/games/ - Games

It looks bland but better than I expected it to. The ship building is the only part that looks interesting to me and (compared to their past games) the shooting actually doesn't look like it controls like ass. Also like that there isn't a ton of sentient aliens running around like most sci-fi games. It's bethesda so I doubt it won't be buggy as shit on launch but considering they delayed the game it seems like they want to avoid having another 76.

>>28642
It seems the existence of aliens will be a main plot of the game.

>>28642
>buggy as shit on launch
Unless it's some game breaking shit like save corruption or what not it's part of the charm of bethesda games if you ask me. I think I had to launch Skyrim a few times for the opening sequence to not send me in outer space because of collision bugs. I would probably be a little mad if I spent 60 bucks on it thoughever, but I got better things to do with my money than to buy games from huge media conglomerates.

Nothing kills my interest quicker than seeing that every environment is a massive open plain within occasional dungeons scattered kilometers from each other. Its as if Mako missions from Mass Effect were the whole game.

>>28647
I liked the Mako, fight me

>>28648
Cried a lil when they removed it from me2 :(

The conversations looked surprisingly stiff but that's never been Bethesda's strong suit. I'm also curious to see how they handle exploration, as their usual formula is to always have something interesting within the player's line of sight, usually a minute or less away, to keep them exploring one location after another and that seems a lot harder to do by looking at a galaxy map. They also advertised it as having a quarter of a million lines of dialogue, almost 5 times Skyrim and over 2 times Fallout 4, but I'm wondering what that'll mean in practice. Probably a lot more NPC barks rather than in-depth dialogue trees.

After watching the entire video, I realized there are exactly 2 types of environments: barren wasteland and earth. I mean look at this, this is supposed to be an alien planet. Just no imagination whatsoever.

Literally trilobites, a fucking earth species.

And look at those deep engaging RPG mechanics, such as skills that gives you more inventory spece, and skill that lets you skip our awful hacking minigame.

>>28654
>"You know what I hear about these pirates? Completely irresistible to my otherwise irresistible charm."
>"OH MY GOD, look how its coming together!" "That means there is a set!" "Build by the intelligence outside the settled systems."
>"Anything goes as long as you have the money"
>"If you got morality issues, this definitely isnt a job for you."
This is awful writing and voice acting even by Bethesda standards. If I didnt know better I would have thought they are pursuing some campy B-movie style.

I feel like a /v/ermin, seething over a game that isnt even out yet, but almost everything about this looks so fucking bad. Probably around 200 million budget, flushed down the fucking drain.

>>28641
I haven't even watched this trailer but the announcement one looked so bad I'm 0% excited for this. They need to put their 20 year old engine out of its misery already.

I'll probably still pirate it and laugh at it with my BF though.

>>28658
The engine barely has anything with their games being buggy though (see literally any other developers' game# on the NetImmerse/Gamebryo engine like CivIV, Splatterhouse or Zoo Tycoon for example). It is more like their coding team is unable to get their shit together to properly update it and if you handled them something like UE5 or CryEngine they still would find a way to fuck it up.
tl;dr Bethesda has skill issues

>>28657
>flushed down the fucking drain.
Eh even if it's shit this will at least be a framework for a strong modding community. Skyrim gave us The Forgotten City and Enderal, and who knows how many modders ended up developing other (good) games.

>>28661
>Enderal
Was it any good? I tried its Oblivion predecessor (forgot the name), didnt like it much.

>>28660
I'm not really complaining about bugs (those are an issue sure) but their games looking old and being mechanically extremely dated with just a new paintjob each time

>>28642
Maybe it won't be buggy. Xbox forced Bethesta to delay the game a year from it 11.11.22 original release date.

>>28674
Again, it is less of an engine issue as much as BGS lacking ability to write a proper animation engine for their engine (they use Havok to handle animations since Skytim and it causes lots of bugs) and go beyond their usual primitive game design paradigms. Fuckers cannot even be bothered to implement basic mobility stuff that other modern ARPGs have like functional ladders, wall mantling etc.

>>28680
It's not only an engine issue but that's the most obvious red flag/target for mockery IMO.

>>28662
Enderal is great, definitely worth at least trying.

>>28681
Nothing that a competent dev team could not easily fix at least, especially in the light of modders managing to actually add working ladders to Skyrim among other things with the EVG Traversal mod. If they were able to do it, then Bethesda could do it too, but they simply do not do it for whatever reason.

Don't believe his lies.

I read that there's no full planet exploration here. You land in an area that's restricted by invisible borders. Which makes sense, seeing that even if every planet was 1/5 of Skyrim's map size, that would require too much work or just procedural generation (not like they won't use it anyway).

>>28695
I mean I prefer that to the No Man's Sky model where every planet has nothing on it.

>>28696
I think the optimal way would be to combine a couple fully fleshed planets or asteroids, and then have a bunch of these restricted areas. Maybe that's how they are going to do it. Mildly excited for the game overall, but I'm a Bethesda fag, even played F4 multiple times.

The genius of Starfield is that it was made with the understanding that, even in open world games, people just fast-travel everytime to the place they want. So, if you make each fast travel place a planet, you have a succesful space game that is easier to make and doesn't requiere that much procedural generation.

Alarming reports coming in: Starfield is fun

Holy shit they got vehicle physics. Are we gonna get climbable ladders too?

Starfield-RUNE
It's out…

>no full planet exploration here.
>Nothing kills my interest quicker than a game

that is built for consoles first and ported to PC as an afterthought to increase market share. it destroys the UI to be compatible with controllers and limits everything from the beginning.

Goes straight into the trash with STALKER 2.

>>30187
>no full planet exploration here.
Were people seriously expecting this? I'm not even sure how'd you create an entire planet with using procedural generation, and then there's making it actually interesting and not large swathes of nothing.

>STALKER 2
That will prob have Azov apologia so it can't be that bad lol

I have played it. Its fun.

>>30187
>no full planet exploration
Thank Christ, even if it’s 1000 at least it means many of them actually have something worthwhile to see unlike a procedurally generated mess where you’ll spend more time customizing ships than actually exploring.

>>30188
*even with

why would anyone want to play a space game with procedurally generated planets? i’m bit saying they should make every single planet by hand, but the idea and concept was stupid from the start, why would anyone want to “explore” a desert with nothing on it?

I also really hate the art style, every single one of their games looks like shit, with generic fucking designs, I remember some guy speaking about elder scrolls’s art style and i was like “what art style” their games look soulless, which makes sense since they are developed for 10 years if not longer and have colossal teams, with limited amount of freedom to do what they want to do.

>>30197
I'd agree if this criticism was leveled on Starfield in particular, but on the whole TES series? You are obviously baiting here, mate.

>>30201
no bait, full opinion 0 irony or sarcasm. i find the games that be very ugly and or boring looking. (not just tes but fallout too).

what do you like about the tes artystyle? why do you disagree?

>>30204
I honestly like the series' lore mostly, but Morrowind looked very solid for the time with its different architectural styles, weird creatures, props and biomes, especially the Telvanni regions. Best game in regards to worldbuilding in my opinion, though not as pretty as Oblivion.
Oblivion also stands out to me as one of the most beautiful RPGs I have ever played, even if it changed its setting to be more generally "European", as there is still a variety of biomes and architecture that reflects Cyrodiil's status as the heartland of the continent.
I do not really like how most locations in Skyrim look though with it being either a snowy hell or a pine forest most of the time, but certain places like Markarth, the Dwemer ruins and the Black Reach do stand out as the better examples and the expansions have a lot more diverse location pool.

Now that I have answered it, I would like to know what series/game does it better in your opinion.

>>30205
Yeah places like markarth and the red water den standout because they’re actually finished. Skyrim was designed with player satisfaction over game development in mind meaning the devs fucked over concerts like worldbuilding, level design and balanced gameplay in favour of overpowering the player. Thank Christ they backpedalled on this hard in fo4 and then again in starfield with the limited planets and explorability

>>30206
>Skyrim was designed with player satisfaction
It was also just arsed together unfinished and buggy. The engine was so buggy, that it would begin falling apart from the moment you start the game and every minute of gameplay you are taking more dicerolls on memory corruption, crashes and, eventually, destroying your save. All of which was accelerated by putting more strain on the engine, such as playing it on PC (which seemed a console port) or adding mods. It's as if they cobbled what they had together and ran tests so that the game was on average unlikely to crash in under X playtime and that's about it for QA.

I remember installing the original release, and going through the motions of the fixes and patches. Soon after that, "the big fix" came from a mod called "crash fixes"(?) which was a bunch of in-memory patches fixing stuff like unhandled null pointers. But the biggest fix, which up to then had been solved by trying to get the game to work less on managing memory was done by… Replacing the fancy low latency game memory management with C malloc. It cannot be worse right? And somehow it wasn't. Somehow bypassing the custom memory management engine, made the game work smoother and stable.

