The game is aggressively Bethesda but I'm enjoying the visuals and sniffing the 3d model of every insignificant bit of detritis in the world. I saw a very nice looking bowl, maybe THE bowl of all videogames. Other than that the narrative and main story has already lost my interest after about 10 minutes and I'll be off being a space menace if the game will let me.
Once i found out I can travel using the ship in scanner mode it doesn't feel like a map simulator anymore.
Also the chef having a perk for dueling tickles me.
Game also runs like shit on PC but digital foundry showed most settings being on medium yields good performance with no noticable quality loss.
I'm kinda astounded that Bethesda still seem to be really bad at like, setting up the start of their game and story to let you make a wide variety of custom characters that actually makes sense logically?
Like yeah you can make a decrepit old man in this one and give him a history as a professor, but he's still just signed up as manual mining labor? Like that's just bad and lazy as fuck design. You should not have to put blinders on and selectively choose to ignore core parts of the beginning of the game in order to have a consistent roleplaying experience.
That's one of the reasons why TES traditionally has you being a convict. You could have been anyone, thrown in prison for any reason.
For this one they could have had you be a passenger on a ship that crashes, you go to try to do X (find a radio, find water, whatever) and you discover the macguffin.
Yeah, it's really not that hard, Skyrim just has you crossing a completely imaginary border that probably doesn't even matter to 99% of people at the wrong time when the empire is watching, you could have done it for literally any reason, thats good enough.
Like they even do the amnesia thing in Starfield after you get zapped by the macguffin, an amnesia inducing vehicle accident is like one of the most classic cliches they could have used instead.
Yeah it should have been like the movie Pitch Black. You could even start the game with the two pilots being like, I'm still reading one life sign from the cargo bay! Oh really which one? *character creation begins*
I'm just glad it was short I don't think I could survive another oblivion intro level. I much prefer morrowinds approach of just dumping you on a shore with a vague direction and leaving it at that.
At least Oblivion provided you with a save at the end of the intro where you could change everything about your character and quickly jump into a different playthrough.
I replayed some oblivion a couple months ago- Im not sure if I can find out exactly what mods I was using over a decade ago, but Steam still has my saves and I can see the little low res screenshots of all my old characters. Very nostalgic
Gameplay: Good, but the AI is trash and needs modding tweaks.
Worldbuilding: Lib trash.
Writing: Trash.
Politics: Trash.
It is probably the best base game for modding they've ever made though and I'm excited for when the Creation Kit eventually drops 6 months from now.
It's also extremely obvious that they've done a "muh russia" with the game because of Ukraine by not including anything about the soviet union nor Laika nor Yuri Gagarin etc etc, yet they include all the America shit.
Didn't need Ukraine to do a historical revisionism on the USSRs space achievements that had already happened
It's just something that should so obviously be included. It's essential to the setting.
Also the fucking pirates have guns with
and "no gods no masters" written on them but are blatantly not anarchists in ideology. The representation of the left in the game is deliberately dogshit written by techbro ancaps.The liberals and libertarians are written like shit too to be fair
I've not even seen the left in game. Closest was the LIST settlers quest.
ECS (you'll know when you meet them) seem to live 100% collectively but they have hereditary leadership. They don't really seem like they have left politics though and more like it's literally the only way to live in their circumstances.
Kinda messy. But they've lived 200 years as a self sustaining commune at the very least. If they actually colonise somewhere I can't imagine them changing the way they live currently, it would just spill out into the foundation of their new colony. Eventually the primary contradiction that would arise would be the desire for democratic collective decision making instead of hereditary leadership, once that plays out it would literally just be a communist colony in every single way.
The fucky thing is the fact they're a colony ship of rich bougies who set out to "save humanity". Literally communism for the rich, death for the poor back on earth.
Yeah, but I never completed the quest because I refuse to give the CEO of Nonce Resort ltd the win.
lmao I too was disappointed with my available options for this. He wins in both outcomes! There really should be a way to sabotage the place to have everyone flee the planet or something. Releasing a xenoweapon in the
StarbucksTerabrew shop or something. There is literally a Terrormorph already on the planet in some caves as well. Surely the discovery of a Terrormorph nearby would send the entire place into a panic.Cannot wait for someone to turn off the "cant kill important npcs" filter so I can start my program of 1870s style adventurism.
