Starfield

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Rating down at 77% (store.steampowered.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Starfield is not exactly unique in having lots of load screens

Two things: First, that in NO way makes it better.

Second, I haven't played X3 in a LONG time, but X4 has a similar structure of warping between systems. Thing is, there isn't any load time when you warp. You're not looking at a 5 second animation followed by a black loading screen for another 5 seconds just to travel from a planet to its moon. You also have to fly to those jump points, so you get to actually fly your ship. In Starfield, you just point at a blue dot and then load. Arrive in your system, get scanned, load some more. Etc.

I think competitors to anything should be considered in the genre of that something

Interesting. I don't actually think of Starfield as a space flight game since that's such a minor part of the game and you don't actually fly much, you mostly load screen between areas. I think of Starfield as an RPG with some space flavor, which is why I compared it to two other RPG's. You're mostly quick traveling between locations and then talking/role playing. The space flight is a (sadly) minor part of the game.

In fact, I think Elite is a terrible comparison. But I get that the niche seems to be your jam so I get why you'd want to compare and contrast the two.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

RPG with some space flavor, which is why I compared it to two other RPG’s

Sure, it is RPG first and foremost, space flight distant second. But it's certainly not your typical swords-and-spells fantasy world RPG. Mass Effect would be the closest, but has even less space ship stuff. In fact, I don't think there has recently been another thematically similar game.

Star Citizen and Elite are IMO thematically much closer to Starfield than BG3, especially when we consider the core game mechanics (turn based party RPG vs. realtime first-person gunplay). The former two and Starfield boil down to your character using a spaceship to travel between planets and space POI-s, dogfighting in space and gunfights on foot with exploration, salvaging/scavenging, trading, bounty hunting and other activities to fill your time with.