I feel like the kind of “freedom” players want from an RPG is somewhat inconsistent with playing as a specific character, i.e. Geralt. For me, I want to be my own character and decide who they are and what they do. I never really got on with Geralt because I don’t want to be a moody medieval jedi, I’d much rather be a whimsical wizard or something.
As someone who personally enjoys a told story more than a lot of directionless freedom (because I get bored after a few dozen hours, so I want the game to get its thing told and then I’m ready for the next game, basically) I of course enjoyed Geralt’s directed character more, but the two are definitely incompatible at a very basic level.
And honestly, none is inherently better, though I wish studios understood more readily just how different the underlying approach is. If someone creates a defined story then give me those fully defined characters. Give me a cool story through which I learn of them. With a few surprises. Make it like a book! On the other hand, if something is freeform, then go hard the opposite way. Make it sandbox-y! Allow me to create narrative myself through what I do, don’t hold my hand and try to guide me back onto rails.
(That is, the main story was just about the part I enjoyed the least in CP2077 next to the bugs, and I really don’t think V’s character fits the gameplay and what we players do in it very well. V is an interesting character, but not for an open world do-whatever-you-want game, and the game they created doesn’t fit a character that is supposed to have a specific design very well.)
I’m not suggesting it should be at all. Not sure how you got that from my comment. I liked the Witcher 3, honestly, but it isn’t a game about freedom and it shouldn’t be imo. It tells character focused stories well, which is harder to do the more choice you give the player.
“You don’t want to be forced to play a specific role, and that removes the R in RPG” is what they are saying. However, I disagree with them. Real RPGs let you choose your role, ethical alignment, and quirks of behavior. Even older video games like Fallout 3 have that. Being forced to play a specific role is almost antithetical to the concept of RPGs.
Of course, maybe that’s not what they meant at all.
Well there’s a reason it’s not a verified game. Valve is rightfully not targeting the steam deck for it because the gameplay experience wouldn’t be good. If you want to still play it that’s on you but I don’t blame them for not supporting it. It shows that they are serious about cs this time, imo
I like to play all my games on the deck and just dock it for shooters. If they were serious about cs this time they’d optimize it. A lot of people including me still have PC’s less powerful than the deck. Plus a competitive game needs to be optimized well enough to run smoothly.
That’s not the target usecase for the deck or for cs2. It’s cool that it’s possible and really showcases how flexible and capable the deck is, but valve has no obligation to support or optimize for it.
Cs2 is quite optimized for a typical Windows gaming PC, aka the target platform. I get well over 300fps on my midrange build. Valve is putting a lot of extra work into proton configurations to get Windows games working well out of the box on the deck, it’s perfectly fine that they haven’t done that specific work for the deck yet, if at all.
I’m sorry to say but you’re an outlier. Most people with decks aren’t typically docking them, and even less are docking them as a desktop replacement. For me it’s a portable with the flexibility of easy couch coop but I never want to have to use a mouse and keyboard on it.
Controlling scope of supported systems to ones that are most commonly used is the smartest thing they could do. There’s a reason cs2 isn’t supporting consoles this time around and it’s telegraphing great things for the game this time. They aren’t making the same mistakes they had to correct with cs:go on launch.
Crackers: We don’t do it for the piracy, we just like the challenge.
Denuvo: Try this one then.
Crackers: Too hard bro, at least give us a chance!
I acknowledge that this isn’t going to be a popular opinion in a piracy sub, but the main reason people hate Denuvo is that it works.
It’s basically killed the entire game hacking scene, because by the time they break it, nobody is interested in the game any more. There’s like one person left that can do it, and they’re more than a little bit odd.
It may be “anti-consumer”, but you know what was worse? All the other shit they tried on PC. Always online bullshit. Single player games that you couldn’t save any more if your connection wobbled. Actual rootkits.
Death to the concept of intellectual property and all but I’ve never actually felt Denuvo making problems for me when I played a game using it, you’re right it seems to be working as advertised.
I’m still hoping someone to crack it in a more reliable and fast manner, fuck large gamedev companies and their profit margins.
People hate Denuvo because it requires a regular connection to the Internet and has a big impact on the performance of games.
I’m not buying these games not because I can’t pirate games with Denuvo (I don’t really pirate games at all anymore) but because they tend to run like shit.
I haven’t pirated any actual software since the 1990s (too cowardly) but my hatred for Denuvo and the like burns with unsurpassed intensity. I will never knowingly buy a game that includes it. “Anti-tampering” indeed. I’m not sure if that shit should be legally allowed at all, but certainly not in ordinary mass-market PC games.
