Riggswolfe

Yeah, they made two mystifying decisions with the starborn armor. One, they made it all one piece. Two, they made it unmodifiable. I don't understand either decision. The armor looks kind of cool but unless the stats on run 10 are amazing it's easy to make and/or find better armor, pretty quickly too.

The usual crowd can't help whining about "woke" even though they probably don't even know what the word means and would be hard pressed to say what exactly in the game other than a pronoun slider in character creation even qualifies. You just learn to tune it out after a while.

The main use for outposts currently is to grind levels very quickly. I'm a bit puzzled why people are doing it on PC instead of using console commands but on Xbox it's by far the fastest way to blow through levels. It's also an easy way to get money quickly. Again, makes more sense on Xbox than PC. On PC people use outposts to get 60k or more XP per minute. On Xbox it's a lot slower because of how the UI works but still pretty fast. The other major use they have is dropping a landing pad with a ship builder so you have one place to build your ship with almost all of the parts minus the bridges and 2-3 unique hab parts you have to go to the specific builder's main base to get.

There are some differences in NG+. Most of them center around the lodge and your first entrance as you can get some pretty big differences there depending on RNG. But there are other subtle differences throughout the game. For example, I overheard the head of the Universum church talking to a small crowd about Unity. I also enjoy how you can shortcircuit quests as a Starborn sometimes. "Look, I already know you're doing X and Y. So just give me what I want already."

I get not liking a game. But come on, at least be factual in your complaints about it. Worst graphics of a Bethesda game? Hardly. It's like all of their games. The graphics are an incremental improvement over the prior game. Starfield looks better than Fallout 4 that looked better than Skyrim etc. Oddly, it feels like some of the graphics like skin and hair texture were downgraded from the 2022 preview. I have a sneaky suspicion that's because of the Xbox Series S holding them back since it's a weak console compared to the X and PS5. Starfield's lighting is definitely an improvement over prior games though in some places it is too bright. NPC hair looks kind of bad sometimes and the trees in New Atlantis are pretty bad but other than that the graphics are an improvement over their prior games. I won't comment on the whine about the pronoun switch at character creation. Plethora of bugs? Nope. It's got some bugs but less than Fallout 4 or Skyrim had at launch. I think I've had maybe half a dozen bugs in my 100+ hours of playing. None of them broke quests and were mostly just annoyances like my landing pad shipbuilder console stopped working so I had to destroy and rebuild it.

I'm pretty sure that stuff is all the little clutter that makes your ship feel lived in. I'm not sure why it shows up in your ships cargo but I suspect it is an attempt to prevent people getting around cargo space limits by just dropping stuff in their ship. Easy way to check. Now that you've dropped all that, is your ship missing all the items in its various rooms? Unity makes sense to me. I do find the Starborn odd in that they seem to simply be fighting over getting the space magic from the artifacts but none of them seem to question where the artifacts came from, where their spaceships come from and where their suits come from. I think some of that is intentional as all of the Starborn seem to be single minded obsessives who have long lost any connection to their humanity. (with the possible exception of the emissary). I really hope one of the DLC goes into the origins of the artifacts. If not and we have to wait for the inevitable sequel to get any answers we'll be waiting for 20+ years with Bethesda's release cycle.

And what is this so-called ideology you rant about? Equal rights and less hate? Oh noooo. You're up in arms because some dude made a mod to remove an option that literally doesn't hurt anyone and it got removed by Nexus because they saw it for what it was. A pathetic political statement disguised as a mod. Lol. What a wonderful troll response.

I just had to respond to this. Sneak attack depends on not being detected. Early on that is quite hard as your space suit is noisy and lighting makes a hell of a difference. There is space exploration though a lot of people don't bother with it. It's not as robust as ground exploration really since space is, well, space but you can explore if you want. Some of my most interesting and unexpected moments came from me indulging my curiosity in space. Planetary exploration has far more than 3-4 pois. Far more. You must have just stood right outside your ship and turned in a circle. It's like Skyrim or Fallout. You have a range on how far you can detect POIs that I believe is increased by upping the survey skill. But most areas on a planet have 10 or 12 POIs at least. Probably more as I have never bothered to count. I just know when I pick a direction and go I find more and more stuff. And that's just where you choose to land. You can land anywhere and find even more POIs not to mention new biomes depending on where you choose to land. Tired of a desert? Land near mountains or in a forest or on one of the poles... The multiverse is a mechanic you can utterly ignore if you want to. There is no reason it should impact your enjoyment unless simply knowing it exists bothers you. In which case, I have bad news. The multiverse isn't just a trend in fiction. It's a legitimate theory in physics that quite a few physicists think is the most likely reality we live in. I won't comment on the AI. It's not super great but it's not awful either. I think that one is just down to taste. It really sounds like you barely touched the game and decided it wasn't for you. That's fine but your post is riddled with inaccuracies.

