Rarely, outposts can become unbuildable. You have to save and reload
The bounty system is slightly more jank than I’m used to. Sometimes I’ll get a 15000 bounty for a stealth kill while unseen - those 15000 bounties never go away from witness death. Other times a 650 bounty that immediately goes away from “last witness died”. I had to save-scum a pirate ship because it happened with some specific folks, and I solved it by chucking a grenade into the bridge. I commented elsewhere, grenades are super-stealth and you usually get away with throwing a grenade in full view in a crowded room if you can hide before it blows up.
I’d like to see #2 fixed/improved, but honestly don’t mind either very much.
I mean, you can always just follow reasonable contrast advice from square 1, and colorblindness won’t be an issue. It’s a pretty solved problem in the web world if people are willing to actually give a damn about it. You can have red and green text and buttons all across the screen as long as their contrast is enough that color-blind users can differentiate them.
Adding colorblind mode to a product you’ve already spent years on saying “fuck colorblind people, I don’t care about them”. Yeah, that’s not so easy.
I work on a product that strives for Section 508 compliance, despite the fact that any improvement we make will only be used by fewer than 1% of our userbase.
Yes, we can and do exactly fault developers for ignoring users with disabilities.
Worse (at least back then), the replayability plummeted a lot. Once the fear was gone, you played a couple times to see all the branches and min-max a bit. Once you did an extreme deathless run, it was as solved-problem as any puzzler (which in a way, it was).
I’m curious what a sequel would look like. If it’s a totally different puzzle to work out, it might be interesting.
From the images, though, it looks like it might be a bit more seamless an experience, where expanding beyond the initial burner is possible. That could change everything.
I’m sorry to feel that way. Looks like sticking to the topic isn’t working. Cheers.
One point, though. You punctuate your point with a statement that sounds like you think no game is to your “standards of quality” if there exists a gamer somewhere in the world who doesn’t get what they want out of it. Seems a weird type of measurement. I usually consider “mostly positive” on Steam a fairly decent bar for quality. But you can consider whatever you like, of course.
Paying customers are footing the bill for that anti-theft
The guy is making over $500k off someone else’s product with a couple days’ work. I’m no Tankie, but you don’t have to be a high schooler or a pothead to have a problem with capitalism’s more toxic extremes. People have been conditioned to forget this, but piracy is a counter-leverage to prevent product pricing from going out of control. Just look at the average prices of Switch games vs PC games. The harder it is to pirate a product, the further the price of that product is from a value consensus.
These types of anti-thefts tend to false-fire for the paying customers (who footed the bill). This is especially true because he builds his mods against a closed-source product that behaves in ways he cannot always predict. Published modding interfaces are never perfect.
I’m sorry, but not everyone has a high brightness display. Adding a brightness gauge can be very useful for those people.
Sure… but that’s not an indicator if a game is complete or if it’s “like a circa 2000 game”. I don’t fault you for wanting a feature that’s not present. But that’s not an objective measure of the game.
The rest is just nonsense and Bethesda fanatism. Like
You know how you can tell someone is approaching toxicity? They fault people for liking things. I disagree with you, therefore I must be a stupid fan who would accept anything.
if you like Bethesda games, you love Starfield Is one of the worst take possible to save your wallet.
Not sure what you mean here. Bethesda flagships are equational games. You expect “X”, so if you want “X”, you give them money for “X”. I dunno about you, but I used to “demo pirate” games because you never knew what you were getting and nothing sucks like blowing $50+ hoping for “X” and getting “Y”.
<span style="color:#323232;">ME: "I want Skyrim in Space"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Them: "Here you go, Skyrim in Space"
</span>
I call that a breath of fresh air. You’re actually holding that against them and me. Why? Have you never bought a game that surprised you unpleasantly?
Like if they come out with a broken game at 150$ you are going to buy it because you like Bethesda?
That’s the opposite of what I said.
Let’s put it this way. I don’t like McDonalds. But I know people who do. When they order a Big Mac, it is exactly the same every single time. So if you’re craving a Big Mac, you will never be disappointed when you buy a Big Mac. I’m not saying a McDonalds fan should drop $150 on a flaming bag of crap. I’m saying that you don’t get a “flaming bag of crap” when you order a Big Mac. You get a Big Mac.
Bethesda didn’t come out with a broken game at $150. They came out with Skyrim in Space. If you don’t like McDonalds, don’t buy McDonalds. But stop treating people who happen to like McDonalds like there’s something wrong with them, or like they’re zealous superfans.
People are complaining about issues with the characters, broken launch mission launch bugs and bad quest variety.
Do you know what moving the goalposts is? It starts with the line “It’s not about the bugs. I have no idea what bugs are in the game.”. Make up your mind, because we’ve had a fairly heated discussion where you chose to make no meaningful statements about bugs. You don’t get to just drop that line, now. And you were smart to do so, because overall consensus seems to be that Starfield is overall less buggy than the new Gold Standard AAA (BG3). I’ve been playing it since release, and have found exactly ONE frustrating bug (related to outpost building), significantly lower than my gaming expectation of ANY game over the last 20+ years.
And maybe you need to take a new look at what “finished” means in a dictionary. Because quest breaking bugs
Let me reiterate your words: “It’s not about the bugs. I have no idea what bugs are in the game.”
…and missing features don’t seem to mean “finished”.
