Bleeping Lobster
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My initial response is prob as sarcastic as the others but a thought just occurred to me.
Skyrim, v1. The og release, before all the mods and bug fixes.
Undoubtedly still a better game than Star field. But was it the Skyrim we revere today? Will Starfield be transformed into something fun over the next decade?
What am I on about. Almost certainly not lol.
You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.
Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.
This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!
Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).
This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.
It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.
I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).
Yeah for $17 it’d be an absolute steal, assuming it’s playable. Iirc it didn’t crash once for me, just there were sooooo many ridiculous graphical bugs, and so many systems just felt half-arsed or unfinished. Some notable examples for me:
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looking out over the city from a high point, zooming in on the traffic and finding out they’re sprites
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no real police / law system, you could have your back to a wall and they’d somehow teleport behind you
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on my first cyberpsycho case, as the “Thanks for work, I’ll take it from here” call didn’t trigger until leaving the area, I was unsure of what to do with the knocked-out psycho, so I carried them to the trunk of my car. Well, the game did not account for my idiocy and there were, let’s just say, interesting spaghettification results when I drove away
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the autodrive when calling your car often had hilarious or strange results
Thanks for the informative reply! I am definitely going to update at some point. I tend to only play one game at a time, not sure if it’s an autism thing but I get very much into one game, play it to completion, do all the side quests if I really like it, then move onto the next… don’t replay games very often.
I got the absolute worst ending possible on my CP2077 runthrough, I have a save from just before the point-of-no-return and was mopping up all the side activities with the intent of trying to get a better ending. Perhaps I should start a new game from scratch to really appreciate all the additions. Though, I wager I’ll be installing the car handling / HUD element and minimap resizing mods immediately, unless they’ve fixed those issues?
It was a good game, just it fell well short of expectations. When you compare the little systems that contribute to games by R* like rdr2 / gta5 feeling so detailed and alive, it felt a bit barren, despite all the gorgeous backdrop and cool abilities.
“mile wide, inch deep” would be how I described it. The story was excellent but the gameplay loop imo needed some work.
Have you played the new version / dlc yet (I’ve not so pls no spoilery spoilers)?
I’m cautiously optimistic for Light No Fire. The main thing I learned from the NMS initial launch experience (am a day 1 player) is not to allow myself to get too hyped for games (this knowledge was cemented by the launch of CP2077 haha). And, you’d hope that Sean / HG learned also not to overpromise in terms of feature set… would hope they learned a hell of a lot from the long cycle of updating NMS.
The development started right after Fallout 4, so I feel like 8 years of development is a pretty long time and if it had to be rushed out, there had to be some management problems.
That’s a really good point tbf. 8 years, and this is what they released!
I’ve completed the game and agree, while it is an engaging game in some aspects, many systems felt ‘mile wide / inch deep’. Especially the AI. And I fucking hated the stealth, it just didn’t seem to work (though apparently a big reason for that is, many of us had armour ‘set to invisible in settlement’ which meant we’re tramping around with all our armour on, which makes us very visible / audible even though we can’t see the armour ourselves).
I got a strong sense of laziness from so many aspects of the game, but now I’ve had more time to think about it… it’s more likely yet another case of upper management forcing the game out earlier than the devs wanted. Same thing happened with CP2077.
Upper management often doesn’t give a shit about the game at all, all they’re interested in is how much money it’s going to make; so the longer it’s in dev, the more times it gets pushed back, the harder they’re chomping at the bit to just release it already.
Make sure you also get the mod that speeds up the sound FX. Speeding up the doors was a good QOL for me, though I think it also affected the death animations… the final killing shot on an enemy made their dying animation happen ridiculously fast after installing that mod. Or maybe it was happening all along and I just never noticed until I became OP
I got given a great tip from someone re the stealth, that I WISH the damn game had explained.
You know how you can set your armour to ‘hide when in settlement’ or something similar… easy to forget that setting, turns out we’re tramping around with our armour on, which makes us easy to spot and hear. So to get proper stealth you have to take your armour off (and therefore be quite vulnerable). Makes sense, once explained!
half melted mannequin fucks
The best (worst?) example of that for me was my companion sobbing and sniffling during a ceremony, expressing their love and commitment, all with a flat emotionless face. It’s funny you said mannequin because everytime I started a conversation, for some reason my brain would say “Here comes another puppet show”.
Gunplay is definitely decent, though there seemed to be no line between being overpowered and bullet sponge. Also would’ve liked to have seen more imaginative / futuristic weaponry considering the time period. I’m sure modders will create something more fun with the framework.
Another thing that really grated on me was the ‘digital clutter’. A generation ship from hundreds of years ago should not have the same ornaments and books as a ship from the current time period!
Imo the big problems with the game are because they outsourced so much of it.
Although there were too many fetch quests (imo), generally the game I found to be quite engaging. Just, not very deep systems; load times going into even the smallest buildings meant it’s not even approaching open world; drab procedural planets and outposts in a sad attempt to bulk it up; horrid animations and NPC models that wouldn’t be out of place in a game 10 years ago. Not to mention the horrendous amount of bugs I experienced.
This is why I can no longer allow myself to get excited for new games. I paid £7.99 for a month of PC gamepass to experience Starfield, if I paid full price I’d have been very unhappy. Now we pay to be bugtesters.
It only seems cool to do that with Unreal because they haven’t pulled anything like Unity… yet
Good point. Though, you’d hope they would’ve looked at the current Unity debacle and thought “fuck that for a game of soldiers”, the backlash was resounding and rightly so.
Not sure if I offended some Bethesda fanboys or my idea sound too much like communism but people don’t seem to like it haha.
A thought I had yesterday playing Starfield, sighing with frustration as janky, broken system after janky, broken system sucked the fun out of my session…
All these different game devs, pouring all these funds & resources / hours into each creating their own special little bespoke game systems, mostly I assume to avoid paying licensing fees to Unity / Unreal. Imagine if they all pooled their resources and knowhow into making one stable, insanely-powerful, insanely-well-funded engine with limitless creative possibilities.
Starfield looks like a game from 10 years ago. Shitty character animations and weird-looking ‘people’. CDPR are, imo, making the smart decision moving over to Unreal for future games. It works, it looks fantastic, it’s very stable. More money and resources to put into the actual process of game dev rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions
That’s pretty much Starfield in a nutshell, Skyrim in space. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fun game but it’s basically reskinned Skyrim with a few new systems bolted on. I’m also noticing some reused assets from Fallout, pretty sure the noise the scanner makes when opening is the same as opening the PipBoy.
I went from a Samsung s9 to a Pixel 7a this year.
At first I thought I’d made a big mistake; egregious amounts of tracking in all apps, enabled and encouraged by google; no ability to customise the home screen which has a whopping 2/3rds taken up by useless, unremovable widgets. Wtf is this shit?!
However, now I’ve had it a few months and customised it to suit my needs I’m very happy with it, especially for the price. I installed a custom launcher (fixed home screen woes), and installed DuckDuckGo browser which has an inbuilt tracking blocker for all installed apps and the launcher (using Nova, I know, I know, I should be using grapheneOS bla bla bla but it suits my needs and tracking is blocked).
I’ve been playing Control on and off since 2019… I finally completed it this week.
There was always something that halted my progress… Frustration with the map, boredom with progression, unfixable crashing. Decided to give it one more go on a new gpu and finally it clicked :)
Now I’m doing all the awesome post game content.