Starfield - Epic Shit Takes from Bethestards

[Gargaune]

the best lockpicking mechanic ever - the one in Thief: Deadly Shadows

How is it any different from than any of the other minigames? The minigames in bethesda games also involve the player.

I actually wouldn't call either of them "minigames", not Thief 3's and not Fallout 3's, I see them as action mechanics. Like iron sights or cover or water arrows. When you say minigames, I think of something more involved, like DX4's hacking, which would probably be a fun thing to play on your mobile waiting at the barber's, but I hate when it's distracting me from playing what I really wanna play - Deus Ex. Fo4's hacking is another example, where you have to actually stop playing the game and start doing word puzzles instead.

As to how the lockpicking in T3's different, I think the key is that it was an organic evolution from T1/2. You think back to the Dark Engine implementations, all the elements were already there - you were "fighting" against time to avoid being caught, and there was a very minor randomness factor in your selecting the correct pick the first time around and not knowing how many swaps you'd have to go through ahead of time. The rest was just sitting there waiting for the process to complete, like hacking in the original DX. With T3, you know how many stages you've got when you engage the lock, but the variability is shifted to the player's luck and speed in finding those sweet spots. It gives you something to do in the process, while not taking you out of the core gameplay experience at all, you're still looking out for the guards, might have to back away etc.

I assume you know it, but for everyone who isn't familiar, here's a video:



When it comes to Bethesda Game, the way the gameplay loops are set up, time to detection would very rarely be a factor, so it's taken completely out of the equation by pausing the game. The resource here are those breakable lockpicks, but they're such a common drop that it becomes a complete non-issue past the first hour of play. You can't really tighten the sweet spots any more than they already were in Fo4 because it'd just get too frustrating. Tightening the drop rate would work, but might make casuals complain too much that they need both the skills/perks and a rare resource.

It doesn't really bring much over a simple threshold system, but it's not too distracting either. It's less annoying than Oblivion's was, at least, and probably among the less offensive such implementations when you consider the "competition" - BioShock's plumbing, DX4's hacking, Fo4's hacking, even CBP's hacking...

Again, I can't say for Starfield, but at a glance it looks to me like it's a step back and would involve more of a distraction than the old Fo3 lockpicking.

 

[Child of Malkav]

As to how the lockpicking in T3's different, I think the key is that it was an organic evolution from T1/2. You think back to the Dark Engine implementations, all the elements were already there - you were "fighting" against time to avoid being caught, and there was a very minor randomness factor in your selecting the correct pick the first time around and not knowing how many swaps you'd have to go through ahead of time. The rest was just sitting there waiting for the process to complete, like hacking in the original DX. With T3, you know how many stages you've got when you engage the lock, but the variability is shifted to the player's luck and speed in finding those sweet spots. It gives you something to do in the process, while not taking you out of the core gameplay experience at all, you're still looking out for the guards, might have to back away etc.

Yeah I see what you're saying but I really prefer the classic system regardless.
Or they could add an option in the settings to toggle on or off the whole thing. Who enjoys this can keep it and who doesn't can skip it. Just like in Far Cry.

actually wouldn't call either of them "minigames", not Thief 3's and not Fallout 3's, I see them as action mechanics. Like iron sights or cover or water arrows. When you say minigames, I think of something more involved, like DX4's hacking, which would probably be a fun thing to play on your mobile waiting at the barber's

They're all the same to me.
I did like in Dx3 and 4 the hacking minigame, seems like they put a lot of effort into it and it was pretty good plus the software types you could use if you explored. Yeah, it was fun...for the 5 or 6 times you did it but considering how many times you have to do it it quickly got boring and then annoying.
At least you had multitools or disposable picks or whatever they were called. They're another good alternative to the settings option I suggested above.

 

[Spukrian]

With T3, you know how many stages you've got when you engage the lock, but the variability is shifted to the player's luck and speed in finding those sweet spots. It gives you something to do in the process, while not taking you out of the core gameplay experience at all, you're still looking out for the guards, might have to back away etc.

