Starfield - Bethesda's new space IP: will probably be full of fun and easily trackable bugs

[indigoisviolet]

Outer Worlds(a superior title) also had a low enemy variety but at least each one behaved differently.

There are four raider enemy factions, all dress mostly in red, all arm themselves the same way (with perhaps the addition of the Serpent Cult occasionally dropping a Novablast Rifle they didn't shoot with) and all react to the player in exactly the same manner.

The Crimson Fleet speak like normal NPCs because they are part of a side quest, the Serpent Cult girls hiss menacingly and occasionally talk bollocks about religion to each other, Ecliptic Mercenaries growl manly growls and grumble a lot about their chosen profession, and Spacers talk like Bane infected with a zombie virus. The Notes section in the inventory soon gets spammed with voice recordings from all four which state that their faction mission is to take over abandoned facilities, thus giving them all the same goal. They will fight among themselves, too, and occasionally they stage landings next to civilian outposts to give the impression they are invading and the player has arrived in the nick of time. Those are quite fun events ("holy shit, something's happening!!") but you can't steal those spaceships afterwards, or stow away onboard as they are really single game props that you fall through when the model pretends to take off, not proper ships like yours.

Now look that up on a wiki. Oh... oh dear. Starfield is in trouble, the wikis have stopped recycling the same six lists and nobody is adding new content. By now games are usually mapped inside out. Nobody is playing this game.

 

[Tiger Jack]

I dont even know at this point if mods can fix this game. Everything is built around this incredibly boiled down gameplay loop of go to recycled area ---> shoot enemies ---> loot ---> repeat. Once you get bored of that (which you do very quickly) there's nothing left to hold your interest because everything else the game offers is either half baked or straight up doesn't work. How do you fix that beyond just making a different game?

In terms of game design Starfield is an evolutionary dead end.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

How do you fix that beyond just making a different game?

I think there's fun that could be had with a proper bounty system and possibly a bounty guild/storyline. Or simply set up new storylines/radiant quests that allow you to actually feel like a "Ranger" with the Freestar Rangers.

More could be done on the ship combat/design side as well. Set up a new war so you could have large scale battles? Make it so you could design small and agile single seat fighters? Giant carrier ships?

Someone could maybe try to create a real economy so you could be an actual space trucker?

Just creating more and more templates to be used in randomly generated dungeons would help a lot. Starfield for the entire month I played it felt like there were 6 total dungeons that were just recycled over and over.

Having Constellation discover things outside of just the artifacts would be cool. But I feel like that avenue is limited with how they set the lore up. Maybe something around discovering old Earth probes or possibly some sort of historical pieces from the galactic wars? Maybe a separate guild set up as some sort of historical society instead of an explorers group?

Depending on how the mod tools and everything works, I'd like to see if people could set up NG+ to have more drastic changes than the ones I've heard about. (how about a universe where everyone is white? lol)

 

[Super Hans v2]

I think there's fun that could be had with a proper bounty system and possibly a bounty guild/storyline. Or simply set up new storylines/radiant quests that allow you to actually feel like a "Ranger" with the Freestar Rangers.

More could be done on the ship combat/design side as well. Set up a new war so you could have large scale battles? Make it so you could design small and agile single seat fighters? Giant carrier ships?

Someone could maybe try to create a real economy so you could be an actual space trucker?

Just creating more and more templates to be used in randomly generated dungeons would help a lot. Starfield for the entire month I played it felt like there were 6 total dungeons that were just recycled over and over.

Having Constellation discover things outside of just the artifacts would be cool. But I feel like that avenue is limited with how they set the lore up. Maybe something around discovering old Earth probes or possibly some sort of historical pieces from the galactic wars? Maybe a separate guild set up as some sort of historical society instead of an explorers group?

Depending on how the mod tools and everything works, I'd like to see if people could set up NG+ to have more drastic changes than the ones I've heard about. (how about a universe where everyone is white? lol)

So Starfield is salvageable, it's just that the ship building and combat need to be overhauled, Emil's story nuked, quest system made much deeper, economy significantly rebalanced, much more/any effort put into dungeon design, along with Gamebryo tossed out root and branch so that they'd have an engine capable of supporting such things.

