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

[Gargaune]

If any of you buy this I hate you - you are Decline Enablers and should be lined up in the street and shot. This has been a post.

Well obviously I won't buy it or play it. I'm just here for the butthurt.

I will buy it and I will play it. And after I spend two hundred man-hours modding it, I might even like it.

 

[Ryzer]

If any of you buy this I hate you - you are Decline Enablers and should be lined up in the street and shot. This has been a post.

Well obviously I won't buy it or play it. I'm just here for the butthurt.

I will buy it and I will play it. And after I spend two hundred man-hours modding it, I might even like it.

And you will tell us how shitty it is on the codex .

 

[somerandomdude]

To those who are interested in this, you might as well just wait and get it on sale after most of the game breaking bugs are fixed in 2-3 years time, and the modding community has some quality stuff out, like complete mechanical revamps and expansions of certain mechanics. You'd have to be a dumb cuck to preorder this shit and play it at launch.

 

[Robotigan]

Oh, they are empty, randomly generated worlds. So what's the point? Gather space scrap and space epoxy?

People are thinking about this the wrong way. In every open world game, the majority of the world is filler. You're not supposed to play Elder Scrolls or Fallout by aimlessly waltzing around the overworld, you're supposed to visit towns, do quests, and get distracted by dungeons and enemy encampments. The open world is just organizing everything in a comprehensible way that feels more real as well as giving the player the freedom to bounce around between objectives in whatever order they choose.

The starfield of planets is analogous to the overworld map of any open world game. You're not supposed to spend dozens of hours exploring each planet anymore than you're intended to spend dozens of hours in one dungeon (even though several games like Castlevania do that). The "point" is a quest will send you to an objective on some far flung desolate planet, you scout it out for their base, and then do a dungeon run, then return to the quest giver just like you would in any Bethesda game. And if you need to repair your ship or work towards an upgrade, you can gather space epoxy.

It's not like they can just make a handful of cool Star Wars planets. If they want the player to engage with their space ship systems, there needs to be a reason the player is using their spaceship so much.

 

[Robotigan]

To those who are interested in this, you might as well just wait and get it on sale after most of the game breaking bugs are fixed in 2-3 years time, and the modding community has some quality stuff out, like complete mechanical revamps and expansions of certain mechanics. You'd have to be a dumb cuck to preorder this shit and play it at launch.

If some bugs and annoyances put you off from playing a game, you were never that into the game to begin with. You would think that would be obvious to a forum that praises games like V:TMB but I guess not.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

DEEP: https://wccftech.com/starfield-comp...-you-another-perspective-on-your-whole-being/

Starfield Composer Says the Game Is Huge and Will Give You Another Perspective on Your Whole Being​

Starfield is gonna be the schindler's list of our generation?

The Birth of a Nation would probably be a more fitting analogy.

 

[racofer]

Imagine buying a Bethesda game...

Before it's even out yet

 

[KateMicucci]

Oh, they are empty, randomly generated worlds. So what's the point? Gather space scrap and space epoxy?

People are thinking about this the wrong way. In every open world game, the majority of the world is filler. You're not supposed to play Elder Scrolls or Fallout by aimlessly waltzing around the overworld, you're supposed to visit towns, do quests, and get distracted by dungeons and enemy encampments. The open world is just organizing everything in a comprehensible way that feels more real as well as giving the player the freedom to bounce around between objectives in whatever order they choose.

The starfield of planets is analogous to the overworld map of any open world game. You're not supposed to spend dozens of hours exploring each planet anymore than you're intended to spend dozens of hours in one dungeon (even though several games like Castlevania do that). The "point" is a quest will send you to an objective on some far flung desolate planet, you scout it out for their base, and then do a dungeon run, then return to the quest giver just like you would in any Bethesda game. And if you need to repair your ship or work towards an upgrade, you can gather space epoxy.

It's not like they can just make a handful of cool Star Wars planets. If they want the player to engage with their space ship systems, there needs to be a reason the player is using their spaceship so much.

