In comparison to BG3, the dialogue and stories are incredibly bland in Starfield.
If you don’t compare it to BG3 though, then the dialogue and stories are still incredibly bland.
I swear every Bethesda game does this. For example, when you get three dialogue options, they all say basically the same thing, and they all set up the player to be dunked on by the NPCs response…
Or the only options are:
“wow! Incredible! I love kittens, good on ya kid!”
At least the stories were pretty good for the most part. Starfield’s story and lore are just so generic and boring, and the dialogue ranges from corny to just flatout awful. Even compared to previous Bethesda games, the story elements in Starfield are a yawn fest that feel like they were written by history majors and not people who love science fiction.
The ship builder is just tons of fun. I wish the controls were a little bit more obvious but once you get the hang of it, I think it’s my favourite in genre. I love building something neat and then going to check out the interior walkthrough, particularly. I think I need a save where I just cheat in millions of credits so i can experiment for a while
Is it? I find it pretty fun, sure games like everspace did it better, but that is literally a space dogfighting game lol.
NMS space combat is noticably worse in comparison, and some of the upgrade paths and the ability to adjust your reactor usage (very reminiscent of FTL) make it interesting enough for me.
Your ship is kinda like a player home you bring around with you. Having one that uniquely suits your needs and preferences is cool, and also I want a damn weapon workbench.
It’s what happens when you operate your company with an accountant mentality. The focus is 100% on money, and 0% on creativity.
They always realize too late that customers won’t just give you money, you have to offer them something decent in exchange, but accountants don’t know how to do that, which is why you NEVER let accountant craft the business strategy for a company.
If they try to offer suggestions, you scream at them to get back to their hole and count the money like they’re supposed to, and when their opinion is needed, it will be solicited, which will be NEVER.
The irony is that they actually have some pretty unique and creative ideas spread out in most of their open-world games despite the jokes about how they’re all the same. If they cared about making good shit and not just money, they could have a game that rivals or surpasses Grand Theft Auto.
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up??? Especially when you were already doing it.
And not to mention…
“Hey guys, what can we make that people really want?”
“I hear people all the time over the last decade asking for a new Splinter Cell game.”
“Yeah, ok, Brad. We’ll call that plan B… Every year with this asshole. Does anyone have any REAL ideas???”
Because fuck gamers, right, Ubi? Expedition 33 showed the world what current games makers can do when pricks in suits arent around to muddy the waters. The quicker UBI folds, and all that talent leaves to make something that they actually want to make the better.
I have a lifetime boycott of all things Ubisoft for this very reason. I bought game after game after game from the late 90’s until early 2000’s. 100% of them were legal purchases and with the CD in the drive… "please insert CD " error
Then I became the lead developer for gameloft.com and saw how completely incompetent the French leadership of the company is. Absolute morons to the highest levels.
Never another penny shall be conveyed to Ubi from my holdings.
edit: You wanna know what I’m talking about? Ok. They import the director from France. He does not speak English, he does not speak Quebecois, which is very different than Parisian French. He has no knowledge of the games industry whatsoever, but is a cherished family friend. He cannot communicate with anybody in written or verbal ways. He shows up for work at 10am and takes 2 hour coffee with other “leadership” and then lunch. Then he comes back from a 2 hour lunch, and him and come C-Level turnip laugh at his Billy Bass for 30 minutes. I am not making any of this up. This man installs a friend he met into the position of Executive Producer. The man’s previous experience was managing an Esso gas station. No embellishment. So I’m the Sr dev and I’m the fucking acting director, account manager, game designer, executive producer, producer, technical producer, project manager, director of production, developer, creative director, QA lead, every god damned thing just to get some corny-ass games produced.
edit2: Laughing at a Billy Bass. A Billy. Bass. Singing. Fish. Laughing at it uproariously.
They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.
My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.
He did some revolutionary things back then, Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park and Black & White were truly great games.
I would say those earlier games were influental to the whole industry, but only if Molyneux dropped dead around 2012. He missed the chance to remembered as a legend by living too long to become the arse of the joke.
This taxable individual, Kokott explains, was found to have bought and resold through “various forums, groups, and platforms such as Facebook, Discord, and Skype” enough RuneScape gold to earn €415,484—approximately $488,000 USD—between 2021 and 2023.
They then were ordered to backpay VAT because they made above 45k. Defendant says trading virtual currencies is like trading crypto, and VAT exempt. Government says its like selling a voucher instead.
