I really hope they have Malkavian (clan of madmen and prophets) with unique content as a starting option, I would love to run through the game for the first time not 100% sure what’s real.
I actually had this game pre-ordered a long while back but with the huge upheaval around the developer I canceled it. I haven't played any other games by this developer but I like the concept art. Still, I remain ever apprehensive.
They don’t have a history of developing system heavy games / immersive sims.
They seem to specialize in very linear narrative experience that are extremely light on gameplay systems. Walking sims is what people like to describe them as.
A mainstream fairly well funded sequel to a cult classic owned by a company that has yet to develop anything even close to the same quality as a janky pre-release third-party source game that has switched developers at least once now?
…I’m sure it will be fine, it’s not like there’s at least two other examples of that exact scenario failing miserably.
TLDR: Dev is The Chinese Room, developer of Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. They still won’t say what happened with Hardsuit Labs, the OG dev, and the mechanics and system will be totally different.
Instead of a thin-blood (new, weak vampire), you’re an Elder (old, scary vampire) fresh from torpor (long VampNap).
Neither of those had any NPCs, did they? I'm not familiar with Dear Esther but from looking it up it says you just explore environments, and I remember Everybody's Gone to the Rapture having like, vague humanoid models but I don't recall them being animated, could be wrong.
Some of the best games have come from developers stepping out of their comfort zone.
Alien Isolation and Space Marine were made by RTS developers. Last of Us was made by the Crash Bandicoot developers. Insomniac made Spyro, then FPS series Resistance, then the Spiderman games.
Expecting a developer to only make one type of game forever is probably why they inevitably turn to shit and close.
Fair enough, we won’t know until it drops! I just really really hope it’s going to be a worthy successor to VTM, and a studio that doesn’t have experience in one of the key parts I’m expecting doesn’t fill my doomer heart with hope.
It’s also worth noting that the original Chinese Room was composed of eight employees, who ended up laid off around 2017. One of the two original directors quit this year, but the team is reportedly composed of over 100 people now.
People experienced with the company constantly complain that whenever they talk to someone in it, it’s like they never truly understand the conversation and are just replying with formulaic phrases.
I have nothing but Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs to judge them on and based on that, they are very good at writing mysteries and cryptic stuff but they seem to be lighter on the gameplay side. From that, the writing will be good but hopefully it will have any gameplay.
Depends on how long the torpor lasted. If it was for a couple of centuries, a lot of has changed in 200 years. The player is going to have to find out the new political players, guns, vehicles, new clans, etc.
If the player was in torpor for a couple of decades, yeah the world exploration will be dull.
No no see you just woke up from Torpor, so yeah you’re an elder, but also you’re super weak, and nobody knows who you are so you won’t get any respect until you’ve done some basic bitch errands. But EVENTUALLY, you’ll be powerful and respected.
Yeah this “Elder fresh from torpor” angle just completely killed my excitement, shit sounds so… bland now. So typical.
I played the shit out of Blacklight: Retribution back in the day, and saw the whole transition from zombie studios to buildblock to hardsuit labs. The devs were really active on various forums, and all seemed like great people.
I've been waiting so long for them to release something new, but this sort of game was a complete departure from anything they worked on (as the main dev) in the past. I'm not shocked that it didn't worked out.
To be fair, an indie like Coffee Stain went from an absolute dumbass meme game like Goat Simulator to something crazy complex like Satisfactory.
You can't really judge what a young studio is capable of.
As for you not being a thinblood in this game, you're named as being a thorped elder waking up, so there could be RPG mechanics of you growing as you get stronger from waking up.
And they don't say which elder you are, so you could wake up as any type of elder, even a Nosferatu.
I think digital foundry hit the nail on the head when they said “This isn’t a space simulation like No Man’s Sky or Star Citizen, it’s a Bethesda RPG with space as a background setting”. For a lot of people that’s not a bad thing, but the advertising for this game set expectations wrong.
Still, the seamlessness should be there, I don’t care how they mask it, but it should be there somewhat, again, this is 2023. It doesn’t even do simple fade to blacks, but full blown loading screens everywhere.
Also, travelling with the ship mechanic is incredibly, frustratingly cumbersome. For example, let’s say you wanted to jump to Sol for the first time, in Starfield, you’d do:
Select and mark your destination through map screen.
Somehow exit the map screen (either mash B or hold B and tap B again to exit the menu, cumbersome)
Highlight your weapons with the D-Pad and mash down button.
Highlight GRAV and mash the up button.
Enjoy game stripping controls away from you.
Go back into map screen to mark surface spot you want to go to.
Hold X.
Voilà, you’re there, insantly.
Why have an entire space mechanic, if you’re just gonna make it frustrating to interact with? Game is okay with teleporting you around at times, but not others as well. It literally disrespects your time, but not in a good way. Speaking of a game that disrespects your time well, it’s Elite, which the flow of events would be:
Open Galaxy Map with Y+Left D-Pad and select a destination.
