So.. Starfield...

[Vallsz]

I've discovered things on planets with no fast travel at all. The very same environmental storytelling Beth has always had in their games. Equally discovered twice the amount of diverse creatures than the constant feral ghouls and raiders of Fallout. Infact i've found this game has less useless dungeons and more diversity than the 9493294329 gunner filled buildings and vaults of Fallout 4. Yes you cannot land on the planet yourself. BUT you can infact fly to any location without fast traveling to it. One person did it, took 7 hours, and that's the thing. Why would you though. Nobody got time for 7 hours flying to another planet. Not only that, because the game has so many planets and systems, it also has tons of radiant content depending on the region. I got a random distress call in one system only for it to turn out into a much bigger adventure than I was expecting. These things happen planetside too. So that's still there as well.

Edited September 3, 2023 by vallixas

[Naria]

26 minutes ago, Wandering_Mania said:

And if you are going to keep up with the baseless accusations, simply because I state my opinion of what I saw; You can just cease replying to me, because I will never change my opinions based on what you say.

In order for a accusation to be baseless it has to lack fact so here is a direct quote of what an open world game is: "While the openness of the game world is an important facet to games featuring open worlds, the main draw of open-world games is about providing the player with autonomy—not so much the freedom to do anything they want in the game (which is nearly impossible with current computing technology), but the ability to choose how to approach the game and its challenges in the order and manner as the player desires while still constrained by gameplay rules"

 

That's the exact gameplay Starfield offers. Thus not being baseless. Also has for another fact. I said your complaints were "valid"

 

What it sounds like is you hate the loading screens which is perfectly valid, but what that ultimately comes down too, is expecting Starfield to give Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous or No Mans Sky level of flight freedom. And if anyone has spent any amount of time playing Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous you'd understand how spending 5+ minutes flying to each planet, spending 30 seconds or more landing/docking, stopping at stars to refuel, is incredibly repetitive and tedious, and that's just base case scenario. You can go on large hour long flights just to finally be able to trade/shop parts/buy ships.

 

It's not ideal that Starfield went this route, but I'll take this any day over freedom to fly between planets, because I know how that'll end up.

 

Also keep in mind this game has to be playable on consoles, and as far as i'm aware, they run at 30 FPS. There isn't a chance that they'd be able to get all of those systems working properly on consoles without them exploding.

 

 

 

[FCKYOURALREADYTAKENNAMES]

30 minutes ago, Naria said:

"While the openness of the game world is an important facet to games featuring open worlds, the main draw of open-world games is about providing the player with autonomy—not so much the freedom to do anything they want in the game (which is nearly impossible with current computing technology), but the ability to choose how to approach the game and its challenges in the order and manner as the player desires while still constrained by gameplay rules"

 

That's the exact gameplay Starfield offers. Thus not being baseless. Also has for another fact. I said your complaints were "valid"

Really no offense, but why are we always ending up with playing these stupid nuance and defintion wars with one side intentionally playing stupid on top of it?

You know full well what an open world game is. From gta to skyrim, it has absolutely zero, nothing and nada to do with the freedom to approach content in a the order you please.
The term open world, refers to the a consistent, coherent open world. Not more and not less, and this quote of yours is at best an opinion from someone who has no idea about open world games, or at worst its the words of a shait game developer/journalist who intentionally employs sophism and word play to make their faulty product look better.

You can argue that skyrim was a box too because the map was not a complete world, but it could sell you the feeling and immersion of it being so regardless.
Starfield is completely incapable of doing that because its a mess of loading screens and matchbox size levels.

Furthermore:

 

30 minutes ago, Naria said:

What it sounds like is you hate the loading screens which is perfectly valid, but what that ultimately comes down too, is expecting Starfield to give Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous or No Mans Sky level of flight freedom. And if anyone has spent any amount of time playing Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous you'd understand how spending 5+ minutes flying to each planet, spending 30 seconds or more landing/docking, stopping at stars to refuel, is incredibly repetitive and tedious, and that's just base case scenario. You can go on large hour long flights just to finally be able to trade/shop parts/buy ships.

