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

[Caim]

Wait a fucking minute.

I thought it was 100mil not 400mil?

This is like 5x the failure of ME: Andromeda.

Where did all the money go?

This is the first question that should have arisen at Microsoft when testing it.

Pete Hines with a fake mustache has been seen trying to fit a very large bag with a dollar sign on it in his car.

 

[0wca]

Wait a fucking minute.

I thought it was 100mil not 400mil?

This is like 5x the failure of ME: Andromeda.

Where did all the money go?

This is the first question that should have arisen at Microsoft when testing it.

 

[turkishronin]

Niggers can't into space, so if we're doing realism arguments then the game should be filled with Chinese people, with a token Serb, Rus and German. Every single nigger would have been wiped out when Earth was destroyed, total nigger death.

What is exactly preventing Mr. Shekelestein from purchasing a spaceship and filling it with as many niggers as he could?

 

[Ryzer]

Frankly this is an utter disgrace, nothing in it shows next-generation game, not even the textures, not even the facial animations, nothing.

Maybe if an indie game developers made something like that, most people would have accepted with a grain of salt, but even the indie game developers would have made a better job.

Here, there is nothing great, nor good, everything is unexploited, everything is left to its empty shell of an idea that could have been great.

And what's worse, nothing in the game reeks 400M$ of development let alone 7 years of development, everything is under-cooked, there is no polishing, no attention to detail, no exciting new gameplay element.

 

[tritosine2k]

Won't matter after the inevitable '76 treatment

 

[0wca]

Won't matter after the inevitable '76 treatment

That's the part that surprises me the most.

You'd think that after the way this company fucked its fans with scam after scam, people wouldn't give this PoS a chance.

Yet, here we are again with more of Todd's bullshit.

 

[VerSacrum]

Everything I see gameplay or designwise in this game looks dull. Who designed this? It's like they took F4 and stripped it from everything that made that setting unique. This just feels bland, uninspired and well ... boring.

I guess this is what you end up with if they don't have old Elder Scrolls and Fallout lore they can draw from, things better people came up with.

 

[ind33d]

"The settlement mechanics in Fallout 4 were taken from Starfield's design documents rather than the other way around."

N-nani?

 

[Vic]

All the bitching aside, game is super fun to play and to explore if you liked combat and collecting trash in Fallout 4.

The outpost system (settlements in FO4) is vastly improved in Starfield.

So if you liked these aspects, you will like Starfield. It is definitely not a game that will appeal to everyone, certainly not on the codex.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

The lack of aliens does suck. I get the feeling the game went through a change in tonal direction midway through - it seems like they set out to make a realistic thing (hence "NASApunk"), realised that it would be excruciatingly boring, and then started adding in Cyberpunk World and Cowboy World and Solarpunk World.

But it just feels completely peculiar. Everything looks and feels drab, but then wacky genre-pastiche shit is happening on screen.

It would have been 100x better if they'd just added aliens. The game would have gotten some much-needed visual variety, would have started to feel a little bit like a distinct new setting rather than a crappy generic waste of time, they could hire voice actors to do fun accents and inject a bit of life into the game, and everyone would doubtlessly have fawned over the game because they got to romance Big Amazonian Purple Alien Woman With Four Arms and/or Suave Fish Man With Smooth British Accent or whatever.

Is there any synthetics in the game? Transhumans? (lol). Rogue AI? Devolved/evolved humans? There's a lot of things a space setting can do without aliens.

Just interesting politics in general.

It says a lot that after like 10 hours the only thing that sticks out is landing on new Atlantis and seeing ape niggaz with Cornelius haircuts.

 

[Lemming42]

Is there any synthetics in the game? Transhumans? (lol). Rogue AI? Devolved/evolved humans? There's a lot of things a space setting can do without aliens.

As far as I can tell, just regular humans. The technology level the universe is at isn't clear, because every settlement ends up being different (Cowboy Town is obviously a bit less tech-y than Cyberpunk Town, for example).

There's no transhumans that I've met, even in Cyberpunk World. There are cosmetic gene clinics where people can change their appearance/sex/race, but the effect of that on society doesn't seem to be discussed, probably because the clinics only exist so that the player can change their characters' appearance.

 

[Vic]

There are cosmetic gene clinics where people can change their appearance/sex/race

how futuristic

 

[Vic]

So, basically, this game has no setting at all? Just humans in space? Sorry if I'm out of the loop, I've been mining rocks for 20 hours.

 

[spectre]

Just got my review key from dauphong, here's some really early impressions.
I wasn't really following this game other than some vague sense of what's there, so I decided to let Beth surprise me.