I don't understand why so many NPCs are marked "important". Only NPCs relevant to the main quest should be, everything else should just ruin their various optional quest lines or open up alternate routes. There's no reason a different person wouldn't just become the CEO of Paradiso upon his death and inherit the questline along with it.
I wanted to glass that entire resort after seeing my options for that. Ended up paying for the part with the creds I stole from as many people as I could pickpocket from in the area.
Yea the other planet in the new atlantis system is called gagarin
there's actually a plot relevant planet called Gagarin, with a statue of him in the main square and you get lore about his accomplishments
not as much as I'd wish, but like no other location is seemingly named after any other famous space race figures afaik
Politics: Trash.
This game has you playing as a privately funded grave robber going around stealing the Dead Sea scrolls for the hobby lobby CEO while massacring the natives in the name of eXpLoRaTiOn. It makes sense considering it’s so heavily inspired by NASA for aesthetic and vibe. It’s cool when viewed from a distance but examining the details and thinking critically for a second makes you realize exactly how fucked up and nazi adjacent it all really is
Its the most bethesda game of them all. Terrible writing, story, plot... no improvements to the genre in any way. Plays exactly like oblivion, but with slightly better graphics. And god,
spoiler
the multiverse shit is the laziest of writing from them yet
Quests don't impact the world in any way. Finishing a faction questline just gives you a new item with no impact whatsoever.
4/10 game
spoiler
God I hate this shit. Using time travel and multiverse bs to justify bad writing has infected a few games lately.
yup, none of your choices matter! cause at the end of the game
spoiler
you jump to a new universe!
I didn't realize it was gonna be on game pass lol so I did end up downloading it even though I swore up and down I'd wait on buying until they fixed all the crap they were gonna inevitably do.
The amount of loading screens is kinda profligate, there's more than one quest where you go to a planet (loading screen) talk to a guy then to the next planet (loading screen) and talk to a guy, and just repeat. The combat is pretty bad, I can't say I was expecting super smart AI or whatever but there's been more than a few times where enemies just kinda stood somewhere far away and couldn't figure out how to path to the fight? The main storyline didn't capture my interest. There's still a lot of bugs, nothing that'll bluescreen or whatever but I've had VASCO twirling his head talking to me, the Charlie 3 guy rotating really fast, theres one quest marker that doesnt get removed during a quest in the Well which made me rely on the actual given instructions (which was a nice change of pace), just a bunch of stuff like that. Stealth needs an overhaul, it's hard to get the sneak attacks to rank up and it starts getting really useful at rank 3. Also, unarmed is very very underwhelming and hard to do - which I guess is fair but whatever.
I love the setting and aesthetic, I do like the NASApunk look. I actually gasped at New Atlantis topside and Neon city. Also, there's just so much stuff to find. The sidequests are usually pretty goos. The Well was cool. Getting UC citizenship seems to be a thing Bethesda expected people to do because it has a lot of strong writing, I didn't love UC as a faction but whatever they're obviously very lib. It feels like a lot of people are discounting gastronomy, which is understandable because it takes a lot of work to rank it up to where the buffs are really good. Oh yeah and seeing Earth all fucked up actually made me feel quite sad, I landed on it and just felt... upset I guess, which is a plus for me if a videogame can make me feel an emotion like that.
I didn't know how to feel about the religions... it was interesting to think of organized charitable Atheism as a religion or the like syncretic dialectic synthesis of ALL monotheistic religions? I didn't get to try out the Great Serpent stuff but they're interesting guess to just consider. For some reason the religious struggle in skyrim was cool for me but future humans with made-up religions aren't as cool? I'm not sure why I struggled with it. Also, a lot of the spacesuits are kinda ugly, hard to play fashion field.
I don't think I'd pay separately for this and I don't know if I'll finish it, but so long as it's on gamepass and so long as I keep having that I guess I'll keep it installed. I'm still eagerly anticipating a GOTY edition with unofficial bug fix mod at some point to actually enjoy starfield.
there's more than one quest where you go to a planet (loading screen) talk to a guy then to the next planet (loading screen) and talk to a guy, and just repeat.
Man this is really terminal fast travel game design brain, this is the kind of shit business guys did before cellphones and the internet were considered good enough, just hopping around the world on concordes to have one business meeting and then go back. Don't they have interplanetary communication in this world?
