Starfield Thread - Shattered Space expansion coming September 30th

[Nifft Batuff]

nobody really wants a return to the exact same design philosophies that were popular in those days

I want.

 

[Lemming42]

I want.

Then have I got the game for you!

 

[Harthwain]

some good advice is to watch what everybody else is doing and do the opposite, the masses are retarded

I don't know about that. I like breathing.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I'm playing a game called Planet's Edge from 1992 right now and, along with games like Starflight and Star Control and (sort of) Space 1889, you really can see that the designers of Starfield played these games and took inspiration from them. Flying around a vast galaxy on your own terms, landing on any planet and switching to a different gameplay mode to explore, gathering resources and looking around mostly-empty terrain, adjusting the specifics of your ship and choosing a crew and trading.

If you don't mind the old DOS EGA graphics, there's also SSI's Star Command.



Damn, I miss SSI.

 

[Basshead]

Got reminded of this song and now it's back on repeat.

Imagine dragons is soulless corporate slop, way more so than Bethesda. Fitting music for this shit game.

 

[Vic]

Anybody working on a mod to make the loot more Diablo-like and not just "does more damage"? Items that are specific for certain builds and change how you play your character? Vanilla loot is total garbage for a game with looter shooter combat and "infinite" replay ability baked in.

 

[ind33d]

In case any modders want to make Starfield good, look at the way enemy models die in Destiny and Left 4 Dead. I could shoot a Vex in the belly for 5000 hours and not get bored.



SF doesn't necessarily need gore, but it does need each enemy faction to have a unique crit spot and death animations. Even Bethesda Fallout correctly had energy weapons turn people to ash. One thing that should come up in Starfield but doesn't is ground-to-air battles, like if the player were on foot and shooting at Vertibirds or helicopters. The player gains supernatural powers, but the enemies stay impotent throughout the whole game. You never get the sense that you're overwhelmed like you do in Hell Diablo. By the time you're level 60, you should be fighting Metal Gears, not sniping fish for experience points.

In terms of Diablo loot, there is so much potential for builds that interact with other game systems: +100% damage if you've fully scanned the planet you're on, guns that reload instantly while you're on Amp, weapon mods with random rolls. Maybe Starfield just needs a Horadric Cube and runewords. Runes would really help the endgame.

 

[KeAShizuku]

apparently mission boards are unique to the system you're in, so if you build a settlement in deep space you can farm credits since boards will send you to nearby planets.

cruising high-level space in your custom Star Destroyer is fun, it's just obvious there was supposed to be an in-game radio. did beth make StarfieldRadio.com and it's just not in the game for censorship or legal reasons? SF is so generic they could have licensed literally any soundtrack and bumped up the game's ratings by a full point. shit they could have L. Ron Hubbard reading bedtime stories and it would still be preferable to awkward silence

MUH REALISM probably.

Mass Effect had an iconic soundtrack. Nobody likes silence.

 

[Lemming42]

I can't imagine what songs would be on the radio. If that Imagine Dragons stuff is what was planned then it's a mercy it was scrapped.

They did have the opportunity to do potentially the funniest thing in history by having the radio just play Easy Living by Billie Holiday and all the other shit they've been recycling since Fo3. Android Three Dog, why not. Pete Hines at his bullshitting peak would have been able to spin it as some shit about retrofuturism and hauntology.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

They should have put the possibility to listen to Billie Holiday from radio waves by jumping in hyperdrive in the systems about 400 light years far away from Earth.

 

[Bulo]

IMAGINE DRAGONS LMAO

 

[Silverfish]

I can't imagine what songs would be on the radio.

The tavern songs from Skyrim, but with autotune effects overlaid.

 

[TheKing01]

This inherently flawed design won't affect ESVI even marginally

 

[ind33d]

After 6 days played, I just saw one (1) poster for Hephaestus Mining. Was there supposed to be a major theme of pagan art and statues and someone told them to pull it, which is why the game is so bland? The central conflict should have been between House Varuun worshiping the celestial serpent versus pagans worshiping Starborn. How did we even get what shipped?

 

[Joryyyy]

The problem with starfield is that the "Skyrim in space" goal they were aiming for is completely antithetical with the way the game is structured with the planets exploration and tiles. There is also the fact that Bethesda lost more and more competent talent and such they aren't even able to replicate the Skyrim, much less Morrowind or FO3 when they were in their peak

After 6 days played, I just saw one (1) poster for Hephaestus Mining. Was there supposed to be a major theme of pagan art and statues and someone told them to pull it, which is why the game is so bland? The central conflict should have been between House Varuun worshiping the celestial serpent versus pagans worshiping Starborn. How did we even get what shipped?

That would have been a far better and cool concept than what we got but modern Bethesda is incapable of creativity

 

[ind33d]

The problem with starfield is that the "Skyrim in space" goal they were aiming for is completely antithetical with the way the game is structured with the planets exploration and tiles. There is also the fact that Bethesda lost more and more competent talent and such they aren't even able to replicate the Skyrim, much less Morrowind or FO3 when they were in their peak

After 6 days played, I just saw one (1) poster for Hephaestus Mining. Was there supposed to be a major theme of pagan art and statues and someone told them to pull it, which is why the game is so bland? The central conflict should have been between House Varuun worshiping the celestial serpent versus pagans worshiping Starborn. How did we even get what shipped?

That would have been a far better and cool concept than what we got but modern Bethesda is incapable of creativity

It's very obvious that the power temples named after Greek letters were supposed to be full dungeons (probably irradiated for extra challenge so you would have to bring medicine and a space suit) and the Starborn you fight at the end would be a pagan deity like in God of War. I assume after killing them, you would absorb their powers like Mega Man, ex. killing Not Hermes would give you Whirlwind Sprint. The original story would have probably been something like working for House Varuun only to discover that you have Starborn blood, so your own friends betray you. That's way more interesting than the retarded bullshit this game turned into. Actually, the beginning mining sequence is a complete waste of time unless it was originally intended to introduce the pagan-Varuun conflict. Maybe you WERE supposed to be an employee of Hephaestus Mining.

