Starfield Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[mediocrepoet]

You can walk across planets a hectare at a time, but you can't actually arrive anywhere. Sounds like the Bethesda-iest title of all time.

 

[FugueLah]

I had low expectations for this game and somehow I am still disappointed.

 

[sosmoflux]

Consoles ruin yet another great game idea
They didn't learn from Deus Ex Invisible War...

 

[Silverfish]

Consoles ruin yet another great game idea

Todd Howard would be the Michelangelo of the medium if weren't for that darn XBox.

 

[Utgard-Loki]

Spoiler

motion blur: medium.

 

[sosmoflux]

Why didn't they just hexagon grid planets into connected instances? Why does your landing position create a new instance at that location, entirely disregarding any connectedness?

Do you actually gain anything with thier weird middle ground? You can't even fly directly into planets to land so what's the point of this half arsed approach???

Just break planets down into connected hexes that act like loading gates between each other. Allow players to land anywhere in them and load that instance and place them approx where they landed. Done???

 

[FugueLah]

Why didn't they just hexagon grid planets into connected instances? Why does your landing position create a new instance at that location, entirely disregarding any connectedness?

Do you actually gain anything with thier weird middle ground? You can't even fly directly into planets to land so what's the point of this half arsed approach???

Just break planets down into connected hexes that act like loading gates between each other. Allow players to land anywhere in them and load that instance and place them approx where they landed. Done???

Because randomly generating an isolated square and only saving up to four squares is easier.

 

[Shaki]

So basically majority of the game you will be exploring randomly generated areas, filled with Radiant Quests 2.0? Seems super fun

 

[Spectacle]

I want to be able to loot all enemy spacesuits.
And I want there to be an animation that takes a realistic amount of time to strip a spacesuit off a dead body.
While I'm also wearing a spacesuit including the big oven mitt gloves.
In zero gee.
I figure that would take at least 20 minutes, with maximum Spacesuit Tech skill.
And I want to have to carry it realistically too, i.e. I can't carry anything else until I stow it in a storage locker.
Because realism > gameplay.

You misunderstand, it's not "realism" that I'm apprehensive about, but 16-karat Sawyer-certified Balance™. Up till now, (humanoid) enemies in Bethesda game used the same gear as the player, there was a partially level playing field in that respect and gear power levels were well stratified - e.g. an unmodded 10mm pistol in Fo4 does 18 damage and that's that, the rest is skill points. Contrast this to CBP2077 where there's no connection between what NPCs are using and what they drop, and the same model shotgun does twenty times more damage if it spawns at level 30 versus level 10. And I do believe someone mentioned coloured weapon tiers for Starfield at some point, so I've got my reserves about all that.

And on a more minor point, yeah, it was cool that you could loot NPCs down to their tooth fillings. There ain't a lot of games that let you do that.

It's definitely a lot more satisfying to loot a mook when you find all their gear on the body instead of a single box of ammo and 38 credits. Seems like Bethesda are giving up on more and more of the things that made their games unique. At this rate TES6 will be an Assassins Creed clone.

 

[Ulysa]

Consoles ruin yet another great game idea
They didn't learn from Deus Ex Invisible War...

They did learn about the Invisible Wall.
I'll see myself out.

 

[Fedora Master]

Again, how oblivious do you have to be to expect anything but the easiest most cookie-cutter solution from Bethesda?

 

[Ulysa]

To be fair if you see about 0:26 the landing area where he is, is really far from the city, if you have any idea of what that distance is from orbit, it must be like at least 100km away. No way you are going to see the city from there in reality.

 

[thesecret1]

If you look far enough, you just see an empty landscape? Damn, couldn't they have faked something nice there? Especially if they have invisible walls anyway

 

[Talby]

It's looking like it won't have any actual exploration like previous Bethesda games. You'll have points of interest like cities which will be small, and you'll have random square areas of planets with nothing to do or find in them. You won't be able to just wander about getting into adventures like you do in Skyrim.

 

[Caim]

It's looking like it won't have any actual exploration like previous Bethesda games. You'll have points of interest like cities which will be small, and you'll have random square areas of planets with nothing to do or find in them. You won't be able to just wander about getting into adventures like you do in Skyrim.

it just works

 

[Konjad]

It's looking like it won't have any actual exploration like previous Bethesda games. You'll have points of interest like cities which will be small, and you'll have random square areas of planets with nothing to do or find in them. You won't be able to just wander about getting into adventures like you do in Skyrim.

