I honestly can't understand how Starfield was so boring. I played it a bit waiting for the fun to start and it just never did. Such a weird game
First new IP in 25 years and this time they don't have decades' worth of other people's writing to build lore off of. Their failures of imagination are front and center now.
It’s because it’s unironically just Skyrim with spaceships, but it’s not even good because like @FourteenEyes@hexbear.net said, they don’t have much material to go off of.
They also expect modders to fix everything and I imagine most of them are content with making stuff for fallout and elder scrolls instead.
unironically just Skyrim with spaceships,
hell it's worse because of all the mandatory loads. somebody made open cities skyrim but i doubt there's going to be a mod letting you manually fly between planets and even if that did exist it would be boring af instead of interesting.
This game really makes you feel like you're paying for another re-release of Skyrim
waiting for the fun to start and it just never did.
fallout 4 was that for a lot of people.
I'm doing all the main and side missions while ignoring radiant or filler stuff and it fuckin' sucks. I played Fallout 4, which I consider mediocre at best, the same way and remember having a MUCH better time. Starfield is so utterly boring that I'm actually kind of fascinated by it. It's immediately obvious the first time you set foot on an "unexplored" planet that the entire allure of Bethesda games since at least Oblivion has been abandoned. There is no intricately designed open world here, just copy-pasted garbage.
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
Even that could have been done ok if the factions weren't both garbage self-defeatingly stupid fascist shitholes. Like if the UC was a socialist state that had tacitly tolerated/been unable to stop capitalist colonists from establishing corporate powers and so found itself effectively in a permanent low-intensity conflict with itself as the central party tried to keep control over these large parallel power structures, while the FC was a coalition of breakaway fascist corpo-states that were actively trying to encircle and undermine the UC.
But as it is the two factions are "the fascists from Starship Troopers" and "the Confederacy but it's constituent parts are feudal corpo-states" and they're both stagnating and rotting away and being chipped away at by petty warlords in a universe where the literal only hope is that maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology and they successfully wipe out all the fascists and ancaps, but we don't know anything about them because they're almost completely absent from the story as it is. And the Bethesda execs and a terrifying chunk of their fans think it's a good, aspirational setting full of hope.
I think the real problem is that they wanted to have both a well-established space-faring society but also an american frontier settler-brainworm aesthetic, when the two are clearly mismatched. The FC makes sense if the grav drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology [...], but we don't know anything about them because they're almost completely absent from the story as it is
:todd: had to remove any content involving House Varuun so that it could be made into a $30 DLC later.
Even that could have been done ok if the factions weren't both garbage self-defeatingly stupid fascist shitholes. Like if the UC was a socialist state that had tacitly tolerated/been unable to stop capitalist colonists from establishing corporate powers and so found itself effectively in a permanent low-intensity conflict with itself as the central party tried to keep control over these large parallel power structures, while the FC was a coalition of breakaway fascist corpo-states that were actively trying to encircle and undermine the UC.
Capitalist realism ideology requires there to be no future possible without capitalism dominating everything.
I think the real problem is that they wanted to have both a well-established space-faring society but also an american frontier settler-brainworm aesthetic, when the two are clearly mismatched. The FC makes sense if the grave drive has only been around for a single generation or something, not the 200+ years as depicted in-game.
maybe the reform Serpent cult might have a not-dogshit ideology [...], but we don't know anything about them because they're almost completely absent from the story as it is
:todd: had to remove any content involving House Varuun so that it could be made into a $30 DLC later.
My favorite bit is what Sseth's review pointed out: you can literally kill the last practicing Jew in the universe as a side effect of choosing the "evil" choice in the resort planet quest. One of the unfrozen colonists has kept up all the rabbinical traditions and is implied to be the last living example of his religion in a setting that has largely allowed religion to die out because it doesn't serve corporate interests. What the Austrian painter started, Todd will make you finish
Never mind how the world feels even more disjointed than ever. There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
How is this a background tidbit and not the actual plot of the game?
There was apparently an interplanetary war lasting years between a fascist industrialized space society and checks notes 20-30 cowboys.
Isn't that what happened in Firefly
You're probably right that's where they got it from, though I think it's kept deliberately vague there because they didn't care about the war itself and it was just a way to justify it being a western in space.
Perhaps part of it is that the writers at Bethesda thought they had to provide sufficient backstory because players would be interested. The colony war in Starfield is supposedly a peer-to-peer war of two stellar nations started over the dumbest shit imaginable: there was a law saying no nation could officially control more than 3 star systems. Also the cowboys won.
Yeah but a) space confederates got curbstomped because they attempted regular warfare. b) There is clearly at least a couple of well established major metropolitan planets in the outer planets, they're just not all fascist star trek.
Literally just make Cowboy Bebop The Game. Cowboy aesthetics on other planets, real guns, a variety of jazz genres. It’s so god damn simple.
