Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[Yosharian]

No way it's Rusty, he's reasonable

The alt I mean, not Rusty

 

[Old Hans]

never found a proper way to guide the player through dungeons and assist players with bad spacial awareness

you mean like a map? Yeah, Starfield doesn't have those, but the good developers are steadily working on it! Maybe by 2025 we'll have working maps.

the real astronauts didn't use a map exploring the moon #nasapunk

 

[Vic]

never found a proper way to guide the player through dungeons and assist players with bad spacial awareness

you mean like a map? Yeah, Starfield doesn't have those, but the good developers are steadily working on it! Maybe by 2025 we'll have working maps.

the real astronauts didn't use a map exploring the moon #nasapunk

that's a good point, all part of Todd's design genius but his spoiled little fans cried too much because they got lost in the big scary dungeons so now they're wasting precious dev time to add maps

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

who will pick up the torch and deliver us another game like skyrim? who does open world as good as bethesda?

Nobody. That's the problem.

Although nothing rises to the level of Morrowind, Kingdom Come: Deliverance (2018) was a good Open World RPG where the chief weakness was a predefined player-character with too much narrative surrounding him. Unfortunately, it's been five years without a word on the progress of the sequel, and it's unlikely that Warhorse will move away from that cinematic narrative in favor of player freedom.

Outward (2019) was a promising Open World RPG with survival elements from a new developer, though janky in various respects and with nowhere near the budget of KC:D much less a later Elder Scrolls game. I had hopes that Nine Dots Studio would be able to build on this, but there isn't any news about a sequel yet.

CDPR did manage to create the Codex's GotY 2015 with The Witcher III, which adopted an Open World approach, though one inferior to Morrowind or KC:D due to the heavy use of non-interactable NPCs and locations. They could create a Witcher IV with a player-generated protagonist, a better Open World, and fewer cinematics, but their approach has yet to be revealed.

Elden Ring (2022) combined an Open World with the action-based gameplay of the Demon's/Dark Souls series. Considering its massive commercial success, it seems doubtful that FromSoftware will return to the earlier Souls formula but instead would probably create another hybrid Action RPG / Open World RPG, though it will never be equivalent to a game that is simply an Open World RPG.

Kenshi (2018) can also be considered an Open World RPG, but it's a rather strange game in certain respects, and in any case differs considerably from all of the above by not having a single player-controlled character but instead large squads. There still isn't much information about the sequel from Lo-Fi Games.

 

[Rhobar121]

Let Bethard's games and all games like them go where they belong - in the trash.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

CDPR did manage to create the Codex's GotY 2015 with The Witcher III, which adopted an Open World approach, though one inferior to Morrowind or KC:D due to the heavy use of non-interactable NPCs and locations. They could create a Witcher IV with a player-generated protagonist, a better Open World, and fewer cinematics, but their approach has yet to be revealed.

Cyberpunk's world design is also pretty solid. I enjoyed exploring it even if it was a broken mess when I played it.

Controversial opinion? Redfall's map is actually really interesting in places. There's some great fantasy elements that made me want to keep playing mixed in with the generic modern american town. A lot of these broken as fuck games still have really solid world design and fun wants to get around them. Finding ways to climb up buildings to sneak inside is pretty fun IMO and a good open world RPG should have vertical exploration and ways to use the roof for any of it's major locations. Human revolution did a good job of that too. You could grab stuff to jump over fences and climb ladders.

 

[Silverfish]

no amount of mods can fix how boring that game is.

I'm sorry no one ever steered you toward a stealth / throwing build.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

no amount of mods can fix how boring that game is.

I'm sorry no one ever steered you toward a stealth / throwing build.

Crab walking isn't fun.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Can I just say, controversially, that I enjoy video games.

 

[Konjad]

Vic it's a time for celebration! Starfield won "Most Innovative Gameplay" award on Steam!

 

[Yosharian]

Vic it's a time for celebration! Starfield won "Most Innovative Gameplay" award on Steam!

