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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2422 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 1, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Starfield thread.

Mediocre writing, animations, gameplay, many loading screens. And yet I can’t deny I played until 7am today, and I started very tired and wanting to go to sleep at 10. There’s a certain charm to this game that’s hard to describe, a sense of adventure that was in Skyrim but not - in my opinion - in Fallout 4 (although that might just be because I find post apocalyptic settings very boring). I slept for three hours, now I can’t stop thinking about playing some more. You overhear something, then the next thing you know you’re off a grand adventure around the galaxy; time vanishes.

Would I recommend it? I’m not sure, all the criticisms are valid. But I’m having more fun with it than with Baldur’s Gate 3 so far.

It's weird, there are quite a few games that I have played for no reason other than it was leaked early, but with Starfield I just... It feels like a waste of bandwidth? That's not really it, it can't be - I have unlimited bandwidth, but I'm going to get the game on gamepass and I've already downloaded the files and it just seems like a waste to play a leaked copy. Besides, I'm still playing Sea of Stars (which is pretty good, wears it's chrono trigger inspiration on its sleeve and the soundtrack is by Yasunori Mitsuda. And while some of the early tracks are a bit weak, the music really picks up once you pass the first act) so I figured might as well try to finish that.

Also has anyone here gotten their hands on the Chunks promos Bethesda are sending out? A friend got the full swag bag and along with the hat and tote bag and shit it comes with a smart watch designed to look like the starfield version of the pip boy and, more importantly, these bricks of flavoured marshmallows mimicking the Chunks food items in the game. Sadly however, the Chunks Chicken Fillet is toffee flavoured, not chicken fillet flavoured. And while I think the idea of advertising your game/movie/universe by recreating iconic products from it is great (and the more they commit to it the better), I've never understood why they are so stingy with them - I haven't found a way an ordinary member of the public could get chicken fillet marshmallow slabs, and without one I have no way to justify eating my way into a diabetic coma.

But I’m having more fun with it than with Baldur’s Gate 3 so far.

BG3's writing and quests are.. nothing much, however, compared to Todd Howard Fallouts they're genius.

Never giving that poisonous dwarf Todd H. any money ever again. Let others fund his Skyrim reskins now with Barbie houses.

A copy magically appeared on my machine, but I'm yawning my way through, so far.

Mechanically uninteresting, enemies are bullet sponges, making guns full-auto somehow cuts their damage output down to a third, hogs too many system resources for too little to look at, and oh boy yes please I can't get enough of inventory management. All the RPG pacing where you're just a random miner who still happens to be able to wipe the floor with dozens of pirates at once, and everyone you meet takes one look at you and gives you a job (often their job!) to do, still weirds me out. And the lack of a mini-map is just insulting.

Edit: I normally put all my gripes into steam reviews, but since that's not an option, I'll put them here instead.

The quests, at least at this stage of the game, are asinine. Talk to person A, talk to person B, retrieve object from clearly marked point that's five loading screens away, return to person A to receive uniformly paltry reward. No challenge whatsoever, pure busywork.

The need to forego the use of my perfectly atmospheric-flight-capable spaceship and its giant guns in favor of trudging around entire planets on foot and shooting entire brigades of pirates or mercenaries with those underpowered bb rifles they use in this future is baffling. Not that it's difficult - it isn't - but how time-consuming it all is, where it could be so much faster! If you could at least pack a jeep into the cargo hold, but no, no.

Surveying planets requires scanning resources and plants. Well, I thought I was doing so by pointing my scanner at them, but somehow my survey percentage didn't go up. Turns out you not only need to point your scanner at them, but also press a key to actually make it scan. This takes no time and consumes no resources and requires no skill of any sort - the keypress is perfectly superfluous.

The game is very frequently interrupted by loading screens, but don't you dare alt-tab and do something else, because they won't load in the background.

The space combat and by extension the shipbuilding are so basic and linear that I don't think anyone would miss them if they were gone.

Edit: Played some more, and it's not worth reviewing at length. Hot trash.

making guns full-auto somehow cuts their damage output down to a third

This always gave me an aneurysm in Fallout. At least modded weapons aren't as susceptible to this bullshit.

