Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Oct 2, 2018
Messages
18,911
Location
大同
I'm still not seeing the modding potential for this game beyond basic stuff like "de-fuck Bethesda's shit UI" and "tweak combat values up and down a little bit". The game doesn't have the basic groundwork to support all Skyrim's life sim mods like becoming a farmer or whatever the fuck, NPC beautification mods are a waste of time since there's relatively few NPCs other than "Citizen", etc. The only real big innovation modders could include would be vehicles, which I imagine will be coming in about two weeks despite Todd saying they're impossible or w/e.

It's going to suffer the same fate as Fallout 4 modding, just a bunch of slutty clothes for virtual barbies and MW2 weapon ports, the setting doesn't lend itself to Skyrim tier stuff.
I don't see why not though. People can make custom planets suited towards particular life sim gameplay styles (e.g. aforementioned farming, survivalism in a place with bad habitability and/or stronger hostile aliens etc etc).
 

Moink

Cipher
Joined
Feb 28, 2015
Messages
675
I'm still not seeing the modding potential for this game beyond basic stuff like "de-fuck Bethesda's shit UI" and "tweak combat values up and down a little bit". The game doesn't have the basic groundwork to support all Skyrim's life sim mods like becoming a farmer or whatever the fuck, NPC beautification mods are a waste of time since there's relatively few NPCs other than "Citizen", etc. The only real big innovation modders could include would be vehicles, which I imagine will be coming in about two weeks despite Todd saying they're impossible or w/e.

It's going to suffer the same fate as Fallout 4 modding, just a bunch of slutty clothes for virtual barbies and MW2 weapon ports, the setting doesn't lend itself to Skyrim tier stuff.
I don't see why not though. People can make custom planets suited towards particular life sim gameplay styles (e.g. aforementioned farming, survivalism in a place with bad habitability and/or stronger hostile aliens etc etc).
The question is "can they?", there's no modding tools out yet, we don't know what people can do.
 

Lemming42

Arcane
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
Messages
6,769
Location
The Satellite Of Love
I don't see why not though. People can make custom planets suited towards particular life sim gameplay styles (e.g. aforementioned farming, survivalism in a place with bad habitability and/or stronger hostile aliens etc etc).
The thing is, it'll all be so disjointed. With Skyrim you can integrate something like farming because it fits into the world, you can make all the existing objects interactible and give them new purposes, so you can have some new mechanic where the ground starts randomly spawning gourds or w/e the fuck and the player can "harvest" them and sell them.

But with Starfield there's just no real consistent world as there is with Skyrim, so a farming mod would end up focusing on one planet, or otherwise revolve only around the player, who would own the only farm(s) in the galaxy. (To be fair, there's one other farm in the Rangers questline, but I'm not sure how it could be integrated).

Skyrim also lends itself so well to thousands of great minor mods that make the world a little bit more interesting, just things like adding birds to the skies. With Starfield it's hard to imagine how these game-wide mods could work, given the range of empty planets.

The fact that "official" modding support isn't coming until next year at some point is going to kneecap it just like Fallout 4 as well.
Wtf, no Creation Kit til 2024? Todd's business decisions are consistently some of the worst in the industry. They should have had the CK ready to go on release and let people get stuck in immediately fixing the game.
 

Vic

Savant
Undisputed Queen of Faggotry Bethestard
Joined
Oct 24, 2018
Messages
5,678
Location
[REDACTED]
It's always hard to tell if there's meant to be a class element to this setting
of course. It’s capitalism. People owning businesses like the rich guy in Constellation, then you have all the poors living in The Well and miners working for little pay. expensive restaurants for the rich, and Chunks for the poor. etc.
 

Jaesun

Fabulous Ex-Moderator
Patron
Joined
May 14, 2004
Messages
37,381
Location
Seattle, WA USA
MCA Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech
As someone who has actually played No Man's Sky, I found this amusing:

I tried Starfield and refunded it. It's no NMS.
I gave Starfield 2.5 hours and that's all it took. What a waste of money. No Man's Sky looks way better, plays way better and is actually fun when you start it. With as many hours as I have in NMS, I still get that "What's in this system?" feeling. I get the "Explorer" feeling. Watching my ship land in a cut scene in Starfield was so disappointing for me because it really hit home that Starfield is not a space sim. You do not get to actually fly your spaceship in Starfield. NMS's most boring lifeless planet is a carnival compared to the soul crushing blandness of the first planet i stepped on (after not landing my spaceship myself). I was hoping Starfield was going to be NMS 2.0 but as a space sim NMS is lights years beyond the college project called Starfield
https://steamcommunity.com/app/275850/discussions/0/3815166994159628990/
 
Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Oct 2, 2018
Messages
18,911
Location
大同
The quest is "can they?", there's no modding tools out yet, we don't know what people can do.
Most likely I'd wager. Skyrim was done in the same engine, so I don't see why Starfield would be any different in regards to overall modding capabilities.