This is the opinion of someone who clearly does not understand the concept of immersion or gameplay coherence.
Brings me back to the original world of warcraft which used to be a one of a kind social experience.
How inconvenient it was to have to interact with people in order to form parties. To travel to dungeon locations. To have faction balance issues and much much more.
Yet 10+ million players played it until it became completely convenient:
You dont need to communicate with anyone, you just press a button to dungeon.
You dont need to travel anymore, know maps or anything, you teleport or fly.
You dont need to go to a dungeon, ppl will just summon you.
You dont need to worry about realm balance anymore because the entire game is a sharded shait mess in which you will never meet the same people ever again in your life time coz the servers randomly phase in and out npcs around you which are supposedly players too, but they dont need to communicate and will be despawned around the next corner anyway.
Now its convenient, easy and fast to use, and its almost dead too with less than a million players left who are willing to pay for it.

Convenience kills immersion.
Walking to a location in skyrim has taken you time. A LOT of time.
But it was an adventure.
Literally.
You explored.
You came across things.
You were literally vacuumed into the sensation of an open living world as you traveled instead of 1click fast traveling your arse to your destination because its "incredibly repetitive and tedious".

TL;DR:
Starfield cannot be mentioned on one page with skyrim, in fact not even in the same book.
To as much as imply that starfield is open world is at best an attempt at comedy, at worst complete, fundamental ignorance towards what the concept means.

Edited September 3, 2023 by FCKYOURALREADYTAKENNAMES

[Naria]

Quote

Really no offense, but why are we always ending up with playing these stupid nuance and defintion wars with one side intentionally playing stupid on top of it?
 

Saying no offense doesn't give you a pass to immediately be aggressive and attack someone with insults. 

 

I won't entertain your post purely because you want to act like a child. If, and only if, you grow up and mature, we'd might have a bit of a conservation here. But since you can't be civil, you can move on. I won't give you anymore attention.

 

Toodles.

[Raine_Hyd]

I have yet to play it but from all the stuff I'm seeing it's not open world like Skyrim or Fallout 4 etc. It's "open zones" akin to Final Fantasy 16. Which kind of annoyed me but that's to be expected when 14 is open ones too. At least for the planets Idk how the space stuff works since I haven't watched any media about it. So take this response for what you want.
 

[xking]

2 hours ago, vallixas said:

Huge potential. Not only does the game already provide lots of resources for mod potential and it's huge diversity in cities offering lots of templates to work with. But I can already see how modders will go harder on this game than they did in fallout 4 especially in housing and buildings. Thing about fallout 4 try as you might you couldn't make a bunch of ugly and destroyed textures look pretty. Assets in Starfield are pretty. Even the building system provides much cleaner assets that all the different destroyed and ugly structures in fallout 4.

 

The world's and terrain are pretty. And not just muddy everywhere. Diamond City was trash, Goodneighbor even more trash and it's assets didn't do much to inspire people to create new interiors. Or that many overhauls. Starfield not only has much bigger cities, but they're diverse in both exterior and interior with multiple levels and different cells as are it's dungeons and their interiors. In short Starfield provides x10000 more assets to work with than Fallout 4. Makes Fallout 4 assets really seem boring by comparison.

Yep, the modding potential for this game is thousands of times greater than Fallout 4. Just by having a silent protagonist with the ability to pick backgrounds and traits means a lot can be added in the future when it comes to story mods or even models that add new backgrounds and traits.  Not only, that the cities in this game are pretty much open cities in their own giant tiles. ( you can just walk out of the city Into the Wilderness with no loading screens ) so I can see these cities being expanded in the future by modders.

[xking]

I think a lot of people underestimate how big those tiles actually are. As somebody who plays the game and tries to catalog fauna and Flora on planets. Those tiles are big, like almost the size of Skyrim itself big

 

( when you're just trying to catalog fauna and Flora and a resources and a giant scary crab monster comes at you from out of the bushes. Oh shit )

Edited September 4, 2023 by xking

[Wandering_Mania]

1 hour ago, Naria said:

In order for a accusation to be baseless it has to lack fact

Well your accusation did lack fact, or it 'conveniently ignored', what I had said. And I quote myself:

2 hours ago, Wandering_Mania said:

I state my opinion of what I saw

You say I was lying jut to hate on the game, which is untrue. Notice the wording of "of what I saw"? I watched 5 hours of a stream, and I saw none of that.