There was also an engine bug, discovered I think by the Requiem overhaul devs, which for the longest time had NPC perks reapplying every time you reload, which was harder to notice because the base game perks were so bland, and the enemies so basic, but the modded ones made things go out of whack when perks stacked.

>>30211
>There was also an engine bug, discovered I think by the Requiem overhaul devs, which for the longest time had NPC perks reapplying every time you reload, which was harder to notice because the base game perks were so bland, and the enemies so basic, but the modded ones made things go out of whack when perks stacked.

fugging bethesda, man

>>30205
I really like the visuals and designs in arkane’s dishonored series. they are not perfect, a lot of reusing of textures and designs and models which leads lack of unique identity in certain places, also some textures and models have not aged too well, especially up close. But the games are also really pretty, the games have a lot of identity, the games have an atmosphere which can be felt everywhere and makes it feel unique. Even though the games are not perfect and very flawed the unique atmosphere and identity of the universe makes me wish Arkane would make more games.

Now that we have discussed the locations what about the people and characters/monsters? I think the tes games and other Bethesda games are kind of lacking in that aspect.

>>30213
now that i have posted the photos this feels kind of unfair since tes games are older and probably larger, but in my opinions the art style is the real deciding factor in how well a game ages visually

>>30188
Space engine does it

>>28641
it's over

>>30218
space colonization should have NO POLITICS AT ALL! IM GOING TO BINGE WATCH GUNDAM INSTEAD!!!!!!!!!

My 2 biggest gripes so far are traversal and loading screens. Going to objectives on planets is like wandering around a planet in Mass Effect 1 without the mako, it'll take 5 minutes of running to reach the destination and there's nothing to really fill that time. There's also a ton of loading screens, especially if you're skipping traversal completely and only fast traveling. My only other minor complaint is the tutorials are not great. It's pretty good overall though, I totally disagree with that other anon about the art direction, which imo is fantastic and the UI is really well integrated into the overall aesthetic. The soundtrack is good too.

>>30218
is there a cure for these kinds of people? so deeply reactionary that even a 20th century fascist would be shocked.

>>30220
what is the main plot and side stuff like?

>>30222
Shockingly for Bethesda the main story is the strongest part of the game. The handcrafted side stuff decent too, but the procedural content sticks out after a while, especially when you recognize locations you've seen on other planets already.

>>30223
the story looked fucking garbage from the trailers, the most generic thing ever, so that doesn't fill me with confidence

>>30223
It’s surprising knowing they added in procedural content. With the handcrafted hubs and limited planet exploration it would’ve made more sense to completely handcraft the game than mix procedural content with developer created content

so if this game is not about no man's sky-ish space exploration, then what is it, i watched vinny play it for 10 minutes and it looks like a run-of-the-mill looter shooter?

>>30227
Oblivion with NASA aesthetic. Categorically not revolutionary but a good game.

+ employee's personal account of situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kglNioOuK8

Why do Californians make nerds so mad?

>>30212
>>30211
What do you file the bug under when you don't notice it because of how bland your game is and modders have to find it because they did something interesting?

>>30235
> fucking current day Californian shit
damn dude, can they even comprehend their meme vernacular makes them sound like complete schizos to everyone else

what is the point if you need a nasa computer to play it

>>30238
Oh wow I thought it was the standard "ew this game runs at 52 fps not 60!" That's hilariously shit framerates for a game like this.

>>28641
i wanted a dynamic economy but instead we are getting a static economy :/

>>30239
What do you expect? Game devs have been getting lazier with pc optimization since they build their games around consoles and don’t give a shit about pc players. It’s not even entirely unreasonable considering piracy rates on pc are abysmal and pc players tend to spend less on games. There’s no reason to spend effort on compressing texture files, using shared textures for entire meshes - for clarification this just means that all the textures used for an asset are found shared in a single image texture with a uv - instancing assets, script optimizations, taking advantage of PC memory to reduce load times, multi threading, logarithmic depth buffers etc.

>>30235
>waits to hear what he's gonna complain about
>[feraljaks irl]: PRONOUNS!!!1!!
>pauses video
Did the right just abandon the idea of having a radicalization entry point? Did they forget they need that? This is entirely alien to anyone not already completely indoctrinated, especially kids. There will be no new right wingers because of this shit.

It is funny that as the game is getting backlash over mistreatment of trans employees, they won't have pandering to long covoids as an out because the inevitability of basic grammatical syntax in violently triggering to them.

>>30244
They are making the same mistake made by porky shilling conservatism for boomers and then kind of ignoring gen X and completely ignoring millennials. The lunatics started running the asylum because they outcompeted the more rational people in the "marketplace of ideas" because they were a "better" (more extreme) version of the thing that demographic wanted. It might be strategically sound to have that pipeline in terms of radicalizing people, but it's not sound as a business model because your audience gets bored of you.

is starfield worth a purchase in current year or should I wait for mods?

I heard it's been cracked already haha

Nah just pirate it, awful work environment, especially for trans employees.

Imagine getting angry at pronouns. Its ironic. After playing the game I felt Bethesda wasn't "woke" enough in its lore. I used to read a fuck ton of older science fiction stories as a teen and those stories didn't just deal with sexual identities alone, they went crazy in showing just how different future societies could be.
<pronouns
How about no nouns like literally just a society of vat-grown clones that have no gender.
<gay couples
Wow, soo futuristic… how about a society where there are no couples or family units because that colony has moved past the use of that dynamic?
<muh United Colonies, space cowboys, and space pirates
How about a bunch of different societies with different tech levels and social norms? Colonies run entirely by AI. Colonies reduced to feudal serfdom who have long lost the ability to traverse the stars. Societies that have strict dress codes or bizarre customs.
<muh three space religions
Just three? How about a colony that worships a Christian-centric pantheon of "ghosts" but they are actually just AI of the previous planet's rulers (Book of the New Sun)?

Its all the same boring shit/tech level/faction distinctions every star system. Everything looks the same, sounds the same, and is so neatly arranged that it wears itself out too soon. Its low effort and devoid of any creativity.

>bethesda games
likely not even worth pirating until good mods appear

>>30287
That's key reason why Starfield is so bland, Bethesda was scared to include anything that could be construed as an ideology or political system. Therefore everything can only be painted in lazy cliches that make no sense.

>>30304
can't believe soyjakkers have turned on their own like this

>purchase

>>30305
Idk who the guy is but from seeing the clip it seems obvious he was trying to pander to them and it backfired hard.

>>30302
Honestly I think that’s the for the best than getting another new Vegas/fo3 problem where there’s a community of reactionaries and tankies battling over whose genocidal faction is slightly less vicious. I’m just glad the characters were neat even if the world building wasn’t too interesting.

>>30307
There are communists in nv and 3??

>>30309
Followers of the Apocalypse are clearly anarchists and communists.

>>30248
>>30249
Every company is trash. Drop this idea of "ethical companies".
>>30287
I will now remind you of Star Trek: Discovery, aka STD, particularly of how a human joined with a Trill Symbiont (an alien that alternates gender, and was previously an androgynous alien who I still don't know the gender of) came out as "non-binary" and had to explain what that meant to a gay couple 🙄

In the context of them travelling on a ship with hundreds of different alien species. Like bruh.

>>30317
No, but there are people who think that and it's probably why someone was saying there's communists in FONV.

>>30318
Like >>30311 says, there are, but they've never been a big faction. They aren't even in FO3.

>>30319
I don't think they >>30307 meant the Followers since those guys aren't battling anybody or genocidal.

>>30320
They probably mean all the edgelords who are like 'legion good because (insert psychobabble about how they will rebuild the world even though they are just destroying everything)

>>30307
baby shit, who cares. f:nv was good specifically because bethesda didnt develop it so good writers could write interesting factions

>>30311
They aren't against states, only the bad ones; and I have yet to see someone mention even class struggle amongst their ranks. They seem more like the red cross or a charity organization.

>>30343
even one of the game designers themselves said they are the most left-wing in the franchise consisting of communist, syndicalist, anarchist, socialist etc

>>30344
Apparently in F76 there's an anarchist faction called 'the Free States', shame that game sucks

>>30344
Not a hard line to cross but why is this never really expanded on much in the games

>>30374
Because having an overtly left wing faction would be 'too political'

It's looks as boring as every other Bethesda game without mods.

