In Space No One Can Hear You Scream a Funny Thread Title - The Starfield Thread

[InsaneCommander]

 

[HoonDing]

Kinda painful going to Freestar after UC/Ryujin/Sysdef. The whole cowboy larping is risible.

 

[MrBrown]

 

[Gorth]

1 hour ago, MrBrown said:

 

You had me for the first 30 seconds

[HoonDing]

I finished all factions

UC Vanguard = Crimson Fleet/Sysdef > Ryujin >> Freestar rangers

[uuuhhii]

On 10/10/2023 at 10:30 AM, MrBrown said:

 

this sound better than real todd

 

song at the end is nice

[Blodhemn]

On 9/5/2023 at 3:50 PM, Theonlygarby said:

Yes but I had seen all over reddit and YouTube people...

That's where you fk'd up.

On 9/6/2023 at 4:34 AM, majestic said:

For the record, I am not and will not be playing Starfield. From everything I have seen, heard and read, it is just another Bethesda game.

Yeah. Nobody can expect anything else. It's their brand. I will get it on sale, one day, maybe, or I will simply replay Morrowind or Skyrim, etc.. The only thing that might sway me is from getting put into a scifi mood from being forced to watch Star Trek but I'm not sure that'll hold.

On 9/11/2023 at 3:54 PM, InsaneCommander said:

Developer Explains Why Starfield NPCs Look Like They’re Dead Inside

 

This is why, no matter how better the tech, the big team projects of today, will never outdo the soulful, smaller teams of old.

[HoonDing]

Sam Coe's ex-wife would've been preferable as a companion. Fact that he's Adam Jensen doesn't help either.

[HoonDing]

NG+ where you repeat the main quest doesn't make much sense

You fly around in a ship with unknown technology, you can turn invisible, stop time, etc. and yet no one really asks any questions

[Keyrock]

I finally got around to starting my Starfield journey. To the game's credit, it let me make a fat guy with terrible complexion and a sweet combover, so points right off the bat for Bethesda. I did a bunch of the early Constellation stuff and have joined UC Vanguard, but only for the purposes of eventually going Crimson Fleet. I guess eventually UC Vanguard is going to have me "infiltrate' the Crimson Fleet except I'll be doing less infiltrating and more joining, but the UC doesn't need to know about that small, insignificant detail right now.

[HoonDing]

Crimson Fleet are morons tbh

I'm repeating that questline only for the gun at the end

[Keyrock]

I finally joined the Crimson Fleet. I could have done it earlier but there are a lot of side quests that involve killing Crimson Fleet pirates so I wanted to knock a good number of those out before joining. Now that I'm a Crimson Fleet pirate myself I'm going to abstain from killing my brethren. Those dumbasses at SysDef (sounds like a bash console command) still think I'm "undercover" and working to feed them intel. 

[Keyrock]

The jig is up, SysDef is onto me and they don't much like me any more, blowing up a bunch of their ships probably didn't help matters but they were already keen to the fact that I hadn't "infiltrated" the Crimson Fleet for them but rather used SysDef to join the Crimson Fleet at that point. Oh well, they'll get over it... Actually, they probably won't but they also lack the means to apprehend or eliminate me so they can eat a ****. I mean, they already tried and it ended with a whole bunch of space debris that used to be SysDef ships.

Starfield is a frustrating game. There's a lot I like about the game and it has the best combat of any Bethesda game ever (not a high bar to clear, but still), plus the ship building is legitimately good. At the same time, though, this game wastes my time. There is so much time spent in this game either staring at a loading screen or taking a boring and needlessly long trek across a dull as **** landscape. There are some cool landscape features here and there, but it's honestly astonishing just how dull Bethesda managed to make alien planets.

[HoonDing]

There are some planets with completely unique locations but they're hidden a bit.

I leveled up almost entirely by planet scanning. Now on NG+ with maxed science skills it goes really fast to 100% a planet. Of course I no longer bother with lifeless planets or planets without traits.

Basically the game is Daggerfall in space. In Daggerfall I would traipse across almost endless landscapes spawning enemies to train skills.

Edited December 29, 2023 by HoonDing

[bjhbgjh]

SysDef can eat a big one too. Blowing up their ships was just a public service announcement, letting them know the party's over for their Crimson Fleet infiltration nonsense. They brought a knife to a space laser fight, and now they're crying about singed eyebrows. Boo hoo.
 

[Keyrock]

It's kind of crazy how dull exploration can be in Starfield. I mean, we're talking about Bethesda, exploration has been this company's bread and butter for decades. Plus, you have a freakin' jetpack. A Bethesda game with a jetpack? That sounds like a slam dunk in terms of exploration. And yet, here were are. According to Bethesda, they have things coming down the pipe that supposedly will address peoples' complaints about travel and exploration. What form said things coming down the pipe will take and whether they will actually happen is a mystery. Remember, this is a company that has time and again relied on modders to fix their broken games in the past. I don't know what they can do to make the planets less dull, given that the vast majority of them are procedurally generated, but at the very least they need to ungimp the jetpack. You can do that to some degree with skills and crafting, but at best you can make the jetpack less $#!+, you can't make it good. It doesn't have nearly enough forward thrust. On a planet with low enough gravity you can use the jetpack to essentially sprint forever, regaining stamina while in midair, but it doesn't make you move from point a to point b any faster, except that you don't have to stop sprinting. Either give the jetpack enough horizontal thrust that it significantly speeds up your travel or give us a vehicle to traverse these boring ass planet, and one that doesn't require a loading screen to get in and out of. Even the jetpack in Elex, which is lame, is better than the jetpack in Starfield.

