Starfield - No Man's Bethesda
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Ironically those faces together sum up the game pretty well. A mixture of befuddlement topped off by Phil’s eternal shit eating grin.
Nah, very specifically having a second health bar that fills up/reduces to trigger a stagger where you can then do the real damage is the new fad. It probably has been done before, but it definitely spiked up after Sekiro (just off the top of my head, Starfield, ARmored Core 6, Sekiro, Wayfinder, Strayed Light, Elden Ring (Crystalians, though non visible), and more recent Destiny 2 content)
There were lots of stuff prior that would have you do a particular action (usually a parry/counter) to open a high damage oppurtunity, but it was never just "beat on this til it happens or with a specific damage type"
Note how I said that it's slightly more obvious. It's nothing more than a small fad, and if everyone starts doing it: oh, well. I'll take health meters and a break meter, over no meter at all and try to enforce "realism". By the way, both of the Norse God Of War games use a stun/break meter too. There is Sifu as well, but it's spiritual predecessor, Absolver, has a break meter too. Like I said before, it's nothing more than some games being more obvious than others now.
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Starfield players pirate its DLSS mod after its creator puts it behind a paywall | VGC
The modder reportedly added DRM to the mod to make sure people were paying for it…
www.videogameschronicle.com
Todd Howard says Starfield's barren planets are boring on purpose
To be fair, not all 1,000 planets can be fun
www.gamesradar.com
That's cool and all, but I feel like someone should remind Bethesda that they are MAKING VIDEO GAMES FOR FUN!!!!! Games should be fun and if your realism is anti-fun then don't be realistic you fucking tossers.
"Our game is great. You just need to learn how to computer."
Getting off-topic, but that collar insignia looks like a giant rubber duck on top of a bed. I'd love to serve in that division.
As a point of order for Todd, realism would also indicate if you put a single modestly powerful bullet into a guys space suit in a hostile environment, that ****rs prettymuch instadead. Not able to absord like 5 + to the head..Todd Howard says Starfield's barren planets are boring on purpose
To be fair, not all 1,000 planets can be fun
That's cool and all, but I feel like someone should remind Bethesda that they are MAKING VIDEO GAMES FOR FUN!!!!! Games should be fun and if your realism is anti-fun then don't be realistic you fucking tossers.
If you're going to actively cite the harsh barren dreadfulness of actual space, you got to spread that out evenly.
.Todd Howard says Starfield's barren planets are boring on purpose
To be fair, not all 1,000 planets can be fun
That's cool and all, but I feel like someone should remind Bethesda that they are MAKING VIDEO GAMES FOR FUN!!!!! Games should be fun and if your realism is anti-fun then don't be realistic you fucking tossers.
This is why I disliked the 7th generation so much. Take out the fun for the sake of "realism".
See also the tightrope of anyone trying to make a wrestling game after 2005 or so. Which was always amusing because they were trying to "realistically" simulate something that in itself was pretending but not actually realistic 95% of the time.
I mean, hardcore simulation games are certainly a market. Its way too niche for the budget Bethesda wants to throw around though.
Even most "sim" space games will ignore stuff like the fact you'd never hit a ship a reasonable distance away without a super-computer to plot an instant intercept course for your ballistic projectiles, and the force of firing anything powerful enough to brute force through another ships hull would either spin you out of control at best, or just blow a hole in your ship because theres no planet worth of gravity and mass to brace it on.
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I heard AEW: Fight Forever brings back the arcade style of things. I am not interested, but it does warm my heart, if that's the case.
When you start considering the demographics of the global population, if humans go to space roughly in the same proportions as they are on Earth now, you should probably expect not that many "white people". And even then a lot of those "white people" may not be "white" in the way certain people particularly bothered by race would be satisfied with.
I remember in Fallout 4, even after destroying the in game community with all my settlement building - I was still being a total scrooge. Still looting everything, using .32 pipe weapons against molerats for better cost efficiency of ammunition and reserving energy weapon ammo for super mutants. After a while I was like... what the hell am I doing?! I managed to get a Legendary roll for a Never-Ending plasma gun and turned it into a plasma flamer I never had to reload. Plasma ammo overall is pretty uncommon and not many enemies wield it and thus it doesn't drop much. I threw my endless cash at all the vendors to supply my hedonistic plasma use. Also wore my jetpack power armor everywhere, who needs to care about power cores if I can buy more? So yeah while games do run into the whole money is useless problem, sometimes there's ways to utilize the money to have some fun even if it's not entirely necessary.
