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

[xXx: State of the Union]

Yeah, I don't think there is any way anyone could avoid triggering the SysDef thing unintentionally their first time through the main quest if they were trying to avoid being a bad guy.

Worst thing is is that you trigger this shit RIGHT before a major critical story point that is clearly supposed to take place directly after the previous mission. It's baffling they thought this was a good idea. It just leaves everything feeling very disjointed.

 

[Hector Hamsteak]

Something I don't see enough people talk about is how arbitrary and obscure the conditions to trigger some side quests are. Some require you to be in a location at the right time to overhear a specific NPC talk to another NPC before the dialog to accept the quest occurs, while others involve talking to previous NPCs that you probably haven't spoken to since you did their quest hours and hours ago and never mentioned a followup.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Something I don't see enough people talk about is how arbitrary and obscure the conditions to trigger some side quests are. Some require you to be in a location at the right time to overhear a specific NPC talk to another NPC before the dialog to accept the quest occurs, while others involve talking to previous NPCs that you probably haven't spoken to since you did their quest hours and hours ago and never mentioned a followup.

I noticed the one when you're first leaving New Atlantis and the security guards are detaining a Freestar Diplomat. If you enter your ship, it's just gone. You can't do it.

I've heard some people claim there is a similar thing where you do an interview with a news reporter about the attack on Vectera, but all anyone can tell me is you just have to kind of wander around the spaceport till they either come up and bother you or you have to find them. Still not clear on that and not restarting again to try and find out.

I got to the Unity on my second playthrough tonight, and this time opted to stay in my universe. If anyone is wondering, despite all of your companions demanding you go into the Unity, if you don't go through you come back to find out that they all couldn't make the choice either and get some cheesy "our family is more important than the unity" dialogues.

Oh, I also opted to fight The Emissary and The Hunter this time instead of talking them down. The fight seems like it could be cool with you traveling to all the different places you've been through the game, but it gets too fucking chaotic with how many duplicates and parallel self's they spawn.

 

[Molly White's Breast Milk]

Something I don't see enough people talk about is how arbitrary and obscure the conditions to trigger some side quests are. Some require you to be in a location at the right time to overhear a specific NPC talk to another NPC before the dialog to accept the quest occurs, while others involve talking to previous NPCs that you probably haven't spoken to since you did their quest hours and hours ago and never mentioned a followup.

The Interesting NPC mod is the same way and the mod author had a lot of influence over quest design. There's a quest in that mod that requires you to have had recruited a follower, dismissed them, recruited another follower then dismissing them and going to a specific tavern to talk to another NPC. None of this has a quest marker or instructions. The only way to do every quest in the mod is to read the wiki and plan your playthrough before you make a character. I hope they don't have a guy banging his daughter because he looks like her dead wife like in Skyrim.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

I'm going to hope that any of these easily missable missions are as worthless as the Freestar Diplomat one, as you literally just go to their embassy and tell the receptionist he's detained and get like 100 xp and 1000 credits.

I mean, I guess that's "okay" for like very early game but also nothing to be pissed about missing out on.

 

[Drain Todger]

TLDR: There is too much to fix to make the game "good" and even then, it will come too late and not be worth slogging thru rest of the game to experience it.

Indeed, the core game here has a lot of fundamental flaws. There are a lot of things that I, personally, would have done differently, from a design perspective.

Spoiler: Giant Bulleted Starfield Wish List (Full-Frontal Autism Assault)