Making your accusation baseless by definition.

Care to continue? Because if you do, I'll just ignore every post you make.

 

1 hour ago, FCKYOURALREADYTAKENNAMES said:

Convenience kills immersion.
Walking to a location in skyrim has taken you time. A LOT of time.
But it was an adventure.
Literally.
You explored.
You came across things.
You were literally vacuumed into the sensation of an open living world as you traveled instead of 1click fast traveling your arse to your destination because its "incredibly repetitive and tedious".

100% agreed! This is why Starfield is not an 'a-typical Bethesda game'. And this is why Starfield was a massive letdown to a lot of us.

 

1 hour ago, Naria said:

Saying no offense doesn't give you a pass to immediately be aggressive and attack someone with insults.

Yet you where attacking and accusing me of lying simply because you gloss over a few words as mentioned at the top of this post? Hypocrite much?

[Miauzi]

Vor 1 Minute sagte xking:

Ich glaube, viele Leute unterschätzen, wie groß diese Fliesen tatsächlich sind. Als jemand, der das Spiel spielt und versucht, die Fauna und Flora auf Planeten zu katalogisieren. Diese Kacheln sind groß, fast so groß wie Skyrim selbst

 

You really have no idea how big the Earth's moon is, for example - even the actual area of Skyrim or the area around Boston (Fallout 4) would fit into it thousands of times... not to mention a REAL planet like Earth or Venus.

If you go around the Earth's equator at 1,000 km/h ... it takes 40 long hours!

[Naria]

Starfield has all the staples of an open world game, it just doesn't have a seamless world. I'd still call it an open world personally because it meets 90% of that criteria. FF16 is just a linear action RPG with a large world that is constantly locked and unlocked as you progress through the story with no choice to do anything else but a few side quests or progress the story. It's the same thing with FF14, once you start ARR your locked in progressing the story till you finish endwalker and then the game opens up with a lot more choice and freedom like a traditional mmorpg

 

But for example, my first 10 hours of the game I landed in the first city, did some stuff at the lodge, and then didn't touch the main story quest for the better part of 8 hours. I explored different systems, went down the rabbit trail of random side quests I found. Spent 4 hours on a single planet exploring and surveying it to 100% and never getting in my ship. Cleaning out pirate hideouts, scanning ruins, coming across random NPCs with quests asking me to do something somewhere on the planet, and then I left. I found a resort planet, did a quest there. Became a debt collector, did some stuff for that. Did some bounty hunting. Then I finally went back and started the main quest line, got a few missions in and then got sidetracked by joining a faction and spent another 8-10 hours doing that whole quest line before picking the main story back up.

 

It's a giant openly explorable world, albeit, not seamless, it's still completely explorable with freedom of choice.

 

I get everyone's frustrations with it being split up into zones and that it breaks immersion, etc. That's all completely valid and warranted complaints, I'm not at all trying to sell anything to anyone or sway anyone in anyway shape or form. Merely trying to give a different perspective.

There is MASSIVE potential here for modders to be absolutely wild with their imagination. Which is only made possible because everything is a "zone" it's sectioned off so modders have almost a complete canvas to do as they please without it bogging the entire galaxy down.

 

Edited September 4, 2023 by Naria

[Gameplayer]

1 hour ago, FCKYOURALREADYTAKENNAMES said:

Really no offense, but why are we always ending up with playing these stupid nuance and defintion wars with one side intentionally playing stupid on top of it?

You know full well what an open world game is. From gta to skyrim, it has absolutely zero, nothing and nada to do with the freedom to approach content in a the order you please.
The term open world, refers to the a consistent, coherent open world. Not more and not less, and this quote of yours is at best an opinion from someone who has no idea about open world games, or at worst its the words of a shait game developer/journalist who intentionally employs sophism and word play to make their faulty product look better.

You can argue that skyrim was a box too because the map was not a complete world, but it could sell you the feeling and immersion of it being so regardless.
Starfield is completely incapable of doing that because its a mess of loading screens and matchbox size levels.

