Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[Lemming42]

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.

It's hard to immediately see how this'll work. The problem with this game IMO is that it's a standard Bethesda game, but it's been badly transplanted into a totally different game. Logically, it should have taken place on a few small maps across a handful of planets (like The Outer Worlds) but instead it's got this half-implemented procgen stuff that not only doesn't really gel with the meat of the game, but stands in contrast to it, hence a lot of players becoming bored because the game they actually want to play keeps getting interrupted with space travel and visiting systems that have nothing in. People want to go exploring dungeons and an overworld like in previous Bethesda games, instead they're getting less than half the number of dungeons, no overworld, and a badly-done fast travel menu that keeps forcing itself on you.

The game is basically Skyrim except instead of giving you everything in one medium-sized, well-designed map, it's all spread out. It'd be like if, rather than walking from Riverwood to Bleak Falls Barrow, you had to go to a map screen twice and sit through four loading screens before being teleported directly to the entrance of the dungeon. The way to fix the game would be to eliminate that pointless busywork, not expand upon it. I legit think the best Starfield mod would be one that just reduces the scope of the game by about 95% and changes the galaxy menu to an Outer Worlds style one that just lets you visit the four main populated worlds. Then it'd be a question of populating those worlds with things to do.

 

[Vic]

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.

it will have overall less mods than skyrim and then tes6 simply because the scifi setting is less popular than fantasy

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[Gargaune]

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.

It's quite possible, we had to wait like four or five months last time around with Fallout 4. I just wish Todd would fucking tell us already.

 

[Star Citizen]

Man, fuck this era and timeline of garbage shit. What a fucking joke we even have to discuss this trash.

 

[Star Citizen]

Like laughing at how terrible shit is expired by Oblivion's time already. Fuck everything.

 

[darkpatriot]

The Freestar quests are super dumb.

-Get a mission to hunt down some mercs, they are actually holdouts from the war who feel betrayed by the government. Cool! You can choose to switch sides and join... ha ha ha, no, just shoot them.
-After shooting all their leaders they stop and say "wait don't you want to know the horrible secret behind the attacks?" but still no option to work with them, they just give a slate you can get anyway by killing them.
-One mission involves a merc who checked into a hospital under a fake name, she reprograms the turrets to attack the staff and kills a doctor. No option to tell anyone there's dead staff in the secure ward or alert anyone or have any kind of reaction at all. Just stroll off the station and for all they know you shot the doctors. The bad guy conveniently leaves a note behind with her exact location.
-Turns out the Evil White Businessman (EWBM) was behind it all! What a tweest.
-You go to confront the guy alone with no backup (???) (he's also in the government!)
-Options are arrest or take a bribe. Arrest always resulted in a fight no matter what I did.
-Casually shoot the head of a major shipbuilder and a governor.
-Go back to the Marshal, tell him you shot the governor and CEO of a company based on a note you found on a dead rebel. No other evidence or witnesses provided to back up the claim, but that's still good enough for the Marshal. Get your ranger badge and a free awesome ship.
-Faction complete!

The free ship you get is ridiculous, all ship design level 4 parts but still rank A so anyone can fly it. Better than anything I've even seen available to build. This is something that you really should have had to work up to over many different quests and climbing up through multiple ranks, not just the one and only promotion.

In short, Bethesda being Bethesda.

A simple sidequest grants you the razorleaf, one of the best ship too, for nothing as well as mantis gear you will never have to upgrade, far far too easily.

Ironically, for me there was a bounty hunter armor suit in the mantis base which offers much better protection than the mantis suit that was one of the two big rewards for the quest. I assume it was randomized loot, but I am still wearing that Bounty Hunter suit while I sold the mantis suit off. Same with the ship. My current ship was already better so I sold off the quest reward ship.

That may be because I did that quest at a higher level than they normally intend for you to do it.

 

[Gargaune]

Wow, so the NPCs saw the trap and changed their tactics to drop in from above? Starfield's AI is amazing! Shame the parachutes didn't work, though...

 

[Alienman]

Man, fuck this era and timeline of garbage shit. What a fucking joke we even have to discuss this trash.

In one timeline Starfield is a magnificent innovative RPG that will be remembered fondly for years.

 

[Alienman]

Wow, so the NPCs saw the trap and changed their tactics to drop in from above? Starfield's AI is amazing! Shame the parachutes didn't work, though...