A modern game should have been able to do this all with seamless loading screens, too. I, too, hate the "There will be no cell phones/e-mail in the future". Anything that requires communication should be doable from a console in your ship unless there's a very good reason why you can't. Like if there's a nebula that does space bullshit to cellphone reception then sure, go there. But if you're just having a conversation that should be something you do from your ship or a phone booth or whatever.
Beth made a game with a space aesthetic, but they didn't drop all the crap that only makes sense in a quasi-medieval game. Why are you walking anywhere? Where's your rover or go cart or ATV or atmospheric shuttle? Why are you picking up random bullshit to sell for chump change? Why do you have to kill space rabbits for glue, why can't you just order 20 tons of glue delivered to your location? Why are you surveying for common light elements? There's no way it makes more sense financially to mine and refine your own aluminum isntead of just buying it by the ton from an established producer.
When Todd said "Skyrim in Space" he really meant it. Just tons of game elements that don't make any sense in a futuristish spaceish game.
Seemless loading should very much be possible and very necessary for this kind of game. I can only imagine its an engine limitation they're having a hard time resolving.
It doesn't even need to be seamless. We've been using the Airlock/warp space/elevator trick to hide loading screens for decades!
One of the things I found in game to be obnoxious is when you go to one settlement on mars to go into the actual part with people in it you need to cycle the airlock, so you're stuck waiting for the airlock to cycle before it opens and loads in the interior. There is no actual airlock. And then through fast traveling, you're placed right in front of that airlock meaning you're forced to wait at the airlock a bunch of times.
It's really frustrating because its such a basic narrative tool to factor in what routes of communication are available, as well as the time and space required.
I remember an early plot point in the Shadowrun SNES game is to try and get ahold of a credit card and a working phone so you can actually call people, because theres a price on your head so every time you step outside theres basically at least one assassin trying to gun you down, which makes it pretty undesirable to try and take the subway everywhere rather than making a phone call.
And then you can instead there take into account that remote communication is unsecure, so perhaps you can't call people sometimes, or you have to use more secure methods that take more time and are limited in scope, there's just a lot you can do when the default form of communication isn't just teleporting to peoples houses to personally chat with them for 1 single minute then teleporting away again.
Remember back in the 00s when everyone having a cellphone was just starting to be a thing, and movie writers had no idea what to do about it? So many plots relied on not being able to reach people at important moments, and suddenly everyone was carrying phones around and writers just had no idea.
Oblivion was a real mess with the reliance on magical map fast traveling- Morrowind's was perfect, they just had convenient ships and silt striders in most towns. Oblivion had no physical fast travel at all.
Side note, I actually recently discovered a small town in Morrowind with no transport to it, for the first time, after making maybe 30 characters. It's Ald Velothi, a harbor town north of Gnisis.
Anyway, I feel like Starfield couldnt really work without a reliance on fast travel. Not just interstellar/interplanetary, but even across planets. I don't know what else to do. Not even little taxis would make much sense.
If they're using the same combat AI they've been using since the 16th century their AI is capable of being much better than this. It seems like they've turned down all the parameters until they might as well be off. Speed of reaction to the player, intervals at which they fire their guns, interval for seeking cover and repositioning, it's all turned way down.
Religion works in TES because you can, and frequently do, interact with the gods. Whether Talos and Tiber Septim are the same entity has major metaphysical ramifications on the world. Like, if the Thalmor can make Talos and Tiber Septim be different entities through magical Dragon Break fuckery it might allow them to unmake hte world. Religions in space are kind of silly. Like you went to Heaven, god isn't there, why are you still doing this?
The ai is weird because its practically passive. AI in games just keeps getting worse and worse ots kinda sad. I had to up the difficulty to give them a chance to land a hit on me and even then I had to stand still
Even then they actually interacted with the environment - breaching doors, knocking over furniture, improvising cover, exploding walls. Combat environments feel so static in most games, like all the objects in your surrounds are either immutable and unbreakable, or are just there to demonstrate havok physics and go flying around like they’re filled with helium
It seems like they've turned down all the parameters until they might as well be off.
There is a combat ai mod that basically proves this. Here is some of the code, it's also helpfully commented showing the vanilla number vs the changed numbers.