• First of all, I would have shitcanned Gamebryo/Creation, with its chugging cell transitions and general inefficiency, and gone with UE4.
• There would have been little to nothing in the way of loading screens. Maybe a slight hitch when entering detailed interiors, but that's it.
• Instead of being a collection of randomly-generated flat planes, the planets would have been actual spheres, like Space Engineers, KSP, No Man's Sky, Empyrion, Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, etc.
• Planets would not be background objects. As you got closer to them, there would be reentry effects, procedural terrain populated with POIs would appear, and you would be able to land manually on flat enough terrain.
• Planets would be 1:1 scale and millions of square kilometers.
• No invisible walls, period.
• No mandatory fast-traveling using the map, period.
• If you got beyond a certain distance from a zone, it would despawn, to avoid savegame bloat, however, due to the random seed, if you re-entered the same area, it would regenerate the same exact way. Cleared POIs would not respawn immediately; it would take a week of in-game time for them to repopulate with enemies. The way this would work is simple. If the player clears a POI, it sets an invisible flag that tells the engine "don't spawn enemies or loot in this circular zone". If the player fucks off elsewhere for a bit, the flag would eventually time-out and disappear from their save, and enemies and loot would spawn again.
• There would be HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT POIs. The player would seldom see the same exact POI twice in a single playthrough.
• Atmospheric flight would be possible, but deliberately slow and clunky, to match how un-aerodynamic the ships are, encouraging the player to enter orbit to travel long distances, but ships would be perfectly capable of making short hops of a kilometer or two in a matter of seconds (their top speed in-atmosphere would be capped at about <200 m/s or so, and they would turn like boat anchors; it would feel less like conveniently flying a jet aircraft around, and more like the rocket-powered VTOLs from Highfleet; higher gravity would mean harder landings).
• Travel between planets and systems would NOT be accomplished by selecting them from a menu and fast-traveling. It would have been more like Elite, where you enter Supercruise and actually fly between planets without resorting to a cutscene transition.
• There would be ground vehicles.
  • There would be rocket-powered bikes, but they wouldn't be like speeders from Star Wars or the jet bikes from GTA or Saints Row. They would be more like rocket VTOL flying platforms that are more fuel tank and tubular frames than anything else, and flying them around would be kind of like playing Lunar Lander.
  • There would be tracked mini-tanks with machine guns.
  • There would also be power armor Exoframes, with extensive customization, like Fallout 4.
• You would be able to go on spacewalks with either your suit on, or with your power armor, by exiting an airlock or an Exoframe Bay.
• You would be able to board enemy ships while wearing power armor, but with a catch; you would need a specialized power armor bay and a drop pod launcher. Your pod would destructively pierce the enemy ship's hull and render it inoperable, and then you'd have to spacewalk back to your ship and re-enter via the power armor bay. You would only be able to loot the enemy ship's interior, not fly it around, due to the damage from the boarding.
• Drop pod launchers would also be perfectly capable of dropping you onto a planet from outside the atmosphere, with cool reentry effects.
• You would be able to call your ship in to land on autopilot (or have your crew pilot it) to pick you up, if you were separated from your ship for any reason (like No Man's Sky).
• You would be able to heavily customize robot followers like in Fallout 4's Automatron DLC.
  • Botmaster builds centered on siccing robot followers on enemies would be viable.
• There would be extensive cybernetic augmentations; not just neuroamps, but full-on prosthetic limbs with different attributes and such.
• If you sustained sufficient injuries in combat, your limbs could be amputated by an enemy attack, like in Kenshi. If you run into some space pirate with a big-ass gun, he absolutely could blow your leg clean off your body and force you to apply a tourniquet and crawl back to your ship half-dead.
• There would be nasty Gears of War-ish executions that you could perform on crippled or downed enemies, but they could also do the same to you if you're downed/crippled.
  • A Crimson Fleet asshole could come right up to your flailing ass with your leg shot off, kick the gun out of your hand, taunt you, and execute you in a gory cinematic second-person camera turnaround.
  • Enemies in video games are more interesting when you're actually given a reason to hate their guts, because they make it personal. Take the Zirax from Empyrion, for instance. They actively hunt you down. They send drones and troop transports to blow up your base. Every POI raid is a harrowing experience. You actually grow to despise them and just plain want to exterminate them from every corner of the universe.
• Location-based damage would work both ways, of course. In other words, it would be much like Fallout 4 (except with the added twist of de-limbed players/enemies surviving with a bleed-out effect).
• Enemies would have levels and perks and such, but there wouldn't be any special Legendary Enemies that are extra bullet-spongy minibosses. All human characters would be on a level playing field, and you'd be able to judge their combat effectiveness just by seeing what armor they're wearing and what weapon they're holding. The bullet sponge enemies would pretty much exclusively be monsters.
