Considering the chart still lists Starfield’s release date as “H1 2023”, it was probably made before Starfield’s delay and Spencer’s comments on it being 5+ years away are probably more in line with their current outlook.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Although, it’s less foresight for random actions and more of a way to set the tone for the rest of the game.
There are two possible outcomes of how one of the early missions plays out, depending on actions you wouldn’t initially consider.
There’s a hostage crisis and if you don’t listen to Sarif and get to the transport on time, they’ll all be dead when you arrive there.
Thing is, you’re not really given like a ticking clock on the top of your screen or anything. And in most games, you expect the “meet me there now” thing to not actually matter much, because oftentimes NPCs will act either as if we’re perfectly on time or just make a minor note about it in dialogue. We’re also used to most missions starting the same or only with minor differences depending on choice, but there is no explicit choice here.
So if you treat it like any other game, ignore the quest marker, and just wander around the building, exploring and looking for interesting shit before actually leaving, you arrive at the location and get berated because you took too long and now a bunch of innocent people are dead because you were fucking around.
If you go immediately, you have a chance to actually save them all.
I think you’ll actually find a lot of stuff like this in immersive sims, just due to their nature, although it’s less “we know you’re going to do this exact thing” and more “you’ve got freedom and we know you’re going to do something we didn’t expect, so we’ll embrace that instead of limiting your options”.
I know that when Arkane was developing Prey, they knew the GLOO Cannon was going to be experimented with in a bunch of ways that they couldn’t necessarily anticipate, so instead of imposing limits on it, they embraced it, gave the gun to you at the beginning (well, very close to beginning) and just said “go wild”.
They basically turned what would otherwise just be a random, only semi-important utility into a super useful tool for traversal and combat engagement. Went from “cool, does gluey things” to “okay, I’m going to make a staircase with this thing because it looks like there’s something up there”.
Apparently, they were inspired by Bethesda’s famous lack of usable ladders up until that point, which is pretty funny. Or rather, they used that as a metaphor for design in general (though, they did put up posters or notes or something that just said “NO FUCKING LADDERS”, if I recall, but I’ll have to find the video/article about that later).
It was basically this approach of “there doesn’t need to be a ladder if you can make one yourself”.
The factions are all boring. Permanent skills, with no respec options?! And for god’s sake, let me eat food on the ground by long pressing E.
Apparently that last one is being added with an update soon.
I think the factions are okay, but not nearly as good as their counterparts in previous games (eg. NCR > Freestar Collective, although that’s probably more thanks to Obsidian than Bethesda).
Progression is a real grind. 32 hours in and I’m only level 22, AND I feel like I don’t have skill points in basically anything compared to how big the skill tree is.
Thank you. I’m in a similar situation and finding that the grind is really annoying with not a lot of payoff. And then you’ve got so many skills to invest in and you never quite know if you’ll actually need some of them.
I know planets don’t all have to be super interesting, but I dread landing on anything now, because they’re just… so boring to me.
Running to buildings from landing spots is a real bore.
Don’t know if you know this already, but bringing up your scanner and pointing it to your ship icon lets you fast travel to it.
Also, you can skip the whole “return to ship” thing altogether and open up the star map or whatever it’s called and immediately jump to space and set course/land on another planet. I think it only works if you’re unencumbered, though, but I’m not certain.
Edit: Lol, I accidentally misread that as “running from buildings to landing spots”, so ignore that last bit. Hard agree on running to the buildings. At least in TES/FO there’s interesting stuff along the way. Here, it’s just rocks and minerals and maybe a few animals.
I think the problem is also that Bethesda doesn’t really “do” vehicles, probably due to engine limitations.
Usually, it’s just horses or “passenger” travel (like when you man the guns in FO4 birds). I guess one could maybe consider power armor in FO4 to be kind of like a “vehicle”, but it works more or less the same as just walking around.
Oh, there is dragon riding in Skyrim, but it’s a mess and you don’t have that much control.
I’m surprised the engine can even handle space combat, honestly. And 360° movement as well, which would have been great for dragon riding in Skyrim. But most of the dragons in TES are dead, so we probably won’t get proper dragon riding in whatever TES: VI is.
