Starfield

[Lightwing]

Thoughts?

YouTube

[CS2x]

Thanks - I really enjoyed that.

Unlike many others, I loved No Man's Sky from the beginning (and even more now it has been patched), which this reminds me of a lot. I also liked Fallout 3...but am going to wait and see with this as some Bethesda tendencies and jankiness I'm not a fan of. The scale, depth and possibilities if this video are anything to go by seem immense, however.

[Lightwing]

I never played No Man's Sky at launch but the Day 1 launch day version of it seemed to get hyped up rage for no good reason. The game looked fine to me and filled with a lot of content.

Based on the preview of Starfield, I have mixed thoughts. The lore seems unoriginal, lacking in imagination. A cyberpunk city where anything goes is called Neon. Come on. There are literal space cowboys with Firefly TV show music. Everything looks bland. A lot of it is like more realistic looking No Man's Sky. Star Citizen clearly inspired a genre of the Do-Everything Space Sims.

On the other hand, it adds actual scripted NPCs with distinct personalities. Not sure how far they will go with stories but this is missing from NMSky. Squad 42 promised this kind of thing but is dead in the water. I also like how heavily they're leaning into evoking that feeling you had as a kid looking at astronomy books and documentaries. I imagine a lot of kids are going to get the Chronomark wristwatch and fondly remember how they jumped into this whole universe and pretended they were really in it.

[elmuerte]

Primary thought: it is a Bethesda game. It will start out buggy has hell and a lot of things will be bad or broken. I will experience this day one! The community will eventually release a shitload of mods to fix various things.
I'm a huge fan of Bethesda RPGs. I simply love their concept. "This is the main quest path. Ok, fine, see you in maybe 40 hours"
For me Bethesda never over promised and under delivered.
I played NMS when it was release, as it was enjoyable. I replayed NMS a couple of times in the past years after mayor updates were released. It became much better. NMS was mostly a mechanical game, the world itself was quite lacking in substance.
Cyberpunk I also played at release. The story missions were absolutely great. Everything else sucked. A huge world, which was effectively empty. I kinda of expected Cyberpunk to be like a Bethesda RPG, so I wandered off to explore. There is essentially nothing there.
No with Starfield and its huge number of planets. It will probably be mostly like NMS, you can explore sometimes there might be something interesting. The rest will probably just be resources. I do expect that most of the inhabited planets have various interesting places to explore which are not part of any larger story.

[CS2x]

Agree with you both on all points, elmuerte and Lightwing! I'm a bit of an evangelist to people who hate it when it comes to NMS (it's become a running joke with teenagers we've fostered...Robert playing that weird, totally boring space game) - but apart from the great feeling of discovery it fostered, the text and moments of "story" were at least really original, or fresh in being more seemingly inspired by 50s sci fi than the current dystopian emphasis. A lot of nice bits of totally strange dialog and visually striking, unique narrative-like reveal moments.

I agree with you Lightwing on this lore being pretty plain. You homing in on those examples makes it even clearer, and I'd certainly like something less derivative. But I also have a thing for their games, warts and all, as elmuerte said. There's a really lovely dense-yet-sprawling feel they do well. The last game that properly felt like that apart from their own works was Outcast.

The last game I played with genuinely imaginative lore was Death Stranding. I wish more things took risks like that. But for however much I loved the harder sci-fi take, I didn't really enjoy the actual gameplay much.

[Lightwing]

I think, to this day, that the most creative trade-space-sim universe is in Freelancer. The world feels empty, but the ingredients are there for a great space Sim.

[Double-J]

I've tried to get into No Man's Sky a couple times but each time I just sort of lose interest.

I have to go back and play more of Outer Wilds though because that really scratched an exploration itch for me, but the gpu in my rig at the time decided to crap out so now that I have a new rig I'll have to try it once more.

Anyways, I like Bethesda's offerings so I'd be interested to see how this turns out.

