I said you shouldn't treat it as you used to treat videogames.
Which I disagree with.
That's a very narrow minded approach. If you give someone a chess set without telling them how they should play it it wouldn't be a very good experience for them.
There is a difference between teaching someone how a game works and telling them how it has to be enjoyed. What you are really doing is mental gymnastics to try and convince people its a good game by telling them the mindset you had and the reasons why you enjoyed the game. You are basically telling people why the game's shortcomings aren't exactly that.
Good games need no excuses. Their players also do not need to be told what mindset they need to have to simply enjoy the experience.
I'm offering advice on how you can enjoy Starfield, if people refuse to heed that advice that's entirely up to them. I'm not trying to call anyone stupid, I want them to find the same enjoyment I got out of it if they'd only allow it and be more open minded.
Be open minded all you want. Enjoyment of games is more or less a binary thing. You either enjoy a game or you don't. Sure, there are degrees of enjoyment for any game but being open minded won't change the fact that the game design is dated at best and primitive at its worst.
For crying out loud zhat was my exact point, that you shouldn't roam around empty landscapes without a reason. You expect the game to hold your hand and only allow you to roam around where there are rewards. This is the reason I like the game so much because it doesn't try to hold my hand like that.
A game being linear isn't necessarily hand holding. Clear objectives and directives also respect the players time by focusing their attention on what needs to be done and leads players to the next POI or story element, cut scene or whatever. There is certainly a place for sandbox type gameplay. However, the trade off is narrative focus and a more generic experience. Unfortunately, Starfield's sandbox is more of a series of loosely connected shoeboxes that you access via a bunch of fast travel points and loading screens.
I never explored the same thing twice during my entire 150 hours of playtime. You are your own worst enemy if you repeatedly try to explore the same way. What is it that they say? Repeating the same thing expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.
I thought exploration was its own reward? Are you telling me that you shouldn't explore the game or that you should and be grateful that you can explore nothing because that's rewarding?
I simply stated that a planet is essentially the same as the 100m area around your landing site and that you can experience all a planet has to offer in Starfield simply by going to the POI's related to your quests. There is no need for exploration and even if wandering around is your thing, you won't get anything out of it. There is nothing to be found.
The most repetitive thing I did in it was unlocking temples. When I say exploring should be its own reward I mean you should want to explore the facility / structure to begin with and not just go there for the expected loot. The only buildings and bunkers and outposts I explored were the ones I wanted to explore because they looked interesting already from the outside. Whether I found any secrets there is irrelevant. There
It would if you'd only let it.
The buildings and facilities you find at least have loot in them. However, they are all pre-generated and then randomized for each planet. This means that Bunker A can appear any number of times on various planets. You will end up exploring Bunker A more than once (with randomized loot and possibly different factions as enemies) even if you do the bare minimum to complete quests in the game. There are only a handful of mines, buildings, outposts, bunkers and installations that exist in the game and each will be encountered many times in different places.
In most games that make exploration part of the experience, the player is provided with a reward for putting in the time and effort to explore the landscape. Easter eggs, interesting items, secrets, special loot, or discovered lore and even sometimes achievements are all provided as potential incentives to do this. Starfield may have more explorable area than any other game in history but it doesn't make any of it interesting. Nor does it reward you for the time sink.
If you insist on having video game tropes all the way from the 90s in all new games we'll never have any progress in game design.
I wasn't suggesting that video game tropes from the 1990's and beyond were necessary. Again, talking about progress in game design in reference to Bethesda is ****ing hilarious since its still building games like its 2007.
It is entirely up to you to only explore places in starfield that have things you'd like to see. That was my point in the first place don't just randomly explore, explore like you'd if it was not a game.
That's all I did. I've only criticized Bethesda on the exploration element of the game because it chose a quantity over quality approach to the game world. It's a game that's as big as an ocean but only an inch deep. Sure, you can travel great distances but it never feels like it given the prevalence of fast travel and the places you go have no depth to them. They are rarely interesting and again, doing the bare minimum you'll encounter the same mines and outposts on different planets repeatedly. I will criticize them for this because its lazy and uninspired.