>>30374
It's about the age old storytelling idea of show, don't tell.
The followers come from the boneyard of fallout 1, before the NCR was even a thing. According to a follower in westside, the NCR and followers used to have good relations, but the greed of and wealth inequality of the NCR made them split.
The followers clean up after the NCR as they head east, and they're pretty decentralized. Every follower's branch has their own structure and operations to fit the material conditions of the poor they're attempting to help. Pretty much the only tenant that has stuck with every follower branch is the concept of public education. The doctor in the New Vegas clinic was trained in the Boneyard, where the followers originated in fallout 1, presumably for free.
Regarding the class war, if you ask Julie Farkas to help the NCR during the fight for hoover dam, Julie asks why they should help the ones who have a monopoly on water.
If you ask Dr. Usanagi if the followers are apart of the NCR, she'll say they once were, but the NCR became obsessed with patents and profitablility. "We see them as oppressive, and they view us as anarchists."

>>30387
None of this is inherently communist. To add more anecdotes we once had some sort of a enviromentalist talk to us about UN sustainable development goals in high school when they were new and she said all this same stuff: inequality bad, greed bad, super rich people bad, non-free education bad. This shit isn't communist, it's just that the whole faction is like the result of an american symphatetic to leftists: it ended up being a bunch of charitable hippies. When in reality their views are just common sense and decency.
NCR calling them anarchists is especially propaganda-sounding too btw.

>>30393
>None of this is inherently communist.
? the topic is "are there communist factions in fallout", and the answer is yes, there are

>>30316
No company in ethical, of course, but for those willing to purchase that which can be pirated, a bit of pointing out the unethicality can kill the consoomtion vibes. Money potentially spent on an indie or something instead.

i am currently playing this and it seems pretty generic. There isn’t anything in this game that screams starfield, if you were to move something from this game to lets say destiny 2, you wouldn’t be able to tell due to how generic both of these games look. I don’t hate it, but i don’t love it either, but one thing is sure and thats the ui is absolutely dogshit, most generic looking shit.

>>28641
Just done the Sarah Morgan personal quest, I thought it was quite well done and touching, nothing incredible of course but not everything about this game is bad IMO

>>30396
Unironically yes, it does work in case of independent devs since most of the time they're not even small businesses but artisans. Worthwhile indie devs stay afloat through the sales and word of mouth, while shitty ones get usually get filtered.

>>30402
you arent a communist but a liberal

>>30396
"voting with your wallet" is like coke vs pepsi shit, anon was talking about not buying AAA games. it's like drinking tap water instead of any soda.

>>30402
>>30403
In the era of socialist construction and beyond the soviet union had artels where are worker could spend their hard earned labour hours on the labour hours of an artisan with modern machine tools to make something nice.

Kruschev cancelled these artels, because of course he did.

Gotta love him for banging his shoe on the table at the UN and saying we will bury you, but y'know.

>>30396
Are you actually retarded or just new to making bait? That's not voting with your wallet, that's choosing not to pour a cup of clean water in the drain when you could drink it yourself or give it to someone nearby that could actually make use of it. Your money means nothing to Bethesda, they make more than you could ever pay them through consumption via stocks. If you wanna be a "patron of the arts" then buy indie, if not then keep in in your damn wallet and spend it on something you can't just download for free.

My computer's shut down from overheating twice while playing and I'm too nervous to try again, I can play BG3 just fine but Starfield gets my CPU cooking for some reason.

>>30403
>paying someone for their own labor and acknowledging we are still living in a capitalist system is liberal
Get a load of this dimwit.

>>30410
>im helping those who deserve it with my money :)
stop feeling good over your consumption habits dickhead

>>30408
>dont support big companies support small companies instead :)
uh it literally is voting with ur wallet

>>30412
indie isn't "small buisnesses" that's just artists. I'm going to take this as confirnation you're baiting because I can't imagine a set of blieifs that would make someone unironically think that.

>>30411
>look mum i am doing a hecking anti-consumerism!
It is still consumption even if you do not pay you vulgar shit for brains.

>>30394
The same actions committed by the communist followers are also repeated by millions of non-communists every day. Wasn't the post I responded to about showing them do a communism instead of telling.

>>28641
Outposts are fucking pointless, I'm kinda mad I even bothered spending a couple hours trying to understand how they work. You can't make storage in homes either with more than like 10 capacity so you might as well just live at the lodge, at least there's a safe there that has infinite capacity.

I really wish they trimmed the amount of systems in this game to focus that effort on fleshing out the more important systems like combat, story, etc etc.

>>30414
>stop trying to vote with your wallet and feel good over your consumption habits
<ummmmmmmmmm are you being anticonsumerism bro?????????
nice implication you fucking retard, im exactly saying that caring about consumption and trying to apply morals to it is stupid

>>30413
>>30402
>it isnt "small business" its just artists/artisans
so small businesses then? does anyone here actually fucking read?

you can tell leftypol is filled with burger radlibs when making fun of someone saying you should support the little guy with your money :) gets you a big backlash rofl

>>30433
indie developers are workers though

>>30435
More like petit bourgeois if they own their studio

>>30436
most indie studios don't have employees but are a collection of workers who own the company in common, ie. a co-op

What a beautifully derailed thread.

>>30437
They are petty bourgeois - undeniably they are class enemies. They own capital, so they are bourgeois. They produce NOTHING but culture pigfeed - for the first world pigs. They hypnotize and lumpenize the people by transforming them into gamers, at the benefit of the bourgeosie.

>>30435
irrelevant to the point of "feeling good buying ethically"

>>30440
Buying indie games only on purpose is the same as with buying "union-made" clothing, really. Even if it is truly made by self-governing unionized workers, it will contribute nothing to class struggle and participation in the market will eventually just quell whatever socialist ambitions they might have. Ethical consumption is no more than a myth and the rest of people ITT really should have realized this a long time ago.

>>30441
I mean how far do you take this, is it ok to buy blood diamonds too?

>>30442
Most clothing people wear including the working class is made in sweatshop conditions or worse. The only thing that is stands out about blood diamond trade is that the buyer is definitely a bourgeois pig, because only they can afford buying a piece of diamond jewelry even for credit.

>>30443
I mean I think sweatshops aren't as bad as unregulated mining

So what's the consensus of the story and characters? Better or worse than Bethesda's previous games?

>>30433
You a zigga

Dropped the game after 30 hours. It is not very exciting. Maybe I'll revisit it later, but I can already tell you that I liked MW, Oblivion and Skyrim more than this one. The characters are especially bland this time, even compared to something like Fallout 4. I did like the worldbuilding and general lore. Combat is very basic now that VATS isn't a thing. There's no dismemberment as well.

>>30441
Also because only indies are reliably good.
>it will contribute nothing to class struggle and participation in the market will eventually just quell whatever socialist ambitions they might have.
Accelerationism isn't real, you can't vote for more class struggle with your wallet, that is a meme.
Unions are an effective way of organizng without having to start from ground 0 like a co-op. co-ops are better in the long run tho imtbho You demonstrate to the masses that they have the ability to work as a collective to fight porky, against what those tapes they play. Put into the spotlight the antagonistic relationship the bourg have with their workers, and that socialism is achievable through revolution rather than revision.

>>30524
>There's no dismemberment as well.
>No dismembered limbs floating around in zero G
what a wasted opportunity.

>>30527
In general everything seems very safe. Even though the game is an 18 there's no nudity or anything like that.

>>30528
The main companions are all very safe too. Everyone's a boring good person, even the one you see killing a guy when you are introduced to her. She's supposed to be on the darker side but no, she'll still dislike you for killing everyone who's not an obvious bad guy.
That was one of the more annoying things for me.

>see starfield gameplay
>game is still an FPS than a fully fleshed out third person space rpg because the team is that lazy to innovate and move away from the limitations of that perspective
>same goofy ass rag doll animation from Skyrim plays every time you die
>same reputation system from oblivion is still present
>not as horribly bugged as fallout 76 but generally runs like shit even on the best cards, like less than 30 fps on normal settings kind of shit
>game literally can’t handle being in your ship away from your cockpit during takeoff
>still no pre recorded real time cutscenes
>no cutscenes in general
>same shitty issues with trying to make small turns in third person are still apparent here
>facial animations are still done with algorithms than motion capture and look as shitty as you’d expect
>same shitty and lazy level and world design you’d expect from any other major Bethesda title
>hub areas and cities look as shitty and uninspired as any city you’d find in Skyrim, they don’t even have trains like in star citizen
>graphics look like they’re from the ps3
>still no land vehicles
>no grabbing animations, barely any interaction animations
>literally the only innovation with this entry outside of space flight are working ladders that you can’t even use in first person

How do they keep getting away with pushing out these trash games, I can’t even blame the engine for this shit because they updated, but the game is still as janky and unfinished as every other bugthesda title. And worst off, this is a finished game, this is the best the developers could make in that many years.

