this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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No Man's Sky
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This makes sense, while I am having fun with Starfield, no mans sky offers an experience that I felt that Starfield promised and did not provide.
This is exactly what I heard on a podcast today (unfortunately I can’t play starfield) and basically boils down to the fact, that starfield really doesn’t offer anything more than mass effect did like 15 years ago - gameplay wise.
Which for me is absolutely fine. I’d much rather spend my time doing quests in detailed cities and occasionally going out to explore over the painfully empty universe of NMS. And I love NMS just for difference reasons. NMS is like a relaxing sandbox game for me, but Mass Effect and Starfield brings the characters, story, worldbuilding, quests, factions.
Apple to oranges then?
I agree with both of you. I was hoping Starfield would be a mix of both, but sadly, it isn't
Exactly! The problem comes when you overpromise and overhype stuff and then don’t deliver on that front - which is a shame.
And yes, you really can’t compare NMS and starfield, as you mentioned.
I asked the question(last night on Team Fortress 2, the people's forum), if Starfield isn't a good space game, is it still a good Bethesda game?
And the answer? Mostly yes. I've added it to my wishlist. I'll get it whenever I can mod in 500 different improvements to shit they'll never fix.
I mean... I think it's a pretty good space game too, depending on what you want.
Yesterday I took my custom-built ship to explore an alien world. On my way in, I was hailed by a merchant and warned there were pirates in system. I thanked them, they jumped off, and being me, I decided to go planet hopping until I ran into the pirates. Destroyed two, saw that one had a cool looking ship so I switched to EMP weapons and took out their grav drive and engines. Once those were offline, I boarded them. The damage had taken out their gravity so the whole ship was in zero-g, with pens and junk floating around, obscuring my vision. The firefight against the crew was surprisingly tough, as they had mounted auto-turrets that were at a distinct advantage against me because I was being thrown around by the micrograv, but I did eventually capture the ship. Once I got the gravity on, though, all the stuff in the interior crashed down and was scattered everywhere. I searched around to see if I could find some contraband... but it was too messy, and I guess I missed some, because when I jumped into a more civilized sector the SysDef patrols caught me. Here I am, flying a stolen pirate ship, trying to explain to the cops that the drugs in my hold aren't mine and I didn't know they were there. Usually I'd bribe the guy to let me through but that didn't work out well this time, and the next thing you know I find myself in the brig aboard the UC Vanguard under a bright lamp being interrogated by someone with far too much brass on his chest to be dealing with a reported drug runner. Looks like maybe I got myself in a bit over my head...
Anyway. If that's not a space game, I don't know what is. I can't think of any other space games that would offer that particular mix of space combat and RPG experiences. And that wasn't really an unusual play story! It's just that this isn't NMS, as I think that shows.
The question now is, how does a good Bethesda game compare to all the other games released?
Same here, but I definitely need to upgrade my PC first haha But by then it should run fine and there should be mod support as well.
Well if you don't expect much more than previous ganes I guess.
They removed some stuff like the NPCs don't have schedules so it's a little bit weird when you get missions of go there and put this documents in there or steal something from that office just to find out they work 365/7/24h.... not random NPCs, NPCs with names that live in the office. So that plan of getting in at night or something goes to shit. Or waiting for that specific guy to leave the office.... nah not happening.
That said... you can enter a company an walk through it visit the boss office go through it to their back warehousesteal whatever and as long as they don see you directly do something they don't care one bit, no disguise no tricking them into thinking you are a technician or shit nah, look at me I work here now. Really really dumb. You have to use your imagination of how that actually happen.
Unfortunately for me, I did expect a bit more… but that’s on me.
Baldur’s gate for sure set the bar quite high in some aspects - and rightfully so imho.
As a day1 NMS player who is getting a bit bored with the game, if you said to me hey there's a new game and it's pretty similar to mass effect... I'd be very interested in that!
Not every game is for everyone, I know quite a few people just don't seem to get NMS. I often take breaks from it now but each expedition / update brings me back; it's amazing how far the game has come and it still surprises me how addictive I find it after 7 years. It's awesome when a game comes out that reinvents the wheel but maybe not every game has to do that, it can just be a decent game to spend some time forgetting about our worries in?
I've not played Starfield yet but looking forward to trying it out, guess I should keep my expectations low then I'll be less likely to be disappointed.
I’m a Day 1 NMS player too and I’m really glad and impressed how much the turned the ship around. I also come back for the expeditions/updates!
You’re right, nobody excepts a new invention of the wheel every time, but to keep with your analogy, I would be nice if the at least used the newer/updated wheel instead of hanging on to 15 year old ones - sure they still work, but the newer ones offer a lot of things I’ve got used to. Or in other words, the standards have changed quite a bit.
I really don’t want to hate on the game, it’s definitely on my list and if I can justify a small PC upgrade I will definitely play it. But I’m just a bit… disappointed, that Starfield didn’t live up to the hype/promises - this is also on me, I got again caught a bit by the hypetrain.
I really hate that this has become a trend now… I really don’t know why and how, but at least in my opinion, this changed drastically over the last view years. I can remember when I rode the hypetrain until the release and wasn’t disappointed… but nowadays you really have to keep your expectations low to end up not disappointed (there are of course expectations).