Yeah, I more or less agree. The gunplay was alright. Enemies are spongy as all hell, but the actual shooting can be kept as it is.

 

[moocow]

This is what happens when you keep haphazardly patchworking an engine made for video games in like 2008.

The frustrating part is Gamebryo is still in active development and they didn't have to use the 2008 bash kit mutant for this game. Of course, that would cost extra money, but compared to what keeping the old beast patched up for 15+ years must have cost them I can't imagine it would have been any more expensive.

And Gamebryo itself isn't a bad engine, either! Hell, Defense Grid was built on it (at least DG1 was, anyway) and though it was a tiny little game it ran smooth as silk even on potato hardware.

I have actually come to believe that Chris Roberts and his cult will wind up mogging Todd Howard and Bethesda now.

lol meanwhile X4 Foundations mogs all this shit with ease and that's just a handful of Germans working on it.

 

[anustart76]

So here's something a little funny, I was at the store and I saw an Xbox promotion on a bag of Doritos. Guess which massive Xbox/Bethesda game was being promoted.

That's right, Doom! You know, the series whose last game came out like 3 years ago, and not their big new game Starfield.


Starfield is such a poorly received and forgettable game that Xbox had to go back to their last actual hit, Doom, to market their promotion.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

So here's something a little funny, I was at the store and I saw an Xbox promotion on a bag of Doritos. Guess which massive Xbox/Bethesda game was being promoted.

That's right, Doom! You know, the series whose last game came out like 3 years ago, and not their big new game Starfield.
View attachment 5518184

Starfield is such a poorly received and forgettable game that Xbox had to go back to their last actual hit, Doom, to market their promotion.

This is weird, cause I think these things are printed off like 3-6 months in advanced.

So this would have been printed off before Starfield even came out.

This years Doritos/Mountain Dew gamer thing is so weird. Mountain Dew has a Halo Infinite promotion going on as well, and everyone I know is wondering why because nobody gives a shit about Halo Infinite.

 

[Snekposter]

This years Doritos/Mountain Dew gamer thing is so weird. Mountain Dew has a Halo Infinite promotion going on as well, and everyone I know is wondering why because nobody gives a shit about Halo Infinite.

Did the Dorito Pope finally die?

 

[indigoisviolet]

I don't think I could mod myself into playing this game 10 times over, and these days modding sites are all tranny-infested lunatic asylums anyway. Nexus currently has a mod to spray jizz over Cora's tits, but they banned a mod that incidentally made Cora lighter-skinned. That's where we're at. Cora is a little kid, non-players.

Obvious stuff I could mod myself with a Creation Kit:

• functional EM weapons/Incapacitation skill, boosting EM damage by a factor of at least 10.
• Cora becoming a book vendor: she asks for books, I have books, why can't I give her books? Everything wrong with Starfield in precis.
• weightless armor mods, as at the moment adding Carrying Capacity is almost as heavy as the bonus itself.
• and while we're at it, weightless gun mods, as the current weights are non-sensical and abitrary.
• add weight to ammunition! What the fuck, game? I can carry an army's worth of lead with me at all times, but Pb weighs 0.5 per unit in my resource pack? Either make carry weight make sense, or get rid of it altogether and let us carry everything and anything.
• all corporate vendors have a million credits: we're in space, money is digital, there aren't the limits of physical coinage any more. Again, Starfield in precis; they didn't think things like the Trade Federation kiosks through.
• increase the value of Contraband by a factor of at least ten, if not a hundred. Given how much the game hypes contraband scans, and has specific Skills and very expensive spaceship kit to deceive them, why is it only ever worth less than a single space suit? It just has to make sense, devs, that's all we're asking. The reward for the risk is supposed to be tempting. Then again, the space station in Wolf System justs lets you gravjump right in with no scans at all, so what is the point of any of it? Well done game, you played yourself.
• remove the 85% cap on environmental protection which is entirely arbitrary. What is the point of upgrading your protective clothing at all if you can never be fully protected? Currently you will always take HP damage outside after a certain amount of time in "bad weather" so why bother breaking it down into four little categories, even?
• I can craft a nuclear reactor. I can craft a fully-functional starship-building shipyard, and then a fully-functional starship. I can craft a little army of combat robots, all manner of combat-enhancing chems, as well as set up automated production lines for the rarest component parts in The Universe. So if you don't mind, game, I'm going to add Digipicks to the crafting options, alongside Medpacks and Traumapacks, and, oh I don't know, ammunition.

