ArchAngel
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2015
- Messages
- 20,725
Soon Guatanamo Bay will have a lot of GMs for all the islamic terrorists there.I wonder what went wr...
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Soon Guatanamo Bay will have a lot of GMs for all the islamic terrorists there.I wonder what went wr...
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Starfield without a predetermined start would still lack an Open World (aside from procedurally-generated wastelands), still not offer the player anything to do in space other than combat (which is worse than that found in Spaceborne, created by a single person), and still be more of a 'looter-shooter' than an RPG. Not even the same type of game that established the phenomenal success of Bethesda Softworks starting with Morrowind in 2002, and not even rising to the level of quality found in Morrowind's lackluster successors.Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.
Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.
This is beyond their ability to implement, most likely too late and too fucking costly, even if they would abstract away the scale of interplanetary distances freelancer style. I mean for fucks sake, they dropped the ball on something as simple as space piracy. The hard parts like boarding ships and fighting the other crew in enemy ship interiors are implemented (the only really good thing in this game apart from a few quests/minor locations in a sea of half-assed filler), but not only is there jack shit in supporting such a play style (for instance a black market ship buyer/fence) despite it being low effort to implement, even worse you can't scrap ships "into razors" for cash without jumping through "no fun allowed" hoops they deliberately implemented to make it uneconomical (unless they fixed this in a patch, wasn't paying attention to the changelogs). That's just straight up retarded and a red flag as far as competence goes.If they don’t release a contiguous space to explore as a dlc/expansion soon they will really be missing the plot as a studio.
X4 actually has a few start options that are just that (the starts with the most story, Terran Cadet and Stranded, were both added in an expansion). It also added budgeted custom start option to one of the patches that lets you pick starting stuff (already know all the sectors of the core, got a gunboat instead just a fighter, already have a bit of renown with the humans) using points you get for doing unique things across your previous playthroughs to a limit (if you've ever made a million in a single transaction you can with an extra 200,000 credits, If you've done an quest of X type before you can start with a few knowledge points, if you've ever had a crewmember reach 4 stars overall rating you can afford better starting crew). The main reason this really works is the entire X4 economy is simulated (e.g., killing off a faction's miners will, in-fact, slow down or even stop their production if you get enough to choke their resource supply) so X at start of game is more powerful than X hours into it, but it would work fine in a more static world too. (It's a feature I'd love to have in Bannerlord)Bethesda have no idea why people like their games. No one likes their main quests, their games are all about the life-sim elements, and the best thing Bethesda can do to facilite this is simply get out of the player's way. Instead they force the player into scripted, narrative-heavy scenes.
Imagine how much better Starfield would've been if the moment the player clicks "New Game" you are immediately dropped onto a random planet, in some random outpost, with some basic gear based on the class you chose. That's it. No forced dialogue or cutscenes or exposition. Just free to play and explore at your own leisure. You can choose to travel to a nearby space station or city to discover the world and main quest, or you could simply stay at the spot the game dumped you at the start and simply live out your character on that planet.
There's something kind of "weightless" about the MQ lines in Bethesda games.
It's always the little things that push you over the edge.I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about
The - whatever it is, let's call it modularity - fits perfectly well with open world wandering, emergent gameplay and small interesting quests you stumble across, but when something is presented as an MQ or a major SQ in a Bethesda game, you kind of feel it's just a module that's been slotted into the game
This has annoyed me in a few games as well (not just Bethesda's). I suspect developers are in love with their animations and voice actors, they can't fathom that the player just wants to trade and so want to force the player to watch their cutscene masterpiece.Going back to the starting example, the implementation has actually gotten worse since Skyrim because of the written line - Lydia would just gripe that she was "sworn to carry your burdens" so it was relatively quick, but now this Andreja doorknob subjects you to her life story before you get to do routine stuff. It's idiotic, the line doesn't add anything and there's no reason not to display the UI right away and have it play in the background.
I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about in the sea of fail that Starfield seemingly is, but like I said, it's gotten to the point it's fascinating to observe. I've speculated that it might be due to an overfamiliarised QA crew that just stops noticing this shit, but this is a very long time to be using the same staffers in testing... I can't tell whether the point of failure is in the feedback or the receiver.
It's fascinating watching how some design flaws persist for decades across a product line. I just had this weird curiosity and checked out another Gopher Starfield video that appeared in my feed, and noticed how he was managing Andreja's inventory... Click on the "let's trade gear", she spouts off a long response line ("I have never been one to shy away from shouldering my share of a heavy load", not making this shit up), and then the inventory UI pops up.
This sort of substandard interaction queing and prioritising has been a problem in Bethesda games since forever. Basically, the game wastes your fucking time. Consider how annoying it is when Fallout 4 pulls the same crap when you engage a farming settler in conversation - they SLOOOOOOWLY put their crap away, wipe their hands and get up, and then you can finally talk. Same thing applies to sleeping NPCs, you're just standing there for ages while their dumb asses get out of bed. In fact, there was a mod for Fo4 that corrected this behaviour by having conversation initiate immediately, and the animation state change while you were already talking, but apparently it triggered some bugs (in a Bethesda game, inconceivable, I know). For another example going further back (tangential but still part of the same flawed approach), I remember my rifle jamming with a Super Mutant bearing down on me in Fallout 3, and I'm mashing the shotgun's hotkey but the game's stuck playing loops of trying to reload the bloody rifle due to its poor condition. And Skyrim had a mod that just quickened up your pointlessly-long dismount animation.
Going back to the starting example, the implementation has actually gotten worse since Skyrim because of the written line - Lydia would just gripe that she was "sworn to carry your burdens" so it was relatively quick, but now this Andreja doorknob subjects you to her life story before you get to do routine stuff. It's idiotic, the line doesn't add anything and there's no reason not to display the UI right away and have it play in the background.