• The enemy AI would be way, way smarter and more aggressive to compensate. They would actively and intelligently make use of cover, aggressively push up on wounded or reloading players, make effective use of grenades, and be aware of their friendlies and coordinate assaults with them.
• There would be no loot rarity system or legendary effects. Every gun and piece of armor would have a fixed tier instead of that Diablo colored loot tier bullshit (i.e. Gun X is Gun X, there isn't a Magic Super Slaughterer Epic 12-Gauge Shotgun you can get in the endgame that does 10x as much damage as one you get near the start of the game).
• The player wouldn't be railroaded into wearing an ugly piece of armor with weak stats just because it has a few legendary effects on it, or forgoing the bonus to wear armor with better baseline stats but common tier.
• To compensate, there would be a much larger variety of weapons and armor, and their stats would correspond with their appearance.
  • "High-tier" guns wouldn't be high tier by virtue of being leveled or having loot rarity. Instead, a gun that does several times more damage than a regular anti-materiel rifle would be a visually oversized, heavier, rarer weapon that fires like 25mm cannon rounds or something.
  • Any bonus stats that could be applied to armor or weapons would be applied by modding/crafting only.
  • Weapon mods would be true-to-life. It wouldn't be ArmA-level realistic, but it wouldn't be counterfactual, either. Mods that lighten weapons would increase recoil, not decrease it, for instance. Also, each mod would only affect the stat that makes sense for that particular attachment. (Comps/Brakes would only affect kick, not accuracy. Barrel lengths would realistically affect muzzle velocity. Barrel profiles would affect accuracy. A big drum magazine would actually decrease recoil by increasing weight, etc.).
• There would be optional, fully-functional survival mechanics where you would absolutely need food and water and have limited fuel for your ship, Exoframe, vehicles, and boost pack.
• All of the un-fun bullshit inventory management would be completely stripped out. Crafting resources would be weightless like Cyberpunk 2077, subject only to a numeric cap.
• Resource containers in outposts would not have their own chest-like inventories. They would simply increase the numeric cap of the resource stockpile accessible to the player, while the player is standing within the outpost's area of effect.
• There would be none of this nonsense of linking containers together manually or having outpost link pads pile up with excess resources. If you build an outpost link, it would automatically link the stockpiles of all the outposts in the system (or in the game, with the inter-system ones), and you would gain access to all your other stockpiles immediately (i.e. outposts would instantly and invisibly share their stockpiles and resource caps, without any shuffling of weighted items around between containers; it would be abstracted and stress-free).
• You would be able to build resource containers on your ships, but these would only be for mining resources with your ship or moving resources in bulk to sell. They would be separate from the cargo containers used to carry loot, misc items, products, etc.
• If you didn't have such containers on your ship, your resource inventory would be limited to just your character's cap, and you would be restricted to hand-mining.
• The character resource cap could be increased with perks.
• You would be able to modify your ship with specialized asteroid mining, gas extraction, and liquid extraction equipment, and you would be able to land your ship directly on top of resource fields and extract them directly to the bulk resource containers on your ship.
• All ground chests would be infinite, to allow players to easily and conveniently dump excess cargo so they aren't forced to turn their ships into massive freighters just to carry a few hundred guns around that they have no way to quickly get rid of.
• There would be a reverse-engineering system where you could take weapons and armor to the workshop, break them down, and, eventually, receive blueprints.
• You would be able to manufacture any weapon or armor piece in the game yourself, from raw materials, so long as you had the blueprints. This would help give outposts a purpose.
• There would be a lot more outpost building prefabs to plunk down. You could practically build a luxury house in the middle of nowhere.
• You could also turn outposts into settlements, removing them from your outpost cap but also removing them from your direct control and having settlers live and work in them autonomously. Essentially, these locations become trade posts you can always visit and pick up rent money/radiant quests from.
• New Atlantis and Akila would both have been about five times larger, and the tram ride would let you stand inside the tram and watch the scenery go by.
• NPCs would be more reactive, instead of not even giving a shit about you discharging a firearm at their feet.
• NPC headtracking of the player in crowds would not be nearly as aggressive.
• Characters wouldn't look like waxy friggin' Madame Tussaud's sculptures.
• The subtitles would have actually 100% matched the dialogue and wouldn't be ridden with typos.
• Ships would not be arbitrarily limited to being <80m long. Instead, there would have been starport facilities for larger ships, and the largest of ships would have to use flat terrain outside a city instead of landing at the starport. Instead of your ship size being limited by infrastructure, it would just limit where you can land.
