Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[GentlemanCthulhu]

I'm a huge bethesda fan but even i haven't played this game. i just don't care for a space exploration game and as far as those go Starfield doesn't seem that special.

 

[Lord_Potato]

I really don't get the quest design in this game. If you have an engine with irritating constant loading screens (especially during space travel) quests should be designed in ways to mitigate that. So, longer quests on 1 planet, like in KOTOR or Mass Effect.

Instead every quest in Starfield looks like this: go to planet X to speak with a guy, then travel to space station Y in another system to grab an item (inclusing two unskippable docking cutscenes), then go to a moon Z in yet another system to give the item to yet another guy, maybe shoot some spacers on the way, so that you don't die of boredom already, then return to New Atlantis for a reward.

It's like the quest designers were actually trolling the players to waste time on constant loading screens, showing off all the weaknesses of the game.

Also, you've got a city like Neon. I can understand, given the archaic engine, that the three main neighbourhoods of Neon are separate cells that need loading screen on traversal by lifts. But why is almost every individual shop in the Core a cell of its own, requiring a short, yet irritating loading screen? The Core is not even that big and the shops are tiny, two rooms at best. If Trade Authority can be located within the Core cell, why can't places like general store, liquer store or medical clinic?

Previous Bethesda games also suffered from this, but they at least had one large 'outside world' cell, where you could spend a lot of time without a single load screen. Starfield doesn't even have that, despite the fact a dozen years passed since the last Elder Scrolls release.

 

[jackofshadows]

Also, you've got a city like Neon. I can understand, given the archaic engine, that the three main neighbourhoods of Neon are separate cells that need loading screen on traversal by lifts. But why is almost every individual shop in the Core a cell of its own, requiring a short, yet irritating loading screen? The Core is not even that big and the shops are tiny, two rooms at best.

Xuybox optimization I imagine.

Agree regarding the quest design but the aswer is they clearly just didn't care. It's an extremely corporate, check list conceived, detached from reality product. So often I'd thought while playing: there's no way this was actually playtested.

 

[cvv]

It's crazy how dead this thread is already

Even bashing of the game is dead :D

I got the game for free when I bought a new mouse so I was actually planning to play it and then shit on it with others on Codex.

Seems tho nobody is even interested in that anymore. Sad.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Also, you've got a city like Neon. I can understand, given the archaic engine, that the three main neighbourhoods of Neon are separate cells that need loading screen on traversal by lifts. But why is almost every individual shop in the Core a cell of its own, requiring a short, yet irritating loading screen? The Core is not even that big and the shops are tiny, two rooms at best.

Xuybox optimization I imagine.

xBox can handle both the entire world of Witcher 3 and AC: Odyssey. Literally dozens of square kms of lands and cities, without a single loading screen.

I'm sure it could handle Neon Core with all the shops included.

Agree regarding the quest design but the aswer is they clearly just didn't care. It's an extremely corporate, check list conceived, detached from reality product. So often I'd thought while playing: there's no way this was actually playtested.

True, there's no emotion in this. Yesterday I started a romance with Andreja. Her declaration of love was so flat and apathetic I could not believe my ears. It sounded like a parody of games with romances. Fucking erotic visual novels have better voice acting.

 

[Lord_Potato]

It's crazy how dead this thread is already

Even bashing of the game is dead :D

I got the game for free when I bought a new mouse so I was actually planning to play it and then shit on it with others on Codex.

Seems tho nobody is even interested in that anymore. Sad.

I'm playing it, dunno why exactly. Skipping the exploration of all the randomly generated planets and doing all the radiant quests, focusing just on the handcrafted content of the main quest and the faction questlines. But it's still not very good and quite repetitive. Shooting and space combat can be fun, but that's about it. It's quite obvious people making this didn't have much enjoyment either. It feels like somebody's homework.

 

[jackofshadows]

xBox can handle both the entire world of Witcher 3 and AC: Odyssey. Literally dozens of square kms of lands and cities, without a single loading screen.

