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Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

Vic

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The lore specifically mentions that the Earth evacuation was not complete and billions died with it.
where does it say that? In the museum they say they were able to evacuate everybody, just propaganda?
Considering humanity didn't have the interstellar travel going on at the point
that's not true, they had the grav drive already when the earth was dying, where are you getting your information from?
 

Lemming42

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I wonder, do we know the total size of the human population?
The fact that there's just one city per planet adds to the impression that there's few humans left. You'd think that Jemison, being relatively near to Earth and a lush Earth-like planet, would be the choice location for most evacuees. There should be tons of cities all over the planet, but there's only New Atlantis. Same for the other planets.

It really strains credibility that places like Neon have sprung up on otherwise-barren worlds. It'd be like if the only city on Earth was Las Vegas and the rest of the entire planet was empty fields. Neon might have been a bustling city prior to the loss of Earth, but then you'd think it'd be flooded with an absurd number of Earth refugees.

I get the feeling the lore and dialogue might have been subject to hasty rewrites - kind of like how Fo3 is littered with evidence that it was originally intended to be set much earlier than it is.

That bit at the start where Lin says that a lot of the miners think Earth is just a myth doesn't line up with pretty much anything else we're shown. Emil must have given the plot one of his trademark last-minute reworks and fucked 90% of it up in the process, which could explain why the tech level and the human population level are all over the place.
 

Grampy_Bone

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Wandering the world randomly in search of maps
It has to have the most advanced space dogfights seen in a video game as of yet, it has to have a fully simulated economy, it has to be an MMO, it has to have unique Ubisoft styled point of interests on thousands of planets.

Couldn't care less about MMO, and Ubisoft POIs would be decline. What it really needs is Daggerfall's procedural quests (which Starfield kinda has) and the world to support that content (which Starfield does not). "Story quests" are stupid, instead build a "story engine." Picking a faction should be a major decision, and ranking up in that faction should require significant effort but provide commensurate reward. Imagine if you had to do your time as a crewmember before even getting a ship, to eventually commanding a whole fleet.

RPG levels and skills automatically make any game better, just by giving you something to progress towards. That's something NMS lacks. That and the infinite spawning asteroids everywhere really bother me, ruins any sense of the vast openness of space. You're constantly traveling through this wierd fog of rocks and it's stupid. NMS has added a ton more busywork but not a lot more progress; it's too easy to max out your gun and ship and then there's nothing meaningful left to challenge you with.
 

Levenmouth

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Airlocks that take over a dozen seconds to cycle put in random bases everywhere on the open map.

Thank you Todd, very cool game design.
I especially like the one on Cydonia, where you wait for an airlock and then get a loading screen.
I like how doors are still broken when multiple people are using them and we are like, what, 4-5 games in? If someone opens the door, you need to wait for the animation to play until you can walk through it yourself. I don't remember if this happened in Oblivion and FO3 anymore, but it definitely happened in Skyrim and it still is happening in Starfield.
 

Lemming42

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I don't remember if this happened in Oblivion and FO3
As far as I remember, they didn't have animations, NPCs would just fade out of existence when interacting with one and the player would immediately get a loading screen upon using them.

It was always such an amusingly pointless touch to add in Skyrim that actually hindered gameplay, I suppose it's par for the course that the door animations in Starfield are long as fuck and the door remains inoperable for like an extra three seconds after its finished playing.
 

Vyvian

Educated
Joined
Jul 11, 2023
Messages
343
Even by Bethesda's standards (and I'm sorry for putting words "Bethesda" and "standards" in the same sentence) Starfailed is a new low. A grenade exploding in the water doesn't even make a splash in a supposedly AAA game in 2023, really? "B-b-but it doesn't matter, it's an RPG!" Yeah, it's an "RPG" where nobody even reacts to a gun in their face.

What a ridiculously lazy money grab.
Starfield really pushes the technology as per Todd Howard.
Perhaps you need an upgrade.
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
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Mar 16, 2015
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I feel like I already played this game before and was much better...

It was called Fallout 4.

I just don't understand but starfield is just so damn boring, I'm not saying Fallout 4 was the best game ever or anything like that but I am saying is that game is essentially Starfield but much better...

  • Better perks
  • Better combat (VATS was great)
  • Better exploration
  • Better settlements and reason to do them at least thematically
  • You had a radio station full of immersive music
  • Better main quest
  • Better characters
  • Better exposition to the lore and rules of the world
  • Much better intro and clearer objectives
  • Crafting wasn't this confusive BS it is in Starfield
  • You could attach or detach mods from weapons if I remember correctly

