none of #Starfield's updates are tempting me to try again. I just found the quest design extremely dull, none of your choices really matter, it didn't even really feel like there were different approaches to combat
@joelanman I did one pass of New Game+ and got to around half way done. Somewhere I picked up a rifle that trivializes pretty much all combat to where it only takes 1-3 ammo to conclusively end most fights. I was slightly more than lukewarm on it the first time through and didn't realize how much it would ruin the game for me to have ~no danger.
Also didn't see nearly as many branching choices versus something like the faction choices in New Vegas or Oblivion, so there's no story drive for me.
Spent an hour last night in #Starfield and came away impressed with the visuals. The writing, um, doesn't quite keep up? Lowly miner touches a stone and then is offered a ship to leave the derelict moon?
Arthur at least managed to pull the sword without fainting before gaining the kingdom 😅
Let's see if this gets better after this rather weak opening! 🤞
We have been doing some ship building in #Starfield. Mine is the green ship and my wife’s is the red. I love to use spines and cross passages to get rid of the doors.
I wanted my ship to be one level and be able to work all the way round. There is a very longer corridor under the radiator at the back.
@heckj@finestructure It probably would be really hard to manage temperature, radiation,as well as corrosive resistances. It explains why you can store many suits in the spaceship.
Today I'm releasing my new Milky Way poster series: 8 posters showing all the glorious detail of Gaia DR3 (and other recent data) from 10 parsecs to 12 thousand parsecs. Plus two bonus #Starfield maps!
I started this new poster series after millions of people bought the #StarfieldGame from Bethesda Game Studios, with the hope that a fraction of those people would be willing to back a cartography Kickstarter.
I wanted to like #Starfield , and I played it quite a bit. But ultimately, I found it lacking to, say, #Fallout 4 or #Skyrim . Here are some things I thought it fell short:
There isn't enough variety in enemy types. Mostly you just fight fellow humans with a variety of guns. The Starborn are a bit more interesting, but they also show up extremely rarely (apart from the Temple Guardians, and those are pushovers). Sometimes there are robots, which help a bit. And the alien creatures have some truly interesting varieties - but they are almost never inside the "dungeons" (i.e. facilities) themselves, and instead are an easily-avoidable obstacle on the overland map.
Outside of the handcrafted major settlement, the procedurally-placed facility placement is just... weird. Basically, the setting feels like the ultimate culmination of the American sprawl - everyone wants to put up shop as far away from anyone else as possible. Only instead of everyone having cars, everyone has spaceships. You never get the feeling that anyone interacts with their neighbors, or clusters together for companionship and mutual aid.
Also, because of this procedural placement, there is no reason to revisit the same region other than the handcrafted settlement twice. With Skyrim and Fallout 4, I developed a real sense of place as I gradually explored the map and discovered new nooks and crannies. But with Starfield, everything felt... disconnected.
The Alien Temples. God, those are boring - what was Bethesda thinking? The Dragon Walls in Skyrim fulfilled pretty much the same purpose, but they were always placed in interesting locations.
Could Starfield become a more interesting game with enough expansions and mods? Probably. But I'm not sure it will be able to reach the same heights as Skyrim and Fallout 4 did.
I just realized that I put maybe 20-30 hours into #Starfield and NOTHING stands out as especially cool and worth remembering. Not the boring spaceflight, not the bland characters, not the bare-bones combat, none of it.
Meanwhile, the frustrations are still clear as day. The pointlessly limited inventory, the long-ass animations they were so in love with that they would not let you skip, the terrible UI that was fixed by modders within DAYS of release... All still fresh and infuriating.
...which generally ends up being the sensible option, because there's really nothing of value to craft anyway! By the time you've unlocked the ability to craft something, you've probably picked up or bought something equivalent, and you'll regret having those spent character points on pointless crafting unlocks. (2/3)
And how could I forget the generic procedural planets that you spend 95% of your time fast-travelling across, completely removing any sense of wonder or adventure that had been Bethesda's ONE THING they did really well?!? It's like they looked at Radiant Quests, the least fun thing from all their previous games and decided to replace the entire galaxy with it!
And I STILL can't think of anything really fun that I enjoyed about the game!!! (3/3)
I have a set of maps for the popular #Starfield video game, which is based on real nearby stars (sometimes renamed). I created them for a failed Kickstarter last year and I am thinking about releasing the full resolution versions for free. Please like or comment if you want them.