Skyrim also lends itself so well to thousands of great minor mods that make the world a little bit more interesting, just things like adding birds to the skies. With Starfield it's hard to imagine how these game-wide mods could work, given the range of empty planets.
I wouldn't be surprised if modders will be able to mess with the procgen stuff itself once the modding tools are released tbh. Perhaps that's why it's taking so long for the creation kit to be released in the first place.
 

GaelicVigil

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 13, 2013
Messages
304
As someone who has actually played No Man's Sky, I found this amusing:

I tried Starfield and refunded it. It's no NMS.
I gave Starfield 2.5 hours and that's all it took. What a waste of money. No Man's Sky looks way better, plays way better and is actually fun when you start it. With as many hours as I have in NMS, I still get that "What's in this system?" feeling. I get the "Explorer" feeling. Watching my ship land in a cut scene in Starfield was so disappointing for me because it really hit home that Starfield is not a space sim. You do not get to actually fly your spaceship in Starfield. NMS's most boring lifeless planet is a carnival compared to the soul crushing blandness of the first planet i stepped on (after not landing my spaceship myself). I was hoping Starfield was going to be NMS 2.0 but as a space sim NMS is lights years beyond the college project called Starfield
https://steamcommunity.com/app/275850/discussions/0/3815166994159628990/

I agree. Even setting aside the "fun factor", NMS is a far bigger technical achievement than Stafield. I am not impressed by static set pieces and instanced cells which Startfield is loaded with.

Empyrion Galactic Survival, to me, is more fun to me than NMS.

Spacebourne 2 is better than Starfield, and that game is still in early access with ONE GUY developing it.
 

Fedora Master

STOP POSTING
Patron
Edgy
Joined
Jun 28, 2017
Messages
31,127
The game manages to appeal to nobody except undiscerning Skyrim fans. It's not a good space game, it's not a good crafting/building/survival game, it's not a good shooter.
 

Lord of Riva

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 16, 2018
Messages
2,854
Strap Yourselves In Pathfinder: Wrath
The game manages to appeal to nobody except undiscerning Skyrim fans. It's not a good space game, it's not a good crafting/building/survival game, it's not a good shooter.

Thats basically it. Now we do not need to pretend it's utter shit but why play it when there is better stuff around, especially with a 70$ price tag.

I mean having it on gamepass is a good thing I guess.
 
Last edited:

Moink

Cipher
Joined
Feb 28, 2015
Messages
675
The game manages to appeal to nobody except undiscerning Skyrim fans.
People really liked that A-B "you can climb that mountain" adventure in Skyrim and this game replaces all of that with a bad menu system and fast travel, so I'm not sure it even appeals to the most casual Skyrim player.
 

Grampy_Bone

Arcane
Joined
Jan 25, 2016
Messages
3,905
Location
Wandering the world randomly in search of maps
Last edited:

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,467
Clearly, No Man's Sky faced a lot of criticism upon release, but they continued to work on it, and the planet exploration it offers is far superior to anything Starfield provides. In No Man's Sky, you can fully explore planets, even terraform them a bit to establish your bases. There's a tremendous variety and some truly alien landscapes to discover. Plus, there are legitimate reasons to build outposts.
The planet exploration is entirely unique within video games and if you have the
be06833ee18a2857e484ceci8j.jpg
it might be enough for you, but I think there are many space game enthusiasts who aren't happy unless they get the Star Citizen as promised by Chris Roberts. 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. You can't just find a neat planet in NMS, land on it, interact with the wildlife, find some unmarked place that's neat and then take off. That isn't content. Content is when you speak to a character and get a checkbox and then go to a bandit camp in space, clear it out and get a purple item. It also has to be a great first person shooter (impossible with modern game design and fidelity, extra impossible with procgen).

They're retarded because they will shit on all the games that do one part of this great. No Man's Sky has the best procedurally generated content on the market, seamless space to planet landings, no load times, etc. Outer Wilds has the best handcrafted content and science fiction plot since games in the 90's and people are shitting on it for not being Elite or something, idk, it got a pretty bad response in the Codex thread last time I checked.

Then they get first person Diablo in space, now with extra loading screens and none of the features that made the TES series noteworthy and they gobble it up. They can even shit out a turd of political agitation on top of the goyslop stew and they'll still slurp it up. Or they'll sign over their entire bank account to Christ Roberts who's selling jpegs instead of jerry rigging netimmerse to make a woke "space" game.

