I seem to recall Tolkien straight up mentioned that fact in the books.
“Why Frodo, you look all pale and unhealthy! Here, have some foo-”
“I WALKED INTO MORDOR FOOL!”
stabs, goes on PTSD induced murderous rage across the Shire
I thought this was a Starfield thread? Get all of this LOTR nonsense out of here.
I saw an article that mentions your ship having a ragequit button and I think that is pretty neat. But won’t be necessary because ragequitting isn’t something that happens anymore, right guys?
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I just saw a Titan Submersible meme about the pilot throwing the wireless controller.
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Hello,
This game comes out tomorrow. Sort of, if you paid $100. It comes out next week for people like me who didn’t.
Are you gonna play it. Do you want to be a space person
I have edited the title of this thread to include our realm name in the hopes that it will not be moved to the off topic gaming forum for no good reason like my Baldur’s Gate 3 thread was. I would be happy to share my baldurs gate 3 thoughts as I continue to play through it but I can’t since I don’t have a subscription and thus can’t post on the games forum.
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That’s some BS right there, locking you out of your own thread.
Anyways. I got Starfield and I think it’s pretty fun! I’m only ten or so hours in, so I can’t give a solid review or anything.
But I have to say, some of the negativity is a little warranted. It’s not a seamless space exploration game like Elite or Star Citizen. The robot companion can say your name which is cool, but the jury is still out on the other early friends you can make. They kind of all have this “we’re really chummy with each other” banter that I don’t enjoy all too much. It feels just a little forced. And then the whole fast travel thing is kind of disheartening. Like, in Elite, you supercruise over to other planets and whatnot. It takes a few mins but adds a lot to the immersive experience. In SF, you’re fast traveling to all points in space. I’ve yet to really feel like I’m exploring space. Maybe that will come later.
But those are my only issues, and they’re not big ones. The combat is fun. The missions have been fun. Exploration on the planet surface is cool and feels Bethesda-y. The character creation process was good and I was able to make a guy who looks like me, so that was nice. The backgrounds are all interesting, as are most of the traits. I feel immersed in my character, at the very least. Spaceship combat is also fun.
So anyway, I still recommend buying it, and I think the small points of disappointment will fade once you get into the groove of what the game is.
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My favorite YouTuber has started playing it and I refer back to my original comment in this thread with the addendum that I am gutted by the fact my slight jest of it being “No Man’s Skyrim” was entirely, utterly correct.
Except No Man’s Sky has had 7 years of active development and thus, is a more comprehensive game than Starfield.
The NPCs are a gigantic step up in terms of animations. The dialogue is fine too. I’m not hearing any of the cast of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim which is surprising as well. Flip side, the initial gaggle of NPCs you meet on New Atlantis feel like they got lost from The Outer Worlds. There’s a weird mix of “This is super serious” and “hahafunni”.
Also not sure if your starting system gets randomized, but the opening dialogue referring that half the miners you work with don’t believe in Earth feels super, super weird when you open the Galaxy Map for the first time and Sol is literally right next to your own system.
Humans are skeptical creatures. We learn early on not to believe everything that people tell us, especially those who don’t have our best interest at heart. Sometimes this works against us, though. Plenty of folks don’t believe in global warming, for example, or weren’t taught about the holocaust and therefore aren’t sold on it being a true event.
Not believing in earth then, not as a planet that exists but as the birthplace of humanity that used to sustain our entire species by itself, isn’t so far fetched in this new world where the diaspora has flung itself across the stars. It sounds like a fairy tale. So, I think the skepticism is kind of cool.
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I’ve played for a little while now that it is out for the poor people. I see some fun here, but I do think the writing is sort of a problem… the setting doesn’t really have the punch of a TES or Fallout for me so far. This character I met summed up my issue with a “hard sci fi” approach
https://i.imgur.com/AWJt5Fk.jpg
There’s not really a whole lot to bite into in the world-building. There’s the sort of polished Federation style faction, the more rough and tumble independent minded cowboy faction in opposition to that… but nothing as distinct as alien cultures of Mass Effect or fantasy cultures of TES. The weird cult of snake god worshippers is something but so far they’ve just been raider-like enemies for me, idk if you can join them or if they have their own city.
