The worst thing a video game can do is be boring. Buggy games can be fun as you laugh at the absurdity of the physics. That was honestly one of the reasons I stuck with fallout 3, because I loved that you could turn someone supersonic with enough landmines. Even if the game crashes and you lose progress, you can’t lose the fun you had playing the game.
I recently replayed fallout 3 after starfield failed to scratch my Bethesda itch, and I realized how much more alive the world felt (and how much less often I saw a loading screen when doing quests).
I am going to make a fallout 3 mod that brings the starfield experience, you can now only fast travel and it adds two loading screens between every location. It will also remove every NPC that isn’t strictly quest related and make them immortal. It will also level the wasteland and replace it with a procedurally generated landscape with absolutely nothing to discover in it.
I think Fallout 3 has the best execution on atmospheric storytelling and plenty of unique, branching quests to compliment that. The takeover of Tenpenny Tower where you let the ferals in will go down as one of the most memorably crazy quests I’ve played in a game. Completely unrestrained in its brutality. Modern Bethesda is so sanitized and as a result, utterly boring.
I have many times and it’s easy to see they made a stronger rpg with better writing, but it’s harmed by the setting. Wandering through the desert doesn’t hit the same for me as the capital wasteland nor are the stories told by random scenes you can find as compelling.
I know that I’m probably supposed to say that New Vegas is perfect, but I gotta say that Fallout 3 is my favorite. Now if we could have a Fallout 3 made by Obsidian…
Huh i replayed that game several times Not once do i remember letting the gouls in to ten penny tower
If i remember right (looong time ago) letting ghouls into the tower was one option for how to play out that quest line. It was kind of written to be the “bad” outcome because it obviously killed all the people in the tower, so likely most people didnt play it out that way…buuut, that was the rich, snobby people, so ya know…eat the rich.
The half hour I spent watching this beast rampage through the ship was probably the most actual fun I had in this game. https://imgur.com/YLD39Za
Really, really wanted to like this game. Morrowind was like, my entire childhood. Bethesda have been on a downward spiral for so long to me and I’ve completely lost my faith in their titles. Starfield felt soulless to me when I played. A game that’s supposed to be about an organization of explorers, where the exploration consists of fast travel and loading screens. Starfield did a lot of things and it didn’t do any of them phenomenally, and only a few of them adequately.
Haven’t played the game.
I’m curious as to how exactly the space exploration differs from Elite Dangerous.
Because in that nearly decade old game, space exploration does largely consist of fast travel warping to systems, scanning them and potentially any planets from your ship, scooping fuel from the stars, avoiding white dwarfs and neutron stars… And its absolutely enthralling.
Curious as to how they screwed up a proven formula.
The weird one to me is that they made it sound like a space survival game where the ship and its maintenance was going to be a primary game element, but other than the ship builder and random encounters outside a planets, it seems like it’s hardly a thing.
The space exploration for Starfield only happens in orbit of another planet. From the few hours I played before I gave up on it you couldn’t even fly to a station nearby the planet, you had to fast travel to it which was a loading screen then you had a loading screen for docking on to the station and then another loading screen for getting into the station
Elite has a sense of scale and seamless transitions between places (even if they are just well-disguised loading screens). The planets feel planet sized, and you can move around them or between them freely in hypercruise (or whatever the system for traveling inside systems was called). There isn’t any fast travel system as far as I’m aware – if you want to get to the other side of the galaxy, the journey will take you days or weeks, even with a kitted out exploration ship. This, combined with the sense of scale and incredibly well made map system, makes it feel like an expedition, even if the journey itself is extremely lonely and repetitive. Despite Elite’s many, many flaws - they absolutely nailed this aspect of a space game.
Starfield feels like clicking through menus to get to boring minigames with different skyboxes. It cannot be overstated how non-immersive the travel and “exploration” is compared to ED.
*Edited disclaimer: I gave up a couple of hours in. If there’s a good game in this mess that you get to after 100 hours, as some people have said, I’m sure as fuck not sticking around to find out. More likely it’s just the sunk cost coping mechanisms kicking in.
I wanted to like it too. I did like my first playthrough after I learned to navigate its ridiculous menu diving, I thought it had some cool concepts and I liked the gameplay well enough for how I played it. Some aspects clearly had cool intentions then just forgot about, like unique NPC followers.
Then after over 100 hours or so I tried out NG+.
It shows all the flaws of the game at 10,000 nits, they are blinding. My first realization that things were bad was one of the first dialogue options that was different was pretty close to, “hey, i already know all of this lets move this along”. And the response is, like, “wow, well okay then.”.
My second realization it was going to get worse was that continued style of dialogue choice for each follower you can play with - which by the way if you don’t like some of them then you’re gameplay time is severely limited. I didn’t really care about Sam or the religion guy, and the characters that were interesting were locked behind quests that I’d already done and decided whether I wanted them or not.
My third and final realization was that all the items and customizations I put into my ship are also worthless, since now I have to re-find each part and rebuild my ship. Could have done a save mechanic for shipbuilding…
I stopped not long after that. There is just no point to the game after the first playthrough because everything that was interesting about the game was the philosophy. But it’s not that motivating as a game. Especially when you’re going through copy-paste maps that are totally like that one other place. It’s. All. The same.
Also from like a gameplay perspective, what the fuck? You’re trying to tell me that *I have all of my knowledge of previous interactions, but none of my blueprint knowledge?" How does that track? It doesn’t, and it’s bullshit. There were so many ways the NG+ could have played out and they took the absolute laziest possible one.
P.S. the scrooge dream sequence ending of seeing the future of your outcomes was buggy and boring.
And yet it was still better than Rebel Moon…
I was very confused, when it was nominated in the steam awards for most innovative game. Made me a bit sad when people do not know what great games are out there that only cost 1/5 of a AAA borefest.