Exit with tapping B, once.
Align your ship with the destination and throttle up.
Tap Y to initiate jump.
Enjoy being able to look around or (albeit barely) interact with your screens.
Open System Map with Y+Right D-Pad and select your destination.
Align the ship with destination.
Open Navigation Panel via X+Left D-Pad, select your target and enable Supercruise Assist.
Enjoy ship taking you there, feel free to interact with panels, photo mode, chat, etc.
Sure, it’s a lot more complicated as it is a sim, but see that you don’t really do redundant actions and you’re in control most of the time. Also, no loading screens as the jumping effect will mask the system change, and the “dropping from Supercruise” screen will mask the second loading screen. Funnily enough, you’ll wait more but feel like it took less.
I don’t want Starfield to be be Elite or Star Citizen, but it doesn’t even have the rudimentary systems in place. For example, I thought you were able to fly anywhere with your ship in the atmosphere and outside it. Just not seamlessly transition between those. That’d be “possible” to have as the game already does this technically. It just isn’t there for whatever reason.
Also this basically breaks exploration as the wast majority of travelling you’ll do is via the menus and loading screens due to the exact same issues. I remind you this game was marketed as an exploration game with 1000 and whatnot.
This is also the case for game play as well. There are just way too many loading screens. Especially weird when they already have airlocks which would mask vast majority of those perfectly.
Bethesda’s engine disallows that entirely. Everything has to be chunked into pieces with loading screens between – every previous Bethesda game has done that, so it’s not really a surprise.
Agree it would be neat, but I also already have No Man’s Sky, and I’m looking forward to Bethesda competing on story.
It blows my mind that Bethesda have owned id Software for over a decade and haven’t at any point got them to make a version of id Tech engine for their games.
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
Like, modders have made their own Open Morrowind engine from scratch, in their spare fucking time. It runs all the same files and all the same mods work, without any of the drawbacks of the Gamebryo engine. It would be trivial for id’s engineers, with their experience and resources, to make something better. For some reason Bethesda just… keep bolting new shit to the creaking husk of their old engine.
There’s literally no reason the graphics wizards at id couldn’t make a Bethesda branch of the engine that uses similar or identical workflows to Creation but also employs all the best practices for a modern open world engine.
It's hard to take your opinion seriously with this kind of statement. It has some real "It's 2023, where is my flying car?" energy.
At the end of the day, it's a lot easier to write a wishlist of game engine features than it is to actually develop said engine.
id Tech was already an open world engine with id Tech 5, after being a regular map-based engine for id Tech 4 and the Quake engines preceding it. It was then scaled back to normal maps for id Tech 6.
They can and have made it do whatever they want. What’s missing is the will from Bethesda to pay for it.
I’d argue it would be smarter to upgrade CE to meet modern standards than creating a branch of id’s software while porting all of existing Bethesda tools.
we don’t have access to the source so we can’t really say things are bolted on. it’s also possible that code is removed as it’s made obsolete.
I don’t think you would have to create an entirely new engine to support elite dangerous type of warping, or elevators even now they could make the illusion better
Yeah, as soon as it became known that this is still on the Creation Engine, I knew there would be loading screens galore. Seamless exploration of planets and actual infinite space flight is just not something this engine is capable of. Hell, I’m impressed they managed to squeeze even the little space flight out of it that they did.
An engine doesn’t disallow anything. The engine wouldn’t work with multiplayer, but then it did. The engine wasn’t 64-bit until it was. Bethesda could have added it, but they didn’t for whatever reason they have.
Fallout 4’s elevators were loading screens but you never faded to black and load in again. There are plenty of ways to mask a loading screen (as well just leaving a loading screen while keeping things menu-free), Bethesda just chose not to.
As someone who usually loves the Battlefield games, I get where you’re coming from. But for us, it’s disappointing that the current version of a game we enjoy is so disappointing. Tragic perhaps in terms of the game itself and its fans. The greedy suits at the top can f right off though.
For me it feels like it has less destruction than 4 and the operators are just something I thought I’d like but it feels off in battlefield. None of the maps were that good either and it always felt too spread out or too many flanks to get shot from. And I’m a huge planetside 2 player so I’m used to 500+ player battles (I miss those days) and it felt everytime I died it was from somewhere that made 0 sense and was frustrating
There’s definately less destruction on the maps. The super hero thing negates classes entirely. The fact that you can’t (or could t at launch) run squads or have comms in the game was crazy.
Basically all the mechanics that reinforced any semblance of team play were removed.
I guess I spent 9,99 Euro on 1 month Game Pass to realize that it’s too bad on my GTX 970 to be fun, glad there are other games I can play for the money. Still I need to see for myself, cry a bit and life will go on.
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