My God, it's full of Starfield...

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invertedpanda

invertedpanda

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  • #3,841
    New update is out. Started the Dark Brother.. err, the Tracker's Guild questline. They are laying a foundation for some interesting radiant-style quests, but we'll see how it holds up.

    Interestingly enough, one of the official mods you can get for free (a new Starborn suit) is supposed to be in your room at Constellation, but.. Well, it wasn't for me (at least, not in my current NG+ loop). We'll see what happens on the next loop.
     
    invertedpanda

    invertedpanda

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  • #3,844
    Patch notes are up.

    Some really good things to note here:

    Armed and Ever Ready! Those of you who appreciate being extra crafty may now find new melee weapon tiers and the ability to modify melee weapons when crafting. For those that prefer the firepower approach, ammo crafting has also been added with this update. You can research your preferred ammo at a Research Station and craft them at an Industrial Workbench!
    Click to expand...

    ABOUT TIME on ammo crafting. I got tired of roaming the 'verse to get enough .45 ammo.

    Still no fix for similar effects from skills/armor/whatever cancelling out the SB powers.
     
    invertedpanda

    invertedpanda

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  • #3,846
    So.. Ammo crafting is just about useless.

    Like in real life, you need primers (and the equivalent for the laser weps) to make ammo.

    Well, you can't craft primers. You have to buy them.

    You can only get a handful at most of primers at a time from shops.. And each recipe spits out only 10 rounds or so.

    Freakin'.. Guess it'll be up to modders to fix it.
     
    invertedpanda

    invertedpanda

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  • #3,847
    Alright, here's my thoughts on the new bounty hunting (Tracker's Alliance) gameplay:

    The first mission (they say they'll release more later, but this is the only quest-style mission right now) is.. Dumb, and pretty easy to guess the "twist", like most Bethesda stuff.

    The Creation Club paid mission you can buy? That one was actually decent.. And you get a sweet sniper rifle as a reward. If you bought the digital deluxe edition, definitely grab it from the creation club; it's 600 credits, and you get 1000 for free with the digital deluxe edition.

    In fact, that sniper rifle is one of the best in the game.

    Default it does PB damage, and a lot of it; I have no points in PB weps and it does more than my maxed out Hard Target.. but honestly, that's not how you should build it out.

    You should use the EM magazine instead.

    EM damage in SF is rather unique in that everybody has a base set of EM damage they can take - something like 100. They can have resistances to EM damage, but not enough for this rifle, let me tell you.

    In my NG11+ game this rifle does 300 EM damage (I do have 1 point in EM weapons to hit that, though).. Doesn't even need the sneak attack bonuses to drop any human foe with one single shot anywhere (and I dropped every bot I encountered with one shot too).. Of course, it's also able to be suppressed, which makes it even better.

    Anyway, if you plan on doing Elite Bounties you'll want this rifle (or at least EM weapons in general), because there are targets that have to be taken down alive, rather than outright killed.

    The bounties are a little different than the standard "Kill X" bounties: Aside from the dead/alive variation, the targets I've encountered aren't deep within some bunker (edit: Spoke too soon, had one in a bunker), and the payout is a little higher.

    I do wish you could do a "slap the cuffs on them" type thing, but really once you stun/kill them you get the bounty complete message.

    Also, keep your eyes open for special loot called "Astra" when on these bounties. These are little token thingies you can trade in to some dude at the TA base for unique weapons.
     
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    Ardax

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  • #3,848
    grommit! said:
    There seems to be some kind of drama in the Bethesda modding community, with people recommending to stay away from arthmoor's "unofficial" patch?
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    Yeah. The Starfield modding community pretty much, on release day, created a "Community Patch" mod to collect bugfixes in an attempt to ice Arthmoor out and prevent his mods from gaining traction and becoming a widespread required base. The claim is that -- while extremely talented -- he's become an arrogant, abrasive asshole. In addition, it's also claimed that his mods contain opinionated non-fix changes and have been at the center of other game issues.
     
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    Tom Foolery

    Tom Foolery

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  • #3,849
    I wonder what the modders' cut is in the creation club? Because of the premium edition, I had 1100 club credits. I bought the Vulture and then saw that Elianora was one of the modders in the CC. Unfortunately, I did not have enough club credits to buy her mod, but I will remediate that shortfall after work today. I will definitely buy her mod to support her work, but I wonder, how much of that $5 goes to her?