There are actually limited set of patterns for sweet spots, memorizing them makes lockpicking maybe a bit too fast...

 

[Bad Sector]

Or they could add an option in the settings to toggle on or off the whole thing. Who enjoys this can keep it and who doesn't can skip it. Just like in Far Cry.

IMO this is bad design. If a mechanic is such an option that it can be toggled off without affecting the rest of the game then it has no purpose in the first place.

 

[Child of Malkav]

IMO this is bad design. If a mechanic is such an option that it can be toggled off without affecting the rest of the game then it has no purpose in the first place.

Well yeah but if we can't decide one way or another....you gotta pick one or add it as an option. There are people who like the mini games and people who are tired of them. Again, FC did that and it worked although those were animations not mechanics.

 

[Bad Sector]

Well yeah but if we can't decide one way or another....you gotta pick one or add it as an option.

If you can't decide one way or another then IMO there is something wrong with the design, as i wrote, gameplay elements should have a purpose. For example in the case of lockpicking if the purpose of the mechanic is to deplete your resources, check the player character's skills, introduce some form of time delay that lock the player in place and vulnerable, check the player's own skills or similar things, these are all things that can affect the rest of the game and its design and not things you can just toggle off - otherwise they'd be pointless and shouldn't exist in the first place.

So, to continue that example, if the purpose is to deplete your resources, disabling it would affect the resource economy of the rest of the game. If it doesn't then the mechanic failed at its purpose and/or the economy is inherently broken (which would also make the mechanic pointless).

If the purpose is to check the player character's skills, disabling it would cause those skills/stats/etc irrelevant (or less relevant) and in turn affect the entire character build. Again, if it doesn't then it failed its purpose and made having those skills/stats/etc pointless in the first place.

If the purpose is to introduce some form of time delay to lock the player in place and leave them vulnerable to enemies/hazards/alarms/whatever, disabling it would affect the entire flow of the level/area, any potential encounters that may be set up and the game's difficulty. Like before, if disabling the mechanic doesn't cause this to happen then the mechanic has no real purpose aside from wasting the player's time.

If the purpose is to check the player's own skill, disabling it would again affect the flow of level/area and the game's difficulty - it'd be like disabling enemy encounters or other roadblocks in the game. If that isn't the case and the game isn't affected, having that mechanic in place would be superfluous.

In all of these cases disabling the mechanic would either affect the rest of the game negatively or reveal a flaw either in the game's design or the pointlessness of having the mechanic in the game.

There are people who like the mini games and people who are tired of them. Again, FC did that and it worked although those were animations not mechanics.

TBH i don't remember which part of Far Cry you refer to as it has been some time since i played any FC game, but if these were just animations that didn't affect the gameplay then that at least wasn't what i had in mind.

 

[Beastro]

the best lockpicking mechanic ever - the one in Thief: Deadly Shadows

How is it any different from than any of the other minigames? The minigames in bethesda games also involve the player.

I actually wouldn't call either of them "minigames", not Thief 3's and not Fallout 3's, I see them as action mechanics. Like iron sights or cover or water arrows. When you say minigames, I think of something more involved, like DX4's hacking, which would probably be a fun thing to play on your mobile waiting at the barber's, but I hate when it's distracting me from playing what I really wanna play - Deus Ex. Fo4's hacking is another example, where you have to actually stop playing the game and start doing word puzzles instead.

As to how the lockpicking in T3's different, I think the key is that it was an organic evolution from T1/2. You think back to the Dark Engine implementations, all the elements were already there - you were "fighting" against time to avoid being caught, and there was a very minor randomness factor in your selecting the correct pick the first time around and not knowing how many swaps you'd have to go through ahead of time. The rest was just sitting there waiting for the process to complete, like hacking in the original DX. With T3, you know how many stages you've got when you engage the lock, but the variability is shifted to the player's luck and speed in finding those sweet spots. It gives you something to do in the process, while not taking you out of the core gameplay experience at all, you're still looking out for the guards, might have to back away etc.

