Videogames Latest: Starfields of Glory

[IlyaP]

14 minutes ago, Raja said:

You might not agree with that and the game might work really well for you, and that's fine because we all respond to these things differently, but it doesn't make the criticism any less valid.

But they...never intended to have that feature. If they promised it and then didn't include it, that'd be one thing, and I'd wholeheartedly agree with you, as that'd be an instance of underdelivering on promises, but since they didn't, that rather undermines the validity of the criticism a bit, don't you think? 

That said - it's a Bethesda game, so I'm sure in time, someone will find a way to mod that feature into the game. If Skyrim can add flippin' Thomas the Tank Engine, then damn well anything is possible at this point, as far as I'm concerned.

[Raja]

17 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

But they...never intended to have that feature. If they promised it and then didn't include it, that'd be one thing

I think this is a bit of a cop out, really. Especially when devs say "We're putting you in a space ship & you can do pretty much anything" or "There are plenty of sights to see & stops to make on the way to your next adventure" when they were talking specifically about space flight.

So much of Starfield was sold on exploration - and that includes planetary ( which I think it does well) and space exploration both ( which I think it doesn't do well) - some people don't find the space flight & space exploration satisfying, and that's totally valid.

I don't think they've left anything out, I just don't think they've executed well. It's not just about the ability to fly into a planet, it's the lack of things to do other than fly around in orbit of a planet.

Edited September 7, 2023 by Raja

[IlyaP]

4 minutes ago, Raja said:

I think this is a bit of a cop out, really. Especially when devs say "We're putting you in a space ship & you can do pretty much anything" or "There are plenty of sights to see & stops to make on the way to your next adventure"

They may have said those things, but they never said "you can fly onto a planet from space". That was never promised. 

So I can't understand people being upset about this. (Had they promised it and then pulled it and offered hollow explanations, then I could understand. But they didn't, so...)

[Raja]

4 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

They may have said those things, but they never said "you can fly onto a planet from space". That was never promised. 

So I can't understand people being upset about this. (Had they promised it and then pulled it and offered hollow explanations, then I could understand. But they didn't, so...)

See below

Quote

I don't think they've left anything out, I just don't think they've executed well. It's not just about the ability to fly into a planet, it's the lack of things to do other than fly around in orbit of a planet.

I would have been totally cool with not having that feature, if there was plenty of other stuff to do than fly around the orbit of a planet, but there isn't

Edited September 7, 2023 by Raja

[IlyaP]

1 minute ago, Raja said:

I don't think they've left anything out, I just don't think they've executed well. It's not just about the ability to fly into a planet, it's the lack of things to do other than fly around in orbit of a planet.

What else would you have wanted? To...dodge rocks? Space debris? Satellites? Wave to the Rocinante as it flew by?

[Raja]

1 minute ago, IlyaP said:

What else would you have wanted? To...dodge rocks? Space debris? Satellites? Wave to the Rocinante as it flew by?

The ability to travel from A to B. Or even into the orbit of a planet within the same system. There are lots of options

 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

I would’ve preferred if Starfield wouldve just had 8-10 highly detailed, handcrafted planets compared to 1000 procedurally generated ones tbh. 

[Raja]

I kinda like the vibe of some of the emptier planets though I do think sacrificing some scale could have been an interesting idea

 

[IlyaP]

3 minutes ago, Raja said:

The ability to travel from A to B. Or even into the orbit of a planet within the same system. There are lots of options

I'm sure a mod to allow for those things will eventually end up on NexusMods. To be fair to the designers, there's only so many things they're going to imagine, and it's going to be impossible to please everyone all of the time. 

And how come absolutely none of you are mentioning Inon Zur's terrific score? It's a sonic feast. 

[Kalbear]

5 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

I would’ve preferred if Starfield wouldve just had 8-10 highly detailed, handcrafted planets compared to 1000 procedurally generated ones tbh. 

Sure, that's a valid want. That's what I like in my games too. But I don't see that as a failure of the game as much as a game that doesn't personally appeal to me as much. Other people love the feeling of games that aren't the same and have their own personal experience with them. Heck, I like that kind of game in other contexts too (like civ 6 or minecraft).

I think its fair to like something different, but I think it's unfair to say that it's bad because of it.

[IlyaP]

6 minutes ago, Raja said:

I kinda like the vibe of some of the emptier planets though I do think sacrificing some scale could have been an interesting idea

I still feel this way about Daggerfall, and it's been 27 years (WHAT) since that game came out.

[IlyaP]

1 minute ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

I think its fair to like something different, but I think it's unfair to say that it's bad because of it.

Hell, Kalnak likes badgers, but we still like him even though it's clearly wrong to like badgers. Or snakes. 

*ducks*

[Raja]

2 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

 it's going to be impossible to please everyone all of the time.

Of course. But this is a discussion forum with people offering their critique of a game, and their execution on this fundemental  aspect of the game didn't work for me

Totally cool if it worked for other people though.

 

[IlyaP]

While everyone else is playing Starfield and Baldur's Gate III, I'm over here discovering the Mafia series with Mafia: Definitive Edition, which is frankly amazing, and wildly engrossing. And my goodness, composer Jesse Harlin needs to have flowers and bars of gold delivered to his doorstep for his phenomenal scoring working. 

[Luzifer's right hand]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

While everyone else is playing Starfield and Baldur's Gate III, I'm over here discovering the Mafia series with Mafia: Definitive Edition, which is frankly amazing, and wildly engrossing. And my goodness, composer Jesse Harlin needs to have flowers and bars of gold delivered to his doorstep for his phenomenal scoring working. 

I enjoyed the original Mafia a lot back in the day even if the driving was rather difficult.