    In the game, I have given up on finding and scanning the fifth species of "fauna" that would 100% Altair II. I have spent a lot of time trying to land my ship close enough to an ocean, just in case what I am missing is a fish, and I spent a stupid amount of time getting following around the gas-bag things to get enough scans to complete them. I may return when Bethesda has released ground vehicles, but right now finding the ocean and landing near it seem to be beyond what my high-tech explorer can manage. :\
     
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    DarthSlack

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  • #3,850
    Exploration is pretty broken. You've got this high-tech ship that can scan for all kinds of minerals from orbit, but when it comes to looking for flora and fauna the only way to find things is to land, then walk around and look. There's no way to get your scanner to give you even a basic "Try over there". Or even a listing of what you've seen once or twice.

    Come to think of it, that's the exact same problem with exploration in Elite Dangerous.

    And yeah, randomly clicking around the planetary map until you accidentally find a spot marked "Coast" is absolutely moronic.
     
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    GloatingSwine

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  • #3,851
    DarthSlack said:
    Exploration is pretty broken. You've got this high-tech ship that can scan for all kinds of minerals from orbit, but when it comes to looking for flora and fauna the only way to find things is to land, then walk around and look. There's no way to get your scanner to give you even a basic "Try over there". Or even a listing of what you've seen once or twice.

    Come to think of it, that's the exact same problem with exploration in Elite Dangerous.

    And yeah, randomly clicking around the planetary map until you accidentally find a spot marked "Coast" is absolutely moronic.
    Click to expand...

    It's also the same problem as No Man's Sky.

    It all hinges on the fact that you're just ticking boxes to say that you have successfully poked one of each thing that was on the planet, and it's hard to make any of them matter beyond that point because the only other game component that interacts with them is the settlement building and that only does so in the most simplistic ways possible.

    But that's probably the only way to do it if you want a billionty planets. Every game that promises "we have a big galaxy and you can drive around and land anywhere" is going to be this. People will keep imagining that it won't be, that it will be infinite variety that all feels like handcrafted content, but it can't be. All it can be is procedural placement.

    This is why the only actual space exploration game is Outer Wilds because everything you find in that is interesting and relevant to everything else.
     
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    JeffQyzt

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  • #3,852
    With regards to exploration - I'm always a bit amused by the concept that these planets would have less than a dozen distinct species of flora and fauna, or mineable resources, across an entire planet's worth of biomes. It would have made more sense to me to have just required a time and/or area scan in each relevant biome (and even then, you'd still just be massively oversimplifying for gameplay.) Alien ecologist simulator this is not. The fact that you do have to track down X number of particular specimens also really drives home the re-use of assets because you can't help but notice that you've tagged the exact same xenos on half a dozen different worlds, which might have otherwise been easier to gloss over.
    No Man's Sky is also hugely oversimplified, but at least the algorithmic variation of the biomes means that the flora and fauna doesn't suffer as badly from the same kinds of asset reuse deja vu (it's still there to a degree if you play enough- but it takes longer because at least there's variation.)
     
    Tom Foolery

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  • #3,853
    I finally found some coastline on Altair II last night. Add "swimming" to the list of things that Starfield did wrong, and was done better by half a dozen open world sci-fi games that I can think of off the top of my head, some of which are indies, as well as prior fookin' Bethsoft games. I did actually successfully 100% Survey Altair II, but unfortunately some "hunting sharkwhales" were killed in the process.

    I know you fine folks are going to tire of hearing this, but Empyrion handles liquid better than Starfield, even if it is a bit more simplistic of a game mechanic.
     
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    Ed209

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  • #3,854
    Tom Foolery said:
    I finally found some coastline on Altair II last night. Add "swimming" to the list of things that Starfield did wrong, and was done better by half a dozen open world sci-fi games that I can think of off the top of my head, some of which are indies, as well as prior fookin' Bethsoft games. I did actually successfully 100% Survey Altair II, but unfortunately some "hunting sharkwhales" were killed in the process.

    I know you fine folks are going to tire of hearing this, but Empyrion handles liquid better than Starfield, even if it is a bit more simplistic of a game mechanic.
    Click to expand...

    Are there even any water bodies in Starfield that are deep enough to swim? I don't think I've ever encountered water deeper than waist-deep that you can wade around in, even on that water planet (whatever planet Neon was on).

