Starfield Thread - now with Shattered Space horror expansion

[ColaWerewolf]

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.

Interesting take. I don't know if procgen tech can ever be good, I doubt it. But maybe now with the massive AI emergence it might actually be feasible to create half-decent procgen content. Or it's still too early.

 

[ind33d]

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Everything in it is outdated and is absolutely shameful in 2023.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.

ground zeroes is an hour long, of course it's more polished. i beat GZ and loved it but that's a stupid comparison

 

[Frank Capicoli]

Cohh is what i call an honest shills. He said that Bethesda is sponsoring the first 2 h of his stream.

Only because they are obligated to.

 

[Kruyurk]

The AI is at least 20 years old delayed

You can call them retarded, we don't mind around here.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I don't know if procgen tech can ever be good

Look at Kenshi. The whole world is hand made, but there's no story, no quests, and no voice acting. It was made by a very small team, and its insanely fun and addictive because the systems are complex, engaging, and rewarding. (The old buzzword for this was 'emergent' gameplay).

There's no reason why a bargain bin looking indie title made by one guy should be more fun to play than a $100 million AAA epic. Imagine Kenshi with Starfield's budget; instant greatest game ever made.

Consider Rimworld. In a few seconds the game generates a dozen factions, religions, large continents, multiple biomes, and dozens of settlements. It also has no story or voice acting, yet the gameplay is endless. Fight, trade conquer, survive, exterminate. Another one man project. Sure, the graphics look like shit, but that's where the AAA development muscle should be going. Not quests or voice acting or "muh story."

There is no problem with the tech, it already exists. It just needs smart people to take the right chances. Diablo was nothing more than Rogue with the rough edges sanded off and a coat of AAA paint, and look where that went.

 

[Child of Malkav]

How can this company have fans is beyond me. At this point, for real and no joke there should be some psychologists and/or psychiatrists analyzing this fanbase. It's unreal how reason and arguments do not get through to these NPCs. Which just reinforces my belief that some companies that are very successful utilize psychological understanding to develop techniques implemented in the gameplay loops that create some sort of addiction of some description.
And Bethesda is nothing but a collection of crooks that lucked their way into success. In this world you can truly make the lowest of the lowest effort products and you can make a career out of it and be acclaimed. And as an added bonus even get an army of NPC simps to provide protection detail online and IRL. Fuck this world.

 

[Konjad]

I don't know if procgen tech can ever be good

Look at Kenshi. The whole world is hand made, but there's no story, no quests, and no voice acting. It was made by a very small team, and its insanely fun and addictive because the systems are complex, engaging, and rewarding. (The old buzzword for this was 'emergent' gameplay).

There's no reason why a bargain bin looking indie title made by one guy should be more fun to play than a $100 million AAA epic. Imagine Kenshi with Starfield's budget; instant greatest game ever made.

Consider Rimworld. In a few seconds the game generates a dozen factions, religions, large continents, multiple biomes, and dozens of settlements. It also has no story or voice acting, yet the gameplay is endless. Fight, trade conquer, survive, exterminate. Another one man project. Sure, the graphics look like shit, but that's where the AAA development muscle should be going. Not quests or voice acting or "muh story."

There is no problem with the tech, it already exists. It just needs smart people to take the right chances. Diablo was nothing more than Rogue with the rough edges sanded off and a coat of AAA paint, and look where that went.

People who make decisions in most large companies do not play games themselves. They watch movies though so they push games to be like movies.

 

[Hellraiser]

There's no reason why a bargain bin looking indie title made by one guy should be more fun to play than a $100 million AAA epic. Imagine Kenshi with Starfield's budget; instant greatest game ever made.

I disagree, there are a few reasons.

For one whoever is bankrolling the production is unlikely to not have requirements or demands and giving 100 million away no questions asked, even worse they will have projections and financial performance targets. Even if you have a limitless budget you will most likely have a deadline that the suits will want you to stick to, and it doesn't matter that you project a 500% return on the investment or whatever if they think it is taking too long (despite probably having no relevant development experience or intellectual capacity to even make a proper judgement on that).

Secondly there's the issue that money can't replace actual talent (and passion), good ideas and execution plans (everyone has ideas, few have the brains to know how to make them reality) brewing for years to maturity, and sometimes raw luck or whatever coincidences made certain games possible. The right stuff is rare and money is not the bottleneck. The kickstarter craze has shown this the most, Kenshi and Rimworld are outliers in a sea of half-finished, sometimes abandoned, games that spent an eternity in early access and plain shit that failed to deliver (Battletech, ToN). Also the first point about corporate structures is most liely to frustrate and drive away people with the actual chops to pull it off (Rimworld is one case IIRC, don't remember what Tynan did before he went indie though).

Going back to your point I don't believe Kenshi would have been that much better with more money. More money can buy you a score of artists that might make better models, so it would be prettier, but it sure as hell can't get you more complexity. Most likely if a developer has the technical skills to do such systems he would implement them, maybe even during some midnight coding frenzy while he's still inspired.