I don't know, when does the game get better? Because I don't think it does,searching online, many, many people have expressed how boring this game feels and I feel the same.
Fallout 4 was shit game. Still better than Fo3 but still shit.
Perks are about the same
VATS was always shit, Fo4 finally has a decent FPS combat, Starfield FPS combat is even better.
Different exploration but it was just grey and more grey. And half the houses you could not enter and you were fighting bugs and shit or raiders that looked like bums.
Settlements were a joke. No matter what you did it would always look like a junkyard. And UI and everything was a joke. Sure mods could make it better but you need to compare release version vs Starfield.
Radio was better than what Starfield has (Sarah that goes with you and nags constantly about everything).
Main quest was a joke. I am looking for my kid but let me first spend couple of years doing random shit...
What better characters?! Same joke like in Starfield. Shit in both games.
?! LOL
Intro was cool, I give you that, but after that why do you need clear goals in a Bethesda game?!
Only bad thing about crafting in starfield is that you now got way too many crafting tables for every little thing.
You can do same with mods here.. on a crafting table.. it was same in FO4.
 

GaelicVigil

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 13, 2013
Messages
411
25 hours in and I still don't have any clue as to what the hell is going on in this universe. Apparently there was a war once, but nobody even talks about it. It seems like they tacked the story on post-production and never programmed it into the NPC dialog trees at all. Very surreal.
Talk with "Sarah's contact" in the MAST building and tell him you want to apply for the UC Vanguard. He will send you in the basement, there you will find a museum which will tell the whole story. And if you continue the UC Vanguard faction you will learn more about the world too. Just do quests, they will slowly fill you in about the world.

Yeah, I did that already. That's what I'm talking about. You get the story presented to you in the museum, but nobody outside the museum ever seem to acknowledge this epic war that just happened a few years ago. That's the disconnect I'm referring to. It's like the programmers added the musuem stuff after they programmed all the NPC responses. The NPCs should be bringing up this catastrophe shouldn't they in their speech? Shouldn't we be seeing disabled war veterans? Half-destroyed infrastructures in the cities? A post-war world would not look so clean and pristine as this world does.
 

Vic

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Shouldn't we be seeing disabled war veterans? Half-destroyed infrastructures in the cities? A post-war world would not look so clean and pristine as this world does.
all these randomly generated “abandoned facilities” are from before the war :lol:
 

GaelicVigil

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 13, 2013
Messages
411
If there was recently this massive civil war in Starfield, cities should look more like this:
LL-066%20-%20Kristen%20D.%20Burton.jpg


Not like this:
1694044169_How-to-get-to-New-Atlantis-in-Starfield.jpg


This is something modders should definitely try to fix.
 

Vic

Savant
Undisputed Queen of Faggotry Bethestard
Joined
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Messages
5,760
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[REDACTED]
If there was recently this massive civil war in Starfield, cities should look more like this:
LL-066%20-%20Kristen%20D.%20Burton.jpg


Not like this:
1694044169_How-to-get-to-New-Atlantis-in-Starfield.jpg


This is something modders should definitely try to fix.
I don’t think they had battles on every planet, more likely on fringe planets rather than on their homeworlds. also a lot of the battles happened in space.
 

Ben Zyklon

Educated
Joined
Aug 30, 2023
Messages
116
I feel like I already played this game before and was much better...

It was called Fallout 4.

I just don't understand but starfield is just so damn boring, I'm not saying Fallout 4 was the best game ever or anything like that but I am saying is that game is essentially Starfield but much better...

  • Better perks
  • Better combat (VATS was great)
  • Better exploration
  • Better settlements and reason to do them at least thematically
  • You had a radio station full of immersive music
  • Better main quest
  • Better characters
  • Better exposition to the lore and rules of the world
  • Much better intro and clearer objectives
  • Crafting wasn't this confusive BS it is in Starfield
  • You could attach or detach mods from weapons if I remember correctly

I don't know, when does the game get better? Because I don't think it does,searching online, many, many people have expressed how boring this game feels and I feel the same.
Fallout 4 was shit game. Still better than Fo3 but still shit.
Perks are about the same
VATS was always shit, Fo4 finally has a decent FPS combat, Starfield FPS combat is even better.
Different exploration but it was just grey and more grey. And half the houses you could not enter and you were fighting bugs and shit or raiders that looked like bums.
Settlements were a joke. No matter what you did it would always look like a junkyard. And UI and everything was a joke. Sure mods could make it better but you need to compare release version vs Starfield.
Radio was better than what Starfield has (Sarah that goes with you and nags constantly about everything).
Main quest was a joke. I am looking for my kid but let me first spend couple of years doing random shit...
What better characters?! Same joke like in Starfield. Shit in both games.
?! LOL
Intro was cool, I give you that, but after that why do you need clear goals in a Bethesda game?!
Only bad thing about crafting in starfield is that you now got way too many crafting tables for every little thing.
You can do same with mods here.. on a crafting table.. it was same in FO4.
I think Fallout 3 was better than 4.

Obviously my comment was going to trigger the massive FO1 and 2 fanboys, Im sure those games are great, at some point I will play them but no matter that Starfield has better combat than FO4 in terms of shooting I still had way more fun with that game.
 