>>30565
>How do they keep getting away with pushing out these trash games
I feel like video game discussion is so astroturfed now that it's impossible for bad games to get their due backlash. It's always years after the fact, when the bots are gone and the fanboys get bored that we're allowed to acknowledge that a game sucks. By then the company responsible has made their money back and is working on the next product.
Bethesda in particular is good at selling a particular concept or setting but always fail to deliver, yet people eat it up anyway. I mean I thought skyrim and fallout 4 was trash but people beg to differ
It could also be a product of monopolization? too big to fail companies with outsized market share putting out subpar products because theres no alternative?
but really wha tdo I know I barely game now. Im basically an old man yelling at the clouds here

>>30566
Monopolization? N’wah there fans are just that stupid and ignorant of how shitty these games are in overall quality compared to literally all their competition. The only thing Bethesda does different is accessibility with its UI and having interesting writing, that’s it. The games themselves are fucking shitty in every core element of there design and it’s a shame knowing they’ve survived this long with public backlash for failure to commit to quality control.

>>30568
You forgot mod support. Like, literally half the reason people still come back to them is what people put out to attempt fixing them or otherwise modifying the experience. Aside from indie RPG devs like Lo-Fi and TaleWorlds, only Bethesda openly endorses modders to the point of vouching for allowing modding their games on consoles, and they blatantly exploit this fact to get away with a lot of oversights and errors that their competition could not. This is not even funny, but fucking tragic.

I played this game for roughly 12 hours and then dropped it. It’s insane how there is this mindset that you can’t criticise a show, game etc until you spend tens of hours on it. Back in the day games took much less time to finish now there are games like persona 5 which take a hundred to finish the main story and their fans defend them because you didn’t spend 50 hours playing them. I think games should be less length oriented and more replay ability oriented, have more dialogue options, more scenarios and story diversions etc.

I really hate the inventory bullshit Bethesda games like doing. I was really annoyed with the useless misc items that are just junk. I was also really hoping that there would be Control style destruction, it just felt like that it would drastically improve the game. I also can’t help but be annoyed at how generic everything is, generic bug monster aliens(literal ice spiders), generic factions(space america, space raiders, space pirates who are also anarchists), generic locations(the first mission is you exploring a military lab where they tried to control monsters for war, which is the most generic trope you could use). The game just doesn’t feel unique, everything is too safe, basic and generic to be interesting, in my opinion.

>>30574
I lasted 30 hours and I agree with everything you said. It's crazy that even fucking Fallout 4 felt more fun, and I wasn't a fan of that game at all.

>>30574
Yeah, agree. I really hate how Fallout 4's story has been padded out by the settlement mechanic, and the settlement mechanic itself was also padded by the perk grinding, like to get basic traders you have to get 10+ levels plus also invest into a perk that is merely there to gate it. Here it seems this kind of bullcrap is a focal point of the whole game. It is if they are not even trying anymore.

>>30575
FO4's main draw for me was that for the first time in the series the real-time gunplay was good enough that I did not feel like using VATS much. Story-wise though it is a solid L, basically being same story as 3 but with roles changed and some cartoonishly bland-ass factions that lack any depth to them i.e. Minutemen are American revolutionary LARPers, Institute are autismo technocrats, Railroad are abolitionist LARPers etc. Barely any characters of note besides the robot followers, the junkie pit fighter girl, Kellogg's Cornflakes and your son, too. Can be a fun looter shooter/autism simulator with mods, but if you are looking for a post apoc RPG then I advise to just skip it.

>graphics
it's shit for more reasons. the graphics look good and even run on my 1060 well enough, never seen a ps3 game like this.

>>30579
>never seen a ps3 game like this.
Dead Space and Alien Isolation?

>>30580
they don’t really look the same, starfield has better graphics, those games just use the lighting to their advantage, which starfield should have done too. Game studious in general should use lighting, shadows and art style more, i am really bored of the generic realism.

>>30579
Mate the game looks like shit graphically and visually. The weapon and uniform models are alright but the environment sets and textures are cartoonishly unrealistic. The biggest indicator for how little the graphics have evolved from fallout 4 is the fact that most planets still use the same day and night style lighting you’d find on earth than an organic ambient shading you’d find on an planet organic to these spaces. Not to mention to complete and total lack of visual detail all of the planets in-game have compared to real ones.

>>30583
Second, I’m pretty sure the game doesn’t even have that many environmental assets compared to 4 anyways, it’s all just uncompressed textures that take up most of the file sizes anyways. Just look at any outpost or in-game city, they all look as barren and out of place as the ones you’d find in the wasteland or in a far cry game and there’s a lot of them that look generally the same wherever you’re.

>>30579
Because actual ps3 games look like the switch port of mk1. Starfield is closer to a ps4 game in visuals.

I dont even care about the graphics. But the story is way too fucking bland, as are the characters. I did all the faction quests except for the Neon corporation one. The UC was pretty neat, I won't lie, it gave me Aliens vibes. The pirates were alright, I sided with them because fuck SysDef. The rangers are fucking boring, by the time I was done with them I decided that I'm not going to continue playing.
I still played a bit more, did some main quests, they were just awful.

>>30586
The world and level design is much more tragic dude. Like take a moment to recognize how barren most planets and cities look, even AC mirage came out with a world looking less empty and that’s saying something if even a company as bad as Ubisoft can do open world design better than your studio.

>>30583
day/night cycles aren't graphics, that's an entire gameplay feature missing.
>>30584
you'd be wrong, the game has lot of enviromental assets but the problem is it ain't enough for a thousand planets.

>>30598
That’s still a lazy excuse, the game is 100+ gigs. Even if they couldn’t create assets for every planet they could’ve just used instancing to fake detail or procedural mesh generation off instances geometry like what the devs for star citizen did for their city planet. There’s no reason for star field to look as shitty as it already does.

>>30565
>How do they keep getting away with pushing out these trash games
> I mean I thought skyrim and fallout 4 was trash
Uygha check the release dates for those games. Skyrim was horrible back in the day, but the sheer extension of the map and convincing art direction wowed normies back in the day. Now every major RPG is an open world, so Starfield isn't getting major accolades this year, it's over, Bethesda no longer has any ciritic cache. FromSoft is the major innovative powerhouse now.

>>30601
Even FromSoft have given into formalism, what with AC6 having Elden Ring-style bosses. The RPG genre is hopelessly bastardized and stagnant at this point and barely anyone except maybe Obsidian, Lo-Fi or Larian set out to provide actual role playing experiences rather than just action-adventures with progression mechanics.

>>30617
>armoured core 6
>elden ring style boss fights
No, that just doesn’t work mate. The former is a game about piloting flying mechas against bullet hell type boss fights while the ladder is a grounded hack and slash title taking place in an open world based off Nordic mythology with ancient mayan and Italian style architecture for its sets. Movement alone creates a massive difference in how those two games play out.

RPGs have definitely been getting dryer with BG3 feeling fun but lacking in innovation for the genre, and maybe that’s fine and makes a lot of sense. You have to keep in mind that the role playing element of RPGs is influenced heavily by their storytelling elements attached to their gameplay. This also means games that aren’t even meant to be played out as RPGs can end up having more roleplaying elements involved in their stories just because there is a narrative that the player takes part in pretty often: games like the last of us, bioshock, we happy few, dishonoured or grand theft auto can stand as examples by how some offer multiple different endings or events to play out depending on the players decisions. Trying to balance that aspect of storytelling with the amount of systems many of these games take advantage of would mean there would be some cuts to how gameplay or story have to play out because you’d either end up with ludo narrative dissonance where your actions wouldn’t matter at all to the roleplaying experience, or blander stories but accompanied by stronger gameplay like what you’d see in how the souls trilogy approach lore when compared to their gameplay.

>>30636
There is a lot of gameplay differences in AC6 for sure, but there is enough similarities between game design, mechanics and roles of various boss encounters to call for regular comparisons so I do not think you have retorted it completely.
Regarding the second paragraph: yeah, I kind of wanted to get to the point that for a game to be a good "RPG" there needs not to be lots of gameplay systems and integers but ability to play out a role, inspect the story and the setting in-depth through interaction and make decisions that could lead to varying outcomes affecting the story's flow and ultimate outcome while still having the game in question be a game rather than an interactive CGI movie.
It is something of a seemingly difficult balancing act, but thats the sort of conundrum RPG developers are facing where on one hand they got to come up with an engaging and winded story, and on the other hand make sure the storytelling and the game mechanics play hand-in-hand to allow for experiencing the first while allowing enough narrative and gameplay freedom to entertain the player's curiosity for different outcomes, alternate routes and challenges. Getting all of the game's components work together in this way is what makes, in my opinion, a good computer role-playing game.

Sorry if I kinda went on a ramble here, just opinions out loud.

>>30656
RPG's don't have to be story heavy. For example, the Wizardry series.

I really don’t like the bullshit “rpg” progression systems most of the modern games have, the ones that likit most basic shit like how starfield locks off stealth, basic restoration items etc behind level ups. Feels forced.