[XXStranger]

[Polaris]

All physical editions are not physical, whyyy

[XXStranger]

https://pcgamespotlight.com/starfiel...espite-rumours


https://www.videogamer.com/news/star...nt-have-discs/

[elmuerte]

Despite that, physical copies are often cheaper than the digital copies. Even though the physical is just digital.

[Lightwing]

They had to put pronouns into this. They had to. And of course mods that attempt to remove the pronouns have been banned and will be banned. Because pronouns are not a big deal. Unless you try to remove them from the game - in which case you should be destroyed.

Do not give these people your money.

Originally Posted by Polaris

Lightwing : My point is that what is usually referred to as "woke", "SJW", or if I have understood you correctly "Progressivists", is certainly not an in-group (people identifying themselves as a group), and maybe not even an out-group (other people defining them as a group).
As such, people who fit the description don't have that much in common, and aren't centralised, thus, they don't have a common agenda.

Sorry buddy, I couldn’t hear you. Could you repeat that a little louder?

[elmuerte]

Who made an official announcement? Hold on, I do not really care.

Do people who made all this noise (on either side) even play the games? Probably not.

I've put 27 hours in the game so far. So either I have not wandered into the Gay planet or Woke planet yet. Too busy killing space pirates and filling my inventory with crap I'm not going to use for the rest of the game, but might need to.

I did a quick search on nexusmods banning a mod like that. And absolutely nothing showed up except for the same references to a post on the steam community forums and various websites referring to those posts with added speculation.

[SpaceGuitarist]

Lightwing vs elmuerte? OOooh this is a debate I'd like to see.

[Lightwing]

You don't care, but the proponents of this do. The goal is to make undesired pronoun usage punishable by fines and/or jail (resistance punishable by death). It was made illegal in Canada and California (Senate Bill No. 219). In California, where this is all coming from the most, the Civil Rights Department (an official gov body) punished a company for this at $20,000.

You think these things in games are benign and unrelated, but I've seen enough noise from the people making these games, espousing constant pronoun/Progressive rage on Twitter and I'm not convinced. The writing's on the wall. I will not fund these people.

[elmuerte]

Originally Posted by SpaceGuitarist

Lightwing vs elmuerte? OOooh this is a debate I'd like to see.

Ha! You are going to be extremely disappointed. I don't know what debate you are expecting.

I haven't given any money to nexusmods, even though I have been using their service for years. If they are going to ban mods which remove the gay relationship options or pronoun (which I think are rather idiotic mods) is an incredibly idiotic move. But I haven't found any proof of that. Just people from the extreme sides, which didn't even own the game, making wild claims.

Not giving money to bethsoft because there are gay relations options or pronouns in Starfield. (TBH, I really don't even recall if there was a pronoun options during character creation) (And didn't the previous bethsoft RPG have gay romance options too?) Yeah, not going to happen. Unless they are forcing me down those paths, because if they do that, they are effectively ruining their 30 year long concept of creating a world where you can be/play what you feel like.

As for the "we won" idea of kicking out/excluding others... fuck that. There is absolute no sensible reason to do that.

[SpaceGuitarist]

Originally Posted by elmuerte

Ha! You are going to be extremely disappointed. I don't know what debate you are expecting.

* disappointed *

[Lightwing]

Yeah this debate is over, SGK. We’ve already moved on to counting our private minerals collection.

[RGaspar]

I got the game and tried it on release day, it works ok-ish for my hardware. I'll try to play it for real after I finish some other games, in a month or two.


Played Starfield until I reached the first mayor city and it's looking pretty good. Fallout 3 and Skyrim vibes, really enjoyed my first hour with it.

[johnnybrubacker]

I got it free with my recent GPU purchase. Doesn’t look too interesting to me but maybe will fire it up after finishing BG3. Looking forward to getting 40fps on my 4090

[elmuerte]

Haven't checked the FPSes... but it runs quite good on my (rather new) system.
Depending on how you play the game it could be quite slow to open up. i.e. in my case. I'm 50 hours in, just reached level 25, barely touched any main quest line. I have yet to do any serious ship or outpost building.

