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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
To be clear, there’s 50 years from 1954 to when gay marriage was first legalized. And 40 years ago, we even thought we were done with the whole abortion debate. Don’t even need to get into how long it took for people with Brown skin were legally treated anywhere near equal. BLM was how many years after the Emancipation? And still opposed by people who “want to leave it all well alone”. It’s a big deal that it takes that long to enact minimal change (considering we have a seated SCOTUS Justice who said we need to reconsider the constitutionality of gay marriage)
The real problem, perhaps, is everyone coming to the defense of the modder, even here. People saying “just let people do what they do” (see highly upvoted comment here). If the intolerant side “do what they do” and the rest of us get bored or sick of the human rights side, then it takes 50 years, or 100 years, or more to make meaningful change.
It’s not censorship when private groups are doing it. Moreso, I think the entire world has figured out the right answer to the Paradox of Tolerance is intolerance (yes, even censorship).
There are two reasons said censorship is okay.
Those who hold to these extreme beliefs are happy to censor the opposing viewpoint whether we censor them or not. They see the idea of trans human rights as unworthy of protection.
So long as you allow a false belief to spread, there will always be adherents. When it is a harmful belief, that makes even innocent-seeming propagation of that belief genuinely harmful… which by every moral tradition (and most legal ones) is sufficient to override freedom of speech.
Remember, there is no free speech absolutism where all speech is protected. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying or ignorant. What we’re arguing about is whether to draw the line at malicious behavior that is already more harmful than speech many of us are already against.
And from your “don’t want stupid pronouns in my game”, you show you’ve fallen for bullet point #2.
Generally speaking, it’s awkward in English (or even weird) to constantly use the Proper Noun every single time you refer to a person.
Simplest example is “Jim got into his car”. “Jim got into Jim’s car” is strange. And that’s within a single sentence. Properly in English, we use gendered pronouns for all unambiguous references to a person several sentences in a row. For example:
“Jim got into his car. He turned it on, and hit the gas. When he saw a red light, he stopped quickly. Jim got impatient, and honked on the horn”. That would be entirely proper, and virtually none of those pronouns should be replaced with Jim’s proper name.
But what the anti-trans people tend to miss when making the “offended every mis-gender” is the wide gulf of difference between being hurt and being offended. I’ve known people in Emergency Services who had PTSD triggered by off-color comments that reminded them of something they lived through (things like “he’ll have your head for this”… you can imagine why).
They weren’t offended by those off-color comments. They were hurt. And those of us who care about them are careful not to say things that hurt those we love. But if we do slip up, we know and they know that it wasn’t out of malice, and nobody is offended.
…except the people who want to call you by your deadname because hurting you makes them feel good. They are offended, and they want to hurt you. And nobody should be making excuses for them. Dozens of people here are, and that’s a shame.
Let me guess, you don’t have any trans friends. Probably don’t have any gay friends, either.
I know no fewer than 5 people who have been physically assaulted over their sexuality or their gender identity. My local pro-LGBTQ church was vandalized by people who left messages about how god hates them.
You deserve all those downvotes you’re complaining about if you really believe that non-binary people in the Western world aren’t reasonably afraid to express their gender.
And as for “how it relates to…a game”. Can you imagine being Jewish and a bunch of pro-nazi mods made it to the frontpage of your favorite game? Can you imagine if then everyone started bitching because the site took those hateful mods down?
Games, as online communities, are used to “innocently” draw people towards extreme beliefs.
Not a problem. People don’t usually think about pronouns. We could circumvent a lot of confusion if there were an agreeable gender-neutral pronoun in English… But people have gone back and forth about the only one we have (“they”) enough that it rubs both sides wrong. Gendering a person in a sentence rarely disambiguates… it only maters if you have a conversation with exactly 1 male and female subject and ZERO genderable objects.
A man and a woman sitting in a boat, for example, and “her” still might be ambiguous.
I mostly agree and have been defending it from haters recently myself. But there is one thing in the way of “You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission… I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do.”
Starfield is a “looter shooter RPG” like other Bethesda games. And like other Bethesda games, your time off-leash is limited by your inventory size, with valuable items dropping that take up to 10% of that or more a piece. Awkwardly, ship storage is just not that incredible, until/unless you either go all-in on outposts or all-in on megaships. Which means you do end up having to stop and go to a city often, probably the one with your next mission goal.
It’s not a huge gripe, but I think Bethesda has always used inventory to drive people back to populated centers to pick up quests.
It’s days like this that remind me I’m not a typical gamer.
When Sims 4 came out, I put Sims 3 away thinking it was time for something bigger and better even though I’d had wishlisted DLC unpurchased. When Sims 4 clearly had basic content locked behind future DLC, I quit and didn’t go back to anything because playing the old version when the new version is out “didn’t make sense”. Went from being a Sims player to not a Sims player, not in protest but because their business model “failed to monetize” me. Obviously, if I were the base case, EA would have backpedaled.
Reminds me of the “mini-outrigger and story collection” thing with fantasy literature. I’ve gone from being a diehard fan to no longer even reading simply because I didn’t have the bandwidth and research hours to take it all in (Dresden and Iron Druid, lookin at you).
With the namedrops in the main stories on things I didn’t recognize and my not being able to keep up with side stories, my interest waned and I moved on. I still haven’t read anything after Peace Talks, and I don’t recall what’s going on in Iron Druid anymore.