Obviously it's not that simple. We need some engine guy to sort this out but as far as I'm concerned, tech limitations should be considered only in the engine context. I'm sure even retards at Bethpizda wouldn't do such awkward separation of shops and inconsistently at that (like with your example with trade authority on Neon) if they hadn't to.

True, there's no emotion in this. Yesterday I started a romance with Andreja. Her declaration of love was so flat and apathetic I could not believe my ears. It sounded like a parody of games with romances. Fucking erotic visual novels have better voice acting.

Yeah it's definitely perceived as a parody to me also. And I don't think that's a fault of the actress, the material is just too abysmal. They couldn't muster even the slightest edge for Andreja so while on the surface she's suppose to be dark and misterious, in practice she's actually bland and without any moral ambiguity because of fucking course. Anyway, instead of coldness (with potential contrast) or much less sinister manner she sounds flat and unemotional. And it's all carried over to romance. It's like they couldn't even decide what to do with such a character given the corpo limitations. In the end, Andreja doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

[Gargaune]

I really don't get the quest design in this game. If you have an engine with irritating constant loading screens (especially during space travel) quests should be designed in ways to mitigate that. So, longer quests on 1 planet, like in KOTOR or Mass Effect.

Instead every quest in Starfield looks like this: go to planet X to speak with a guy, then travel to space station Y in another system to grab an item (inclusing two unskippable docking cutscenes), then go to a moon Z in yet another system to give the item to yet another guy, maybe shoot some spacers on the way, so that you don't die of boredom already, then return to New Atlantis for a reward.

It's like the quest designers were actually trolling the players to waste time on constant loading screens, showing off all the weaknesses of the game.

That's the typical Bethesda formula, quests are deliberately designed to (manually or randomly) send you to a variety of far-off locations to push you into exploring the open world. But what works in a contiguous worldspace like Skyrim or the Commonwealth won't fly in fragmented game space that requires fast travel transitions, and things get even worse if you've got to further break up locations due to - presumably - AI or performance optimisations.

xBox can handle both the entire world of Witcher 3 and AC: Odyssey. Literally dozens of square kms of lands and cities, without a single loading screen.

TW3 (and its Ubisoft "homages") have a lot less going on in their worldspaces in terms of AI states, object persistence/cell refresh etc. This has been discussed in detail before, either in this thread or the Fo4 one, I forget. The core problem isn't "why can't Bethesda's engine do what CDPR's does?", because it does a lot more different things, but rather that Bethesda's engine was purposefully iterated on over literal decades to support a very particular kind of game experience and they screwed the pooch by trying to use it for something quite structurally different without appropriately accounting for the design's technical requirements.


TL;DR: Todd Inc. should stick to giving us more Skyrims and Bethesdouts. It's what they know, it's what they have the tools for, and it's what their fans expect from them.

 

[Lord_Potato]

I really don't get the quest design in this game. If you have an engine with irritating constant loading screens (especially during space travel) quests should be designed in ways to mitigate that. So, longer quests on 1 planet, like in KOTOR or Mass Effect.

Instead every quest in Starfield looks like this: go to planet X to speak with a guy, then travel to space station Y in another system to grab an item (inclusing two unskippable docking cutscenes), then go to a moon Z in yet another system to give the item to yet another guy, maybe shoot some spacers on the way, so that you don't die of boredom already, then return to New Atlantis for a reward.

It's like the quest designers were actually trolling the players to waste time on constant loading screens, showing off all the weaknesses of the game.

That's the typical Bethesda formula, quests are deliberately designed to (manually or randomly) send you to a variety of far-off locations to push you into exploring the open world. But what works in a contiguous worldspace like Skyrim or the Commonwealth won't fly in fragmented game space that requires fast travel transitions, and things get even worse if you've got to further break up locations due to - presumably - AI or performance optimisations.