>>30659
I get what you're saying but they have to give you something to keep you playing.

>>30660
isn’t that kind of fucked up? Modern games seem to incentivise players to keep playing by giving little pieces of dopamine, gained not trough gameplay but trough perks and other junk(cosmetics) gained trough grinding. Also perks in starfield are kind of bullshit, like how you can’t lock pick certain stuff because it’s “higher level” etc.

>>30661
I wasn't saying it was a good thing.

>>30661
>Also perks in starfield are kind of bullshit, like how you can’t lock pick certain stuff because it’s “higher level” etc.

Every Bethesda game has this system though.

Bethesda is the only major game developer whose games I actively loathe. Boring ass combat, systems that are insanely easy to exploit, janky/"floaty" movement and physics. It feels bad to control a character in a Bethesda developed game.

>>30665
None of the reasons you listed are why their games are bad now. But you are free to loathe whatever you like, and Starfield is best ignored in any case, it truly is a shit game.

>>30666
No that’s exactly why their games are trash. No one beyond the most dedicated Bethesda fans would tolerate how fucking terrible the gameplay of their major games are if not for the mods. The story and writing can only do so much.

Now that the dust has settled; which Starfield faction is the best?

>>30669
Crimson Lance

>>30669
They all suck. Fuck this game.

>>30670
they're not even called that

>>30669
too generic to care, I hate nasa punk

>>30675
Almost every sci-fi game that is not ripping off some sci-fi franchise is NASApunk to some extent as it is so it does not impress me too yeah. I'd like to see a game use colorful and sleek Soviet space race poster aesthetics for a change, that is something I barely see nowadays besides maybe Atomic Heart.

>>30673
I keep mixing them up with the Borderlands guys sorry.

todd is losing his touch

Steam numbers aren't a complete picture but I'm shocked that Starfield is performing roughly on par with Skyrim at this point, and is completely eclipsed by Baldur's Gate 3. It doesn't have anywhere near the same cultural impact as the latter two games either. Speaking from my own experience it really doesn't deserve the hate but it's extremely average overall, they went all in on procedural generation without giving the player meaningful tools to tell their own story, so of course a handcrafted, thoughtful world is going to win out. It's like the Daggerfall vs Morrowind design debate more than 20 years ago but this time they took the completely wrong path, but with how bad development sounded I guess it's a good thing the game even came out playable. I hope they take the lukewarm reception as a sign to mix up their formula, but if anything they'll probably get more risk-averse and more aggressively monetized in response.

>>30776
RPG mechanics are just a matter of making games addictive. Just slap a number that goes up in there and there's a whole chunk of people who can't stop playing.

>>31694
I am not really shocked by the fact that people are realizing how in-your-face this game's mediocrity at this point, especially after them rereleasing Skyrim three times in a row and then making a shitty online spinoff of Fallout. Here they thought they could just regurgitate FO4 and put it into space age decorations, but first of all FO4 was not a good game itself to begin with, and secondly they barely did anything to make their new setting stand out except putting on a cassette futurist aesthetic that still felt like a derivative of other sci-fi like Alien and Firefly. And this is not even getting into details like the fucked economy where you can buy a ship for the price of a several dozen sandwiches and absolutely boring gunplay where opponents just play a variation of Skyrim's spinning death animation when killed and there is not even a gibbing system that gave just a bit.
I gave them a bit of benefit of doubt when looking at pre-release footage, but I can surely say at this point that Bethesda cannot get anything right and their execs do not really care about improving it as long as it brings them and Zenimax cash. Forget about TES6, it is going to suck even more.

>>30218
Dude have you ever watched a synthetic man video he's every stereotype of a reactionary game reviewer, obsession with race and sexuality, thinks any female characters who are strong is """woke""" it's actually sad if he didn't have a big following.

>>31710
Here is take on starfield

>>31710
>synthetic man
fitting name for a animal that looks like a test tub baby made at PragerU.

I stopped playing after reaching mars and starting some side missions. Such a boring and soulless game. The dialogue was already pretty bad, now imagine it written by an AI.

Also when it comes to all the fashoid gamers do you think og nazies were like that? They were bunch of retarded nerds so do you think they would seethe about pronouns in vidya if they were still around.

>>31710
>giving zelda huge tits
i am so angry right now

>>31710
i remember that thumbnail, is that the guy who kept being horny for interracial cuck futa porn while being outraged at it in a review of a nintendo babby game

>>31710
People listen to this dimwit?

>>31738
don't underestimate the amount of chinlets in the world

You can tell their (Bethesda dudes) pride is really hurt because their game is a bestseller but they still feel the need to argue online. It's not enough that you buy their garbage with your hard earned money you must also unquestioningly praise it.
Here's a 15-tweet-long thread by the main writer of Starfield whining that people didn't like their fast travel simulator.
https://nitter.net/Dezinuh/status/1734978421736738978#m

>>32476
Fuck them retards. I am not giving them any more respect until they learn how to make games actually worthy of a 9/10 rating rather than watered down crap that requires player-made modifications to be palatable.

>>32479
>watered down crap that requires player-made modifications to be palatable
Sonic fans: "First time?" On a serious note, mods can really make a game wonderful, that's the reason why games should be libre software, the project should be improved by the community post-release even if the game was already good, there is zero excuse for this other than a propertarian mindset.

>>32476
No matter how many millions of copies a game sells, everyone responsible knows deep down that they are making garbage and they hate themselves for it.

I recently finished getting every achievement for Starfield on Steam without mods and kept track of my thoughts while playing, so I figured I'd write them down here. Rather than Skyrim or Fallout 4 in Space think of it more like Daggerfall in Space (or maybe more appropriately Arena in Space, since you can't really travel between spots on planet surfaces and points of interest are procedurally generated). If you really enjoy the Bethesda style you can get it now and probably be happy with what you get. For everyone else, maybe in a few months to a year when modding is easier, and/or if they have a Phantom Liberty-style turnaround in a year or two it will be worth it.

TL;DR: The level of quality is hugely variable from one moment to the next, there are genuinely enjoyable parts but every aspect of the game has flaws, sometimes major flaws, some of which can be easily fixed and others which are unlikely to be.

Technical Aspects
I didn't have any crashes but there are bugs. It really is the least buggy Bethesda release, believe it or not. Every faction/main quest can be completed, but three side quests completely broke for me. I managed to complete one of those side quests by using a different bug to undo the quest bug. I played on a potato so some areas of the game (the main cities and planets with dense foliage) ran like shit. There's also an unresolved bug where long saves (200+ hours) run into a dynamic formID bug where old formIDs aren't getting recycled and saves start to break, but I started a new game+ right before it became an issue.

Tutorials
The tutorials in this game are terrible. I still don't fully understand how environmental hazards work and just accept that I'll get injuries randomly while running around on planets. I didn't realize I could tell the local planet's exact time from the tab menu, fast travel without using the map and scan the cargo of other ships by using the scanner while in space, or toggle spacesuits/helmets in settlements and breathable areas until more than 100 hours in. A ton of stuff regarding surveying, outpost management, and resource families are never explained to the player. There's a weapon that does more damage when the trigger is held down, but I had no idea until I was almost done with the game and couldn't figure out why the damage output wasn't matching the item description. I didn't realize you could purchase items directly to your ship's cargo bay until today.

Art and Design
I don't have a great aesthetic sensibility but for what it's worth I like the art design overall. The planet map UI is cool too. I was really impressed by the system map accounting for day and night on the planet itself but unfortunately it doesn't accurately map where planets and moons are in their orbits, even if it does so when you're on the planet itself. Every planet has its own local time, and when you wait on that planet it waits in that planet's hours, so 1 hour on Venus would make 100 hours of universal time pass. I also enjoyed the soundtrack and was surprised at how many voice actors they used, and they're pretty good overall. The facial animations and gestures seem dated and don't hold a candle to games like Cyberpunk, but the few interactions that are motion captured are surprisingly well done. There's an extremely annoying quirk where most NPCs can't be engaged in conversation unless they're standing in a neutral position, so you have to wait for them to get up from a chair or finish their idle pose before they can talk which can take 3-5 seconds. This was possible in Skyrim and Fallout 4, I don't know why they've taken a step back here. Worth noting this also extends to hostile NPCs, you can unload an entire magazine into them while they take the time to stand up from their chair and they won't react until they've stood up completely. The randomly generated unnamed citizens wandering around cities are very, very weird looking, like they're rendered in lower detail to save processing power. Might be my own personal taste but I think a lot of NPCs talk for way too long. The game mostly ignores the physiological and architectural implications of living on planets and moons with wildly varying climates and gravity, which is a shame. Named NPCs don't have any kind of schedule and cities are populated by the randomly generated citizens (who do have schedules, interestingly) so things feel somewhat lifeless. Maybe a minor point for others but I intensely dislike that enemies are no longer shown with their equipped gear but instead have faction uniforms that show regardless of what they're wearing, and have only a 10% chance of dropping any of their armor (which doesn't reflect in their appearance when you loot it). Also, there's a pirate graffiti font the game uses all over the place and once you realize it, it becomes distracting.