Lemming42

Arcane
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Nov 4, 2012
Messages
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If there was recently this massive civil war in Starfield, cities should look more like this:
Did the battles take place on the inhabited planets? It could have been relegated mostly to ship-to-ship battles and outpost worlds. That'd be kind of interesting to explore; the idea that war in the future is less about running at each other with rifles like WW2 and more just a matter of establishing orbital supremacy and winning by default as a result, since spaceship weapons are so powerful that ground combat is a pointless forgone conclusion if you've got ships in orbit, and neither side has a desire to go down and blast civilian settlements.

I agree with you though, there's no real sense of there having just been a war at all.
 

GaelicVigil

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 13, 2013
Messages
411
If there was recently this massive civil war in Starfield, cities should look more like this:
LL-066%20-%20Kristen%20D.%20Burton.jpg


Not like this:
1694044169_How-to-get-to-New-Atlantis-in-Starfield.jpg


This is something modders should definitely try to fix.
I don’t think they had battles on every planet, more likely on fringe planets rather than on their homeworlds. also a lot of the battles happened in space.

Ok, which settlements have any evidence of war destruction whatsoever? And even if places like New Atlantis didn't get affected, there would still be poverty and economic destruction present. There would still be PEOPLE injured or maimed from fighting. There should be depressed homeless veterans in the streets. There should be guards saying things like, "I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took a laser blast to the knee in the war.". But no mention whatsoever anywhere??? Nonsense.

Not buying your explanations. Better explanation is that Bethesda was lazy and tacked the story onto a world they had already finished designing and couldn't be bothered to go back in and make it LOOK like it had been ravaged by war.
 

Lemming42

Arcane
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
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It might actually be worthwhile trying to decode exactly what happened with the plot. As mentioned above, I get the feeling it went through a lot of revisions. The war does seem like something that could have been stitched on at the last minute.

Best theory is that they started with their realistic, down-to-earth, "NASApunk" stuff, realised that was boring and started adding the wild west and cyberpunk towns, realised they had no hook and added the war on, and then fucked around with the timeline to decide exactly when the game was set, and also never figured out the full details behind the evacuation of Earth.
 

Lemming42

Arcane
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Do they have maimings in SF? Seems like the char gen shop lets you do pretty much whatever you want with you body.
If you have the Kid Stuff trait, your parents indicate that they're in relatively old age, even though they're both like 60. So one theory is that medical technology, despite the incredible cosmetic surgery clinics, is not much more advanced than it is right now.

Another theory is that Emil is a dumbass who's shit at writing games.

You're right, the gene clinic things should have a much bigger impact on the world. I was thinking about it quite a bit throughout the game, like everyone should be living to 150 and being strong and healthy, but you still get quests like the one in The Well where the doctor's like "oh I don't even know how to treat stomach bugs, help".
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
21,331
I don't understand why to level up I need to do "challenges" its massively stupid.
You do not. To level up you just need XP. To put more points into skills you already have you need to use them to level them. This system is a mix of Fo4 and Skyrim and it is kind of cool. You no longer grind random useless skills just to level up in general but you still need to do something with skills you took to level up those.
 

Vic

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Undisputed Queen of Faggotry Bethestard
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Ok, which settlements have any evidence of war destruction whatsoever? And even if places like New Atlantis didn't get affected, there would still be poverty and economic destruction present. There would still be PEOPLE injured or maimed from fighting. There should be depressed homeless veterans in the streets.
Well, the infamous "tranny" character was a xenobiologist in the colony war but then xeno stuff and mechs were outlawed after the war, so a lot of people lost their jobs. There are abandonded mech graveyards which indicate to that.
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
21,331
Ok, which settlements have any evidence of war destruction whatsoever? And even if places like New Atlantis didn't get affected, there would still be poverty and economic destruction present. There would still be PEOPLE injured or maimed from fighting. There should be depressed homeless veterans in the streets.
Well, the infamous "tranny" character was a xenobiologist in the colony war but then xeno stuff and mechs were outlawed after the war, so a lot of people lost their jobs. There are abandonded mech graveyards which indicate to that.
There are also those war veterans from Ranger's quest.

Also didn't this war happen like few decades back? With future tech thing can be rebuilt fast.
 

Levenmouth

Cipher
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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
If you have the Kid Stuff trait, your parents indicate that they're in relatively old age, even though they're both like 60. So one theory is that medical technology, despite the incredible cosmetic surgery clinics, is not much more advanced than it is right now.
I don't think that's true. I took that trait and your dad specifically tells you that mom keeps going to the clinic and looking younger all the time, which he does not mind.
 

Vic

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I don't think that's true. I took that trait and your dad specifically tells you that mom keeps going to the clinic and looking younger all the time, which he does not mind.
me too but my mom looks like in her mid 50s, and yeah "dad" said the same about her doing what I assume are only cosmetic touchups, I don't think that tech can reverse aging or she would look younger. It may only work for the player that way.
 

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