Thread 724189646

Anyone else sad that Starfield sucked? I really wanted immersive, open-world space kino.

>>724189646 (OP)
I expected it to suck, and it did. When you set your expectations low, you can only be pleasantly surprised. It doesn't happen often that I am.

>>724189646 (OP)
It is what it is
Bethesda is dead trash

>>724189646 (OP)
>I really wanted immersive, open-world space kino
me too. If the world and lore wasnt so dogshit it wouldve been acceptable. But no. Everything about it stinks.

>>724189646 (OP)
>I really wanted immersive, open-world space kino.
sounds exactly like what we've got

>>724189646 (OP)
Most of us knew it would suck already.
So we aren't sad that it sucked.
We are mad AND sad that Bethesda is a bunch of worthless retards.
Starfield was simply the moment you noticed.
For a lot of us it was around fallout 4, when we started taking a look back at skyrim and oblivion and seeing the patterns the older people had noticed by the time oblivion came out.

It wasn't that it sucked that bothers me
It's that people assumed it was going to be Bethesda Mass Effect and were extremely disappointed when it wasn't

It's a depressing game about space exploration ultimately being an empty pursuit (there's literally nothing out there except what we bring with us) and how the pursuit of novelty comes at a great cost

If you take the deal at the end you miss the point of Starfield entirely though, we are the sum of our choices

>>724189646 (OP)
I didn't expect it to be that great and I assumed that the whole space exploration was going to be just like Daggerfall again (fast-travel->dungeon->fast-travel->city->repeat), but I was still hoping for something like Morrowind's StarWind mod on top of the randomly-generated content.

>>724191436
>Morrowind's StarWind mod
Looks interdasting, gonna give it a try. Thanks.

I thought I could be like a space trucker. But I'm just an errand boy for a bunch of nerds and I'm exploring barren planets learning fucking dragon shouts.

Why do I keep falling for his fucking lies?

>>724189646 (OP)
>people actually thought Bethesda would improve the game post launch
They release like 5 patches and 1 or 2 dlc and then fuck off, they're a shitty company and im glad people finally see it.

>>724189646 (OP)
I remember when some third worlder got an early copy and it was revealed that landing on a planet or taking off was just a black loading screen. I knew then it was over.

yeah I was expecting something like prey but it felt like a crappy fallout mod with lots of loading screens played it on gamepass for 30 hours then dropped it

>>724189646 (OP)
Considering how bad their recent track record was, my expectations were low but obviously I'd prefer if it was good. Oh well. At least we can enjoy their games as trainwrecks that you can't look away from

>>724193175
30 hours is overly generous.

>>724189646 (OP)
I honestly just wanted Fallout 4 in space.
I somehow got even less than that. I don't think Fallout 4 is a great game, but I liked it well enough. Starfield is worse than that.
What stings is that there is a lot in there that has the bones of something good. Ship building is borderline fantastic, but its useless because ship combat is rare, easy and broken and building a ship doesn't really effect anything else. Things like that are strewn across the game everywhere.

>>724189646 (OP)
i went in not expecting it to be a good game at all, but i gave it an honest shot, wanted to like it even, but did not except every single facet of the game to be terrible.

usually with a bethesda game it's objectively garbage but there's still something, at least one thing you like doing. starfield doesn't have that at all.

the fact that they really expected people to NG+ it over and over to be the normal experience is baffling. todd is truly delusional. the average person doesn't even beat a game once. especially if you're going to intentionally bore them to death the entire time.

>>724191436
I wanted something like Freelancer

>>724189646 (OP)
I like it a lot more than I expected to because of all the negativity and how disappointing Fallout 4 and 76 were. It's a bummer that it won't have the modding and popularity of Skyrim or FO4 but it scratches the itch well when I'm in the mood for it

>>724189894
The most offensive part to me is that they wrote a perfectly competent setting with interesting conflicts, and then had ALL of it happen 200 years before the game itself took place. All the cool shit happened in the past and is over. You walk through literal in-game museums displaying awesome mechs that you'll never get to use because they're from the war in the past. What the fuck?

>>724189646 (OP)
If you thought a quickly-made game by modern day Bethesda released in 2023 was going to be good than I just don't know what to tell you.