Dude no fucking way. Please tell me you're joking

 

[Yosharian]

Oh my god you are actually not kidding. I despair, I truly do despair at the state of this industry.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

Oh my god you are actually not kidding. I despair, I truly do despair at the state of this industry.

Isn't it player voted? In which case it's a complete shit post made to mock Bethesda and the industry.

Nice to see the TERF game get an award. Not my thing but that game is clearly a huge passion project and it got utterly fucked despite bowing to the troons.

 

[Yosharian]

Oh my god you are actually not kidding. I despair, I truly do despair at the state of this industry.

Isn't it player voted? In which case it's a complete shit post made to mock Bethesda and the industry.

Nice to see the TERF game get an award. Not my thing but that game is clearly a huge passion project and it got utterly fucked despite bowing to the troons.

Eh I guess if it's a shitpost then faith restored, but christ there is a very real danger that a legion of gamer dads actually voted for it

 

[Late Bloomer]

Here are the games it went up against.

Remnant II
Your Only Move Is HUSTLE
Contraband Police
Shadows of Doubt

 

[Butter]

https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2024/01/happy-2024-lets-talk-about-starflight.html

Sadly, he's not actually talking about Starflight, but about the much less interesting Starfield. I'm pretty sure he said somewhere that Skyrim is his favorite RPG, and even he thinks Starfield is a pile of shit.

• Ground combat is way too easy, but if you increase the difficulty to compensate, space combat becomes way too hard. I want to hear more about others' experiences with both styles of combat, as I find them extremely unexciting and I wonder if I'm missing something. They don't seem very tactical to me. Chemical boosters don't seem to make much difference despite what they promise. Grenades hardly do any damage. Mines are a waste of time because enemies don't come to you. I mostly just charge into battle and heal later.
• Companions have the worst AI since the 1980s.
• Procedural generation ruins the open-world experience. Wondering what you might find over the next hill is fundamentally different from knowing that the game will generate something for you over the next hill.
• I know that a lot of the abandoned outposts and whatnot are supposed to be left over from "The Colony Wars," but it still doesn't begin to make sense that there are that many such facilities on that many planets.
• So much time was invested in the outpost-building mechanics, and yet there's absolutely no reason to build any outposts, mostly because . . .
• There are no survival mechanics at all. Fuel isn't even any sort of consideration. It should have been an option for the player.
• For all the excitement that flying your own ship and fighting other ships is supposed to generate, you fundamentally don't fly anything at all. You just rotate a view window.
• I do like some of the world-building and lore, but it's very . . . bland? You've got a couple of factions and about 200 years of history, but nothing approaching the richness of, say, Mass Effect or even Bethesda's own Fallout games. Other than the immediate problem with the "Starborn," there are no real mysteries, conflicts, or complexity to the universe. You never hear much of anything from the most-interesting sounding faction, House Va'ruun. I assume they're being saved for an expansion.
• In contrast to the sometimes-interesting side quests, I have never been less invested in a game's main storyline. I found its conclusion idiotic--although I allow that there might be some complexities that I haven't had a chance to process.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Oh my god you are actually not kidding. I despair, I truly do despair at the state of this industry.

This is pretty damn humiliating for Steam as a platform. I think they're going to have to explain how the fuck this actually happened because the numbers don't add up.
All I got to say is that if Starfield is the most innovative title our industry can produce, then our industry is dead because over time this type of game is going to run diminishing returns if you kept going. That's the lesson Todd learned by selling Oblivion again with a new coat of paint for what the 8th time now?

 

[Rhobar121]

Oh my god you are actually not kidding. I despair, I truly do despair at the state of this industry.

This is pretty damn humiliating for Steam as a platform. I think they're going to have to explain how the fuck this actually happened because the numbers don't add up.
All I got to say is that if Starfield is the most innovative title our industry can produce, then our industry is dead because over time this type of game is going to run diminishing returns if you kept going. That's the lesson Todd learned by selling Oblivion again with a new coat of paint for what the 8th time now?

