Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[Inec0rn]

246 pages for this game?!

 

[Robotigan]

Bethesda have no idea whatsoever why people like their games. People want more interactivity, mechanics and life sim elements in order to create their own narratives using all the systems the game offers. That trailer basically offers none of that, but just another storyline that will play out in the same script-heavy questlines in all their other games.

You've more or less restated the thesis of Emil's K.I.S.S. talk. Incredible, we've come full circle.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Playing the game again now and I'm 100% reinforced in my opinion that this should have been a regular FPS. The open world stuff drags it down.

The main problem with Starfield is precisely that it isn't Open World, instead offering empty procedurally-generated environments with at best 3 or 4 type of alien fauna to shoot at and generally not even that. Bethesda gutted the ludic model established by Morrowind and had nothing worthwhile to replace it with. Rather than attempting to substitute procedural blandness for hand-crafted content, Bethesda should have set out to create ten or so habitable planets, each of which would offer a sizable Open World area in the style of Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 (though less dense with content, to make them somewhat more realistic for the setting), but without attempting to actually simulate an entire planet. The game could still have occasionally directed the player to lifeless rocks, but these would be detours from the main action in the true, populated Open World environments. These would have offered the same kind of exploration as in Bethesda's previous Open World RPGs, with similar hand-crafted settlements and dungeon-substitutes, and a variety of enemies rather than fighting the same spacers over and over again.

 

[ind33d]

Playing the game again now and I'm 100% reinforced in my opinion that this should have been a regular FPS. The open world stuff drags it down.

The main problem with Starfield is precisely that it isn't Open World, instead offering empty procedurally-generated environments with at best 3 or 4 type of alien fauna to shoot at and generally not even that. Bethesda gutted the ludic model established by Morrowind and had nothing worthwhile to replace it with. Rather than attempting to substitute procedural blandness for hand-crafted content, Bethesda should have set out to create ten or so habitable planets, each of which would offer a sizable Open World area in the style of Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 (though less dense with content, to make them somewhat more realistic for the setting), but without attempting to actually simulate an entire planet. The game could still have occasionally directed the player to lifeless rocks, but these would be detours from the main action in the true, populated Open World environments. These would have offered the same kind of exploration as in Bethesda's previous Open World RPGs, with similar hand-crafted settlements and dungeon-substitutes, and a variety of enemies rather than fighting the same spacers over and over again.

I read that Beth didn't realize in development that a lot of the POIs were leveled, so that meant that instead of seeing random points of interest from the full list, they would only show you five or six points of interest that matched your current character level, causing repetitive gameplay. They said they're fixing this by Shattered Space

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Starfield is what happens if you take Nu-Bethesda's games as an amusement park formula.

And replace the attractions with empty rocks of dust.

What's gonna happen? The tourists feeling rather ripped.

 

[markec]

They should have made Skyrim in space with vast majority of game being set on a single handcrafted planet. But Todd wanted to make his dream game that involves space explorations and a freedom to explore a huge universe.

 

[ind33d]

They should have made Skyrim in space with vast majority of game being set on a single handcrafted planet. But Todd wanted to make his dream game that involves space explorations and a freedom to explore a huge universe.

it would have been much better if Starfield had just been ES6 but the twist was that halfway through you obtain a teleportation spell to visit other planets, although I'm sure it would have been leaked

 

[Butter]

They should have made Skyrim in space with vast majority of game being set on a single handcrafted planet. But Todd wanted to make his dream game that involves space explorations and a freedom to explore a huge universe.

it would have been much better if Starfield had just been ES6 but the twist was that halfway through you obtain a teleportation spell to visit other planets, although I'm sure it would have been leaked

There's no way they could resist the urge to put that all over the promotional materials, and in the first 30 minutes of gameplay. These are the people who made Skyrim and Fallout 4.

 

[Frozen]

Playing the game again now and I'm 100% reinforced in my opinion that this should have been a regular FPS. The open world stuff drags it down. All the good stuff, all the stuff that's had care and attention put into it and which is actually fun to play, is in the faction questlines. There isn't any reason for this to have been anything other than a standard FPS game with no backtracking and no open world.