Clicked through characterface generation, just enough to make something not resembling a baboon which took considerable effort this time.
Picked whatever background, none of the traits looked enticing, so I didn't pick any.

Tutorial area introduces the standard Elder Scrolls fare, you're the chosen one cause you touched a space rock in a mining accident and started tripping.
Decided to keep it to myself, but the plot-critical NPC swooped in and saw right through it. Decided we should become BFF and he will give me his spaceship and robot.
Bethesda probably thought that guy is charismatic and I'd be excited to go on an adventure. I really wasn't. Decided to fuck off and explore the immediate surroundings
(that's basically what I do in each TES).
Unfortunately, there was fuck all to do, blast some rocksminerals, get cooked in a radioactive vent,
I realized going away further would mean taking the same time to go back for nothing, so I begrudgingly hobbled back to the spaceship.

I realize I was being deliberately going against the plot here, but the game really sandwiches you between a set of genuinely unappealing characters:
there's the mine foreman and her whiny sidekick and the black guy who's supposed to move the plot forward, but seemed to be in a middle of doing
some sort of his own thing and I was rather content to leave him to it.

The black guy bestows upon you the pipboy Interface Expanding Watch(tm) signalling that we're nearing the end of the mandatory tutorial section.
A lesser man would make an off-hand remark that the black man is acting way out of character when it comes to the typical direction
of wristwear redistribution, but then the game hinted at me that the spaceship is probably "borrowed".
How dare you, Bethesda.

A bit earlier than that there was a brief combat segment, the game gave me a pistol and pointed me in the direction of some pirates. Felt like a peashooter,
so I switched to an axe for a bit of oomph. Basically fallout combat without vats and slomo (or at least I've seen nothing of the sort yet).

Anyways, I went inside the ship and was immediately stunned at how shitty the textures looked. Specifically the starry background
and the instrument panels (apparently non-functional). There was a brief space combat tutorial. You do some pew pew, then fly to the wreckage
and press E to loot it. If this sounds banal shit boring to you, that's exactly that. Nobody expected a simulation here,
but if you even took a whiff of Elite Dangulugu or That Other Scam Game... I dare say you can't feel anything but disappointed.
Heck, I'd say even the first Everspace would give Bethesda's current flagship a run for its money.

Next, after some fumbling with the interface, I followed the quest marker to the nearby moon.
Landing on the surface made me feel like Fallout 4 again, only much worse looking.
With all the lessons learned from my prior experience with TES, I ignored the main quest marker and started exploring (this time it seems that it was finally unlocked).
There was a generic settlement filled with a randomly generated crowd of generics (there's a slider in the options to adjust this),
a leader-figure who told me nothing interesting, and when asked about work told me to fuck off to a bulletin board. There was also a trader that didn't have anything to sell.
This concluded my yesterday's session.

So far the impressions are really... fucking meh doesn't even begin to describe it. I know I've barely seen anything, so maybe I'll give it an honest attempt,
but so far Bethesda managed the unthinkable - to make me consider going back to Elite or ... perish the thought ... Scam Citizen.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

The lonely galaxy theory is interesting to me but yeah you have to do something Varley-esque with nanotech engineering and get weird humans and mutants to compensate.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

The lack of aliens does suck.

I was wondering, are there really no sentient aliens? Man, I'm telling you the game is unfinished. Lots of graphical glitches and stuff like trees spawning on top your base, no swimming, etc. I really hope they will fix it with future updates.

Bro, they've already announced just before this released that TES 6 has started production. Todd is bailing on this pronto to salvage his reputation, I imagine he can't wait to see the back of this game.

 

[Lemming42]

So, basically, this game has no setting at all? Just humans in space? Sorry if I'm out of the loop, I've been mining rocks for 20 hours.

The setting is mostly dictated by the relationships between the factions - UC and Freestar Collective mainly, I think, the weird religious people don't seem to come up much.

There are a few glimmers of interesting stuff. For example. the Rangers who I joined are viewed as traitors by a lot of war veterans from Freestar Collective, who now form bandit gangs to resist the Rangers.

For the most part though, yeah, the game doesn't feel coherent. It's all ideas you've seen elsewhere and already played in countless games, and the planets don't really connect. It feels a bit like the worst parts of Fallout 2, in that the settlements are all tonally different and don't really connect together in a way that gives the feeling of a real setting where people actually live. I have no idea how Cowboy World and Solarpunk World interact, for example, or why anyone is choosing to live in one or the other.

