Expected it when I saw it was 39.99€ fully expected it. My brother and I had a lot of fun on the 2nd, we might get the 40€, but it’ll need to be really good for both of us to get the DLC, we rarely do that
Huh? Wasn’t that literally one of the original goals of Stadia. You’d watch someone play a game and you’d be able to launch the same game at the place where you paused the video.
Likewise, there is a subscription model that allows you to maintain access to the title and is divided into two types: Centurion (€12.22 per month or €134 per year) and Imperator (€24.44 per month or €268 per year). The Imperator offers, unlike the Centurion, exclusive events and an allocation of in-game money per month to rent ships and weapons.
Some pretty sloppy work here. The subscription options have nothing to do with playing the game; it’s a buy once product with no subscription system at all. The Centurion and Imperator subscriptions are better thought of as a kind of “backstage pass”, they mostly just give you patreon style content and extra in game flair items. Are they worth the money? Unless you’re a die hard fan, absolutely not. But it’s not like you have to pay up “maintain access” as the article puts it.
Encumbrance is supposed to provide a type of challenge, and realism. Though how realistic is carrying more than like, one extra weapon really? Also, it is a weird thing to get hung up on for “realism’s” sake. The best possible argument for encumbrance is forcing players to make choices. In roguelikes for example, you very often only get to choose from a limited number of rewards. In that sense it’s really fun, but you cannot go back on your choice. With encumbrance, if you must, you can keep all your rewards, but it’s just very tedious to do so. So instead of forcing the choice and creating dynamic gameplay, most likely you’re just forcing the player to do some tedious shit. Roguelikes deal with the hording mentality much better than a traditional RPG.
Another thing to note about encumbrance, is that there’s just so much random garbage you can pick up in these games. Someone else mentioned that in real table top rpg, you’re not picking 100 wheels of cheese cuz they might come in handy later. I think it’s honestly just filler content, and doesn’t really add to the game aside from the fact that if you couldn’t pick up that wheel of cheese, you’d feel slightly cheated. I wouldn’t call it lazy game development, but I think “loot” as a gameplay element has a lot of evolving to do. It feels good to get loot, but so often it has to be padded out to feel like you’re actually getting anything. You have to receive it often enough. It has to give some benefit or it just feels like window dressing. That’s a fine line that very few games handle very well at all.
I think it would be interesting to be able to hire a merchant NPC to loot for you. You’d lose a bit of the value (say, half), but the merchant would reinvest those profits to carry better items, and they’d give you a discount.
You’d have an incentive to look through the loot to take what you want, as well as an incentive to ignore the stuff you don’t. That way you get the immersiveness of an encumbrance system, without most of the tedium.
Right, at the very least it’d add a gameplay element to the tedium. Or maybe your character refuses to pick up random shit unless they have the right abilities/training. Or like in skyrim where you can’t see the characteristics of certain plants you pick up until you’ve leveled up in a certain field enough, but instead of not showing the alchemical properties, the item itself isn’t fully detailed - like it’ll just look like a generic mushroom, or a generic sword/gun/etc. And a player with very high skills in certain areas would unlock different characteristics of that item.
The downside is with a realistic encumbrance system, you’d either:
A) Not be picking anything up, or:
B) Making so many milk runs your head will spin from the tedium of ferrying useless bullshit back and forth.
Being 70-80 hours into STARFIELD, there’s non-cheating ways to avoid the encumbrance penalty, such as the “Powered Assist” backpacks which lowers O2 / stamina consumption by 75% when overencumbered. You can also deposit your loot into your ship’s cargo bay and sell directly from it by pressing Q at any vendor.
In ITR/Into The Radius VR, a fully realistic military looter shooter survival horror like STALKER; I picked up and carried EVERYTHING, but through the use of an inane amount of utility items, such as a chest harness, backpack, lower back bags, leg bags, thigh bags, and so on. (My favorite thing to put in my belt bags was cake slices and energy drink cans, made for hilarious streaming content when you take a bite of cake in a dire situation)
I still spent like 20 real-life hours slogging knee deep through swamp to ferry back an entire inventory of artifacts worth 5K/ea.
So my takeaway is, people are gonna loot and hoard; if they do that, encourage it. If not, reward the player with more credits from missions and other things that don’t involve scraping and strip-mining every planet for every ounce of metal.
It depends on the kind of tabletop rpg. In old school ones you may have a cart and hireling to carry this stuff, so you would definitely take those cheese wheels to sell them or for food to your group that’s not so small anymore. Logistic was part of the game. But a part that’s easily lost depending on how you play.
Honestly, realism justifications for encumbrance outside of survival-type games where basic biological needs are the core gameplay loop have always been silly to me… but the latter one about wheels of cheese rings true.
To me the argument is “what does optimal play look like”? Without encumbrance, there’s no reason not to pick up every wheel of cheese, so optimal play is to pick up every wheel of cheese, which is tedious and dumb. But with encumbrance, every wheel of cheese becomes a tedious decision, and completionist-optimal play is to burn endless time ferrying stuff to the shops or storage or whatever. But as you said, making every wheel of cheese not something you can pick up breaks immersion.
So what’s the compromise that actually makes sense for the “wheel of cheese” problem? A realistic setting is cluttered with “slightly-useful” items. Don’t put so many “slightly-useful” items outside of settings with NPCs that will have realistic reactions to you stealing their stuff? But coding those realistic reactions (“uh, you’re The Savior, I guess you can steal all my food… a bit… okay that tears it call the guards!”) would be some more dev-work in these already-bloated projects.
