (which, to be fair, was briefly acknowledged in MGS3). I love my Gundams and my Battlemechs but unless you have minovsky particle magic you just rapidly recreate the meta that thousands of house rules have failed to stop in Battletech: 1000 points of Atlas goes down REAL fast when you have even 500 points of effectively pickup trucks with gauss guns on the back. Jaburo wouldn’t have panicked and fed themselves to Kamille and Not-Char attacking. They would have grabbed their ATGMs and started leaning out of bolt holes to light those two up.
And if Rex hadn’t been inside of a giant missile silo (hmmm), it would have been lit up by a bombing run the moment someone saw it on satellite imagery.
But that is kind of my point. The MGSes, like Deus Ex, is mostly a hodge podge of conspiracy theories and cool concepts from other media. People see what they want in there and handwave the rest.
Does that mean the story is not political? Of course not (even if DX is inconsistent to the point it might be… Like… that Alex Garland Civil War might be less nonsensical in terms of sides somehow). But you can very much have an author(s) with no political intent make a political statement.
Im completelly opposide. Its maybe only AAA game im intrested in long time.
Mostly because of their track record. I have been playing GTA since the very first top down game and every main game in the series has pushed the games further.
Thinking how big leaps every game has done, i cant wait to see what kind of the beast 6 is going to be.
I just want trains to work in this new game. They never make trains work properly they’re always just indestructible juggernauts and are therefore boring. GTA V had submarines but not drivable trains.
I’m the same but I may just be getting older. Last game I was hyped for was Cyberpunk 2077 coming off of the stellar Witcher 3 and having followed both games I loved, W1 & W2. Sometime before it released, I just dropped all hype for it and haven’t felt the same after. Haven’t even played it yet either.
Today, I let myself be pleasantly surprised by games I never thought I’d like. I really liked Death Stranding and I’m waiting for its sequel but still no hype… I haven’t even seen the trailer yet and I doubt I will… I’ll buy it and go in blindly. Just have a PS for Sony’s once a year AAA and that’s it for AAA gaming. Most other days, its just AA or indie games on PC… which is where I find a lot more flavor. As an example, this month, I’ve played Minami Lane, MudRunner and Art of Rally and starting Tactical Breach Wizards soon.
I’m holding out some hope for GTA VI still. Reason being, while Cyberpunk promised to be super duper everything interconnected magic programming to follow an absolutely awesome but technologically realistic game (Witcher 3), I haven’t seen hype like that for GTA VI. The expectation is to get a well polished freeroam game with lots of fun toys to play around with, a story that’s hopefully long enough to be worth the game’s price, and a new Online mode that gets updates over time. Basically GTA V with a new city and a more polished game overall, but no exponential leaps - despite the fact that the budget is much larger than Cyberpunk.
But I mean MudRunner is also awesome. Couldn’t get into Death Stranding myself, just wasn’t feeling it. Should pick up Art of Rally soon. Tons of great AA and indie games out there if GTA VI flops indeed.
Because it will be full of micro transactions and bullshit content no-one asked for, with anti cheat horseshit that will pretty much be a virus on your computer.
Sad thing is that it’ll still sell millions because most people don’t even know when they are being served shit.
It’s just so meh. Another city, you’re a criminal doing crime. There are just games with much better stories or mechanics at this point. I don’t get the hype around it.
It feels like this has disaster written all over it.
Sorry if I’m harshing anyone’s vibe, but I can’t escape the feeling that a group of people whose main involvement in the games industry is as voice talent are basically saying “How hard could it be?” and not understanding that the answer is “Very.”
Ideally they would team up with an experienced studio to build something off of their creative ideas. But if they try to do this whole thing themselves, it has the makings of a Wha Happen? episode all over it.
Maybe it’ll work. They pulled off Vox Machina, so who knows. I’d certainly like to be wrong. But I can’t help but feel like we’ll all be talking about the fallout from this in five years, when eager backers are still waiting for the game they were promised.