It does require you be online, and it is essentially a “rootkit.” Its malware features are more polite and better hidden than some of the worst of what has been tried before, but that just adds to the danger that it might be seen as acceptable by people who don’t know any better.
I’ve seen Denuvo combined with the always online requirement with the latest Far Cry 6 on steam. The always online requirement makes a cracked version worth it in my use case.
Most bad Denuvo stuff seems to come from any extra DRM they add as well, just in case Denuvo wasn’t enough. Always online sounds like one of those extras, because I don’t think it’s part of Denuvo itself. I think the Denuvo online requirements are when you install, every X days (seems to vary from two weeks to a month, probably configurable per game), and when you change your hardware configuration.
Denuvo alone is enough, because as soon as Denuvo is removed, the rest can be removed by regular mortal hackers.
I jest, but seriously I was in HS personally while whinging about 8 and wanting 7 back after my laptop auto updated on me like a jackass. Its actually the event that lead to me learning IT!
Windows 8 is actually great. It’s the last efficient OS from Microsoft. I mean, you can actually be surfing on the internet and have 4 GBs of RAM and you’re actually having a good time? By good I mean like 2.5 GB used with the browser open.
Well apparently you could before windows 10, or there’s something wrong with my laptop but it’s always chuggin along after boot at like 3.25 Gb used easy.
Maybe it’s because all the fancy x86 emulation it does is actually pretty RAM hungry too. Oh well.
(It’s a Samsung Galaxy book go. They’re dirt cheap! And I actually quite like it, it’s been my main computer for a few years now actually. )
Some of it is organic hype and some of it is Corporate Funded social media teams / personnel who do their best to control the online narrative. Happens every time a Triple A game launches, no matter how many times that Company has betrayed it’s audience and succumbed to greedy scummy practices. People even still talk about Activision Blizzard titles as if it won’t just be another cashgrab.
Personally, I’m always super skeptical about these sort of games having a positive reception. I think the fast decline in user scores since launch is a perfect example of how unreliable the hype is.
Yeah, and I don’t get why. We quite literally got exactly what we expected with Starfield, and nobody said we would get anything different. For those of us who enjoy it, we got precisely what we were promised. For those who don’t enjoy it, nobody tried to pretend they were getting something different.
If I have one complaint, they did not manage to brand it as effectively as they branded Fallout (the blonde cartoon, music, etc). But then, they never managed to brand tES that way and we’re all still alive.
My 2c. Isn’t it a breath of fresh air that we got a complete game without $100s in day1 DLC required to make it playable?
I remember people hating on Skyrim when it came out, then Fallout 4, surprisingly not Fallout 76, you are right they never lied about it or promised stuff we didn’t get, I don’t really have interest in the game so I haven’t been following it to much but I don’t recall there being any classic Toddisms either
Starfield is as Generic Bethesda as it gets(which is a good thing) they didn’t introduce shit from other AAA games, like you said, no annoying Battle pass, day one DLC etc and other than early access, was there preorder bonuses?
The hate just seems odd, I can get the hate for most AAA shit but it seems really misplaced for StarField
You’re right about the branding, nothing to me sticks out for the series’s brand, maybe they didnt want another vault boy esq thing, so the game could stand alone, I dont know
Also, I guess also the cutscenese/animations everywhere, launching ships, docking, landing can get annoying, I understand the complaints about those
like you said, no annoying Battle pass, day one DLC etc and other than early access, was there preorder bonuses?
There were some minor cosmetic day 1 bonuses that nobody is losing sleep over not having. Basically, a skin pack for 4 items you get early on in the game’s main story. Unless people are roleplaying heavy, those items are in storage or sold to vendors by the 5 hour mark in the game. I’ve seen some people who wanted pay-to-win or pay-to-pretty bitch because this was miles from it.
The hate just seems odd, I can get the hate for most AAA shit but it seems really misplaced for StarField
Exactly. Bethesda games have never been the bleeding edge for graphics, even when they were the games crushing GPUs (Balmorra@6fps, I’ll never forget you). Nobody is even meaningfully saying that the money was spent on bonuses or moon vacations for the execs or anything, only that what they spent it on was not hyper-realistic graphics. They’ve always been a vast game. That’s where they spend their dev money.