Plenty of planets had unexpected formations or unique features on them, including buildings I've never seen elsewhere.
There are very few unique structures in Starfield. Earth certainly has them as an example but again, the duplication of mines and other facilities is well documented by many reviewers and random Youtubers. I'll confirm it myself. There are unique ones. The Mantis's lair is one example of that.
I don't think I've even tried to land on the same planet twice. What did you expect really? That you'll find some amazing secret in a completely random star system on a completely random planet, at a completely random unmarked landing zone? Just because you are allowed to land anywhere doesn't mean you should take that as an invitation to land everywhere.
Actually, if a planet can support life I would expect different regions of the planet to have different weather, plant and animal life as well as different geographical features. Sure, a lifeless planetoid that looks like Mercury would probably be uniformly boring but not every planet should be.
Bethesda chose quantity over quality with its planets. Five or six explorable planets that were highly detailed, varied and hand crafted would have made a lot more sense and been more immersive than this far reaching procedurally generated sameness all over the place.
I didn't know you had the option to explore interstellar space in reality. Starfield is still fiction, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make that fiction realistic and believable.
You are the one who said to treat it like reality. Again with telling people how to enjoy a game. Reality isn't necessarily exciting. Games need to strike a balance between being realistic and entertaining.
The real irony is that I never found the exploration in old bethesda games all that interesting. There are pois everywhere, but after exploring one of a type you basically seen them all. The same architecture and puzzles and even enemies will repeat with slight variation of the layout.
I don't disagree. My issues with Bethesda building the game this way aren't because I was hoping it would be like other Bethesda games. I just think the amount of space we were provided is completely pointless the way its been utilized.
You just explained perfectly why you wouldn't land on random planets in reality, and this is exactly why you shouldn't do it in Starfield either. Remember you choose to land, nothing in the game forces you to.
And with some exceptions that is exactly what is prudent to do. The empty planets give a scale to the game, that it wouldn't have otherwise. The reason Mass Effect was not very immersive to me because it lacked this scale.
The game's extra worlds do not give it scale when you use a system of menus and fast travels to reach them. The game feels remarkably tiny despite having so many worlds. Immersion in a game isn't necessarily about scale. Story, characters, setting, world building and gameplay all have an impact on feelings of immersion.
Many people would disagree with you about how immersive Starfield is even compared to Mass Effect. Even basic stuff like conversations with NPC's in Starfield are years behind the Mass Effect series.
For example I wish in Cyberpunk 2077 you could go into any building and explore them. even if you find nothing of interest in them. That wouldn't make the game worse it would make it better and more immersive.
No, it wouldn't. Is the real world less immersive because you can't simply walk into any house or apartment you want to? It wouldn't make sense for me to do it in Cyberpunk 2077 either. I think it would hurt the game to have built it that way rather than how they did. It takes resources and time to generate that stuff and its useless.
Sure, conceptually being able to explore every room and closet of a city sounds good but in reality, it wouldn't add much if anything to the game.
It is the traditional game design that dictates that if something exists in a game it must by definition have an use for the player.
It's an issue of practicality and resources. There is no need to waste time, effort and resources on building things that players won't interact with or likely won't ever interact with.
Not all realism is beneficial, but without realism games don't have immersion. I'm not suggesting everything should be 100% realistic.
And this is why I say being able to go into every apartment and house in Night City isn't beneficial. Even if in some ways it could make the game more immersive, the juice to do it isn't worth the squeeze. When you have finite resources, you are better off using them towards improving other aspects of the game or adding elsewhere than making random **** open to the player that serves no purpose.
Well my suspension of disbelief works a lot better if there is not a chest with my name on every planet and in every cave. There needs to be a balance, but everything being put there for the player's benefit is not a believable balance to me.
Your tastes are pretty far from the mainstream based on what I can see from your posts. Nothing wrong with that, but people are here for their dopamine hit. They need rewards or they do not engage with the content. Frankly, wandering around an area with few if any interesting natural formations, no loot, no enemies, or anything else isn't entertaining for most people.
The animations I agree about, but the character models are pretty good, better than Cyberpunk 2077 in my opinion. Except for the random civilians.