I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about in the sea of fail that Starfield seemingly is, but like I said, it's gotten to the point it's fascinating to observe. I've speculated that it might be due to an overfamiliarised QA crew that just stops noticing this shit, but this is a very long time to be using the same staffers in testing... I can't tell whether the point of failure is in the feedback or the receiver.
Bethesda should have taken notes from other games and allow you to move through conversations at your own pace. I've seen mobile games get this right.It's fascinating watching how some design flaws persist for decades across a product line. I just had this weird curiosity and checked out another Gopher Starfield video that appeared in my feed, and noticed how he was managing Andreja's inventory... Click on the "let's trade gear", she spouts off a long response line ("I have never been one to shy away from shouldering my share of a heavy load", not making this shit up), and then the inventory UI pops up.
This sort of substandard interaction queing and prioritising has been a problem in Bethesda games since forever. Basically, the game wastes your fucking time. Consider how annoying it is when Fallout 4 pulls the same crap when you engage a farming settler in conversation - they SLOOOOOOWLY put their crap away, wipe their hands and get up, and then you can finally talk. Same thing applies to sleeping NPCs, you're just standing there for ages while their dumb asses get out of bed. In fact, there was a mod for Fo4 that corrected this behaviour by having conversation initiate immediately, and the animation state change while you were already talking, but apparently it triggered some bugs (in a Bethesda game, inconceivable, I know). For another example going further back (tangential but still part of the same flawed approach), I remember my rifle jamming with a Super Mutant bearing down on me in Fallout 3, and I'm mashing the shotgun's hotkey but the game's stuck playing loops of trying to reload the bloody rifle due to its poor condition. And Skyrim had a mod that just quickened up your pointlessly-long dismount animation.
Going back to the starting example, the implementation has actually gotten worse since Skyrim because of the written line - Lydia would just gripe that she was "sworn to carry your burdens" so it was relatively quick, but now this Andreja doorknob subjects you to her life story before you get to do routine stuff. It's idiotic, the line doesn't add anything and there's no reason not to display the UI right away and have it play in the background.
I know that it's a relatively small thing to gripe about in the sea of fail that Starfield seemingly is, but like I said, it's gotten to the point it's fascinating to observe. I've speculated that it might be due to an overfamiliarised QA crew that just stops noticing this shit, but this is a very long time to be using the same staffers in testing... I can't tell whether the point of failure is in the feedback or the receiver.
This has annoyed me in a few games as well (not just Bethesda's). I suspect developers are in love with their animations and voice actors, they can't fathom that the player just wants to trade and so want to force the player to watch their cutscene masterpiece.
But of course a lot depends on how well the puppet show is done. If it's nicely done, you can enjoy it a few times, if not, then it's even more of an intrusion. Bethesda have just never been very good at the puppet show side of things.
This reminds me of the criticism raised against RDR2 for having a bunch of detailed, long animations for every action of the main character. While that's nice, having to see them for the entire duration of the game, over and over became maddening at some point.Just like that other example I gave you with Fallout 3 not letting me swap weapons during a jam reload loop or how in Fallout 4 pumping water reduces thirst one level at a time, even though it's an infinite rad-free source. You can just about get away with crap like that in some dozen-hour movie-game like The Last of Us, but in titles whose main appeal is "play for a hundred hours (and then call it shit)", it's borderline criminal and part of the reason Bethesda's got a reputation for "jank."
Kingdom Come was bad about this too. But it was the other way that the mini game was so piss-easy as to be pointless. Really, lockpicking amounted to nothing more than how well you draw a circle with your mouse.This is also the reason why I despise mini games for lockpicking/hacking/etc. now. Nothing but a waste of time. Games like Thief 1 and 2, Deus Ex 1, Dark Messiah, VTMB1, The outer worlds and others have done it well. No mini games just a certain duration or resource check to unlock something.
For NV and FO4 there are mods that check to see if your skill i high enough to unlock a locked door/safe/terminal etc and then if you do you just press a rebindable hotkey to just instantly unlock whatever it is you want to access or go through. Saves so much time it's unreal.
The Morrowind's MQ is also non-intrusive and you can ignore it without the game even nudging you to complete it.Only the final stage has reactivity and you can play after finishing the MQ.Emil and Todd clearly like """"epic"""" quests with high stakes and plenty of cinematic action, but I think shit like Dawnguard proves that you can do that in a non-intrusive way that isn't forced on the player.
For NV and FO4 there are mods that check to see if your skill i high enough to unlock a locked door/safe/terminal etc and then if you do you just press a rebindable hotkey to just instantly unlock whatever it is you want to access or go through. Saves so much time it's unreal.
Kingdom Come was bad about this too. But it was the other way that the mini game was so piss-easy as to be pointless. Really, lockpicking amounted to nothing more than how well you draw a circle with your mouse.
How is it any different from than any of the other minigames? The minigames in bethesda games also involve the player.the best lockpicking mechanic ever - the one in Thief: Deadly Shadows
I actually wouldn't call either of them "minigames", not Thief 3's and not Fallout 3's, I see them as action mechanics. Like iron sights or cover or water arrows. When you say minigames, I think of something more involved, like DX4's hacking, which would probably be a fun thing to play on your mobile waiting at the barber's, but I hate when it's distracting me from playing what I really wanna play - Deus Ex. Fo4's hacking is another example, where you have to actually stop playing the game and start doing word puzzles instead.How is it any different from than any of the other minigames? The minigames in bethesda games also involve the player.the best lockpicking mechanic ever - the one in Thief: Deadly Shadows