 

[Ben Zyklon]

This game is so fucking boring, if only you could actually travel to other planets manually at least it would feel like a fucking world.

 

[Fedora Master]

It's like playing Skyrim with the entire map uncovered and you can only fast travel from POI to POI. Also it dumps you at least half a minutes walk away from them every time.

 

[Modron]

This game is so fucking boring, if only you could actually travel to other planets manually at least it would feel like a fucking world.

All that travel time would serve to just prolong the boredom wouldn't it?

 

[ind33d]

This game is so fucking boring, if only you could actually travel to other planets manually at least it would feel like a fucking world.

that makes no sense, what do you think "warp" is? flying at sub-light is asinine

 

[Tyranicon]

Massive bland worlds sell better than narrow ones with better handcrafted content.

The vast majority of gamers have awful taste. Look at the number of people who no-lifed Diablo 3 of all things.

The current state of the games industry is exactly what they deserve.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

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.

20 years of pretending Bugthesda games aren't garbage. It's habit at this point, both for the media and their fans.

 

[Ben Zyklon]

This game is so fucking boring, if only you could actually travel to other planets manually at least it would feel like a fucking world.

All that travel time would serve to just prolong the boredom wouldn't it?

I think not because the travel time is where you start encountering stuff or even changing routes because you see something more interesting than your actual destination and you end up going someplace entirely different and thus having an actual adventure.

 

[Fedora Master]

This game is so fucking boring, if only you could actually travel to other planets manually at least it would feel like a fucking world.

All that travel time would serve to just prolong the boredom wouldn't it?

I think not because the travel time is where you start encountering stuff or even changing routes because you see something more interesting than your actual destination and you end up going someplace entirely different and thus having an actual adventure.

You know, like in every other Bethesda sandbox...

 

[darkpatriot]

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.

I too like to sometimes imagine a world where Bethesda had focused on trying to refine the ProcGen rather than going the path of just hand crafting everything. In my dreams it is a far better world.

That is one reason I am excited to see Bethesda moving back towards that direction with Starfield. I want to see more experimenting with it in future updates (mods if possible?), and future games. I am certainly willing to forgive some misfires along the way if it gets us higher quality procgen the next time around.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Going back to your point I don't believe Kenshi would have been that much better with more money.

Eh, how did Diablo sell a shitzillion copies and create an entire subgenre?

Taking Kenshi and upscalling the graphics would certainly produce a higher quality product that would move more copies. But the real point isn't kenshi itself. Youre right, the literal autist who wrote Dwarf Fortress probably can't run a real studio. Yet the recent steam release of his game made him a ton more money. The point is the industry obsession on chasing last year's gaming trends, forever. For the longest time it was common knowledge that hard games didn't sell, then we got Dark Souls. It was common knowledge that games needed guided story quests and on-rails handholding, then we got Breath of the Wild.

Bethesda gave people open world when RPG meant linear quests and cutscenes. Now open world isn't special anymore and Bethesda is trying to make linear story quests. FFS.

Open world isn't new, all the classic RPGs were open world. It's true that big studios won't fund multimillion experiments. The model is not sustainable. They take the current popular things, mix it in a slurry, and try to add lootboxes and season passes. But that doesn't mean there isn't money on the table waiting for someone to take it. Stephanie Meyer wrote a story based on her dream diary and became a billionaire, not because she was a good writer but because she gave the market something no one else was giving it.

 

[Hellraiser]

This game is so fucking boring, if only you could actually travel to other planets manually at least it would feel like a fucking world.

that makes no sense, what do you think "warp" is? flying at sub-light is asinine

In system travel doesn't use the grav drive though, neither mechanically (as in you don't need any power allocated to it to fly to another moon/planet and the jump prep sequence doesn't run) nor in the cutscene that plays (the ship flies off on main thrusters). Of course this whole thing is another example of Bethesda putting shit in and not thinking it through regarding consistency or logic. If ships can jump right to a planet's orbit from light years away, why not within system? Also the in-system travel is instantaneous and actual game time doesn't pass.

Sub-light could be implemented either with time compression or you just abstract away the scale like Freelancer did. Otherwise just do a special in-system FTL like Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky (I guess? it anyway also used an arbitrary scale and made-up units so hard to say, but it definitely looks and feels like FTL) did.

They could have done it so that you discover planets, moons, asteroids or space stations on a system map while flying around to make it seem similar to prior games with their world map, but if there's no actual terrain to navigate and the "hiking" component is missing, would it matter much? You would just end up with what Mass Effect had where you just went clockwise or counterclockwise around the map in the Mako to find everything, with maybe spacers or pirates bogging you down. This is one of my peeves about exploration of unknown systems in games, as far as I know nobody approached in a way that wouldn't be extremely repetitive and devoid of challenge, resulting in a "nothing can be missed" situation (although ever since Fallout 3 bethesda's games anyway mostly have this problem due to the radar, enemies and terrain however mitigate it a bit).