• You absolutely would be able to build a massive 300+ meter long capital ship and populate it with dozens of crew members (the crew cap would not be set by a perk, but solely by how many control stations there are on a ship).
  • All ships would be tail-sitters instead of belly-landers.
  • There would be realistic orbital mechanics.
  • There would be realistic Newtonian space combat like I-War or Children of a Dead Earth where you can overshoot an enemy and end up kilometers off-target.
  • Oh god, I just want a real Expanse game.
• Every hab module on your ship would be functional and have a purpose. Infirmaries would be used for treating the wounded, science labs would allow you to actually examine plant and animal samples and make discoveries, etc.
• For those wanting a more viable pacifist/humanitarian route, there would have been an entire faction dedicated to search-and-rescue missions, where your goal would be to answer distress calls, fix people's ships, evacuate stranded people and treat their injuries, etc.
  • There would be an Exoframe attachment with a welder specifically for doing spacewalks around stranded ships and repairing them by hand.
  • You would also be able to do this to your own ship.
• Ships would not be repaired by using a consumable from the cockpit. They would only be manually repairable either by walking around them on the ground and going over the damage by hand with a welder, going on a spacewalk and doing the same, or flying them to a technician and paying a fee. However, to compensate, shields would have much shorter recharge delays, such that shields are not one-and-done damage buffers that are depleted at the start of a fight and never regenerate, but can actually regenerate mid-battle.
• Even smaller ships would still be combat-viable in dogfights, with sufficient skill.
• There would be much larger space battles with dozens of ships flying around.
• There would be a Risk-style political map and an invasion system akin to Mount & Blade.
  • Players would be able to take part in faction invasions to seize territory from pirates, spacers, et cetera, which would turn over territory to the invading faction, if successful.
  • You could join the UC or FC and raid enemy strongholds for them as part of recurring radiant quests for money, but there would also be a player faction and you would be able to plot invasions, hire mercs (or bring along your own followers as a group) and seize territory for yourself.
  • These missions would involve squad-based combat where you have at least a dozen followers and have to tackle big, well-defended enemy strongholds with lots of sentry guns. They would have an artificially raised follower cap, in the sense that once an invasion is planned, you would meet up with everyone you sent on the invasion and they would all follow you around, but only within a certain distance of the objective (no dragging a dozen followers elsewhere).
  • Invade enough strongholds in key locations, and you can take over a whole planet.
  • Taking over a planet will reduce the number of raids on your outposts and settlements and confer various other productivity bonuses, if it's your own faction, or confer a flat monetary reward and increased favors from the established factions if you helped them with one of their invasions.
  • Factions would try to reclaim lost territory, and you'd be able to repel enemy invasions, too.
  • The invasion mechanic would also apply to space stations and space battles.
• There would be a real economy with fluctuating prices, and players would actually have an incentive to make and sell manufactured goods for profit. You could play Starfield like it was X3:TC or Avorion if you wanted to.
• Players would be able to build stations from modules, up to and including their own staryard.
• There would be an entire questline centered around the player going into business as a shipbuilder, with Walter mentoring you at first, but then perhaps growing envious of your success partway through depending on your choices, but then coming back around to respecting you as a competitor, etc.
  • You would be able to select the aesthetics of your ship part line from a number of different choices, like luxury, utilitarian, military, etc.
  • You would be able to design and sell your own ships, sending resources from your mining outposts to your staryard to manufacture whole ships from scratch.
  • NPCs would start spawning with your own ship designs, and you could also assign ship designs to your player faction.
• M-Class parts to make capital ships would be finished, fleshed out, unlocked, and functional, and have their own perk tier.
• The exploration would be actual motherfucking exploration; not just wandering around for its own sake, but actually documenting everything in a growing database and using your findings to advance the tech tree.
• There would be unusual and exotic biotech armor and weapons that could only be developed and obtained by the player, from analyzing plants, animals, and exotic minerals and using their crafting ingredients.
• The main quest would actually center on exploration, wilderness survival, jury-rigging your ship, and so on, and not urban social intrigue. Exploration wouldn't just be going from Point A to Point B scanning everything along the way. There would be full-fledged expeditions that slowly, piece by piece, uncover the geological and paleontological history of the planets you visit.
  • It wouldn't be as simple as just running up to a POI plunked on procedurally-generated terrain and scanning it. These would be actual EXPLORATION MISSIONS. You'd be diving in mile-deep caves, wending your way through canyons, running across glaciers and avoiding falling in crevasses, et cetera. These missions would have exploration-relevant dialogue and your followers would comment on your findings and you could have conversations with them about it.

