A friend is showing me all his cool starfield stuff and I kind of just feel bad for him. A lot of systems seem really stripped down even compared to Fallout 4. It doesn't seem like you can, for instance, lay down foundations and build whatever building you want in whatever shape you want like you could with Fallout's extremely janky settlement system. You have to plop down various NASA white habitat modules and you're limited by how those modules click together. I'm not clear on whether you can layout rooms and workstations within the hab modules and at this point I'm a little afraid to ask.
The armor system in fallout where you had a clothing layer and could then add customizable armor on top of the clothing layer seems to be gone. In FO4 you could have separate armor pieces for your chest, for each arm, for each leg, plus helmets and a few other things. All the pieces could be modded with different appearances and perks. No it looks like you're down to a set of clothing and a space suit with very limited customization options.
Combat just looks appalling bad. Beth has never had good combat, but it looks like for Starfield they tuned the combat AI down to the point where it reacts very, very slowly and doesn't do much beyond stand there and and wait to be shot. I assume this is to compensate for the removal of VATS, which is another inexplicably absent system. VATS was notable in FO3 and FO4 for making the game much more accessible to people who didn't play FPS games and I cannot fathom why it was removed.
The spaceship builder is okay, but it looks very limited in what it can do. Most of the ships end up looking very samey since they're snapped together out of modules. You're not getting anything with a single smooth external hull, nor do you have freedom to define the shape of the rooms inside the pressure vessel. There may be some large interior space modules I haven't run in to yet. Personally I think the "Nasapunk" clean-room aesthetic conflicts with the space opera story framework. It works in kerbal because the space ships behave like space ships, but it looks weird when the space ships operate on space opera rules. Like instead of having the ship vertically oriented for launch to orbit it takes off with VTOL thrusters and then flies away like a plane despite really not being a space plane. When star wars, which runs entirely on bullshit space opera, does it it doesn't bother me because it's consistent with the aesthetic. But having a ship that sorta-kinda is trying to look realistically doing star-wars stuff is a big jarring.
It also suffers from millennium falcon syndrome. You can only control one ship at a time, and "control" is doing a lot of work when all you can really do is point the nose around in a very limited space combat minigame, so your ship has to be able to do everything- cargo, combat, whatever. You can't deploy fighters or call for backup in a space fight, which has been frustrating a few people i know as they get in to space combat but their ship isn't built properly for it. Space combat also looks very basic. You're not going to be doing anything fancy with drone weapons, newtonian maneuvers, or turrets. You kind of just point your nose at the enemy and hold down the fire button until one of you explodes. It's like a stripped down version of X-wing vs Tie Fighter.
Apparently there no space walk/EVA. Which... Why? Why? Why wouldn't you make that a thing?
Bethesda's innability or unwillingness to learn, innovate or really do anything new in very frustrating. I doubt this will make sense to most people, but I've spent so many hundreds of hours under the hood of these games fixing problems, fleshing out anemic systems, and so forth, it feels very disappointing to see that Beth has yet again shipped a bunch of very shallow systems without much complexity or depth.
And who am I to make these criticisms? The last version of a mod I contributed too long ago has had 400,000 downloads since 2016, is who I am. A very minor contribution, but I've been in the guts of these games almost as long as Todd has. And while the mod community has grown and done incredible things Beth keeps shipping stripped down, disappointing messes. I view Beth's games as a process where Beth releases a problem and then the modding community has to fix it, over and over again, and every so often Todd tries to destroy the whole relationship by monetizing modding. without the bullshit of IP and profit motive, if Beth's games could truly be a collaborative community process with open source code, Bethesda probably would have been forced out of the process a long time ago for causing more problems than they solve. The simple fact that the script extenders have to be re-built from scratch for each game and then arduously maintained when they're constantly broken by updates, even after all these years, is extremely frustrating. Beth could just... integrate the script extensions natively instead of making the community hack them back together every time, but they don't. It's rude.
