I’ll type up some further thoughts when I get a chance to (when I’m not either working or playing it) but as I suspected mainlining the main story/reaching judgement after under 30 hours is simply not doing what is there justice.
I’ll type up some further thoughts when I get a chance to (when I’m not either working or playing it) but as I suspected mainlining the main story/reaching judgement after under 30 hours is simply not doing what is there justice.
Yeah, curse that mainstream media for not having the patience for '30 hours until it gets good'.
I absolutely hate that nonsense with a game. Like, a TV series, it takes an episode to get good? Sure that's max an hour out of your life. Film takes half an hour or whatever.
The game only gets good at end game and new game plus lads just put in 60 hours of time into something you're actively disliking you'll see.
Anyhoo had a softlock with this last night where incouldnt do anything, genuinely game ending if you were running one save, could've reloaded the save, but just binned it completely outright. 15 hours is more than enough time to say if something is arse or not.
That's not what I'm saying and I think the "takes 30 hours until it gets good" is a fundamental misunderstanding/misrepresentation of the situation. It took me 10-12 hours of genuinely not enjoying it to get into it. The game is good/very good/excellent/whatever from the get go, but it hides this behind some seriously complicated and not at all spoon fed to you mechanics. Some of these actually work very well when you persevere and understand them and some could still do with improvement.Originally Posted by Shindig
But the point is that if you're simply fast travelling from A to C every single time, avoiding all of the incredible immersion in the World just to get the main story done then I'm not remotely surprised that you had an average shit time with it as you're missing out on so much that makes the game great.
Take this post...
The star travel system is actually fine, I wouldn't necessarily say brilliant or anything, but once you're absorbed it plays its part in making you believe that you're in a tiny part of a huge universe. Little things like getting out of your chair manually (rather than warping straight to your final destination) and hammering down on the thrusters and spinning around from the planet you've just left before grav jumping all play their part in avoiding the feeling of a loading screen/fast travel lobby that so many have complained about.
And on the other hand the map in New Atlantis remains an abomination and absolutely needs to be changed, but what it has done is force me to understand where things are which also helps towards that immersive feeling of actually being there.
That's still bad design on their part. The vast majority of people will not give the game that chance and will possibly even refund (I have a couple of those in my extended circle). That's not to say the game has to hold your hand, but it has to keep you engaged from minute one and it's obviously not doing that for a lot of people.
Starfield will be afforded more leeway on that regard cause it's from the people that made Skyrim, but at some point that reputation will not matter anymore.
Case in point, the steam charts:
Now part of the drop is the weekend being over, but the trend still continued going down today and you have to factor in the fact that it's people who got early access, which you would typically expect to stick with the game longer. It will peak tomorrow with the full release, but we'll see.
That's not to say you can't enjoy the game of course. I haven't even played it yet and I will probably stick with it regardless, I'm mostly talking on a general level.
Last edited by Adramelch; 05-09-2023 at 06:55 PM.
On the one hand I agree with that take in principle, but then on the other Bethesda have had a load of flak for simplifying their IPs over the years (ruining Fallout, by releasing a not RPG and dumbing down the Elder Scrolls series with Skyrim) so with this reaction I'm not sure how they can actually win.
I think some of the problems have come from the reviews and the things that they implied or stated. The "30 hours until you enjoy it" thing came directly from them and it's manifestly wrong (DS can play as much as he likes and he's never going to, for example) and the other is the planet procedural generation thing, which was widely slated (a take that I bought into before I'd given it a chance with another post I can't be arsed to quote on page 3) but when dovetailed with the hand crafted stuff (and not just running from one point of interest to another) it works very well. If I had a YouTube presence I'd absolutely be releasing a "How to enjoy Starfield" video now, which I think would absolutely bang and Youtubers are missing a trick by not doing so.
And in terms of barriers to entry, what about Elden Ring? A game that should rightly go down as one of the best ever, but if you played it new to the series (I'd imagine there were millions of people who did) you'd have been missing out if you binned it off after a few hours due to those barriers.
Clearly those barriers weren't there with Elden Ring. It was a difficulty barrier than understanding the systems surely? The fact that it kept that many players despite that barrier shows you exactly what I mean "no handholding but keeping people engaged". Same with Baldur's Gate 3 (which will inevitably be a point of reference for Starfield). Probably among the most complicated games you'll find, a relatively niche genre, tutorials that are informative yet discrete ("during combat you have an action, a bonus action and movement" rather than highlighting the spell you need to press) and yet it had great player retention (lost something like less than 10% of players within 2 weeks).
And on top of all that, there's the Bethesda trademark of a multitude of bugs. Again, I haven't actually played yet (no early access) and even though I've tried to stay away from the subject so nothing gets spoiled, I've come across too many a video with serious bugs.