>>724199138
todd never understood how gamers think and play.
if you have gone through the imperial guard questline in morrowind his lack of knowledge is blatent.
he had to step in and do those quests himself because of how fucked development was, and tried to do a brief murder mystery at one point

>>724189646 (OP)
I'm not sad, my heart broke when F4 dropped. I'm just confused why Todd keeps messing up basic RPG stuff and quest branching, while trying to force this playebase building mechanic into RPGs when it clearly doesn’t work. And for the few it does work for, they don’t even appreciate the rest of the game (not that there would be much to appreciate), so what’s the point? He’s failing at both
>The game for everyone, is game for no one

>>724199612
Freelancer but ground portions are TES is the dream. Underspace comes close but isn't there for ground stuff, Spacebourne 2 is janky as fuck, and don't even get me sharted on Shart Citizen

It's perhaps the most boring sci-fi universe ever conceived. Zero thought to the worldbuilding besides "oh, I liked that show/game/movie, lets copy and paste it into our game!"
The decision not to have intelligent alien races was retarded, and I bet it was a decision made solely by Todd or Emilio.

>>724189748
That's why I expect Elder scrolls 6 to be extremely safe, boring, and pozzed like Starfield.

>>724201524
It'll still be better if they aren't using that fucking procgen shit

Impossible to make a good one, it will either have to be generated slop or only few locations.

>>724197280
The ship mechanic seemed cool at least

>>724202510
Or just don't make it realistic scale. Freelancer did this 25 years ago and it was great.

>>724189646 (OP)
You can’t have it both ways. Space is open and boring. You either want an immersive open world space game or a well crafted narrative space story. You can’t have both because it doesn’t work like that.

>>724203130
>You either want an immersive open world space game or a well crafted narrative space story.
Again, managed just fine with Freelancer.

Every "problem" with space games has been fucking solved.

Its a pity, it really could have been a solid Bethsda title with space travel and the like but unfortunately not. Though frankly
>immersive, open -world space kino
has some options for single player including X, No Man's Sky, Underspace, or Evochron Legacy. However
Star Citizen is by far the best, even during the alpha, and has the benefit online of playing kinda like the oldfag MMO days where the community really hangs together.

>>724202949
That's a linear game.

>>724203410
You're thinking of FreeSPACE, Freelancer is the game Chris Roberts got kicked off, and is an open world space game.

The number of old guard devs who quit their jobs because of Fallout 76 and Saarfield is the most depressing part of it for me. It's a completely different studio now.

>>724189646 (OP)
I expect almost nothing from "space games" so I wasn't disappointed. It is a cursed genre, mostly because people imagine some pie in the sky bullshit and then get angry when the impossible isn't realized. If anything Starfield came off better than most because they managed to create a legitimate (if mediocre) game from it, rather than an empty grind like NMS or E:D, or a vaporware scam like SC.

>>724204094
Examples? it's not like they produced a good game since oblivion.

>>724189646 (OP)
What exactly are you looking from this "immersive, open-world space kino"?

>>724203170
Yet somehow it's not enough. No matter how much people praise a space game for doing something better than Starfield, they don't just shut and play those games instead, and that's because those games don't "completely" scratch the itch they're grasping for. This tells me that Starfield is actually going in the right direction, but there's too many things impeding it's progress right now, like a long road filled with wreckages, pot holes and fallen trees.

>>724189646 (OP)
I think the idea that Bethesda still wants to iterate on the idea of procedurally generated worlds like in Daggerfall or Arena is a bit admirable. I think it's a neat concept if you put enough time and care into doing it properly.
Starfield however just didn't have the actual content to warrant using an algorithm to design terrain to put it in.

>>724189646 (OP)
It's not great, but it's kind of overhated here. Bethesda really just needs to invest in real writers who don't see writing as unnecessary, and probably some other presentation-side assets like facial animations, people that move in conversations, etc. Compare Reed Solomon to Barrett and it's jarring, like a generational difference.

>>724189646 (OP)
>what it presented as
>no man's sky with a bethesda main quest
>what released
>less than no man's sky with a bethesda main quest

>>724189894
Bethesda should've nabbed someone else's space IP like they did with Fallout

>>724205337
My itch is simple: Freelancer with ground portions

>>724189646 (OP)
I remember watching all the trailers getting excited about the stuff they were showing. And then it came out, and I had pre ordered it, so I ran face first into 500 loading screens and the sad realization that it was all just randomly generated and stagnant bullshit in between the way too small but almost decent actually designed areas. Real fucking buzz kill Todd. Not to mention how shitty the settlement building STILL IS. FROM FALLOUT 4 TODD. YOU HACK.

>>724205038
Bruce Nesmith, Nate Purkeypile, Joel Burgess, Jeff Gardiner, Dennis Mejillones, Jonah Lobe. Those are just the ones who personally confirmed that they left due to FO76 and Saarfield or the rapid studio expansion.
Kurt Kuhlmann was also kicked out due to the Microsoft acquisition.