Literally the only thing that could make their games playable (with mods) and they fuck even this up

 

[Tihskael]

Sure bitching and moaning is the bread and butter of this god forsaken website, but atleast play it yourself or read/watch some reviews before you get down to business?

 

[Child of Malkav]

So I don't understand this: is this the most moddable engine in the world or something? How can they use gamebryo from 20+ years ago and not change it for another engine? There must be one that is at least as moddable as this one right?

 

[racofer]

It's not the engine, it's Bethesda.



Lots of games used Gamebryo without any of the issues you only see in Bethesda games.

 

[VerSacrum]

Sure bitching and moaning is the bread and butter of this god forsaken website, but atleast play it yourself or read/watch some reviews before you get down to business?

 

[Immortal]

It's looking like it won't have any actual exploration like previous Bethesda games. You'll have points of interest like cities which will be small, and you'll have random square areas of planets with nothing to do or find in them. You won't be able to just wander about getting into adventures like you do in Skyrim.

Literally the only thing that could make their games playable (with mods) and they fuck even this up

Actually this could make modding easier and far less conflicting.
The ability to load in entire cities / compounds / prefabs dynamically through the engine would remove the whole "Oh no, both mods touched this Cell now your fucked" problems.

I will need to see how they implemented this first . I'm a little worried because I know the engine can't procedurally generate terrain, they use another tool to do that - it all comes down to.. are your "landing zones" premade cells or does the engine allow you to dynamically splat cells / content on a pre-existing terrain space through papyrus or an engine hook that can be exposed later with script extender?


---

EDIT: The same logic applies for spaceships too.. If a downloaded mod can just seed a new spaceship into your game that you can run across which is a giant city or space station, you again reduce the chance for "two mods touch the same row" conflicts.. This makes modding easier for everyone.

 

[darkpatriot]

I think their new way of doing things with this game is a step forward for Bethesda, even if they can't pull off seemlesss transitions for whatever technical reason they give.

The previous Bethesda games, starting from Oblivion, always had way too much content density in their open worlds. They had to scale everything strangely because they had to fit it onto one world map.

And I think this way is especially fitting given that it is a space game and we are expecting a lot of either unsettled or sparsely settled planets. Whether it is interesting or not and worth exploring the worlds outside of the story hubs and plot points of interest will depend on what kind of systems they have in place to create content worth interacting with in the open world.

It will obviously need new methods and systems Bethesda has never used before, but I am willing to give them a chance to show what they can come up with before writing it off as bad. And if they are bad, I guess I will stick to the hub areas and points of interests for quests.


One thing I do expect is that resource gathering/base building (similar to No Man's Sky) will be an important system for why you would interact with the massive explorable areas. Finding a good place to set up a resource extraction operation and then building it.

 

[darkpatriot]

So I don't understand this: is this the most moddable engine in the world or something? How can they use gamebryo from 20+ years ago and not change it for another engine? There must be one that is at least as moddable as this one right?

They have changed most of it. What they are using now probably has very little code left over from Gamebryo. It was never a sudden change, but they re-wrote various parts of it slowly over time with each new game. And now it is probably accurate to call it an entirely different engine.

 

[Elthosian]

https://www.eurogamer.net/eurogamer-and-bethesda-starfield

Looks like Bethesda/MS didn't send codes for many UK/Polish websites. Given that Eurogamer gave some of the lowest scores to two of the biggest games this year (TOTK, BG3) and Edge usually gives lower scores than avg it feels to me like they're trying to keep that Metascore high. Rather dumb thing to do honestly...

 

[TheCumGuzzler]

https://www.eurogamer.net/eurogamer-and-bethesda-starfield

Looks like Bethesda/MS didn't send codes for many UK/Polish websites. Given that Eurogamer gave some of the lowest scores to two of the biggest games this year (TOTK, BG3) and Edge usually gives lower scores than avg it feels to me like they're trying to keep that Metascore high. Rather dumb thing to do honestly...

Access to the game appears to have been heavily restricted in the UK

I would say It's because of the Activision acquisition or something like that, given that it's not just Eurogamer