Personally I think the biggest issue they have with AI is that they're using one universal set of AI for all locations. The game needs different AI parameters for different locations. The cities. Interior spaceship combat. Planet exterior combat. Interior facility combat. These are all very different spaces where the player behaves very differently. Combat in them should be assumed to be different.
;---Idle Time, Reaction Time--- ;vanilla = 0.25 setgs fCombatMeleeIdleTime 0.01 setgs fCombatMeleeIdleTime 0.01 ;vanilla = 0.5 setgs fCombatRangedGrenadeIdleTime 0.1 ;vanilla = 2 setgs fCombatRangedGunFireWaitTimeMax 0.3 ;vanilla = 0.25 setgs fCombatEvadeReactionTime 0.15 ;vanilla = 0.15 setgs fCombatDodgeReactionTime 0.1 ;vanilla = 2.5 setgs fCombatRangedGunAnimationDrivenDelayTime 0.3 ;vanilla = 1.5 setgs fCombatAttackAnimationDrivenDelayTime 0.3 ;vanilla = 0.25 setgs fCombatInitialMovementDelayTime 0.1 ;vanilla = 0.1 setgs fCombatRangedGunInitialDelayTime 0.01 ;vanilla = 0.33 setgs fCombatRangedGunTargetVisibleReactionTimeMin 0.01 ;vanilla = 0.67 setgs fCombatRangedGunTargetVisibleReactionTimeMax 0.3 ;---Combat AI, Behavior--- ;vanilla = 5 setgs fCombatRangedThrowDelay 6 ;vanilla = 10 setgs fCombatRangedGrenadeThrowDelay 6 ;vanilla = 15 setgs fCombatRangedGrenadeFlushTargetDelay 6 ;vanilla = 5 setgs fCombatRangedGrenadeThrowUnreachableDelay 4 ;vanilla = 0.1 setgs fCombatRangedGunAttackChanceMin 0.25 ;vanilla = 0.25 setgs fCombatRangedGrenadeThrowChanceMax 0.35 ;vanilla = 0.1 setgs fCombatCoverAdvanceChanceMin 0.2 ;vanilla = 0.5 setgs fCombatCoverAdvanceChanceMid 0.5 ;vanilla = 0.75 setgs fCombatCoverAdvanceChanceMax 0.85 ;vanilla = 0.5 setgs fCombatRangedGunAttackChanceCoverBonus 0.65 ;vanilla = 0.25 setgs fCombatCoverChangePositionChance 0.4 ;vanilla = 0.5 setgs fCombatFallbackChanceMax 0.6 ;vanilla = 10 setgs fCombatCoverAttackerSuppressedTimeMax 15 ;vanilla = 0.25 setgs fCombatRangedGrenadeThrowChanceMax 0.35 ;vanilla = 0.5 setgs fCombatRangedGunTargetVisibleAttackThreshold 0.4 ;vanilla = 4 setgs fCombatRangedMinimumRange 4 ;vanilla = 8 setgs fCombatRangedGrenadeThrowMinimumRange 6 ;vanilla = 0.4 setgs fCombatRangedGunAccuracyMinAccuracy 0.6 ;vanilla = 0.25 setgs fCombatRangedGunAccurateAccuracy 0.45 ;vanilla = 0.1 setgs fCombatRangedGunEffectiveAccuracy 0.2Oh my god I can't wait for coherent combat mods.
One time I modded New Vegas to be approximately realistic and oh my god it was such a rush. Everything took 1 or maaaaybe 2 headshots to kill, other than super mutants and deathclaws and shit, but everything also killed you just as fast.
There's damage value mods and the like at the moment but I don't think "coherent" is going to be achieved until we figure out what to do about level up health increases and how to balance armour vs levelling over time. Right now the game adds 20hp to your health every level up, and does something with enemies being tougher with more skills as they get higher level too. But exactly what they do is ehhh I dunno. On top of that you have the question of how to handle armour, particularly the space suits that seem to be intended to be armoured and built for expecting combat or damage of some sort. Factoring that in and having it make sense seems worthwhile.
So yeah. I'm not sure. It can probably be done but also you generally don't just want to entirely trivialise the levelling up system as well. That takes more work and I think a pretty deep understanding of what's in the game, something most of us don't have until a good few hundred hours of gameplay and exploration. This seems a lot slower to explore too, if you're investigating stuff properly. It's taking me a long time to move location to location as I get bogged down in stuff to do.
