Starfield - Discussion Thread

CRISS9000

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I didn't play it, but after watching a bunch of youtubes about it, here's my moderately informed take:

Give it a few more years in the oven and I might pirate it and then mod it a lot.

And I have not pirated anything in well over a decade. I HAVE bought NMS and CP77 tho, specifically after some updates and knowing that there are many more to come, and have no regrets.
 
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Lorddarthvik

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Here's a very different take on it, at least compared to the majority of rageclick youtuber reviews. I think he is correct.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHiP5OPZ2sA



I didn't play it, but after watching a bunch of youtubes about it, here's my moderately informed take:

Give it a few more years in the oven and I might pirate it and then mod it a lot.

And I have not pirated anything in well over a decade. I HAVE bought NMS and CP77 tho, specifically after some updates and knowing that there are many more to come, and have no regrets.
That's fair enough, but have you ever looked at the previous Bethesda RPG's patch history?
I don't think there is any point in waiting. I might by wrong this time, but if history is anything to go by, nothing of note will change. This ain't CDPR or NMS, the oven went cold the day the sales started. Oh we will get DLC of course, but that won't fix anything. It never did before, why would they start now? "It just works!" It might add a few options here and there, maybe one day we will get ground vehicles for example which would be really really nice... But the NPCs will still bug out, the dialog will be just as lame, the guns will still feel a bit gutless, and so on. These things will have to be modded, as always.

So if you are interested, there are already some decent QoL improvement mods out, unless you need some very specific mods like nude nightelf brides or somethin... I think for the price of zero dollars, it's worth a try already. Or you could just wait for the inevitable GOTY edition bundles with all the DLC for 40 bucks next Christmas sale, if you don't wanna go sailing.
 
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Radegast74

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Well, apropos of nothing, here is my completely uninformed take...

...Having not played, but watched a couple of streamers playing it, Bethesda knows what the majority of gamers want: A game that is completely new & different, yet just like Skyrim or Fallout. And why mess with a winning formula? I myself was intrigued by how they were going to pull off a space game (with all the usual problems, like traversal across large empty areas), and the Bethesda solution was to kinda minimize the whole Space-thing, and focus instead on outposts & NPC interactions. And pretty, screenshot worthy space visuals! I think that was smart, as probably 90% of gamers don't own a joystick.

The game itself has some great action, but often the NPC interactions seemed to drag on. At times watching it, it seemed like a graphical novel, with all the NPC interactions where you had to chose a response. The gun fights seemed to be pretty decent, but very game-y.

I could go on, but the TL;DR is that Bethesda made a polished game that would likely appeal to 90% of gamers. I think that seeing what they cut out made me appreciate Star Citizen more, both for the overall vision, and what they have been able to accomplish so far. As well too, what CIG has stated they intend to bring to the game, but still haven't put in.

Looking at Starfield has made me realize more how SC is really more of a "niche" game, and how it would likely not be what a mainstream publisher would put out. I could go on with examples, but I'm sure it would bore people (like, in Starfield it appeared you didn't have to take your helmet off to eat & drink, where as in SC we know you gotta take your helmet off...often with hilarious consequences when you go through an airlock, ha ha). The focus of Starfield really is the single-player gaming experience (how much can I do, as fast as I can, and how much of a rush can I get), while Star Citizen is trying to find the balance between simulation & fun. Or something like that...

I'm not knocking Starfield at all. I will probably play it is 6 months or so, when the modder's have gone to town on it. And it may likely help bring people in to SQ42 when that releases. So overall, it seems to be a good thing.
 
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Lorddarthvik

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Regarding Bethesda's habit of patching their buggy new releases....
I got a patch for a Bethesda RPG today on Steam! Not exactly what I was expecting though.

1694380001474.png
 
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Deroth

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In case there are those that still haven't gotten to the NG+ portion of Starfield yet, I will only state that I'm pretty sure the reason for the 'Main Quest' being the way it is is due to what happens with it in NG+.
 

Lorddarthvik

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In case there are those that still haven't gotten to the NG+ portion of Starfield yet, I will only state that I'm pretty sure the reason for the 'Main Quest' being the way it is is due to what happens with it in NG+.
Nowhere near finishing the main story yet, there's so much actually fun things to do instead. Just like in every Bethesda RPG lol
But I've heard it's worth giving NG+ a go, so I will in time.


WARNING for Modders:
NexusMods VORTEX manager totally ruins your mods! I highly recommend you DO NOT use it just yet.

