I honestly don’t know which is stupider, console wars or iPhone vs Android. Like. Use whatever you like to get your dopamine rush.
I especially can’t wrap my brain around being so loyal to your console that you’d try to get someone fired for playing a game on the other console. If you are at that point, you need to go outside for serious. Go for a nice hike in the woods or something.
In this case I can understand some frustration if you have a PlayStation and can’t play Starfield but would like to. But not to this degree. Just, like… post your disdain for the exclusivity online.
"An honest conversation about Starfield needs to come from judging the game for what it is. And the game itself is … fine, I guess? A recent Kotaku article articulates in more detail how Starfield isn’t “humanity’s greatest achievement,” but it’s an enjoyable game and that’s fine. The menu system is extremely clunky and the aforementioned encumbrance issue is still there—all systems that haven’t changed in decades. Whether it’s deliveries or the fate of the galaxy, nobody else seems to do anything but you, the player. Just because these are hallmarks of past Bethesda games doesn’t mean that they get a free pass.
And herein lies the problem. Because Starfield is so similar to Bethesda’s previous offerings (for better or worse), Bethesda “fans” are pushing back against critiques of the game as a critique of all Bethesda properties. Looking at Sterling’s video about encumbrance again, the online defense of the game’s issues boils down to fans saying, “I can’t tell you why. I just do.” This is indicative of the lack of thought that Bethesda actively encourages in their games."
Yeah, that article does a good job at summing up the issues here. It really shows that maybe we need to have a broader conversation about how most past Bethesda games are worse in retrospect, actually. Starfield is helping to exemplify and point out that.
Tia Nadiezja over in the comments there also has good points:
"Bethesda games get a pass on serious, game-breaking problems that would kill games from other companies. Skyrim still, a decade and more after its original release, two full remasters in, has more glitches and bugs than Mass Effect: Andromeda or Cyberpunk did at launch, and those bugs did serious damage to those games' reputation.
Throw in the horrific treatment of staff by Bethesda's management and the open transphobia they've displayed, and people should not be playing this bad game. Have some standards, folks!"
That second paragraph has nothing to do with the quality of the game Bethesda Studio made though, not that Bethesda Softworks/Zenimax don’t deserve criticism for the HR issue, but it’s not fair to put that on Todd and his team.
On Steam I have 150+ hours and in my achievements I see that only 0.7% of players have touched 100 planets.
So I don’t think that people are being honest and/or don’t really understand how big the game is.
This game is huge. I spent apx 40 hours just surveying systems. And I can for sure say that the prog gen is very well done. Very well especially when comparing to other space games and when specifically talking about POI integration. Every POI looks like it was built there, with minor glitches and imperfections people with less hours would not even notice. The POIs feel balanced especially when the environment is taken into account.
At 100 planets you really begin to understand the breadth of it. The planets I have been on have anywhere from 3-10+ POIs and you can “push” the invisible wall to prog gen more POIs which I understand breaks some immersion but I am fine with it. Some moons are devoid of anything, some have life, some have POIs, and some don’t. The planets typically have at least 3-5 resources and 3-5 flora and fauna. 6+ is common enough as well. While patterns may emerge between systems, it still feels pretty random and balanced.
And again, this game is massive. I haven’t even seen nearly all of the systems which I imagine will hold some easter eggs.
Lastly, this game is meant to be played slow. It’s an explorer game. You can’t rush or speed run this one. Sure some of the stories suck, yet plenty are good. Just like real life.
I can’t wait to see if someone does an “all systems surveyed” video. Because even if you have your surveyed maxxed you have to scan at the surface too. Unless it’s a gas/ice giant.
I have about 120 hours and I also haven’t touched 100 planets. I don’t see the point in it, when they are mostly empty with randomly generated content that by now I’ve seen every possible thing that can exist, I’d just be seeing more of the same; exploring the same handful of possible base configurations across hundreds of planets isn’t really exploring. None of that stuff is interesting, and the stories and dialogue aren’t very interesting either. It’s exactly what I expected, and I guess I just don’t want that anymore. I want them to actually improve the formula and gameplay, and stop making the same exact game with a different coat of paint.
My experience is kinda the exact opposite, I hate how repetitive the planets are and stopped exploring them besides setting up resource collectors.
What I love about the game is the questing and ship building aspects, there is so much depth to what you can do with your ship that it’s kind of ridiculous that it’s such a small part of the game otherwise.
I like it so far, planetary exploration and the ship are the biggest letdowns.
I get the feeling that it would be a much better game if they just focused on what they are known for being good at, interesting maps and immersive worlds.
Do you think that’s because a lot of the planets are procedurally generated? I’ve seen people saying that since they’re generated, not hand crafted, they feel really same-y after a while, and there’s never anything interesting to find to start you on a quest you could easily miss, like you could find in other Bethesda games by exploring.