 

[Vic]

The problem with starfield is that the "Skyrim in space" goal they were aiming for is completely antithetical with the way the game is structured

For me it was Daggerfall x Fallout 4 x Factorio in space. At least that's what I thought at first. As I played I realized the dungeons aren't procedurally generated and instead there's a set of different dungeons that keep repeating. Even the chest is in the same location each time. It's useful for farming legendaries quickly because you can go straight to the boss and chest, but it's not really fun.

It was similar to Fallout 4 to me because that's how the game played. But it had less build variety. There is no Fat Man or other interesting weapons. And it reminded me of Factorio because of the production chain building and acquiring of resources. I guess you could also throw in the idea from space 4x games where you establish outposts on different planets to mine for various resources to add to your "empire". In this case there was no empire, and the whole production chain was kind of pointless, to me at least.

All in all, we have several systems and ideas at play here but individually none of them are as good as the respective games they came from. On the other hand, there's no other game that combines all of these elements into one, at least not to my knowledge. So Starfield is in this sense unique and a "pioneer" but it's so unfinished that it plays almost like a tech demo.

Was this intentional and they decided to let modders finish the game for them but this time pushing for paid mods? Keep in mind that the majority of a mod's sale price goes in Bethesda's pocket. It's an interesting idea from a business perspective. Sell an unfinished game that requires hundreds of mods to add meaningful gameplay depth, save money on development costs and even profit from the work modders do for you.

We know games with hundreds of dollars worth of DLCs can be successful. Paradox games, The Sims and Anno 1800 all have tons of DLCs which, if you don't buy at least some of the big ones, you won't be playing the full game. Train Simulator Classic 2024 has 749 DLCs on steam. Rocksmith over 1000. Now if Bethesda looked to this kind of development model and decided to merge it with their modding culture, that might be a pretty smart move for them.

 

[Lemming42]

It's got to be either incompetence or Microsoft meddling rather than a deliberate choice; they must have known from playtester reports and such that the game was in a middling state on release day.

It still feels to me like a lot of stuff changed abruptly behind the scenes possibly toward the end of development - Emil's "NASApunk" crap going totally out the window at some point and yet half the assets for it still existing, the procgen planets which they clearly came up with early on and then just couldn't be bothered actually implementing in any decent sort of way, the massively disparate nature of the cities which suggests they probably just slapped some generic shit together after scrapping all their original plans, the destruction of Earth which is prominently mentioned near the start but then never really comes up again, etc. I'd bet money that the reason the game feels a bit empty and scant is because tons of time was wasted on making stuff which ended up scrapped when some bullshit directive from higher-ups demanded that the entire game be suddenly altered.

Either way it'll be the ultimate test of Todd's bullshit plan for a "decade long game" or w/e crap he was talking about in that YouTube interview. Starfield could be turned around with a lot of work and a very frequent stream of good content but I wonder if a) they'll be able to do that (the answer to this is "no") and b) whether people will return to the game in any significant numbers even if a slew of great new stuff does come out.

 

[Vic]

whether people will return to the game in any significant numbers even if a slew of great new stuff does come out.

If it does come out it will be on the Creation Club in the form of a paid mod. We have already seen that they are not seriously adding new content with normal patches. And we have also seen that they are, in fact, adding new content in the form of paid mods. Todd's 10 year plan for Starfield probably revolves around making hundreds of bite-sized pieces of content and putting them up on the Creation Club for sale.

 

[Lemming42]

That would explain the Gamepass release I guess - try to get people hooked on the game so they're prepared to fork out for shitty bite-sized DLC, Oblivion horse armour style. Only snag to the masterplan is that virtually nobody's hooked on the game.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

whether people will return to the game in any significant numbers even if a slew of great new stuff does come out.

If it does come out it will be on the Creation Club in the form of a paid mod. We have already seen that they are not seriously adding new content with normal patches. And we have also seen that they are, in fact, adding new content in the form of paid mods. Todd's 10 year plan for Starfield probably revolves around making hundreds of bite-sized pieces of content and putting them up on the Creation Club for sale.

Which is a bad idea since the overwhelming majority of mods will still be free ones on sites like Nexus and those mods won't be designed with compatibility in mind for CC stuff since there are too many permutations for the latter (especially once we get to the point of having Wabbajack style mod lists, at which point those will probably disable paid CC content by default).

 

[Vic]

See that planet? There's a paid mod for it.

 

[Lemming42]

Ship Parts Pack #3 - £4.99
Sarah Exoskeleton Tesla Armour Mod - £4.99
Bounty Hunter Quest #42 - £4.99
Weapon Mod Pack May 2025 Edition - £9.99
Hours of gaming bliss - Priceless

 

[Heroic Liberator]

See that planet? There's a paid mod for it.

Well yeah, but that'll be what expansions do. It's not viable to do smaller paid content regular releases since it doesn't mesh well with modding. If people are forced to choose between some extra Bethesda (& co. with CC mods) content and the broader free modding scene, they'll overwhelmingly choose the latter.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Ship Parts Pack #3 - £4.99
Sarah Exoskeleton Tesla Armour Mod - £4.99
Bounty Hunter Quest #42 - £4.99
Weapon Mod Pack May 2025 Edition - £9.99

Those wouldn't improve the gameplay tho, that's just more content padding (which, again, you can get for free through mods outside of the CC nonsense).