Starfield though does look like it has some use for money in the form of ships. As far as I know you gotta buy them and can't loot them. But I've only played like 4 hours or so.... but I'm thinking I might try letting loose earlier. I found a super strong revolver with scarce ammo, maybe I'll just buy it and go wild.
You can steal enemy ship by disabling their engine and boarding them and killing the crew to take over I think, I never managed to pull it off and I don't know what happen to your old ship in that case so I don't want to try. Although price of ships are kinda strange, they're super expensive but making them piece by piece is kinda cheap.
But for money, you can pretty easily setup an outpost to pump out ridiculous amount of crafted material and sell those for a mountain of cash relatively early, it take just a bit of starter money but afterwards it just keeps going with almost 0 effort on your part.
???
Games need to be fun overall. They don't necessarily need to be fun in every way.
Barren, lifeless balls of rock and ice should be overwhelmingly boring... because they're barren, lifeless balls of rock and ice. So if choose of your own free will to walk across one, you're asking a bit much to complain that you don't have squads of space pirates to gun down every 10 minutes. Particularly when there are places the game has provided for you to gun down space pirates every 10 minutes if that's what you want to do. The complaint "It's outrageous I did something that was totally pointless and boring in a game and found it pointless and boring" isn't exactly the developer's fault.
This is a bad take imo. They created 1000 planets and made most of them boring for no reason. Instead of 1000 planets make 50 that are interesting and rewarding to explore. Take the time it took you to make 950 boring pieces of shit, and put that development time into making the gameplay systems better.
There is ZERO reason to make parts of the game boring on purpose.
So I've decieded to take a look at the nexus mod page to see what mods are trending and what kind of ridiculous shit people are coming up with.
www.nexusmods.com
And to my surprise (or should i say no surprise), the most popular mods aren't crazy additions, but fixes. UI fixes, performance overhaul, script extender to support the said fixes, etc. I was tad disappointed no one has made thomas the tank engine or Macho Man RAndy Savage mod yet
Most popular mods at Starfield Nexus - Mods and Community
www.nexusmods.com
And to my surprise (or should i say no surprise), the most popular mods aren't crazy additions, but fixes. UI fixes, performance overhaul, script extender to support the said fixes, etc. I was tad disappointed no one has made thomas the tank engine or Macho Man RAndy Savage mod yet
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I... do not agree with you.
Again, the sort of games we're looking at here for comparison are No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous.
These are perfectly good games in their own right - and yet in them too you can spend weeks doing basically nothing. E: D has simulated the galaxy: literally billions of systems, tens-hundreds of billions of planets/moons, and outside a core area of a few tens of thousands of systems, most of those systems have basically nothing but proc gen stars and planets. One icy moon is much like another. There's nothing on most of them except the odd mineral cluster you can pick up. And yet thousands of players will explore them anyway, just for the sake of it. After seven years with a few million players, I think about 1% of those systems have ever been visited. And just occasionally, you do stop and realise the view from a particular point is really fucking beautiful, because the proc gen also ends up creating some wonders. You won't see it unless you go out there, and some of us are prepared to put up with the routine to catch those moments.
There's a tiny, weeny, little chunk of the E: D galaxy in the middle of nowhere, about 50-10 light years in diameter, which you can visit and almost every one of those systems shows me as the first player to discover it. Just routine: jumped to the system, fired off the discovery scanner, maybe scanned the planets (if worth the bother), left. No space pirates, no trading, no mining, no alien ruins. It wasn't "exciting" as such, and yet I loved it. That's my little area of the E: D galaxy, that I picked pretty much at random, on a whim decided to make mine. And it felt good.
Those boring planets offer a sense of scope. They mean there's a vastness out there, a place beyond the frontier, places people haven't really gone. You don't really need to use them, but they do actually give something. How utterly weird and claustrophobic would it be, with the whole expanse of the galaxy, that there's only 50 worlds and loads of shit going on on all of them? So yeah, there's 1000 planets and maybe 950 of them are kind of not worth the bother for many players. And yet I suspect their absence would still fundamentally change how the game would feel: it would no longer be a sense of exploration, of humanity expanding across the stars.
NMS and E: D show there's an appetite for this stuff out there. I certainly accept that some people want to play Skyrim: a meticulously crafted place from corner to corner, filled with carefully curated stuff to engage the player (even if plenty of it is still routine kill/fetch quests). If those Skyrim types "don't get it", it's no big deal. Other players do.