Today I thought, with almost all of the mods I use being updated to vortex compatible, that I should just move things over. Cleaned up all of the manual installs, did a fresh mods install with vortex. Non worked. Spent the 2 hours I had free with problem solving... which ended up with me deleting the vortex extension, cleaning up the mess it left behind, and reinstalling all mods manually to the documents/mygames/Starfield folder! Even if a mod states it should go into the main starfield/data folder, unless it's overwriting an original file, it does not go there! It might load, it might not load from there, more likely it won't. Use Try the mygamas folder, that seems to work more consistently.
 
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Deroth

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Nowhere near finishing the main story yet, there's so much actually fun things to do instead. Just like in every Bethesda RPG lol
But I've heard it's worth giving NG+ a go, so I will in time.


WARNING for Modders:
NexusMods VORTEX manager totally ruins your mods! I highly recommend you DO NOT use it just yet.

Today I thought, with almost all of the mods I use being updated to vortex compatible, that I should just move things over. Cleaned up all of the manual installs, did a fresh mods install with vortex. Non worked. Spent the 2 hours I had free with problem solving... which ended up with me deleting the vortex extension, cleaning up the mess it left behind, and reinstalling all mods manually to the documents/mygames/Starfield folder! Even if a mod states it should go into the main starfield/data folder, unless it's overwriting an original file, it does not go there! It might load, it might not load from there, more likely it won't. Use Try the mygamas folder, that seems to work more consistently.
I tried Vortex back when they decommissioned NMM, realized it was a dumpster fire after it made a complete mess of things, so removed it and haven't gone back since. NMM worked really well but wasn't setup to support all the ad space they added with Vortex, and with all that ad space they added a very clunky unintuitive mess of a buggy UI that is more prone to break mods and games than to actually do what was intended.

For my first playthrough I was taking the main quest line casually as I found more of the side quests interesting, until I got to the point I unlocked something in the main quest, was surprised so looked up more about it, at which point I found out the basics of how NG+ works...so changed the way I was playing until I find a NG+ I want to settle down in until DLC is released. I really hope the DLC adds value to the Outposts, right now they just feel to me like the point of Outposts is to support making more Outposts.
 
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Radegast74

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There was an interesting interview with Todd Howard in the Washington Post...ok, it wasn't that interesting, certainly not going behind the paywall level of interesting...

The 2 things I thought were interesting were:
i) he mentioned that there wer 6 million early access players...weren't those games priced around USD90 - 100? In any event, that is a chunk of change! Definitely may be a good sign of future interest in SQ42 and CIG;

ii) Todd Howard gave a list of his influences that helped him imagine and develop Starfield. He gave a pretty lengthy list; the funny thing was that I didn't see a single CR game on his list! I'm guessing his lawyers probably advised him...he did mention the paper & pencil RPG Traveller (which I was & still am a HUGE fan of) and he also mentioned a space game I had never heard of : Sundog


There is also a "resurrrection" project that has been in beta for quite a while -> March 16, 2016!...lol, nothing new to us!


Did anybody ever play the original game?
 
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CRISS9000

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why mess with a winning formula?
Well, Bathsalts did mess with the winning formula.

They went from a big-world RPG with many factions that are each very different from eachother, interesting stories and a world packed full of locations, items, atmospheres and things to do (and loot),

To a shallow RPG with a bunch of playfields that are connected only by loading screens, and a few factions that are mostly just a change of uniform and maybe the general attitude.

They went from Robots vs Mutants vs Petrolheaded Templars vs Brainrotted Zombies vs Raiders vs Armed Farmers vs Wild Beasts (Fallout 4)

To Blue Uniform People vs Red Uniform People vs White Uniform People vs No Uniform People ... and I guess some idiot aliens and a few untamed animals sometimes? in Starfail.
 

BUTUZ

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Well I've put a good few hours in now done a bit of the main story a few side quests.

Sadly it just isn't really doing much for me - the story is unable to grip you in the same way that say mass effect does, the quests etc just seem to plod along in a kind of slow disjointed way, there's no flow to it.

Space combat is arcadey and doesn't really seem to have any skill for the player to develop or use.

FP combat is average I'd say. You just have bullet sponges and guns do a certain amount of damage, and just do the same thing over and over except with better guns then stronger sponges.

AI is average nowt special.

Graphics are average at best - sadly star citizen has spoiled me in that regard.

Sound is average. sadly star citizen has spoiled me in that regard.

Is it worth £60? No.

Is it worth the 10/10 IGN blah reviews and the glowing review off many youtubers? No.

Will I keep playing it? Yeh probably.
 

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Well I've put a good few hours in now done a bit of the main story a few side quests.
My first few hours were not that impressive either. I felt that Star Citizen has spoiled us with the game mechanics, but then you just need to get into the main story line.
If its still not for you, then thats fine. Anybody who played Fallout or Skyrim and enjoyed them will enjoy this too, but plenty of people did not like those games either.
 