Nothing to do is precisely why Thief1/2s lockpicking is better. Instead of an annoying task to focus on that becomes simple once you're used to it, you're left with nothing to do but watch the handle shaking as you keep an eye out for guards.

The result is more tension with no way of venting it or finding a distraction from it.

 

[Child of Malkav]

If you can't decide one way or another then IMO there is something wrong with the design, as i wrote, gameplay elements should have a purpose. For example in the case of lockpicking if the purpose of the mechanic is to deplete your resources, check the player character's skills, introduce some form of time delay that lock the player in place and vulnerable, check the player's own skills or similar things, these are all things that can affect the rest of the game and its design and not things you can just toggle off - otherwise they'd be pointless and shouldn't exist in the first place.

So, to continue that example, if the purpose is to deplete your resources, disabling it would affect the resource economy of the rest of the game. If it doesn't then the mechanic failed at its purpose and/or the economy is inherently broken (which would also make the mechanic pointless).

If the purpose is to check the player character's skills, disabling it would cause those skills/stats/etc irrelevant (or less relevant) and in turn affect the entire character build. Again, if it doesn't then it failed its purpose and made having those skills/stats/etc pointless in the first place.

If the purpose is to introduce some form of time delay to lock the player in place and leave them vulnerable to enemies/hazards/alarms/whatever, disabling it would affect the entire flow of the level/area, any potential encounters that may be set up and the game's difficulty. Like before, if disabling the mechanic doesn't cause this to happen then the mechanic has no real purpose aside from wasting the player's time.

If the purpose is to check the player's own skill, disabling it would again affect the flow of level/area and the game's difficulty - it'd be like disabling enemy encounters or other roadblocks in the game. If that isn't the case and the game isn't affected, having that mechanic in place would be superfluous.

In all of these cases disabling the mechanic would either affect the rest of the game negatively or reveal a flaw either in the game's design or the pointlessness of having the mechanic in the game.

Good answer. Keeping this rationale, what would toggling on or off the hacking minigame in DXHR/DXMD accomplish? Under what category would it fall? Resource depletion? Player vulnerability? Testing player skills?
What's its purpose?
At what point, when the player is able to complete the challenge easily, does it become a chore and a waste of player's time?
A problem with the above example in DXHR and DXMD hacking is that if you don't hack you won't get any extra resources from it. And since there are so many hacking terminals you would be at a disadvantage by not engaging and extracting the resources after a successful hack. This is an issue as it makes interacting with the mechanic, excessive.

 

[Konjad]

Fluent

 

[Cyberarmy]

Even my Bethestard shill of a friend admited that Starfield is a boring ass game that'll be forgetten in a year or two. Some people just shill in the name of shilling.

 

[I eat frozen vegetables]

The amount of cope in this thread could power Kiwi Farms for the next few decades. That Steam post alone added at least three decades.

 

[Gargaune]

Nothing to do is precisely why Thief1/2s lockpicking is better. Instead of an annoying task to focus on that becomes simple once you're used to it, you're left with nothing to do but watch the handle shaking as you keep an eye out for guards.

The result is more tension with no way of venting it or finding a distraction from it.

I haven't played T3 in many years, but I don't remember its lockpicking "venting" tension, quite the contrary, I felt like I was more pressed as I had to split my attention between the handling the picks and keeping an eye out for guard patrols. I also wouldn't say that it becoming simpler as you gain familiarity is necessarily a detriment, since it's merely a matter of player skill progression. You could argue that perhaps it gets too simple and the mechanic needed more variability, but that's not a point against it in comparison to T1/2 because that system involved no skill progression, you just had to look out for patrols while the correct pick worked on autopilot.

What I don't recall about T3's lockpicking is whether you could do it bit by bit. In T1/2, you can pick a lock halfway, scurry back to the shadows if you spot heat around the corner, then go back and pick up where you left out, I don't remember if the same goes for T3 or you gotta start over from scratch.

Lest anyone gets defensive, I'm not calling T1/2's lockpicking "bad", it's definitely one of the best approaches taken in context of its gameplay, I just think T3's got even better.