Beth games are an excellent example of how art, creatively, and inventiveness are stifled by property laws and IP.
im personally a big fan of the x series, i totally recommend it. its basically like if you merged morrowind and eve online. its silly, janky, and i love having my giant carrier shit on people with a flotilla of 100 frigates while i purge capitalism from my sector
X4 is one of those games that have been on my radar for a long while, but I never got around to playing it. Janky space Morrowind sells it for me. Anything I should know before buying?
It's an extremely complicated game with tons of not terribly well documented systems, so I'd suggest messing around for a few hours then looking up some guides. It's labor of love german sim jank at it's purest and most wonderful.
Save frequently, especially early game, as you can easily get blown up or otherwise die unexpectedly
Think about passive income streams when you start thinking about expanding. Mining water and ore are safe, reliable, and relatively inexpensive start ups. You don't have to pay wages or worry about labor issues so once you get a refinery running your costs are mostly basic supplies and repairs. E-cells are another good start.
Modding will disable some offline multiplayer features, but mods like "brighter crystals" or "emergency teleport" can greatly help. Emergency teleport may have been integrated in to the core game at this point, i'm not sure.
The campaigns can be fun to play and often put you in unique scenarios. Definitely pursue the "main quest" once you've got your footing as there are some important systems you unlock during the quest.
I LOVED tachyon when I was a kid. The ships were really cool and the gates were a fun way to do loading zones.
I've got hundreds of hours in it. I'm not that excited to go back right now for two reasons
1.) - The combo of mods I installed didn't play well together and turned the game in to a terrible, desperate death grind to stop the Xenon from overrunning the entire gate network. From the word go it was a battle to keep the Xenon contained. I lost the Argon, most of the Teladi, and the Split before I could even get to the point where I could really put up a fight. Every gate that I still controlled had massive gun-fortresses with dozens of the most powerful long range guns I could afford stacked in batteries to annihilate any Xenon ship coming through the gate before it could get loose in the system. If one of the super-capital ships came through I had one specific sniper-destroyer with an array of very long range forward guns and I'd have to painstakingly snipe each gun turret off the xenon ship before I could even think about sending in other ships to approach it. It was exhausting and nerve wracking. Trying to push back in to Xenon controlled systems was a massive gamble that relied almost entirely on moving construction teams to the far side of the gate and building a gun fortress to secure it before the Xenon arrived in force. I simply did not have the tonnage of destroyers to engage them in fleet combat and I was totally reliant on the much less expensive but much more limited gunfortresses. Hundreds of hours in (I never used SETA) I finally started to have enough military industry to start really pushing back, but by that point I was dealing with depression and just couldn't maintain interest
2.) After a certain point the game really becomes focused on military stuff. Trade just isn't very difficult and there aren't that many real obstacles to just trading your way to infinite wealth. At that point there's not much to do.
X3 was perfect and x4 didn't seem to live up to it. Though perhaps it changed over the years to be better
Last I played it was lacking some of the mods that I liked from x3 but other than that it was pretty solid.
Found a reddit post where the redditors are talking about how depressing Fallout is and how bright and hopeful Starfield is, and I think we need to go back in time and kill Steve Jobs before he can trigger the dark future.
Eh. It does seem like a "somewhat" hopeful version of the future. Obviously its liberal as fuck but this is what many liberals would believe a bright future would look like.
Combat just looks appalling bad. Beth has never had good combat, but it looks like for Starfield they tuned the combat AI down to the point where it reacts very, very slowly and doesn't do much beyond stand there and and wait to be shot. I assume this is to compensate for the removal of VATS, which is another inexplicably absent system. VATS was notable in FO3 and FO4 for making the game much more accessible to people who didn't play FPS games and I cannot fathom why it was removed.
VATS was created because Fallout 1 and 2 were turn-based and you could explicitly do things like target body parts. It was added to give that feeling and to bridge the gap between turn-based and first person real time.
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This is part of the identity of Fallout and including it in a non-Fallout game would be pretty odd without very drastic changes.