[Ser Not Appearing]

Unless they added all sorts of non-realism-stuff between celestial bodies, I don't think I would ever fly between planets, even within the same system ... but a lot of people think they would. I do think I might fly from a planet to its moons. Not often, but some. They could add some sort of scanning work in there, I'm sure, by being more creative than me and it might not even be boring. But I'd do it even if it was just chilling on the flight. I do wish you could fly around within a planet but I do understand how that (and vehicles) would ruin a lot of the gameplay loop for exploration.

Between dog fights, random encounters, finding staryards and even mining asteroids ... I actually do find that I end up spending some time in space and, more than time, I do fun things there. But it's still not enough for some people and it takes awhile for a lot of what is actually there to get going. It'll be interesting to see what mods are made AND what mods people actually use regularly. I honestly don't expect much interstellar slow travel even when it's enabled.

---

Anyway, regarding my own gameplay, I had a different experience the past few days.  It's what good games do so well - I hit a roadblack of sorts and it forced me into a totally different rhythm of gameplay than the heavy quest focus I had been doing.

I realized I had bounties with the Crimson Fleet and the UC and I was also carrying contraband. I couldn't go to my normal places to clear the bounty or sell the contraband and I didn't want to just Google a different location, so I spent hours hopping between unaffiliated star systems to try and find a settlement with a bounty-clearing portal and/or a place that bought contraband.

I got plenty distracted along the way and it was honestly about 4-6 hours (no idea) of exploration and questing and surveying across maybe 5 systems, a staryard and a mystery spaceship before I finally thought to build an outpost with a building, drop the contraband in there and then fly to Neon to clear the bounty before returning to pick the contraband back up. By then I had captured another ship and had about 1,000 weight in excess of what my ship could hold, so I made a giant pile of stuff after getting sick of being overburdened. It's pretty remarkable that all that stuff has permanence and physics.

Being overburdened, btw, is actually a great way to train fitness. And the fourth level of fitness (which I got last night) is a HUGE upgrade for sprinting.

Side note: I just realized that you don't actually die from running while overburdened. It'll sap your health way down but it doesn't kill you ... which is a realization that significantly speeds things for me.

Edited September 7, 2023 by Ser Not Appearing

[Raja]

6 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I enjoyed the original Mafia a lot back in the day even if the driving was rather difficult.

Yeah, great game ( even though it was a lot of godfather, really)

[Werthead]

16 hours ago, IlyaP said:

How does it compare to the space and flight mechanics of Freelancer? 

Also, Todd Howard even confirmed last year that players would not be able to fly onto planets, so I'm not sure if peoples' expectations around this are a communications failure from Bethesda or players not correctly reading the manual, if you will, around the game's design and features. 

Between the mouse controls, the general arcadey flight model and the "press button to fast travel everywhere" stuff, Starfield's flight section highly resembles that of Freelancer.

15 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

I would’ve preferred if Starfield wouldve just had 8-10 highly detailed, handcrafted planets compared to 1000 procedurally generated ones tbh. 

It does have both. It has a number of highly-detailed, handcrafted planets (not sure if it's 10, but you certainly have the 4 big city-planets and then a number of additional planets important to the main quest and the main faction quests; I think I've counted 7 so far in that bracket) plus a huge number of procgen planets.

8 hours ago, IlyaP said:

While everyone else is playing Starfield and Baldur's Gate III, I'm over here discovering the Mafia series with Mafia: Definitive Edition, which is frankly amazing, and wildly engrossing. And my goodness, composer Jesse Harlin needs to have flowers and bars of gold delivered to his doorstep for his phenomenal scoring working. 

Mafia is an outrageously good game. I am not in love with the remaster though, which really does Tommy dirty. The original voice actor was amazing and his character arc was brilliant. Replacement Tommy 2.0 is a terrible character in comparison.

Edited September 7, 2023 by Werthead

[Werthead]

Excellent analysis of how Starfield's planets work. The modder confirms that the topography for each tile indeed seems to be linked to the orbital map, and that you can switch off the boundaries (in the console, with a lot of fiddling) to travel from one tile to the next. When you cross the boundary, the game generates the map markers and quest points for the next tile and keeps the last ones set, so he was able to set up cross-land (or jetpack) journeys from New Atlantis to relatively nearby quest markers in other tiles. He also notes that the city of New Atlantis properly loads in as you approach it (rather than just being a LOD thing).

However, disabling the boundaries introduces floating point errors which accumulate until the game just crashes. There are no easy ways of overcoming floating point errors as you'd have to rejig the Creation Engine's entire coordinate system, which has massive implications for the way the game tracks all of the physical assets in the world (which is a huge deal for BGS games). They could have done that to make each planet a contiguous worldspace but ultimately chose not to, on the not-unreasonable grounds that it's a shitload of work for not a massive amount of point.

Modders suggesting that maybe they can make the "no boundaries" thing more stable, so even if you can't walk around the equator (even the fastest PC in the world would struggle with that without exploding), you might at least be able to double or quadruple the size of tiles, to sell the illusion better.

Someone did build the biggest single ship possible on all axes:

 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Werthead

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Mafia is an outrageously good game. I am not in love with the remaster though, which really does Tommy dirty. The original voice actor was amazing and his character arc was brilliant. Replacement Tommy 2.0 is a terrible character in comparison.

They did Tommy dirty? Really? 

I've been warned that the original game is good, but that the race car segment (I am not a fan of racing games) would drive me absolutely bonkers and is ridiculously difficult to the point of frustration, so I went straight to the shiny remaster. Also, I was astonished to discover the main character is not in fact Sam Witwer, given the startling resemblance, but Italian-Australian actor Andrew Bongiorno.