 

[deuxhero]

Bethesda can't code. Linux user realizes fuck up and fixes it, improving performance dramatically (but only for Linux users)
https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/pull/1694

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

That is one reason I am excited to see Bethesda moving back towards that direction with Starfield. I want to see more experimenting with it in future updates (mods if possible?), and future games. I am certainly willing to forgive some misfires along the way if it gets us higher quality procgen the next time around.

More likely they'll just blame procedural generation for a lot of the problems the game has, since the generations are half-baked and less complex than what Daggerfall did 27 years ago.

They're just big boxes with invisible walls and one or two things to do on them. They don't even join together. That's not a legitimate attempt to do anything, other than hoodwink people into believing there are 1000 "planets" in the game.

Minecraft is more advanced procedural tech than this.

 

[darkpatriot]

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.

This game is more fun than cuberpunk 2077 at launch. The problem with 2077 was the open world was truly shit. The activities they had on them were too disjointed and unfun, and only the story missions and a few of the side quests had good content.

Starfield does a better job at making some of the open world content engaging. More quests and side quests to get and keep your attention. More side activities, like ship customization, to keep you entertained.

I am at 55 to 60 hours of starfield and still not burned out. I haven't even gone that far down the main quest, and have touched none of the faction missions. I think have done most of the side quests you get in major hubs and explored a lot of the minor settlements by now, though.

I am probably going to advance a bit more down the main quest and start one of the faction quests (probably free star rangers) tonight.

Also, I am interested to try doing one of those legendary battleship quests tonight, maybe. The only thing holding me back is I still haven't maxxed out piloting, and I don't know if I will get the opportunity to board and capture the battleship if I have good enough piloting. But given there appear to be multiple quests of that type (I have a spacer and mercenary one available) I will give it a try for the spacer one.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

This game is more fun than cuberpunk 2077 at launch.

Fake news. Provided you weren't a console sped and didn't have whatever hardware that ran into serious bugs/performance issues, 2077 was a better looking game with a much better (not saying much here) story, and far better (still not saying much) gameplay.

I played it on my laptop and had a great time with it. Disappointing still, but far more enjoyable than this.

 

[Hellraiser]

Going back to your point I don't believe Kenshi would have been that much better with more money.

Eh, how did Diablo sell a shitzillion copies and create an entire subgenre?

Taking Kenshi and upscalling the graphics would certainly produce a higher quality product that would move more copies. But the real point isn't kenshi itself. Youre right, the literal autist who wrote Dwarf Fortress probably can't run a real studio. Yet the recent steam release of his game made him a ton more money. The point is the industry obsession on chasing last year's gaming trends, forever. For the longest time it was common knowledge that hard games didn't sell, then we got Dark Souls. It was common knowledge that games needed guided story quests and on-rails handholding, then we got Breath of the Wild.

Bethesda gave people open world when RPG meant linear quests and cutscenes. Now open world isn't special anymore and Bethesda is trying to make linear story quests. FFS.

Open world isn't new, all the classic RPGs were open world. It's true that big studios won't fund multimillion experiments. The model is not sustainable. They take the current popular things, mix it in a slurry, and try to add lootboxes and season passes. But that doesn't mean there isn't money on the table waiting for someone to take it. Stephanie Meyer wrote a story based on her dream diary and became a billionaire, not because she was a good writer but because she gave the market something no one else was giving it.

Call me jaded but this is an ideal world scenario, it would be great to have, everyone with a brain knows it, but the environment (call it the industry, system, corporate culture or a jewish conspiracy if you wish) filters this out apart from rare flukes that seep through the cracks (the first Fallout was this, apparently Fargo and the rest didn't give a shit or believe in the project, and just written it off letting Cain and crew do whatever they wanted hilarious and depressing simultaneously). If Diablo never happened today's Blizzard would never make it, because they system is as it is and that pioneering "start-up" creative phase they had died when the suits from Activision came in.

This is why I also see MS gobbling up studios as likely a bad thing, it's just going to get worse regarding the systemic filtering out of risky innovative concepts in those companies (even if Obshitian is shit, it will probably get worse). On the other hand Rimworld, Kenshi and others prove that with middleware even as flawed as Unity talented devs can do something great and better than AAA, so AAA and the big publishers might as well be ignored especially if you expect actual incline.

Also this reminds me of the time my boss was reading annual project survey feedback on one of the projects I was involved in. One guy wrote something that everyone would like, but it was simply impossible to implement because the decision-makers are clueless suits, the stakeholders would bitch because they are used to the old way and god forbid they need to do something efficiently for a change and not like cavemen boomers, and also general corporate politics and feudal squabbles would be involved due to the scope. My boss however upon finishing reading that comment just said "this guy had to be on crack or he's new here".

 

[GamingConnoisseur]

How do I get the minigun and the drum barrel grenade launcher? Are these weapons level locked?