I don’t like it, so many loading screens, the faction bounties are copy/paste, the space combat is awkward, neon was a huge disappointment to me being just one long corridor with neon signs, the main quest railroads you like no other Bethesda game before it and it’s just not fun to me. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s just not for me and moved back over to baldurs gate 3 and recently started another new run in the outer worlds.
I mean, my opinion is anecdotal I suppose. I have friends that like it and some that think it’s just okay. For me, I just wasn’t having fun and that’s the point of games, to have fun. I also don’t really think their whole “NASApunk” style is very good. It doesn’t feel like it has any unique style or identity. It’s honestly baffling to me how it’s gotten some 9’s and 10’s for scores. It’s easily a 7 out of 10 for me, maybe even a 6. It’s definitely not the game Bethesda sold everyone on with marketing IMO.
The loading screens are atrocious even for a Bethesda game. Walk up a ladder, loading screen, open a door, loading screen, dock with another ship, loading screen, travel to another planet in the same system, loading screen, land on a planet that’s already loaded, loading screen, exit the ship, loading screen. Maybe it’s different on PC, but I’m playing on a series S that has pretty fast read/write speeds and that’s just absurd. Pretty sure if my character could use the toilet there would be a loading screen for the bathroom.
It’s still open world in the sense that there are plenty of places you can go to and in any order without being gated through a linear story line.
Even if you were to ignore my advice, it wouldn’t be any more open world because travelling between these areas is always gated by loading screens.
My suggestion is merely to reduce the amount of loading screens between zones.
Instead of leaving constellation, loading Jameisom, getting on the train, loading the shipyard, entering your ship, loading the ship interior, taking off, loading space, going to your map, selecting warp to sol, loading sol, selecting a landing site on Cydonia, loading your ship interior on cydonia, leaving your ship, and loading cydonia.
I’m suggesting you fast travel straight from the lodge to cydonia. Cutting 7 loading screens down to 1.
Of course, I also recommend that you take time to explore the areas you’re in.
You’re right that the loading screens can be minimized with fast travel, but also, some of the best parts of a game like this is the immersion, which doesn’t really work well with loading directly from point to point on your to-do list. I think Starfield is fine, tbh, but I do agree that the amount of loading screens is excessive. Games like NMS and Elite Dangerous have been doing seamless space travel for a long time now. There’s really no excuse.
Yeah, that tracks. I get that as a company, they’re gonna wring every resource dry before ponying up the money to redevelop, but that engine’s been showing its age for a while now, and Starfield is a great concept that deserved better.
I get what you’re saying, but eliminating loading screens in a game like this just isn’t feasible.
NMS or Elite Dangerous style space travel might be, but then it would have a similarly cartoonist reduced scale. I wouldn’t mind that personally, but I get why they didn’t do it.
My primary complaint is that the cities themselves are split up into multiple zones. If Skyrim can be entirely open, so to should Jameison.
I’m not saying they need to eliminate them entirely, just agreeing that there are way too many, and “fast travel to the plot” isn’t a reasonable solution in a game like this. I do think (mostly) seamless space travel would go a very long way to helping the overall experience.
To answer the OP, it’s an expandalone with flight mechanics and new powers. Regular Elden Ring is also a co-op action adventure game, but more notably in this trailer is that none of the other players are phantoms, meaning that, like they said in a previous interview, the “seamless co-op” mod and its popularity has influenced how they’re handling multiplayer going forward.
My big question is whether this can be played singleplayer or if it’s designed from the ground up to be multiplayer, since the trailer put a lot of focus on it being co-op. Man, I’m hyped either way!
Starfield has fantastic art direction and ambience. The gunplay is really good, perhaps the best gunplay of any RPG, and a surprise coming from Bethesda. Story hits some good beats, and exploration is rewarding, though repetitive about 50% of the time in the typical Bethesda fashion (remember Draugr crypts?).
That being said, the game has some shortfalls, primarily in the roleplay aspect. The ship building and crew management is good, but it doesn’t feel great, and is sometimes just frustrating, so you never feel truly immersed in your own ship. Lack of low earth orbital and terrestrial flight is immersion breaking (even if players might opt to skip it if it were present) along with the fact that the ship is relegated to being a flying mule and most transportation is basically instant teleportation via menus, which IMO hurts the isolation and exploration RP and challenge. Ship combat is straight up mediocre for a space game in 2023. Gun selection and modding is decent, but far from top tier. I would describe the apparel as a bit on the bland side, few of the clothes and armor pickups made me go: I want to put this on, I’ll look badass (Cyberpunk 2077 syndrome).
In fact I think starfield shares a lot with Cyberpunk 2077: massive budget, AAA art direction with gameplay spread across so many systems and features that a lot of them leave you wanting more.
Because the cost, gimmicky useless features, overpriced, expensive games, pay to play big title last Gen games with no improvements to them, a fake 120hz screen (games won’t run at 120fps on this console btw), last last Gen hardware equivalent, non hall sensors for the controllers, pro 1 controller won’t work, lost goes on and on.
Good points but not all of them are correct, the Switch 1 controller does work and there are games running at 120Hz (even if it will be mostly Indie games in the future.)
In my experience, even when a game has a native Linux version, the Windows version run via Proton can often be the better choice.
