Starfield Thread - Shattered Space expansion coming September 30th

[Vic]

apparently if you do the main quest iz gud game but if you do side content first it's trash?

well, there are some powers that are a must imo: detect life and unlimited oxygen, the force wave is useful too in combat against strong opponents to stunlock them and keep shooting in their head while they're trying to recover

I get that but he was talking like doing the main quest first turns the game into the second coming of Jesus

nah it just gives you spaceborn powers... if you are into the story (lol) it gets "cool" around halfway through (main quest has 19 quests)

 

[GaelicVigil]

I did it boys

Is it even possible to explore the adjacent region without a console command when the planetary landing icon covers the adjacent tile?

Why can't they just give you an option to load you into the adjacent region from this pop-up? Bizarre design here.

 

[Vic]

I did it boys

Is it even possible to explore the adjacent region without a console command when the planetary landing icon covers the adjacent tile?

Why can't they just give you an option to load you into the adjacent region from this pop-up? Bizarre design here.

it's all generic so who cares, the planetary landing icon accepts almost pixel perfect input, so you'd have to use some script to position it just right, but then I don't know if the cells are being saved at all or just scrapped after you leave, probably the latter.

 

[GaelicVigil]

I have a confession to make. After 25 hours I'm finally starting to like Starfield. You know what made the difference for me?

I installed the mod that removes all the black people. Strange, but I've realized this was the main problem for me all along.

 

[Vic]

I have a confession to make. After 25 hours I'm finally starting to like Starfield. You know what made the difference for me?

I installed the mod that removes all the black people. Strange, but I've realized this was the main problem for me all along.

 

[Vic]

cool sword:

 

[just]

cool sword:

very nasapunk

 

[Lemming42]

Finally bothered to finish the main quest, so I'm calling it there. FINAL REVIEW (most of which I posted earlier in the thread anyway):

Spoiler

GOOD:
- Faction quests are a lot of fun, some of the best Bethesda's done. Some great ideas and some setpieces that actually work (the escape from the Legacy was very cool)
- Combat is, again, probably the best they've ever done (not saying much, but this is passable FPS-RPG combat)
- Quests often have speech or stealth solutions, which is nice
- Lots of nice bits of small reactivity
- Space battles are simplistic but fun
- Character creation and perk system are well thought out and force you to make some genuinely tough choices, and allow for distinct builds
- Boost pack feels fully integrated into the game, with all kinds of vertical secrets and shit to discover, as well as alternate paths
- All quest dungeons were really good
- Speech minigame is absolute genius

BAD:
- Most boring use of procgen in any videogame ever
- Very little to actually do outside quests
- Writing was not bad, but not particularly captivating either. Some parts were good (i liked the Terrormorph stuff) but the setting as a whole doesn't quite work
- Space travel is a complete hassle, and jumping between locations you've already visited i(which is what most of the game is about) is extremely fucking boring
- Vast universe is full of absolutely nothing and forces you to sift through a lot of nothingness in search of content

Overall, I liked it. It started to overstay it's welcome a bit by the end, but my final time was over 70 hours, so that's pretty good.

There's a lot to praise but the big criticism is the one that's been made time and again - it's a Bethesda game where, unlike every other Todd-era Bethesda game up to this point, they actively hide content. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fo3, Skyrim (and maybe Fo4, idk, I played it once) all overwhelm the player with content. Their worlds are designed to guide you from one dungeon or settlement to the next in an endless stream of adventure, and they're all a lot of fun as a result (if you like the formula, obviously, which I do). Starfield, meanwhile, hides content from you, whether by filling towns with "Citizen" and forcing you to play "hunt for the one NPC in this area who's actually interactive", or in the stupid galaxy map, where you have to fly through ten different empty systems in the vague hope of finding something interesting.

Bethesda's other games also all have a superb sense of place - Vvardenfell, Cyrodiil, the Capital Wasteland, Skyrim. You can obviously criticise the logical integrity of each of those places and pick apart the writing, but they all have an undeniably strong and distinctive atmosphere. Starfield really struggles to do the same, its setting just hasn't been well thought out enough and lacks anything distinct to help characterise it.