The characters I’ve met have been sort of bland, everything feels a bit like pre-Deep Space 9 star trek where everyone was just sort of friendly and competent but not all that interesting. But without aliens and Kirk or Riker being horny (Baldur’s Gate asking me immediately upon starting whether or not I want to see gnome genitals really drives home how sexless Bethesda games are by comparison)
The space travel is frankly weird. I assumed it would work like “Freelancer” did, with free movement within and between systems but loading screens between space and planet. But really, you only ever use your ship in immediate orbit of a location you fast traveled to, you cannot practically fly manually between planets within a system because things are so far apart. I’ve barely had any cause to fly my ship around because of this, it just seems strange that they included spaceflight at all if it was going to play this sort of role.
As for the “no man’s skyrim” takes idk the story with no man’s sky, but I’m assuming this is saying “no content”. One positive thing I’ve noticed is there are actually quite a few non-RNG settlements in the game, with several large capital cities and more small towns. This is a change from Fallout 4 where there were basically no towns other than diamond city and the ones you built yourself–it is much more like Skyrim when it comes to friendly settlements and hubs. So on that front there is a good bit of handmade content, just… you basically have to fast travel a lot, since each city is located on a different planet or moon. Though it is true that, unlike TES games, the cities are not populated 100% by named NPCs with their own schedules and homes, you’ll see a lot of generic NPCs and not a lot of private residences.
The character creation is quite good I thought, it is downright thrilling to see things like “wearing hats doesn’t delete your hair” become standard in games. And said hair has physics! Hair physics is still amusingly cutting edge and sometimes janky but I can’t single out Starfield for that because I’ve seen Shadowhearts braid do some weird things too. I have a physics enabled poncho to wear as well, and it only flips out when I’m really giving it challenging movements to wrap around.
I do sort of like the low-pressure main quest approach. You found a weird thing which made you have a vision of colors or something. Some explorers are interested in it, but you can also just do whatever. Nice to have that degree of flexibility when Fallout 4’s “your son was kidnapped” or Skyrim’s “dragon messing things up” plots made it feel weird when you just said nah I wanna go join the thieves guild or somethin instead
I can at least say that the Bethesda freedom-focused design is fun enough to make me wanna play more even with my reservations about the writing/setting/characters. My first impression isn’t “this is a catastrophic failure how dare you Todd” nor is it “this is an amazing insta-classic on par with Morrowind or Skyrim”. Just sorta… in-between.
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Going from playing BG3 where the character animations are spectacular and full of life and well…character to the usual Bethesda empty-eyed vacant stare is a bit of whiplash. I mean so far it really seems like nothing groundbreaking or new. It’s not bad and I’m going to keep delving deeper but hopefully, it improves the longer I play it.
I was excited to be able to do immersive space travel and be able to enter atmospheres and land my ship manually or relax and coast from one planet to another but instead, we get menu fast travel and loading screens. Meh.
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No, when I say “No Man’s Skyrim” I mean the scanning minerals and animals and especially the space combat is ripped wholesale from Hello Games. The difference there being space combat in No Man’s Sky can literally encompass the entire star system since you aren’t stuck in a glorified skybox.
As for the rest of it, I’m curious how long it will take people to latch onto the fact Bethesda’s big “innovation” in dialogue animation involves the characters eyebrows mechanically moving up and down at regular intervals.
I’m pretty sure the animations in BG3 are just these kind of “rolling” animations where characters have a set number of moves and perform them fluidly throughout dialogue, giving them the semblance of life and having personality but really just being on a repeating movement track. I first noticed this kind of thing in Starcraft 2’s WoL campaign. Matt Horner’s animations were the most noticeable.
Granted, it looks really good and does the job well, but it’s just a better version of what Bethesda’s done.
Having more hours in the game now, I’ll say that I’ve gotten more into it than I was previously. I stumbled upon some cool quests, one of which feels like it has pretty high stakes. I’m also surprised at how having a mortgage over my head with the dream home perk has changed my outlook on quests. I find myself opting to try and get more money out of people, which the morally inflexible crew you have accompanying you doesn’t always like. The robot doesn’t give me a hard time, though.
Space combat hasn’t always felt like a walk in the park, though I’ll admit a little frustration at the lack of things you can do to bring your shields back up after they come down and your hull is getting hammered. I bought a better shield generator and reactor so maybe that will help down the line. I’m still happy with the game, if anything my opinion is getting better as time goes on.
