My argument for why landing on the moon wasn’t boring is they actually got to pilot the ship, landing it safely on the surface. If the astronauts has a cut scene, they were suddenly safely landed, then could just fast travel home, having nothing to do on the surface would be far more apparent.
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I really can’t decide if I agree or not. Only had a chance to play 4 hours or so. My main impression so far is the menus are clunky and I hate how reliant travel is on the menu system. Doesn’t feel like I’m actually piloting anything
Axxi@lemmy.world 9 months ago
massive_bereavement@kbin.social 9 months ago
"We choose to go to the Moon in this game and do the other things, not because they are easy, but to watch the cutscene"
FrankFrankson@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The person that made FallUI (a solid UI mod for Fallout 4 that fixes inventory management amd other stuff) released a mid for Starfield’s inventory last night.
BaroqueInMind@kbin.social 9 months ago
200 million dollar budget, as large as a summer blockbuster film, yet a dude with his free time fixed an issue that was the devs responsibility. Remind me why this game is $70?
c0c0c0@lemmy.world 9 months ago
UI elements are usually designed to work on the lowest common denominator. Small screens, struggling cpus, etc. Modders don’t care about any of that.
FrankFrankson@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This game runs like poop on anything but newer hardware so I highly doubt the crappy UI was developers being considerate of small screens and struggling CPUs and instead it’s probably because Bethesda games always have a shit inventory UI.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
This is the real answer
EvilMonkeySlayer@kbin.social 9 months ago
The people who're emotionally invested in something will almost always make something better than the developers themselves.
snooggums@kbin.social 9 months ago
Part of that is the ability to focus on improving on all of the work that already exists and the other part is being able to unilaterally make decisions while being emotionally invested.
Developers are often spending the majority of the time making sure whatever gameplay exists passes testing without breaking the overall compromise vision that is limited by time and money for deadlines. Companies don't allow enough time for polish and frequently have decisions made based on the added cost of labor and testing tha mods don't have since mods having bugs is an acceptable situation for people while a company putting out bugs is generally met with hostility. Different levels of standards and costs have a huge impact on why many mods vastly improve the game in ways that don't fit into the game development process.
Plus a lot of mods are focused on a specific part and don't appeal to the playerbase as a whole.
thesprongler@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Do Nexus mods disable steam achievements, or is there a mod that prevents that? I’m a filthy achievement hunter and at least for my first playthrough I want to grab as many as I can. But I don’t consider mods like this to be cheating.
Osa-Eris-Xero512@kbin.social 9 months ago
There's a mod which reenables achievements
thesprongler@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Thanks! I checked the other day and couldn’t find it.
JJROKCZ@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yea that’s my main problem so far, I don’t understand how NMS and space engineers both allow seamless travel from space to atmosphere but this major studio game forces me to open up the map and select land. Hopefully a mod fixes it because this is pretty atrocious for $70
Skiptrace@lemmy.one 9 months ago
It’s an engine limitation. The Engine that Bethesda holds onto with an iron fist is what hampers their games.
However, the opposite side of the coin is, that it makes them super easy to modify, so people can make their own additions. Because Starfield is using the same engine as Skyrim and Fallout 4.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I don’t know if a better, modded flight system would be possible really. That looks like something so ingrained into the foundation of Starfield it would have had to be changed during production
c0c0c0@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is why I cut them slack. I’d rather have the clunky mechanics than lose the vibrant modding platform.
Dax87@forum.stellarcastle.net 9 months ago
I haven’t played NMS, but watched a lot of videos regarding simulating planets, atmosphere (and transitioning to-from space) around the time it was hyped, and assumed that’s what NMS is doing. Which is (maybe? I haven’t played) why you can walk around the whole planet, and take off and turn around and see that same planet from space without loading, etc.
NMS as I understand it is a simulation first, sandbox second.
Starfield sounds like Spacerim if anything.
nico@lepoulsdumonde.com 9 months ago
@JJROKCZ @NOT_RICK @starfield this will never be modded
kromem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
4 hours is not enough time to get a sense of it.
I’m pretty blown away, while at the same time recognizing why the first 15 hours are disappointing a lot of people.
In Skyrim, you see on the map something interesting and then start heading there discovering things along the way.
In Fallout, maybe you see a tower of a building or a bridge.
In this game, everything is ‘hidden’ behind navigation screens.
It’s probably the largest distribution of open world content across an open world to date, but it feels very much like you are walking around with blinders on.
But a lot of the issues I had early on were with approaching it like it was a Skyrim or a Fallout, as a map to be fully explored, looking in every crate or looting every enemy, etc.
The entire paradigm of the game is different from anything I’ve played before.
Space is a backdrop for the establishment of a living RPG universe. It throws in radiant system stuff for small missions to pick up credits here and there if you like, and tons of handcrafted side quest distractions.
It’s a brilliant play by Bethesda particularly for Microsoft, as this is effectively a live service single player game, that subscribers to GamePass will continue to stay playing for months. The opportunities for additional content being worked into it is literally endless.
The problem is that it’s very hard to communicate that scale and scope in the first few hours. So you are running around a more linear tutorial phase without the mystery and enticing that a viewable open world delivers.
It’s pretty wild to see the shift from players of “this is disappointing” to “this is incredible” as the number of hours in the game increases.
I actually wonder in terms of the ratings what the actual playtime was for each review relative to the score.
It might not be a game for everyone, but it’s probably more of a game for everyone than any previous Bethesda RPG. It just takes a while to find that scope for any given player.
Some of the criticisms are ridiculous though. Like I saw a new piece that actually claimed navigating the universe would be more fun if it worked like Elite: Dangerous, which it said was immersive and quick with its FSD.
I can just imagine having a quest at Hutton Orbital (takes an hour and a half real time) and watching the reviews had they needed to actually leg it to the destination.
It is its own thing.
thesprongler@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I thought that fast-travel-via-menu was clunky too after 4 hours. Then I realized you don’t need to use the menus to fast travel, it’s just perhaps clunkier to do so from your cockpit. Aim at a planet, go into scan mode, then tap A and hold X (on controller). Here’s a video demoing it.
There are several less than intuitive features in the game that I’m slowing discovering by paying more attention to the prompts at the bottom of the screen. I may have missed a tooltip but it seems this is a very common one based on negative feedback.