Starfield is currently a 4-5/10 game and by the time Modders will be done with it, probably a 9/10 game (10/10 if someone mods the whole main story out of the game).
But that's not what modders should be wasting their time on. They shouldn't be fixing the game.
Besides, the changes and oversimplifications Bethesda has made to the engine and the extraordinary announcement that the modkit will take a year to be released, will vastly delay the amount and quality of mods that will be released for the game.
Baldur's Gate was a 7/10 game on release, mostly due to the issues with Act 3. But they took all of a few weeks to fix the vast majority of major issues and bring the game upto 9/10. Every patch and hotfix they released fixed thousands of small and large issues.
Meanwhile Bethesda announced updates right after the game released, fixed like 4 progression breaking bugs and nothing else.
10 days after announcing they were working on bugfixes and patches, not a goddamn peep, not a single thing fixed beyond those 4 small fixes.
It's straight up disgusting how these corporations operate.
All of their games have their mod kits release about that long after the game comes out, so while I can understand the timeline seeming excessive, and I might agree, it's less extraordinary, and more predictably ordinary.
And your 5/10 is my 7/10, so tastes will vary. I think a lot of what makes Starfield problematic is inherent to its design and the growing pain of them moving formats to space and not simply a bug issue, though the bugs are absolutely there, so making your personal rating of it a supposed effect of its bugginess is, I don't think, completely accurate, but your point still stands.
I am waiting for more paid skins to be tossed in the game. I wonder if the mod tools will somehow try and block weapon skins so it stays an only paid feature.
Tbh I'm still not sure what the point of it is. In gtav you get into trouble with police if you rob shops, steal cars or drive over pedestrians, among other things like scripted missions. In saints row it's about gang warfare and them being a nuisance during your city demolition. In mafia you have to obey road laws, hide weapons from plain sight and they are generally a bigger threat.
You can't rob stuff or do heists in 2077, you can summon your own car for free at any point so no need to steal them and since you can fast travel you don't drive as much anyway. The missions that do have car chases are heavily scripted and on the rails.
Is this something just for people who want to go out of their way to fight endless waves of cops and thats it or am I missing something that makes it such a hype worthy feature?
It was a huge immersion breaker for anyone not going stealth/low profile (as the author admits he does). In fact, it was the reason I haven’t played until now. I guess I’m a patient gamer and it irked me what was missing from launch. I’d built my 2070 machine for this game years ago and now I’m stoked to have a 3080 to break it in with.
Seems more immersion breaking to me that you can fight maxtac and get away with it in the first place, or that they all still just forget about you if you hide for a minute or two out of sight, but we'll see. Maybe I'm just missing something and will appreciate it ingame more.
I mean what features are removed exactly? They have all the components needed to install windows/mac/linux and hook up a mouse and keyboard. I really don’t see any distinction besides they come with gamepads and a gaming oriented OS instead of keyboards and a more general OS.
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.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m absolutely happy that this game is doing well, that people love it, that it isn’t exploitative, etc. those are all great things.
But do we need a daily article essentially restating the same thing?
Even my non-gamer wife knows about the scam that is SC. Honestly, at least it’s just whales who fall for it, who had too much money undeservedly either way. 🤷
I think the author might be interpreting a bit too much into Sean’s words here. “In the background” could just mean out of the eye of the public and he said it’s another tiny team, not necessarily smaller than the NMS one which he also calls tiny in the same post. Hello games is a pretty small studio. LNF could easily still be years away, but I don’t think Sean’s comment here tells us anything either way.
That’s what you get when you don’t want to pay people for their work and try to keep teams together. The newbies aren’t going to care about the rich history of the games they’re banging out code for at 3 AM on a Saturday.
The usual cycle. They get good, get big, get shit, get insolvent or bought up until there’s no bigger fish anymore (in which case you have to live with shit until they get insolvent after a long time).
$70 million on gpu cluster + $21 million yearly on employee AI tools and training. They could fund 21 $1 million indie games per year with zero expectations, but no push the money to the slop and get nothing in return. Fuck them.
The fact that he knows that people won’t believe him is hilarious. It means he’s fully aware that he has a problem and has never taken any steps to fix it.
He wants to rejuvenate his reputation but the time to do that was about 25-30 years ago. If you make one game and you’ve over promised on it, the very next game has to be your redemption, or you go CDPR route and you fix it, you can’t do it decades later.
A redemption arc this late would’ve had to have been quietly making a great game, no big announcements in advance until it was done or nearly so and playable, and then letting it speak for itself.
I watched a video of some of the “gameplay” of that, and… Wow. It is the most by the numbers mundane idle game I’ve ever seen. Inspired, how uninspired it is.
I played Legacy for an hour purely out of curiosity. It was absolute shit. Boring, uninspired, “worst of mobile” gameplay, generic visuals, multiplayer tacked on in a way that doesn’t enhance the gameplay. I will speculate they simply repurposed the Legacy engine for Masters of Albion.
It’s almost certainly going to be terrible.
If you want a business sim, you would be far better of looking at the Capitalism series, Industry Giant 2 (it holds up pretty even after 20+ years) or perhaps Big Ambitions.
I only remembered it was being developed from watching a Nintendo Direct half a year ago, and then only heard about it after launch due to performance issues and Randy opening up twitter again.
The worst part, it’s apparently really good, which I didn’t expect. But I can’t run it on anything and won’t for a while.
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