In the end, there's a lot of positive lessons Bethesda could take from Starfield going forward. A lot of things work and deserve to be built on, and could easily be repurposed for TES VI. But yeah, there's a lot of lessons to be learned from the errors too, and if there's one takeaway from this, it's this - please, for the love of fuck, set your game in a medium-sized worldspace filled with content. Do not make me fly a fucking ship again.

tl;dr, it's good and has some features Bethesda should use again in future games, but it also doesn't really play to the formula's strengths

7.5/10 overall, decent fun.

 

[GaelicVigil]

Actually, in all seriousness, I did the Neon main mission last night and a couple things surprised me. First I heard a government announcement talking about how Tau Ceti 2 had been wiped out by a Terrormorph. That's interesting because that is the only Vanguard mission I've done so far. It was pretty cool to hear that what I did had an actual effect in the game world. I'm curious now if I do other side missions, that the world will begin talking about it.

The other cool thing was options the game gave you to finish this mission on Neon. When your ship gets impounded by a corporate asshole you have the option to either talk your way through all of it, or you could just slaughter everyone. Certainly not BG3 level of freedom, but still interesting. I'm also wondering if these choices end up effecting the ending or NG+ as well.

This is the first time Starfield did something cool.

 

[GaelicVigil]

By the way, have any of you seen the film, "Neon City" with Michael Ironside? It's actually a pretty good B post-apocalyptic movie. I've actually seen it quite a few times because my dad was an extra in it. I wonder if that was an inspiration for Neon in Starfield.

 

[Johnny Biggums]

Bro MS owns gamepass

Yeah, but Gamepass costs about 7 times less than 1 standard copy of Starfield. Gamepass isn't some magic money maker, there's a certain methodology behind it. If it doesn't lead to people staying subscribed for an additional 5-6 months, or without a direct purchase, Microsoft will still lose money.

Edit: What do you suppose they are licensing Starfield copies at? I dont know but I presume it is extremely favorable.

 

[Vic]

It was pretty cool to hear that what I did had an actual effect in the game world. I'm curious now if I do other side missions, that the world will begin talking about it.

if you talk to the girl at SSNN (the news network in new atlantis) you can give her news stories about your exploits and they will play it in the broadcasts. guards also comment on certain things you did.

 

[darkpatriot]

ok I think I figured out planetary exploration of the proc gen content: land ship anywhere on the planet, get out and look around with your scanner if there are any POIs you want to visit (hit E on your scanner to get more details about what it is), if there are, go there and look for new POIs that pop up on the way. If there aren't, go back to your ship and fly to a new cell. that's the most efficient way I've found to find relevant POIs and not waste time running around the wilderness. Oh and only do that in solar systems that are at your level, because you can kill aliens on the way for xp and the Elites drop good loot for you, don't waste time exploring lower level planets. Doing the highest level planets you can efficiently kill Elites in is probably best.

I would also add in that it is worth checking out some of the POI near landing zones/structures that main or important quests take you to. Sometimes the nearby POI are also hand crafted and are a little more interesting than the run-of-the-mill Proc Gen ones.

 

[darkpatriot]

It was pretty cool to hear that what I did had an actual effect in the game world. I'm curious now if I do other side missions, that the world will begin talking about it.

if you talk to the girl at SSNN (the news network in new atlantis) you can give her news stories about your exploits and they will play it in the broadcasts. guards also comment on certain things you did.

I really wish the guards would stop telling me I don't need to wear a helmet when I have chosen the option to display the regular clothes in towns.

I'm not wearing a helmet, Mr. Guard, I promise you.

 

[Vic]

BG3 still the most played single player game on steam

except it's co-op

which makes Starfield the most played single player game on steam

 

[ColaWerewolf]

I have a confession to make. After 25 hours I'm finally starting to like Starfield. You know what made the difference for me?