Deroth

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I personally feel where the disconnect is between Starfield and players is that the expectation that was built up was more akin to a spiritual successor to Privateer with the Bethesda makeover (like what they did for the Fallout series), however, what we got was more of a spiritual successor to Freelancer with the Bethesda makeover overseen by Microsoft.
With the first (expectation) it would've been stiff competition for SQ42, even if it doesn't release for a few more years. However, with what we got it is still a fun game, just not what many were hoping for.
 

Radegast74

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Well, Bathsalts did mess with the winning formula.
Honestly, part of the Bathsalts (I love that, lol!) winning formula has been to keep on making games more and more "accessible" (read: dumbing down) so that more and more players will play and like the game, no matter what their skill level is. People like taking 45min, running around and feeling like a god...

The old games probably are way too grindy now, nobody has time to sink into a game like that anymore. I admire how Bethesda is able to make engaging stories, but their games now are pretty shallow.

Like Our Glorious Leader said above, I think SC has spoiled us. And Bethesda isn't the same Bethesda as before. Oh well, time marches on...and btw, GET OFF MY LAWN, ha ha
 
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Rear_Intruder

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Its good! I'm happy
I decided to do what I should have done in Skyrim, ignore the main story.
I am level 13 and have not yet gone to the folk that I am supposed to see at New Atlantis.
I killed a lot of animals on Kreet, many of them stealthy to get that to maximum. Then I pickpocketed everyone I could. It was not long before I robbed the bank terminals near the train station at the new Atlantis train station. (first lockpick level up)
I then found the UC weapon shop in the "wells " and spent 2 hours stealing all his stuff, You can distract the shopkeeper and steal all his goods one by one. I will be back for his master level safe later.
It looks like it limits my travel until I join in with the main story or maybe I do not understand the mechanics.
One last thing, I found a bigger ship with an annoying NPC crew, who just did rubbish NPC things, I herded all 8 of them into a room, threw them a grenade, got a 15,000 bounty paid it off and now the ship is mine alone.

It looks great on ultra settings and runs well
 

CRISS9000

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SC has spoiled us.
That arguement is invalid. I know for a fact that past bethesda spoiled me. When I watch all the videos of Starfield, I look back to Fallout 4 and I think to myself: I'll take FO4 over SFail any day.

And don't give me the "many years of post launch development" nonsense. Every game that's being released TODAY has to CONTEND with the market of TODAY. The Star Citizen of TODAY. The No Man's Sky of TODAY. The Cyberpunk 2077 of TODAY. and the Armored Core 6 of TODAY.
 

Lorddarthvik

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Well, according to the internet the last 87.5 hours I spent playing this were literal torture, unenjoyable to the max, and just outright outrageously horrible.

Somehow, it doesn't feel like it.

Mind you, I did mod the game to make it into something palpable.

Yes it's watered down.
Yes the writing is on the level of "I'm 12 and this is deep, now where's my achievement bingbong noise". Much lower quality than ever before. Nothing can deny that.
But, if you stay with the main story, all the decisions they took with simplifying certain aspects will start to make some sense. Not the writing, but the general rhythm of it all.
It's no masterpiece, it's not the next coming of "insert deity/saint of choice". But neither was Skyrim or Fo3 or 4. Rose tinted goggles and all that...
It's kind of a mediocre game, I still hold my rating of 6.5 out of 10 and I think it's fair.

As is usual with these games, mods are not only a suggestion, but basically a neccessity.

The grapshics are xbox360 levels of horrible without a LUT mod. NaturaLUTS seems to do a good job of bringing back the black levels and injecting some color as well instead of the uniform vomit filter.

Looting better weapons, and combat in general, would feel meaningless without a mod that disables NPCs' leveled extra HP gains. Enemies are so spongy because they gain HP with leveling and they get an additional multiplier of health added, ranging from 5 to 20 per level. This makes them comically tough. By removing this extra gain, combat is more enjoyable, fast paced, modern. Headshots finally matter. But it also trivializes some encounters where you would have tried to stay out of combat otherwise.

The UI is freakin horrible. No one can convince me otherwise. I get the main screen's round design for consoles, but the inventory feels like it was made for a 640x480 monitor, the HUD is atrocious (the stealth meter looks like it was a total afterthought and looks like a debug element). StarUI fixed the inventory on day one basically, the mod that disables transitions and makes every UI interactions more snappy is also a must have imo, it's much more user friendly now, and I'm sure the rest will get modded soon.

Lockpicking is annoying. Not just because you have to think for a little bit and it gets repetitive real fast and you can't be bothered to think ahead... Because it's buggy. On several occasions I was shown spaces where there were non, or were seemingly no spaces while with auto-solve it turns out there was one.