 

[Bad Sector]

Good answer. Keeping this rationale, what would toggling on or off the hacking minigame in DXHR/DXMD accomplish? Under what category would it fall? Resource depletion? Player vulnerability? Testing player skills?
What's its purpose?
At what point, when the player is able to complete the challenge easily, does it become a chore and a waste of player's time?
A problem with the above example in DXHR and DXMD hacking is that if you don't hack you won't get any extra resources from it. And since there are so many hacking terminals you would be at a disadvantage by not engaging and extracting the resources after a successful hack. This is an issue as it makes interacting with the mechanic, excessive.

Note that what i wrote is how the design should be made, not to explain/excuse existing designs - after all it might just be a subpar design choice, just a different type of choice (i.e. both having a minigame and having the ability to toggle of a mechanic can be bad design ideas, but each for different reasons).

I don't know what exactly the design goals of the DXHR/DXMD hacking minigame were, so i can only guess based on the minigame's effects in my playthroughs.

So, AFAICT (mainly from DXHR, i haven't played DXMD as much), the purpose of the hacking game is to provide alternative means for the player to accomplish their goals (essentially an elaborate lock) and its "software" can be used as both a means for resource depletion (money to buy things) and reward (finding software in the game world or gaining it as bonuses) with some minor strategic elements in how/when to use the software. As it is running in realtime with the rest of the game it also leaves the player vulnerable while "hacking". It is also used in a couple of places mainly for thematic reasons but those are so easy to bypass that might as well have been animations if the minigame didn't exist.

Now, personally i liked the minigame itself in isolation - i think it is one of the best minigames i've seen in games and could easily be some little casual game you'd play in a desktop window ala solitaire or in a mobile phone.

In the scope of DXHR, if you disable the minigame you will miss alternative solutions to the player's goals, the game's economy will be affected as a very common type of resource (software) will both become useless and unnecessary (so you wont have reason to buy it, leaving you with more money to spend elsewhere) and you will lose those moments of vulnerability (making the game slightly easier and losing chances for unexpected encounters).

Now here it the thing: all of the above goals could be accomplished in a different manner, largely by changing how hacking is done. The original Deus Ex is a good starting point where hacking both gives alternative solutions and leaves the player vulnerable (though i'd use a more diegetic presentation as i was never a fan of the black screen with the little progressbar at the top right). The main remaining aspect would be the resource economy, which could be handled by the game "reading out" potential issues with the device (e.g. has passwords which are hard to break), perhaps based on some character skill too and the player specifying which software to run based on them (e.g. password breaker) *before* the hacking begins and then it is left at that or cancelled, just like the original Deus Ex. This would require a different design by itself (it isn't a drop-in replacement, which shows that at least the hacking minigame wasn't thrown in thoughtlessly) so this is something i just came up with.

So yeah, i don't think the minigame was really necessary in DXHR/DXMD and TBH i am not a fan of minigames in general, so perhaps not the best person to try and defend them :-P. Note that when i argued that an option is bad design wasn't because i wanted to keep the minigame in, but because if you are at a position where you can make game design suggestions, suggesting an option isn't any better than keeping or leaving the minigame: the better suggestion would be to reexamine why the minigame exists in the first place, if it is really necessary and only after that making a decision. Making a game design element optional is basically a bad design decision to bandaid another bad design decision - one that should have been avoided in the first place.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Gargaune I think that a possible evolution of the T1/2 lock picking mechanic, one that's more involved is not the one in T3 but the one in The Dark Mod. You hold right click until you hear a mechanical sound inside the lock and that's when you release the right click, you switch to the other lockpick and repeat the process. This makes you focused and paying attention to the sound (a big mechanic in Thief and one that the games are known for as well as being thematically appropriate) and environment even more so.

 

[Gargaune]

Gargaune I think that a possible evolution of the T1/2 lock picking mechanic, one that's more involved is not the one in T3 but the one in The Dark Mod. You hold right click until you hear a mechanical sound inside the lock and that's when you release the right click, you switch to the other lockpick and repeat the process. This makes you focused and paying attention to the sound (a big mechanic in Thief and one that the games are known for as well as being thematically appropriate) and environment even more so.

