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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2940 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 8, 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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Anyone playing Starfield?

I'm about 10 hours in. I typically enjoy Bethesda games and really want to like it, but it is just not grabbing my interest. It feels like Fallout 4, but with the art deco charm ripped out and replaced with an overcomplicated fast travel system.

ok starting with the good, the level up system looks excellent - spending a skill point gives you a little challenge to complete before you can spend a skill point to level it up again. I like the lockpicking minigame. Boosting around with the jetpack is fun. Stability is probably the best of a Bethesda game at launch. Which is a low bar but y'know. Only 2 crashes so far, and 2 bugs that required loading an earlier save. OK let's move on.

Combat is frustrating. There's a combination of manual dexterity required to aim your gun, and then RNG on whether the shot hits. I'm bad at videogames (and playing on controller) so have trouble just with the first part. Desperately need something like VATS from Fallout. I've found the most effective method so far is to just run up and hit things with an axe, at least it doesn't run out of ammo! Maybe eventually I'll figure out how to buy or craft a proper sniper rifle, although "hold breath to stop the cursor randomly moving around" is bound to "hold in the stick you use for moving around", which combined with unsteady hands amounts to "Cursor still moves around randomly and also maybe you'll wander off a cliff".

Space combat is a chore, like, maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding about how it's meant to work... but there is no feeling of movement, just moving your cursor around and holding down triggers until the bullet sponges explode. Docking your ship at a space station is so unintuitive and unexplained that crashing and blowing up on the first attempt is a rite of passage. (The answer is, don't try to fly up and manoeuvre your ship to dock - simply press A at a distance! With no prompt to do so on screen).

Navigation is awful. There is no mini map, and the ground map is just a bunch of blue elevation dots which are totally useless in a city. Sometimes the scanner gives you arrows on the ground, and sometimes these even lead you to your objective but there's no guarantee. The star map fast travel system is needlessly convoluted. Sometimes you get told you can't fast travel to places you haven't explored, but go up a level on the map and you can fast travel there anyway. It feels small and disjointed, like the endgame of an open world RPG when you're fast travelling to points to finish off quests, without the initial exploration of the map.

There's lots of underexplained systems to master down the track - research, planetary exploration, settlements, ship building, crafting, cooking etc. This game could keep me busy for a long time but it feels like doing chores. The whole game feels like a chore.

Well that was cathartic. Maybe I'll turn it down to super easy and see if the story gets any better.

Space combat is a chore, like, maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding about how it's meant to work... but there is no feeling of movement, just moving your cursor around and holding down triggers until the bullet sponges explode.

Man, this has been a pet peeve of mine forever. So many space combat games now are designed around mouse controls, and even show you where you need to lead your target to hit. So you just point at the screen, your ship automatically rolls or pitches however it needs to, and then you hold triggers until dude blows up. It's profoundly boring. I forget when this really became prominent, but I remember Freelancer being this way? Maybe also Darkstar One? Everspace definitely is too.

If it's a space game, I want controls for roll, pitch and yaw, not generic "Ship goes here" pointing.

I much prefer twitch/dogfighting space combat in my space games instead of what Starfield seems to offer, so ultimately I didn't even download it.

I admit I'm very interested in what Star Citizen wants to do as it's much more what I'm looking for in a space game, but I really want to wait for an actual release schedule than what they're doing right now which largely seems grifting people out of large sums of money.

I’m loving Starfield, but I’m a stickler for aesthetics and I think its 80s tech future is so visually distinct and fun, the architecture, the clothing, the ship designs, the meticulously cluttered interiors, the fact that every item is modelled and you can rotate it in the inventory, it’s great. I also love the music, Inon Zur is one of my all time favorite game composers and the Starfield soundtrack is a love letter to ‘60s and ‘70s sci fi, with these huge ‘pang’ sounds, heavy use of cymbals and strings, an eerie vastness-of-space motif, some synth at times. It’s great.