Furthermore:

 

This is the opinion of someone who clearly does not understand the concept of immersion or gameplay coherence.
Brings me back to the original world of warcraft which used to be a one of a kind social experience.
How inconvenient it was to have to interact with people in order to form parties. To travel to dungeon locations. To have faction balance issues and much much more.
Yet 10+ million players played it until it became completely convenient:
You dont need to communicate with anyone, you just press a button to dungeon.
You dont need to travel anymore, know maps or anything, you teleport or fly.
You dont need to go to a dungeon, ppl will just summon you.
You dont need to worry about realm balance anymore because the entire game is a sharded shait mess in which you will never meet the same people ever again in your life time coz the servers randomly phase in and out npcs around you which are supposedly players too, but they dont need to communicate and will be despawned around the next corner anyway.
Now its convenient, easy and fast to use, and its almost dead too with less than a million players left who are willing to pay for it.

Convenience kills immersion.
Walking to a location in skyrim has taken you time. A LOT of time.
But it was an adventure.
Literally.
You explored.
You came across things.
You were literally vacuumed into the sensation of an open living world as you traveled instead of 1click fast traveling your arse to your destination because its "incredibly repetitive and tedious".

TL;DR:
Starfield cannot be mentioned on one page with skyrim, in fact not even in the same book.
To as much as imply that starfield is open world is at best an attempt at comedy, at worst complete, fundamental ignorance towards what the concept means.

 

I got you.

 

It was a mistake "forcing fast travel" on everyone.

In fact it completely removes the ability to travel to a location outside of using "fast travel", which before in earlier games by the same Devs "fast travel" was completely optional and although there likely were loads of players that would use it all the time, it certainly was not all players.

I have had a few games without use of fast travel in fact its easy enough to say that people that did a survival run in Fo4 for sure ran everywhere for at least one of those playthroughs.

 

We dont even have the option of doing the same.

 

Also in prior Bethsada TES and Fallout games, there were plenty of random encounters that would/could happen along the way that a player that consistently fast travels never see's.

 

Starfield is not like TES or Fallout games in that regard.

It is more like older games such as Privateer.

 

[Arethiel]

29 minutes ago, Wandering_Mania said:

100% agreed! This is why Starfield is not an 'a-typical Bethesda game'. And this is why Starfield was a massive letdown to a lot of us.

 

 

I think you and the other guy are looking through some rose tinted goggles for Vanilla Skyrim. Running to a location in vanilla Skyrim (or Oblivion or Morrowind for that matter) was never enjoyable, it was never an "exploration" experience. It was a tedious run along a road that looks basically the same everywhere in Skyrim except when bad snow textures cover the same stuff in the north.

The problem is that people let themselves expect a 10/10 because they look at Skyrim or FO4 (for some reason) with rose tinted goggles when Starfield, and every other Bethesda game (including New Vegas), is a 7/10 or an 8/10.

In fact, if we're being honest, Starfield is the least buggy and most polished of all the Bethesda launches even though it still has plenty of bugs.

[sherrif]

49 minutes ago, xking said:

Those tiles are big, like almost the size of Skyrim itself big...

I was pretty sure somebody quoted that the tiles were approximately twice the size of Skyrim, the fact is I've had little reason to land in a custom spot because the "POI" landing spots are plenty of planet to explore.

[Wandering_Mania]

8 minutes ago, Arethiel said:

I think you and the other guy are looking through some rose tinted goggles for Vanilla Skyrim. Running to a location in vanilla Skyrim (or Oblivion or Morrowind for that matter) was never enjoyable, it was never an "exploration" experience. It was a tedious run along a road that looks basically the same everywhere in Skyrim except when bad snow textures cover the same stuff in the north.

Well, that's your opinion. And if you only stuck to the road, yeah that's what you would see. But some of us enjoyed it, and also some of us didn't stick to the road. We went off the 'beaten path', and had that very 'exploration experience'. Which you might want to consider trying next time you play any of the TES games.