I installed the mod that removes all the black people. Strange, but I've realized this was the main problem for me all along.

+1 starchad added

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2023/09/09/starfield-todd-howard/

A ‘Starfield’ post-mortem with Todd Howard and Phil Spencer​

I’m the interviewer, but legendary game creator Todd Howard was looking like he had questions for me.
It turns out I’m the first person he’s spoken to outside his workplace who’s played and finished the video game he’s dreamed of making for the last quarter of a century. It’s called “Starfield,” developed by Bethesda Game Studios in Rockville, Md., and published under Microsoft’s Xbox brand.


Expectations for the project have been astronomical thanks to the pedigree of the studio’s past titles and that it’s the company’s first new intellectual property in almost 30 years. Fans have whispered about the title “Starfield” in gaming forums and discussions since it was trademarked in 2013. For years, it felt mythical. On top of that, it’s saddled with the burden of being a marquee title for Xbox, a successful platform that nevertheless has a smaller market footprint in the global games industry.


This month, “Starfield” became real. And Howard wants to know what we all think.

“I haven’t talked to anybody who’s finished it, so I’m fascinated by your experience,” Howard tells me.
Howard seems nervous about the reception, but the game appears to be a success so far. During its week of early access with 6 million players, “Starfield” is already the most-played Xbox-exclusive game this console generation, according to Xbox. It’s the Xbox game on the most wish lists ever on the Steam marketplace. And it broke the record for the most pre-installed game since the 2017 start of Microsoft’s games subscription service, Xbox Game Pass.
“Starfield” is a milestone in Microsoft’s strategy to become a universal gaming platform across various methods of distribution, through the cloud, PC or the Xbox series consoles. Game Pass, billed as a Netflix-like disruptor service for gaming, last year reported 25 million subscribers, and “Starfield” is aimed to boost those numbers.


Microsoft acquired Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media in 2021 for $7.5 billion with hopes to buttress its subscription service with exclusive quality titles. Howard and Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, say the partnership is a natural fit, especially since the studio has worked closely with Xbox in the past.
“It’s been a while since we launched anything of this scale that’s single player,” Spencer tells The Washington Post in an interview. “It’s kind of a pin for us in our strategy that we can do big multiplayer games and single-player games. The business models that we have in Xbox and the places where we ship allow us to find millions of players.”

A key to Microsoft’s game strategy​

Microsoft is recently closing up its historic $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, publisher of the Call of Duty and Candy Crush games, after a federal judge rejected a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit that alleged the deal was anti-competitive. This aggressive expansion is not just to stay competitive with Nintendo and Sony PlayStation, but also to stave off other tech giants who have been trying to enter the enormously lucrative video games industry.
Spencer says the deal is Microsoft’s attempt to establish more open standards in gaming.
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer, left, meets German official Robert Habeck at the Gamescom video game fair in Germany. (Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images)
“I spent a lot of time thinking about how the game industry is going to grow, and my view is that it grows if there’s less friction of a player anywhere wanting to find their game, and closed platforms create real barriers to that,” Spencer said. He admitted Xbox has its own walled-off content (“Starfield” is not available on PlayStation, for example), but said he’s working to change that.


Xbox is still focused on expanding its game services while its rivals race ahead in film and television. This year Nintendo and Sony have expanded their intellectual property to include “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which earned more than $1.3 billion at the global box office, and the 24-time Emmy-nominated HBO series “The Last of Us.” Spencer admits Xbox is still “earlier in our journey” to squeeze its brands in other spaces.
“We don’t have the deep expertise that Sony obviously has from their movie studios that make world-class video content, and Nintendo did a great job obviously,” Spencer said. “I do think it’s important for these worlds we’re creating in games. We used to have a lot of envy in our industry of Hollywood and what they created, then you see comics kind of take over, and now you’re going to see video game stories continue to grow in importance because our creators are as capable as creators of any medium.”