But the problem still exists in hostile locales. A lived-in enemy camp is going to have store-rooms of “slightly useful” stuff. If the hero stops to raid the larder while massacring nameless Stormtroopers, is that a problem? I can see the immersion argument that “well, if you can, you probably should since you might need it and that breaks immersion” and therefore that justifies the encumbrance idea, but I also see Steph Sterling’s argument “this is just a game and I wanna!” And I have trouble defending realism in these games about butchering your way across the landscape without ever stopping to poop.
Bethesda’s RPGs have always been shallow in the choice you have with dialogue and altering the story, but deep with the detail, world-building, and mechanics of gameplay. Arena is almost no different in the gameplay loop as Starfield. They went through various phases of how to use rules and complexity of certain systems, but have since settled in a formula established first by Morrowind and refined with Oblivion and further with Skyrim.
They are not about the story. The story is just kinda there to drive some motivation and give context to your own thing. They excel at immersing you in the world and allowing you to just play however you want without restrictions (such as being a god in everything without having to start over and build specific characters to do specific things). They have a pretty good track record of doing good environmental story telling and adding in all those little stories in notes and terminals that aren’t even tied to quests.
But when it comes to stories and dialogue? They had ONE game that was a masterpiece, Morrowind, and the rest have ranged from absolute shit to pretty good. And not one of them, not even Morrowind, actually have the same kind of choice and sweeping changes affected through dialogue get in a story-focused RPG like Baldur’s Gate. Bethesda will likely never have a game as well written as Morrowind again, because that isn’t what they are about.
They are very much about the action over the words. Despite the jank as fuck AI, the combat is still fun somehow (and imagine how much more fun it could be if the AI didn’t suck!), it’s incredibly easy to lose yourself in the world because of how detailed it is, and there are plenty of shenanigans to pull once you begin to dive in and see how everything works. Like, I can’t wait to completely fill one of the huge craters near my base with watermelons and then dive in.
This is it. Forget all the tracked on nonsense. The base building, the character management, production chains all that nonsense…
If you focus on the combat/looter aspect of the game, that part is actually pretty good. A world apart from the janky combat of Fallout, it actually feels pretty visceral.
They may not explode like in Fallout, but there is a new fun spectacle in town: Shooting out backpacks on low gravity environments and launching your enemies off world.
And this is why I didn’t buy Starfield. I loved Morrowind and was disappointed with Skyrim, and I think it’s because I prefer a tighter, more linear story and don’t like “messing around” as much. I watched a gameplay video, and the things that player got excited about (all the side content) really didn’t grab my attention, and the story itself seemed a bit flat.
I probably would’ve loved it as a kid, but that’s not what I’m looking for these days.
So for me, BG3 is the better game. But younger me would’ve preferred Starfield. They’re both great games, just for very different audiences. And I could totally see someone having exactly the opposite opinion as me, which just shows how great both are.
Yeah I just had a scene where wyll asked me to dance and I was ready to dunk on him with my skillz but instead they danced and make out and the game didn’t even ask me if I wanted to
Ugh, I hate bad PC writing. It's bad enough when it's "I agree 100%," "I agree 100% and wanna s your d," and "You're the stupidest, ugliest, evilest piece of absolute crap I have ever seen in my life and I'd kill you myself if it wouldn't get your blood in the carpet" but then some games just insist on somehow making it non-obvious which is which >:|
It’s a fun wrap-up to act 1 before you dive into the underdark or the mountain pass. It also serves as an important relationship set-up - it’s where you’re meant to establish who you want to romance, if anyone.
The fact you need a 4090 to touch 120fps on 1080p in 2023 is disgusting. That should be the minimum target fps for mid range hardware at the least.
Meh, game is bland anyway.
Ok sure, 1080p low settings, I can get away with a 4080 if I have an i9 13900K. 1080p high? Yeah, not even a 4090 with a 13900K will get you near 120fps.
It's shitty code bound. Sometimes no matter how powerful your hardware is, software will perform poorly because it just doesn't scale. Writing complex software like game so that it can fully utilize current hardware AND actually run faster with better CPU/GPU can become very difficult once a certain complexity threshold is reached. It's easy enough to do for a small linear game even if it has exceptional graphics, but an open world sandbox game like ones that Bethesda makes is a completely different story.
That doesn't mean that it's impossible of course - Bethesda absolutely should have made a better job, but it's by no means an easy task.
I was able to get a consistent 70+ fps with most things set to medium, 1440p with a 3900x and a rtx 2080 with dlss2 and a mod that helps performance without any noticable dregredarion I can tell.
In comparison to BG3, the dialogue and stories are incredibly bland in Starfield.
If you don’t compare it to BG3 though, then the dialogue and stories are still incredibly bland.
I swear every Bethesda game does this. For example, when you get three dialogue options, they all say basically the same thing, and they all set up the player to be dunked on by the NPCs response…
Or the only options are:
“wow! Incredible! I love kittens, good on ya kid!”
At least the stories were pretty good for the most part. Starfield’s story and lore are just so generic and boring, and the dialogue ranges from corny to just flatout awful. Even compared to previous Bethesda games, the story elements in Starfield are a yawn fest that feel like they were written by history majors and not people who love science fiction.
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