The gameplay and questing is pretty fun, at least to me. I enjoyed the corporate infiltration and starship rangers faction storylines, I will do the other two this week. The main storyline is, as ever, poor.

Tried it without paying. Deleted it after a few hours.

It didn't impress me or intrigue me. Not just because they forgot to add any kind of HDR mode. Combat feels pretty meaningless. You and the enemies are bullet sponges. The dialogue sucks. No intelligence in it. Few choices to make. Nothing slightly controversial allowed. Character graphics suck, very outdated. Overall I just had the feeling of "there's a big universe to explore here, but why would I waste my time on it?"

I watched some of the bigger Twitch streams and just kind of ehhh passed on it. I liked earlier Fallout games (until Fallout 4/76) and the Elder Scrolls series (except for ES Online). I enjoyed No Man's Sky for what it was and also Mass Effect. The tech is there, it's been done before, but somehow they screwed it up.

I also really hate the hamfisted hitpoint/levelling of some of these RPGs. Your enemy is high level so can take multiple bullets to the face with no problem? I had this same issue in Dying Light, but it's put me off many other games like the recent Assassin's Creed games (where high level enemies can somehow survive assassination attacks from stealth). There is something about fantasy RPG hitpoints that just doesn't translate well to historical/modern/future RPGs.

Agree. I think I would like it better if it were more realistic. There would be more tension, in a good way, if you had to take care instead of just going run'n'gun through each level as if they're just tiny meaningless obstacles in a game where you're expected to clear a thousand of them in the same way. Oh, that's what they want you to do... Same goes for character faces, they're reminiscent of TES Oblivion's, and the dialogue writing is also lacking in realism.

Tried. Disliked. IMO it's big, but bad. There's a lot of it, but not a single part that's actually good.

Tried it on Gamepass but didn't really like it. Feels like 50% of the game is loading screens, menus, and inventory management, and the other 50% is pretty bland combat.

Not yet. With Bethesda games, I usually buy the Game of the Year edition on sale on Steam, which makes me unfashionably late to any relevant discussions. I like Bethesda games, but I don't love them. Just not a huge fan of FPS/RPG hybrids. I'm still waiting for the GOTY edition of Cyberpunk 2077.

At least it isn't the usual Elder Scrolls or Fallout. I haven't played No Man's Sky or Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen, so I don't have strong opinions on space games. Other than Star Citizen being an absolute shitshow behind the scenes. Holy smokes.

Waiting for a “Grounded” mod like there is for Fallout 4 to remove woke, pronouns, and redo the racial makeup. I’ll still pirate it.

pronouns

I've played dozens of hours, and the only instance of this is during character creation.

I’m aware. I’m told it doesn’t even tie in fully with NPCs dialogue, and even they “mix up your pronouns” occasionally, much like real life NPCs.

redo the racial makeup

What’s the problem with the racial makeup of Starfield?. Interestingly the game is actually a lot ‘whiter’ than a linear extrapolation of earth demographics would suggest, like at least half the population is white when whites will be like 5-10% (or less) of the earth’s population by the end of this century.

I don’t believe that complete mongrelization of the lightcone is an inevitability, or even likely. The motivation to present the game with a striking (vitiligo anyone?) medley of brown and black character races, and mostly ugly regardless of race, is to pay tribute to the Current Year (not 2330!) preoccupation with DEI. I reject that. As far as I know, not having played it, it is not to bring forth some worthwhile narrative exploring ethnic strife of some afrofuturistic faction causing a planetary-scale South African catastrophe - it’s window dressing and it’s not my window dressing.

And my conspicuous rejection (see Nexus Mods preemptively banning the pronoun mods) makes my enemies upset and anxious, and I want to maximize this.

Edit: I just realized that a character designer for Bethesda is some Brazilian mutt, gloating about his mystery meat creations in Starfield. Go figure.

Edit2: looks like possibly more ESG influence?