 

[Readher]

Various quests constantly take me to hand-crafted settlements on different planets, and they're really nicely designed. I find some kind of quest just by accident on almost every one of them, and I'm pretty sure there are more if you look closer, but I'm focusing on a single storyline right now. A lot of work went into it, that's for sure. As I've mentioned before, I didn't really tackle any procgen content yet, but I think way too many people are focusing on that instead of finding all the hand-crafted content, of which there is a fuckton.

 

[darkpatriot]

Here are some of my feelings and observations after playing a bit more than a day (8 to 10 hours I think). I probably forgot to mention some things and didn't take notes while playing, so this is far from comprehensive.

Pros:
-There is no local map and I get the impression they are trying to making a bit better use of laying off quest markers when appropriate. As an example there is a shopkeeper that lost something important, so he tells you the name of the three stores he had been. You have to actually find and go to those stores (not that hard as they are nearby) and look around, no quest marker is available for the quest. Very promising, and I am looking forward to seeing if there is more of this kind of thing.

-Combat is fun so far. Fallout 4 and Fallout 74 are good examples to determine if you will like combat or not. If you liked or didn't like it there, you will probably like or not like it here.

-FO4 gameplay loop (Explore - Fight - Loot - Craft) is very much present, well implemented, and seems to be the core gameplay loop for Starfield as well. They just expanded the crafting options. Although, I haven't yet tried the settlement building. I believe it will be expanded, better, and more important than in FO4 based on what I have seen, but I can't fully form an opinion on that yet. Of course, if you didn't like the FO4 game loop, this won't be a pro for you.

-I am liking what I see from dungeon/level design so far (with one negative that I include under the cons). So far most are pretty non-linear with multiple entrance points and ways to navigate through them. One standout example, which was a bit more linear, was a spaceship that had fluctuating power. So gravity kept cycling on and off. It was a multi-level design (something I didn't realize initially, so wound up getting stuck for about 10 minutes until I noticed a ceiling hatch I could open) and you had to make use of the periods of no gravity to navigate the dungeon vertically and solve it a bit like a puzzle. Given that there was no local map and the maze like design of the dungeon, the quest marker actually wound up trolling more often than it was helpful. It wound up being very satisfying to complete and took more thinking to clear than any dungeon I had seen from the last couple Bethesda games.

-Persuasion mini-game - Not only the best Bethesda has done, probably one of the best implementations of dialog checks I have seen in any RPG. Bethesda's writing doesn't take full advantage of it, though (Bethesda's writing always being kind of lackluster). The main way they don't take advantage of it is that they don't more often make the options you can try to use for persuasion based on previous information you have learned from books, investigations, or previous conversation. I have seen it happen once or twice. I believe that was what happened based on the notification that popped up, at least.

If a game came out that used a similar system and made extensive use of skills/things you have learned/inventory items/other character traits to determine which persuasion options you had available I would call it hands down the best conversation mechanic in any CRPG.

Cons:
-The interface is not only designed for consoles, it is poorly designed for consoles. I have wasted money with accidental purchases I never meant to make, and customizing my ship was a real pain in the ass. In particular the internal walkable ship components don't actually let you know what kind of crafting benches or other interactables they have. I spent a lot of time adding an engineering bay to my ship expecting to see crafting stations. But nope, not a single one. I would like to see the ability to customize the internals of your ship as well, but maybe that unlocks later. Probably not though.

-Character development - Extremely limited choices, with many choices arbitrarily locked behind other stuff you aren't interested in. Despite being similar to FO4s it is actually worse. FO4 used level and Stats requirements to unlock higher level perk choices. For this game the skills (which are the same as FO4 perks) are locked behind getting more skills in a tree first. The big problem of this is that there are a lot of cases where I want higher tier skills, but am not interested in many (if any) of the lower tier skills. So I am going to be forced to invest many levels in skills I will never use just to unlock the ones I want to get.

-Re-use of dungeon designs. Despite encountering some really nice level/dungeon design in the first dozen or so dungeons I have done, I have also already encountered one dungeon design copied with only a few modifications.

-Ugly female faces and no sexy clothes to dress your female harem crew in. The faces are better than Oblivion, but fall short of Skyrim. Should be one of the first things mods fix, though.


Other notes:
-The culture warriors are exaggerating. New Atlantis is nowhere close to all black. It isn't even majority black. There are plenty of white people, both in randomly generated pedestrians and quests/permanent NPCs. No one racial group is in the majority for background NPCs, so white-skinned characters are a minority, but neither are black people, Asians, Indians, or Hispanic/mixed characters. For quest/permenant NPCs there are a higher percentage of white characters. About 40% I'd say, eyeballing it. And while forced diversity like that can be annoying when present in fantasy or historical games without a good explanation, that level of diversity makes plenty of sense for a sci-fi game. That is just based on New Atlantis though, as I haven't really visited the other factions major settlements yet.