As a developer, someone whining to me that my product isn’t “finished” because it doesn’t have this silly feature they want that was never on our roadmap is annoying as hell. Can you imagine that? Is your house “finished”? I don’t see an indoor pool or sauna, so it can’t be.
The game was advertised as “next gen” priced as a high quality AAA
I mean, they were very clear that it was Creation Engine 2, a new iteration on the Creation Engine. What were you or anyone expecting except another iteration on the Creation Engine?
it’s last/previous gen with s* optimisation, and bad physics on many parts
This is a surprise or a disappointment? Nobody plays a Bethesda game for the physics.
And not delivering well on the rest either.
What “the rest” did they not deliver well on? Consensus seems to be that if you like Bethesda games, you love Starfield. If you don’t, you don’t. I mean, I don’t buy the fancy new Madden Football. You know why? I don’t like Madden Football. When Madden 2077 comes out with a new “throw the ball” engine, I’m not getting all amped up that this is finally the Madden Football I’ll want to play. They promised us Skyrim in Space. They gave us Skyrim in Space. The only let-down is that it didn’t have nearly as many “signature bugs” as I would expect from Skyrim in Space.
It’s a bit extreme
Extreme is an understatement. I love CP2077, but they made terrible design decisions and most gamers would have been happier if we got a little less “physics realism” and a lot more game at release. Call me old school, but I feel like “Realistic Physics Simulation” is something that doesn’t belong in most games, and it’s often the cause of bugs and detracts from the game itself.
but we can see the care put into the character, weapon and static object physics and interaction is nothing
You probably want to separate all those other things from interaction. You kinda shoehorned that in at the end of the rant about physics. Even that Nik guy focuses on physics mostly (and drugged out people dancing).
It’s year 2000 type of quality, even then there was maybe better character physics.
I’m thinking you’re a fairly young gamer. You clearly don’t remember year 2000 quality. Morrowind came out in 2002 and Vampire Bloodlines cames out in 2004… Starfield definitely feels like a game 20 years newer than those.
They didn’t even bother to add a brightness control in the game
…full tilt, here? Sounds like you’re looking for a year 2000 game. More and more games leave out brightness control the last decade because you can do it at system level on tv or computer. When I see one of those brightness control gauges, I think “early-mid 2000s”. Bioshock 1 comes to mind.
No hdr (even if I can’t run it, is a f 60+$ game !).
That’s a very cherry-picked feature. HDR is not “the big buzzword of the future of gaming” or some shit, it’s just a color range technology. Big deal? The lack of native RTX/DLSS (otoh) is a bit disappointing, but not exactly unique to Starfield. Most new games don’t have it, and it generally has to do with vendor/API lock-in (something I can respect)
And the start screen could have just been a style, to be “empty”. But with all of this, it’s more likely they just didn’t bother.
Or it was just a style to be “empty” since that was a signature of Skyrim and they were trying to give us Skyrim in Space.
And there is plenty more complaints on the game quality.
Go on. None of your complaints have had to do with game quality so far. They were that it isn’t a Physics Simulator, and that it doesn’t have certain vendor-lock video features you admitted you can’t even run on your system.
I don’t call such a game “finished”.
I think you need to look up what “finished” means. None of your complaints are about an incomplete nature to the game, but for decisions not to include things that were unnecessary to the game’s vision. This isn’t “they left out major questlines halfway through to save money” or “they were 6 months short on QA time”. This was “I want a physics simulator with my cheesy poofs!”
EDIT: Just to add a bit more. I find it interesting everyone wants Bethesda to be a physics simulation. Nobody expects that of a Diablo, or a Baldur’s Gate, or even a GTA. A few FPS games added it. So what? Truth is, people are falling into this “FPS rut” where every game is expected to have (and lack) the features the a few FPS franchises spearheaded. I literally spent my entire life avoiding FPS games because I hate them, and everyone bitches at the good and original games for every time an FPS has a feature they don’t.
You know what else doesn’t have a physics simulator built in? Microsoft Excel.
Proof of exactly how important unions are. I never got into gamedev because of its well-earned reputation of being a meatgrinder full of underpaid, overworked devs who never get credit and are the first to be laid off.
I think 180k people disagree with you each day playing starfield.
As a developer myself, I consider Starfield to be a fairly finished product in terms of quality. The outstanding bugs I’ve seen are uncommon and the type I would expect to end up in a production product.
My complaints about Starfield are fairly specific. I don’t like how they built the bounty and forgiveness process, as it’s a bit unpredictable and simultaneously gamable. I can pirate a ship and rack up a $650 bounty, or get a $30000+ bounty pirating the same ship. The way stealth works is comical (if not buggy) in that it’s stealthier to be seen throwing a grenade into a room and running than to shoot someone from hiding. But those (presumably) aren’t bugs or incompleteness, they’re side-effects of the designed systems working as intended.
Basically me, too. I can do 4 or 5 playthroughs of Skyrim and enjoy the hell out of it and want more, but I only reached “late-ish-game” in Witcher 3 once in 4 or 5 attempts… and even then burn out.
It feels exactly like Witcher 3 with cars, guns, and less janky combat. There’s a lot of people who think Witcher 3 is the best game ever made. I think CP2077 is better than Witcher 3. Of course, I’m that guy who doesn’t really love Witcher 3.
Of course, my favorite games are Bethesda “collect garbage and shut up” games. I play them for the story (feel like I’m getting judged for reading Playboy now)