But Todd really wanted to make some kind of Starflight thing and I guess Bethesda felt they had to make something that vaguely resembled the game they've been making over and over since Morrowind, so you end up with an unholy combination of lots of shit that doesn't work. It's Starflight 35 years too late, it's Skyrim with no exploration, it's an FPS with fifty loading screens and hubs between missions.

I feel sorry for you if you think that is what a good shooter looks like.

What they should do with every next update of prehistoric gamebryo is to sell it as a toolkit and suckers should make their own games.

It's mostly what people do anyway with every next shitty entry of more of the same (aka Fallout, TES) - first ignore main quest and call head cannon a feature then they wait for 10y so modders make it playable.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

One word: Shatterfield.

 

[Moink]

246 pages for this game?!

Half the fun of Bethesda games is breaking down what went wrong.

 

[ind33d]

246 pages for this game?!

Half the fun of Bethesda games is breaking down what went wrong.

the only problem is that you're railroaded into constellation instead of able to pick different occult orders with varying belief systems. maybe they had intended you to choose between Constellation and House Varuun in dev but ran out of time like how Deus Ex had unfinished content about staying with UNATCO

 

[Inec0rn]

They wanted to release this game a year earlier than when it actually released. MS had to step in and delay the game, they really thought they had a slam dunk on their hands. There's nothing really redeemable in this game, If I'm MS I would be very concerned with the exec's and project leads that ran this production.

- a recycled and very boring predictable story.
- recycled skyrim shout mechanics, so uninspired.
- inconconsistent and ugly graphics at times, pretty standard for this studio.
- poor performance for what it is, standard Beth release.
- Broken itemisation, again standard fair.
- accentuating the engines limitations in loading areas to the point where tedious and a serious problem.
- launched years after other games already launched doing more and outperforming their own game.
- the tacked on space flight (maybe the only new thing they added to the core Bethesda gameplay loop) is worse mechanically than early space sims from 1991.
- a complete waste of the setting, you have 3 decades to dream up new IP - not even aliens.
- delayed creation kit another massive exec fail.

The only good thing the game had was an interesting art-style, and I think the writing would have been on the wall merely a year or so into production warranting it be cancelled. They also screwed Arcane and sunk likely a 200+ million in that out of touch vampire disaster.. this company has to be in serious trouble right?

It doesn't seem hard to me, release tools in alignment with the community, aim to better support your community. They can literally navigate the nexus and list by download to see what their customers want in the next game. They also need to fix or add some semblance of in-engine cutscenes for their story as well, this has not seen any change in the engine since Morrowind.

 

[ind33d]

They wanted to release this game a year earlier than when it actually released. MS had to step in and delay the game, they really thought they had a slam dunk on their hands. There's nothing really redeemable in this game, If I'm MS I would be very concerned with the exec's and project leads that ran this production.

- a recycled and very boring predictable story.
- recycled skyrim shout mechanics, so uninspired.
- inconconsistent and ugly graphics at times, pretty standard for this studio.
- poor performance for what it is.
- Broken itemisation although this is kind of standard Beth fair.
- accentuates the engines limitations in loading areas to the point to the point where tedious and a serious problem.
- launched years after other games already launched doing more and outperforming their own game.
- the tacked on space flight (maybe the only new thing they added to the core Bethesda gameplay loop) is worse mechanically than early space sims from 1991.
- a complete waste of the setting, you have 3 decades to dream up new IP - not even aliens.
- delayed creation kit another massive exec fail.

The only good thing the game had was an interesting art-style, and I think the writing would have been on the wall merely a year or so into production warranting it be cancelled. They also screwed Arcane and sunk likely a 200+ million in that out of touch vampire disaster.. this company has to be in serious trouble right?

i wouldn't be surprised if MS stepped in to purposely make the game worse. Elder Scrolls has multiple races. there is no conceivable way Starfield was not intended to have aliens and survival mechanics

 

[Lemming42]

I feel sorry for you if you think that is what a good shooter looks like.