Women are also not in all the positions of power while men are just there to be made fun of. I have encountered many powerful men, sometimes even powerful white men, in leadership positions while the very first character I encountered being mocked like that is actually a woman. When entering new Atlantis you encounter a group who had fled from a station that was attacked. The leader of that outpost, a woman, is acting like a complete selfish incompetent (Karen) and she didn't even properly handld the evacuation. The only reason that anyone escaped was actually due to the actions of an older white male, who is presented as the hero of the tale. That woman is promised a new job commensurate to her abilities, and you later find her working in a coffee shop, but being incompetent there as well.

If the very idea of a non-white character in a video game or position of power not held by a man sends you into a frenzy, good luck with that, but the claims that there are almost no non-white characters and that the ones there are are for comic relief is a straight up lie.

I was annoyed to see the pronoun stuff make it's way into yet another character creator, though. Although, so far only one gay couple presented (and also in the background) while there have been at least half a dozen straight couples I have encountered. So far they seem to be sticking to fairly realistic ratios for that rather than making 70% of all couples gay as happens with some games that embrace the woke.

-So far I like the exploration aspect (I never expected any kind of space sim because it was obvious Bethesda wasn't going to be making one from the pre-release materials). I actually want more games to embrace procedural and am excited to see what Bethesda does with that. I am still early in the game (I have done exploration mostly in one system, mostly the first planet), and haven't done any base building yet. I actually like that stuff is actually a bit more realistic in terms of content density, but I haven't played it enough to see how repetitive it will get yet. So far most of the stuff I am encountering is the first time I am encountering it, but I expect that to change.

 

[Vic]

Anyways, I went inside the ship and was immediately stunned at how shitty the textures looked. Specifically the starry background
and the instrument panels (apparently non-functional).

Disable Dynamic Resolution and set Render Resolution Scale to 100%

I don't know why they ship with these ugly default settings.

 

[ChildInTime]

Is there any synthetics in the game? Transhumans? (lol). Rogue AI? Devolved/evolved humans? There's a lot of things a space setting can do without aliens.

As far as I can tell, just regular humans. The technology level the universe is at isn't clear, because every settlement ends up being different (Cowboy Town is obviously a bit less tech-y than Cyberpunk Town, for example).

There's no transhumans that I've met, even in Cyberpunk World. There are cosmetic gene clinics where people can change their appearance/sex/race, but the effect of that on society doesn't seem to be discussed, probably because the clinics only exist so that the player can change their characters' appearance.

So not even some cosmetic shit like cyberarms or anything? lol

 

[Lemming42]

If a game came out that used a similar system and made extensive use of skills/things you have learned/inventory items/other character traits to determine which persuasion options you had available I would call it hands down the best conversation mechanic in any CRPG.

I noticed that having the Diplomat background pays off in persuasion checks sometimes. You get fairly powerful options (+4 or +5) tagged with [Diplomat] which seem to have a high chance of working, they're usually coloured orange rather than red.

 

[Perkel]

"The settlement mechanics in Fallout 4 were taken from Starfield's design documents rather than the other way around."

N-nani?

They were copied from FNV mod

 

[Vic]

Various quests constantly take me to hand-crafted settlements on different planets, and they're really nicely designed. I find some kind of quest just by accident on almost every one of them, and I'm pretty sure there are more if you look closer, but I'm focusing on a single storyline right now. A lot of work went into it, that's for sure. As I've mentioned before, I didn't really tackle any procgen content yet, but I think way too many people are focusing on that instead of finding all the hand-crafted content, of which there is a fuckton.

Game is legitimately awesome. 90% of the people shitting on this here haven't even played it. Either way it's protocol to shit on the new Bethesda game until the next game comes out, then this one becomes everyone's favorite. You can see it starting already itt people saying that it isn't as good as Fallout 4

I don't think people enjoying the game are posting in this thread too much for this reason. Personally, I just enjoy being a contrarian and also showing more people the way I'm having fun with the game. Believe me, there are plenty of people having a blast with the game, It's been the third day for me and I'm still hooked.

That being said, parts of it are unfinished and really do hope they will patch it up.

 

[spectre]

Disable Dynamic Resolution and set Render Resolution Scale to 100%

I don't know why they ship with these ugly default settings.

Yeah, I haven't really taken an in-depth look into the settings, it was just a quick sitdown.
Anyways, thanks, I'll see if I can will myself into giving it an honest go.