Agree 100%. To borrow a phrase that's popular atm, I think it's the 'enshittification' trend at work in games just like social media. Games used to be made by comparatively-smaller teams, devs often had a very deep passion for what they were creating. I'm sure that's still the case for many devs now but with so many big developers now being owned and controlled by publishers... it's becoming less and less a passion project, and more a "how much juice can we squeeze out of this lemon" scenario. Then you've got stuff being outsourced massively to lots of little providers in order to deal with the scale of modern games, which causes fractures and lack of cohesion in the overall vision (imo).
TBH, NMS taught me a valuable lesson, not to overhype anything. And that's not to say I'm now a pessimist, more I'd say I'm a realist... prepare for the worst, hope for the best kinda thing. Then CP77 reinforced that, the one studio I still had faith in did exactly what all the others did by releasing a half-baked game that didn't live up to their claims (though I'm definitely looking forward to the new update, tempering expectations as always now).
Yeah, it really feels like enshittification… gaming just got so big over the last few years. It really is not as niche as it was.
Oh yes, NMS was actually the first game I pre-ordered (digitally as well) and played it at midnight - hyped beyond the stars… to be disappointed. Then I was stupid enough to run across town to a shop that sold CP2077 a day early - to be massively disappointed again. Do you think I’ve learned my lesson - no, I also pre-ordered with a group of friend BF2042, because “they cannot possibly drop the ball” - we all now how that turned out.
At least with NMS, they really turned it around and added so much free content. With CP2077, we will see with the new 2.0 update and the DLC, but I wait for sure for reviews this time. And yeah BF2042 is now in the state it should have launched in… this is the one I regret the most.
So by now, I have learned my lesson and am proud to say that I’m pre-order free and never in my life will pre-order something again. As you said, keep the expectations low and wait for reviews and the feedback of people here on lemmy. I any don’t have so much time to play games anymore and a few days longer also don’t hurt.
I don't think you need to keep your expectations low, just keep them realistic. It's a Bethesda game, it plays like their other games... it's a whole ton of jank muddled up and duct taped until it holds together just enough for launch. This time they raised the bar to what counts as "holding together" to the level of the other major studios, but a lot of the gameplay systems still feel unfinished. In this I actually think it's a lot like modern NMS, where things like outpost building feel like they're actively contradictory to things like settlements; outposts in SF feel like someone did them early in the dev cycle and was then pulled off to work somewhere else and the only attention they got from then on was making sure they didn't crash the game. Then you've also got the typical Bethesda game stuff that people are acting surprised Pikachu about. The character animations look weird sometimes, low poly NPCs especially, there are too many load screens in some places, performance is poor considering the level of graphics, etc.
However, as long as you know what you're getting into, imo it's a great game. The storyline is interesting enough to be fun, but also manages to skip that annoying thing where you're off learning to be a space pirate for months while your family is being held hostage or something. Some of the side stories are excellent, and the game rewards you well for just taking your time doing stuff. I got caught with contraband yesterday... usually I hit the grav drive and escape rather than paying the fine, but I decided I didn't care and suddenly found myself embroiled in a shockingly compelling crime drama scene instead of the usual simple dialogue options. There's shit like that everywhere. There's an entire cyberpunk mini city half-hidden beneath the main city that you can just not find for dozens of hours, and when you finally get taken there it's really cool to realize it was under your feet the whole time. And these aren't even significant spoilers, there's more that I could tell you that would wreck the surprise for you.
Basically, go in expecting a game like morrowind/Skyrim/oblivion, where it's all about a huge breadth of interestint content (and yeah a fair bit of mediocre content because there's so much of it all) rather than any specific thing being the best in the genre, and you won't have to keep your expectations low.
A defining trait of those games, to me, is having everything in one big world you can wander around in (besides DLC areas, of course). The engine can't support doing that on an interplanetary scale, so Starfield feels less open to me despite the much larger scope.
I can't speak for everyone (including you) but I just can't understand that feeling. It's hugely open, it just uses tricks to capture that openness in a few places. It's nice to, say, fly down to a planet seamlessly in NMS, but we all know it's also kind of a pain in the butt sometimes, it can be annoying to land and it can take a long time and when you've done it a bunch it essentially turns into just another loading screen. Flying to or from a planet in SF is slightly less immersive but for me, it's just a tiny detail that could have been a bit better but doesn't materially impact the game.
And I've so far never reached the edge of an on-planet instance, the fields are huge and it seems to me you have to actively go hunting for the borders.
Yes, but they're also completely empty of anything interesting. In Bethesda's previous games, there were also large swaths of nothing, but there was always something hand-crafted if you ventured far enough. There is no point to going anywhere outside of the hand-crafted areas in Starfield, all of which you must fast travel to. It really kills the exploration aspect of the game, usually one of Bethesda's strong points.
Huh?
My chief complaint has been that there are too many things. If you go to a moon in the middle of nowhere, your landing site will have an abandoned research station and a secret factory and an observation post all within a couple KM around it. These aren't tied to the location, but they are hand-crafted, and as soon as the mod API drops I plan to decrease the frequency they show up, because my only complaint is that I hear after a while they get repetitive. So far I've been doing enough different things that I haven't found the same one twice, a hundred hours in.