Few could conceieve of the shitty shooters I have played. I've battled through the likes of Forbes Corporate Warrior, The Stalin Subway, and Mortyr. Next to those, Starfield is a class act.

Nah it's not great but it's solid enough to work as a "here's something we've shoved on Steam for 40 quid, please buy it" FPS title if the chaff were removed, while it doesn't work on any level as "the next Skyrim" or w/e it's meant to be.

 

[processdaemon]

New animated trailer for Shattered Space. I'm kind of interested in House Va'ruun generally but I don't really see anything in it to get excited over, although I'm probably not the best person to comment since the artstyle put me off from the start.

 

[Fedora Master]

246 pages for this game?!

Buyers remorse is a hell of mental state

 

[ind33d]

I prefer to explore in Bethesda games. I can create my own story while playing in their worlds. Starfield couldnt even do that right.

has there ever been any j*wish references in a sweetbaby game? i can't think of one. does sweetbaby actually just remove all references to religion and spirituality under the guise of "diversity," and bethesda turned them down so Starfield got review bombed?

 

[ind33d]

Forgot that I wrote a review of Starfield that never came out because the gaming journalism website I wrote for fired my honky ass to increase its diversity quotient. Enjoy!

Starfield Review: The Kingdom of Heaven is Loading

“Be careful not to choke on your aspirations.” Darth Vader​

Captain’s log, stardate September 6, 2023: Bethesda Game Studios boldly voyages where no developer has gone before. While Bioware’s Mass Effect proved that there was room in the galaxy for a AAA sci-fi roleplaying experience and Frontier’s Elite: Dangerous warped flight sims into the 21st century, combining as many genres as there are planets into a seamless open world was Todd Howard’s most ambitious vision yet. Unfortunately, Bethesda’s eyes were bigger than their interns.

“It just works.” Todd​

Starfield is a lot of things, arguably too many: a mediocre dogfighter, a middling truck simulator, a mindless looter shooter. Worst of all, it’s boring. Every design decision feels coldly calculated to be as inoffensive as possible—Fallout’s dismemberment and edgy humor were jettisoned out the airlock—which is especially insane considering this game is rated M for Mature. Helium-3 refueling? Evaporated. Survival mode? Vaporized. Astrogation? The closest you get to watching a NASA launch is watching the uninstall bar. Not a space opera: a space school play.

Never A Straight Answer​

Many unfazed fans set their sights on Emil Pagliaro’s script. True, it is a retread of the same fantasy tropes we’ve seen hundreds of times before: a chosen one, a mystery box, a blonde sidekick. But Bethesda’s writing has always been less-than-stellar. The Elder Scrolls was never about quests; it was about your character. In theory, Starfield’s unspoken lore and unfathomable plot would be the perfect tabula rasa on which an incoming traveler could scrawl his own legend. In practice, this multiverse is so boring that nobody would want to.

It’s a small world, after all.​

Touching down on a virgin planet in Starfield feels like shopping at a looted Walmart. Three abandoned mining platforms, two NPCs asking for help repairing a radio, one scannable species of fruit. Daggerfall-style procedural generation just doesn’t cut it in a post-Breath of the Wild world. Even if patches knocked down the invisible walls and added vehicles, there’s nowhere to drive. Whereas every inch of Morrowind was crafted with a coherent art direction and a consistent theme, Starfield feels like a merry-go-round that Bethesda is too short to ride.

“Compassion: that’s the one thing no machine ever had.” McCoy​

To say Starfield might be generated by artificial intelligence is like saying Firefly might be best TV show ever made. Deep down, we all know it’s true. The scope of modern games is simply too large for one studio to handle, manifesting in Destiny 2’s spaghetti code and Baldur’s Gate 3’s conspicuously absent third act. On the other hand, auteurs like Hideo Kojima can tie together even bizarre and experimental titles like Death Stranding. Starfield feels like a focus group trying to land on the moon using decolonized math.