Setting and Locations
The setting and worldbuilding doesn't pull you in like it would for Fallout or TES, nothing about it is very compelling or makes you want to learn more. It serves as a decent backdrop for space shenanigans but the space magic stuff comes out of left field and has nothing to do with the rest of the game. Cities are tiny, and there are only 3 of them with a handful of smaller towns on top. I'm not the first to mention that the game's cyberpunk-esque city Neon feels weirdly safe and not very cyberpunk; the entire game feels very "safe" overall. I do like that you can walk outside a city and explore the surrounding area, for what it's worth. Planets are in rough categories (with/without life, terrestrial, moon, ice) and within those categories it's pretty hard to tell one planet apart from another, there aren't many distinguishing features and no really interesting weather effects or unique fauna. The handcrafted dungeons and locations are good, and even the reused POIs are interesting the first time you see them.

Systems and Mechanics
>Landing areas and POIs
Planets have procedurally generated terrain, and if they have life they'll have flora and fauna scattered around as well. The landing area then gets populated with points of interest from a list, either manmade structures or natural landmarks. You're restricted to walking within the landing area, but I've never bothered walking to the edges to figure out where the boundaries are (it's pretty big, at least a 4kmx4km square). You end up seeing a lot of the same plants and animals reused and even buildings down to the detail. I didn't believe it was THAT bad when I started playing, until I found an abandoned research lab that was exactly the same I had seen a couple hours before, and had the exact same story down to character names in lore notes scattered around. I'm not totally against the idea of pulling from a list but I swear there's only like 30 locations max and you end up running through the same areas again and again, and the decision to have specific location backstories with specific characters' names reused multiple times is totally baffling, and sometimes you'll find locations that make no sense whatsoever, like a cave with mushrooms on a planet without atmosphere and a burning hellscape surface. If they're going to make it work they need at least a hundred more locations to pull from, maybe even hundreds more. The first time I saw a location reused it took me completely out of the game. POIs end up being both too far away and too close together as well. Even on remote inhospitable moons in barely populated systems, there are outposts and buildings everywhere and ships constantly landing and taking off, but they're far enough away with nothing to do between them that they're tedious to get to. Given their current design I don't know how they would address this. The NPCs you find at friendly POIs are all unnamed and give you radiant busywork quests (one told me to find their friend who had been attacked by a wild animal, this quest being given on a barren, frozen moon without an atmosphere and no life anywhere), and once you finish it they forget who you are and nothing changes at all. Nothing you do at any of these random locations matters.

>Surveying
Planets have resources, flora, fauna, and natural features the player can scan. I did it for a while and surveyed the entire starting area system but it was a huge time and skill point investment with very little payoff. I assume the intention is to have an exploration loop like other Bethesda games where the player is busy surveying, then sees something off in the distance, goes to check it out, clears a dungeon, goes back to surveying, etc. etc. It doesn't really work in practice, especially on planets without flora and fauna. Plus there are a lot of little annoyances with the surveying UI, like not being able to open doors or certain containers and not being able to use hotkeyed items.

>Fast travel
Unlike other Bethesda titles fast travel is absolutely essential. In other games, the trade off is that you would miss out on any exploration along the way to the destination. Here there is absolutely no reason not to except to make getting anywhere take 10x longer with nothing interesting in between. You often end up rapidly hopping between systems trying to find vendors to offload all your junk to and buy resources for crafting, and without fast travel this would be intolerable. The exploration-encouraging design from Skyrim and Fallout 4 fundamentally does not exist in this game.

>Leveling and perks
It works sort of like Fallout 4, where there's no level cap and the player can get all the perks if they play long enough. In practice, leveling slows down massively and by the time I finished every quest and a bunch of exploration on the side I was level 80, reaching level 100 was a slog. There are outpost crafting methods the player can use to get fast levels but I didn't want to use them. You get one skill point per level and each skill has 4 ranks, making the skill stronger each rank and usually adding something extra that the skill does. You have to perform tasks related to the skill (do x damage with laser weapons, persuade x people, etc.) in order to unlock the next rank for investing in, some of them are easy and will unlock easily as you play while others are a huge pain in the ass and require up to an hour of grinding out because you never do it otherwise. Skills are separated into categories (physical, social, combat, science, tech) and are sorted into 4 tiers, so you can pick one of 5 entry level skills in each category but need to invest more points into the category as a whole before you can unlock higher tier skills. I think the system is fine and wouldn't be mad if that's how TES6 does it, but I'd prefer if some of the skill challenges were reworked to be less time consuming. Some skills are pretty much mandatory for any playthrough, you can't use boost packs or even have a stealth meter without spending a skill point in either for example. A couple skills are completely useless unless you have an extremely specific playstyle.

>Combat
Pretty much like Fallout 4 but with jetpacks and variable gravity. Zero-G fights are a lot of fun but there are 3 or 4 in the entire game, criminally underutilized in my opinion. There are rudimentary cover mechanics which are helpful but unreliable, where you can aim and poke your head out from cover from some things but not others and it isn't clear when it'll be the case. Both the player character and enemies get extremely spongy as they level up, where low level enemies can't even make a dent in your health. Combat AI is pretty braindead and sometimes enemies seem to just "switch off" right in front of you and stop moving. On the other hand, they do have demoralization mechanics and will run away if things are panning out, which I think is pretty cool. Unlike other weapons, melee and unarmed don't scale and aren't viable.

>Difficulty
The usual for Bethesda, it tweaks outgoing damage and boosts enemy health. Also increases the number of legendary enemies encountered so you get more rare gear. I kept the game on the highest difficulty the entire time and (ground) combat was for the most part extremely easy, I invested only a couple points into combat skills and didn't have any issues for the entire game. I don't mean that in a bragging way, the scaling on gear and health is all out of wack and you get aid items in abundance, I only died if I was being lazy and standing there unloading on enemies instead of taking cover, and even then it was rare. Getting armor piercing weapons (and the skill, if needed) helps deal with spongy legendary enemies. There's also some other mechanic where enemies who outlevel you seem to do more damage based on how large the disparity is so you could quickly die from a couple shots if the level gap is huge. Space combat on the other hand is a lot more challenging and is the only time I considered turning down the difficulty, but I'll get more into that later.

>Gear
Again similar to Fallout 4 but this time weapons and armor have quality tiers of base, refined, calibrated, and advanced, while armor has an additional final tier of superior. Legendary gear is in the game too, but this time there are rarity levels of common, rare, epic, and legendary, where each rarity tier has its own perks it pulls from and includes random perks from tiers below it (so a legendary weapon will also have epic and rare perks). Players can't add quality or rarity to weapons and need to find them out in the world. Some of the perks are extremely strong, at level 70 I found an advanced magsniper (the strongest rifle in the game) with perks that did double damage to enemies at full health and had extra armor penetration, meaning it could one shot most enemies even without investing any skills into stealth bonuses or rifles. Armor mods are very weak and not worth the investment and there seems to be a bug where none of the armor you loot is modded anyway. Weapon mods on the other hand are extremely useful and well worth the skill investment. For whatever reason melee weapons lack both quality tiers and the ability to mod them so they scale extremely poorly past level 15 or so, but at the same time they have an outsize drop rate on the rare gear drop table so you'll be swimming in useless legendary axes and knives. A couple other weapons (including the only non-ballistic heavy weapon) lack quality tiers as well. Grenades also have no damage scaling or quality tiers so by level 30 or so you're safer just staying in cover and tanking it than you are trying to avoid them. Some mines on the other hand have unavoidable CC abilities like stunning or freezing and are extremely useful throughout the game. Enemy mines are so slow to detonate that you'll rarely ever take damage from them. There are ballistic, laser, particle beam, and EM weapons, but ballistic weapons are by far the most plentiful and powerful. There aren't many laser or particle beam weapons and I think there are only two (base) EM weapons, though other weapons can be modded into EM type. EM weapons can do non-lethal stuns, which is interesting but poorly implemented, as not many combat-related quests give you the option of not killing quest targets.

