It actually looks like a pretty good game after skimming this video. I hope the combat will be more dangerous and punchy though and that the quest/dialogue aspect of the game which wasn't the focus the vid will be good.
Planned to release for September 6th, I think I'll pirate it on day one, or whenever empress does her magic if it's under Denuvo.
Well I would need a better PC, whenever I thought about upgrading my decade old machine to play releasing AAA titles such as Cyberpunk or Callisto Protocol I ended up not doing it because those games were shit, most of the big games recently were shit actually, hope Starfield breaks the trend.
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.
>>28641I 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.
>>28658The 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
>>30201no 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?
>>30204I 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.
>>30206>Skyrim was designed with player satisfactionIt 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.
>>30205I 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.
>>30235>waits to hear what he's gonna complain about>[feraljaks irl]: PRONOUNS!!!1!!>pauses videoDid 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.
>>30248>>30249Every company is trash. Drop this idea of "ethical companies".
>>30287I 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.
>>30318Like
>>30311 says, there are, but they've never been a big faction. They aren't even in FO3.
>>30319I don't think they
>>30307 meant the Followers since those guys aren't battling anybody or genocidal.
>>30374It'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."
>>30387None 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.
>>30402>>30403In 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.
>>28641Outposts 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.
>>30441Also 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.
>>30528The 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.
>>30565>How do they keep getting away with pushing out these trash gamesI 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
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.
>>30575FO4'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.
>>30583day/night cycles aren't graphics, that's an entire gameplay feature missing.
>>30584you'd be wrong, the game has lot of enviromental assets but the problem is it ain't enough for a thousand planets.
>>30617>armoured core 6>elden ring style boss fightsNo, 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.
>>30636There 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.
>>31694I 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.
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#mI 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.
>>32740Factions>United ColoniesStarship Troopers played straight
>Freestar CollectiveSpace Texans, complete with cowboy larpers and rule by CEO oligarchs
>Crimson FleetPirates
>Ryujin IndustriesEvil megacorp
>SpacersPirates (not Crimson Fleet)
>House Va'ruunForeign-sounding cultist bad guys
Quests>OverallIn 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 questI 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 questsThere 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 questsSome 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 questsOnly 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 ThoughtsOne 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.
>>32745I'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.
>>33480Yeah, 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.
>>33480haha 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
>>33504Honestly, 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.
>>33507 (me)
The final solution is therefore
communism the collapse of the console market.
>>35089ehhhh starfield was dead on arrival.
>Generic visuals and art direction>Generic setting and characters>Generic gameplay and mechanicsIt’s just boring.
>>35089 (me)
Creation Kit just dropped today. They also finally added melee weapon tiers and mods and ammo crafting. They're slowly ticking off things that I seriously disliked when I played through it but there's still a ways to go before I could recommend people try it, at least there's mods now to fill in the gaps. They showcased the new DLC in a different video too.
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