They mistook it for a planet with zero g. Easily done, but it comes with a fatal outcome as seen.

 

[Vic]

That may be because I did that quest at a higher level than they normally intend for you to do it.

you were over level 30 right? I noticed that too that mantis is good until 30 but then gets outscaled by random loot

 

[ind33d]

the game is generic and mediocre enough that modders could add questlines about anything and it wouldn't fuck up the game, right? at least it's very open-ended

 

[darkpatriot]

That may be because I did that quest at a higher level than they normally intend for you to do it.

you were over level 30 right? I noticed that too that mantis is good until 30 but then gets outscaled by random loot

26 or 27 I think. I really like this bounty hunter armor though. Not only does it have good protection, but Non-Edgy Gamer would approve of it because it looks like armor intended for combat and not a balloon like space suit you are worried is going to rupture and kill you.

 

[Robotigan]

That may be because I did that quest at a higher level than they normally intend for you to do it.

you were over level 30 right? I noticed that too that mantis is good until 30 but then gets outscaled by random loot

I don't like how it looks so I just left it there. I'll come back for it when I have an outpost with mannequins set up.

 

[likash]

I think even a lot of the hate is mostly just disappointment from people who wanted to love it

I disagree, I think a hype train of hate is much more satisfying than a hype train of "love". People wanted to play Starfield because it's a cultural game. Everyone knows about it, playing it means being part of the zeitgeist, whether you want to have fun or not. Up until Skyrim, the BGS games were niche enough to not really attract widespread attention. Skyrim changed that by giving the studio massive public awareness, which did a disservice to Fallout 4 as it had a higher initial player count than Skyrim yet was received worse, since people just played it because Skyrim was popular and not because they had any interest in the setting or exploration. Then the F76 shitshow happened which primed the public that BGS is synonymous with drama. F76 rage videos had millions of views despite relatively few people actually playing it, because that's what people really love: drama.

Starfield suffers the same issue Fallout 4 does, exacerbated after F76. People just want to play it to be part of the latest online drama, not because they want anything else out of the game or are interested in the game itself.

Say what you will about Cohh, but he's right about this phenomenon.

You will get what you want out of this game. If you want to have a bad time, you will have a terrible time. It's just like Skyrim, or Fallout 4, or any of those games.

Cohh is what i call an honest shills. He said that Bethesda is sponsoring the first 2 h of his stream. He basicaly told you from the start that he won't be objective. He is also a skilled shill and does not do the "GOTY" type of shilling that other dumb streamers do. To his credit he does play the games at least on hard difficulty and tries to do a completionist run every time. The only time he rushed was with Starfield first run and that's should tell you everything about the game.

 

[Vic]

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.

It's quite possible, we had to wait like four or five months last time around with Fallout 4. I just wish Todd would fucking tell us already.

I’ve heard that modders he has hired are now working with the CK to create paid mods

 

[Robotigan]

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.

It's hard to immediately see how this'll work. The problem with this game IMO is that it's a standard Bethesda game, but it's been badly transplanted into a totally different game. Logically, it should have taken place on a few small maps across a handful of planets (like The Outer Worlds) but instead it's got this half-implemented procgen stuff that not only doesn't really gel with the meat of the game, but stands in contrast to it, hence a lot of players becoming bored because the game they actually want to play keeps getting interrupted with space travel and visiting systems that have nothing in. People want to go exploring dungeons and an overworld like in previous Bethesda games, instead they're getting less than half the number of dungeons, no overworld, and a badly-done fast travel menu that keeps forcing itself on you.

The game is basically Skyrim except instead of giving you everything in one medium-sized, well-designed map, it's all spread out. It'd be like if, rather than walking from Riverwood to Bleak Falls Barrow, you had to go to a map screen twice and sit through four loading screens before being teleported directly to the entrance of the dungeon. The way to fix the game would be to eliminate that pointless busywork, not expand upon it. I legit think the best Starfield mod would be one that just reduces the scope of the game by about 95% and changes the galaxy menu to an Outer Worlds style one that just lets you visit the four main populated worlds. Then it'd be a question of populating those worlds with things to do.