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Oh ok. The scanning doesn’t bug me much because it is not in any way presented as the “main gameplay”–it is just a side thing akin to picking flowers in Skyrim. This is still mostly a Fallout-style rpg/fps, cataloguing space trees is just a side activity.
Space combat/spaceships in general are quite bad though, idk what they were going for here. The game’s overall feeling would be vastly improved if space was a free roaming overworld where you would manually fly to planets to check out what’s there rather than doing everything through the map. It was mentioned repeatedly in pre-release interviews that there would be no seamless landings, and I thought that was a totally reasonable compromise due to the complexity in pulling something like that off, but… not being able to fly manually from planet to planet was a bad surprise.
The closest comparison I can think of is Starbound, where your ship is basically a floating house/fast travel point, but unlike Starbound they get like… halfway there? Like, they put in the effort to have some basic ship combat and movement controls, there’s just little context where those things are ever very important. Just make the ship a Starbound-style floating house if that’s all it is gonna be
I’m a little torn on this. The novelty of flying from planet to planet is like using a horse to ride around Skyrim. Yeah, it’s cool and immersive, but eventually I just want to get to the action, you know? But since it isn’t an option, it feels worse than if it were and we decided not to use it.
The problem with space travel is that there’s not a lot going on and that space is huge. That we jump into debris fields or places where UC guard boats or Ranger ships are patrolling is itself highly unrealistic. And it’s fine that we’re not banking on realism here- this is an RPG, not a space sim. It would be cool if sometimes we jumped into a debris field and had to maneuver through some exploded ships or something before grav jumping or traveling away, but what can you do.
I also wouldn’t mind dropping into atmosphere, firing a handful of missiles at the spacers occupying the nearby weapons depot, and then head on in on foot to survey the debris.
Well I was thinking it’d function like the overworld in Skyrim. Yeah, running through a forest is not super interesting, but it is how you discover the interesting dungeons and stuff. And then, once you’ve done it once, you can fast travel around rather than do boring treks over again.
I don’t get the same discovery feeling in Starfield when I just open up the system map, see that there is a derelict space station, and fast travel there. There is a context to stumbling upon a dungeon in Skyrim that I don’t get with zipping to a location on the map which has some value.
One thing Starfield makes me feel is that, again, Bethesda needs some competition 
The Baldur’s Gate 3 comparisons have been frequent and unavoidable but the fact is that I can’t get a Bethesda-like level of freedom from BG3 no matter how good it is. It just doesn’t support the totally open world life-sim like stuff Bethesda does, so I’m drawn to a flawed thing like Starfield a lot since I enjoy that formula and they have been the only studio attempting that sort of thing.
I badly want that Bethesda formula with, well, better writing and characters as charismatic as those Larian dreamed up. I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen because Todd is the only big game developer who wants to make this sort of thing apparently
Yeah. I’ve seen some of the gameplay on this one and there seems to be a lot of nothing going on. A player lands and runs for 6 minutes without any activity. Kinda makes it seem like an unfinished game.
I played it a lot and beat the main quest, dabbled in all of the side factions except one, and have mostly completed the main quest a second time. So obviously I found it pretty engaging to play it that much. It is fun to fly around, shoot thing, and ransack ruins.
That said, I am kinda disappointed with it in the end. The writing never really got better for me, and I had a hard time finding stuff to engage with as an RPer in the setting.
They hyped it up a bit as Bethesda’s first “new universe in 25 years”, and they just… failed to do very good universe-building. Let me summarize the setting:
There are two major political entities, the Freestar Collective and the United Colonies. The United Colonies control the planets closest to earth and have a clean, UN-like aesthetic. Freestar Collective have planets further out and have a grungier aesthetic: their major cities are Akila City, a cowboy desert town, and Neon, a cyberpunk town run by megacorps.
Ideologically, they’re kinda… the same.
The UC capital of New Atlantis is a rich city with a seedy underbelly called “the well” inhabited by the deprived lower classes. Miners are ruthlessly exploited on Cydonia, one of the faction’s major cities on Mars. So we have a rich upper crust with exploited lower class in a capitalist style system.
The FC is also a capitalist society with a sharp class divide, but there are more cowboy outfits. Right down to the city design–like New Atlantis has a scummy underbelly in “the well”, Neon has “ebbside”, the sketchy underbelly where people live in shipping containers while corporate executives party in the city above.