Also, I guess also the cutscenese/animations everywhere, launching ships, docking, landing can get annoying, I understand the complaints about those
Everything is fast travel and loading screens. You’re right. This has been the complaint about every Bethesda game since day 1. I remember loading screens in Daggerfall. Yes, games with different focus and different engines have mastered seamless landing and takeoff. Yes, I’m sure Bethesda could have added that, or faked it. But they made clear a year ago we’d be seeing load screens for those things, so nobody should’ve expected otherwise.
Everything is fast travel and loading screens. You’re right. This has been the complaint about every Bethesda game since day 1. I remember loading screens in Daggerfall. Yes, games with different focus and different engines have mastered seamless landing and takeoff. Yes, I’m sure Bethesda could have added that, or faked it. But they made clear a year ago we’d be seeing load screens for those things, so nobody should’ve expected otherwise.
Sorry, I’m not talking load screens, as, well, that’s a thing you can’t avoid and it’s silly to want that, what I mean is when you dock a ship, when you land a ship, when you furniture or something, those animations, like fallout 4, there’s mods that skip these animations, they’re cool like once or twice but it’s silly that they happen all the time, just take us to a load screen as soon as we press the button :(
Ahh. But don’t those animations mask loading processing so you see fewer “spinning wheel” screens? I remember early Skyrim having minute long waits when you entered a door
I could swear I’ve definitely seen transitions happen with no loading screen, just the transition. I am pretty certain the transition is just the start of the loading-screen process.
Modern gamers are self-destructive. Nothing is good enough, and because every AAA release gets torn down and review bombed in one way or another, most and eventually all games from developers with the resources to make something of scale will become pay to win, microtransaction based garbage.
Because if they can’t please their audience and lose all passion for the craft because of it, they’ll just say fuck it go straight for the credit cards of those that do show up.
I’ve played about 70 hours so far. If you like the genre but starfield doesn’t wow you, I don’t think you’re able to be pleased. Is it perfect? No. Is it at absolute minimum an A grade? Absolutely.
I agree that we should appreciate well made games. But those are already beloved all around and praised at every turn, I don’t know how the people could be more supportive.
Think BG3, think Elden Ring. Even CP77, after a very rough release, is in a pretty good state now and about to receive a dlc + update that delivers many things originally promised; allowing the developer to recuperate a lot of the lost good will with the customers.
The point is, people still love good games. Just that starfield is pretty mediocre. Not a bad game by any means, but it feels like a lot of compromises, loading screens and reused assets.
One of the major disappointments imo is that space isn’t interesting. You only really go there for the odd ship battle to progress the plot or whatever, but you can’t really fly between planets, so you miss out on the cool side stories you get with Elder Scrolls games by walking between cities. I was hoping for Firefly the Bethesda game, but it’s just Skyrim stretched across planets that you fast travel between.
I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.
I think the planets are fine, but I’d rather have fewer, more densely populated planets. I don’t think space-colonizing people would only make 3-4 settlements per planet, there would be dozens if not hundreds of settlements before moving to the next planet. I’d rather buy a DLC to get access to more systems then current setup where everything is spread out. In fact, just give me Sol with Earth, Mars, and maybe one of a Jupiter’s moons being inhabited with the rest working like the planets in Starfield.
But no, it’s just Skyrim set it space, with fast travel between cities. That’s fine, just not particularly special. I may play it at some point, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now.
The scale is definitely too big. I’m pretty sure most of the systems are pretty much there just to fill in the star map. I’d rather have a setting where maybe interstellar FTL requires a sublight trip first so only the nearest few stars to Sol are accessible. Really I just want Everspace 2 where I can hop out of my ship occasionally and deal with fewer annoying “puzzles”.
I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.
The problem is that they let people skip the space parts arbitrarily often (sometimes planets make me stop to get scanned, sometimes I can go from ground to ground). All of those are encounters that happen, but if you fast travel you won’t see them. I have warped in and seen each of those, with ships in distress even landing near me to ask for help when I’m on the ground. Although the only actual pirate outpost in space AFAIK is the Crimson Fleet base and Everspace 2 does everything in space way better.
The fact that you can’t space walk without cheats is what I’m getting at. I want to be able to leave the ship to go investigate some wreckage, get into someone’s airlock to bring some needed supplies to a stranded vessel, or set up a mining outpost on an asteroid. Basically, the same feel you get when walking between towns in Elder Scrolls games, but with the unique mechanics space allows.