The AI is as dumb as ever, but one huge improvement is that even when they got stuck running back and forth because the pathfinding bugged out, the quest marker and the quest still moved along. Feels like they have encountered these problems and worked around it with some extra checks instead of solving em outright. Also it's quiet refreshing to see that they atleast tried to solve pathfinding issues by making the NPC walk back to a reset point and try again, usually solving the problem.
What they haven't solved is how infuriating it can get, when your companion wants to talk to you, in the middle of a firefight, and you just really wanted to give them a better weapon or take some extra grenades you got stored on em. Instead you have to suffer through minutes of childishly bad irrelevant dialogue, exit and re-enter interaction with your companion, and if you are lucky, you can finally access their inventory.

Knowing where the story leads, investing any effort into building outposts feels absolutely unneccessary. Even without the context, I just couldn't find a reason to try building one. I have easily earned and spent around 800k credits just on building ships, without using outposts, without using any exploits.
Unless you count waiting 2 days for the vendor cash reset an exploit. This is something that I still don't understand why Bethesda keeps doing especially in this game. Why limit their cash so low when prices are inflated so high that unless something's worth a 1000 credits sale price, it's not even worth keeping around. There's no economy to balance, you will have to find a chair and wait a couple of minutes as 2days tick by and that's it. It's a totally unnecessary inconvenience. Haven't found a mod that fixes this yet, but once it's out it's basically a must have. I guess technically if you cheat your way under the map and find their stashes (yes, every vendor still has a box nearby under the map that contains their full inventory including credits) you could get too rich too fast. But then again, you can already add as much money as you want via console. So I just can't see a reason why keep doing this limitation on enjoyment.

SO yeah, there are some improvements over previous games, there are some elements that are unarguably sup par, and the rest... the rest just works lol

I wonder if I make it far enough into NG+ for their ways of doing things to make sense, before Phantom Liberty is out.


Edit:
1694636252007.png


As you can see from the above pic, only a small amount of players have gotten close to completing the game (all those shiny achievements are main story quests past the mid point), and even less "completed" the main story. I guess they found better things to do in game or just dropped out.
What you can't see, is that only 8.3% of the players completed the, lets call it the "mid point revelation" quest. Without having that reveal, that context to wtf is this all about, it's not really fair to judge the games design decisions.

This still doesn't change the fact the writing for almost every quest I've done so far was dogshit, so what this revelation, or call it plot twist if you have to, grants you is absolutely wasted.
But I enjoyed the journey to this point, and might do it again.
 
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Shadow Reaper

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Lorddarthvik

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This makes me much less interested to play, single player or not. The fact you can farm points by crafting creates pressure to do so and makes you feel very second class if you’re the explorer type. Just doesn’t seem to support the kind of play I’m most interested in and in effect, renders it pointless.

Why would you want to rush to lvl100?? It doesn't give you any superpowers, there are no "Ultimate" skills that would require such a high level or that would drastically alter the game. This ain't multiplayer, what's the rush? What's the point of getting there fast?
If you just want to have all skills unlocked, you can get anyhting you want via simple console commands with zero effort.

As for this "exploit" described in the article:
This actually involves a fair bit of leveling and gathering before you can apply this method.
Apart from the skills directly mentioned, which means you would need to level up quiet a few times and do certain things, it states that you need a ship with a cargo cap of 2000 to 3000. What the articles doesn't tell you is that such a large capacity ship will most likely require a Piloting skill of level 3 out of 4.
Getting to lvl3 piloting (Class B ships and parts unlocked), that's a lot of grinding in space killing ships, or you can grind it on a simulator in game which is less risk but also less reward.
Also building such a ship will require a good chunk o change, around 200-300k credits.

The max cargo I could get my ship up to with the default piloting skill (Class A ships) is around 1500-1800 cargo, but 1800 would mean you basically have nothing but cargo boxes attach, basically zero weapons or maneuvering. Even then I'm not sure you can add the required amount of engines/landing thrusters to make a flyable ship. The ship builder has rules and hard limits on how large and heavy a ship can be and it needs to have certain things attached in the right amount and output range to be deemed a complete working ship. Heavier ship means it need better engines which in turn requires a higher class reactor which requires the right skill level of piloting unlocked.


Like most other soft-exploits, this one is only really viable once you are well into the game. It's a stupid one, lots of effort to not play the game. There are much more fun ways to cheat some extra XP out of the system while playing. Like stacking XP % buffs from consumables and switching around the difficulty level form hardest to easiest after you landed, giving you way more XP and much better loot which in turn nets you a lot more credits as well.
 
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