[Lightwing]

Originally Posted by elmuerte

Who made an official announcement? Hold on, I do not really care.

…

I did a quick search on nexusmods banning a mod like that. And absolutely nothing showed up except for the same references to a post on the steam community forums and various websites referring to those posts with added speculation.

Just to follow up on this: NexusMod banned the no-pronoun mods and made an official statement after people claimed, as you did, that there seemed to be no evidence of Starfield mod banning.

https://archive.ph/5BvqL

Edit: I guess a distinction can be made between banning and deleting, but it’s effectively the same thing.

[johnnybrubacker]

Originally Posted by elmuerte

Haven't checked the FPSes... but it runs quite good on my (rather new) system.
Depending on how you play the game it could be quite slow to open up. i.e. in my case. I'm 50 hours in, just reached level 25, barely touched any main quest line. I have yet to do any serious ship or outpost building.

I think there’s been a patch now but the performance for nvidia GPUs was pretty bad vs AMD (which the game was bundled with). Might be a while before I play it as Baldurs gate 3 itself is a very long game but hopefully everything major has been sorted out! Also kind of want to play this:

https://youtu.be/AuVyqnCtKnM?si=zTS4u_RaA4236Pdv

[Polaris]

Lightwing : NexusMods host whatever they want on their platforms, it's their house. I could see how the presence of such a mod could be considered a gratuitous attack, at the same time, I don't like anyone gatekeeping a game mod, and deciding that they should follow an agenda.

The person saying "we are winning" is as wrong as anyone else. I don't know them, but I'm pretty sure it's not hard finding people who while not being against the introduction of pronouns in game, would find that comment idiotic.

Originally Posted by johnnybrubacker

I got it free with my recent GPU purchase. Doesn’t look too interesting to me but maybe will fire it up after finishing BG3. Looking forward to getting 40fps on my 4090

Starfield, Diablo 4... How many games did that GPU come with ?

[Battler]

Originally Posted by Lightwing

You don't care, but the proponents of this do. The goal is to make undesired pronoun usage punishable by fines and/or jail (resistance punishable by death). It was made illegal in Canada and California (Senate Bill No. 219). In California, where this is all coming from the most, the Civil Rights Department (an official gov body) punished a company for this at $20,000.

You think these things in games are benign and unrelated, but I've seen enough noise from the people making these games, espousing constant pronoun/Progressive rage on Twitter and I'm not convinced. The writing's on the wall. I will not fund these people.

Last I checked, Twitter has been bought by the rather conservative Elon Musk and renamed to X, and pretty much all the progressives have fled it for Mastodon, where the most lunatic of them quickly found that Mastodon isn't going to have any of it.

Also, Senate Bill No. 219 of California is about elderly care facilities, and the stuff about Canada's bill has been wildly exaggerated. I would advise you to actually talk to someone from the other side - I also used to believe the same things before I've had people from the other side actually clarify things to me.

Don't get me wrong - I'm sick of identity politics and rainbow capitalism, but so are pretty much all the trans and non-binary people I talk to.

But I honestly don't like what either side is going - the Republicans' Project 2025 with the plan to imprison all LGBT people is outright frightening and is beginning to remind me of Nazi Germany.

- Polaris: The ironic thing is, it's capitalism with its "I have the right to do whatever I want on my private property" mentality that is allowing corporations like NexusMods to engage in such censorship.

Also, this whole Starfield pronouns situation gets even funnier - in the Japanese translation, they translated the pronoun choices literally, using the masculine plural pronoun "karera" for "they". Aside from the fact that third person pronouns are seldom used in Japanese so preferred first person pronoun would make more sense to ask, with "watashi" as the generic, non-gendered option, the "they" SNAFU just shows they have absolutely no idea what they are doing, or that singular they is a feature that only exists in English.

Not to mention that this brilliantly proves me right in that basing an ideology on the specificities of a specific language (in this case, English) and culture (in this case, American), is going to cause problems when adapting it to other languages and cultures. It's the very same colonialism that the same progressives claim to hate.