Designing an interconnected world​

Ask anyone in the games industry, and they’d point to Howard as one of those capable people. Bethesda Game Studios’ entries in the post-apocalyptic “Fallout” franchise catapulted the series from a niche computer role-playing game into a mainstream, multimillion dollar franchise. A “Fallout” show is in the works for Prime Video. (Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon, which owns Prime Video.)


Howard and his teams like to create games that form backdrops for countless other stories. “Starfield” has a thousand explorable planets, including an Earth with a surface blasted by some mass annihilation event. I landed my ship in the D.C. area with hopes to find the nuclear wasteland from “Fallout 3” — to no avail.
Howard laughs. “We talked about it.”
Visitors queue for the game “Starfield” at the Xbox booth during the Gamescom gaming convention in Cologne, Germany in August. The game is the most eagerly anticipated title for Xbox platforms in decades. (Friedemann Vogel/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
It was just one of hundreds of plans that didn’t quite make it into the game. Howard said it was a challenge to make sure the studio’s technology could keep up with its ambition.
“Oh, we planned, and those plans went out the window,” Howard said. “We knew we were going to rewrite parts of the engine, so we started building technology for the planets and the outer space stuff on our previous engine and renderer.” Eventually they realized they had to port years of work to a new engine. And then the pandemic hit.


Howard said working from home made production “very, very slow,” especially since the studio was going to overhaul all of its technology with lots of already finished art assets. The game was initially scheduled for a 2022 release, but that May, the studio announced a delay into this year.
When Bethesda chose the original November 2022 release date, “we had lots of buffer and we felt really good about it,” Howard said. “As things moved on, we were off by a percentage, and a percentage when it comes to the scale of this game turns out to be a lot of time. We felt it was the right thing to do to give us the time we required.”
Howard seems particularly pleased at how the game’s main quest comes together. So our conversation returns to my thoughts on the main storyline. I tell him the same thing I wrote in my review: This is the studio’s best main questline. The appeal of a Bethesda-made role-playing game is that players can inhabit large worlds and simply exist in them, partaking in activities like building houses or farming between countless storylines scattered across a map. These games are notorious for having so many things to do a player may simply ignore the central quests — which, critics and players often agree, aren’t exactly the highlight of these games anyway. So it was surprising to see how much production and planning went into the main quest of “Starfield.”


“We started with the themes and the ending,” Howard said. “We started early on where the theme and the long-term play of the game was built into the story. Those two things are fused together.”
Howard said “Starfield” made him think about the nature of video games and why people play them. Video games are usually a power fantasy, and even in Bethesda games, that fantasy is often achieved with finding a better weapon, getting stronger or having more money. “Starfield” is meant to challenge that notion.
If video games are wish fulfillment, the story of “Starfield” aims to fulfill an ancient human fantasy: Given all the experience and wisdom you’ve attained since birth, would you do it all again?

“Usually in a video game, you go on to the next quest or the next thing. But if it challenges to say, ‘Are you sure?’ I find that an interesting idea as it applies to a game,” Howard said. “We do ask a lot of questions throughout the main quest and we don’t provide all the answers. We want you to look inside yourself. How do you feel about the choices you’ve made? How do you feel about everything you’ve learned and built up, and would you do it again if given the choice?”

The legacy of “Starfield” has yet to be written. It’s the latest in a long line of video games about space. “Spacewar!” in 1962 was developed in an MIT lab and can be called the grandfather of the video game medium. It was followed by games like “Space Invaders,” “Galaga” and “Asteroids.” I asked Howard if that legacy weighs on him.
“That is an excellent observation, and I think I’ve done enough interviews for this game and no one’s mentioned that, so I appreciate that,” Howard said.

“Growing up with video games at a very young age, there were a lot of space games … there was ‘Star Raiders’ from Atari, ‘Elite’ comes along, there were some role-playing games that I really love, ‘SunDog,’ which no one remembers but was way ahead of its time. People were playing Dungeons and Dragons but I really loved this game ‘Traveller.’ Still have the original boxes in my office.”
For Howard, “Starfield” is born of a wish to play space-faring adventures with the modern technology and design language of video games.
“It’s something we always talked about here. A few years in, we figured out why people try and stop or don’t want to do it all the way,” he said. “But we are in a fortunate position to have the support and time to do it.”