(Sidenote about dragon riding/combat: Before Larian delved further into CRPGs, they made a regular third person RPG where you could play as a dragon. It was actually pretty fun. Still didn’t have full control, and it was only in certain sections, but it was entertaining. Divinity II: Director’s Cut, in case anyone’s interested. Don’t know how well it’s aged, but I enjoyed it a few years ago.)
At the very least, they could have added viewable maps at those terminals in the cities, a lot like how some zoos usually have a fairly readable map, often with a “you are here!” marker to help out.
Yeah, I was really happy when they got Eidos and Crystal Dynamics out of Square’s hands. Deus Ex continuation finally looked like a possibility.
Losing Eidos would be especially bad for those of us who are fans of immersive sims.
And with Deep Silver, they excelled in giving us the great Eurojank RPGs we know and love (I’ll still die on the hill that Risen is an entertaining trilogy, probably because of the major tone shift after the first game).
This is actually new. They very rarely shut down studios until last month.
When THQ fell apart a about a decade ago, they bought the trademark and were doing business as THQ Nordic for quite a while.
Changed their name to Embracer a few years ago for clarity because, confusingly, one of their publishing arms is THQ Nordic GmbH.
As THQ Nordic (and later Embracer), they’ve been buying up studios (and IPs) for years. Being a holding company meant they were relatively hands off when it comes to development.
Being bought by them actually majorly increased job security, because they tended to just let studios do their shit, and kind of “understood” that a lot of their studios focus on relatively niche audiences, so they didn’t mind taking a financial hit here and there.
All that really mattered was whether or not the IP in general was profitable.
Then they had some sort of deal fall through or something earlier this year and that’s when things got a little shaky. Basically, they lost a couple billion dollars and now need to make “cost-saving measures”.
Now the commercial failures and lack of interest in certain IPs means less job security than it did about a year ago.
This makes me worried about Eidos Montréal and Crystal Dynamics. Particularly Deus Ex, since it was looking like Eidos might eventually get to finish its Human Revolution/Mankind Divided trilogy.
New playthrough, got some .ini tweaks which seem to help performance quite a bit so far, not screwing myself with traits and character background like I did initially, and making gameplay priorities.
I was too overwhelmed the first time with all the different mechanics and forgot to do what I do with most Bethesda games: focus on a few select areas and ignore the rest, so I’m not going to bother with a lot of the mechanics I’m not interested in.
If they draw me in at some other point, might give it a shot. Otherwise, unimportant to me.
Other than that, I’ve been on a FIFA kick for a while. Still messing around with that. I really wish women’s football was more popular. I’d honestly pay for a game specifically focusing on it and ignoring the men’s side of things.
I think, yeah, that’s another issue. It’s got a very disparate kind of approach with a bunch of mechanics that aren’t all related. I mean, that’s not unusual for Bethesda, but I think I also forgot how much I prioritize in their other games and was kind of overwhelmed here and didn’t really prioritize stuff like I do with Skyrim or Fallout.
And yeah, going to your example, boost packs was initially confusing to me. I get one from Constellation, telling me that now I should be able to get some height but then I realized I can’t actually use it until I unlock the skill.
As for how I spent my 12 hours, I absolutely missed out on a lot. The game is massive, but the performance issues kind of prevented me from really getting into it gameplay-wise. Also fucked myself with some of the traits I picked, which I know you can get removed in-game pretty easily, but since you can’t replace them, it feels like I might as well have not used any.
When it comes to mods, yeah. Problem is right now I’m on the Game Pass version, so Nexus has some but not a fortune of compatible stuff. I’ll buy it probably winter sale on Steam, which will have much better support for mods. Hopefully Creation Kit comes out early next year as well. When that happens, the quality and scope of mods is going to explode.
I mean, I might give it another chance before then, but I’m content to wait a while. I’m pretty patient with all games and usually only play them a year or so after release. Only reason I played this on release is because of my Game Pass subscription. If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have bought it until like next year. Might still do that, buy it during the spring sale, rather than winter. No rush.
Not space, but it actually just makes me want to play Fallout instead. I love Bethesda games, but it just isn’t grabbing me in the way some of their other games did.
I’ve put in around 12 hours and I’m kind of done. Maybe it’s also because my CPU is limiting me to around ~45 FPS (or lower) in most areas regardless of settings, which isn’t unplayable, but it is distracting a lot of the time because it’s more “choppy” than just like a stable, if lower, frame rate.
I’ll probably wait to play it again until some more performance mods come out like they did with Skyrim.