 

13 minutes ago, Arethiel said:

The problem is that people let themselves expect a 10/10 because they look at Skyrim or FO4 (for some reason) with rose tinted goggles when Starfield, and every other Bethesda game (including New Vegas), is a 7/10 or an 8/10.

Well I will agree that they are not a '10 out of 10' by any means. But FO4 did have some merits of it's own, even though the voiced Player Character (PC) was a mistake. And why it's not done in Starfield most likely. And as for Skyrim, also has some merits of it's own, even though the only viable playstyle was a stealth/archer.

 

But New Vegas wasn't a Bethesda game. It was only published by 'Bethesda Softworks', which is not the same company branch as 'Bethesda Games Studio'. And it was developed by Obsidian. So any grievances that may be brought up about it, are completely moot.

 

22 minutes ago, Arethiel said:

In fact, if we're being honest, Starfield is the least buggy and most polished of all the Bethesda launches even though it still has plenty of bugs.

And that's a good thing. But that, in no way, shape, or form, gives them a 'free pass' just because of 'fewer bugs'. When they removed the 'big exploreable world', it was just about as big, if not a bigger mistake, as the FO4 voiced PC. When you have no other choice than to go through a load screen, it breaks immersion. And each and every one you have to go through, chips at it's very heart; Right up until there is nothing left, but a game that is less of an 'RPG', and more of a poorly written 'Action Adventure'. And when you have to go through several load screens just to do a simple task, it just exacerbates and showcases the underlying flaws.

[UnholyDoughnut]

I preordered it and played it for a little, but I ended up refunding it. I found it to be a bit sterile and boring. Maybe in a year or so there will be enough of a change from the modding community...

 

but...

 

...Seeing as Bethesda is now entirely owned by Microsoft. I'm willing to bet the release of the creation kit for modding is going to come with some giant strings attached. 

 

 

 

29 minutes ago, Arethiel said:

The problem is that people let themselves expect a 10/10 because they look at Skyrim or FO4 (for some reason) with rose tinted goggles when Starfield, and every other Bethesda game (including New Vegas), is a 7/10 or an 8/10.

 

A 7/10 Bethesda game can end up being a fun 8 or 9/10 game after a long enough period of time. Maybe Starfield will be the same? 

[bjornk]

 

Who would have thought... ?

[bjornk]

 

 

 

 

"A Bethesda game through and through..." ?

 

Edited September 4, 2023 by bjornk

[FauxFurry]

5 hours ago, sativa said:

 

 

Honestly, I am surprised that more 'non-Americans' (it only makes sense to use the most pompously America-centric terminology here) don't lose their patience with Americans' constant need to preach at them or worse, to force their own domestic storytelling to contain their flavor-of-the-month messages that will not only distract everyone partaking of the media but it will age poorly, possibly even becoming offensive when the next set of taboos is rolled out for use. so that they can make their works suitable for export.

[Wandering_Mania]

55 minutes ago, bjornk said:

Who would have thought... ?

In that second vid, the parts about the loading screens, and the elevator specifically is what really baffled me. I mean BGS had 'immersive load screens' in FO4 in some places with the elevators. Like at the DC entrance, at the end of the 'Kellog quest', and so on; But they couldn't even bother to bring that back for Starfield? It just makes no sense.

 

Also yeah, it is very funny that a game like 2077, one that will go down in history as 'one of the most broken games at launch'; Can be played from start to finish with zero loading screens, and has more immersion, than a BGS game, which a lot of people celebrate for making immersive games.

[BAB PEEG]

2 hours ago, bjornk said:

 

Who would have thought... ?

 

Bro does the first picture have the fo4 brown face bug?

[Silvist]

I literally made this comparison last night about how much more I liked CP2077's combat over Starfield.  And the incoming dlc has vehicle combat...lol.

There's something odd with models outside of the character creation, like the 3rd person uses a lower res model (both textures and meshes). Which is hilarious because I remember them doing this in Skyrim with the first person model vs the 3rd person model  (which made sense since you only really saw your hands in first person).

I also made sure to test it with all graphic settings maxed out.  

Edited September 4, 2023 by Silvist

[bjornk]

27 minutes ago, BAB PEEG said:

Bro does the first picture have the fo4 brown face bug?