OK, but with 1000 worlds, they're randomly generated. Skyrim and Fallout 3's dungeons were all hand-made and they frequently had something unique in them because of that. Most of Oblivion's dungeons were randomly generated and they were shit.

If a handful of handmade worlds means no spaceship system, that would be fine with me. We don't even know if the spaceship system will be good or a game-ruining chore yet.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Starfield will break the spell we are living under.

 

[Baron Dupek]

See ya WAY later, space cowboys!

 

[Just Locus]

As much as I want to remain optimistic about the starfield(I deeply enjoy Space exploration games). I just feel like the past few years of success have put bethesda into complacency, They don't have to worry about putting out a decent product cause they know people will purchase it(either out of curiosity or just fan-boyism), and we'll wait for another 2 years after the game, after the honeymoon phase is over, It'll receive the same treatment as FO4 and Skyrim, where people will make those shitty (Starfield - X years later.) videos and on and on it goes and the cycle repeats.
Just wish that people had higher standards and don't just defend or accept mediocrity as it is.
We can get better products and If this sort of shit continues, there'll be a precedence where it doesn't matter and we won't get good games, just digital gambling machines or mind-fucks disguised as games.

 

[undecaf]

Bethesda games are shit but it's hard not to play them in the vain hope that some day they'll accidentally release a good one

They kinda sorta have something close to the ”right idea” behind it all, they just can’t for the life of them get the execution even as right as Morrowind anymore.

And they don’t have to either, because they have their dedicated horde of lemmings who’ll eat any sort of shit that get’s shoveled in their mouths by the Bethesda brand guano-spoon.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Imagine buying a Bethesda game...

You will buy Starfield.

And you will buy it again, every time a new version is released.
Punk!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

people shit on bethesda when nobody else even tries to do what bethesda does
I hate skyrim, but its world is still significantly better than most other "open world" games, especially ones that came after skyrim and just copied the ubisoft formula e.g., twitcher 3. Skyrim's NPCs may all have some kind of mental retardation, but at least they try to some degree provoke a sense of realism compared to the static, lifeless text dumps in nearly the entire rest of the genre. So on and so forth.
If Bethesda games are "shit", then nearly every other game in the genre -- and by this, I do not mean the greater RPG genre -- are even worse. Just look at how awful Outerworlds is to the point where it makes Fallout 4 look good. KCD has some great parts, but in many areas it feels like a pale imitation of a bethesda game that falls apart when you play with it, like your parents buying you some cheap megabrïcks instead of legos.
If I had to pick a game that was the closest to a modern descendant of Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld, the choice becomes obvious. Does that mean it's good? No, but it does mean they get an A when I'm grading on a curve.

Oh, and the creation engine is vastly superior to most other engines on the market solely on the basis that it's founded upon moddability. I don't give a shit about most of the so-called "features" engines tout nowadays, Bethesda has been shipping an engine with extensive modding support and their games come with an SDK for two decades now. Unreal has gone backwards in terms of moddability, with UE4/5 being one of the most modder unfriendly engines on the market and therefore one of the worst recent developments in video games.

All things considered, Bethesda is shit. But nearly every other developer is vastly worse. The rest of the industry needs to get their shit together.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

oh and starfield is going to be fantastic, I believe in the Todd.

 

[somerandomdude]

To those who are interested in this, you might as well just wait and get it on sale after most of the game breaking bugs are fixed in 2-3 years time, and the modding community has some quality stuff out, like complete mechanical revamps and expansions of certain mechanics. You'd have to be a dumb cuck to preorder this shit and play it at launch.

If some bugs and annoyances put you off from playing a game, you were never that into the game to begin with. You would think that would be obvious to a forum that praises games like V:TMB but I guess not.

I don't like playing a game with a high likelihood of running into a game breaking bug that keeps me from progressing and having to start over from scratch, hoping/coping that it was a once-off that doesn't happen again. I'd rather let others beta test it, because that's the sorta thing that's to be expected with any Bethesda title at launch.

