Maybe take a day or two off, Todd. The game might actually not suck if you aren’t involved.
Caius Cosaides Forever at this point. Another ten years of vaporware
I am not interested anymore, sorry… the indie scene makes much, much better games than whatever starfield is. It’s honestly a little heartbreaking because I am a longtime Morrowind fan but obviously the magic is gone
There’s absolutely no way it’ll be able to live up to the hype. Fallout 4 was a disappointment compared to the rest of the series, Starfield was a disappointment, I just no longer have confidence Bethesda can produce good games.
There’s no way a game that people have been waiting over a decade for is ever going to live up to the hype.
Silksong was 8 years, and had some of the craziest hype ever, and it’s been solid.
I haven’t played Starfield due to its reception, but Fallout 4 for me was excellent taken for what it was. Granted, the modding community (as usual for Bethesda) elevated it from a good to great game. I was surprised the number of hours I’ve put into it actually surpassed New Vegas. Though overall imo New Vegas > 4 > 3.
I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the world who enjoyed Starfield, though the criticisms are definitely valid. It’s not a good RPG but it does make for a fun initial playthrough if you just do the main and major side quests. I would cautiously recommend it on sale due to the reception but I happened to find it fun. I sunk about 60 hours into it on my first playthrough but didn’t pick it up after. Still, 60 hours of having fun is worth the cost for me personally. I’d only recommend it on sale though, but that also goes for nearly every game so take that with a grain of salt.
I also happened to really enjoy Fallout 4, but again not as an RPG. It’s not a great RPG but it is a really fun open world FPS game with mild RPG elements and a sadly lacklustre post-game, just like Starfield. Procedurally generated areas definitely harmed Starfield where it didn’t harm Fallout 4, but otherwise, to me personally, I’d say they’re comparable in terms of quality. Hot take, I know. I’m prepared to have this be the most downvoted comment in lemmy history, but that’s just my opinion. Take it with the grainiest of salts.
I don’t think that’s all that hot of a take. The big killer in Starfield is just how much not playing there is between the playing.
In Fallout, just walking to a new place you’ll stumble on a few ruins, a couple fights, maybe even some faction action. You’ll get some loot, spend some time and resources, maybe discover a good story or unique item. And in Fallout 4, all the useless loot can be broken down for upgrades to your equipment and home base, so most of it is nice.
Is Starfield, there’s nothing. Maybe a generic fight with pirates you could easily run from. Even if you happen to find good loot, it’s not really that good.
I’m glad you found fun in there though!
Yeah, that’s fair. I get what you mean. I guess I agree with that too because I have more time in Fallout 4 than Starfield by a fair bit. I would still consider them to be comparable though in terms of quality, with Fallout 4 just a bit above Starfield. I like both games though, but don’t love either. I really enjoyed the ship building in Starfield too, it was one of my favourite aspects of the game. Settlement building in Fallout 4 was pretty fun but not nearly as fun to me.
The ship building is really cool! Getting there is tedious and annoying, but being able to walk around your ship is fun. It’s like Space Engineers with 99% less avoidable mistakes!
I wonder how good Starfield might have been if they dumped most of the planetside stuff and just had ships and space stations, all using this modular build system.
I hope someone takes Starfield’s ship building, adds something new and interesting, and releases it as a main feature of a new game. Every now and then I’m tempted to hop back into Starfield just to mess around with that mechanic. Or maybe if Bethesda makes a sequel, but tames it down and listens to fans to make it a really solid game, and brings back the ship building. I’d definitely give it a shot.
I mean to each their own, I was not impressed by the lack of meaningful roleplaying decisions and the lack of other faction questlines. I felt like the game had very little to offer outside of the main storyline, it really felt like settlement building took too much of the scope despite being rather lackluster. I also think “good with mods” is the same as “fun with friends” in that it applies to literally any game.