 

Never played FO4, but I have a "no face" bug for you if you're interested, at 04:30 in the video below. ?

 

 

[bjornk]

 

So if you sneak into somebody else's ship the game just drops you off into the air as soon as they take off. Where's muh Immersion Bethesda!?

[isee]

3 hours ago, Wandering_Mania said:

In that second vid, the parts about the loading screens, and the elevator specifically is what really baffled me. I mean BGS had 'immersive load screens' in FO4

See it's weird because they did bring that back for starfield, but it isn't used everywhere. The elevators load screens are gone because they had a habit to break in FO4. But there are 'immersive' load screens for trains, docking, and like they half way tried with the grav jumps you make to other systems. It starts a cutscene and you get a two second loading screen and then your in the new area.

 

First chance I get I'm going to find a way to disable or bypass these, they don't add much and you end up using them hundreds of times during a playthrough. Especially the docking animation, the docking animation which you can easily mess up by accidently pressing the 'undock' button immediately after docking instead of 'exit' meaning you have to go through it another two times.

 

Starfield reminds me more of a modern day Morrowind or Oblivion then it does Skyrim or Fallout 4, The procedural land tech freed them up to focus on making really well designed cities, outposts, and dungeons with plenty of fleshed out factions. I honestly think this game might have some of the most atmospheric and fun dungeons and encounters in any bethesda game. Just randomly exploring I was asked if I wanted to join in a zero g party aboard a pleasure boat. Out of curiosity I said yes, went over and they handed me some beer and turned off the gravity. No quests or anything else there except for a floating bar that I could buy drinks from. Next time I came back to that planet it was gone.

 

As a tradeoff for the scope of this however we are back into that old style of game where there is a load screen every thirty seconds if you are in a city because the land thirty minutes in each direction is also loaded in an any exterior cell.

 

Fast travel is a mess because the menu works like a nesting doll and also very inconsistently. Sometimes the game will only fast travel you part way so that a random encounter can play out in orbit. Forcing you to open the menu again afterward and reselect your destination. New Atlantis has four fast travel points, but it's far easier to just memorize the city and go on foot then it is to figure out which one you need from the map screen. You can also fast travel from 95% of all locations, which makes the game feel smaller even if it is massive.

 

If you don't have a quest marker leading you to the specific planet you want to go to? God help you because the star map is extremely unhelpful. It makes finding outposts or cities that are off the beaten path a pain to come back to.

 

But past all of the clunky UI and inconsistent fast travel? You get moments that are great. Scaling the outside of a Neon mega building in the rain while trying to remain undetected was fun, and I can forgive a lot of the mess because I was around back in the day when things like bad UI and tons of load screens were common. It's obvious that their efforts went into the world building, factions and sub factions, banks and corporations you can interact with. Dungeons are great, and exploring an abandoned ship only for the gravity to cut out and a giant alien to shoot off of the ceiling to come and tackle you is great. And that wasn't even a main story location, I just happened across that.

 

Mods I think will fix the UI. But I don't regret playing through the game in this state. The main story was actually pretty good and the way they handle new game plus is a treat that I can't wait to see used in mods. Factions quests are also fun and worthwhile.

 

In a year? This might be a completely different game with mods. That I think will be a game worth playing. Even if the only two mods you used where to disable fast travel and get rid of some of the more egregious loading screens so that you don't go insane.

Edited September 4, 2023 by isee

[bjornk]

3 hours ago, Wandering_Mania said:

 a BGS game, which a lot of people celebrate for making immersive games.

 

What people celebrate as "immersion" in BGS games, is a product of their imagination, it's not what BGS has been doing or has ever intended to do. BGS just provides them with a half empty canvas and people fill it using their own imagination and using mods. If creating truly immersive games were their goal, they would've attempted to create systems that actually do something in the game. instead, everything they put in their game is an illusion; illusion of a town/city, illusion of working NPCs in them, illusion of guilds, illusion of war, etc. In BGS games the entire game world is nothing but an illusion, nothing changes in them without the player's influence. That's the main reason for the "wide but shallow" experience in their games. To this day I have not seen any proof that they intend to change this mentality. It has become even more obvious with Starfield.