It also suffers from millennium falcon syndrome. You can only control one ship at a time, and "control" is doing a lot of work when all you can really do is point the nose around in a very limited space combat minigame, so your ship has to be able to do everything- cargo, combat, whatever. You can't deploy fighters or call for backup in a space fight, which has been frustrating a few people i know as they get in to space combat but their ship isn't built properly for it. Space combat also looks very basic. You're not going to be doing anything fancy with drone weapons, newtonian maneuvers, or turrets. You kind of just point your nose at the enemy and hold down the fire button until one of you explodes. It's like a stripped down version of X-wing vs Tie Fighter.
Space boats would work significantly better. Barges with gunner positions that must be manned by people inside the ship. Instead of having the player control the guns, the player simply flies and their turret operators would do the shooting (or vice versa, why not let the AI fly and having the player on gunnery instead?) People have noticed that the auto-turrets are incredible as well and seem to like it.
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All of these issues don't really bother me that much though because they're not my core interest in the game. I don't really care that the space combat is bad or about base building. They're features for a specific crowd and I can basically ignore them almost entirely. I didn't like them in FO4 either, bad direction for a franchise that's supposed to be about your character and their development, base building belongs in management games not rpgs.
A lot of systems seem really stripped down
Neoliberalism is about smooth, frictionless consumerism. Like gamers complaining about Morrowind being "stupid" because "I can't hit stuff if I don't have enough skill in that weapon type". You have no one to blame but yourselves lol
you absolute dork, you really can't stand that other people don't love your favorite treat as much as you do. "everyone with a different opinion than me is a neoliberal" is the stupidest most childish thing i've seen from a BMF post. my post has apparently been living in your head rent-free lmfao. morrowind has OK (not great) worldbuilding and bland dialogue thats almost always the same between any character. its an OK game, but the combat sucks. it is simplistic randomized hidden dice roll shit, none of the animations look like the devs have ever seen a living human before, only had them described, and the music puts me to sleep. there is 1 attack button but 4 attacks dependence on movement direction, 1 of which is always objectively superior in terms of damage per weapon. that is shit game design, not ''''''''roleplaying potential'''''''''' there's a complete lack of any climbing (roleplay as thief? fuck you go through the front door moron), and stealth is almost impossible during early stealth questlines. every single questline requires combat, so your "lmao just roleplay" argument remains bullshit. morrowind isn't some hidden gem of perfect roleplaying, its a shitty old western RPG, and Daggerfall was better in every concievable way.
Eh. 5/10. This doesn't capture the Redditist self righteousness very well.
The nostalgia for Daggerfall does kind of perplex me. It's a good game, it's big in a procedural generation way, But it's very much the weirdness of Morrowind that makes it stand out all these years later and Daggerfall is a fairly straightforward post-Tolkien/D&D fantasy setting.
That one always irked me because after like 2-3 hours of play you should be hitting most enemies 100% of the time and then you never have to think about it again. The levelling system was weird and obscure and bad, and they did nothing to fix it in Oblivion and Skyrim was only vaguely better (no spell scaling!) But the rolling to hit thing was never the problem people make it out to be.
It also doesn't seem like you can choose your own furniture layouts inside ship modules. You get what you get. No re-arranging chairs or moving beds around or anything. Which is just bizarre given that you could build whatever you wanted in settlements in fallout. Having no control over the interior furnishings of the ship, given the ship is nominally so important, just just such a strange, strange design decision. All I can really think is they stripped it out to make it work better on consoles or something.
It also doesn't look very NASA, except that it's very sterile. There's no sleeping vertically in bags tethered to the walls so you don't float away, there are just cots. And I can't even see straps on the cots to keep you in place. Like yeah, the game has magic gravity, but you could at least put in the effort.
And "Modders will fix it". They're strip all the crap out of the habs and add it back in as furniture you can place to suit your tastes (maybe, if Beth set up the system to make that possible). They'll do all kinds of shit to fix all the inexplicable design choices and steps backwards. They'll clean up the mess.
These games don't belong to Beth. They never have. They've always been collaborative projects, but Beth dictates and then the community does the best it can. It's so frustrating.