In case you were wondering, Starfield was much of the same. Lots of “Yes, Sarcastic Yes, No” dialogues, lots of focus on the main story, with the big twist being that they added lots of New Game+ easter eggs to encourage replaying with the same character.
I think there’s something to be said about a game that is both able to be and worth modding to such a degree. Bethesda has a bit of an unfair advantage due to decades of community knowledge building on the creation engine, however. I don’t disagree with any of your criticisms though.
There’s a very good chance that my daughter, who was too young to play games when Skyrim was released, will be long into adulthood by the time TES 6 is released. Blows my mind.
I’m hoping we see a similar technological jump like we did with Oblivion and Skyrim instead of just a new setting, like we got with Starfield.
Honestly I think they just have their priorities weird. Like… what value does it add that there’s a bazillion little interactable objects for every piece of silverware and trash in a room, and that they all have physics and remember their positions when I leave a room?
Don’t get me wrong, that is impressive, and has great meme potential as shown with Skyrim cheese wheels, etc, but what value does it actually add to the core gameplay? Because when the core gameplay is bland, I don’t care to collect 10,000 cheese wheels, and using Fus Ro Dah on the Jarl’s feast didn’t single-handedly make Skyrim fun. In practice, most of those objects are just inventory clutter I avoid like the plague to make sure I don’t have to sort it all later.
I really just feel like they’re struggling immensely to win a technical battle they never needed to win, and it’s causing them to be lacklustre in every other technical aspect.
The creation engine is the embodiment of the sunk-cost fallacy for Bethesda.
I’m hoping they sell the IP to someone who competent who will realse solid games and not cashgrab, but I think I’ll be dead before that day comes. I have zero plan to buy it when it comes out despite enjoying Skyrim and Oblivion
It would have to have something like a VR mode.
Or the ENTIRE planet of Nirn that you can walk from one side of to the other.
This might upset some of you, but I picture them implementing NPCs with AI and personalities that you can actually converse with.
Todd said a few years back that they simply did not have the technology to do what they want with TES6 yet, so I’m assuming this is what he was referring to.
I have been expecting that to happen in gaming in general. I feel like the reason we aren’t seeing it right now, is because it would feel quite pointless to integrate it into a game, if it isn’t actually properly integrated.
For example, if you tell an NPC to jump off a cliff and the LLM responds with “Excellent idea!”, then well, you expect the NPC to do that thing.
Or if a dragon crashlands next to an NPC, you expect it to notice and not tell you calmly about the weather.
You need code for these things. Tons of code.To some degree, Bethesda will have the money to do that sort of thing, especially since they’re now owned by Microsoft, which’s investors are extra horny for AI.
And they already have a reputation of jank and Todd Howard lying, so there’s perhaps less of an expectation for an NPC actually reacting to a crashlanded dragon.But even then, this whole thing might just end up being a very expensive gimmick.
In particular, you can’t expect console players to have a keyboard for chatting. You can try to do voice control instead, but you also cannot expect players to have a (decent) microphone, or for them to be talking to their console when they want to play late in the evening.So, you can’t really make this LLM thing part of the core gameplay. Everything will still need to be solvable without it. Which gives it very high potential to become a gimmick.
Maybe you could have pre-canned questions like we currently do and then an LLM responds, kind of keeping the context of your conversation in mind? That might still be annoying, though, when as a player, you can never be too sure, if it gave you all the relevant info, or you have to repeat the question another time.If there’s a shortcut that Todd can take by not even needing to write dialog for NPCs, he’ll take it.
I’ll just continue playing Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon and you can continue to be totally irrelevant to gaming, Todd.
I just looked it up and wow, how have I managed to not hear about this game until now? This is going to be my next obsession.
Enjoy! They just opened it to modding too iirc
That game is better than any new TES game Bethesda has made in ten years. Oh right, they haven’t even made a new TES game in time frame. Game is still quite good :)
i just hope Skyrim Grandma gets to play it :(
Probably “great grandma” by then.