I'm not really into early-access games, I've supported very few, and I generally don't like play testing games I paid for, and writing up bug reports. Back in the day, they used to have to actually pay people to do this. Now, developers expect us to have to pay them to have the privilege to test their games. This applies to Bethesda as well, because their titles at launch are basically rushed out games in beta state sold as 1.0 versions. Beta 1.0, maybe. It's honestly the new normal these days, so it's not just Bethesda, but they're among the worst offenders. My patience for this new norm is at its end. Along with a great many other new norms.

Besides, these Bethesda games need mods to be decent. Vanilla states for these games leave far too much to be desired, even if there's no bugs. Stuff like huge mechanical changes to the combat and balancing, and skills, etc. And mods like this take some time to make, it might even be a year or 2 after launch before people start putting out really core game changing mods like this.

 

[Crispy]

Todd's main problem is that while he's pretty good at coming up with large, open worlds to explore, to this date, other than his work on Morrowind, he hasn't put in any reason to want to explore his worlds. Oblivion is the most obvious example, but even Skyrim -- other than its varying landscapes and pretty trees to look at -- was just boring to walk around in after the first couple of hours.

When you take the examples of games like New Vegas and Enderal, which were obviously based on "worlds" that Bethesda created, it's painfully obvious how incapable Todd and his team is of putting any kind of creative pizzazz into his own games. They, unlike the derivative games based on them, lack any intellectual stimuli to invoke the desire to climb that mountain that he so proudly claims you can.

 

[Gargaune]

Oh, and the creation engine is vastly superior to most other engines on the market solely on the basis that it's founded upon moddability. I don't give a shit about most of the so-called "features" engines tout nowadays, Bethesda has been shipping an engine with extensive modding support and their games come with an SDK for two decades now. Unreal has gone backwards in terms of moddability, with UE4/5 being one of the most modder unfriendly engines on the market and therefore one of the worst recent developments in video games.

Mod support is the Creation Engine's greatest asset, but it actually has some other selling points in the technical department. I keep coming back to goof around in Cyberpunk and I constantly find myself wishing X or Y were more like Bethesda Game™, like object physicality or cell handling, with how consistently the CE writes temporary deltas to the savegame. The engine's got its downsides, most notably the expensive AI and the design limitations that incurs, and a ton of patented Bethesda "it'll do" implementations, but at its core it really is a technical solution catered to a better breed of open world design.

 

[racofer]

people shit on bethesda when nobody else even tries to do what bethesda does
I hate skyrim, but its world is still significantly better than most other "open world" games, especially ones that came after skyrim and just copied the ubisoft formula e.g., twitcher 3. Skyrim's NPCs may all have some kind of mental retardation, but at least they try to some degree provoke a sense of realism compared to the static, lifeless text dumps in nearly the entire rest of the genre. So on and so forth.
If Bethesda games are "shit", then nearly every other game in the genre -- and by this, I do not mean the greater RPG genre -- are even worse. Just look at how awful Outerworlds is to the point where it makes Fallout 4 look good. KCD has some great parts, but in many areas it feels like a pale imitation of a bethesda game that falls apart when you play with it, like your parents buying you some cheap megabrïcks instead of legos.
If I had to pick a game that was the closest to a modern descendant of Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld, the choice becomes obvious. Does that mean it's good? No, but it does mean they get an A when I'm grading on a curve.

Oh, and the creation engine is vastly superior to most other engines on the market solely on the basis that it's founded upon moddability. I don't give a shit about most of the so-called "features" engines tout nowadays, Bethesda has been shipping an engine with extensive modding support and their games come with an SDK for two decades now. Unreal has gone backwards in terms of moddability, with UE4/5 being one of the most modder unfriendly engines on the market and therefore one of the worst recent developments in video games.

All things considered, Bethesda is shit. But nearly every other developer is vastly worse. The rest of the industry needs to get their shit together.

While all of this is true, it does not make Bethesda games any less terrible. 100% reliance on mods to make the game somewhat decent, although still mostly unplayable garbage, is not something to be counted as a positive when the game itself is still a steaming pile of shit.