I figure I'll post my reactions here. I'm about 23 hours into the game and love it with a few complaints. Things I like or love: Quest writing. The quests so far feel like some of the best writing Bethesda has done. Miles better than Fallout 4. The return of RPG mechanics. The skills are more interesting and sometimes get used in dialogues and such. I'm pretty sure my character may hit a wall as I've gone broad on my skills and not deep. I just want to be able to do a variety of stuff. I've quite enjoyed how the traits play into the game. One of mine is Kid Stuff and I've really enjoyed my parents and my interactions with them. They also keep giving me cool stuff! My favorite pistol was given to me by my in-game father! Designing and building ships. See the longer note below though. It's not an endgame activity like Todd said other than you need to get deep into the skill trees for some of the better ship add-ons. The characters. So far I've enjoyed all of the characters I've met both companions and non-companions. This sort of ties into the quest writing note above but I think it applies in general. All of the characters feel unique and so far the voice acting is good across the board. I haven't heard that one guy who did like every voice in Oblivion! The lighting system. It is definitely an advance over past games. The big caveat to this is sometimes it washes things out a bit and I think it could use some adjustments, especially in interiors. The combat is a vast improvement over Skyrim and Fallout 4. Guns especially feel better. Melee doesn't feel a ton better to me but I also haven't really done much of it as I feel silly doing melee stuff in a setting with guns most of the time. The sheer amount of stuff to do. I've only been to maybe 5 or 6 systems in spite of how much time I've played the game. That's because I keep finding stuff to do and getting sidetracked in good old Bethesda fashion. New Atlantis alone had a ton of content for me to explore. I still haven't even been to the Freestar Collective or the Crimson Fleet but I do have quests that will send me to both areas. Each planet I land on I usually find a few POIs to go check out just because I'm curious about them. Space combat is fun if shallower than a dedicated space sim like Elite Dangerous. I still have yet to board an enemy ship except one time in a quest. This is because they usually fight me in groups and even if I take their engines out I'm usually busy with others and they're still shooting at me so it's smarter to blow them up. Usually when I get to the last ship the fight has gone on long enough I just need to blow them up so I take less damage. That said, I just upgraded my shields massively so this may change going forward. I like a lot of the QoL stuff like having a toggle to hide your armor in outposts. As someone who plays in third person so I can see my character, I love that since it lets me walk around in a more civilian looking outfit when I'm in a town or whatever. Far less buggy than my experience with prior Bethesda games. I've heard of people encountering big bugs but so far the closest I've had to a bug is NPCs sometimes not turning to face me if I come up behind them and start a dialogue. No quest issues. No stuck animations. Things I don't like or have mixed opinions on (this list seems longer than the above but most of these, for me personally, are nitpicks. Also things like "I like the quest writing" covers a ton of ground!): There are a ton of loading screens. Luckily they are super fast most of the time. It's kind of odd how many there are. I know a lot of people are complaining it's because the engine is old or whatever. I have a sneaking suspicion it is because of the Series S and sacrifices that had to be made to play on that weak console. My character looks amazing in the character creator. And uhhh...less so in-game. It's not the usual "the lighting in the character creator is different" issue I usually experience. There's a big downgrade in skin textures from character creation to actually playing. Likewise, the hairs are mostly bleh. Both of these issues will probably be fixed fairly quickly by mods to be honest. Loot is...odd. You pretty quickly figure out that this isn't Fallout 4. All that junk lying around? Ignore it. It's not worth hauling it back to a city to sell it. On top of that, inventory space is an issue for me as I'm carrying around a ton of aid items and they're filling my packs. I really need to find a place to drop some of this stuff off. I did just recently upgrade my cargo holds but I'm using that mostly to store resources for crafting at the moment. So far there isn't a ton of weapon and armor variety. About a half dozen of each type. A half dozen pistols, a half dozen rifles, etc. I suspect that I'll see more variety as I go to different factions and start fighting higher level enemies. Some of the systems are super complex and could use a tutorial. See my notes below about this. Speaking of, I haven't figured out a way to know what some of the traits on items do. For example, I just found two new types of boost packs. One is called balanced. The other is called something like "skip jump". What do these do compared to the "basic boostpack"? I don't know. I'll need to google and hope for the best. On PC you might be able to mouse over stuff like this and see a tooltip but I'm playing my first time on console so I can play it on my big 4k TV. Finally, skin textures are a mixed bag and most hair textures are bad. It's weird because I know they can do better but I suspect things were toned down, again because of the Series S. Most characters look quite good other than their hair. That's what weirds me out when I see videos like the one earlier in the thread. I haven't seen characters that look that bad, it's just in some lighting some of the skin textures look a bit flat. I almost think they've intentionally sabotaged their own graphics or something or are intentionally hunting background characters who don't look as good or something. It's definitely not as open as past Bethesda games and some of the landscapes are quite boring to look at. I've yet to find a forest or high mountains but I've also only gone to maybe half a dozen planets so far as I mentioned. That said, there is a lot to explore on each planet so don't listen to people who say there aren't. Each area I've landed in has a ton of POIs in it though you do have to explore to see them pop up on your watch or compass or whatever you'd like to call it. I also have yet to find a repeated indoor environment so people who say they've explored the same building more than once are probably lying so they can complain. Last night, for example, I wandered around an abandoned cryo facility I just randomly found while doing a quest and it was really neat, and felt like a mini-dungeon with a lot of nooks and crannies to explore and a couple of pieces of good loot. Which reminds me, I got a lead on an abandoned outpost with "amazing treasure" I should follow up on eventually. Finally, what the hell is up with the maps? On a planet they're forgivable. They show the POIs you've found and stuff. But in the city? Why is there not a map with things like "store X" and such clearly marked with an actual map. I think the maps on planets are simplistic because of the procedural generation, but there is no reason for that to be true in a city. I figured I'd go into more detail with my complaints about more complex systems. For example, I totally redesigned my starter ship but it took me a while to figure out how to add a new weapon to a group so that the build would be legal. Likewise, it actually took me a while to figure out how to buy new parts. It's simple but there's no tutorial about it. Still, my redesigned Frontier looks neat and I quite like it. I can already tell I'm going to enjoy the hell out of building ships. I also built an outpost and love the new overhead view and how you put down "modules" instead of building wall by wall. It is another part of the game that could use a tutorial however as it took me a while to figure out that you have to build a "character station" to assign a companion to an outpost. It also took me a while to figure out how to have my extractor put stuff in a storage bin. I do like how right off the bat you can drop extractors and stuff so the outpost grabs resources for you.