Starfield does a lot of things pretty well, but doesn’t really stand out in any of them. There’s a lot of elements of a great game there, but it just ends up being pretty good instead. That’s still awesome and it’ll sell well, but I am looking for that special something, and I’m basically seeing Skyrim in space. Not a lot of innovation, just a mapping of that formula into a space setting.
Try joining the FreeStar Collective, which is Wild West Scifi just like Firefly.
You’ll get the same types of stories and encounters. Including distressed ships, pirate outposts among asteroid field and scuttled ships you can scavenge.
TBH, I haven’t missed any of the other mechanics you mention. Yeah would be cool to do a space walk, but is it really necessary?
It would be more immersive, just like flying into and out of planets with no loading screen would. Their Elder Scrolls games nailed that immersion, yet Starfield went backward with a bunch of loading screens and limitations.
It’s still a pretty good game, like an 8/10 or so, but to really get that GOTY 10/10 rating, they need to excel at something. Either have better immersion, or limit the scope in some way to improve other aspects of the game.
There’s a lot of gamers out there who believe they are Bethesda fans, and this is one of the first times they’ve actually had to reconcile the game’s quality vs the developer they think consistently puts out good games. The amount of comments displaying obvious buyers remorse masquerading as defense of the game is hilarious.
I dunno, I think it's a game somewhat damned by faint praise. I hear "It's good, not great" a lot and I get it. If you like Skyrim you will like Starfield. But I'd say the big achievement is to scale up a game like Skyrim into such a big playspace.
It's certainly good quality in terms of the look and what they've technically achieved. But the actual gameplay isn't that far away from what they did in Skyrim and Fallout. I get it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it - but to be honest it feels a little dated. And No Man's Sky does alot of the non-RPG elements better.
It's been a strong year for games; and look at Baldur's Gate 3 - that game actually pushed forward narrative game play.
Starfield is huge and interesting, but ultimately a bit samey. I think the "ocean wide, inch deep" is too far and unfair but the basic concept kinda applies in a crude way. Baldur's Gate 3 is smaller in scope but so much richer and varied. Time was Bethesda was the undisputed king of RPGs, but I think CDProject Red supassed them with the story telling in Witcher 3 (and then fell back with Cyberpunk 2077) and now Larian have supassed both with Baldur's Gate 3.
It's a good game, but it's impact is dimmed a bit by what else has come. It'll make a ton of money and probably be around for years, but it doesn't feel the same huge leap forward as when Skyrim came out. But hey, hard act to follow to be fair.
It is actually a Role Playing Game as in you get to decide what role (aka character) you want to play, unlike some of the other “RPGs” out there (looking at you Witcher).
You sound like you need to play more games. Gamers generally have every right to hate AAA games these days, as they are, categorically, not A grade games.
I guess that depends on how narrowly you define “genre.” It’s a pretty good sandbox RPG, and it’ll get even better with community mods. If that’s what you’re looking for, it’s great and way better than pretty much anything else.
But if you broaden it a bit, it has a mediocre story, mediocre combat, and mediocre exploration. So compared to other RPGs, it’s really not special.
So I’d give it a B grade. It gets Cs in many areas, but the sandbox is good enough to pull it up to a B. To get to A, it needs to excel at something, like exploration (e.g. do more with the ship in space) or economy (e.g. invest in trade routes and impact the cost of goods by flooding the market). But it doesn’t really excel at anything, it’s basically the same formula they’ve had in the past with a different setting.
It’s still a good game, it just doesn’t stand out in any particular way. For everything it does, another game does it better, and it really needs to be the best at something to get an A from me.
Full model replacements are typically not hard, especially if theyre being used as a replacment for already existing assets vs creating a new asset and item id for.
Its like the modding scene for both brawl and umvc3.
It only starts off with replacing already exiting assets, but it wont explode till you figure out how to add custom assets. Brawls point was when project m devs found how to add character slots, umvc3 was when they figured out similar + making fully custom models/animations without having to borrow existing ones.
You need the tools to exist to get to the blowup point.
I don’t really understand the decision here, wouldn’t it be better to just put out a notice saying that it won’t see any more updates, discount it, and then move on? A lot of people like it, so I doubt it would require any real work.
Then again, if the OP actually did steal assets, I can understand taking it down to limit liability.
Valve pulled support for Steam at the start of January 2024 for Windows 7/8. I thought that was the end, but apparently it actually just meant “Steam may still run but we don’t support it in any way”. Which surprised me when I booted up the old Windows 7 PC a few months ago and discovered that Steam still ran and seemed to work.
Apparently this update is actually incompatible and now Steam won’t run at all.
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