Thing is, I won't be playing Starfield by the time a cracked version of the Creation Kit hits torrenting. You know that they are going to try to force us to join a Creation Club, it's why the editor didn't come with the game. I strongly suspect that they might even try to force us to make mods online in common with every other greedy website on The Internet these days. "Purchase 1000 Starfield Creation Tokens and we'll give you 48 hours access to the color picker app for free!"

 

[Sniperwoof]

The Witcher 3 is getting an official mod editor/tools early next year and Cyberpunk probably will too.

Looks like CDPR smells weakness.

Good, Bethesda badly badly needs competition.

 

[Snekposter]

The Witcher 3 is getting an official mod editor/tools early next year and Cyberpunk probably will too.

Looks like CDPR smells weakness.

Good, Bethesda badly badly needs competition.

Witcher 3 already has some pretty extensive community-made tools, and Cyberpunk isn't that far behind. It probably has less to do with Bethesda and more to do with their own fans beating them to the punch.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Yeah, mods basically saved Cyberpunk and kept it afloat while CDPR "fixed" it for 3 years.

It's almost too late to release the tools at this point, unless they're expecting it to take a long time before they get anything new out. Oh what am I saying? Of course it's going to take forever to get a new game out.

 

[11 Herbs and Spices]

increase the value of Contraband by a factor of at least ten, if not a hundred. Given how much the game hypes contraband scans, and has specific Skills and very expensive spaceship kit to deceive them, why is it only ever worth less than a single space suit? It just has to make sense, devs, that's all we're asking. The reward for the risk is supposed to be tempting. Then again, the space station in Wolf System justs lets you gravjump right in with no scans at all, so what is the point of any of it? Well done game, you played yourself.

I feel like an entire subplot related to not-jet/meth was removed at some point. It's everywhere and worthless. The mech parts marginally make sense and pretty sure it was part of something to put mechs together in a faction questline or just minor one. The contraband just being high value loot stuck behind skill checks or exploring feels off.

Everything is just so bare bones that you end up speculating too much about what was removed rather than the tiny amount even there. Maybe it's giving them too much credit to even guess there was actually purpose.

Edit: The ideal implementation for it would just be that you should pretty much have zero items in your hold but it, shielded or not, if you want any chance of not getting caught. So with the increased value, it makes it more efficient looting instead of just offloading an African warlord level of guns from every mission.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Everything is just so bare bones that you end up speculating too much about what was removed rather than the tiny amount even there. Maybe it's giving them too much credit to even guess there was actually purpose.

Todd has said that most of their games don't "come together" until the final months.

But in this case, I feel like Starfield just never came together.

There's a good possibility that the "Bethesda" style of game development simply doesn't work with more than 100 people working on the game. That's kind of what I took away from some of the comments Bruce Nesmith has said about the size of the Starfield team before he left.

 

[FedPostalService]

Maybe it’s time we all need to admit it’s over with Bethesda and move on? It’s like thinking about a first love and thinking “what if?” but we keep bumping into her and now she’s a fat vacuous retard with bad tattoos and empty eyes who you have nothing in common with anymore.

 

[Would]

They really need to fast track the creation kit/mod tools.

They must really be trying to scrub a ton of shit from the files or something. I realize that there has been a delay before but Starfield needs this shit more than any of their other games IMO.

It took Bethesda around a year and change to release the Fallout 4 GECK and it was substantially nerfed compared to the F3 one. It's clear Bethesda don't want people to have the power to port older games to their latest one with ease or vice-versa.

Honestly, the script extender is more important than the Creation Kit anyway, sans animation mods.