The worst part of this is that the fundamental problem with leaving it up to the modders is that the modders need a framework to go off of, the more robust the base game, the more robust the mods, otherwise everyone's stuck waiting around for a programming wizard to come up with solutions.
Custom animation framework in Skyrim was a nightmare for years before community effort finally got a good system going. Changing seasons in Skyrim was a floated possibility during a developer game jam circa 2013 but without that ever being released it took modders ten years to implement their own version.
The Fallout 4 weapon system actually ended up being a huge hindrance to the modding community, not to mention what a pain in the butt handling power armor weapon animations was.
Could modders implement a version of spacewalking eventually? Maybe there's an elegant solution, maybe it'll be something super jank and only ironed out five years from now. Could modders implement more modular ship furniture? Yeah, I bet, but imagine how much better the mods could be if Bethesda had done it themselves?
I have to wonder if Bethesda's content frameworks were more concerned with future proofing their own walled garden downloadable content shop and leaving the rest of the modding community to fend for itself.
God the weapon modding system was so bad. Even working as intended having to do all the mods through those terrible menus was so bad.
Was watching Hasan play a bit last night and he got to the part where you get space dragon shouts, oh spoilers by the way theres just inexplicible space magic and temples and shit so I'm just totally taken out of the plot entirely now, it's just more dull mystic space shit as usual that doesn't make any fucking sense.
I think it's all that can really be done for liberal stories in space: trying to actually address like real world political reflections would drop the mask too hard, when any flavour of socialist faction would emphasize how hollow all the other libertarian factions they came up with are.
Red faction guerilla remains my favorite space game because it's just like "yeah terrorism is cool. Join this union waging a protracted people" s war against space america. Your final mission will be to assault the suburbs. Violent action is legitimate and bombs are cool"
This is assuming they at all reflect with some accuracy the reality of any given political system, which they wouldn’t do in the first place.
That's good! If you're having fun please keep having fun. My criticisms are my own.
i think there's things that are fair to criticise, i think you hit on a few but there's just something in it for me such that I can't stop plowing hours into it haha
maybe i've got endemic gamer brain or something :P
You don't need to apologize for having fun. I'm glad you're enjoying yourself and having a good time. : )
You're definitely not alone. I think I love this game and I'm pretty sure it will be at least goty for me.
I assume this is to compensate for the removal of VATS, which is another inexplicably absent system.
Inexplicably absent? VATS is a fallout specific thing created due to the roots of the series in top-down tactics. It would be extremely unusual to wedge it into a normal FPS.
I'd actually like to see them doing something other than having the most bland FPS combat. It doesn't have to be specifically VATS, but a system like it would make the game more interesting imo. Fallout 4's transition away from VATS-centered combat towards being just another generic FPS was one of the worst things about that game and exemplifies Bethesda's increasingly conservative approach to game design
VATS served to make the game very accessible to people who were not familiar with or skilled at fps shooting. You press the button, choose who you want to shoot, and the game does the shooting for you.
This helped people who otherwise did not enjoy fps games a great deal. It was frequently cited as being a key system for many people. While vats may have been thematically and aesthetically linked to fo i and iis targetting system what it was in a practical perspective was an accessibility tool, and in that light i believe that removing it was an unforced error.
To be fair, Red Dead Redemption had the whole Dead Eye mechanic which is somewhat similar. Bethesda could have included a bootleg tweaked/reskinned VATS called 'ultrafocus' or whatever.
I'll probably pirate it at some point, but I'm not in a hurry
Thanks for this. Most thought out opinion on the game I've seen so far. And you've solidified my thought that I should just stick to minecraft tonight. I can play this later, when more mods are out.
I dunno why people expected an actual space sim from bethsoft lol
Well, im sure modders will mod like X4 levels of complexity into this in a year or 2
I dunno maybe because they have more money behind them than god. Maybe because the have a history of making large video games.
Like I know Bethesda kinda sucks but they have the resources to not.