Hey, if they’re actually securing funding for this instead of pushing the cost off onto eager fans, good for them. At least they’re doing one thing right. Unfortunately that only increases the potential for this to turn into a trash fire that sinks their whole company.
The potential for this project to sink their whole company would come from them being extremely reckless with the ample cash flow they’ve got right now, which this interview says they’re not, and hopefully they mean it. I don’t get the sense they’re trying to build an Immortals of Aveum or a Callisto Protocol.
Unfortunately with the upcoming FO4 patch in a few days, a lot of those mods are gonna be broken for a few weeks/months. Bad timing by Bethesda on that front.
The show caused me to finally buy FO4, and so I immediately hopped onto Nexus and downloaded the highest-rated mod collection for the game. It has over 700 mods, so something tells me I won’t actually be playing much of the game for a while yet. (I wouldn’t deign to play a modern Bethesda game without mods.)
i cloud game and luckily there’s back ups. but i boot the cloud, boot moonlight and click skse64… about 1.5 months skyrim will update. and its a pita. steam just be like that. it’s honestly why i havent tried fo4 lately. i wanna bad.
What i did with Skyrim was setting the update option in steam to only update when i launch the game. But then only launch the game with the script extender.
You’re gonna have to watch that mod count. I had to axe a bunch of my mods because the game kept crashing every few minutes due to scripts and visual stuff
That’s what I thought when I saw the number of mods in that pack, but after a bit of tweaking (a few mods that cause crashing in Linux) it’s been quite stable. I’m only about 10 hours in though.
Nowadays you can pick a collection and install it without having to worry about compatibility, someone else already figured it out! I think that’s worth using vortex
Wabbajack is even better! If you’re playing Skyrim, Nolvus is amazing and has its own installer, even installs an enb for you, you can choose between 4 or 5 of them
Can they please not? I’d rather not have Blizzard stay Blizzard, seeing what they did to WoW, SC2, D3, D4, DI, Overwatch and worst of all, Heroes of the Storm.
He is the one that still wanted to make Project Titan work. Overwatch was the crawl, PvE was suppose to be the walk and then they’d have the run with the MMORPG.
Have they done something to SC2? I quit playing that game years ago, but it seemed like they were done touching it, and it was still in its original glory.
The most recent expansion for WoW has been really good. Blizzard has been transparent with their changes and have been listening to the community. Recently the alpha for the next expansion has released and seems very promising with positive response from the community.
So I disagree, I’m glad microsoft is letting blizzard developers do their own thing. After the tumultuous expansion Shadowlands, a lot of the old guard for blizzard were removed and the current executive producer Holly Longdale has been doing a great job.
Oh I had not yet heard that they’re turning the ship around. That’s really really cool. After all this time I just stopped following stuff around it since it got so depressing over the years.
She was working on classic before being promoted to her current position. Regardless, the entire wow dev team has been incredible these past few months. There has been such an influx of news of upcoming content these coming weeks its almost hard to keep up. Hoping that they can keep on the gas as The War Within comes out.
I can’t speak to your preferences as there are multiple different ways to play an mmo. I can, however, speak to the community’s perspective and I have not seen the wow community be more positive about the current expansion since modern wow.
Its hard to judge community response for wrath or vanilla for a game made 16+ years ago (lots of people tend to looks things back with rose-tinted glasses).
I’ve been playing since MoP and started doing high end content in WoD. So from this perspective, I can say that I haven’t seen a more community response for the game since then, including legion. No endless grind for power, blizz being transparent about changes, and they are also listening to feedback.
Additionally, Shadowlands did a number of Dragonflight’s sales but recent reports indicate that more subscribers are coming back to retail wow and the expansion does not have the post-expansion drought of subscribers.
Not Wrath or Legion good, if the numbers are any indication. While the community has generally been positive, Dragonflight simply hasn’t sold very well.
The expansion’s over, anyway. They have officially moved the expansion cadence to only two major patches from three.
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