I also hate the fact that bulletspongy enemies have become a staple of the "RPG" genre, for all that it has nothing intrinsically in common with trying to role play anything but a mass shooting at an airsoft convention..

There was a brief golden moment, in the original Deus Ex, where it looked like we might have been able to move to a more serious timeline. I remember being flabbergasted at my first death, in the first level: "He just shot me once! With just a pistol! How did I get killed by a single pistol shot to the head!?! ... Wait a minute. What kinds of games have I been playing, to make me believe I should be able to shrug off a bullet to the head?" That might have been on hard mode, but even so the principle surprised me. Of course, what's good for the PC is good for the NPCs, so only the armored enemies were bullet sponges.

But shortly into the game, even Deus Ex gave you some options for handwavy "use nanotech to make your skin more bulletproof" magic armor. Naturally, because in a long game "bullets all miss" would be even more implausible, "you can't let yourself get shot at ever" would be too hard, and "every now and then you die instantly" would be too frustrating. It's easy to sympathize with game designers who just skip the "too hard" and "too frustrating" options entirely; I just wish it wasn't so many of them.

Well, I play a lot of Tarkov, Squad and Arma, and in those games people usually die when you shoot them even once in the head.

(Sometimes characters might seem even tankier in Tarkov than many RPGs, but only because you're using piddling rounds against really good armor, and you'd have much the same result IRL. Good bullets can kill in 2 or 3 torso hits.)

I don't understand why this became such an RPG staple, and I hate every time it shows up. At least in some games, like Fallout 4 or Stalker you can mod the damage and end up with a much more enjoyable experience!

A copy magically appeared on my machine

Did you pre-order it a long time ago?

No, it's far too expensive to me.

It sounds like a piracy joke to me.

Yes.

I tried it briefly. Don't feel like playing it before they add HDR support. On PC there's no HDR mode at all. Even the SDR implementation is poor. Everything looks washed out, and I suspect it was even intentional.

I got Windows auto HDR to work with it by copying the executable, renaming the copy to farcry5.exe, and setting the steam launch settings to

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Starfield\farcry5.exe" %command%

What the hell.. why should that work or be needed ?

Is that a Windows 11 thing?

I'm on Windows 11 yeah. Not sure if it's on other versions.

Culture war angle

Starfield has a black scientist named Vladimir who speaks in a Russian accent and wears what appears to be a telnyashka. They basically made a stereotypically Russian character, named him after the Russian president, and then also made him a black dude.

quickly checking setting and lore of the game

Starfield is set in an area that extends outward from the Solar System for approximately 50 light-years called the Settled Systems.[16] Around the year 2310, the two largest factions in the game, the United Colonies and Freestar Collective, engaged in a conflict called the Colony War.

In this case, unlike various medieval fantasy worlds where tiny villages in nowhere are perfectly diverse and multiracial, this is realistic and all nerd rage is misplaced. Easily to imagine 24th century where white race is long extinct, but modern nations still exist, only all black (some might see it as utopia, some as dystopia).

this is realistic and all nerd rage is misplaced

I skimmed the thread you linked... Where do you see the nerd rage?

in Fallout 4 (although that might just be because I find post apocalyptic settings very boring).

Nah, it's not you. Fallout 4 was a shameless cashgrab trying to milk the positive sentiment people had for the previous part. It felt very sterile to me as well, but I loved Fallout 3.

I'm a little bit worried about the positive comparison to Skyrim, though. I know lots of people love it, but in my opinion it was already missing something fundamental to Bethesda games.

Whenever I've seen opinions on the wider Elder Scrolls series, it has always been that the most recent edition has been a tragic dumbing down of the series. People who played Daggerfall find Morrowind to be a mass market, lowest-common-denominator mess. People who played Morrowind think the same of Oblivion, and those who played Oblivion find the same issue with Skyrim.

I've only played the last two, but from what I've seen of the other games there is certainly some truth that the series gradually became simpler, more accessible - but perhaps at some cost. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar plan was in place for Fallout, until New Vegas came along and ruined any chance of people looking positively at the others.