So is the game pretty much somehow worse than Fallout 4? I imagine that it doesn't bode well for TESVI for even Skyrim normalfags.

>>724189748
>I expected it to suck, and it did.
It ended up being worse than I ever could've anticipated, I the decline would've been more gradual but they really accelerated.

>>724201360
>I bet it was a decision made solely by Todd or Emilio
id assume the game director would make such a critical decision so it would be todd of course

I also hoped starfield modding would pick up atleast like fallout4. f4 isnt a super good game but i recently downloaded and played it with like 200 mods and that was the most fun ive had with gaming in a long time

starfield has nothing. not many interesting quest or new location mods. modders just gave up.

>>724205913
Yes, it downgraded some things that were pretty good in FO4. And TES 6 is doomed because the most important lore writer was kicked out, after which Kirkbride announced that he wants nothing to do with Bethesda anymore. Kirkbride was a consultant for Skyrim and several of his ideas made it to the main quest. The next game won't have anyone left to carry it.

>>724205940
The problem was the amount of actual static point of interests, or even just points of interest in general, were tiny.

>>724206294
modders gave up on nexus due to troonery, there's 3-4x as many on the official thing

>>724206294
Starfield modding is dead after nexusfags discovered a critical design flaw that makes the game ruin saves without the possibility of fixing it with any script extender utilities. Basically the proc-gen system spams the save files with permanent records of every cloned POI until saves completely run out of address space to record more shit. This can happen even with vanilla game if it's played long enough, mods (including the paid ones) only accelerate the process. Nobody wants to get seriously invested in modding because their comment sections are swarmed by people who are losing their saves to something that isn't even their fault.

>>724189646 (OP)
I would have forgiven every single mechanical and content flaw if it had ANYTHING interesting about the setting.
But there isn't. There's no grandeur or wonder, no meaning, no real conflict. It's just a boring big fat plotless nothing of uninteresting static human polities and factions you can't affect in any way, nor which can affect you in any way. There is ZERO motivation to actually play the game except as a die-hard simfag who wants to RP as a space trucker (badly).
To say Starfield has bad writing is a mistake: it has NO writing - anti-writing, even.

>>724206590
fixed a year ago

>>724206297
You mean Kuhlmann? Without the two of them it's probably going to be proper fucked unless they got some diehard TES autist on board, yeah. I can only imagine fucking Emil or some literal who diversity hire who bullshitted their way up getting the keys to the kingdom.

it's gonna be funny when ES6 is gonna be full of retextured starfield assets

>>724206965
Well, the odds that it could go forward with the space program bullshit in the expanded lore aren't exactly zero.

>>724206590
>Starfield modding is dead after nexusfags discovered a critical design flaw that makes the game ruin saves without the possibility of fixing it with any script extender utilities.

i wasnt aware about this. are you memeing

>>724207298
No, but it was fixed over a year ago

>>724206870
No, this is something else. The thing that was fixed was the limit on the number of plugins that can be loaded. Last month nexusfags came up with new diagnostic tools and confirmed that saves go to shit even with vanilla game.

Plugins go up to FExxxxxx since Morrowind. The FF address space is reserved entirely for the save files, it stores dynamically created references. Container and NPC inventories, loot, random encounter NPCs, crafted items, anything spawned with scripts (Fallout 4 settlements for example). Saarfield fucks it up by filling that address space with EVERYTHING that spawns in the landing zones.

In previous games, the map locations were unique. As such, every building block that went into making them could be loaded directly from the main ESM, it didn't need to be stored in the save files. In Saarfield the same POIs spawn everywhere, over and over. ESM stores their immutable templates and it gets cloned every time those POIs are created in new landing zones. Clones are script-spawned objects that populate the save files.
You know the webm where the guy runs between two identical POIs? That's why they have to be cloned. So you can loot one of them, hack the locks, blow up barrels, whatever, without causing the same thing to happen in every other copy of that POI in the universe.

>>724206962
The problem with TES autists is that they're all some kind of retarded furry or junkie who insists that every obviously bullshit myth of beastmen is 100% true. That's actually what happened to ESO.
Kuhlmann is a historian, he curated all the we wuz myths and was the sole reason why TES always had conflicting accounts and narratives created by different interest groups. He recognized the need of any functional nation to have its national mythology, most of which is a lie or a great exaggeration.