But we don't know how many people Starfield has lost yet do we, all we're going on is the NARRATIVE that fuels Youtube clicks. If you look at its reddit for example, the initial reaction (similar to the one I had) has died down hugely and the positive comments are shining through now. As I said above I'm convinced a fair bit of the negatives came from perceptions people had due to reading/seeing reviews (from all creators, not just Gamespot) and projecting those on the things they were seeing in game. I know I certainly did that and I'm still yet to see a review that chimes with why I think this could be an absolutely amazing game.
Just seen your edit Adra, how does that graph compare with Elden Ring? I'm also not convinced that shows much of a trend until we see the data for today and another comparable weekend (which I get that there won't be come full release). In any case, if the narrative changes loudly enough (and it appears as though it's starting to) a lot of those people will come back.
And this is another thing that I'm just not convinced is as widespread as the reviewers made out, partly due to them playing an unpatched version for 10 days of their 14. I've seen three bugs in my 34 hours so far on this save. One a floating door, another having to stand on a table to get to talk to someone and an odd one when you put a storage container down in an outpost and it says there's already mass in it.
That's the first couple of weeks of Elden Ring (it doesn't keep the hourly data so that's just daily sadly).
The main "concerning" part of what I linked for Starfield is that at 19.00 today the game had 170k concurrent players as opposed to 250k yesterday. It is limited data nevertheless, so just making a premature analysis I guess. It's just a steeper decline than usual I guess (there's always a decrease after the first weekend of any game of course).
A big part of the ones I've seen are immovable npcs (that some times weren't even supposed to be there from what I gathered) boxing you in. All said videos were from players by the way, I pay literally no attention to reviewers.
Last edited by Adramelch; 05-09-2023 at 08:02 PM.
To counter the initial thing. By manually holding a button down to launch, is just extending you before a loading screen. If pressing a button to sit in a cockpit then holding a button to watch an identikit cut scene, into a loading screen improves your immersion fairplay, but almost all players aren't going to do that when you can just fuck off into the stars and forego the extra 30 seconds of process.
Pointing to a position and again holding down a button to initiate an identikit grav jump cutscene before a black loading screen is the same. What immersion is there to 'holding X then cutscene' really adding? They couldn't even be arsed masking the loading screen with a 'load cutscreen' seeing you fly through the wormhole there, or follow the ship leave the atmosphere etc. When you have grav jumped, it just loads into you floating in front of a planet. Nothing. You can't even launch your ship off a planet manually, can't even lift it into the air. Its just 'here is asset watch asset'.
Even Destiny masked loading screens on the 360 with static 'space travel' immersion scenes, even if it did take a minute to load back then.
It just feels lazy. It just feels lazy in a lot of places. It also has very good ideas in a lot places. I could write a whole novella on the randomly generated slices of planets which are fucking abhorrent and almost insulting at times.
I visited Neon. Actually a fantastic piece of design. But then you very quickly realise it's a load of shopfronts most of which require yet another cutscene to load a single tile room, and the sheer verticality, complexity of construction is just that. There's nothing when you look around.
I also got softlocked there. Pickpocketed a key, used said key, I was not allowed to leave the location. Could not exit, could not warp. Spent 30 minutes, no hidden vents or escapes. Just absolutely stuck there for eternity.
Last edited by Dark Soldier; 05-09-2023 at 08:02 PM.
@Adramelch I've had the boxed in thing multiple times. My favourite was being caught stealing so went behind a table, against the wall. About 10 cops rocked up, leapt over the table at me, but seemingly that object being there completely fucked their AI as they kept asking how I was doing etc. Second I stepped away from the table, after pushing through the NPC crowd, they arrested me. Can't even pathfind a 2 foot piece of elevation.
Everything you're saying should be the only right answer and there should be no reason why extending your time doing something works as well as it does (for me at least), but it does. Maybe it's catching a glimpse of space as I swivel out of my chair, maybe it's all of these little things adding up to make a greater whole, I'm really not sure, but since I started again on Saturday morning I've felt like I was in space, both when I'm playing the game and when I'm thinking about it. Very few games have ever accomplished the latter, but Bethesda do it time and time again and FromSoft did it too with Elden Ring.
The drop is probably attributable to the US "Labor Day" holiday. They're all back to work/shooting up schools now
@Yevrah - have you done the Mantis quest yet? it's kinda the Silver Shroud of Starfield and you get some mega rewards for it
Not yet RD, only 17 quests down so far (3 of them main ones). That said, I have seen a bit of what that quest is about due to a video popping up for it in my Youtube feed with more information crammed into a thumbnail about something than I've ever seen before.
What are your thoughts on the game now overall?
Yev never get VR you will never leave.
This may shock you, but I got the PSVR2 and sadly, it's crap. Played it for about two weeks and haven't touched it since.
