What are folks playing this weekend? (Sept 9th, 2023)
What are folks playing this weekend? (Sept 9th, 2023)
Who is playing what this weekend? How're folks feeling about Starfield?
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Starfield.
It's exactly what I was expecting and wanted it to be so far. I don't have the time to be 50 hours deep or anything, but it very much has the Skyrim/FO4 DNA but with less painful gunplay and a space setting.
I'm mostly confused what the people who feel let down expected. It's not BG3 because you can only do that in a CRPG, and they didn't claim to be. It's not No Man's Sky with unlimited procedural generation to fill in every planet, but again, they never claimed to be that, and there are several substantial areas that are built out much more than anything on NMS.
I watched the direct and so far, it's pretty much exactly what I expected. I really like the variety of choices for building out your character. I like the modern/sci-fi guns a lot better than fallout's plinky pipe guns. They feel better to play. I like the way they use to boost pack as a thematic movement perk. I don't think the spaceship combat is great early, and am not sure if more ship choices will feel more interesting there (though like the options of modularity and customization). I've looked at way more perks than I did after the initial direct and it looks like a healthy variety of different ways to play the game.
It's a Bethesda game, for better or worse. That's what they told us, and that's exactly what I wanted. Throw in mod support that's much less limited than most other games, and I can absolutely see this having the longevity Skyrim did.
I think what gets me is aside from a few neat things like space combat and building spaceships, it just feels very paint-by-numbers at this point. It's pretty (in parts), but feels kind of hollow. Maybe after 20 years of playing Bethesda games, I'm just over that style and there hasn't been enough evolution on the core gameplay.
There's no one else who makes anything like Bethesda does. It's not going to be cutting edge technically. It can't be when you work on the same game with that much content for that long. But it's huge, you won't see it all in a playthrough, and you can play the same game a completely different way every time.
There are common elements, but compare it to other big 3D open world games. Far Cry and Assassin's creed ship the same game every year with small tweaks. There are smaller budget ones by smaller studios, but they're a lot less polished mechanically than Bethesda and don't have anywhere near the scale. Bethesda is reusing something like gun mods or base building, but with completely different themes and adapted to completely different gameplay. They're not cloning. They're iterating.
I wish Bethesda would take a page from witcher 3 when it comes to making their games feel less dated. They dint have to copy it but take some of the good aspects that made it feel like a modern RPG and apply that. Really I feel like they are just limited by their engine, and they aren't allowed to take risks.
What aspects are those? I thought the gameplay of TW3 was mediocre at best. There was one way to play, with bad, not even kind of a challenge at deathmarch swordplay and a crossbow that's a glorified "get flying enemy on the ground" button.
The only thing it does particularly well is cutscenes on the main story line.
For one it runs well and isn't full of bugs, not requiring modders to makenit good. The combat isn't deep but it not deep in a single Bethesda game either.. The combat in Skyrim is worse, just flailing a sword around. fuck even fallout aims your shot for you.
It didn't run well on launch.
It doesn't even have RPG combat. The only RPG element is the story. There's exactly one viable weapon with some skins and stats changes, and exactly one way to handle combat encounters. It's a hack and slash with bad (not just shallow) hack and slash combat.
As dated as Skyrim combat is, it's not as dated as the Witcher's is. Dark souls 1 is janky as hell and murders it at swordplay while also having a whole stack of different viable weapon choices.
Absolutely. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it also feels like their series haven't evolved enough in 20 years to hold my attention. It's the scale of things that I love about their games. Exploring random caves and tombs in oblivion and skyrim and finding factions battling it out, or a new trap i hadn't run into was hundreds of hours of entertainment (probably 1500 total?). I'm sure this will have all of that.
Even compared to skyrim and oblivion though, each dungeon, cave, tomb felt unique. But this seems to be a lot of copy-paste to service the procedural generation.
It's fine if it's not for you.
They still have a lot of hand crafted content, though. There are definitely some things that don't have the intense attention to detail, but it's not No Man's Sky where it's overwhelmingly procedural and randomly generated with very little that stands out.
Some stuff should feel slightly repetitive. There are military and other heavily planned facilities, and those types of organizations would genuinely be standardizing a lot of things for cost and other reasons. They really would reuse base designs for small to medium buildings in worlds where the parameters were similar and they didn't have space constraints. Earth feels organic because of how much less advanced we were when all of those areas filled in, and how many cities were already crowded with people before they decided to build modern stuff.