I thought Fallout 4 was pretty decent, mechanically anyway. The gunplay was fine ("best in series" is not saying much, but I'll say it anyway), the settlement building and crafting were shallow but offered a decent respite from the endless "walk from person a to person b" quests or clearing what looks like the same dungeon post apocalyptic factory for the 10th time. I didn't play the story through to completion (and probably the less said of the writing, the better) but it was a reasonably memorable ~30 hours before I got bored. I liked the power armor. Solid 7/10.

Starfield seems considerably streamlined, even compared to Fallout 4. The loss of attributes means the only thing differentiating your character build is your choice of skills now, and unfortunately I have terminal RPG brain and cannot justify taking anything that doesn't grant me more utility (e.g., better lockpicking to open more doors and explore more locations, higher persuasion chance to open up new quest options, etc) and the combat isn't exactly difficult (you can spam medkits to brute force any encounter, even on Very Hard) so I can't see myself dropping a point into any of the weapons skills until, like, level 30+.

Companion AI seems even more braindead than I remember in Fallout 4, with followers regularly getting stuck on geometry, and they don't teleport to you until you change location, so they're useless in most fights. The space combat is basically just a minigame (and a hard DPS check if you're up against >3 enemies, as there aren't any useful mobility options, cover/asteroids are rare and get destroyed almost immediately) but the lego-style ship customization is still pretty fun to toy around with. Jump jets are cool, different planets having different levels of gravity makes combat feel a little different depending on where you are.

It feels extraordinarily casual. This is not necessarily a criticism, it's just a reasonably well executed AAA video game, with all that entails. My biggest complaint is that the design is unambitious: it's Fallout 4 In Space. Any time they had a choice of introducing more systematic complexity, they chose against. With the extended development cycle I was hoping we'd see something genuinely novel, but alas. I think they either experimented a lot (and cut a lot) or spent most of their time on content (and from what I can tell, there is a ton of it). Overall, it seems competent. It's not God's Gift to Gaming or whatever people were hyping themselves up for: it's a mainstream Bethesda game with as many rough edges filed down as possible. I'm still having a good time and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in an open world sci fi light RPG shooter.

The gunplay was fine ("best in series" is not saying much, but I'll say it anyway)

VATS is objectively the only proper way to play a Fallout game, so that's irrelevant.

the settlement building and crafting were shallow

I saw the potential in it, but it felt pointless.

but offered a decent respite from the endless "walk from person a to person b" quests or clearing what looks like the same dungeon post apocalyptic factory for the 10th time.

There's the rub, even if Fallout 3 had the same quest structure, it didn't feel like endless "clear dungeon"/"escort person". It felt the way 2rafa is describing Starfield - going on an adventure.

but it was a reasonably memorable ~30 hours before I got bored. I liked the power armor. Solid 7/10.

The contrast between your description and the final grade feels rather flabbergasting. I'd never give a 7/10 for a game too boring to finish (and yeah, I couldn't force myself to complete it either even though Steam says I clocked in 75 hours). As for memorability... I suppose, but I only remember it because of how disappointing it was.

It feels extraordinarily casual.

Ok... this is pretty much why I haven't bothered with a mainstream game in a long time. Thanks for the warning.

Starfield definitely seems more systematically complex than Skyrim, there’s a lot more to do, skills and stats are more prominent etc. I don’t know that dialogue is more complex, but then again I don’t think Morrowind had particularly complex dialogue trees vs the CRPGs of that era either.

but then again I don’t think Morrowind had particularly complex dialogue trees vs the CRPGs of that era either.

Yeah, I don't think the dialogue was particularly good, but the world-building was. The quests, the books you could find, all the little details scattered around the map... it was all very well done.

Yeah, I don't think the dialogue was particularly good, but the world-building was. The quests, the books you could find, all the little details scattered around the map... it was all very well done.

Seconded. The purpose of NPCs in Morrowind is admittedly to be walking lorebooks and direction-givers. The only character you can have in any way a dynamic conversation with is Vivec. (Which, hey, he achieved CHIM, so...) But Morrowind didn't focus on character relationships, so judging it by this rubric seems to miss the point.

Morrowind's writing is good in the same way of Dark Souls or Outer Wilds. It isn't about the interaction of characters. It's the process of collecting shards the backstory in your mind, and eventually piecing together truth out of fragments.

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