Its corner cases like this one that make taxes complicated for regular people.
I also find it hilarious that tax lawyers and accountants will have to read that court decision.
This concept of a second screen show is so unbelievably fucking moronic… It’s your own damn fault if you’re not paying attention!
I have a second monitor that I play things on, and it’s either a stream of someone playing something similar or the same game, or it’s a show I’ve already watched and know the story of.
If I’m watching something new, then I’m watching it. To have stories dumbed down, or just butchered to suit tictok brainrotted people completely devoid of attention spans is so freaking depressing and only exacerbates the issue. But in the end I guess I get it, you’re out for a profit and it hurts to have a plethora of idiots rate you poorly because they weren’t paying attention and didn’t understand the story… Ughh…
While I hate googles tendency to kill everything I have to ask, did google really promise chromebooks as a gaming system? I always understood them as dirt cheap computers made to handle the basics of word processing and average web based applications. Ideal only to be school or work computers
Honestly I think that’s the constant problem of every “low cost computer” setup that comes out. They start out with an understanding of what they are… a cheap disposable alternative for doing the basics, after getting some momentum in that they cry about the lack of profit margins, keep adding to it to justify pricing them the same as regular laptops, but at the fundamental level do far less and they don’t sell for crap at that price.
Like say netbooks, it’s so commonly assumed the ipad killed the netbook… as a former netbook owner I disagree. I bought an acer aspire 1 when they were on sale for like $100, it was a really low powered, basic windows system. If I recall it was running win XP in the vista era. For me it was a good choice, a nice note taking, word document writing and basic web browsing computer with a decent battery life, and tiny enough to slip in a bag with little work.
I worked at staples at the time, and if I recall they were around $200 regular price, but frequently on sale for 100-150, and when they went on sale they sold like hotcakes. They had other netbooks in the 300-500 price range… I don’t think I ever saw one sell, and to this day I don’t get the appeal. You’d need more hardware if you were say, editing graphics… or playing games, or doing something more complex, but why would you do those things on a 10" screen. Same price you could buy a real laptop, bit bigger, but more importantly a comfortable screen size and a full sized keyboard. So in short, the netbooks went from a cheap option that can do the the main fundimentals of a PC slightly worse, for 1/3rd the price. To a… laptop that could do 80% of what a laptop can, on an uncomfortably tiny screen, for 100% of the price.
around the same time the ipad came out… for $500, the netbooks shifted their focus, more and more models in the $300-$700 price range. Nebooks shifted to being what I would effectively describe as… small little boxes, that do most of what a laptop does, much worse with a tiny screen… for the same price, maybe a bit more when comparing spec for spec.
Honestly i see the same with chromebooks. So you’ve got chromeos, which has less general computer support than regular linux. Can’t run MS office, slightly lesser game support. No special form factor or advantage for games like say the steam deck etc… No matter how you slice it you’ve got a computer, designed to do… say 70% of what you can on a regular laptop… for the price of… a regular laptop.
They're never gonna run demanding AAA titles, but Steam is full of simpler 2D and classic games they could handle. You could play Balatro or Stardew Valley on a Chromebook.
Hate to “umm ackshually” over what amounts to a difference of fictional rules, but for what it’s worth, vampires do have reflections in the World of Darkness setting. Only vampires of clan Lasombra (not playable in bloodlines) don’t have reflections since it’s their clan weakness.
Otherwise, if all vampires couldn’t have reflections, it would be incredibly easy to tell who’s a kindred and there would be no way of keeping up the Masquerade.
Whatever you are willing to pay, since they are most likely looking for a new job. They have experience in damage stacking and liability research. And stapling.
In a real ‘what if’ moment for Taito he even “made a prototype for a new games console, but that was not approved by the sales team as they were purely focused on arcade games.”
The Taito sales team, as it was back then, hovers in the background of Nishikado’s recollections like a ghost: it clearly exerted great influence on what the company would allow the creatives to make.
Marketing people are bunch of idiots. They stop real creativity and replace it with copies of what succeed somewhere else.
1983 was a uniquely American event. Japan and Europe were unaffected, and as no Japanese consoles had any success in the US at the time they wouldn’t have aimed for an American release anyway, while Europe only bought computers.
Other than GOTY edition of the first game, this entire series has LAN (so far), which is commendable and stupidly rare! I hope the GOTY edition doesn’t show that they’re nixing this for BL4 as well.
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