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Yeah it was odd to read that description being presented as an oddity - that sounds like most households I know. If you have a wife, kids, or roommate and don’t enjoy being holed up in your own room the whole time you play (and those sharing your house don’t just want to watch you game all night) then in house streaming is a huge boon.
I PC game, but most of my gaming is done on the couch, streamed onto my phone. I’ve been very tempted to buy a dedicated streaming device lately to avoid draining my phone battery while playing
I don’t even know if I agree with that tbh - I’ve yet to see anything that actually shows that AI voiceovers can replace human ones. Oh they can make realistic speech, but they can’t voice act. A voice actor isn’t just a person who reads a script in a monotone, they’re an actor.
AI will probably eventually get good enough to understand the context of the dialogue and add the appropriate inflections and such - but nothing today comes even close
You really don’t need any AI (assuming you mean LLMs like ChatGPT) to bot the shit out of Eve - the way the game fundamentally functions makes it dead simple to bot (it’s not like WoW where you have to deal with pathfinding or positioning for combat) - you could write a mining bot in a weekend, and it’s dead hard to catch because “normal” mining basically looks indistinguishable from botting
As someone who basically finished it (was putting off the final mission until I wrapped up the side quests, but then got bored and haven’t bothered to pick it back up to finish it) I think waiting for a sale is the best choice
For one thing, by then there will be mods, and this game desperately needs some mods to make it better, lots of QoL issues or half-assed gameplay that could be improved by mods
But it also is pretty much as you describe, it’s a fine game, but nothing to really get excited about. I had some fun with it, I also got bored of it pretty quickly. And for a game whose story is literallt built around the concept of Newgame+, there’s very little reason to actually do one, because there aren’t many different routes you can go - you can really only play as “Savior of the Galaxy”, every other playstyle you might try leaves you actively fighting against the game
If I picked it up for less than $40, id call it money well spent on an alright game that can kill a week or two of evenings, but for full price I’m left feeling a bit ripped off
I did actually enjoy starfield (it wasn’t amazing or anything, but I don’t regret my purchase), but I have to say, I hate this argument.
For one thing, being a Bethesda game doesn’t just immediately grant a pass for being bad in all the ways Bethesda games are generally always bad (bugs, bad facial animations, outdated mechanics, etc). Each game should be judged for how good of a game it is, not how good a " Bethesda game" it is.
Secondly, and more importantly, the fact is that this time around is especially bad simply because all the typical “Bethesda” issues are just starting to become more and more egregious as time goes on. The fact is that if you handed me this game and told me that it was a heavily modded copy of FO4 I’d 100% believe you. Nothing in this game really shows a meaningful step forward either in tech or gameplay from what we’ve seen before. The only real “new” thing is ship to ship combat, which is frankly very lackluster.
As for what people expected? Better. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it. They expected it to feel less clunky than FO4, they expected space travel mechanics that weren’t just glorified fast travel menus, and new gameplay that doesn’t just feel like the same shit Bethesda has been doing since Morrowind.
That being said, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, as is typical of Bethesda, and at least for me, that’s where most of the fun came in, just wandering around and doing side quests to explore more of the world. But once you’ve more or less explored the world, there’s not much left to draw you in. The gameplay itself certainly hasn’t been fun enough to make me seriously consider a newgame+ any time soon.
I don’t think it’d work all that well to be frank. You’d wind up with dozens of pages for each subject since each instance can have their own. You could probably come up with a distinct federated solution that might work though, where the servers are federated but the content is shared. Not sure how that would look in practice though, and how you could keep instances from diverging
Given that the switch version looks terrible even by Switch standard, I think they’re right to complain and refuse to buy it. And not everyone can just “invest in better hardware” the second an upgrade comes along. Let’s not forget that up until the Steam Deck, the switch was the gold standard for handheld gaming - mainly by virtue of being the only real option
the main quest isn’t where you have the best interactions.
No worries there, I’ve been focusing on faction quests and stuff like that for the most part, only occasionally dipping into the main quest for a few missions. One thing I feel like Bethesda did well with the writing of Starfield is that they finally made the main quest not world-saving urgent (at least not from the get-go). In practically every other bethesda game I can think of, the player starts off pretty much right from the start with a “Hurry! We need to do [Quest] before [Bad Thing] happens!”, which inevitably kills the immersion a bit when you go fuck around for a solid month just exploring and doing side-quests. But in Starfield it makes perfect sense that you’re not necessarily out there every single day chasing down artifacts, at the beginning of the game, they’re just a curiosity
Just off the top of my head
- No Man’s Sky
- Elite: Dangerous
- Star Citizen
- Space Engineers
- Kerbal Space Program
I’m sure there are others, but it’s really not as uncommon as you’re making it sound, especially for AAA titles. I’d also argue it’s disingenuous to say that No Man’s Sky has “very little else going for it”. It was shit at launch, but they’ve built a really solid game now.
