- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
I must say it is not the best RPG out there, but I feel like it would have earned more. I personally have a lot of fun playing.
While it was not a Cyberpunk-grade overhype, I think it must still have been overhyped. Because if you see it as Skyrim with better graphics, it is pretty much what you’d expect.
Some of the common criticism seems to be intrinsic to the sci-fi genre. In Skyrim, you walk 100 meters and then you find some cave or camp or something that a game designer has placed there manually with some story or meaning behind it. And as a player, you notice that, because most locations in Skyrim feel somehow unique. Even though for example the dungeons have rooms that repeat a lot. Having a designer place them manually with some thought gives them something unique.
In interstellar sci-fi, a dense world like this is simply impossible. Planets are extremely large so filling them manually with content is simply not possible. And using procedural generation makes things feel meaningless. Players notice that fast. So instead, Starfield opted for having a few manually constructed locations that are placed randomly on planets, unfortunately with a lot of repetition. But that is a sound compromise, given the constraints of today’s game development technology. The dense worlds that we are used to from other genres simply don’t scale up to planetary scale, and as players, we have to get used to that.
It’s crazy how much better the plot and setting are in that game despite the fact it has maybe a 1/10 of the content Starfield does.
Man Outer Worlds was so cringe to me. I tried really hard to get into it but it felt like it just kept rehashing the same jokes over and over. “Haha I’m owned by a company and they’re cheap and I’m silly!” Just over and over and over. After 10-15hrs I put it down for good.
It’s like someone delivering a punch line and waiting awkwardly for the chuckles packaged into a game.
This is exactly how I felt playing it. The game played like a much improved fallout, but it took modern fallout’s shitty cynical “everything is a joke” attitude and multiplied it by 10. It was insufferable.
Starfield has managed to tone it down, but every once in a while I see the fallout “jokes” pop up.
I played Outer Worlds and, I think I completed it. The setting got old and the plot… what was the plot again…? I’m like 90% sure I finished it but I couldn’t tell you what happened.
Contrast that to Starfield, I’ve completed two faction quest lines and they were both superb. They took unexpected twists and turns and were full of lore and interesting characters. The Crimsom Fleet quest line was epic, and payed off in just the right way for me (seriously the discovery at the end is 🤌). The Rjujin quest line was also great, and took such an unexpected turn from the initial thing of applying for an office job. Also the toy you get from the questine is really fun to play with, crazy that someone might play the whole game and miss it because they thought applying for a corp job would be boring.
At the moment I’m taking a break from story missions, and I’ve been taking pirate hunting bounties, and just exploring. I’ve found loads of random encounters and followed threads to some epic stuff. And I’ve still only just started the main quest line.
The game is so much deeper than Outer Worlds, while also being far broader. Also, Bethesda make open world games, if they had released something as stripped back and linear as OW, they pull have been torn apart for it, even more than they are now.
I think that’s what some people are missing with the world gen. Landing on some random planet in a random system probably shouldn’t yield some uniquely woven tapestry of civilizations that were once there, or a story about a family persevering through harsh climates and conditions only to have a random encounter with the Ecliptics and be wiped out. It’s a random planet in a vast universe.
There is stuff to find and stories to be made, but you’re pulling a ball out of a bag full of balls and hoping that it’s made of gold. Bethesda quest lines traditionally have unfolded with exploration because they were pretty limited in area with which to work. Skyrim is 60km x 60km, backfill from there, spread things out as needed. It can’t really work like that with Starfield.