It's still a much steeper decline than Elden Ring/BG3 had from Sunday to Monday, but I am probably reading too much into this and we won't know for a couple weeks anyway, since the full release is tomorrow. Not that it matters on a personal level, there will be people that enjoy the game a lot and there will be people that will hate it. I'm more trying to speak on a game (or product in general I guess) design basis, and how the "it gets good" way doesn't generally work.
Spent the last two evenings in Neon. Still really enjoying this.
My photo mode is mostly my guy posing in front of stuff
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Oh, that HeelVsBabyFace rant was very much real. What a shaven bollock.
Not go time to write up a fuller answer, but loving it really. It's just all the shit I love in Beth games plus awesome space stuff.
There's things that are a bit wank still like inventory micro-management, it's slow to open up a lot of the skills etc. but all fairly minor stuff. The atmosphere and style makes it a great space shooter
Yev in ‘man excited for game likes said game’ shock news story.
I'm a twit
I've never been aware of this guy before but I looked up his full two and half minute rant on the matter out of morbid curiosity. Cringeworthy doesn't begin to cover it. What an absolute tit. It's presumably literally a five second screen you navigate through in a hundred hour game.
Yep, absolute ball bag.
It's quite amazing that he's still doing this. I first came across him like a decade ago with his WoW videos and they were exactly the same thing. The fact that he has that large a following should be mindblowing, but it's actually not surprising given the current state of the internet (and society I guess).
You can tell he's super serious because he had to take off his headset.
I found him whilst getting into MauLer's stuff. I abandoned ship as soon as I realised he was a genuine basement dweller. Critical Drinker can fuck of as well. "This Disney film isn't for me any more. HOLLYWOOD HAS FAILED."
Played a few hours, so far so good. I could see systems that will probably annoy me in the future but the overall gameplay seems more than good enough to keep me interested. One thing that I immediately noticed however is the graphics. I don't particularly care about graphics in RPGs, but still the game looks like half a decade behind in that respect, if not more.
As for the whole steam chart discussion, the game launched fully today and it peaked at 270k concurrent users. Meanwhile BG3 was at 380k today and the game has already been out for more than a month. That can't be considered successful from Bethesda's point of view surely? Let's see how the weekend goes I guess.
Last edited by Adramelch; 06-09-2023 at 09:18 PM.
Steam numbers won't tell the whole story. Microsoft's getting a surge of console sales off the back of this.
Oh yeah, and I don't mean to say they won't make money out of the game (even without the console sales), just that it won't have met their expectations.
It's prob the fact you can pay a tenner on PC (or about five from CDKeys) and get it a month via PC Gamepass also. So loads woulda prob gone that route to try it.
Yeah, the game pass numbers both on pc and Xbox will have cannibalised a significant figure of the users who would have otherwise played it on steam, you’d imagine.
Am I missing something with storing of resources in outposts?
I can either use my ship and it has everything stored there available or I can build one of each of the storage containers that don’t hold much at all and have to put the rest in crates that aren’t linked to crafting?
You can build multiple of the storage things and link them together using R2 and it'll daisy-chain them
Cheers RD, looks like it's only one of the transfer container you can build. Point number 78 that looked like a problem and isn't.
One other pro-tip: you can hold Start to jump straight to the Starmap
You can also hold the big X button in the centre of the pad to turn the game off.
Does it bother you that Bethesda games live rent free in your head?
No there's not much left I hate in this world so it is quite refreshing to have something irrational still there, makes me feel young.
Very good answer.
This is still probably a game I pick up when it eventually comes to Playstation/Epic gives it away for free. Also, for a game about space, it's seems decidedly vanilla. I want wild alien shit. Imagine a first contact dialogue tree where you have no idea if any responses will land.
I do not like the space combat. Like, at all.
It took me a while to get used to it. It helps to have an upgraded ship and the VATS-like targeting thing. I'm starting to get to grips with it now, I think
I got the grips of it in terms of the mechanics and all, but it feels like I'm permanently fighting the controls rather than the enemy ships (the keyboard and mouse version of it is a complete and utter clusterfuck, but even with the controller it just feels off), and even outside that it just feels too slow and sluggish.
I am enjoying the game and all (still only 10-ish hours in mind you), but there's too many things where I can't help but feel "what the fuck were they thinking". From the dreadful menus (which are a Bethesda staple, but that shouldn't be an excuse), to the pointless fetch quests (it's 2023 lads), to the ridiculous face-to-face (for lack of a better description) dialogue scenes.
Last edited by Adramelch; 08-09-2023 at 07:04 AM.
I think I've seen enough now to say that this is a masterpiece. It has a few flaws no doubt, most of which I'd imagine will be patched out in due course, but when playing it I feel like I'm in and exploring space.
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