In order to understand why Starfield turned out so awful, and to show how bad AAA gaming has become, we have to look at the place developers ironically least expect us to check: The end credits. Starfield's takes over 45 minutes, and this is because despite Bethesda having hundreds of employees, a laundry list of voice actors, support from ZeniMax and backing from Xbox, they have nonetheless outsourced the game to - and this is not an exaggeration - 27 global studios, who do everything from sound design to VFX to modeling and so on. It's a total racket, worse than any of Todd's lies • (You Tube] Starfield Credits 4K (embed) [Embed] In the order in which they are shown in the credits, we have: Sonic Boom Sound, JSR Post, Iron Galaxy, The Multiplayer Group, Spera Soft, Snowed In Studios, GameSim, The Forge, Nobody Studios Undertone FX, Wardog. Sparx*, Scyth Games, Rouge MoCap, RedHot, Kaptured Motions Inc., Airship Interactive, Lakshya Digital, NXA Studios, Goodbye Kansas, GL33k, FuryLion, Cubic Motion, Cloud Mark, M aka Original Force, WIlF aka Mindwalk Studios. You probably picked up on the Chinese ones, but these companies operate everywhere from Ukraine to Vietnam to India About half of these companies are owned by Keywords Studios, a shady as fuck company using investment dollars and ESG points to help give what is effectively sweatshop labor to AAA developers They work with literally everyone. EA, Tencent, Capcom, Bamco, ActiBlizzard and of course Bethesda. Remember the whole rigamarole about crunch? Well, look at this https://www.keywordsstudios.com/prevention-of-modern-slavery-statement/

mongrelization

some Brazilian mutt

Antagonistic

[this whole post]

Wrong thread, this is friday fun thread.

1 day ban.

From my understanding of physics, "a linear extrapolation" of our knowledge of the universe doesn't lead to instant fast travel by end of this century. Yet Bethesda didn't ask space engineers how fast they think spaceships might go in the period the game takes place, and prevented the player from going faster.

Yeah but my point is that most ‘anti-woke’ criticism of diversity in medieval fantasy settings is stuff like how it doesn’t make sense for a small village to be ethnically diverse, or complaints that the demographics of the Northern Kingdoms were altered dramatically by Netflix or whatever. This can extend to stuff like the Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age that have settings loosely inspired by medieval Europe.

But complaining about diversity in a game set in 2330 seems…misguided. Whether @grognard likes it or not, it doesn’t really seem far fetched for Starfield to have a diverse “racial makeup”, so I’m interested in what offends him about it.

A broken clock can still be right twice a day. If these racist companies enjoy erasing white people from everything, eventually they'll get lucky and strike upon a fiction where it's plausible.

Doesn't change that I already know they are racist and don't wish to give them my money.

I think I saw those already on based mods.

https://basedmods.eth.link/

That's hilarious and awesome. Kind of makes me want to buy Fallout 4 so I can try the Donald Trump companion mod.

I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I wouldn't mind enjoying a game modded to be less offensive to my cultural and aesthetic values. On the other hand, I don't want to pay money to a company that made the game innately hostile to my sensibilities. I really don't feel like bothering with game piracy anymore either. My need to consoom just isn't that great.

I'm probably better off just observing it's not for me from afar, and not bothering to polish a turd.

don't feel like bothering with game piracy anymore either. My need to consoom just isn't that great.

Piracy nowadays in most cases easier and takes less time than buying something officially. For single player games there only disadvantages are non-availability of some modern games that aren't cracked yet and the absence of automatic updates(in some cases it can be a positive). Both of these do not relate to Fallout 4.

I'm holding off on it until there's a more robust assortment of mods available, as is my usual policy for Bethesda games.

I plan on it, but I'm waiting a year or two for the unofficial patches, DLC, and good mods to get established. I'm hoping I enjoy or can at least stand the game design and writing, because it will be a big portent for how the next Elder Scrolls will turn out.

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