One thing I might be interested in is expanding the pirates into something more.... Interesting. I'm finding that some of the gameplay feels a bit like sailing the ocean from island to island where you meet the locals and have an adventure on each island and then move on. This travelling loop has been heavily reminding me of One Piece but in space. An expansion to pirates along that line in a political sense could work quite well in the universe, you could even add in a new faction analogous to the Celestial Dragons/World Nobles, suddenly you have One Piece in space and you resolve a lot of the lack of coherent politics the game has.
You don't even need to add new npcs for that kind of faction addition. CEOs are present throughout the game, just add all the CEOs to the faction and make them meaner. Give them something to make the player really see them as shits. Suddenly every damn business owner in the game becomes sussy (and omg the game has you talking to A LOT of business owners).
and you resolve a lot of the lack of coherent politics the game has.
YES! You have these variously libertarian to neoliberal space capitalist societies living in incredibly close proximity to massive bands of spacers and pirates- the governments cannot even provide security, not just for independent colonists but even their own important facilities. This should be a really interesting backdrop, but they just don't seem to talk about it. It's clearly a societal meltdown and the pirates should have some kind of politics. You could have good pirates and bad pirates, and the bad pirates could be getting funded on the DL by rival governments.
Theres a really glaring thing - you have Pirates and you have Spacers, the latter of which are supposed to be just nutjobs or cults or something. But they don't actually do anything different from the pirates, in any way. It seems like something was cut, and they just wound up with two slightly different looking bad guy human types.
I should be able to join commie pirates or mobster pirates, and fight the core world NPCs to different ends.
We need to create like "THE" faction mod in the far future, with more involved factions that include ones with horrible politics too
YES! You have these variously libertarian to neoliberal space capitalist societies living in incredibly close proximity to massive bands of spacers and pirates- the governments cannot even provide security, not just for independent colonists but even their own important facilities. This should be a really interesting backdrop, but they just don't seem to talk about it. It's clearly a societal meltdown and the pirates should have some kind of politics. You could have good pirates and bad pirates, and the bad pirates could be getting funded on the DL by rival governments.
Right, and this is exactly the same as One Piece.
Theres a really glaring thing - you have Pirates and you have Spacers, the latter of which are supposed to be just nutjobs or cults or something. But they don't actually do anything different from the pirates, in any way. It seems like something was cut, and they just wound up with two slightly different looking bad guy human types.
It's pretty obvious that one group was supposed to be good pirates with a clear political basis in anarchism, whereas the other group was supposed to be bad pirates, complete and total marauders, 100% bad in every incarnation of them.
I think representing these as 2 factions was a mistake and the better idea would have been to have "pirates" and do it One Piece style with some of them being objectively good while others are clearly terrible. Create a kind of ambiguity and an understanding for the distrust people have for them, and create a tension for the player because they don't know what kind of pirates they're dealing with until after they take the risk of seeing if they're good or bad. The alternative is blasting them on sight every single time, which turns you into the same as the World Navy.
I'm not sure what you would do with the Spacers if you go down this route. They feel like they shouldn't be a clear independent faction but rather a subfaction of Pirates that do not always make it clear that they're members of that subfaction.
Ultimately this is all a bit of a mess but there is a twinkle of something good here with somewhat minor changes to structure. One Piece is absolutely the right work of fiction to look at for inspiration in repairing it though, it's very similar.
Au contraire, cultic religions make sense in a libertarian capitalist hellscape in which 50% of the population are vagrants and marauders
I was really enjoying it until I tried to build ships. The pieces you can build with have very, very limited customization options. They can only turn or flip certain ways, can only snap onto certain spots. It makes all ships end of looking very samesies.
Unfortunately there's not. I've been keeping an eye on that and so far all there are are some tweaks to let stuff overlap or increase the size you can make ships.
My mistake. I've seem some pretty crazy stuff people did with ship builder unrestricted but I haven't tried it yet
But I’m sure there will be! I’m super excited for the good mods here
Yeah. The ship builder itself is actually a great framework that just has some bafflingly bad constraints put on it and is missing specific features (like choosing where habs connect) or parts (like stairwells or multi-level habs).