I don’t understand why people keep using a history of sucking as like a shield from criticism.
It's not a shield from criticism but it is something that should inform expectations.
The most disappointing thing to me is that the lack of contiguous handcrafted spaces means it kinda lost what I enjoy about Bethesda games. I like wandering around and discovering things. If you do that in Starfield, you're punished with the most boring shit possible. I'd unironically rather be playing Outer Worlds than this, because it at least has a sense of exploration and discovery.
There's tons of that in the game. I've spent literally hours doing just that in the past few days. The handcrafted spaces just aren't connected by handcrafted landscapes anymore.
It doesn't seem like you can, for instance, lay down foundations and build whatever building you want in whatever shape you want like you could with Fallout's extremely janky settlement system.
Yeah it's awful, everything just autoplaces a shitty foundation that doesn't snap, you can't control the height for some mad reason, and even though the bits do refrain from placing their own foundation if stuck on a separate foundation you can't manually place those so it doesn't matter. I can only hope modders can fix it back to at least FO4 levels of usability given a little time.
I'm not clear on whether you can layout rooms and workstations within the hab modules and at this point I'm a little afraid to ask.
You can cycle the walls between different variants, connect multiple habs together, and place objects inside like normal, it's just the proper building pieces that have been reduced to modular big chunks that don't even blob together and instead just place connecting bits between them. I can only hope modders can give us better pieces or even just port FO4/FO76 shit in.
No it looks like you're down to a set of clothing and a space suit with very limited customization options.
Yeah the clothing and armor design is awful even by Bethesda standards. I can only hope modders can do some overhauls that aren't just "I made all the spacesuits assless and barechested and that's it, they all still look like shit but they're horny now," and bring it to at least the level of "bland, but at least a bit slick sometimes" that ME armor had.
You're not getting anything with a single smooth external hull, nor do you have freedom to define the shape of the rooms inside the pressure vessel. There may be some large interior space modules I haven't run in to yet.
There are a few 2x2, 2x3, 3x2, and 3x3 pieces, but they're all still a single level tall. I don't really mind that they're prefab parts, I just wish there were stairwells, multilevel blocks with open space in them, and the ability to cycle walls and floors through connecting/not connecting states to control where the damn ladders and doors go. Multilevel ships are a goddamn nightmare because of the shitty ladder shafts that just spawn wherever they feel like, and pancake ships turn themselves into mazes as doors just decide to be wherever for no reason. I can only hope modders can make these parts and fix this awful, awful system.
Space combat also looks very basic. You're not going to be doing anything fancy with drone weapons, newtonian maneuvers, or turrets. You kind of just point your nose at the enemy and hold down the fire button until one of you explodes.
You do get vector thrusters (from the piloting perk) so you can do a bit more maneuvering, leading to an experience best described as "what if Elite Dangerous was extremely low velocity, up close dogfights with ships that can actually turn," and you can use targeting mode (from the targeting systems perk) to VATs individual ship systems. With more parts (like particle beams and EM weapons) and skill perks it's a bit better than it seems at first, basically just a better feeling and more visually engaging Elite Dangerous but with less depth. I have to say it's the one standout surprise of the game, that Bethesda of all studios somehow managed to put together an ok ship combat system in their engine.
In all, the game Bethesda has presented is a pile of tepid slop oozing all over a surprisingly good mechanical foundation that will hopefully get cleaned up and expanded by modders, just like always.
Always remember to steal the game and never give Bethesda a single cent.
I played like 3 hours of the game and I don't really find myself wanting to play more. All of the characters I interacted with felt uninteresting, the combat is bland, there are too many menus and loading screens, the worldbuilding felt bland as fuck.
I mean it doesn't seem like a terrible game, just kinda meh overall, if I had more free time I'd probably play it all the way through but I'd rather spend my limited free time on better things.
man, i wish the X series (re: x4 foundations) actually got funding that shit like starfield gets. it has so many good ideas but the implementation just isnt there for a variety of reasons
It would be nice. X is a very charming example of janky but lovable German sim game.