 

[Vic]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2023/09/09/starfield-todd-howard/

Howard said “Starfield” made him think about the nature of video games and why people play them. Video games are usually a power fantasy, and even in Bethesda games, that fantasy is often achieved with finding a better weapon, getting stronger or having more money. “Starfield” is meant to challenge that notion.

If video games are wish fulfillment, the story of “Starfield” aims to fulfill an ancient human fantasy: Given all the experience and wisdom you’ve attained since birth, would you do it all again?

That's really not how the game plays. It's still about finding that better weapon.

that article is a bunch of journo crap

 

[Wasteland]

Bro MS owns gamepass

Yeah, but Gamepass costs about 7 times less than 1 standard copy of Starfield. Gamepass isn't some magic money maker, there's a certain methodology behind it. If it doesn't lead to people staying subscribed for an additional 5-6 months, or without a direct purchase, Microsoft will still lose money.

Edit: What do you suppose they are licensing Starfield copies at? I dont know but I presume it is extremely favorable.

Yeah, Microsoft owns both Bethesda and Gamepass. I certainly can't vouch for the soundness of their X-box/Gamepass business model--there are several huge corporations currently setting billions of dollars on fire in a fruitless quest to make their streaming services profitable; maybe MS blundered here too, dunno. But presumably they have some rationale. MS did obtain Starfield at cost, and as Yosharian pointed out, we can't assume that most subscribers would have bought the game for $70, in the absence of Gamepass.

Personally I think you'd have to be mildly insane to buy any game for $70, these days. Or $60. "Stop being poor," I can almost hear the internet's implausibly numerous self-styled tycoons say, but the money isn't as important as the feeling of not being suckered. Games are a depreciating asset by their nature, a depreciating asset that paradoxically offers more and functions better as it goes down in price (patches, driver updates, "GOTY" editions, etc). We also have unprecedented access to an almost unlimited selection of alternative games--a level of choice that both dilutes the value of each individual game, and also makes it more difficult to stick with even a decent game for a full play through. Gone are the days when you'd go to a store, select a title after half an hour of reading boxes, then feverishly sprint home to play the shit out of the thing for the next several weeks, good bad or indifferent, because it was what you had on hand.

The same argument applies to computer hardware. Yeah, sure, new GPUs are impressive; I enjoy following the tech and upgrading my rig on a regular basis, even though I rarely make full use of it. When I was a kid I didn't have the money for a good computer on which to play games; now that I'm old, I have a good computer but very little time or enthusiasm for playing games. C'est la vie. Anyway, the GPU I have now can run almost every title ever released--to include most console games, via emulation--thousands of games, more than I could ever possibly hope to play. The next GPU I buy, in 3-4 years, will only be capable of playing a few dozen games that my current one can't. And the next GPU after that will only add a few dozen to the list. The marginal utility of each new shiny piece of hardware diminishes.

And that's before we approach the thorny subject of how new triple-A games tend to suck more and more as time passes. Really, the marginal utility of the shiniest new gaming tech trends close to negative once you factor in the danger-hair ESG brigade, sociopathic corporate greed (e.g. micro-transactions), and the increasing normalization of general incompetence within the gaming industry. The average gamer would quite literally be better off without the option of wasting his time on most new products. On top of that, we hit diminished returns on graphical fidelity about a decade ago. There is no substitute for thoughtful art direction, despite the tech-for-tech's-sake cheerleading of outlets like Digital Foundry, which has reached parody-defying levels of orgiastic shilling for poorly performing triple-A dreck, in recent months.

As I say, you'd have to be nuts to pay full price for a AAA game these days, or even for most any AA game, though in the latter case you might have a genuine interest in supporting an underdog developer. I admit I'm tempted by the Gamepass though. $10 gets me a month to mess around with Starfield, and if I don't like it, there are a dozen other games that I can screw around with instead. I wouldn't mind taking Everspace 2 out for a spin, for example. Just gotta remember to cancel, preferably as soon as you sign up. Oh, and you can't mod; that's a real downside I suppose.