I chose to make my character’s background a “neon streetrat” (you can choose your character’s affiliation at creation for unique dialogs) and I spent most of my time on FC planets because their outfits were cooler but beyond costumes they just felt the same. There’s no divide as profound as Imperial vs. Dunmer in Morrowind or Nord vs. Thalmor in Skyrim, just two space-America societies.
The game presents humanity as sort of a mostly-anglophone melting pot monoculture. The question of what happened to humanity’s various countries and identities after the
minor spoiler you uncover in the first couple hours of the game
destruction and evacuation of earth
Are basically untouched, we’re just sort of unified in space in America-like societies and that’s how it is I guess.
There are two religious factions, “the enlightened” (humanist atheists in a church-like structure) and “the sanctum universalis” (sp idk) a merge of all historical human religions. Both ideas are frankly silly on their face to me, and even if they weren’t there’s no effort in establishing them as detailed as your 36 sermons of vivec or whatever.
The most interesting idea to me was House Va’ruun, a weird cult inhabiting remote stars which has its own culture (you get some Varuun outfits and weapons and they are distinct and alien) and capital city mentioned in dialog. But, well, there is no House Va’ruun city accessible in the game, it is just backstory. I woulda gladly traded one of my space Americas for a space snake theocracy but idk, maybe they plan to cover them in DLC.
The bit of the story I liked the most was the end of the MQ, where
major extreme spoilers for todd story do not click
you become a space wizard, fight or join forces with a space pope turned dark wizard, discover the ability to become immortal and traverse multiverses, and get a new game+ mode which you get special dialog options for almost every quest reflecting your character’s meta-knowledge of the narrative, and also permutations of events happen where different characters can die, etc which is really pretty neat
Which I actually enjoyed quite a lot but those ideas don’t come into play until you’ve almost finished the main quest.
anyway TLDR the weak setting keeps this game from becoming the next Skyrim. There aren’t gonna be internet arguments of FC vs. UC raging for years on ala Stormcloaks vs. Imperials because I don’t think there’s enough here to make players care. The game’s mechanics are flawed but good enough in that bethesda-y way, the writing just lets it down.
I would still recommend people play it because uh I put in 70 hrs in the short time since it released so it has a lot of fun. I just found it frustrating from a missed-opportunity perspective. This sounds hyperbolic but Skyrim and Morrowind are probably some of the greatest cultural achievements of video games as a whole, in large part because of their well-realized settings which you have such freedom to explore, and Starfield is just fun Bethesda mechanics/sandbox without the awesome setting to give it heart.
So I’m at a total of 76 hrs in and I agree with a lot of what you said here about the setting in where the differences between factions is largely skin deep and nothing else. Your factions are either Space Cowboy’s or the Galactic Republic cosplayers. Etc etc.
Yet I’ve still have had a -massive- amount of fun in the game. Maybe it’s misplaced optimism but I feel like because it’s Bethesda’s new IP in a long time that it hasn’t had time to mature in the same way that the Elder Scrolls had. And I wonder if it’s better to look through the game in it’s potential to evolve into a much more well rounded game storywise as writers and devs get more familiar with the space.
Like there seems to be a lot of good surface ideas and stories and all sorts of mechanics that they seem to be beta testing in this sandbox that I hope show where Bethesda what works and what doesn’t so the game can be part of the long term social conversation the way that Skyrim is.
I don’t know. I’m enjoying the game, I plan on continuing to enjoy the game but it keeps teasing me with things of what could have been that I can’t shake off.
Maybe it could get better over time, but y’know… this game was cooking for ~7 years. That is a lot of time to write lore. The time span from arena to morrowind was only a little longer than that and they got 4 games and a rich setting out during that time.
Not to be mean, but I think a clever dungeonmaster homebrewing a setting could come up with something more compelling than the UC and FC in a weekend.
Bethesda is one of the biggest RPG developers in the world, and I’m sure that there are thousands of talented nerds for whom writing for Bethesda would be the dream job, but they seem stuck with middling talent in this area.
I do agree that the game is fun and I enjoy playing, and I’d recommend others check it out, just more for the freedom and interlocking mechanics than for the story and setting. The game has such huge scope, some charming locations, and varied mechanics that it is tons of fun in spite of a bland setting, but just like you I feel some frustration over what could have been
i wasnt really interested but then i saw a funny tiktok with someone making a waffle house in florida and now im sold!! just need it to go on sale cuz im broke because my dog had an expensive vet bill
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