“It is impossible to live in the past.” Frank Herbert​

Too complex for casuals but too simple for grognards, Starfield feels as though it were recovered from a time capsule buried in 1999. Long-time Beth fans will feel lost in space, since Skyrimesque freeform exploration is gated behind an eternity of loading screens. Meanwhile, Game Pass players can’t dedicate the hundreds of hours it takes to build outposts and optimize their starfleet, especially considering how many bugs they’ll have to stomp to get there. Gamebryo’s glitches may have been funny back in the Bush years, but today they just look amateurish next to techno-marvels like Cyberpunk 2077.

“Great, kid. Don’t get cocky.” Han Solo​

Starfield has its strengths. Faction questlines like the Crimson Fleet and Ryujin Industries are best-in-class, rivaling Oblivion’s Dark Brotherhood. Shipbuilding can be more addictive than Amp, although the best reactors and missile launchers and gravity drives are gated behind obnoxious level requirements. If you enjoyed Fallout 4, you’ll love the gunplay, considering it’s identical. The perk tree and challenges are good enough for government work: you can make any spacer you can imagine, from an intimidating smuggler to a pickpocketing roboticist. There’s even some minor choice and consequence, plus New Game Plus.

Ludicrous Speed​

Boarding a hostile Big Rig with your crewmates, zero gravity shootouts in an abandoned casino, sneaking contraband past a UC scanner—there’s a lot of fun to be had in Starfield. Is there $69.99 worth of fun? That’s up to you to decide. Once the Creation Kit lands, modders will repair most of the game’s problems. Already, freelancers have added an in-game radio, a PC-centric user interface, the Mandalorian’s armor. Thanks to recent advancements in art generation and text-to-speech, content creation’s barrier to entry has never been lower. The sky is the limit.

“We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.” Mal​

Overall, Starfield is technically competent. After 50 hours of gameplay across the Steam Deck and two different computers, we experienced only one bug. During the Showdown mission, a quest NPC was downed in a firefight and halted our progress. A quick console command resurrected him and triggered his dialogue. Had we been on Xbox instead of PC, we would have been out of luck. Controls and performance on Deck were acceptable and will only improve with further optimization. Though the graphics are unremarkable, even underpowered hardware maintains a stable framerate. We also tested DLSS but found frame generation to be too visually distracting to merit the increased FPS.

Hope for the Future​

Starfield’s Shattered Space DLC should energize sometime in 2024. Be sure to make space on your calendar for this expansion pack. Details are scarce, but fans suspect it will reintroduce much of the cut content from House Varuun. After the title’s troubled development cycle and a tragic showing at The Game Awards, we hope that, like Phantom Liberty, Shattered Space will right the ship.

Final Verdict: 4/5

It’s no masterpiece, yet. Hopefully, the DLC will make it so.

 

[Jaesun]

4/5? Really?

 

[Late Bloomer]

Forgot that I wrote a review of Starfield that never came out because the gaming journalism website I wrote for fired my honky ass to increase its diversity quotient. Enjoy!

It seems like you fit one of the diversity check boxes (homosexual), since you actually enjoyed this game as a white dude. Only homos and blacks (and those that worship them) like this dogshit game, as that is clearly who it was made for.

 

[Modron]

4/5? Really?

Indeed.

 

[Inec0rn]

Bethesda Game Studios boldly voyages where no developer has gone before?
Starfield’s unspoken lore and unfathomable plot..
Starfield feels as though it were recovered from a time capsule buried in 1999?
4/5?

troll or maybe never played a videogame before?

 

[ind33d]

4/5? Really?

Any game that ships with mod tools should get bonus points added to the review score. I think Halo Infinite was underrated for similar reasons because journalists never got to see Forge before submitting their reviews: there were some superb custom maps nobody played. How good vanilla Bethesda games are is irrelevant anyway; people will install like 100 mods.

 

[Yoomazir]

Bethesda Game Studios boldly voyages where no developer has gone before?
Starfield’s unspoken lore and unfathomable plot..
Starfield feels as though it were recovered from a time capsule buried in 1999?
4/5?

troll or maybe never played a videogame before?

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