Imho its because the procedural underpinnings are so close to the surface. How are you supposed to stay immersed when you know roughly how many POI's there will be and that you will see the exact same POI on multiple planets, right down to object placement? They will all be within running distance of the ship etc etc.
Its not the first game to do it, NMS is pretty immersion breaking in this respect, but at least its somewhat masked by being able to cruise around the surface, use vehicles etc. But I think proc gen for POI's is a trap for devs. If they do go down that path there needs to be a deep well of content to stitch together so that things feel unique.
I suspect the use of AI in game design (not necessarily in runtime) will go a long way to improving this sort of thing. Its one reason I think the Creation Engine is a dead man walking so to speak and a really bad call for ESVI. I doubt they will be able to shoehorn in AI to the dev pipeline effectively.
How would you solve that paradox. You can always procedurally generate the encounters, buildings, dialogs to make it more interesting. Look at Minecraft or dwarf fortress. They have done a pretty good job in that sense I think
That's what I was going to suggest as well. Basically, the planets and whatever is on the could benefit from a greater degree of procedural generation, even if as trivial as variable room layouts, but a deeper system (variable objects, contents, colors, designs based on the module manufacturer like with ship habs, etc.) would greatly remedy the repetitiveness, as with the current system, you've basically seen all the POIs or the type once you've seen one of them.
Planet surface is nice, though, because I agree with Bethesda's idea of barren and deserted planets being much more prevalent than those that support any kind of life or even atmosphere. Elevation and scenery changes are also fine by me.
But still, POIs are oddly repetitive, even if somewhat numerous. They definitely should've gone for the more roguelike approach or something and use more proc gen with these.
Kind of, I don’t mind the surface being procedurally generated but the landmarks themselves are empty.
Finding a dungeon in Skyrim means a unique layout, rewards and maybe a quest. In Starfield landmarks can’t be unique because they need to populated too many planets but they are also empty, there is never anything worth grabbing or finding inside.
A lot of the game world in Oblivion and pretty much all of it in Daggerfall were procedurally generated by Bethesda yet I personally consider them to be the best games that Bethesda has ever produced!
Interestingly, the original elder scrolls games had a lot of procedurally generated content, it was only Morrowind that was the first “handmade” world from what I recall. But it would have been much cooler if they could have added a few interesting little secrets or stories to each planet and just had fewer of them or something.
I feel that the problem right now is that Starfield can be both considered a Game of the Year contender as well as an absolute waste of money and time for different people, and they can both be completely correct based on their personal preferences.
Personally, I’ve already played all the Starfield (~45h) I’m likely to play for a long while. It turns out that the majority of the gameplay - random exploration, radiant questing, etc - are things that absolutely bore me, and the crafting/construction/research systems are far too rudimentary, pointless / siloed from the rest of the game, and clunky to keep me particularly interested either. So for me it’s a very mid game, something I’d at best recommend picking up at a significantly discounted sale a few years from now - when there’s enough mods to actually make it interesting.
On the other hand, some people I’ve spoken to turn out to absolutely love the radiant questing and proc-gen worlds, a few of them now having more than twice as much time as me in the game - and still loving every second they can spend in it.
This is an interesting piece. It reminds me of the quote “The reason reality is often stranger than fiction is that fiction has to make sense or it wouldn’t be considered realistic.”
The designer’s concern that the game doesn’t consistently give you all the information to inform consistent expectations from the game world is more of a stylistic decision than an objective flaw I think. One of the core appeals of dnd is that it’s impossible to always know what to expect even down to random dice rolls. The game part is very important in dnd, but the roleplaying and emergent narrative are also very important.
If the player is taking it seriously and not save scumming, they are probably not going to have a perfect run and that’s by design. What they will have is a relatively unique game experience with its own mix of successes, failures, and discoveries. If they want to be a murderhobo or munchkin they can and since it’s one-player no one is going to mind. The game can flex into a tactical rpg or a relatively pure story experience as dnd can, but is not going to be the same experience as a chess game or a novel.
Hmm… I think we’re dogging on the author a bit much here. Don’t get me wrong, they’re clearly swimming in philosophical water that’s a bit too deep for themselves, but sometimes you’ve gotta be clumsy in order to explore topics at the edge of theory.
Let’s dial things up a notch and bring Undertale (the Dark Souls of – nevermind) into the discussion. What does it have to say about branching pathways, tonal consistency, and savescum? It says: I was made for you, please enjoy me.
The game adapts to the audience – you, that is. You are weird and hard to please, so the game needs to be flexible without feeling compromised. If you want to leave hidden depths unexplored, the game abides. If you want to vivisect every last detail, the game changes to fit your desire.