    Also reminds me that I need to try Empyrion again. ;)
     
    Tom Foolery

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  • #3,855
    Ed209 said:
    Are there even any water bodies in Starfield that are deep enough to swim? I don't think I've ever encountered water deeper than waist-deep that you can wade around in, even on that water planet (whatever planet Neon was on).
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    The game treats you like you are just swimming at the surface, so you can never really see what is in the water. You can't dive, although one would wonder how deep one could dive with a full EVA/environment suit on you. But on Altair II, I swam out, found the "hunting sharkwhales," scanned them when I got close enough. But they were under water, and could dive deeper so a couple of times I had to be practically on top of them to scan them. The second to the last one I had to scan I got close enough to draw aggro, and thus had to kill it and two others after I jetted to the shore. Then I scanned one of the dead and completed the survey, and harvested them for sealants.
    Ed209 said:
    Also reminds me that I need to try Empyrion again. ;)
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    They are constantly improving that game. While it is still in my opinion very rough, it does a bunch of things right. Base-building is pretty easy, and the Steam Workshop is full of blueprints for bases, hovercraft, small craft, and capitol craft as well as space station bases. They still don't have grenades, which is dumb. The swimming mechanic has not changed, if you do not have a weapon or tool in your hand, you can dive or stay on the surface of the water. And if you do have a tool or weapon in your hand, you sink to the bottom, which is super handy for harvesting materials. They put minerals plus prometheum and pentaxid inside the lakes/streams, which we never really thought to explore until this last instance we created, and it made getting off the ground much, much faster.

    I have been thinking about getting a game together for Sunday afternoon, just a simple server for casual gameplay. My wife and I used to play with the kids and some friends, but slowly we all drifted apart and my kids made it hard to play with other adults. It seems like this game would be pretty awesome for 8-10 players in a single faction. Right now there are just three of us who play occasionally, and thus we are reduced to hit-and-run, guerilla tactics against the factions we have made enemies (the Zyrax start as enemies). But all that is for another thread.
     
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    GloatingSwine

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  • #3,860
    Even "laziness" is baffling to me.

    The game took ages to make, it's apparently been a passion project for Todd Howard forever, and that makes the idea that any bit of it would be approached with laziness just wild and strange.

    TBH I have a sneaky feeling that at some point they realised that making Starfield was just a bad idea. There are so many things in it that are in unresolved tension with each other. There's a big completionist tickbox explore the planets thing (and you have to claim the reward for doing it using the age old limited cash on hand shop mechanic from Morrowind), settlement building, research and upgrades, and it all goes away if you use the NG+ option which is the only way to upgrade the space magic or see the weirdo versions of the universe.

    And they must surely have realised that the same dozen outposts with the same dozen environmental storytelling corpses and emails would be noticed incredibly quickly if they kept showing up over and over again. People were complaining about the repeated outposts 17 years ago in Mass Effect 1 (I apologise if that number made you feel as bad as it made me feel).

    But they're in there anyway.

    I think they were in too deep by the time they realised that the only game they could make with their engine and tools was, well, Starfield and that was never going to be what Todd had been imagining, and the released game is the end product of despair not laziness.
     
    Tom Foolery

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  • #3,861
    GloatingSwine said:
    The game took ages to make, it's apparently been a passion project for Todd Howard forever, and that makes the idea that any bit of it would be approached with laziness just wild and strange
    Click to expand...
    Have you ever been in a large corporation, where an exec "sponsors" a program that they think is important, but the CFO and their minions decide that said program is not worthy of funding? Because I suspect that the first few years of this "project" was productive time stolen from Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and two re-releases of Skyrim. So while it may have been a passion project for Todd Howard, it likely had years of concept work and little else before the ball started rolling.
    GloatingSwine said:
    TBH I have a sneaky feeling that at some point they realised that making Starfield was just a bad idea. There are so many things in it that are in unresolved tension with each other. There's a big completionist tickbox explore the planets thing (and you have to claim the reward for doing it using the age old limited cash on hand shop mechanic from Morrowind), settlement building, research and upgrades, and it all goes away if you use the NG+ option which is the only way to upgrade the space magic or see the weirdo versions of the universe.
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    Most of the game seems pretty half-baked, I'll agree. Since this is their first new IP in a long time, I think they simply could not lean on 20+ years of worldbuilding on this one, which means that the worlds feel pretty anemic. I don't feel compelled to really push for NG+, since I've already been through the singularity once and was pretty dang unimpressed. And I may not be the first to point this out, but I will certainly be the most vocal in saying that the fucking "space magic" aka copy-pasted shouts from Skyrim do nothing to really enhance the game. In fact, they detract from the game in my opinion. Bethsoft could have skipped that bullshit and spent the development cycles on making outpost building or shipbuilding or weapons crafting better, and the game would have been better for it. They could have made more types of storytelling outposts and facilities. They could have done a lot of things that would have improved the game, but instead fell back on wankery from a game from a dozen years prior to it released, because in Todd Howard speak, "It just works." Meaning it was cool back then, surely the fanbois still want to play with that mechanic. Because the one thing missing from Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 were the fucking magical shouts. 🤬 /rant
    GloatingSwine said:
    I think they were in too deep by the time they realised that the only game they could make with their engine and tools was, well, Starfield and that was never going to be what Todd had been imagining, and the released game is the end product of despair not laziness.
    Click to expand...
    I think this may be the case, but as I pointed out, they had built Tamriel out in four games before they put out Skyrim, and between Black Isle Studio's first two Fallouts and Bethesda's Fallout 3 and Obsidian's New Vegas, there was a lot of lore for Fallout 4. They took a chance on random world generation, but as you point out the engine and tools are probably not up to the task. We still see bugs that we have seen since Skyrim, which suggests that these are limitations of the engine. Why else would you see stolen horses run disappear in Skyrim as well as commandeered spaceships fly off on their own in Starfield. Two or three years from now, the modding community may well turn this game into a real treasure, but this is not because of Bethesda and their stupid Creation Engine.
     