I am waiting for a better shipbuilding mod- right now you need Cheat Engine for the only one I've seen, and Cheat Engine is apparently pretty user unfriendly and it's hard to find a download that doesn't give you spyware.
I just want to have multiple reactors (definitely) and multiple shield generators (maybe) and more guns assuming I have enough power (probably)
But I might need to wait for a tweak to enemy ship difficulty in accordance with that anyway
Yeah, folks were having fun building ships, but every ship ends up looking the same even if htey're different shapes, and then wehn you go inside it's all the same sterile space-ikea habitable space.
ive been in a rut of only playing map/spreadsheet games. maybe this will get me out of it, i rlly want to shoot stuff and build custom spaceships
Kerbal Space Program will be your best friend if you haven't already played it
IDK if the new updates made it worse but the version right before they added a for-profit story mode was my favourite game of all time. Perfect amount of parts - not too many, pure orbital mechanics, creativity in problem solving and exploration.
Kerbal is extremely good. The first time you land on the Mun without scattering your rocket across the Mar Imbria feels *good. I learned so much about orbital mechanics 100% against my will. 10/10, would strand a rescue ship sent to rescue the rescue ship sent to rescue the rescue ship sent to rescue the rescue ship in orbit.
Hmm. X4 and Elite Dangerous both allow some customization of ships.
incredibly boring game. you keep feeling like maybe itll get deeper and more interesting but it never does. cyberpunk and baldurs gate at least create vibes and have a somewhat fun storyline to follow.
A space game without sentient alien crew 0/10 BETHESDA MISSED THE POINT AGAIN.
spoiler
Space magic being a spoiler dragon shout thing ughh making it so theres no perks for space wizard
Waiting years for modders to fix everything as usual
It's okay. It's my least favorite Bethesda game. I don't find its version of exploration all that interesting compared to their past entries.
That's my biggest compaint and probably the reason I won't put all that much time into the game. I can excuse a lot of things in a Bethesda game, like a boring main story with bad writing or subpar combat and shitty AI, even the over reliance on fast travel with loading screens, if there was actually something worth to explore.
Between all the procedurally generated stuff I'm having a hard time finding interesting side quests or the kind environmental story telling I like so much from fallout and elder scrolls. Unfortunately I don't care much for exploration if there isn't something cool find. In Skyrim I would often stumble upon a weird or cool place on my way to a quest that turns out to be chock full of little stories. In starfield however I started to ignore most of the points of "interest" on the map because it's almost always a bunch of same looking dudes in space suits with way too much hit points. No little stories, or at best an extremely boring radiant quest.
And even the cities are pretty empty. Where Skyrim shines with it's tight knit communities where NPCs know and (love/hate) each other in starfield you mostly deal with corporations and their workers. But even though these corpos are the epitome of liberal bs every worker just looooves working for them and is eager to tell me their history. And I as the player can only nod and ask for more.
Its fun, I'm having fun, but frustratingly not as good as it could be.
Level grind curve makes Morrowind look forgiving. There's just a lot of annoying shit and ways things could be handled better like transitions could have been done in game rather than via cutscene, just keep the warp animation up like every space game since Privateer. Encumbrance is irritating, base building is frustratingly obtuse. In terms of choice outside of a couple of quests you are railroaded down good/evil paths. Let Me Shoot the Quest Critical Character Bethesda! There are so, so many CEOs in this game I just wanted to shoot as soon as they tried to push me around. Finally, it looks like the deep lore isn't. The big questions like the main quest and the Varuun seem to just hit a brick wall, and there's so far not a lot of small questions outside "I think the terrormorphs are a sentient civilisation."
The worldbuilding is so, so depressing. It's easier to imagine the complete ending of the human condition than the end of capitalism.
And I'm stuck with the bug where when you go into menus it re-renders at 4k and your framerate tanks into single digits. So that sucks.
The big questions like the main quest and the Varuun
Pretty sure the Varuun will be the subject of DLC. It's a good hook that can't be expanded at all by modding so it's ground they can build on without any fear of losing income to mods.
I'm enjoying it so far for the most part. Combat could definitely be better, wish I had a lean button and a key to cycle through my quick weapons.
I'm not really interested in it. I already have too many games and another big open-world thing would take too much effort. Plus I already have Fallout New Vegas which is better.
But like, I have a goofy taste in games so don't let me ruin your fun.
