“yeah we always thought this could happen,” the family said in a statement. “We’re very negligent, to the point of abuse.”
Idk what people are expecting to see.
“yeah we always thought this could happen,” the family said in a statement. “We’re very negligent, to the point of abuse.”
Idk what people are expecting to see.
That seems to be part of it. I haven’t paid any attention to any of the news before it launchedd, because I don’t give a damn about console wars or todd howard. I just got the game because my friends were playing it and it sounded like something I’d really like, and it was.
Huh?
My chief complaint has been that there are too many things. If you go to a moon in the middle of nowhere, your landing site will have an abandoned research station and a secret factory and an observation post all within a couple KM around it. These aren’t tied to the location, but they are hand-crafted, and as soon as the mod API drops I plan to decrease the frequency they show up, because my only complaint is that I hear after a while they get repetitive. So far I’ve been doing enough different things that I haven’t found the same one twice, a hundred hours in.
Many of these sites contain their own storylines and characters, and links to other quests.
Maybe you and I just have different definitions of interesting. I actually got annoyed at one point during a survey mission because I kept going past something new and compelling that I wanted to explore, but I also really wanted to finish the mission I was on.
edit to add: I think it’s specifically interesting to compare this to NMS, which has the exact same problem but a far lower variety of locations to stumble on, none of which have any story or link to each other at all… yet I think we’re all okay with the exploration in NMS?
I’d also give it an 8 or so and I haven’t liked anything they’ve done since Morrowind. I think the internet hate-train has its fangs in this one now, and it’ll be a while before a lot of folks can give it an unbiased chance.
I can’t speak for everyone (including you) but I just can’t understand that feeling. It’s hugely open, it just uses tricks to capture that openness in a few places. It’s nice to, say, fly down to a planet seamlessly in NMS, but we all know it’s also kind of a pain in the butt sometimes, it can be annoying to land and it can take a long time and when you’ve done it a bunch it essentially turns into just another loading screen. Flying to or from a planet in SF is slightly less immersive but for me, it’s just a tiny detail that could have been a bit better but doesn’t materially impact the game.
And I’ve so far never reached the edge of an on-planet instance, the fields are huge and it seems to me you have to actively go hunting for the borders.
I’m not too surprised it isn’t ‘the’ game to play, myself, but I am surprised at the amount of backlash against it online. It seems to me to be everything it says it will be on the tin, warts and all
I mean… I think it’s a pretty good space game too, depending on what you want.
Yesterday I took my custom-built ship to explore an alien world. On my way in, I was hailed by a merchant and warned there were pirates in system. I thanked them, they jumped off, and being me, I decided to go planet hopping until I ran into the pirates. Destroyed two, saw that one had a cool looking ship so I switched to EMP weapons and took out their grav drive and engines. Once those were offline, I boarded them. The damage had taken out their gravity so the whole ship was in zero-g, with pens and junk floating around, obscuring my vision. The firefight against the crew was surprisingly tough, as they had mounted auto-turrets that were at a distinct advantage against me because I was being thrown around by the micrograv, but I did eventually capture the ship. Once I got the gravity on, though, all the stuff in the interior crashed down and was scattered everywhere. I searched around to see if I could find some contraband… but it was too messy, and I guess I missed some, because when I jumped into a more civilized sector the SysDef patrols caught me. Here I am, flying a stolen pirate ship, trying to explain to the cops that the drugs in my hold aren’t mine and I didn’t know they were there. Usually I’d bribe the guy to let me through but that didn’t work out well this time, and the next thing you know I find myself in the brig aboard the UC Vanguard under a bright lamp being interrogated by someone with far too much brass on his chest to be dealing with a reported drug runner. Looks like maybe I got myself in a bit over my head…
Anyway. If that’s not a space game, I don’t know what is. I can’t think of any other space games that would offer that particular mix of space combat and RPG experiences. And that wasn’t really an unusual play story! It’s just that this isn’t NMS, as I think that shows.
I hate typing this ugh… in bethesda’s defense they’ve already started releasing key patches and announced further changes based on feedback. Here in the NMS forum I’d say people should be more sympathetic to that than usual. I don’t have a lot of faith, because of who it is, but then… I knew what I was paying for, and I think most other people did too.
it seems like it’s a little bit more than April? Doesn’t mean it isn’t the biggest in a few years, but it’s not like it’s head and shoulders above. August and July look like they were fairly slow months so the gain in the 30 day average is kind of a skewed stat when the article’s talking about it being special int he span of years.