The thought came to mind after reading a recent post about Baldurs Gate 3 here but it reminded me of the Japense only PSX game Mizzurna Falls where if you don’t perform a certain action early in the game you are prevented from getting a true ending. While this might not be a traditional soft lock because you can still progress...
Suikoden 1 and 2 in particular have very precise soft-locks.
In Suikoden 1, Pahn has to win a battle that seems to be a scripted loss.
Suikoden 2 (my favorite RPG of all time) is actually beyond brutal. There’s a 3-5 second timed input that doesn’t even make much sense and if you get it wrong, nothing predictable changes except you don’t get the 108th star (just one person having a private word with the strategist that only makes sense later)
Good news. You can still beat the game if the “thread of prophecy is severed”, but it is fairly challenging and generally requires stumble-luck or at LEAST knowledge of how to normally beat the game. It helps to know the identity of another character you have to kill in cold blood to get “almost back on track”. And then the location that serves no real purpose except to get back on track from that situation.
I dunno which of the two is worse. I fell for the Pahn one in S1, but managed to guess right in S2 by sheer luck (it’s between a default “Watch Out!” and “Nanami!”. You have to pick “Nanami!” or you lose out on the good ending. And you automatically say “Watch Out!” if you don’t pick fast)
Yeah, that was always a weird one to me. It’s one thing for speech checks to give you advantages and shortcuts, but that straight up cut 30 minutes off the game.
Yeah, and I don’t get why. We quite literally got exactly what we expected with Starfield, and nobody said we would get anything different. For those of us who enjoy it, we got precisely what we were promised. For those who don’t enjoy it, nobody tried to pretend they were getting something different.
If I have one complaint, they did not manage to brand it as effectively as they branded Fallout (the blonde cartoon, music, etc). But then, they never managed to brand tES that way and we’re all still alive.
My 2c. Isn’t it a breath of fresh air that we got a complete game without $100s in day1 DLC required to make it playable?
My guilty pleasure is to install Morrowind again and commit to replaying it, but to instead do another Skyrim playthrough because I just have more fun for some reason.
There’s something about the newer Bethesda games. I’ll go and install legacy games from other companies all the time for the sense of nostalgia, but despite having beaten almost all of them going back to Arena, if I want a Bethesda game I always end up playing Skyrim or FO4. And now (I presume) Starfield
like you said, no annoying Battle pass, day one DLC etc and other than early access, was there preorder bonuses?
There were some minor cosmetic day 1 bonuses that nobody is losing sleep over not having. Basically, a skin pack for 4 items you get early on in the game’s main story. Unless people are roleplaying heavy, those items are in storage or sold to vendors by the 5 hour mark in the game. I’ve seen some people who wanted pay-to-win or pay-to-pretty bitch because this was miles from it.
The hate just seems odd, I can get the hate for most AAA shit but it seems really misplaced for StarField
Exactly. Bethesda games have never been the bleeding edge for graphics, even when they were the games crushing GPUs (Balmorra@6fps, I’ll never forget you). Nobody is even meaningfully saying that the money was spent on bonuses or moon vacations for the execs or anything, only that what they spent it on was not hyper-realistic graphics. They’ve always been a vast game. That’s where they spend their dev money.
Also, I guess also the cutscenese/animations everywhere, launching ships, docking, landing can get annoying, I understand the complaints about those
Everything is fast travel and loading screens. You’re right. This has been the complaint about every Bethesda game since day 1. I remember loading screens in Daggerfall. Yes, games with different focus and different engines have mastered seamless landing and takeoff. Yes, I’m sure Bethesda could have added that, or faked it. But they made clear a year ago we’d be seeing load screens for those things, so nobody should’ve expected otherwise.
Ahh. But don’t those animations mask loading processing so you see fewer “spinning wheel” screens? I remember early Skyrim having minute long waits when you entered a door
I could swear I’ve definitely seen transitions happen with no loading screen, just the transition. I am pretty certain the transition is just the start of the loading-screen process.
A heroic Starfield modder just straight-up deleted those repetitive temple 'puzzles' from the game (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Video game makers aren’t catering for gamers with disabilities, study finds (www.independent.co.uk) angielski
Frostpunk 2 Preview: Less Frost and More Punks in This Daunting Society Simulator Sequel (www.ign.com) angielski
Starfield Paid DLSS Mod Creator Hits Back at Pirates, Threatens to Add 'Hidden Mines' in Future Mods (www.ign.com) angielski
As the WGA writers' strike looks set to end, a massive video game strike could be just around the corner (www.vg247.com) angielski
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review: perhaps the best expansion pack ever made (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Nexus Mods Fine With Bigots Leaving Over Removed Starfield ‘Pronoun’ Mod (kotaku.com) angielski
Starfield review - a game about exploration, without exploration (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
EA confirms The Sims 5 will be free-to-play and co-exist alongside The Sims 4 (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/4968815...
What games had easy soft locks that prevented you from either progressing or getting a true ending? angielski
The thought came to mind after reading a recent post about Baldurs Gate 3 here but it reminded me of the Japense only PSX game Mizzurna Falls where if you don’t perform a certain action early in the game you are prevented from getting a true ending. While this might not be a traditional soft lock because you can still progress...
Starfield user score drops to "mostly positive" on steam (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Steam Strategy Fest 2023 (store.steampowered.com) angielski