>>724189646 (OP)
>Time skip, completely ignoring the shit story from the first
>Set it in like a handful of handcrafted systems with detailed unique explorable planets rather than the absurd amount given
>Recycle the race and racial perks system from Elder scrolls, 10 races all with unique qualities and an ability
>Add alien waifu/husbando bait characters and companions that are well written.
>Ditch the NASApunk shit, go for more of the Mass Effect approach when it comes to ship tech and aesthetic.
>Ditch fast travel at least until a system/planet is found, you have to travel their in about an couple of hours, giving points of interest on the way to tackle (based on ship capabilities or the stage of the game your at or something) or give players the option to just not fast travel for immersion if they want, keep random encounters on the way roughly the same but just flesh it out a bit more.
>Bring back a better karma/alignment system for actual roleplaying
There, I just saved the sequel

>>724189646 (OP)
Not really

>>724189646 (OP)
I expected it to suck because westoid sci fi isn't about cool shit like robots and spaceships but about trannies and faggots

>>724208004
I think that's a problem with a lot of lorefags, vidya or not. Something like Monster Hunter is a prime example of having interesting world building, but practically no real lore worth a damn until maybe Wilds (where the NPCs dump exposition that is all true and makes everything devoid of any actual mystery). Yet it didn't stop people from taking unused concepts from the artbooks and the weapon and armor descriptions at full fucking face value and then some, there's even some Chinese whispers about the players being descendants of supersoldiers that had allegedly sparked from /v/ making up dumb excuses for video game abstractions over a decade ago, just in case you want to downplay the player character's accomplishments. I've even seen ecology excerpts posted from Fandom that had no real sources.

The unreliable narrator stance can result in seemingly large and unpopular retcons at times, but in-world uses of it seem to be overlooked. It kinda gets tiring when virtually every 1000 year-old legend turns out to be true.

>>724208004
I like to think that Pelinal was fairly accurate in his legends.
Reads like a regular bethesda player who went full murderhobo against a particular group.

>>724207513
Is this actually a significant problem? I don't see why anyone would bother visiting the same POIs hundreds of times to trigger this. Even in games like Skyrim where people might spend 500 hours on the same save, they do it by installing a bunch of mods with new locations to explore, which would bloat saves in the same way. Not visiting the same caves over and over.

desu this seems like a fundamental limitation for any procgen game that lets you explore and alter an unbounded space, since the save will keep getting larger. Minecraft would have the same issue, but realistically, people don't have infinite time to bloat a save.

>>724189646 (OP)
I wrongfully assumed that the settlement building would actually try to improve upon Fallout 4 instead of being a massive regression. I wanted to build my own space city on a comfy snow planet instead of shitty prefab outposts that can only house 4 workers at a time.

>>724209965
You don't get it. Just landing anywhere creates those places. You don't even have to leave your ship and walk around to generate all those POIs. It's hard to tell how many individual objects are spawned with every map square. Buildings and caves are made out of lego blocks, BGS called this process kitbashing since at least Oblivion. Every lego brick used represents one dynamic ID that's permanently burned into the save file. And that's just building shells. Add to it all furnishings, fixtures and decorations, collectable clutter items, light nodes, special effects, sound emitters, enemy spawners, guiding markers for enemy AI, occlusion planes, tons of stuff visible only in the editor.

Skyrim mods that add new locations don't add potentially infinite copies of those locations. There's only one of each, and it's loaded from the mod plugin. There's no need to clone them because it's not proc-gen and repeatable.

The sole reason why Starfield's main quest is about resetting the game and starting over, with only character level and skills carrying over, is that this is the only time the game removes all this trash from the save files. The designers completely fucked up by making proc-gen shit persistent. It's something that should be deleted from saves as soon as the player fucks off from a planet, because like you said, nobody revisits those places.

>>724210849
The proc gen shit isn't persistent though, it only sets itself as persistent if you put down a workshop or it's around a static point of interest.

>>724189646 (OP)
I'm not surprised because Bethesda hasn't made a good game in well over a decade.
I unironically enjoy star citizen though for my space game fix.

>>724189646 (OP)
no. starfield is kino.

>>724211389
It's persistent. Landing zones stay on planetary surfaces and on return they will have all the same buildings or natural curiosities in the same places as before. Spending 168 universal hours away from them will only reset the loot, enemies, locks and destructible objects, basically cell reset from previous games.

It would be much easier to research if Fallrim tools were adapted to Starfield's saves. For one, nobody can figure out why mods that add new POIs cause save corruption so much faster. The way nexusfags discovered it in the first place was by using the console in game and highlighting objects to see their reference IDs. Based on that, someone made a script extender based tool that can purge non-unique landing zones. The process is risky and far from perfect, but it shaves 10 MB from smaller saves up to whooping 50MB or more on very bloated and crash-prone saves. It's not a proper solution though, and it's not possible on xbox either.