>Space combat
I enjoy space combat, but encounters tend to be very one-sided. At its best, you spawn into an asteroid cluster against multiple enemies and weave through them picking off enemies one by one until you board the last one, kill everyone and taking their ship. At its worst, after traveling to a planet's orbit you get thrown into empty space in a 4v1 with no time to react and get torn apart. Like regular combat, you have multiple weapon systems to choose from but here particle beams are far and away the best choice, only using EM if you need to disable and board ships. Boarding and taking over ships is a lot of fun but it becomes cumbersome once you actually take the ship, as you can't sell it right away, can't just take it while using your normal home ship, need to pay money to register it before you can change anything about it, and your cargo gets all messed up. You really can't skirt along with just the basics here like you can with regular combat, this is one area where you really need to invest skill points in piloting and ship design on the higher difficulties so you can pilot more powerful ships and install better components. At that point most encounters will be a breeze while you'll run into others where you just get stomped and there's nothing you can do about it. Legendary (class M) ship fights are a fun challenge.

>Ship building
A very strong aspect of the game, where you can tear your ship apart and completely rebuild it to your liking as long as it has the basic essentials for flight. It also functions as an effective gold sink that pushes you to go out and make money to upgrade your ship, at least until you have everything you need and don't feel like editing any of your other ships.

>Injuries
Probably a holdover from when Starfield had a more survival bent, they happen only rarely (usually from doing something stupid like jumping off a cliff or standing in a cloud of toxic gas). Treatment for them is handed out like candy and weighs barely anything, but if you're lazy they also heal on their own. They have a severity and a prognosis, which determines how many debuffs there are and how long it'll take to go away. Most of the time they're mild cases and not a real inconvenience. Oddly enough you generally can't get injuries from normal combat when there are things like flammable rounds and cryo mines and swords, although some fauna have special abilities that can cause injuries.

>Crafting
In order to craft anything, first you need to have the skill level and then you need to do research (spend resources) to unlock that specific type of crafting. I don't know why this is the case, it seems like they had two different systems for gating higher tier crafting and ended up using them both. Weapon crafting is extremely useful and after some investment chems can turn you into a (drug addicted) god. Cooking is not very useful at all, the progression is strange with higher tier foods being strictly worse than lower tier ones, there are only a handful of recipes the player can automate ingredient production for, and potatoes and carrots are harder to find than hardcore drugs so the vast majority of useful recipes are never going to be readily available to the player. Resources for crafting are in general annoying to get, and while you can track resources for mods/research it won't actually tell you how many of the resource you need and there's no way to find out what you're tracking the resources for until you actually craft/research it. For most of the game I had aluminum highlighted as tracked because I mistakenly toggled tracking on a weapon mod for a weapon I sold a long time ago, but I couldn't remember which weapon it was and had no way to turn it off without finding that weapon again. The player can craft injury curing items but oddly not healing items, or ammo, explosives, or repair parts for ships. Ammo in particular is a major money sink throughout the game and would be extremely useful to automate production for, seems like a big missed opportunity. There's also no way to scrap items unlike Fallout 4, so you'll end up leaving a lot of valuable stuff on NPCs because you don't want to take the time or inventory space to sell it and have no other use for it.

>Outposts
Hard to overstate what a letdown this part of the game was. My impression given Fallout 4 and a faction within Starfield called LIST (comprised of colonists on remote outposts which the player can even recruit members for) was that the player would be able to build up settlements and attract colonists, but the game instead ends up being a much more frustrating version of Factorio. There are 75ish resources in the game and 30 or so manufactured components the player can make, but to set up an industry for even the basic level of manufacturing is a huge time and level investment and the in-game information and UI for this is terrible. If you want to build any building on any planet you need at least 10 levels invested, but if you want to make the process bearable and efficient you'll need at least 30 levels. The player will need to spend a while looking for proper locations for inorganic resources across systems, but scouting out organic resources is even worse: you need to invest two levels into scanning flora and fauna to be able to build the production facilities, then you need to fully scan each plant and animal to find out if you can produce their resources at an outpost; if you can, you can only produce their resources on that specific planet and if it's fauna you'll also need a production chain to produce food for them, and if that food resource for some reason not available on the planet (as is often the case; what the fuck do they eat?) you need to ship it in from another planet. You can scan a planet to find out where inorganic resources are but there's no similar system for organic resources: you need to spend the time surveying everything and then just remember where everything is and whether you can produce it at your outpost. I ended up consulting a community guide for all the resources and needed to make a flow chart to plan out how to make stuff and I still only made two out of the three tiers of manufactured goods because the third level was a whole new level of frustration. And unlike Fallout 4, cargo links are one way and only for the specific resources linked, there is no shared inventory between linked outposts. Incoming cargo can't be sorted either so you'd better hope you don't end up with resource imbalances that eventually break your production chain. There's also no way to see what you're actually building at each outpost unless you're at the outpost. Add to this no way to favorite a planet or system for easy finding later on. Plus each part of production requires different resources to build so this means constant trips back and forth and then to cities when you don't have everything and then you need to dump cargo from your ship because you don't have room but then you need to go to multiple cities because the one didn't have what you needed and now you're overencumbered and can't fast travel and FUCK

The process of getting an outpost producing anything useful at all is a huge pain in the ass and I really hope they fix it. Building placement sucks too. Once you get a chain of outposts producing useful stuff it's pretty satisfying but not at all worth the effort, since shops have whatever you want (even otherwise extremely rare and valuable resources) in abundance anyway.

>Companions and crew
Companions are core characters who are part of the main quest, and crew are other characters who are mainly recruited in bars. You get 5 companions early on in the main quest who have a large amount of dialogue and all of them except the robot have companion quests and can be romanced. Then there are named recruitable crew members who have some dialogue and backstory but no quests, romance, or likes/dislikes, and their dialogue is a lot more restricted. Then there are unnamed generic characters with one skill. You can assign any of them to be on your ship or man your outposts, and companions and non-generic crew can accompany you as well. They all have different skills that give buffs to space combat or outpost production, but some skills share names with player skills and don't have the same effects. It isn't really clear what some of the skills do or what their bonuses are, but companions and crew do provide very strong buffs to ship combat. The companions aren't Baldur's Gate 3-level but they're a nice addition, although Barrett isn't very consistently characterized and is sort of all over the place.

>Inventory and economy
There never seems to be enough inventory space or ship cargo space and managing inventory is a frustrating game all to itself, but you are given a container with infinite storage early on (which is still inconvenient to get to). None of the vendors have enough money so you end up hopping planet to planet hoping to sell half of what's in your ship, and eventually you start jettisoning cargo because it's not worth the time. Once you reach a high level your only real expense is ammo, so you stop looting anything except ammo and med packs and end up with millions of credits with nothing to spend it on except vanity ships.

>Crime
The lockpicking minigame sucks and I stopped picking locks above advanced because I loathe it. Smuggling isn't worthwhile because vendors don't have any money, and money is a lot easier to come by through other methods. Piracy is enjoyable. There's a trespassing mechanic that is underutilized, even quests that involve trespassing rarely use it. I still don't understand how crime and bounties work. Sometimes I'll attack hostile robots in an abandoned settlement in a remote system and end up with a murder bounty for one of the factions.

>Stealth
It's a lot harder than in other Bethesda games, and is nearly impossible in a spacesuit (due to its weight) unless you invest heavily in skills and use the right gear/chems. As mentioned above you don't even get a stealth meter unless you spend a skill point.

>Speech
Persuasion and other speech options are surprisingly useful and prevalent in quests, sometimes even overpowered (there's one Crimson Fleet quest in particular where it's fucking ridiculous). There are social skills for CC abilities like pacifying, fearing, and mind controlling but the game doesn't tell you they also play a role in the persuasion minigame. Character background, traits, and skills all play a role in speech checks and conversations, which really impressed me. This is probably the most reactive Bethesda game since Morrowind, but it still drops the ball in a lot of places.

>New game+
You lose literally everything except your level and skills. In return you get a shitty spaceship and garbage tier armor which both get slightly better with each iteration up to 10, and get to hunt down your powers (explained below) all over again to make them even stronger up to 10 times. Enemies also get slightly stronger each iteration, capping out at +10 where they do twice as much damage and take half as much. The main quest has variations every new game+ but I've never seen them, and you can expedite the main quest if you want to in successive new games. I might end up taking it to +10 but I'll probably mess around with mods first. Weirdly you can't choose a new background or traits with each new game+, I think it'd add a lot more reason to replay quests each iteration to see what new options are presented.

>>32740

Factions
>United Colonies
Starship Troopers played straight
>Freestar Collective
Space Texans, complete with cowboy larpers and rule by CEO oligarchs
>Crimson Fleet
Pirates
>Ryujin Industries
Evil megacorp
>Spacers
Pirates (not Crimson Fleet)
>House Va'ruun
Foreign-sounding cultist bad guys

Quests
>Overall
In some parts there's an impressive amount of reactivity and player choice (not just for a Bethesda game, but in general), while other parts leave you going wtf why can't I tell this person something they clearly would like to know, or why doesn't this person have ANYTHING to say about this after the fact. For multiple quests there are unstated options to resolve them, which I appreciate a lot and was surprised to find. In the vast majority of cases when you complete the quests hardly anything changes, and people will still talk to you as if nothing's different, even after completing entire questlines. Many quests require you to accompany a walking NPC but they walk slightly faster than the player character. This gets irritating quickly.

