• ampersandrew@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    Did you play Starfield? It’s definitely got plenty of ideas. It just chickened out of some of them and wrote checks it couldn’t cash for others. (Also, I think you meant astronomy, not astrology.)

    • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      All the new ideas in Starfield fall into one of two categories:

      • The technology doesn’t exist to implement it.
      • The talent at Bethesda is incredibly ill-suited to implement it.

      The Bethesda response to fans saying their main storyline was trash was to make a game where the main storyline is the primary focus and draw of the game? That’s a bold move.

      The NG+ stuff is a cool idea, but again, Bethesda just fundamentally lacks the talent to implement it. You can’t hit what they were aiming for with a handful of gimmicks. I wouldn’t even trust the team behind New Vegas, or whoever writes at Larian, to do it justice.

      • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        I would absolutely trust Obsidian to handle the NG+ angle that Bethesda was aiming for, because they would have known that the right way to do it is to not let you do every faction’s quest line in the same playthrough.

        • BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          since when has obsidian ever had a game you can play after the ending?

          KOTOR you cant

          new vegas you cant (come on, even fo3 let you play after the ending)

          never finished outer worlds so im not sure on that

          • Gamma@beehaw.org
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            8 months ago

            FO3’s after-ending story play was added in a DLC, I remember one of the devs being surprised at how many people wanted to play in a post-story world

        • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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          8 months ago

          I don’t even mean I wouldn’t trust Obsidian. I mean I wouldn’t trust the specific team they had working on New Vegas, which was an absurdly stacked deck that they seemingly haven’t been able to re-create since.

          Films you can re-watch twice and have it be just as good the second time are rare. Bethesda wanted a film you could rewatch ten times while simultaneously larping as a cosmic god and trying to break everything you could.

          • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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            8 months ago

            But this isn’t a film. People replay systems-driven games all the time, because you can tweak the variables and make it feel new. RPGs have done this plenty of times. Interacting with a separate quest line that occasionally intersects with things you did in one of your previous timelines is something that there is absolutely a way to do, and Obsidian has made exactly that type of systems-driven RPG plenty of times.

            • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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              8 months ago

              if RPGs have done this plenty of times, then it’s not a new idea, and why are we talking about it in the context of the new ideas starfield had?

              people replay games for the gameplay. bethesda wanted a game you could replay for the story, and then have it still work as a story when the player deliberately sequence breaks everything because of their omniscience

              • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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                8 months ago

                The thing that Obsidian has done plenty of times is system-driven reputations. The thing that would be new is bending that into new playthroughs on NG+ that interact with your past playthroughs.

                • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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                  8 months ago

                  how would your reputation carry over when nobody in the universe knows who you are? it sounds like you’re just inventing a new thing you have to grind

                  • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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                    8 months ago

                    I don’t know how worth it is to try to explain my idea of what a hypothetical better version of Starfield is, but the short answer is:

                    • only let you do one faction quest per playthrough
                    • those factions’ quest lines already, in the real Starfield that exists today, intersect with one another
                    • change how different factions react to you and those other factions based on a system similar to the type of reputation system Obsidian has done before, not unlike Levine’s “Narrative Legos” video, but it doesn’t even have to be that advanced

                    It wouldn’t involve grinding. If I still haven’t articulated it well enough, don’t worry about it, because that game doesn’t exist anyway.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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          8 months ago

          Yeah Bethesda really needs to pay some attention to Japanese games before they get anywhere near making an NG+ mechanic.

          The whole point of such a game is that they’re so rich in detail that it’s impossible to do everything and see everything in one playthrough. How do you miss that?

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            Maybe they could clear up with another critique, if they introduce a solid NG+: That you can be the hero of everyone and a ruthless murderer, a thief and the guy who stops the thieves etc…

            To some degree, I don’t want them to limit the player freedom here, because it is a role-playing game. Maybe you are role-playing as infiltrating the murderer guild. They can’t know.

            But having no interaction between the factions at all, just makes the world feel less credible. Ideally, they pull off the BG3 and allow you to role-play an infiltration, while also punching you into the face, if your cover is blown.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      8 months ago

      All of the stories were like that in starfield. If I could sum it up it would be “jack of all trades, master of none”. Too much stuff crammed in and none of it fleshed out well enough.

      Base building was fun, until it was tedious because they only half automated the process.

      Ship building was fun, except you could only customize to a point.

      Exploration was fun, except they only made really 10ish buildings to just spawned them everywhere instead of generating custom ones (I fought at the same building at least 2 dozen times)

      With exploration, we want you to wander through giant spaces and planets, but give you no explorer or vehicle to use.

      We also want you to explore the galaxy fully immersed, but couldn’t solve the loading screen problem that yanks you out of the immersion.

      So so many cool ideas that you can tell the committee was just like “no, it’s not with finishing that, players will be fine with it”. The entire game feels like it was built by committee.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        8 months ago

        And despite all that, just you watch if it’s not going to be a cool game once the modders really start going.

        Exact same thing happened with Skyrim, full of promise and ideas, half-assed execution. And look at it now.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, I did mean astronomy. Stupid charlatans co-opting postfixes.

      I did not play Starfield; only watched some videos about it. Which is why I didn’t want to argue that it had no ideas, just that it’s overarching premise is incredibly mundane.

      But thinking about it now, I guess, even that is the case for their other games. Like, the actual Elder Scroll items are basically irrelevant. And ‘Fallout’ is just a generic postapocalyptic setting. Maybe it’s just that it’s a new series, so it hasn’t yet established an own identity, which gives the weak premise much more weight.

      Ultimately, they don’t want a strong premise, because it’s supposed to be sandbox-like. That’s what their fans want. But for answering why you should play specifically Starfield, when tons of space games exist which have done a better job at the space bits, it’s just not doing them any favors.