This is just what I would have preferred to play. Other people's opinions on the matter may differ.

 

[anustart76]

Sarah is somewhat easy on the eyes and has a nice voice, but she is also a nagging, holier-than-thou hag who really finds soyence heckin awesome.

Old and naggy, can be kind of fixed by giving her a younger face/voice, but she does get really preachy at times and it's irritating. I don't need her telling me what to do constantly.

Sam is a fucking Space Cowboy, who couldn't act less like a cowboy. He is a single father of a mutt daughter, and his introduction is that he doesn't want his daughter to spend time with his father because he would infect her with his conservative views. Otherwise he is extremely bland.

He's not the worst, but you're right, he doesn't act like a cowboy should. Just complains a lot and talks about his daughter. He shouldn't be traveling around to begin with. Also worth noting his ex-wife is white. Which means if his daughter isn't, then she's not really even his daughter. HMMMMMMMMMM

Andreja is remarkably milquetoast for being a member of a secretive apocalypse-cult, she is as postmodern in her morals as all the others, she only likes violent solutions slightly more.

Barely interacted with her, but she really should have been the more piratey companion that doesn't care if you're a ruthless pirate.

Worst of all is Barrett, who has to be the most insufferable piece of shit in any game ever. A snarky, unfunny, whiny "scientist", gay Nigger who either makes stupid comments or whines about his dead husband. His entire fucking quest is about some shit to clear his husband's name in an incredibly boring quest where you have to collect evidence for a random lawyer chick.

Barrett starts off like he's going to be a cool action hero type, but as soon as he tags along for a little bit he's more whiny than Sarah. He can get all snarky but he can't take a joke. Though all the "snarky" responses your character can give are so stupid. You can't really play as a tough guy who plays by his own rules. You're just railroaded into being a whiny bitch yourself too, with so little ability to take control like you could in other Bethesda games.

The companions are so bland, meanwhile Fallout 4 had more companions on launch, and they were much more interesting and different. You can be a tough guy in Fallout 4 and you can make choices that actually feel different. You can shoot first and ask questions never if you want. You can't do any of that in Starfield. You can't be a deadly force of nature leaving corpses in your wake like you could in Fallout 4. And people used to complain about Fallout 4!

 

[30+GameOvers]

The starborn motivations and whole system is just so vague and poorly thought out and explained for such a basic concept. Like what are they looking for the artifacts for? I thought they said the artifacts were used to become a starborn, but at the same time they were looking for all the artifacts in order to find some other thing, but they explained it as something different from what made them starborn, but then you get all the artifacts and go to 'unity' which is apparently the ultimate thing they were looking for but its actually the thing that makes you starborn but not the thing they did? The whole thing is probably just a first draft.