That does sound interesting, engaging some player skill in the process like T3 does, but in a way that's possibly closer to the original Thief approach. TDM's been on my #TODO list for a long while, it seems like a milestone success for the fan scene, but I just haven't got around to it.

 

[Fedora Master]

Why are you still talking about this.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Why are you still talking about this.

When you aren't buggering bears and hitting on gay elves, I suggest immersing yourself in the open world of a Bethesda game. Make sure to bring some lock picks! Might I suggest Fallout 4? It's the one in the bottom right, and my personal favourite.

 

[Ryzer]

I hate these useless time-spending minigames. I hate them so much, I see this shit in every games now like Dying Light.

 

[ind33d]

I hate these useless time-spending minigames. I hate them so much, I see this shit in every games now like Dying Light.

I like the Beth minigames, but they break the balance because if the player is good enough at speechcraft or lockpicking, you never have to upgrade your character's stats. It's like if D&D let you resolve combat by punching the DM in the mouth

 

[Silverfish]

When you aren't buggering bears and hitting on gay elves, I suggest immersing yourself in the open world of a Bethesda game.

FM immediately maxes Preston's affinity in hopes of triggering the romance.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

It's like if D&D let you resolve combat by punching the DM in the mouth

I'm pretty sure that would work. Have you ever tried it?

 

[Latelistener]

I sailed the high seas to test my new hardware with this and I seem to be missing the grand idea here.

If their engine was not suited for this type of a game, why the project was even greenlit? Wasn't it easier to just make another fantasy game? Or Todd thought people would ignore the existence of other space games?

To be honest, I'm not even sure anymore that their engine is the cause. It could be impotent game designers.

+ I noticed that the game looks extremely good in 1080p aliasing-wise. I don't even know how they did it, but feels like I'm playing at a higher resolution. Compare that to Elite, which looks like a piece of shit even at 4k.
+ The quality of models, textures and materials is out of this world. I don't believe I've seen something like that before. Armor / weapons / objects are extremely crips and detailed.
+ Some faint feeling of that "Bethesda magic".

- The first thing I noticed is that there is so much clutter with so many non-interactable objects. It's hard to see any useful items in all this junk.
- If the last game you've played was Skyrim 12 years ago, New Atlantis may even look good, but holy shit. After Rockstar games, Ubi games or Cyberpunk, their "main" city it looks like a joke.

- Took a quest (Groundpounder). Wanted to take some clothes from an NPC, but quest NPCs couldn't be killed. They didn't even react to my attempt of killing them.
The same quest asked me to kill Spacers, then more Spacers, then even more Spacers. And then there were 2 dropships with additional Spacers.
I jumped on their ship and it closed the doors, but when it flew high enough it just threw on me out of the cargo hold through the textures, back on the planet.
I threw a grenade in the cargo hold of the second ship. The ship closes and flies away without letting me loot the body of a commander.

- I don't even want to discuss space combat or UI or anything else, in fact.

This is from the same studio / publisher that killed Arkane. The budget of Starfield could've been enough for Dishonored 3 and Prey 2. And those would actually be good games. That's the real tragedy here.

 

[Caim]

This is from the same studio / publisher that killed Arkane. The budget of Starfield could've been enough for Dishonored 3 and Prey 2. And those would actually be good games. That's the real tragedy here.

The real tragedy is that if either of those games were actually made they'd be just as shit as Starfield.

 

[Child of Malkav]

The real tragedy is that if either of those games were actually made they'd be just as shit as Starfield.

Yeah but he probably meant IF the people who made those games were still at Arkane.

 

[Latelistener]

This is from the same studio / publisher that killed Arkane. The budget of Starfield could've been enough for Dishonored 3 and Prey 2. And those would actually be good games. That's the real tragedy here.

The real tragedy is that if either of those games were actually made they'd be just as shit as Starfield.

From the current Arkane? Most likely. But people who made Prey left exactly because those games were canned.