I dont even know at this point if mods can fix this game.

If you don't enjoy the game no mods will save it, and that's also true for Skyrim and Fallout.
You can't fix the loading issues, NPC facial issues, Space-as-an-interactive-loading-screen issue, or main quest issues... you can however make new quests that add new actors and create alternative questlines for the main quest (a la Sim Settlements 2's story quest in Fallout 4) and make space combat more common.

Everything is built around this incredibly boiled down gameplay loop of go to recycled area ---> shoot enemies ---> loot ---> repeat. Once you get bored of that (which you do very quickly) there's nothing left to hold your interest because everything else the game offers is either half baked or straight up doesn't work. How do you fix that beyond just making a different game?

You don't, and tbf this isn't just Bethesda's problem. I eagerly await to see Rockstar Games make the same core linear loop in GTA VI no different than in GTA III (get mission cutscene, go to marker, shoot target or destroy/steal/protect objective, drive back, repeat.

AAA Gaming as whole, gameplay-wise perfected their genre formulas in the 6th generation and have no intention of changing course in that regard. Instead you get texture/resolution upgrades, social contemporary-focused writing, and microtransactions/subscriptions.
Like, the CPU power to handle more complex AI and dynamic mission/quest design is there, but devs/publishers would rather you focus on aesthetics and delivering a flashy 1st-time experience instead. Remember how everyone was so glad games were becoming so "cinematic" and "genuine art" in the mid 00s? The big companies focus on flash with no substance because that's what the mainstream demands. Even if a team of devs have a vision for a new approach to gameplay, big publishers will seldom risk a budget for a project with the potential to flop. So instead you get Sony making every damn game into a homogenized 3rd person over the shoulder action-adventure game with a big hard-on for "cinematic experiences". TLoZ: OoT and RE:4 were too damn great for the industry's own good.

Bethesda will never take a risk like they did with Morrowind ever again until they absolutely need to. The loop as it is now still gets consumed by their cattle, and whatever vision Todd had for his space game 20 years ago wasn't so amazing he refused to compromise and instead take risks.

 

[NPZCC]

It took Bethesda around a year and change to release the Fallout 4 GECK and it was substantially nerfed compared to the F3 one.

A year and change? It came out 5 months later, Skyrim's came out 3 months later.

What ways was it nerfed compared to 3's?

I know it had issues where if you edited any exterior cells you had to rebuild precombined meshes for those areas and Bethesda didn't bother telling anyone about it.

 

[Would]

A year and change? It came out 5 months later

Huh, you're right. I remembered it released in 2016 but forgot F4 released late 2015.

What ways was it nerfed compared to 3's?

Scripting, mostly. IIRC there was no way to opt out of their 4-option replies. Most mods who want more replies have to daisy chain the options rather than let you have your 4+ choices.
Loading the kit was also much worse and had a tendency to crash more often than F3's did.

I know it had issues where if you edited any exterior cells you had to rebuild precombined meshes for those areas and Bethesda didn't bother telling anyone about it.

I don't think Bethesda were all aware of this themselves, considering how Automatron and other updates that made changes to the Commonwealth had busted precombines and terrible culling.

 

[NPZCC]

Scripting, mostly. IIRC there was no way to opt out of their 4-option replies. Most mods who want more replies have to daisy chain the options rather than let you have your 4+ choices.

That's more of a nerf to the whole game rather than just the CK, I think it took about a year for modders to actually fix that and create a framework to allow more than 4 choice replies.

Loading the kit was also much worse and had a tendency to crash more often than F3's did.

This is probably true, I know that Skyrim's CK had similar issues, both require mods to make them more stable and load faster.

I don't think Bethesda were all aware of this themselves, considering how Automatron and other updates that made changes to the Commonwealth had busted precombines and terrible culling.

That's definitely the kind of lazy fuck up Bethesda is known for, the downtown area in FO4 was terrible perfomance wise back in the day even with the use of precombines.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

This is weird, cause I think these things are printed off like 3-6 months in advanced.

Goes to show you; Bethesda had 0 hope for this project