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    GloatingSwine

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  • #3,862
    TBH I'm not sure even mods can fix it.

    They can't replace the core of the game, which is having a billionty planets that are theoretically "unique" but don't actually do anything different from each other and have to have loads of repeated content because, well, procedural generation is the only way to populate them.

    Like the first big effort from modders was to unlock the boundaries of the landing zones for unlimited wandering, but even if it had worked (it breaks if you go too far from your landing point due to the limits of floating point precision and how the engine does coordinates, like the distant lands mangulation in Minecraft used to) all you'd find is the same 4-6 repeated location spawns that are already in your landing square.
     
    Tom Foolery

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  • #3,863
    You may be right, but mods can add new points of interest on the planets out there, slowly fleshing out the planets. There may even be a way to add more POIs that are randomly added to the planets.

    In a way, I wish that they had kept things tighter. Ten systems, maybe 100 planets, with more content on each planet would have been preferable. Infer that there are many more settled systems, that will come out in Starfield 2, 3, 4, etc. By about Starfield 5, (like Skyrim) they will have done a lot of world building, and fleshed out their lore considerably. Or generative AI tools will be making content, and we will have universes to explore.
     
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    GloatingSwine

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  • #3,864
    Generative AI tools will make content no more interesting than procedural algorithms, because they don't know what is interesting to humans.

    It needs humans making content with their creative and artistic brains, that means the scope needs to be such that humans can make content to fill it.

    Make one system, make it interesting to travel around it, and put stories, secrets, and mysteries that are crafted by imaginative people in it for the player to find.
     
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    Tom Foolery

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  • #3,865
    I don't disagree, but I do think that generative AI already works pretty well as a plagiarism engine. It just needs to be a skosh more polished, and it will be able to take the greatest works of literature, move them across state lines, file off the serial numbers, give them a new paint job, and voila! We will have King Lear...in SPACE!!! ;)

    Edit: In short, we will shortly see from AI the same thing we see humans doing, re-telling the same stories in new and exciting settings.
     
    Jonathon

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  • #3,866
    GloatingSwine said:
    They can't replace the core of the game, which is having a billionty planets that are theoretically "unique" but don't actually do anything different from each other and have to have loads of repeated content because, well, procedural generation is the only way to populate them.
    Click to expand...
    That (and not the hand-written content that makes up the main story and faction quests) is the "core" of the game? That's weird, because it's pretty much 100% optional, and you can play through the entire game without ever diving into the planet scanning or procedural quests.

    I think I did like one procedural quest and fully scanned maybe two planets on my first runthrough of the game? It's not that central to the game unless you're confused and you think you're playing No Man's Sky where that's all that there is to play.
     
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    GloatingSwine

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  • #3,867
    Jonathon said:
    That (and not the hand-written content that makes up the main story and faction quests) is the "core" of the game? That's weird, because it's pretty much 100% optional, and you can play through the entire game without ever diving into the planet scanning or procedural quests.

    I think I did like one procedural quest and fully scanned maybe two planets on my first runthrough of the game? It's not that central to the game unless you're confused and you think you're playing No Man's Sky where that's all that there is to play.
    Click to expand...