This brought to you by every video game adaptation ever lol and to be clear I agree with the sentiment, its hard NOT to like bebop but being simple is exactly the same trope perpetuated by people at the top in hollywood/sillicon valley.
The bebop setting you describe is just a very rough outline of what the game would look like, it is by far not enough to build around it. Imagine for a moment once you get past the novelty and somehow ignore the blatant "cultural influence"(read: ripoff) you'd be left with the same fundamental problem with Bethesda games.
The problem is they have a very basic formula for the game loop, their engine is a literal monster from 15 years ago or something and ultimately they must go down the corporate checklist of things "marketing" says must be in the game because how else do you justify the budget?
You're basicaly doing the same thing as telling a blind person to draw a Mona Lisa, even telling them its ok to copy is not the point at all.
its hard NOT to like bebop
"this is anime? I hate anime then, lame"
I got one better, take Cowboy Bebop then combine it with what's been done in Red Dead Redemption 2, and probably for shits'n'giggles throw in a bunch of other random shit a la Yakuza/Like A Dragon in terms of making games within games - I want to play VA-11 Hall-A but Bebop style when I want to chill out between missions.
Just give me Firefly: The Game but written by someone that's not Joss Whedon please Todd Howard I promise I'll consider actually paying money for it.
that might actually make me play a game for once
Played it for like four hours and moved on, and I'm a big space travel sci-fi buff.... Boring.
Edit: I'm glad I pirated it. I'll probs uninstall it.
You won't be missing anything. The game does not get better. If you are feeling any FOMO you can toss it out of the window.
Permanently Deleted
Same. I used to be knee deep into making maps in Hammer Editor and playing mods back in those days. HL and HL2 were more than just games, they were platforms people would build amazing stuff on.
You had the patience to use hammer, which is respect. Getting doors to work in that piece of shit is hard enough, im surprised valve managed to make this many games using hammer, hell im impressed they managed to make their games that good looking with hammer. In fact I think its hilarious that any time some new user waddles in forums whining about hammer and how shitty it is, everyone just replies “yep its utter shit”.
This was my unprompted rant about a very bad no good doodoo editor, thank you.
Thanks for reminding me to download some of those scarily good horror games people have made with Half Life.
How tf has Bethesda not fallen on their ass yet? Oblivion is the last decent thing they did.
[it wasn't decent at the time]
Valve didnt update tf2 so valve still bad.
Valve would rather update rage simulator (Dota 2) which is kept alive by a Saudi prince buying battlepass every year than updating tf2
Giving TF2 the love and respect it deserves is basically the only thing that could turn around my opinion of Valve at this point. Hell maybe its time for a sequel.
3
Dota 2) which is kept alive by a Saudi prince buying battlepass every year
Which most likely brings Blizzard no end of rage, lol
almost all the tropes I have seen from that game only work well in horror and B-rating-ethesda can't do horror imo
It has a few good sci-fi tropes that could work well, like the generation ship concept. They just can't write in a way that is outside of the system they are in. The only solutions are extremely capitalist and also extremely stupid. There are very few concepts executed well or interestingly, despite the insane amount of sci-fi out there to copy from.
Maybe an unfair comparison. Half-Life is one of the greatest games of all time.
But my hot take is that I'm glad Starfield was made and released before ES6. If they hadn't then maybe they would be riding too high from making Skyrim and all the other money they made just releasing it and assumed if they made anything similar that it would be successful so they might have made ES6 as well as they made Starfield. Now I just hope Bethesda listens to the critiques and complaints people have of Starfield so that they take it into account when creating ES6 and make it better.
Only played starfield from gamepass (lies of p and hifi rush are pretty good) and besides the sterile feeling of the game, fuck bethesda for making melee useless. Why tf a knife and axe has the same swing speed? Why the guns with 0 perks outdamages melee with a full specced melee char.
"Its supposed to be realistic" well fuck realism then. Honestly with the low weight limits and annoying onjuries systsem, i think Starfield was originally a survival space game that bethesda rescapped into RPG today
Is lies of p on game pass? I’ve been wanting to try it
Yea
I think theres a 14 day trial for 1 buck too
I always kinda wonder if it isn't some deep nerd brain worm that us nerdy types down want melee to be effective. Like, that's too jock. Despite the fact that in half life the crowbar was absolutely deadly.
It's hard to get around the obvious upsides of a gun in settings that have guns. I think making the learning curve for guns way steeper would be better. Your aim is shaky af, longer time between shots, shitty accuracy at range and it should tske way longer to level up to being very useful than melee and also don't give every enemy npc guns and ammo. I'm mostly thinking Fallout rn, wouldn't play Stanfield even if I could. Guns and ammo should also be really rare and usually locked up or hidden, not just laying on a table or whatever.
Good heads up on posting about this being free. I almost bought it a few months ago actually glad I waited.
I wasn't super crazy about half-life, but the mods were something else. So many awesome mods.
Fond memories of the bizarre and surreal journeys in the Easter egg tunnels of certain Action Half-Life maps
Im about to download Enderal