The past decade worth of mods was not enough to transform Skyrim into a worthwhile game. It's still dull, lacking reactivity, devoid of world building, and with everything taking place in the player's imagination. All player interaction boils down to killing things, and it does that much worse than nearly, if not all those open world games we know, even the ones following the Ubisoft formula. Fallout 4 follows the same path and is as bad today as it was back in 2015.

Also, claiming Bethesda is doing something good by providing modding tools is disingenuous, or naive. They have tried twice so far to lock modding away from players, first by selling them on Steam, which was a total disaster, and now with Bethesda.net. I honestly believe it has not gotten enough traction because of the multitude of mods available elsewhere by the time this became available, and time will tell how Bethesda will handle this for Starfield. Would you be surprised if, initially, mods were only available through Bethesda.net? Just so, you know, Todd can see how it goes with a brand new game, all for the good of the players of course.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The paste decade worth of mods was not enough to transform Skyrim into a worthwhile game.

enderal is one of the better games released in the past decade

 

[Harthwain]

While all of this is true, it does not make Bethesda games any less terrible. 100% reliance on mods to make the game somewhat decent, although still mostly unplayable garbage, is not something to be counted as a positive when the game itself is still a steaming pile of shit.

The past decade worth of mods was not enough to transform Skyrim into a worthwhile game. It's still dull, lacking reactivity, devoid of world building, and with everything taking place in the player's imagination. All player interaction boils down to killing things, and it does that much worse than nearly, if not all those open world games we know, even the ones following the Ubisoft formula. Fallout 4 follows the same path and is as bad today as it was back in 2015.

Eh, something similar could be said about all Bethesda games, including Morrowind (sans world building).

 

[Norfleet]

Todd's main problem is that while he's pretty good at coming up with large, open worlds to explore, to this date, other than his work on Morrowind, he hasn't put in any reason to want to explore his worlds.

That's because the fundamental reasons I've found to be somewhere else in a world:

1. To get something that is found there: Requires that you PUT something specific there, otherwise there is nothing to be found.

2. To get away from someone or something else: Requires that you have someone else you'd want to get away from, like a rival faction (or other players). Also requires that you have some ability to do something once you get away from them, otherwise you're just standing in the middle of an empty field with nothing to do.

So, for an open world to have validity, there needs to be either some pull that drives you to go there, or some push that convinces you to get away from everything else. I think that's why all the interesting open world ideas tend to involve some sort of building system: You have to be able to DO something once you're in the middle of nowhere.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

From a technical point of view there are no better openworlds than Bethesda's.

 

[tritosine2k]

From a technical point of view there are no better openworlds than Bethesda's.

& that's why this stuff is going to be remotely hosted

 

[Urthor]

Todd's main problem is that while he's pretty good at coming up with large, open worlds to explore, to this date, other than his work on Morrowind, he hasn't put in any reason to want to explore his worlds. Oblivion is the most obvious example, but even Skyrim -- other than its varying landscapes and pretty trees to look at -- was just boring to walk around in after the first couple of hours.

When you take the examples of games like New Vegas and Enderal, which were obviously based on "worlds" that Bethesda created, it's painfully obvious how incapable Todd and his team is of putting any kind of creative pizzazz into his own games. They, unlike the derivative games based on them, lack any intellectual stimuli to invoke the desire to climb that mountain that he so proudly claims you can.

I completely disagree in terms of Enderal.

Enderal has many, many, many, virtues, but to me it never felt like a *truly* open world. Enderal felt like a progression of pretty level gated areas. You usually didn't have as much choice on where to go next as you'd think.

It reminded me of Gothic style level design. Gated areas by difficulty progression. Entertaining, not truly exciting.

Now, I dislike many, many aspects of Skyrim, but the way that all of the cities are *truly* destinations and all have their own virtues, was very pleasant.

I think it just goes to show that, the quality of the *world*, is really all writing and quest design. The things Skyrim does fantastically, area design of Markarth, aren't as important as the writing and quests in Markarth they didn't make quite so compelling (I love Markarth... as a concept. I felt the dialogue and NPCs weren't up to scratch).