In Tabletop Simulator, I wasn’t able to join my friends’ multiplayer sessions with the native Linux version. No problem with the Windows version via Proton.
The Linux version of Human Fall Flat isn’t feature complete/outdated.
There are better examples though. Valheim runs fantastic aside from a bug that it picks the first instead of the default audio device for sound output on startup. It even supports mods and r2modman supports Linux as well.
Yeah, it’s unfortunately common to have games running better through proton than the native port. We’ve seen a lot of devs drop their linux port recently because the proton version ran better with fewer issues.
Obviously a well executed native linux port is preferable, but a lot of smaller devs have trouble justifying spending a lot of time working out kinks for a linux port if the game already runs great through proton.
Exactly, and I’d rather devs focus their time on making sure their Windows version works well via Proton than using that same time for a half-assed native Linux version.
I think a huge reason for this is how fragmented the linux ecosystem is.
A hundred ways to do simple things and even mundane things are suggested as “You can’t do X with tool X easily. Just install package Y instead because it can also do it”
But now you have another program installed.
Also some parts of linux have much drama around it (www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Fixes-Two-Choices). This adds uncertainty.
This is irrelevant with Steam though. Steam offers a runtime with preconfigured versions of everything that is needed to give the devs a consistent environment for their games to run no matter how fragmented the linux install base might be. This runtime is also what proton uses for ship its different versions.
It’s because the devs just aren’t testing their Linux build. If they at least had a steam deck and made sure it ran there, the community would figure everything else out on their own.
Straight up just a Switch attached to a head strap. Hilarious. Also, I’m positive people would pay legit money for a game that lets them put AC furniture in their house with AR.
I’m really excited for another boring ubisoft open world wasteland with next to nothing going on. Or gated off by a “gear score” grind-a-thon. Not to mention how excited my wallet is to buy all those juicy timesavers & monopoly money
Xenia Canary runs RDR really well if you haven't tried it yet. I was surprised I was able to get through the entire game without problems on my ~5yr old gaming laptop.
The thing that is incredibly frustrating for me is the rising cost of games. Nintendo of all companies is starting the big push for raised game prices. Frankly, I can’t afford that. It was a stretch for games prior to this. But now I can’t justify it.
Games are currently $80 CAD. In some rare cases $90CAD. If they were bumped up by inflation from 2019 to today. Games would roughly be $96.Still hurts, but alright, sure, I get it.
But Nintendo wants to jack up games to $115 CAD. That’s a massive jump of $35 or 43% if my math is correct. And somehow, people seem to be able to afford this? It feels like I’m trapped in some kind of bubble where I’m just working poor while everyone else is making their money somehow go much further than I can.
I’m working full time, but I am supporting my family. I don’t have kids. I make well above minimum wage. I just don’t get how people are making this work unless they’re all just taking on extreme levels of debt
The game prices I’m ok with. When I was a kid, video games cost $70 CAD, and that’s almost $200 now. I’m perfectly OK with going back to buying fewer games. I have too many of them I shouldn’t have bought in the first place.
I’m wildly upset with the console price, in no small part because Nintendo and other electronics manufacturers seem to be trying to smooth over the shock of Dorito Don’s tariffs by increasing prices globally.
The Americans made their own bed. I’m not willing to lie in it with them.
Hmm when I look it up with this bank of Canada website it claims a game from 2011 that cost 60CAD would be $83 today. I’m wondering if there’s other tools I can use to cross reference? Just curious how you got to the $200 number. Maybe I’m wrong.
The only way I get to roundabout $200 now is if they are talking about 1983/84, but the NES hadn’t even released in NA back then, so that’s somewhat unlikely?
Oh man, 2011… I’m a millennial, and even I was already out of college in 2011. My ‘kid’ games were $80 USD in the 90s. Here’s an articlefrom 2014 that someone made about how insane N64 game prices were.
Star Fox 64 – $79.95 (Source: GamePro #106) - 1997
Resist the FOMO, don’t buy a game just because it’s brand new and they paid for enough marketing that everyone’s talking about it. Go through your backlog, replay your favourites, find some cheap indies or second hand classic or free giveaways. Nobody can force you to pay through the nose for games and there’s more choice than ever before!
Oh for sure. I usually wait 1-3 years before buying games so that I can grab em on sale. It’s really quite rare that Nintendo games go on sale, though. So it’s kinda tough when you want to eventually play them.
I’ll sometimes buy games new, but as it is, most of my purchases are during sales. I’ve been mostly playing old titles. It just surprises me when I see statistics of Nintendo running out of pre-orders etc.
The top 10% of the population now accounts for over 50% of all economic activity. They have a level of income and reserved cash that is hard to comprehend and that just starts at $250,000 US salary and goes up from there.
Those people are spending so freely and so completely it’s practically the entire economy and we are forced to compare ourselves to them.
The extra annoying part is that in a population of 350million people in the US, 10% is still about 35 million people. So there is more than enough of them to compare to and for companies to aim at.
The 90% of us are the working poor and it’s not that others are stretching their money more they either just don’t notice or care to look or have decided they have enough to spend freely without any consideration of whether they can afford it.
You just need to realize just cause they release new product does not mean you need it right away.
Theres 1000s of amazing, incredible, your favorite games you have not paid that are available for like a tenner. And you choose to spend 80-90-100+ dollars on something mediocre that will be 10 bucks in a few years anyway.
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