Edited January 2 by Keyrock

[Hurlshort]

I thought there were some good exploration moments, but they were mostly in the designed areas. The random caves, planets, and bases were pretty boring. It was pretty silly that they didn't do vehicles.

[LadyCrimson]

Maybe they'll pull a No Man's Sky and in three-five years it'll be (sort of, mostly) the game they promised.

Re: the jetpack - is there any "trick" where you can use another chr. command to force horizontal movement? NMS has this thing where if you press melee attack with jetpack hotkey it does a long burst of fast forward momentum while punching the air. Nowhere in the game is this mentioned anywhere that I know of, and it took me forever to discover it by accident. Without it jetpack in NMS re: forward - you go forward but it's similar where it's very slow/feels kind of pointless. Good for getting up steep cliffs/out of holes, mostly.

Edit: it's possible they don't generally want fast forward jet pack/exploration simply because the graphics wouldn't keep up with speed - ie, a lot of draw pop-in when you land/stop. You get that in NMS, even for shortish distances, a lot.

Edited January 3 by LadyCrimson

[Keyrock]

18 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Edit: it's possible they don't generally want fast forward jet pack/exploration simply because the graphics wouldn't keep up with speed - ie, a lot of draw pop-in when you land/stop. You get that in NMS, even for shortish distances, a lot.

That's certainly a possibility, especially given how poorly optimized the game is (it's better now than at launch, that's for sure, but still not great), but there's also the fact that this game is not actually open world, even the planets on their own are not open world. There's essentially a bubble with your landing point as the center, you reach the edge of the bubble and that's as far as you can go. It's a pretty large bubble, but letting you move faster would make it that much more likely that casual players would encounter the edge of the bubble and the illusion of open world would be shattered. There is a mod that disables the bubble boundaries and, from what I've heard and read, it sort of works, but it introduces a whole host of problems. The way I've been told, and I'm not a programmer so forgive my ignorance, is that the game uses floating point to keep track of where everything is with your landing site as the point everything is measured from. What I was told is that floating point simplifies some programming as compared to integer, but it also loses accuracy with distance, unlike integer. Supposedly this is baked deep into the engine and it would require a significant engine overhaul to switch to integer, not to mention that the switch would undoubtedly introduce its own host of issues that would need to be solved or worked around. The dream of making the planets open world might be dead because modders don't believe it's feasible and if you're counting on Bethesda to do a major engine overhaul for this, good luck with that. I don't particularly care if I run into a boundary and the illusion of open world is shattered, I just want to be able to move around much faster, but it's not my decision to make.

[HoonDing]

I imagine vehicles aren't that simple to put in. Lots of extra work factoring in interaction with wildlife, different gravities, etc.

[Keyrock]

17 hours ago, HoonDing said:

I imagine vehicles aren't that simple to put in. Lots of extra work factoring in interaction with wildlife, different gravities, etc.

You're likely correct, that's why in the short term the simplest solution is to make the jetpacks better. Currently, jetpacks only provide vertical thrust, you maintain the horizontal velocity you had when you left the ground. My suggestion is to add horizontal thrust, make it rank 4 of the jetpack skill. As it stands, at rank 2 you use less fuel when thrusting and at rank 3 the fuel regenerates more quickly, both of these are fairly underwhelming upgrades. At rank 4 the bonuses double and become actually meaningful, but that only lets you stay in the air longer, it doesn't do anything to your horizontal velocity. What I would do is build the current rank 4 into rank 2 & 3, doubling each bonus separately, then I would make the new rank 4 into "the jetpack can now have horizontal thrust equal to the vertical thrust". That could probably be worded better, but you get the picture. They'd need to add a button to switch from the current only vertical thrust to vertical AND horizontal thrust (sometimes you want to go straight up). On m&kb that's trivial because you have roughly 100 buttons to work with. On a gamepad... I don't play with a gamepad, but I imagine they'd need to go with a multiple button combination, something like both bumpers or a bumper and a face button or whatever. I'm sure they could figure it out.

In the long run, I'm all for adding planetary vehicles, but that will likely take some time to work through issues, such as the ones you mentioned.

[LadyCrimson]

When are (large expansive area) games going to give us bionic leg attachments as the excuse, so we can simply "run" faster. I don't care about flying per se - not that it's not cool and all - I just want ground running to feel faster than a crippled snail. The run pace is the first thing I mod if it's at all possible.

Sci-fi games especially -bionic leg attachments you can craft - Is that so much to ask for?

[Keyrock]

Remember the Mad Max game Avalanche made some years back? I freakin' love that game. I remember it getting kind of savaged in reviews which left me scratching my head, wondering what game the reviewers played. I'm getting off-track here, sorry. The point I was trying to make is that Mad Max absolutely nailed travel, it was so much fun driving around. It seems like developers often times don't put enough time and/or resources into making getting from point A to point B fun in these types of games, which makes no sense given that the player is going to be spending a very sizable chunk of the game doing exactly that. I can measure how good a game's traversal is by how likely I am to use fast travel. If, once fast travel becomes available, I always use it when it's an option, your game's traversal systems, quite frankly, suck. In Mad Max I almost never used fast travel. Why would I when driving around in my car and ramming bondage gear wearing nut jobs driving buggies was so much fun? Plus, you had that awesome weirdo that worshipped car engines in the back of your car. I should play Mad Max again, that game was freakin' awesome.

[Gorgon]

it's 70 euro on steam. that's a bit optimistic.

 

 

 

[bjhbgjh]

Honestly, I think you're spot on about developers neglecting traversal. So many open-world games feel like the world is just an obstacle course between quests, instead of a place you actually want to explore. Fast travel becomes the default because the journey itself is a bore.