Visiting planets becomes a lot more meaningful when you're engaging with resource collection, surveying, taking pictures, etc. The radiant stuff becomes cool vignettes that help build the adventure. The biggest problem with this game is that it allows you to blast through questlines without engaging with the exploration and survival mechanics. Procedural settlements should actually be important selling and restocking on supplies, but since you can fast travel to major cities at any time people aren't realizing their value. They needed to go even harder on the radiant systems. Like randomizing the locations of major cities/towns and then setting progression-based rules for discovery, i.e. you always run into a major city in the 2nd system you travel to.

 

[Star Citizen]

Man, fuck this era and timeline of garbage shit. What a fucking joke we even have to discuss this trash.

In one timeline Starfield is a magnificent innovative RPG that will be remembered fondly for years.

Rate me like that. Sure. If your bitch ass accepts the utmost below mediocrity even and rakes in millions of dollars regardless you can eat shit too. Fuck you.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Man, fuck this era and timeline of garbage shit. What a fucking joke we even have to discuss this trash.

In one timeline Starfield is a magnificent innovative RPG that will be remembered fondly for years.

Rate me like that. Sure. If your bitch ass accepts the utmost below mediocrity even and rakes in millions of dollars regardless you can eat shit too. Fuck you.

This game is going to have fantastic mods worth alone months if not years of playing. Like all Bethesda games.

 

[Star Citizen]

Man, fuck this era and timeline of garbage shit. What a fucking joke we even have to discuss this trash.

In one timeline Starfield is a magnificent innovative RPG that will be remembered fondly for years.

Rate me like that. Sure. If your bitch ass accepts the utmost below mediocrity even and rakes in millions of dollars regardless you can eat shit too. Fuck you.

This game is going to have fantastic mods worth alone months if not years of playing. Like all Bethesda games.

Get fucked with that shit this is not a game. It's some blatant scam.

 

[Old Hans]

bad NPC spawning, they can't go anywhere and just stand there, how does this happen in 2023?

from my limited knowledge of the creation engine, its usually the result of the nav meshes, which are things you put down in the editor that tells NPCS where they can and cannot walk

 

[GaelicVigil]

Spacer bandits be like:

 

[Grampy_Bone]

ProcGen can not replace actual content

The game doesn't have too much procgen it has too little. It doesn't require 17 studios across the world to copy paste a few generic dungeons around the galaxy.

All the development time and money went into making 'actual content.' That's why there's a unique questline in almost every system, why you can't walk into a city without the game barfing 13 quests into your journal, and why every companion has three novels worth of backstory they nag you with after every stop but can't figure out how to navigate a staircase.

There's a common experience with automation. You see a problem that requires tedious work and you try to write a program to fix it. But the boss doesn't care about the automation, he just wants the result, and he's willing to throw more people at the problem until it gets fixed. None of them are smart enough to solve the programming issue, but they can provide the raw button pushing labor to brute force the solution, and your goal of automation quickly gets thrown out the window. That's Bethesda.

Todd's big innovation over Daggerfall was to throw out the procgen tech and just do everything by hand, with the understanding that more content was better than good content, and it worked. They repeated the same idea with each game until Starfield showed the limits of this approach. If they had smart people iterating procgen techniques for 20 years, they might have been able to deliver a Starfield where every planet had the content of a full elder scrolls game, with fewer people actually working on it.

 

[Fedora Master]

The game doesn't have too much procgen it has too little.

I was talking about NMS dumbo

 

[Ryzer]

Frankly, I'm baffled this game doesn't have a backlash on the same magnitude than Cyberpunk.
Everything in it is outdated and is absolutely shameful in 2023.
The AI is at least 20 years old delayed, even worse since Fear's AI was certainly better in all areas.
The environments are incredibly dull, empty and could be rendered on a PS3.
The gameplay is certainly awful and worse than half-life 1 but when this is your principal focus on a game, it's should be a death sentence.
The story is shit and makes no sense from an human point of view, nobody would call a complete stranger to fetch an artefact and enroll into an important mission.
The looting is mediocre, only rewards you get are standart weapons +% modifiers, same goes for the skills.
The graphics, lightning, shadows, water physics are at the very LEAST 20 years old delayed.
When Ground Zeroes released on the PS3 outmatch it in these categories, you know there is a problem.
The space combat is inferior in every regards compared to Rogue Squadron 2, a game released on Gamecube with a tiny budget.

Their engine is a massive POS and should be thrown into a dustbin.
400M$, this scam, lmao.