Again (and I feel like I need to keep re-iterating this, because people on this site are so sensitive about any criticism to their favorite games) Starfield is fun. That just doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been better, and there’s nothing wrong with pointing out the areas we feel it fell short. Really, I think what Yahtzee Croshaw said about Tears of the Kingdom applies here - “If the game had these things, you wouldn’t be saying they didn’t matter”
That would probably help, but I find stealth builds to be really dull in Bethesda games. I do agree though that the mobility is great, I just wish there was zero-g combat (if there is, and I haven’t gotten there yet, no spoilers plz)
And yeah star citizen has the best flight model and ship combat mechanics imo - it’s a shame about the rest of the game… And to be fair there, there’s only so much you can do that with a flight model when it’s primarily going to be played on KBM or a game pad, but some games manage to do pretty damn well (Everspace comes to mind as a game with really excellent gamepad controls for spaceflight)
to be fair regarding what was promised, the vast majority of gamers arent out here reading every interview about the game ahead of time, so you can’t blame them for seeing a game that takes place in space, with stuff like ship building being one of its big selling points, and then blame them for expecting it to have features on par with the other big name space games from the last decade. Just because it’s not promised, doesn’t mean it’s not missed 🤷🏼♂️ like I said though, it’s really not a deal breaker, it just would have been a big selling point for me personally.
I definetely fall under that umbrella, I’ve got mods downloaded, but didn’t bother with the achievement mod. I downloaded my mods after the first mission though.
I’m enjoying starfield for sure, but I think it does have a fair few faults, though I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of them are subjective. For instance I can’t stand bullet sponge enemies and the bullet sponge is strong with starfield. Drives me crazy when I can literally empty an entire magazine of an auto shotgun pointblank into an enemies face, and have it only take them down to like 40% health lol. I grabbed a mod that helps with it, but its still pretty bad, even with that mod, and it breaks the balance a bit. Hoping that once proper mod support is in we get something better.
I also think the whole “spaceship” part of the game is pretty half-baked, I wasn’t expecting E:D levels of piloting immersion, but I’d have hoped for more than basically a series of menus and loading screens for interstellar travel. Additionally ship combat balancing is pretty rough, all the encounters I’ve done so far have felt comically easy, or ridiculously hard (The final mission of a certain UC Vanguard mission comes to mind…)
Overall though I’m definetely having a lot of fun though, and while there are bugs, it’s definetely one the least buggy Bethesda titles we’ve seen so far, and definetely less buggy (in my experience) than BG3
Be honest, do you actually live in the US? lol
I live in CA, literally entrenched in the history of “the old west” and I can honestly say not a single person I know has any cowboy memorabilia in their homes lol.
My dad had a little cast iron statue of a cowboy wrangling a bull on his desk at work growing up (a gift from a client) , but that is literally the only instance I can think of lol
And I also don’t know a single person who regularly watches cowboy movies, I can’t even remember the last time a cowboy movie was made in the US… I think that remake with Chris Pratt?
Yeah, for a Bethesda game, 25% of people using mods right out of the gate is frankly totally believable.
And while starfield isn’t perfect, people not finishing the first mission would hardly be an indictment against the game itself, who judges if a game is worth playing in the first mission? Usually - and especially in games like this - the first mission has practically nothing to do with the standard gameplay
I mean, not necessarily - they might be buying it on the switch because they want a “mobile” version and don’t own a steam deck.
But yeah, ultimately if you own a switch, you should know what to expect by now from anything that isn’t a first party Nintendo title (and even then it can be a bit hit or miss from a performance standpoint)
My wife and I have almost finished our playthrough in split screen, and I’ve done a act or so solo, so let me share my experience
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The performance can get a bit spotty - I’ve got a really nice rig, and admittedly I’m playing on max setting and 4k resolution, but we do have frame spikes in split screen that you don’t see in solo
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The way inventory is managed is kind of a pain, each player has their own inventory, comprised of their characters stuff, as well as whatever NPCs happen to be associated with that player, so it’s not as straightforward to manage as in Solo. Also if my wife has something in her camp chest, she has to get it herself, I can’t get it for her.
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The way dialogue is handled is a mess (though I’d argue this is partly a problem for solo mode too). If both players are in separate dialogues at the same time, then only half the audio actually gets played, and which half gets played is super inconsistent, to where neither player is really having a smooth experience. Additionally, which player is in control of a dialogues is whoever triggered it, which wouldn’t be so bad except you often wind up triggering them on accident
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Combat feels slightly slower/more boring, because you’re waiting for another person to make their turns, and that only gets worse if they’re playing a build that has lots of minions. I often find myself taking my phone out during combat because it gets boring waiting for them to do their turns.
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Which characters belong to which controllers gets mixed up all the time, and we’re always having to fix it when we first hop on
Those gripes aside it is a lot of fun, you just have to learn to deal with the quirks. But it’s pretty clear while playing that it was designed as a single player game, with couch coop tacked on top of that primary goal
The issue isn’t screen real estate, but processing power
When you do split screen, you’re basically having to render two games at once (a bunch of stuff can be “shared” like physics and such, but you still have to render two PoVs at the very least). This is helped slightly in split screen by the fact that you’re rendering a much smaller PoV for each player, with multi-monitor split screen, you lose that edge.
Basically it could totally be done, but only on pretty decent hardware and/or a really efficient game
Saying it doesn’t count if it’s not in-game feels pedantic - pretty sure you can’t buy shark cards inside GTA either
And the DLC does include functional items that affect gameplay
I’m not saying it’s an egregious example of it, but its not just cosmetic stuff, and it’s a lot more like a microtransaction than an actual DLC
Lol, would love to hear why on earth this is downvoted - guess we’re in full on reddit mode and just downvoting everything that isn’t exactly what I think lol