Just wait for the DLC bro. It will make sure to explain just enough, without actually giving you an answer so that they leave you at a cliffhanger for Starfield 2, which will come out shortly after TES6 and Fallout 5. So by shortly, I mean "hopefully within your lifetime"

It's fun for the first planet or so (particularly on Kreet when you first get the option to explore), but quickly loses any sense of interest or immersion once you realize the "ruins" are randomly generated from the same pool and it happens for every damn place you land. Why does a lifeless rock have the exact same refinery, robotics facility, and supply depot as the near-Earth planet you just visited?

Funnily enough, all the generic pirates and abandoned ruins make the game feel even more like a post apocalyptic game than Outer Worlds, which was literally happening at the time where the food shortages are about to lead to a system collapse. In Starfield, it feels like that already happened and what remained of humanity is now squatting in a couple of former capital cities, eating bugs and inbreeding. I think I already wrote about this in this thread so I won't go into more detail, but I like how even if it's unintentional, Bethesda's obsession with randomly generated content like this gave us more worldbuilding than you get in the entire rest of the game.
The true redpill is that your character lives in the worst possible dimension where everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. There is other dimensions where the galaxy is a whole lot whiter and a whole lot wealthier(funny how the two are connected), hell there must one where Earth was never destroyed.
In the end, you are stuck in the universe where everybody is either nonwhite or gay and they all trusted the "Soyence!" all the way to humanity's grave. Pretty sick shit, but I could see how ESG would love a story like this.

 

[Drain Todger]

A few other things to add to the list:

• The game should have had a fame/infamy system that affects how NPCs react to you. It's very strange that, as a typical Bethsoft protag who winds up massacring a couple thousand people per playthrough, you get absolutely no widespread recognition in this game at all. In every circumstance, you are treated as a complete unknown. You can mow down a thousand Crimson Fleet guys, and then go join the Crimson Fleet, and nobody recognizes you in the least or knows who you are.
• I would've made sure that explosives and melee remained viable throughout the game instead of only being effective on low-level enemies, to encourage more varied builds.
• There would've been a lot more handheld laser and particle weapons.

 

[30+GameOvers]

All these companions sound absolutely dreadful and boring.
From the leaked footage of the intro, I thought that Barrett would at least be a decent companion, until I found out he's a faggot and starts going soft after he remembers his dead husband.
Well, pic related is the worst companion in Outer Worlds and even she's miles above everyone from what I've seen. The robot and Adoring fan are okay, but do they really count?

Time to apologize. You didn't know how good you had it.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Nope

I'm still having more fun with Starfield than The Outer Worlds. That game was fucking boring garbage and anyone praising it now after hating on it before is a fucking bandwagoner.

Nah, Outer Worlds is leaps and bounds above Starfield in literally every way that matters. It's a joke how a small, casual project from Obsidian is so much better than Todd's Magnum Opus he used to dream about when he was a kid.
I hope people start playing OW over this garbage, maybe it will make Obsidian more confident in the upcoming sequel.

 

[Hector Hamsteak]

Well, pic related is the worst companion in Outer Worlds and even she's miles above everyone from what I've seen. The robot and Adoring fan are okay, but do they really count?
View attachment 5403425
Time to apologize. You didn't know how good you had it.

No. A black asexual lesbian quirky autist bitch is worse than any companion in Starfield, Even Barrett. The ONLY decent companion in that Reddit tier Rick and Morty ass game was Vicar Max and he gets completely neutered in his personal quest.

 

[FedPostalService]

No. A black asexual lesbian quirky autist bitch is worse than any companion in Starfield, Even Barrett. The ONLY decent companion in that Reddit tier Rick and Morty ass game was Vicar Max and he gets completely neutered in his personal quest.

Really? I wanted to fuck the asexuality right out of her and bleach her future family tree.

I have zero feelings or thoughts about any Starfield character. They’re Reddit posters in NPC form (well, if the women had penises they’d be full on Reddit posters)

 

[30+GameOvers]

No. A black asexual lesbian quirky autist bitch is worse than any companion in Starfield, Even Barrett. The ONLY decent companion in that Reddit tier Rick and Morty ass game was Vicar Max and he gets completely neutered in his personal quest.

She is only bad if you decide to go with her personal quest(which was written by a woman btw, the original writer had to quit around the time the first planet ends, and it shows). When it first comes up, you can literally tell her to shut up about it and it never comes up again, she's alright as a companion and is mostly just shy and quiet for the most part from that point onwards.
The other companions are also better, as they don't outstay their welcome and keep the cringe to the minimal. Funnily enough, Nyoka(the negress with neon hair) is just as developed as Max is while having nuance to her character, the diversity hires in Starfield like Barrett can only dream of that. Ellie and Felix are not anything special but they do their part to complete the crew nicely(I can go in more detail about each, but I don't want to derail the thread). I already talked about Parvatti and SAM has more personality than Vasqo in Starfield.
From my experience, people who seem to have a blind hatred towards that game haven't played it for more than 2 hours and expect video essays and /v/ to fill in the missing blanks, hence why so much info about the game I hear when people attack it is wrong or just downright retarded. I'm not sure if that applies to you, but I definitely met people who didn't even play the game and just watched a single video on it who came to the conclusion that "everyone is written like pickle rick", which isn't true.

 

[Sniperwoof]

At least in The Outer Worlds if someone is a cunt to you you can shoot them right in their stupid fucking face.

I think the only essential npc in the entire game is Dollar Tree Rick Sanchez and that's because he's tied to every ending.

Compare this with Starfield where 95% of NPCs are essential.

 

[Cpl. Long Dong Silver]

If you can't have a full out evil playthrough then you've failed as an RPG.

Also money makes no sense. On one hand bribes are considered exorbitant at 2-5k credits but a ship costs 400k. The economy has no sense of proper scale IMO

 

[FedPostalService]

If you can't have a full out evil playthrough then you've failed as an RPG.

Also money makes no sense. On one hand bribes are considered exorbitant at 2-5k credits but a ship costs 400k. The economy has no sense of proper scale IMO

I

Spoiler

murdered a ship full of hundreds colonists who had been travelling for hundreds of years

and I got about the same amount of cash as some fetch quests. I think zero thought went into the economy

 

[Something Awful]

The sad thing is, as shit as this game is, the multiverse thing could have actually been interesting. Give players a reason to replay your game, but this time your character has foreknowledge of events, so you can constantly blow everyone's mind and completely change the way quests and storylines play out. They could have made it a secret Groundhog Day game, make a unique nested story, it could have been brilliant and fresh. But they just didn't do anything with the idea. Fucking pointless.

 

[Mega Black]

Lol I took Andreja along for the quest "The Best There Is" and apparently she has stealthboy-like invisibility or some shit while sneaking, and when exiting sneak this somehow caused her to be headless until I reloaded the game. It just works.
View attachment 5385271
View attachment 5385267

Genuine improvement.

I agree with the idea that these games never feel great at the start, but it really isn't the DLC that adds onto it it's the modding IMO.

I think Oblivion and Skyrim at the very least has compelling settings and conflicts to invest the player in even in basic vanilla. Starfield doesn't have that, it's a mishmash of nothing too scared to offend anyone to have interesting content.

 

[Sniperwoof]

I think Oblivion and Skyrim at the very least has compelling settings and conflicts to invest the player in even in basic vanilla. Starfield doesn't have that, it's a mishmash of nothing too scared to offend anyone to have interesting content.

In Skyrim you can side with the racial nationalists who violently remove elf and elf lovers which are scheming to subvert and control society and change Skyrim's demographics and uproot the natives.

Sometimes I think Starfield being 95% and gay was a response to Skyrim unintentionally being extremely based.