If it was a community vote, it explains a lot.
The question is whether it required owning the game or not.
If not, it's probably the work of psycho M$ fans.
They were the ones who mainly defended the game and only because it was an M$ exclusive.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

If it was a community vote, it explains a lot.
The question is whether it required owning the game or not.
If not, it's probably the work of psycho M$ fans.
They were the ones who mainly defended the game and only because it was an M$ exclusive.

Probably right platform evangelicals caused it, lets not also forget that Microsoft are direct competitors with Steam with Gamepass - so in a way this could be seen as sabotage. They need to change it so you have to own the game to vote for it. The fact that they only invalidate smaller indies from this is really unfair, example: I couldn't vote for actual smaller indie games that I liked but didn't own their games. It is a blatant double standard that only benefits AAA studios. So how about we get rid of that shit please.

If a small time Indie wins one of those awards its life changing. If Todd wins he just throws it on the shit pile of worthless shit awards he's received for the past 2 decades, it has no impact at all. These awards should improve the platform for the better, Valve are being idiots.

Really Cocoon was in the finalists again, yeah this is bullshit.
Cities 2.. Really... Can you see there's some clear Publisher fuckery going on here.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Vic it's a time for celebration! Starfield won "Most Innovative Gameplay" award on Steam!

Whole Steam Awards 2023 are jokes except Sifu. You cannot make this shit up.

 

[Vic]

so much cope from the starfield haters khkhkhkhkh

 

[Konjad]

so much cope from the starfield haters khkhkhkhkh

Agreed. Let them seethe. Meanwhile let more prestigious gentlemen enjoy practically the first proper loading simulator

 

[Gargaune]

This is pretty damn humiliating for Steam as a platform. I think they're going to have to explain how the fuck this actually happened because the numbers don't add up.
All I got to say is that if Starfield is the most innovative title our industry can produce, then our industry is dead because over time this type of game is going to run diminishing returns if you kept going.

Guys, maybe we're reading this wrong... Starfield is the most innovative game of 2023 - it took the Bethesda formula and removed the fun exploration! No one's done that before!

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

This is pretty damn humiliating for Steam as a platform. I think they're going to have to explain how the fuck this actually happened because the numbers don't add up.
All I got to say is that if Starfield is the most innovative title our industry can produce, then our industry is dead because over time this type of game is going to run diminishing returns if you kept going.

Guys, maybe we're reading this wrong... Starfield is the most innovative game of 2023 - it took the Bethesda formula and removed the fun exploration! No one's done that before!

Starfield did something very right. The ship building mechanics. Every single piece of the ship you assemble actually have stats. The main problem of starfield is not even the procedural generation. Procedural generation only works with landscapes but fauna,flora buildings are handcrafted and here comes the problem.

They made not enough models to support enough variation to make the game engaging in the long term in fact all it takes is visit 3 planet to start to find copies of the same research facility you found in planet one. For the questing tho (actual questing) is a vast improvement over fallout 4 or Skyrim but again there is not enough content to make the difference.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Starfield did something very right. The ship building mechanics. Every single piece of the ship you assemble actually have stats

There's no point to it when the combat is so terribly bad that the ship stats don't even matter anyway. You can avoid ship combat entirely, Bethesda said that was intentional by design. Its a redundant system designed purely as a gimmick to make people think they didn't just buy a worse version of Fallout 4 with Proc gen. Borderline its just a customizable house in Skyrim that teleports.

But besides the point my gripe was with Valve, and I mentioned even in the VGA thread, its clear something fucky is going on with these votes because the numbers don't add up. When steam is saying certain games are getting sub 10,000 during their lifetime they shouldn't be winning awards, especially if people didn't even play them on that platform to begin with. When voting can be done by pure random people with no verification in place then its prone to abuse. This is why public votes on things like this are inherently flawed and begging to get hijacked. But I care because this shits up the platform even more and creates even worse noise for smaller studios to then have to put up with. If the little guys don't get their chance to kick some ass, everything then goes to publishers and the platform declines in quality overall. We're setting some really shitty precedents.

We should be moving away from consolidated publishing not barreling towards it as an industry. Its not healthy.