The major fuckup of Sean Murray was making a game that was at all appealing to this crowd.
Yes, people were far too harsh with No Man's Sky, which was still a project by a small indie developer. I thought No Man's Sky was too streamlined, but in Starfield, there's no atmospheric entry, no flying over planets—nothing. They aren't even bothering with it. And we're talking about a game with a considerable budget, many years of development, many hires, and massive outsourcing. It's bound to human nature to be dissatisfied, but we certainly should have appreciated more all those indies who were even running on potato PCs.
 

Lemming42

Arcane
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
Messages
6,769
Location
The Satellite Of Love
NMS had its problems and I wasn't a fan but retrospectively it was a very obvious example of people just designating a game as bad as a meme, and dogpiling on it for cool points with internet strangers. Seems to happen a lot lately, people just pick on random games that come out and pile in on them as the single worst thing ever created. That's not to excuse Murray's lies and false promises of course.

It's pretty tiring, I don't remember the culture around gaming being like this back in the 2000s even though a lot of the games coming out were way worse than shit like NMS. The only game I remember thinking got unfairly slated in a big way back in the day was Daikatana, which wasn't anywhere near as bad as people made out (though not great).
 

Steezus

Savant
Patron
Joined
Jul 7, 2018
Messages
761
The game manages to appeal to nobody except undiscerning Skyrim fans.
People really liked that A-B "you can climb that mountain" adventure in Skyrim and this game replaces all of that with a bad menu system and fast travel, so I'm not sure it even appeals to the most casual Skyrim player.

Give it a bit time, a lot of people are dealing with sunk cost fallacy at the moment, lol.

In a year, you'll see a bunch of think pieces and video essays how Starfield, was in fact, not a good game. Unless people actualy create fun worlds or total conversions like Enderal, not even mods are gonna fix the empty and unexciting mess that Starfield is.
 

Hellraiser

Arcane
Joined
Apr 22, 2007
Messages
11,685
Location
Danzig, Potato-Hitman Commonwealth
...you're saying NMS is a worse version of Elite than Starfield is?

I'm saying NMS is worse than Starfield as far as fucking around in space enjoyably living out whatever childhood space ship adventure fantasy through the game mechanics. However I'm not evaluating if either is a direct replacement or improvement of Elite, despite the obvious influences and shared concepts in both, as it wasn't mentioned as a point of reference for your original claim. And if your claim wasn't specifically only about NMS, which I consider a textbook example of game designers having no idea how to make a game out of their ideas and tech, I wouldn't bother responding because besides boarding actions AFAIK Starfield doesn't really do anything better than older titles didn't already do.

Which is irrelevant since you're probably going to be fast traveling to locations rather than using your ship in Wokefield. Since you're actually using your ship to get around in NMS this part of the game is functional and important, even if it obviously isn't the focus of the game. You can do the usual Elite stuff, dogfights, space trading and such, but it's essentially a means to get you from planet to planet. In the space combat sim department there are countless games that do it better than Todd's masterpiss so I don't know why you'd play either that or No Man's Sky if that's what you are after.

It's not irrelevant if that's what the player wants to do it and can pick missions to do it and can get rewarded for it, obviously they won't abuse fast travel in the case they choose the combat route.

Sure, you can fire up your space combat sim of choice for the billionth time or list other games that do it or something else better, but that's irrelevant to the subject as your original point which I contest is that NMS on launch was a better space game than Starfield. You yourself are arguing NMS is a great interactive wallpaper, that's a completely different thing.

They don't, there are no planets, there is just the one biome in the square that is being generated. This is important since they don't need to blend between biomes.

Wrong, they do blend within the tile, below is an example although I found such myself a few times, and it is clear that the underlying noise function for biome works in a resolution similar to their terrain heightmap of the tile's terrain. It is however not that easy to find by accident and requires trial and error even when the player is deliberately looking for it (and lots of walking), as the UI does only show one biome when you select the landing location (so probably lazily they just sampled noise in the top/left, because anything else like 4 corner sampling and printing out combination in the UI would require actual effort).

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1695ej9/outpost_resource_tip_look_for_locations_where/

As for gas giants, of course they do nothing, but you also can't do anything with stars so why the fuck put them into a space game? In both cases the value added is in asethetics and the resemblence to actual space.