TW3 (and its Ubisoft "homages") have a lot less going on in their worldspaces in terms of AI states, object persistence/cell refresh etc. This has been discussed in detail before, either in this thread or the Fo4 one, I forget. The core problem isn't "why can't Bethesda's engine do what CDPR's does?", because it does a lot more different things,

What exactly? I didn't see any advanced NPC routines in Starfield, that were so developed in Oblivion. Shops don't even close at night and while some people rest in beds after work (for example some miners in Cydonia), they're in minority.

but rather that Bethesda's engine was purposefully iterated on over literal decades to support a very particular kind of game experience and they screwed the pooch by trying to use it for something quite structurally different without appropriately accounting for the design's technical requirements.

True, but Bethesda engine was able to generate an entire overworld in a single cell with advanced geometry since the times of Oblivion (Morrowind too, but there it was obscured by fogs to save cpu/gpu power). It boggles my mind why they could not place the main street of Neon in a single cell, and placed shops in separate cells.

TL;DR: Todd Inc. should stick to giving us more Skyrims and Bethesdouts. It's what they know, it's what they have the tools for, and it's what their fans expect from them.

True, but you know, sometimes you want to do something else. And Starfield could still work in Creation engine, but done differently:
1. Fewer planets, but each handcrafted, with entire questlines placed on their surfaces, with as few loading screens as possible.
2. Quest design that plays to the strengths of the engine, without presenting its obsolescence too often.
3. Each planetary system being a single 'overworld cell' so that you can actually fly between planets and only need to see load screens while using your grav drive or landing on the surface.
4. Docking to space stations ingame, not via a load screen, perhaps requiring some piloting prowess.

And of course better story, worldbuilding and characters. If they can't pull it off with their core team (obviously), hire Chris Avellone, Robert Kurvitz or some of the screenwriters from CDPR, ffs.

 

[jackofshadows]

True, but you know, sometimes you want to do something else. And Starfield could still work in Creation engine, but done differently:
1. Fewer planets, but each handcrafted, with entire questlines placed on their surfaces, with as few loading screens as possible.
2. Quest design that plays to the strengths of the engine, without presenting its obsolescence too often.
3. Each planetary system being a single 'overworld cell' so that you can actually fly between planets and only need to see load screens while using your grav drive or landing on the surface.
4. Docking to space stations ingame, not via a load screen, perhaps requiring some piloting prowess.

They had this kang is naked problem when the corporats were too fixated on the idea of proc generated > endless content > metrics go up. While in reality that wouldn't be fun to engage with said content to anyone well, except for likes of Vic apparently. It's like they've done all the handcrafted content "just in case", honestly. If all the effort that went into new generation of radiant quests, generic planets and dungeons was rerouted into something handcrafted the end product would be at least somewhat better but like I said, their heads were too deep inside their own arseholes to recognize that. And something tells me even the lukeworm at best reception they will chalk up on some bullshit reasons as the wrong release window, tech issues or something else entirely.

 

[Gargaune]

What exactly? I didn't see any advanced NPC routines in Starfield, that were so developed in Oblivion. Shops don't even close at night and while some people rest in beds after work (for example some miners in Cydonia), they're in minority.

So I hear (ain't played it yet), but just because they've opted not to use those features this time around doesn't change that the entire engine architecture is built to support all that functionality. Why they chose to forego some of their more interesting features is a different question, and "lol fuck it, they'll buy it anyway" is a strong suspect.

True, but Bethesda engine was able to generate an entire overworld in a single cell with advanced geometry since the times of Oblivion (Morrowind too, but there it was obscured by fogs to save cpu/gpu power). It boggles my mind why they could not place the main street of Neon in a single cell, and placed shops in separate cells.

Like jackofshadows said, there's gotta be a technical rationale behind it, they wouldn't have done it just for the fuck of it. Sight-unseen, I'd assume it's optimising for consoles and older hardware as much as possible. It's already a long tradition in the videogaming industry that hardware development tends to immediately get gobbled up by ever-fancier graphics, with gameplay features fighting each other for leftover scraps of computing power.

If, for instance, Neon's sucking up a lot of CPU cycles to keep up with the GPU and for ambient NPCs (AI is notoriously CPU-hungry), they might've had to chop it up into smaller bits. Think back to how Skyrim's larger cities were segregated in their own separate cells - we know that the engine could've handled them in the core worldspace just fine, mods proved it, but addressing the common hardware denominator among the customer base at the time meant splitting them off.

True, but you know, sometimes you want to do something else. And Starfield could still work in Creation engine, but done differently:
1. Fewer planets, but each handcrafted, with entire questlines placed on their surfaces, with as few loading screens as possible.
2. Quest design that plays to the strengths of the engine, without presenting its obsolescence too often.
3. Each planetary system being a single 'overworld cell' so that you can actually fly between planets and only need to see load screens while using your grav drive or landing on the surface.
4. Docking to space stations ingame, not via a load screen, perhaps requiring some piloting prowess.

I don't think we're in disagreement here because what you want is essentially a bunch of smaller Skyrims in space. And yeah, that would've worked great but, for whatever reason, Todd decided to go in a different direction and the new designs spilled over what Gamebryo was developed to properly support.

Plus there's a bunch of genuinely gratuitous mistakes that make everything worse - go to planet X to collect a space bear's ass, deliver it to planet Y's space station and then collect your payment from moon Z would've flowed much nicer if traveling between these locations involved some proper freeflight gameplay, analogue to traveling between Whiterun and Riften, instead of clicking through a bunch of fast travel loading screens. That one has no technical excuse, but it goes back to my earlier suspicion of "lol fuck it, they'll buy it anyway."

And of course better story, worldbuilding and characters.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Far Harbor proves that Bethesda can write a half-decent plot and Nuka World proves that they don't want to.

 

[Lord_Potato]

And of course better story, worldbuilding and characters.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Far Harbor proves that Bethesda can write a half-decent plot and Nuka World proves that they don't want to.

 

[Justicar]

I really don't get the quest design in this game. If you have an engine with irritating constant loading screens (especially during space travel) quests should be designed in ways to mitigate that. So, longer quests on 1 planet, like in KOTOR or Mass Effect.

Instead every quest in Starfield looks like this: go to planet X to speak with a guy, then travel to space station Y in another system to grab an item (inclusing two unskippable docking cutscenes), then go to a moon Z in yet another system to give the item to yet another guy, maybe shoot some spacers on the way, so that you don't die of boredom already, then return to New Atlantis for a reward.

It's like the quest designers were actually trolling the players to waste time on constant loading screens, showing off all the weaknesses of the game.

That's the typical Bethesda formula, quests are deliberately designed to (manually or randomly) send you to a variety of far-off locations to push you into exploring the open world. But what works in a contiguous worldspace like Skyrim or the Commonwealth won't fly in fragmented game space that requires fast travel transitions, and things get even worse if you've got to further break up locations due to - presumably - AI or performance optimisations.

xBox can handle both the entire world of Witcher 3 and AC: Odyssey. Literally dozens of square kms of lands and cities, without a single loading screen.

TW3 (and its Ubisoft "homages") have a lot less going on in their worldspaces in terms of AI states, object persistence/cell refresh etc. This has been discussed in detail before, either in this thread or the Fo4 one, I forget. The core problem isn't "why can't Bethesda's engine do what CDPR's does?", because it does a lot more different things, but rather that Bethesda's engine was purposefully iterated on over literal decades to support a very particular kind of game experience and they screwed the pooch by trying to use it for something quite structurally different without appropriately accounting for the design's technical requirements.


TL;DR: Todd Inc. should stick to giving us more Skyrims and Bethesdouts. It's what they know, it's what they have the tools for, and it's what their fans expect from them.

Cope.

 

[cvv]

 

[Gargaune]

Cope.

What?

 

[Camel]

It's crazy how dead this thread is already

Vic's threadbanned.

 

[Law]

The Vic Saga will continue once there is some new content either in the form of good mods or DLC. Game right now is like a canvas screaming to be filled in. Will modders get the proper tools to make it fun? Who knows. At least it looks like the desire is there as there are already 6k mods on the nexus even before the release of proper modding tools.

 

[Bulo]

There is no combination of mods that can turn Skyrim into a good game, and Starfield won't be nearly as popular in the modding scene; it doesn't stand a chance

 

[Lemming42]

Now that the dust has settled, the thing that interests me most about this game is the art style. Adam Adamowicz was Bethesda's secret weapon, it seems - Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim all had supremely strong art direction (yes, I know Oblivion is boring LotR ripoff high fantasy and an insult to the TES universe, but taken in isolation away from the other TES games, it had a nice 80s-style sword-and-sandal feel). After the tragic loss of Adamowicz, Fallout 4 looked like dogshit and Starfield has literally no art direction at all.

Like I've never seen this before - a game with no art direction. There is absolutely nothing tying any of it together. Cyberpunk, space western, solarpunk... except it's also meant to be the 1970s or something, with blocky computers and grim tobacco-stained stained beige walls everywhere? What the fuck's happening? We're using clunky-ass CRT monitors but we also have cheap plastic surgery that can make you 50 years younger? That washed out multicoloured stripe on the box art is weird as well, it deliberately invokes the likes of Logan's Run and Blake's 7, but again, the game's 70s influences are totally out of place with absolutely everything else.

They should have just bought an existing license that everyone's forgotten about and worked on that instead. Starflight would have worked, if the license is available - dinosaurs and sentient plants!

Space 1889 is absolutely ideal too:
Running around shooting shit in an identity-less hodgepodge made by outsourced Indian workers and visiting a boring solarpunk city = ehhh
Running around shooting shit as a classy gentleman/gentlewoman accompanied by men with big mustaches and women with fancy hair and visiting Mars to meet the Martian princesses = yes yes yes

I firmly believe that this game would have been warmly received if it had simply looked different. The procedural generation gimmick is a non-starter and sucks balls, but the quests, dungeons, game mechanics, and combat encounters that do exist are all decent enough to make for a solid game - it just needed to have the style and aesthetics and backstory to draw players in, and it fails unbelievably hard on all of those aspects.

 

[jackofshadows]

the quests, dungeons, game mechanics, and combat encounters that do exist are all decent enough to make for a solid game - it just needed to have the style and aesthetics and backstory

No no no. MAYBE in 200x or something, but not now. Starfield is too bad on pretty much all aspects compared to any decent game of late.

 

[Lemming42]

My point is that they've gotten away with worse - look how dire the combat mechanics were in MW, Oblivion, Fo3, and Skyrim. They all had worse combat gameplay than other games at the time they were released. The TES games have some of the worst quest design too, ultra-linear and often conceptually very boring, and yet the series has enjoyed massive success based mostly on the strength of the setting.

Fo4 was technically a step up from Fo3 and NV in terms of combat mechanics, and yet was received quite badly by many players because the world, like Starfield's, had no coherence or soul to it. Bethesda don't seem to realise what made their games popular for a brief period, which is a strong sense of place and the ability to just walk around in a world that looks and sounds nice.

I'm not mounting an enthusiastic defence of the game, I'm just suggesting that they'd have gotten away with a lot of its failings and mediocrity if they'd come up with a decent setting, because that's what their previous games have sold well on. So it's absolutely baffling that they put so little effort into that aspect this time around. It's like they didn't have anyone in charge of art direction at all and just used random conflicting assets.

 

[Law]

Morrowind vibes...

Spoiler

ahh I guess I shouldn't troll you guys too hard or I'll get a stupid tag again, it's hard sometimes

 

[sosmoflux]

Yeah dude you totally trolled us by... consuming the worst goyslop of the past decade

 

[Dadd]

I'd forgotten this game existed

 

[Law]

Yeah dude you totally trolled us by... consuming the worst goyslop of the past decade

Spoken like a true AAA 'tard.

Kid, many of the games I've played in the past decade were a lot worse than Starfield. All I see is butthurt Morrowind fanboys that their precious Bethesda didn't make another game on the same "grand scale".

Yet, Looking at the picture above, it's just another new generation of console 'tards.

Same cycle, new 'tards.