It’s alchemy, of course; both magical and unobtainable, so the author isn’t strictly wrong to accuse Baldur’s Gate of falling short. It’s true: sometimes a gap in the curtains opens up and the illusion is spoilt. With that being said, I think what’s missing is the logical conclusion to the criticism: universality – despite being unobtainable – is still worth striving for. To be universal is to distill humanity itself, as great and terrible and impossible as that may be (and here you thought I was joking with that Dark Souls jab!).
I’m trying to get a refund from GOG, after spending nearly a month truly working my most to love the game, to understand what makes people say Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece.
People said Read Dead Redemption 2 was a masterpiece, and I found myself in agreement. Same with Half-life 1, 2 and 3 (Alyx).
But the almost overwhelming attention to every detail and aspect of those games I cannot see in BG3. Everything from janky animations, buggy combat pathing, awful tutorials, visual glitches, the worst journal I’ve seen since Morrowind, and no pause button in 2023!!
Ironically, nothing of which this article brings up since it seems to shit on save scumming which I don’t care about, all power to the player.
You cannot argue this game is ‘bad’; the story and characters along with competently designed game play would prove that. But it’s no masterpiece to me, and I feel I fell for the the overhype from the fans who just love the franchise.
You can hit the big round turn-based button in bottom right of your HUD to activate turn mode at any time, even outside combat. This effectively pauses the game. The game even makes a sound effect of a clock slowing down and stopping.
The fact that you didn’t find it fun is totally valid. BG3 is a very opinionated game that gets a huge number of things right for its target audience - the people who really enjoy CRPGs, branching paths, and choice driven gameplay. It does sound like that you’re really not into those things, so BG3 could never have been an excellent experience.
The games that you list are designed to be mostly linear experiences, so it was possible for the devs to make the core gameplay shine because they had time to really polish those systems and interactions. There was enough people and time to really tune RDR2’s gunplay, the horse riding, the hunting and tracking, and make the world feel organic.
BG3’s dev time was spent on tuning the combat encounters, tuning the class building options, and making sure the world (almost) always made sense. While baking in hundreds of stories about your companions, side characters, abusive store owners, and lost puppies. The game never holds your hand, only asks “here you are, this is what you’ve done, what do you do now?”. The amount of effort put into respecting the moment to moment choices made by the player is staggering.
The complexity in these systems in BG3 left preeetty clear issues with things that would otherwise have time to be polished out of a game before release (animation jank, visual bugs, pathing, pausing). For me, they were more like bumps in a very scenic road. But I hear you when you come in expecting a shiny polished RPG but there’s all these fourth wall breaking bits that kind of stall the whole show every like 5 minutes.
I think there’s enough nuance here to have both sides of the coin be true - it’s an absolute masterpiece for the players who enjoy the specific experience it offers, and it only makes sense to feel it’s overrated when you’re coming in expecting a cinematic or visceral experience.
I would consider The Witcher 3 a masterpiece as well, far from a linear experience. And I love Fallout, so I know what a good turn based compat rpg is like. And few games have had me so on the edge of my seat as Xcom 2, so I know what an excellent turn based combat system is supposed to be.
BG3 just doesn’t live up to that. The polish fails it, and the combat is just not very fun. The role playing is excellent as long as the other things don’t get in the way, which it does.
Some people truly have nothing going on in their lives. I’d feel bad for them if they weren’t destructive. Alanah is awesome. The line about them being jealous of her successes is accurate here.
Assholes that still believe that they should be loyal to a single megacorp are trying to get someone that works for said megacorp fired from their job for streaming a game that is on a competing megacorp’s console
As someone who hasn’t yet played it but will, and wants to like it, should I read this? Will it point out negative things I might agree with but would never have noticed otherwise?
It’s not that deep. Here’s the two main critiques leveled towards the game in the article.
you don’t always know the consequences of your actions, and they’re not always predictable: a seemingly sensible choice sometimes ends badly, and a seemingly dumb choice could get you a reward
you can load a save and redo your things whenever you want, i.e. save-scum
These are both somewhat obvious just from the structure of the game. Ultimately the conclusion the author is shooting for is that this makes Baldur’s Gate 3 a bad game but a good piece of interactive fiction.
The author uses the mechanics of chess often as sort of an example of the pinnacle of game design which to me is telling. Video Games are much broader than that. Insisting that people should not call the thing you don’t like a game but instead “interactive fiction” is pedantry at best, and gatekeeping at worst.
Sure, if you view the game through the lens of chess you will come away with these flaws. But for example, if you always knew the consequences of every choice the narrative tension would be destroyed. Of course chess has no such concern, so if we’re looking at games through that lens then narrative tension is of no value. Ultimately I think this is just a very narrow viewpoint of what games should be.
And I truly do not get it. I was a PlayStation person before I got a PC, and I never understood it even then. Why are you getting mad at more people getting to play good games?
themarysue.com
Ważne