I don’t think you need to keep your expectations low, just keep them realistic. It’s a Bethesda game, it plays like their other games… it’s a whole ton of jank muddled up and duct taped until it holds together just enough for launch. This time they raised the bar to what counts as “holding together” to the level of the other major studios, but a lot of the gameplay systems still feel unfinished. In this I actually think it’s a lot like modern NMS, where things like outpost building feel like they’re actively contradictory to things like settlements; outposts in SF feel like someone did them early in the dev cycle and was then pulled off to work somewhere else and the only attention they got from then on was making sure they didn’t crash the game. Then you’ve also got the typical Bethesda game stuff that people are acting surprised Pikachu about. The character animations look weird sometimes, low poly NPCs especially, there are too many load screens in some places, performance is poor considering the level of graphics, etc.
However, as long as you know what you’re getting into, imo it’s a great game. The storyline is interesting enough to be fun, but also manages to skip that annoying thing where you’re off learning to be a space pirate for months while your family is being held hostage or something. Some of the side stories are excellent, and the game rewards you well for just taking your time doing stuff. I got caught with contraband yesterday… usually I hit the grav drive and escape rather than paying the fine, but I decided I didn’t care and suddenly found myself embroiled in a shockingly compelling crime drama scene instead of the usual simple dialogue options. There’s shit like that everywhere. There’s an entire cyberpunk mini city half-hidden beneath the main city that you can just not find for dozens of hours, and when you finally get taken there it’s really cool to realize it was under your feet the whole time. And these aren’t even significant spoilers, there’s more that I could tell you that would wreck the surprise for you.
Basically, go in expecting a game like morrowind/Skyrim/oblivion, where it’s all about a huge breadth of interestint content (and yeah a fair bit of mediocre content because there’s so much of it all) rather than any specific thing being the best in the genre, and you won’t have to keep your expectations low.
Yeah, recommending starfield can feel a bit like recommending a show that gets going halfway through the first season.
That is pretty much what my first hundred hours of starfield have been like as well, though, except Starfield has some story, and fewer of the systems seem to contradict each other.
Mostly I don’t think it’s fair to either game to compare them. They’re trying to do different things for different audiences on different budgets and different timescales.
I’m not sure how you can argue that. Starfield does have some of mass effect’s fun, but also I can build my own ship, dogfight a group of mercs in it, play house with the parts, disable and board a pirate ship in zero g… mass effect, in turn, has a much tighter story and gameplay loop. The core similarity is, what, that they have a space looter-shooter component?
They’re different games. Starfield is kind of a fusion of mass effect and no man’s sky, there are plenty of similarities between the three but also a lot of differences.
I’m loving starfield and I’ll agree with this. It’s a mid eighties score kind of game. If it’s what you want it’s amazing, but the people calling it game of the century and whatnot are buying their own hype.
On the other hand, it’s likely to have serious staying power as an all time classic game, Bethesda is great at that and there’s a ton of room for people to use it as an incredible mod canvas. I don’t think that should affect launch reviews though.
I think this is it. I enjoy making fun of the NPCs in starfield but mostly when I’m playing I don’t notice them at all. I do have a few very pretty screenshots of the game. It’s not perfect by any stretch but the scope is impressive and most of it really is pretty good
I don’t think Bethesda has ever sold based on graphics no matter how much they want to pretend it. Morrowind and oblivion both looked under par when they came out as well.
I’m not a fan of Bethesda’s reliance on mods to do basic shit, like fix a broken UI and inventory management system, by honestly I also think this argument is overused. People pay for these games because they want to mod the shit out of them, it’s like ninety percent of the appeal. Nobody is forcing modders to work on them, either. That argument can only stretch so far. For comparison, No Man’s Sky is actively hostile to modding, and as a result I probably won’t be going back to it despite loving it. They’re not going to add the kind of content I want, they’re likely never going to, and they’re not letting anyone else do it either. I wish they’d allow free volunteers to finish off some of their 75%-of-the-way-to-greatness features.
With starfield, I’m excited for the mods, and the game is far from flawless goodness knows, but I’ve had a friggin good time and definitely got my money’s worth on vanilla. Now I look forward to spicing it as I like.
The upper whites thing has led to some of the funniest memes I’ve seen in ages, not gonna complain about that one.
It’s perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.
I’d try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It’s a better release than Bethesda’s usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven’t done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.
I’m playing starfield way too much. Every now and then I get a break to continue my Minecraft project with the kids. The internet keeps telling me I’m not supposed to be having fun with starfield but it’s just not working, I’m really excited about the new capital ship I’m working on now.
A new engine would just have to have a new mod API. Plenty of engines have mod APIs. Nothing’s really stopping them, but they really love driving creation engine onward for some reason.