Many of these sites contain their own storylines and characters, and links to other quests.
Maybe you and I just have different definitions of interesting. I actually got annoyed at one point during a survey mission because I kept going past something new and compelling that I wanted to explore, but I also really wanted to finish the mission I was on.
edit to add: I think it's specifically interesting to compare this to NMS, which has the exact same problem but a far lower variety of locations to stumble on, none of which have any story or link to each other at all... yet I think we're all okay with the exploration in NMS?
You're right that "interesting" is very subjective, and I don't begrudge anyone who finds Starfield's randomly generated areas interesting. It's true that there are a bunch of hand-crafted areas which are randomly placed in such areas, but as you said, it's far too easy to find copies over and over again. I just don't find the way Starfield handles random exploration fun the way I did in their previous titles. No Man's Sky does indeed have the same sort of issues, but that's kind of its whole thing, being a Minecraft-style creativity sandbox. You don't have nearly the same amount of control over creative options in Starfield.
I'm not sure how you can argue that. Starfield does have some of mass effect's fun, but also I can build my own ship, dogfight a group of mercs in it, play house with the parts, disable and board a pirate ship in zero g... mass effect, in turn, has a much tighter story and gameplay loop. The core similarity is, what, that they have a space looter-shooter component?
They're different games. Starfield is kind of a fusion of mass effect and no man's sky, there are plenty of similarities between the three but also a lot of differences.
This was more or less the take from a (german) podcast, where they talked about their Starfield impressions.
Unfortunately my PC can’t run the game and I have to find a excuse to finally upgrade some parts to play it, so my impressions only come from other people either playing or talking about it. I will 100% play, because it is right up my ally and there a certainly many cool things to do and stuff to explore.
But for some reason I didn’t quite turned out to be THE game to play, if you know what I mean?
I'm not too surprised it isn't 'the' game to play, myself, but I am surprised at the amount of backlash against it online. It seems to me to be everything it says it will be on the tin, warts and all
I assume it is in part due to the Bethesda acquisition of Microsoft and that Starfield was destined to be the next big exclusive game for Xbox.
And Todd Howard’s comments about needing better hardware to play the game also didn’t help.
That seems to be part of it. I haven't paid any attention to any of the news before it launchedd, because I don't give a damn about console wars or todd howard. I just got the game because my friends were playing it and it sounded like something I'd really like, and it was.
Me neither haha, it’s still mostly from the same podcast and a few meme post from our group chat.
The whole console war thing as stupid as the whole exclusivity thing…
If I could play Starfield right now, I would, but I also have no problem in waiting until it gets patched (which is the case with a lot of games lately).
At least you're not missing anything that great, since you can't play it.
I don’t understand where they promised space sim. I think people are getting confused with what was promised and what was hoped for.
Probably because it was compared with Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen a lot. I saw a lot of talk about it in those communities. And the YouTubers who cover those games posted a lot of videos about Starfield too. So at least from that perspective, I can understand why folks would. I certainly thought there was going to be some element of space sim in it.
But they were very clear about what you could and couldn't do.
Yeah, but people don't listen and make up their own headcanon, only to be sorely disappointed.
We've seen that time and time again.
Well, if some people are anything like me then there's a bunch of people who had no interest in the hype train, didn't watch those YouTube videos and just went off of the video titles when they popped up in subscriptions.
NMS is one of my most played games with over 500hours. What experience does it offer better than Starfield? Outside of seamless planet travel, NMS is a lot less compared to Starfield. Everything is proc gen, the variety is pretty low.
Your first 100 hours in No Man's Sky will be packed to the brim with discovery, holy shit, random thing, stuff you didn't even know existed, three or four ships you didn't even know you could get, giant space cruisers, black holes on an almost never repeating dispense to your face.
Generative Aliens and planets aside, NMS is full of surprises.
True, but once I went through my first black hole, I came out somewhere in the middle of the great unknown, and I thought ok, now what? Do I just go back and diddle around in my own area, or what is this endless vast space even for? I kind of had an existential crisis making me wonder why I was doing anything in the game at all, why did anything I do matter? Never felt that one on a game before, haven't gone back yet because I'm not sure what to do.
That is pretty much what my first hundred hours of starfield have been like as well, though, except Starfield has some story, and fewer of the systems seem to contradict each other.
Mostly I don't think it's fair to either game to compare them. They're trying to do different things for different audiences on different budgets and different timescales.
They get compared because Starfield borrows a ton of gameplay concepts from NMS without even adapting them much. The exploration gameplay is quite literally identical to NMS except with uglier procgen planets, fewer abilites and no freedom to fly around everywhere.
Which is why people who were interested in the exploration aspect tend to be more disappointed with Starfield. The rest of the game is typical Bethesda stuff which is fine, but exploration outside of cities gets really stale really fast. I think that disappoints a lot of people, including me, because exploration was one of my favorite parts of previous Bethesda games like Skyrim
Yeah but who cares since it's all generated?