I had that same thought. I was on my second replay of BG3 when I thought "I wonder if the people complaining about the mute protagonist in Starfield complained about it in Baldur's Gate 3?"

I had a huge amount of dissonance with the main quest in Fallout 4. I found it somewhat less with Nora because I think she delivered her lines better than Nate but even so the storyline clashed with what I typically do in Bethesda games. In theory you're supposed to have all this urgency to find your son but I wanted to explore and do side content, tinker with settlements, etc. But my character was constantly worried about her son in dialogue, even if I was 30 hours into the game and hadn't even gone to Diamond City yet. I like that Starfield's main quest looks like it won't try for super personal and is instead "go find these artifacts!" I won't feel nearly as much disconnect from the story if I do my own thing for a long time. I'd add V from Cyberpunk 2077 to this list, especially female V. She did an excellent job and I never felt like her dialogue responses were "off" for the scene like I sometimes felt in Fallout 4. I'm curious if you played Nate or Nora. In my experience female VAs are almost always better in RPGs.

I liked the voiced protagonists in Cyberpunk and Mass Effect for sure. Especially Mass Effect since it was such a cinematic game and the VAs did a good job of adjusting their tone to the dialogue choices. I also loved the female VA in Cyberpunk. She did a great job. Fallout 4 I had mixed feelings about. The VAs were pretty good (well, Nora was pretty good) but it made the game feel quite generic in the interactions at times and seriously hampered quest mods at least at first. I think for Bethesda, silent protagonist is absolutely the way to go both for modding and because their games have characters that are usually much more of a blank slate. (Nate and Nora were their attempt to move away from that and I think going back to silent protagonists is a reaction to how poorly that worked out for them.)

For me personally, I quite like voiced protagonists with one major exception. Games with heavy modding. I believe the voiced protagonist was a major issue for making quest mods for Fallout 4, especially in the beginning and is part of why its modding community was never as strong as Skyrim's despite Fallout 4 allegedly outselling Skyrim. (though I'm sure the 3,000 Skyrim rereleases have changed that.) So, in BGS games, I much prefer silent protagonists because it means quest mods and such will be much easier to make. I also like that we have the full dialogue listed now instead of a short prompt like in Fallout 4. It feels to me like Starfield is going back to their RPG roots where Fallout 4 was lacking in that. I quite enjoy Fallout 4 but it is pretty shallow on the roleplaying front. For games like Cyberpunk and Mass Effect I quite like voiced protagonists because it works in their cinematic style and Mass Effect, at least, didn't have mod support officially. Cyberpunk does and I'm sure the voiced protagonists have contributed to its lack of quest mods though it may also be in part because of the tools they have.

I haven't uploaded here in a while! Anyway, the new release is out with a ton of new content, especially if you've only downloaded from Lovers Lab! Enjoy! Get it here!

0.24c is now out! The original post has been updated but you can simply download it from here Version 0.24c Bug fixes: Fixed an issue where Ray's blackmail could be put 28 days in the future! Fixed improperly named pictures in a certain scenario with Ray on Saturday. Version 0.24b Bug fixes: A rare case where you could get a blank screen at the motel has been fixed. Getting a blank screen when meeting the priest and "agreeing to talk" has been fixed. Various spelling errors corrected. Version 0.24a Bug fixes: A bug during the Patterson breakin when you had the key has been fixed. Various spelling errors corrected. Version 0.24 The word count is now over 207,000 words! New content: Meet Kamiko and visit the gas station Sean's first date. Meet Sharelle at the grocery store and Wolfram at the lighthouse. Meet two new characters that won't be named here during a special event. Break into the Patterson home with Anya and Amber with a possible 2nd blackmail "date" with Ray or a new one if you managed to steal the key! New encounter with the Sheriff's deputies! And a possible new date arranged! A very important encounter that could lead to a bad end or deaths for one or more NPCs! Tweaks: Bug fixes: A bug that could get you stuck in the church when you first visit has been fixed. Various spelling errors corrected.