Same for biomes anyway, or the distinction between a moon and a planet, from a game design point of view they don't add much (well unless you go into some KSP-like direction with "realistic" rocket ships and travel times). Both add to the illusion of it being space, and as much as I loathe immersion cultists here is one example where I agree with them. Due to exposure to space-related media (and possibly autism) over my own lifetime space without some features just feels wrong. Space needs to have gas giants with shitloads of moons and moonlets around them, damn it.

So what? There are no space games with interesting things to do in them.

So impressive tech that adds nothing to improve the gameplay is not an argument claiming that game X was a better game than Y is.

Either the multiplayer is enough for you or the format is just inherently not for you. Starshit doesn't have multiplayer so you're doing the brainless basebuilding from Minecarft/Conan Exiles/Rust/Sons of the Forest/Whatever the fuck without the company of others, making it pointless.

I don't see how multiplayer is relevant to the context of this discussion, NMS at release also did not have actual multiplayer where you directly interact with other people.
 
Last edited:

Fedora Master

STOP POSTING
Patron
Edgy
Joined
Jun 28, 2017
Messages
31,127
No, NMS is a fundamentally flawed idea because ProcGen can not replace actual content and farming endlessly for minor improvements isn't fun when done wrong.
 

Robotigan

Learned
Joined
Jan 18, 2022
Messages
420
Skyrim also lends itself so well to thousands of great minor mods that make the world a little bit more interesting, just things like adding birds to the skies. With Starfield it's hard to imagine how these game-wide mods could work, given the range of empty planets.
Like I said before, Starfield will incorporate mods really well precisely because it is an empty procedural game. This game will probably be the undisputed space adventure game once DLC/mods add in a survival mode and more radiant locations/events.
 

Darkwind

Augur
Patron
Joined
Aug 1, 2019
Messages
579
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
I agree 100%. EVERY SINGLE system in Starfield is underwhelming compared to Fallout 4 (even Fallout 3). I'm 25 hours in and the game has gotten worse, not better.

Character progression is screwy. I don't feel at all like I'm getting better at anything in the game. Like, there is no impact to what I'm upgrading really. Sure, I've found a couple better guns, but I'm at level 10 and I still feel as strong as I did at level 1. Suits have not gotten better at all. I'm still using the same 3 suits I found from level 2.

These planets are much more boring than even No Man's Sky (and even those planets were boring). Even the ones with life on them feel janky. A bunch of random alien creatures running around in circles and rocks to scan. Ok...

Storylines are terrible. Okay, Vanguard and Crimson fleet were alright...but those are the exceptions to an ocean of trash. I signed up for the Rangers and these missions are just the most bland things ever.

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.

Nothing catastrophic or epic ever happens in this game. I mean in Skryim you had a dragon invasion. In Oblivion you had the demonic invasion. But this game is just, bland. Main story is an endless fetch quest so far. I assume at some point things get much more interesting, but I haven't seen it yet. I've gone from collecting dragon bones...errr artifacts to shout powers (Skyrim much?). So boring.

I could go on and on. I haven't even mentioned the loading screens, stiff NPC animations, boring settlements, load screens, pointless, and I MEAN POINTLESS space and spaceships.

This is a very good encapsulation of Negrofield™. You echoed most of my own thoughts and I'm pushing up on 40 hours in now so I think I have a really good handle on the gameplay, story, NPC, overall mechanics, itemization, etc.

I highlighted the items of particular note in your text. Storyline is my biggest gripe as well. You have TWO decent questlines and then Ryujin which totally erases any goodwill you developed from Crimson Fleet or Vanguard by sending you on endless fetch quests for the ENTIRE fucking questline so some dyke looking short haired 'HR lady' turbo bitches can have their corporate cat-fight.

In some ways, that is probably the most realistic questline in the game because it mimics pretty much any major corporation circa 2023. Married to their job, childless, soulless, short-haired corporate Karens endlessly clawing at promotions in a company that doesn't give 2 fucks about them until they die alone surrounded by cats.

I'm still using the Mantis armor I also got below level 10, I'm level 30 BTW. :-/ Nothing has come close to it, and I'm flying the Kepler B a big ugly ship that I also got very early on in a main questline. Mechanically, its stats far exceed any other ship you find or would get as a reward. So if I'm doing quests its not for progression, its simply to advance a mediocre story.

Bethesda has never been good at this because the sandbox has always been their thing but it wasn't so egregious in the past. Fallout 4 I think was the turning point because you could get some seriously good gear during the first DeathClaw fight which was basically the intro. The Minutemen / Preston Garvey intro fight. This gear invalidated lots of other gear for many levels. They took this awful idea and dialed it up to 11 in Starfield where you are literally getting Legendary gold items at level 10 or below that far supercede anything you are picking up at level 20 or 30.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom