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

[dustnight]

Does anyone know if there's a finite number of tiles per planet and if so how many tiles are there? Do 'bigger planets' get more than smaller ones or is it the same number for each one.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Starfield almost had a mini resource management game before it was canned, former dev reveals (videogamer archive)

tl;dr: You were originally supposed to be able to use mined resources to build your own ship components. They ran out of time when it came to "art and programming" so they scrapped it. Which makes no fucking sense to me because every other crafting component in the game is just a fucking single animation of someone standing over a table and then just selecting the resources to make the thing.

 

[moocow]

Starfield almost had a mini resource management game before it was canned, former dev reveals (videogamer archive)

tl;dr: You were originally supposed to be able to use mined resources to build your own ship components. They ran out of time when it came to "art and programming" so they scrapped it. Which makes no fucking sense to me because every other crafting component in the game is just a fucking single animation of someone standing over a table and then just selecting the resources to make the thing.

Hey now those holographic "static object floats and rotates in midair" animations are expensive and time-consuming!

Small company, please understand.

 

[Gerelatha]

Starfield almost had a mini resource management game before it was canned, former dev reveals (videogamer archive)

tl;dr: You were originally supposed to be able to use mined resources to build your own ship components. They ran out of time when it came to "art and programming" so they scrapped it. Which makes no fucking sense to me because every other crafting component in the game is just a fucking single animation of someone standing over a table and then just selecting the resources to make the thing.

thank god they scrapped this, the game needs ships as a credit sink

 

[74164978231]

The ship design ui was probably the worst aspect of Starfield.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Starfield almost had a mini resource management game before it was canned, former dev reveals (videogamer archive)

tl;dr: You were originally supposed to be able to use mined resources to build your own ship components. They ran out of time when it came to "art and programming" so they scrapped it. Which makes no fucking sense to me because every other crafting component in the game is just a fucking single animation of someone standing over a table and then just selecting the resources to make the thing.

It would make sense as the base building would play along with this concept. What does mining even do in the final game? Give you a shitload of resources to quickly mod your few guns you're actually using, except that most attachments are locked behind level gated perks? Being able to farm adaptive frames for cash?
The real reason is likely the same one that the QA testers gave them for survival mechanics: It was too hard and confusing for the poor bethesda fanbase so they scrapped it or made it a shell of it's former self.
Not like it matters, game would have still been shit regardless. You know another space rpg that doesn't have meaningless resource management and is far better than Starfield?

I can't wait until this DLC comes out so I can then say that Outer Worlds done it better too.

thank god they scrapped this, the game needs ships as a credit sink

My question is, what happens when you don't give a fuck about the spaceship or the space combat mechanics? I know that there is missions that give you pretty good new ships, and space combat isn't required for most of the game. What does a player who prefer more grounded combat do with their money?

 

[Deus Exica]

Don't know if that's made up cope or not, but it'd kind of be funny because we'd now have at least two things Bethesda made a point of saying they didn't want in the game, only to then add into the game because enough people pointed out how shitty it was to not include/remove them.

Bethesda genuinely seems to have no fucking idea what they're doing anymore. Everything they do seems to just make shit worse. Their entire audience has to gang up on them to get basic shit fixed.

how you finish the quest will have repercussions in the rest of the game.

A few dialogue options? A new world state following a universe reset? What does it matter? The rest of the vanilla content is so garbage and boring I couldn't care less. Is the DLC going to rewrite the entire setting?

don't even get why they need Spacers or Crimson Fleet.

Bethesda HAS to have generic raiders in every location man, they just have to. They can't help themselves.

Do enemies not just drop the crap they're using?

No, for the first time in a Bethesda game enemy drops are not guaranteed. You can no longer strip the clothes off every NPC you kill.

why there ever was a Colony War

Because the treaty was written like the factions were in a setting with limited landmass and not fucking space. The war started because everyone agreed to just never make a colony ever again, but somebody did, so they all had to kill each other with mecha.

Yes, the space setting has it written that every space faring faction agreed to just never expand outward ever again.

What does a player who prefer more grounded combat do with their money?

Literally nothing. The problem with space being empty boxes where you can't actually travel is that the endgame money sink of new ships falls apart completely because space flight might as well not exist.

 

[Two-bit]

Did they ever fix how slow your character walks? I remember that being one of the first mods I downloaded because I found it to be so weird that you couldn't keep up to speed with anybody unless you were lightly jogging alongside.

 

[Drain Todger]

Starfield almost had a mini resource management game before it was canned, former dev reveals (videogamer archive)

tl;dr: You were originally supposed to be able to use mined resources to build your own ship components. They ran out of time when it came to "art and programming" so they scrapped it. Which makes no fucking sense to me because every other crafting component in the game is just a fucking single animation of someone standing over a table and then just selecting the resources to make the thing.

The mining and factory features in the game were easily one of the most bewildering, shitty parts.

The gameplay loop does fucking nothing. It's a tautology. Why do you need Components? To build Advanced Reactors. Why do you need Advanced Reactors? To run Fabricators. Why do you need Fabricators? To build Components. You have to set up 23 fucking outposts that significantly bog down the game's performance to do this in a self-sustaining way. What the everloving fuck?

• Crafting your own components served no purpose whatsoever, because you could always just loot them or buy them from vendors in sufficient numbers to build or upgrade practically whatever you wanted.
• Selling crafted components was not particularly lucrative because you had to wait for vendors to refresh a tiny quantity of Septims. I mean caps. I mean credits.
• Most of the things you could build with components served the primary purpose of powering up things to... build more components. It was kind of a weird, circular, pointless gameplay loop where the reward for having more components was being able to make more components with the things the components made. If they cut gameplay features that were intended to make use of components (like building ship parts with them), I can see why this is the case. Cut enough features that make use of components, and whoops, now you have a totally optional loop that does nothing.
• The container capacity is almost negligible and the container linking system is ass-tastic and unreliable. It's trying to be granular like Factorio, but there's no payoff.
• The system for shipping raw materials from outpost to outpost is like a dose of herpes from a pozzed dick aimed straight down your gullet. The deliveries fucking BACK UP.

If I had designed the component crafting system in Starfield, the resources would have all been abstracted, such that they are weightless and have no actual item associated with them. Instead, building a container within the radius of your outpost would increase a numeric cap for that resource. It wouldn't have had an inventory you could actually access directly, like a chest. Instead, you'd start with some arbitrary cap, like say, 500 iron, and now you build a large container and now you can store 2000 iron, and so on. This same system would have been used for personally carried resources, as well as ship-carried resources. There would have been separate "ore boxes" that would not function like chests, but would only raise the cap. Also, building transit pads would simply connect your outpost's inventory with the shared inventory of all other outposts. There wouldn't be any retarded system for directly linking one outpost to another in a linear chain. They would all just have a shared inventory, and the moment you added the pad, all your factories and workbenches would share an inventory with each other like the caravan system from Fallout 4.

Also, the components would have had a use, of some kind. They would have been used for important stuff, to actually encourage the player to build the outposts necessary to obtain them. Nothing truly important would be gated behind them, but they would've had some benefit other than just selling them or using them for upgrades. Also, the whole system would be streamlined and performant, and it wouldn't cause game-wide lag.

Starfield was originally designed to have a bunch of survival-game-esque features. Like ARK, or Conan, or Rust. Or, hell, Fallout 4 with Survival Mode enabled. You were supposed to synthesize your own fuel to be able to reach the most distant systems. Instead, in the game that actually shipped, fuel became an arbitrary distance cap on your jump range, which would refill itself instantly the moment you finished jumping. Outposts had absolutely no purpose whatsoever. They weren't even that good as player homes, because the selection of prefabs was very limited. Unlike Fallout 4 settlements, you couldn't really populate them properly and turn them into colonies, only leave behind crew in them.

Starfield's outposts were some of the most heavy-duty retardation I've seen from Bethsoft in a long, long time. They took the game's intrinsic inventory management problems and they magnified them many-fold. They weren't even that good of places to dump excess weapons and loot, because Bethesda decided that Skyrim-style infinite chests were too tall of an order... even though they're technically still in Starfield, but just in some specific locations, like some player homes and safe storage in faction HQs. Completely fucking pointless.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

It's obvious as shit that the whole "it comes together by the end" style of development Bethesda says they do completely blew up in their face, and I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when they realized that their version of No Man's Sky was also not fun after spending however many millions and 5 years on the game.

Honestly, they should have just stuck the whole survival thing out. It's so fucking weird that all of the temples and artifacts spawn in the first cluster of planets (sometimes multiple in single systems) except for the final temple which isn't random and serves as the final mission and it's all the way at the other end of the galaxy.

 

[Gerelatha]

It would make sense as the base building would play along with this concept. What does mining even do in the final game? Give you a shitload of resources to quickly mod your few guns you're actually using, except that most attachments are locked behind level gated perks? Being able to farm adaptive frames for cash?
The real reason is likely the same one that the QA testers gave them for survival mechanics: It was too hard and confusing for the poor bethesda fanbase so they scrapped it or made it a shell of it's former self.
Not like it matters, game would have still been shit regardless. You know another space rpg that doesn't have meaningless resource management and is far better than Starfield?
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I can't wait until this DLC comes out so I can then say that Outer Worlds done it better too.

My question is, what happens when you don't give a fuck about the spaceship or the space combat mechanics? I know that there is missions that give you pretty good new ships, and space combat isn't required for most of the game. What does a player who prefer more grounded combat do with their money?

having played both outer worlds and starfield the only thing I can confidently say outer worlds does better is being forgettable

 

[30+GameOvers]

having played both outer worlds and starfield the only thing I can confidently say outer worlds does better is being forgettable

Plenty of good games that are forgettable. "7/10, wasn't bad" and then you never think about it again kind of deal, much better than a complete disaster that will probably kill off Bethesda for good(either that or TES6, if it ever releases). At worst, Obsidian can use OW to pad out it's portfolio and make a sequel to it, it will be a cold day in hell before we see Starfield 2 if even getting a single piece of DLC content is like pushing a kidney stone.

 

[Gerelatha]

Plenty of good games that are forgettable. "7/10, wasn't bad" and then you never think about it again kind of deal, much better than a complete disaster that will probably kill off Bethesda for good(either that or TES6, if it ever releases). At worst, Obsidian can use OW to pad out it's portfolio and make a sequel to it, it will be a cold day in hell before we see Starfield 2 if even getting a single piece of DLC content is like pushing a kidney stone.

the outer sharts is a 2/10 to starfields 5-6/10, you don’t need to worship it just because your favourite faggot company made it
Its also a retarded stretch to call starfield a complete disaster when it at the end of the day made them money

 

[30+GameOvers]

the outer sharts is a 2/10 to starfields 5-6/10, you don’t need to worship it just because your favourite faggot company made it
Its also a retarded stretch to call starfield a complete disaster when it at the end of the day made them money

lol

 

[Gerelatha]

Does anyone know if there's a finite number of tiles per planet and if so how many tiles are there? Do 'bigger planets' get more than smaller ones or is it the same number for each one.

the terrain of each tile is directly mapped to a part of each planet, and is contiguous with the next tile, so it is theoretically finite.
However starfield planets are real scale, so they're effectively infinite because you're never going to run out of unseen landing spots with any normal play.

 

[Deus Exica]

You have to set up 23 fucking outposts that significantly bog down the game's performance to do this in a self-sustaining way.

What I never understood was why they got rid of the busted but admittedly fun settlement system to replace it with something more complex that serves no purpose. You'd think with 1 gazillion planets and RNG settlements you could interlink for resources and cash flow would be a no brainer, especially for a game about space frontiering.

I guess because making colonies is what got the last war started in lore. Thanks Emil.

will be a cold day in hell before we see Starfield 2 if even getting a single piece of DLC content is like pushing a kidney stone.

What would the sequel even be? It's the first Bethesda game where I am left wondering what a sequel could even entail. Elder Scrolls and Fallout have lots of unexplored and unique territory to cover but SF's setting is so limited and dull. I guess with the multiverse they could basically redesign the entire universe from the ground up into something not shit.

 

[30+GameOvers]

What I never understood was why they got rid of the busted but admittedly fun settlement system to replace it with something more complex that serves no purpose. You'd think with 1 gazillion planets and RNG settlements you could interlink for resources and cash flow would be a no brainer, especially for a game about space frontiering.

I guess because making colonies is what got the last war started in lore. Thanks Emil.

What would the sequel even be? It's the first Bethesda game where I am left wondering what a sequel could even entail. Elder Scrolls and Fallout have lots of unexplored and unique territory to cover but SF's setting is so limited and dull. I guess with the multiverse they could basically redesign the entire universe from the ground up into something not shit.

You could make a prequel that takes place around the time of colony wars or even within the first days of proper space exploration, right after Earth was evacuated, but all of these would take effort to make. I am more interested in what OW2 will look like, if it ever comes out, since there is a ton of room for improvement AND they added a hook for a sequel right at the end of OW1. The idea that these two games are anywhere on the same level is laughable, especially when one was successful enough to get a potential sequel and the other one wasn't.

 

[Deus Exica]

am more interested in what OW2 will look like

I wish I could be interested in it but OW1 was just so obnoxious. It's a better game than Starfield but only just.

I also pretty much lost any hope for Obsidian when I saw what they did to Avowed. They can't even make fucking Skyrim 1.5 in current year. I don't think OW2 will be anything to write home about.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I wish I could be interested in it but OW1 was just so obnoxious. It's a better game than Starfield but only just.

I also pretty much lost any hope for Obsidian when I saw what they did to Avowed. They can't even make fucking Skyrim 1.5 in current year. I don't think OW2 will be anything to write home about.

I haven't been paying attention to it, what happened to Avowed?

 

[Deus Exica]

I haven't been paying attention to it, what happened to Avowed?

It went from an open world game to an instances level progression style game, also terrible DEI designs where all the fish people are black and have zoomer haircuts.

They also changed the art style to something less grim and more corporate safe fantasy with lots of bright colors and neon magic sparkles.

Basically it just looks like complete ass. I think the devs admitted they spent like more than half the game's dev time trying to get multiplayer to work before giving up and making cut down slop.