    Yes. It is. A wide open 'verse of a billionty planets all for the player to land anywhere on at any time is the USP of Starfield over just playing Skyrim or Fallout 4 again.

    It's why you get given a spaceship immediately, it's why they put all these procedural generation systems in, it's why Starfield is what it is.

    Bethesda games in general have been about their side content not their main story since at least Fallout 3, by the way. It's super transparent that their main quests are actually guided tours of the map intended to introduce you to the content they were actually interested in making.
     
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    Jonathon

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  • #3,868
    GloatingSwine said:
    Yes. It is. A wide open 'verse of a billionty planets all for the player to land anywhere on at any time is the USP of Starfield over just playing Skyrim or Fallout 4 again.

    It's why you get given a spaceship immediately, it's why they put all these procedural generation systems in, it's why Starfield is what it is.

    Bethesda games in general have been about their side content not their main story since at least Fallout 3, by the way. It's super transparent that their main quests are actually guided tours of the map intended to introduce you to the content they were actually interested in making.
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    Got it. I guess I played the game wrong (even though I mostly enjoyed the game while staying on the hand-scripted rails).

    I will make sure to play the shitty parts of my next Bethesda game. :rolleyes:
     
    JiveTurkeyJerky

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  • #3,869
    Has anyone transferred a GamePass save to Steam? Should be a simple copy & paste, but curious if anyone here had issues.

    Thinking about picking up the premium edition on the Steam summer sale, since I'm going to want to play the DLC [spent the whole game hoping to get a real Va'ruun story] and am tempted to give the Creation Kit a spin. Tried to get back into Fallout 4, but I just find myself missing the gun play of Starfield.
     
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    JeffQyzt

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  • #3,870
    JiveTurkeyJerky said:
    Has anyone transferred a GamePass save to Steam? Should be a simple copy & paste, but curious if anyone here had issues.

    Thinking about picking up the premium edition on the Steam summer sale, since I'm going to want to play the DLC [spent the whole game hoping to get a real Va'ruun story] and am tempted to give the Creation Kit a spin. Tried to get back into Fallout 4, but I just find myself missing the gun play of Starfield.
    Click to expand...

    I get the impression (based on the fact that people have created tools to do so) that it's a bit more than simple copy-paste (or at least of simple copy-paste of a single file in the obvious location, like it is in e.g. Skyrim.)

    I know that the GamePass version at least tracks the saved games separately from just having files in the saved game directory. (I wanted to clear out my old saves after NG+ and didn't want to go through manually - but no, just deleting them borked things up by leaving the ones I manually deleted as phantom entries in the saved list, and caused problems loading the others - so there must be at least a saved game list kept somewhere. Luckily I had backed up rather than just deleted my saves, and putting them back let me do things the tedious way.)

    I'm going to be very conflicted when the first DLC arrives if it's not on GamePass (not that I'm expecting it to be) but will probably eventually purchase the omnibus edition from Steam or GOG down the road....just not at full price.
     
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    Lurch2142

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  • #3,872
    Ulf said:
    My GamePass run had so many bugs (of which I'm not sure all are fixed) that if I did switch to Steam for sanity's sake I'd just start over.
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    This is what I did. Bought it during the sale, loaded up some simple QOL mods, off we go with a fresh start.

    Might RP as a grizzled war veteran (think Sam Elliott character in We Were Soldiers). "If any of you sons of bitches calls me grandpa, I'll kill you."
     
    JiveTurkeyJerky

    JiveTurkeyJerky

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  • #3,873
    Ulf said:
    My GamePass run had so many bugs (of which I'm not sure all are fixed) that if I did switch to Steam for sanity's sake I'd just start over.
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    I didn't run into any bugs and really like my ships & load outs, so would prefer to keep both. I don't use the "things", so I don't care about leveling them up in NG+.

    I'd probably just not play if I had to run through the whole game again. I don't really feel like spending a few hours console commanding to where I was either. Hmm..
     
    JiveTurkeyJerky

    JiveTurkeyJerky

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  • #3,874
    JeffQyzt said:
    I get the impression (based on the fact that people have created tools to do so) that it's a bit more than simple copy-paste (or at least of simple copy-paste of a single file in the obvious location, like it is in e.g. Skyrim.)
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    Hmm.. guess I could always refund if it doesn't work, since I'd figure that out before 2 hours of playing..
     
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