RDR2 was nominated this year for at least one category
It came out years ago, hasn’t been updated significantly, and the online component was abandoned. It’s a fine game but why the fuck was it in on the ballot for anything? There were a few games this year like that. So weird.
Lol I’ll give Bethesda credit for a lot of things, but innovation definitely isn’t one of them.
I’d say radiant AI was innovative, but they haven’t done anything like that in almost 20 years now.
The New Game + was one of the most innovative mechanic that came out this year.
It isn’t the Game of the Year award.
Other games just replay the story with the same stats.
Starfield has (or at least tries) to depict different universes.
Example (Spoiler for Starfield):
spoiler
The Constelation is different each time you run a New Game +
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You meet the non-starborn version of yourself. You can convince yourself to join your crew, and thus you mentor yourself. All other Constellation members are missing/dont exist.
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Same as Above but all the other members are alive and well.
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Multiple version of yourself hang out at Constellation, like a sort of Citadel in Rick and Morty
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Andreja has gone evil, has taken over the Lodge, and wants to take down Constellation.
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Walter Stroud is not benevolent with his money but instead uses it to control Constellation and sells you the artifacts for 100k each.
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You meet the Hunter who has already killed all of Constellation. He gives you the artifacts.
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Cora Coe has returned as a Starborn and wants to avenge her father’s death.
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Evil You is there trying to kill everyone, a wounded Sarah fills you in.
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Only kids are at Constellation, all the members are gone and there are kids in their place.
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Another kid one where all the members are retired and slight changes to the one above.
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Everyone is dead and only Vasco remains.
It is pretty innovative I think, although it could have been better executed.
How is ng+ innovative? Have you played many other games this year? Dave the diver, boneraiser Minions or Astrea have shown me more innovation in gameplay than any AAA game in years.
Can you explain how new game+ works? I got bored and stopped playing before reaching the endgame.
You have the option to get reincarnated at the end of the story. It starts you off with a neat ship and some nice gear, which gets a little better every time you restart. You keep all your powers, so you can re-run quests with opposite options to get whichever powers you missed. IIRC, it takes three or four playthroughs to actually get all the powers. It also gives you new dialogue options, which allow you to skip huge swaths of the story missions.
But it’s not anything super new or innovative. It’s new to Bethesda games but it’s not new.
The main story let’s you choose if you want to become starborn so you can basically go to a new universe get a cool ship and armor and keep your stats. Each time you have a chance that the universe is different in some ways
Haven’t the modders, who in general always fix all of bethesda’s bullshit, mostly gotten bored of this game? I know it was big news when the guy behind the big Skyrim multiplayer mod started working on this star field one and then declared the game stupid and quit.
While I think it makes some business sense to release the modding tools between 6 months to a year after (when their devs aren’t working on the game anymore so they can actually develop the tools and strip it of any proprietary software) I do wonder sometimes how things would change if they just delayed the game until the modding tools were ready.
I think some modders like the challenge or enjoy making a shitty game more fun for the community to actually play
I mean, if a modder has so much ability and creativity that they can essentially rewrite the whole game (because nothing short of that will save this absolute snoozefest of a story) they might as well create their own game and make bank in the process.
Modding a game doesn’t make much sense if the foundation sucks. So much wasted effort, making mods for already good games is much more rewarding in my experience (released about two dozen for different games)
Xfire? You mean the old gaming chat program? 😅
But once you finish all the main+side quests and maybe try out new game + a couple times there’s not really any reason to continue.
“but”? That sounds like hundreds of hours of gameplay.
It is.
I don’t get this fascination with games that allow you to keep playing indefinitely with random generated content.
You saw everything the game has to offer, why don’t you just move on?
High dozens to hundreds, and you might not actually get to see some of the uniques that are radiantly placed too.
Dozens to hundreds of hours of guided content at the least.
On a game that came out on September and already has 6 week updates planned out for 2024 starting as early as February, nearly a full dev team, and a Megacorp already prefunded it all.
They did make the PR mistake of being a brand saying any opinion at all within a user score system, that was dumb.
I make stupid comebacks too when gaslit with things like Cyberpunk or Skyrim having a better launch.
Otherwise, literally (Way back machine it if you ever want to see History rhyming) Same complaints every BGS game gets.
The same ones that years later turn to praise. It’s demented
Yes, you can see a lot of the expected ‘shareholders said to fix this in 2024, they need holiday bonuses first’.
But somehow the 3–that’s less than a handful–of truly disrupting to game play choice bugs (extremely frustrating, but appearing and worsening over dozens to hundreds of hours of gameplay on average) means the rest of the package might as well not exist, let alone be a topic you can discuss online.
Impossible to have a nuanced conversation on anything actually related to the playing of the game.
Especially on nearly every space that dares declare itself as a place to discuss Starfield.
The subreddit of the same name, Steam page, Xbox club page, game effing faqs page.
Just copies of the same toxicity filled–not negative mind you, I’d happily debate a lot of the games negative–disingenuous takes.
I’ve played the thing for just over 200 hours.
I know the bugs, the systems, how to avoid them, and how to make my fun when the trek to Riften flight to Elos is being considered versus fast traveling there.
Because that’s the rub, the scene transitions are awkward (but even on console 2-4 seconds, because they’re a mall store in construction window dressing and not engine limitations as is often touted) but you can explore and take them sequentially. Things will and do happen in-between.
I love this game.
But my love pales in comparison with even a billionth of a billionth of a percentage of the number of times the word ‘hate’ is etched in each ‘nanoangstrom’ of the neurons making up the collective video games and video game industry discussion… industry.
Fuck, it’s money all the the way down isn’t it?
