I really hope starfield lights a bit of a fire under the NMS folks to fix some of their half-finished systems along those lines. NMS has procedurally generated ships, we’re just not allowed to tinker with the procedural generator to make our own for some reason.
I posted a shorter version of this elsewhere in here but I’ve thought more and want to expand.
Disclaimer: I really like both no man’s sky and starfield. Gonna be down on both of them but I’ve got hundreds of hours in NMS and I expect to have hundreds more in SF, they are both good games, I have no regrets about buying either of them.
That said, I’ve realized that starfield is actually making me low-key kind of angry at NMS, for all the potential it wasted. It’s showing just how little extra depth NMS could have used (could still use) to be great. There are really only a couple fairly minor ways that starfield is better, and yet for me and I think a lot of people they spell the difference between “fun sandbox” and “awesome game”. Starfield is so shallow on all of these that despite being the first game to really deliver on the promise of an open world space RPG sandbox, it’s like a wish-dot-com version of what nms could be.
First, combat. Nms has all right space combat, nothing great but acceptable, but there’s no excusing its ground combat. There’s effectively one enemy, they’re not really designed to be fought most of the time, and they’re almost never involved in battles of any meaning. The combat overhaul added some mechanics but didn’t solve the problem… in a way it’s worse now because fighting seems like it could be interesting. How come when I find a trading post it’s never a ruin overrun by pirates, with scattered notes from the lost inhabitants, written in their native language so that if I can speak it I can read their sad story? Why don’t I ever find a detail of gek security bots defending the inner chambers of a crashed frigate? Why can’t I have a shootout with the crew of a frigate on board its procedurally generated interior?
That leads into the issue that there’s no story at all. People complain about the main quest of SF, but nms has one of the flimsiest, poorest written central plots of any game I’ve ever seen. That would be okay, but there are also no side quests. You can’t stumble upon an abandoned mine, or have a spacer randomly ask you to help break a blockade of their home system. There are a tiny number of very shallow fetch quests, but nothing with even a hint of effort in the writing.
I get a bit annoyed at starfield for systems not interacting. Like, i have a house, but I can’t build outpost buildings around it, eg. However, NMS takes that to extremes with how outpost building, village building, and frigate building all seem like they’re actively hostile to each other, as if coming from different games. IIRC even some of the outpost components won’t properly snap together if they’re from different ‘styles’ of outpost, although I may be misremembering.
Add to that that there’s also not a lot of gear collecting mechanics, minimal ways to display loot, minimal character customisation, and so on, and it’s just… sigh. Everything nms does feels like it falls just short of being amazing, but they get bored right before completing the last step to bring it all home and then they go work on another system that they’ll get 3/4 through and then abandon. I wish it had mods.
Meanwhile, starfield doesn’t do any individually thing particularly well either, but unlike NMS, it feels like I can do stuff with what I make. I can build a ship… and then take it smuggling! Or fight pirates! I can have NPCs on board and they’ll chat with each other while I’m flying around, and help run the ship! They’re not all well written, but they’re actually written, and do more than just stand around saying one line back at me. It’s frustrating, because honestly, taken on its own, starfield isn’t particularly remarkable (see how bland space travel is eg) but there’s nothing out there that’s actually gone the very obvious extra mile of “okay we have beautiful worlds to explore, what if now we put some things to do on them”
Se for me has exactly the same issue as NMS. No story, no person-to-person combat, no side quests. Just an empty world you’re expected to populate yourself I guess. Starfield definitely doesn’t do that as well, it isn’t as much a Minecraft style sandbox. If nms or se had quests and story, I might not like starfield this much… but they don’t, and there really isn’t another space sim that also provides a decent shooter and rpg while having a nice open world.
No, I mean when you the player want to sell your items you have to put them up for sale on the black market and wait for buyers, and there’s a simple demand algorithm that determines what kind of price you’ll get and how long it will take.if you’ve flooded the market with cheap guns, you don’t get much for them.
Not so much for these games, but this conversation had me thinking about alternate mechanics for loot sales in the open source game I work on, and I think one solution is to have any loot of any value use more of a pawn shop/consignment mechanic. Rather than selling guns individually maybe you can put your crate of used weaponry up for sale on the black market, and then you have to wait for a buyer. Might take a long time depending on how much they’re worth.
I wouldn’t shape any of your decision to playor not play on this particular detail. It really has little to no impact on the game whatsoever. There are a lot of really interesting worlds to explore, it’s really not worth the amount of discussion lately.
Not saying this means “this is the game for you”. Just that this one facet shouldn’t enter into your assessment at all, in my opinion.
I kind of think it does apply to modern graphics and game design in the same way. A fast paced action shooter still needs moments where you catch your breath, it’s never just an endless constant flood of enemies. A visually beautiful game still has bits that aren’t particularly interesting or you’d get an overdose of visual information and wouldn’t be able to identify what was important.
Similarly, starfield has a lot of small barren moons that don’t have a lot of resources. They are boring compared to the green worlds (there are tons of these too though, which every repeat of this thread has glossed over), but they still have stuff going for them. I spent my evening last night exploring a smuggler base that I randomly fell into while looking for a place to put an aluminum mine on a barren moon. The night before it was a (very cool) mission on an abandoned mining platform.