They say looks are subjective but I think you are the only person who thinks this.
I'm just playing Cyberpunk 2077 again from the beginning and the difference is not that significant compared to Starfield. Yes it is somewhat better, but some weapons being useless or much higher TTK is very much a thing in it too. The usability of weapons in Starfield is spread on a wider spectrum, which makes a few weapons quite OP compared to the rest. But this is the same in Cyberpunk only with smaller margins.
Not even close. I can't think of many weapons that have TTK's as high as a lot of them in Starfield. I think there are a lot more useless weapons in Starfield compared to Cyberpunk 2077, the latter of which has a **** ton more weapons to choose from. Starfield does have a couple of OP weapons that are well beyond anything in CP2077 for that, but that is only because of the 2.x patches which rebalanced everything and level set things a bit better. You no longer have extreme standouts in CP2077. Prior to 1.5 or 1.6, you absolutely did.
You are over exaggerating, I think Starfield has nothing to be ashamed of as an FPS compared to other games.
I never said it should be ashamed. I said the game had serviceable shooting mechanics but that they were subpar compared to most AAA shooters and I stand by that statement. That's not to say that Starfield's combat isn't fun. I'm disagreeing with your statement than its on par with any other shooter out there. It certainly isn't. It's adequate in this area, nothing more.
With the exception of weapon balance, but that is excusable due to the RPG aspect.
Being an RPG does not excuse this. You are the one talking about old tropes of game design holding them back, and that's certainly what this thinking does.
It's presumptuous to think that just becauase you found a strategy that works that's the only way to do things. You can evade enemy fire pretty well using boosters and a fast ship.
I'm simply stating that you can tank and spank everything in the game. With turrets, you can win every fight with no effort or even any piloting on your part. I never said other approaches weren't feasible, I simply said that once you've unlocked the best weapons, reactors, and shields in the game that the combat was no longer challenging and that the proven mechanics you are talking about that the game uses are poorly implemented.
It's super easy as long as the number or level of enemies is not too high.
There are very few instances in the game where this can even happen.
The building of ships and hiring crew is a more rewarding goal in the game than the main story that's for sure. Not that main stories were worth a **** in any Bethesda RPG.
I don't care about the crew really. I just like building the ships. I've modded the game to allow me to take ship building to entirely new levels.
I don't disagree with that, but most people instead of concluding "this game is not for me" declare that "this game is crap" which is as good as calling everyone who likes it dumb.
As I've said many times....I think that the game is greater than the sum of its parts. I found it to be much more fun than I should have given its bugs, issues, bad design decisions and limitations. However, on a technical level I think its fair to call it subpar at best and crap at worst depending on how many of the issues you've experienced.
Not all games appeal to everybody. So by that definition there are no good games, since someone doesn't enjoy it for sure. And it's not a popularity contest either something being popular is not proof of quality.
I don't even know how to make sense of this statement given what it was in response to. It doesn't seem like a response to what I said.
I think the problem was that the game came out after colonial marines and after that disappointment many jumped on Alien Isolation to right that wrong not knowing that it is a very different game.
If I get a burger when expecting a hot-dog I'd not think that it is a very ****ty hot-dog.
This is not a good analogy. If I buy a hot dog and get a burger, I'll be upset that I didn't get what I asked for. I am not going to eat the burger and say that was a ****ty hot dog. I can tell its not a hot dog. If I like burgers, I might be pleased if I chose to eat the burger and it was a good burger. Or I'll get my money back. Lots of ways to go here but a burger isn't ever going to fool anyone into thinking it was a hot dog.
Movies and games aren't like that. You can cut a trailer for either of them that makes people think that the story or type of game or film is something drastically different than what it is. This has been a problem for a lot of movies where they put all the action in the trailer making you think it has more action and excitement in it than it actually does.
Everyone who has played Bethesda games knows Bethesda doesn't really ever change its ways. They expected Fallout in Space and for the most part, that's what they got. However, in their hubris to make the game bigger and bigger, they made it too big and Bethesda's normal strength became its weakness as it had no idea how to even make a space game to begin with, much less adapt their normal game design to that.