>Main quest
I mentioned it earlier but it's surprising how little the main quest has to do with the rest of the game. I saved it for last and was blindsided when I realized you get magic powers since the rest of the game is fairly grounded scifi. It seems like this was added at the last minute or something. That said the main story wasn't bad, it builds toward something interesting but then ends pretty abruptly. There's an interesting narrative around new game+ that I wish they explored more. I think I used the powers one time so I didn't know enough to include a section about it in mechanics. The side quests to get all the powers and artifacts are shockingly bad. For the artifacts, you get sent to procedurally generated dungeons you've seen a dozen times before, and for the powers you 1) go to a planet and 2) do a braindead minigame, then repeat steps 1 and 2 23 more times.

>Faction quests
There are a lot of problems in-universe but none of the factions seem to tackle ones that really matter and are instead self-contained without any wider effects. You can join every faction without conflict, the Freestar Rangers and UC Vanguard don't care if you're a pirate, and UC and Freestar don't care if you join each others' factions even though they were just at war. None of them were bad, although they were pretty short. The Freestar Rangers questline ends as abruptly as the main quest does. The worst any are guilty of is false advertising and lack of consequences. You do absolutely no piracy in the Crimson Fleet questline, and the UC Vanguard implies you'll be doing a lot of piloting when none of their quests involve space combat at all. The Crimson Fleet and UC Vanguard quests feel the most complete of any of the faction quests. Ryujin's story is sort of all over the place and oddly enough the other factions have harder (optional) stealth missions than the actual stealth faction. You don't need to pick any locks harder than novice level. I understand why, but it's disappointing.

>Side quests
Some are pretty good. Most are confined to the main cities and are meant to get you sightseeing or to give you background on the area. I think there are maybe 10 total unique quests outside the systems containing the cities and towns, which is 10 quests spread out over 100+ systems.

>Radiant quests
Only do mission board quests if you want quick landing spots for xp and loot. Best to just plug your nose and get it over with if you really want to grind. For some reason UC and Freestar radiant quests can take place WAY outside their settled areas.

Closing Thoughts
One thing I noticed again and again is that a lot of the systems and stories don't interact with each other much, if at all. None of the crafting skills will help you with space combat, for example. Some parts of the game feel like they were in early while others seem rushed and half-finished. There are mods that change a lot of things I dislike about the game, but other more serious flaws seem pretty fundamental to its design. There are some major steps back that make me extremely nervous about TES6, especially with none of the old influential designers or developers working at Bethesda anymore. I got a ton of play time out of it but I'm ambivalent about the game overall, I don't know if I'll continue on with new game+ or come back to the game at some later time. It really makes me wonder what the state of the game was during its intended release window. There's apparently still 250 people working on the game, so we'll have to see where things go from here. People are whispering about a survival mode update that will save the game but I won't hold my breath.

Also I could do a whole write up about capitalist realism or unexamined settler-colonialism but I don't think there's enough interest in the game to warrant that.

>>32741
>You do absolutely no piracy in the Crimson Fleet questline

TBF there is like one mission in the quest where you have to do piracy but if you're a moralfag you can negotiate with them instead

yeah, what the fuck was bethesdas strategy for this game. The x4 and star sector gamers arent going to play this in the long term, since star field doesnt have a economy. The elite dangerous and star citizen gamers arent going to play this in the long term because starfield doesnt really do first person combat or exploration better than these games. The no man sky, astrox, and avorion gamers wouldnt play this in the long term because nothing starfield offers wouldnt really appeal to them long term either.
The only thing going for this game would be the rpg mechanics, and appealing to the old bethesda gamers, but starfield seems to be worse or at least suffers a lot of the problems fallout 4 did in the rpg department.
WHAT WAS THE PLAN HERE>

>>32745
Its literally just Todd's attempt at getting his dream game Skyrim With Guns In Space done, not much really.

………

>>32745
I'm the one who wrote that bigass post above and I really think this is like Daggerfall in Space. I happen to like Daggerfall a lot and I appreciate what it was going for, it's just that a lot of the systems aren't fully fleshed out. You can technically be
>a smuggler (but the risk/reward isn't worth it and there's only one reliable source of contraband)
>a pirate (but for some reason you need to pay the registration for ships you steal before you can sell them, even to the pirate faction; you can demand ships hand over their cargo but all they have is cheap crap)
>a colonist (but the building interface sucks and you can only send crew members to the outposts)
>a mining/manufacturing magnate (but you have no way to import or export supplies with contracts and setting it all up is way more complicated than it needs to be)
and some other stuff, but all of them have their own flaws.

I mentioned it before but I think the main quest was added pretty late into development, the rest of the game pushes you into treating the game like a sandbox and then the end of the main quest tells you to throw out all the stuff you built and do it all over in new game+. Once you start the new game+ you end up wanting to follow it through to new game+10 to get all the benefits, and during the meantime you don't want to build anything or do any quests so the final iteration can be the "real" game.

>>32745
I'm sure the game made boatloads of money even if it's not that good, this game isn't really for 'serious space game fans"

>>32745
>THE PLAN
to make money by throwing whatever was hyped at the time of dev (2+ years ago)

>>32740
>>32741
Currently trudging my way through to new game+10 for reasons unknown, but if anyone wants a detailed takedown of the million little frustrating things about Starfield, vid related is fantastic. He doesn't cover just how bad melee and unarmed are but I agree 100% with everything he points out.

lol

I haven't played this game but this is the most obsessed I've ever seen redditors about a game. You'd think Todd Howard killed everyone they loved or some shit. Honestly, if the most insufferable mentally ill losers on the planet hate it this much I'm thinking it might actually be decent lmao.

>>32936
I think a lot of it is people losing whatever hope they had left for TES VI. "Most innovative gameplay" is definitely a stretch, I'd hesitate to call the game bad because I put well over 100 hours into it, but I don't think it's good either. Years after Fallout 4's release people started to begrudgingly reevaluate it and admitted it was pretty good at environmental storytelling and getting the player to explore. I don't think Starfield will get the same kind of treatment unless Bethesda puts in massive amounts of work. Some important things players want (like being able to land on planets or travel from one planet to another themselves) just aren't possible without completely reworking the engine, so I can't imagine the devs doing much more than smoothing out the rough edges and calling it done.

>>32936
Most of them are probably either hardcore Bethesda fans themselves or normies who never played a space game before.
I myself just wonder what kind of lewd mods there will be dor it.

Have things ever been more over than they are now?

>>32936
It's something of a hail mary for people who have hated Bethesda, and Todd especially, for a long time. Gratifying to see people wake up to how terrible their games are (pure product), even if only superficially.

It has been several months now and there are still no news regarding the Creation Kit.You would Bethesda would be hyping it like hell considering how barren the game is and Bethesda's history of relying on modders to fix issues with their games.

>>33294
imagine, bethesda cant figure out how to create a proper creation kit for starfield.

>>33294
Maybe it's cancelled and they are full on Elder Scrolls now

>>33316
Not holding out for TES6 either given they supposedly do not even have a prototype. Bethesda is going to just take Fallout 4, add magic, remove guns, add furries and elves and call it a day.

Star sisters, not like this…

>>33480
Yeah, so sad for a multi-billion dollar anti-GNU/Linux and anti-FLOSS bourgeois scum.

Good for you, PS5 owners. But Sony is not better than Microsoft.

>>33480
haha it wasn't good enough to bother keeping it an exclusive I guess

honestly Outer Worlds was better even with everyone being disappointed by it

>>33504
Honestly, fuck Microsoft, they should die in a fire and Bill Gates should hang himself.

I do not get this shilling for exclusives, it's bourgeois. Every game should be available on every platform. Especially on GNU/Linux and BSD PCs.

You know what? Forget the consoles, the console market is cancer that is killing the PC gaming. Like a parasite, it's feasting on its carcass, enriching the platform holders and empoverishing our wallets.

>>33505
I mean PC gaming is hardly dying, it's annoying to miss out on some console exclusives sure but we still have by far the best choice of games

>>33506
It's not only that we get no console exclusives. We also barely get good PC poris either (of bigger-budget games at least). Even if PC gaming isn't dying, the sheer existence of console gaming makes PC gaming worse. There is not enough incentive to make good PC ports. The same way there's not enough incentive to remove Denuvo and third-party launchers as Steam has a very deregulationist policy (despite having a heavy taxation policy, peak neoliberalism) unlike GOG.

>>33507 (me)
The final solution is therefore communism the collapse of the console market.