However, in the process of going to and from these sites, I definitely felt like I was travelling across a barren, dusty moon. That helped the feel. Both those quests had storylines that were inherently tied to the fact that the setting was a barren, dusty moon, rather than a teeming, thriving planet.
Bottom line, I think this one over-shared article says nothing of importance. If you go to one of these ‘boring’ moons there’s lots to do, just not ‘explore and identify the planetary life’ kind of stuff. you can tell at a glance which planets are more likely to have settlements and things from space, and there’s more of them than any one person can explore, so it really doesn’t matter that there are also a bunch that aren’t like that.
Has anyone here ever thought “I would like this game more if it had encumbrance in it”?
Yes, I totally have. In fact even in starfield, I found pretty quickly that I was wishing the game would arbitrarily restrict my ammunition and medpack supplies, because the combat was more fun when I could run out of shots and healing in the early game. It’s not even the kind of thing I can easily do as a challenge myself because it’s so easy to pick them up and go “over”. I legit think starfield’s encumbrance system would be much better if it was more restrictive, so that I had to carefully choose my equipment and things, than the current “I can carry so much that gameplay is not meaningfully restricted, but not nearly enough to collect and sell all the loot I find”.
I posted upstream about the problem with encumbrance in this style of game. It’s not that encumbrance is inherently bad, but that most of the time in crpgs, it just seems to be ‘there’, it’s not in the service of any part of the gameplay.
I agree, I don’t mind much of how they handle encumbrance itself except for the constant nagging from my companion. Personally, I just don’t think they interrogated the concepts of encumbrance at all - which isn’t surprising of course, bethesda design seems to have so many sacred cows it may as well be a holy dairy.
A UI fix to do that for you was modded in almost instantly, I’ll be installing that one tonight I think. The vanilla game is much better than I expected but I’m finding it too easy if I cheat in infinite personal storage, and too much of a cognitive burden to constantly weigh every loot item in my mind.
I don’t agree with that dichotomy in a game like this. Certainly in the deeply simulationist roguelike I stan (cataclysm dark days ahead plug), that’s appropriate, but this game is fundamentally silly and arcade style so I don’t think the trouble has anything to do with realism. The solution I’d have personally in something like this is to eg. allow you to carry up to 6 weapons, 1 of each wearable type of item, and a certain amount of aid items in your “active” inventory, and then have everything else you loot automatically go to your ship inventory which is huge or infinite, but restricted in how you can access it (personally I’d still have ship inventories be finite, but enormous). Let perks increase your number of slots in a particular category, rather than increasing carry weight. Have resources and ‘notes’ go to the ship automatically as well, since it doesn’t really have any impact on the game to be carrying these on your person. Plus, I’d do what modders have been doing for a while and make decorative junk items have no value or weight. Let me pick up as many blenders as I want, I’m just going to use them to decorate my juice bar and play house, who frigging cares.
I’d also remove vendor credit caps, but make the amount of cash you get from loot pretty trivial compared to what you get from missions, so it’s just not that appealing to sell 15 cheap machineguns. And while I’m wishlisting, I’d love to be able to set up an auto-sell filter, eg. ‘sell non-unique weapons below a particular dps’
My issue with it in Starfield (and any game in its genre) is that the game seems to be confused about how it feels about encumbrance. Am I supposed to be looting everything I see? If not, then why is it the major income source, why are so many random objects worth selling and taking? If so, why do merchants have such low credit stores? Am I supposed to be collecting cool stuff to display? If not, then why all the display objects? If so, why have my companions constantly nag me about bringing junk? Why make ship storage so low? Or, am I supposed to be carefully considering what I want to bring as loot? If so, why is there so much of it and why isn’t there some way to quickly see what’s worth taking? Am I supposed to spend an hour after each combat carefully weighing what to take home?
It’s entirely unclear what they want. If they want looting to be less of a game loop, junk items should have no sell value and missions should be more of a reward, and item value/kg should be easy to assess. We should be quickly able to discard valueless items from inventory. Otoh if they want looting to be a bigger part of the game, I should be able to readily carry and sell my loot and doing so shouldn’t make me so rich it breaks the economy.
It’s one of my main complaints, not so much about starfield, but pretty much anything in this genre. It feels like they can’t tell if they want me to loot everything or not, the design is fundamentally at odds with itself.
The ship builder is just tons of fun. I wish the controls were a little bit more obvious but once you get the hang of it, I think it’s my favourite in genre. I love building something neat and then going to check out the interior walkthrough, particularly. I think I need a save where I just cheat in millions of credits so i can experiment for a while
Yeah I can’t really disagree with people’s assessment of how much travel-by-loading-screen there can be, but like… while it’s there, I just mostly haven’t noticed it. Thirty hours in now and I find I’m mixing up fast travelling wide distances with “manually” travelling by launching into orbit and jumping place to place fairly regularly, I don’t think I’d even have thought to criticize it without coming here.
I like how immersive travel can be in a game like NMS, but it’s not like it’s all that exciting or fun to pull into the atmosphere for the 500th time and maneuver to your landing pad, or spend longer than a loading screen amount of time to boost out of atmosphere to hit the jump button. We’re exchanging one form of slightly tedious load for a different one.