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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.

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.

A copy magically appeared on my machine

Did you pre-order it a long time ago?

It sounds like a piracy joke to me.

Yes.