 

[Ben Zyklon]

But Starfield is not the same, the loading screens every time you want to do something is the mayor part that prevents this game from feeling like a Bethesda game,

Can you explain this loading screen business to me? In Starfield, like in every other bethesda game, the outside world is one area (no loading screens) and inside buildings/caves etc. is another area and you enter with loading screen. It's the same in Starfield. What's the problem?

This is my first Bethesda game I am playing using an SSD. It makes it so loading screens don't really bother me at all.

I am used to having to put up with some fairly long loading screens in years gone by when I used a mechanical hard drive and now even 3 load screens in rapid succession still aren't as long as 1 with a non-SSD hard drive.

I have an SSD too and I am 100% bothered by them, the game feels disconnected it doesn't matter if the loading screens is just 1 second long, It only took 1 second to destroy my immersion.

 

[ColaWerewolf]

I have an SSD too and I am 100% bothered by them, the game feels disconnected it doesn't matter if the loading screens is just 1 second long, It only took 1 second to destroy my immersion.

How did you survive through all the immersion breaking jank in F3/F4

 

[processdaemon]

The Crimson Fleet questline was fun but I was annoyed by the end of the evil route when you get to Ikande and the only responses you have to explain why you betrayed UC are 'I wanted to be rich' and 'being good didn't seem like much fun'. The UC kidnap you over what's probably petty theft since it happens with the first crime you're caught committing and threaten you with jail and extra fines if you don't want to go along with them, you should be able to give that as a motivation or at the very least point out that Ikande's 'I should send the criminal to hang out with all the other criminals and hope he doesn't get on with them' plan wasn't exactly that well thought out.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

My new ship design is pretty performant i have to say decent haul nice weapons and overall speed and resistance.

You sound like paid shill.

Paid shill? I told the game is far from perfect.
You are only allowed to like a game totally or don't like it all? This is how it works?

If what you say is true, then you find pleasure in very strange places, toots.

I just wanted to say that I really regret purchasing Starfield. Mods won't fix this. Why did I do it? Because I like suffering? Because I'm more susceptible to marketing than I thought? All I wanted to do was collect minerals in a world where all the modded women looked like models. And now I'm having flashbacks to Andromeda, where the worst thing isn't actually the fact that everyone is LGBT, but that all the NPCs are constantly talking poorly written dialogues and monologues. I can't walk past an NPC without them starting to mumble some boring, irrelevant details about the name of the brother-in-law of the manager of the planet Mungo, or that our polyamorous relationship is over because instead of a cat, a non-binary crocodile is fucking a trans man.

Perhaps this experience will finally teach me that AAA games are not worth buying. Perhaps.

Did you really expect writing in a bethesda game?

Not at all. Their scenarios are terrible, maybe they should even be abandoned altogether. AND HERE THEY WENT IN THE COMPLETELY OPPOSITE DIRECTION.
Why did they do it? From Software games have no storylines at all, so nerds write them themselves. I'm French, I prefer over-intellectualized fan gibberish than non-stop "Hi. I'm Barret and I'm gay. I also have a spaceship and a robot. I work for...".

 

[Mortmal]

I have an SSD too and I am 100% bothered by them, the game feels disconnected it doesn't matter if the loading screens is just 1 second long, It only took 1 second to destroy my immersion.

How did you survive through all the immersion breaking jank in F3/F4

It wasn't the same in previous Bethesda games; there was a sense of continuity. You had expansive landscapes around you, and when you opened a dungeon door, it felt like entering the dungeons even if theres a one min load time. Here, it's completely disjointed and feels extremely artificial moving from instances to instances , with walls everywhere.

 

[Silverfish]

I am surprised to see the reviewers reviewing a Bethesda game more realistically though.

I've heard of maybe five of those. Starting to think Starfield procedurally generates review outlets.