Getting kind of “You maniacs, you blew it up!”-vibes from that… 
2 Likes
Yes. I thought about quoting it but the video is better
5 Likes
I dunno…I think for me any game that tries to go for realism, and then flood the ui with Text and micro details…you start to loose me. I think all the UI screens in this game are just horrible. Switching to UI screen every time I ran out of ammo and switch weapons was painful…though apparently you can slot them for quick change…will look at this…
BUT NPC…look crap. Dated. To me the look the same as a game 10 years a go…and that probably comes from trying to have real people.
The AI is…DUMB…I stood behind one, shot it 5 times in the head point blank…it didn’t react lol. Then it ran away started firing at my companion i circled around was shooting it while it ignore me…while it tried to line up a shot to shoot companion…no shooting at…lining up.
Haven’t done enough story yet…ship battle with first mission to board ship…boarding cool…rest dumb. Don’t like ship battle. Maybe will once better ship.
I dunno…still not feelin it…not giving up on it yet though.
3 Likes
So far, I have focused on side quests…so many, I am confused, lol. The only thing I really dislike is the map system in the towns. Planet map I am fine with. The pain is eased by fast travel. But I am currently looking for all the stat boosting magazines.
Yes you can set weapons, aid etc…to a quick select ring on the d-pad.
Typical Bethesda physics are on full display. Set canned goods on a shelf in my house and they fell thru the first time I left and returned but are stable now. Exactly the same as Skyrim yet it never happened to me in Fallout 4.
Yes weird NPC behavior which I sometimes find hilarious.
Honestly, Bethesda must not have time to rebuild whatever their games are built on so bloopers all seems very Skyrimish.
I too find space fighting cumbersome but actually more realistic. I have not yet upgraded my ship because I am torn between buying a ship and paying college tuition for a girl in Homestead 
I am enjoying it. After playing bug-filled NMS for 7 years, I don’t demand perfection. Gave up on it a long time ago 
Taking the Homestead tour
Feeling a connection to the past
It is also good to know you can place your suit on the quick menu. I have already stepped out of my ship without it on…twice. 
3 Likes
I now have 3 ships - find an enemy ship landed on the ground, kill the crew, sit in the pilot’s seat, and it’s yours. Unfortunately, if you want to sell them, they have to be registered to you - and that costs nearly as much as the ship is worth.
I would have had four - I captured a really big Ecliptic ship, but it was too high level, and I couldn’t pilot it. I had to let it go.
One of my gripes with Mass Effect was that planetary exploration was too limited. Starfield’s procedural generation solves that one quite neatly. Exploration is limited to a six kilometer square around your landing site - but if you take off and land again, you find that there are a near-infinite number of procedurally generated six kilometer squares on every planet. You could spend the rest of your life just exploring one planet.
The Va’ruun are tough muthas, but they seem (so far) to have the best weapons and armour.
Some crafting components are unaccountably hard to find (e.g. cosmetic, spice). It also seems some important consumables (e.g. med kits) can’t be crafted at all.
I agree the graphics quality is variable at best. Backgrounds and scenery are, for the most part, detailed, and high resolution. NPC characters, however, are not*. I suspect that’s because animating a lot of NPCs in a photo-realistic way uses a lot of polygons, and NPC realism was the sacrifice we paid for console compatibility. Bethesda clearly looked at CD Projekt Red’s experience with Cyberpunk, and learned from it.
*Being objective about it, it’s not even the that NPCs are poorly drawn or rendered. The bodies, clothing, and movements are very crisp and detailed. It’s their faces. There’s something wrong, something almost cartoon-like, about their faces. I find it very hard to put my finger on it - they just look subtly peculiar and unrealistic.
3 Likes
I find their eyes roll back into their head a lot.
I wish I had understood I could have more than one ship. I cleared out a Spacer ship while I was on the moon…I thought it was trading my original ship, not adding it to my fleet. 
And thanks for answering a question I had about planets…I wondered if there were more POIs at each landing…kinda overwhelming.
1 Like
Yes. If you depart from the mission-determined landing places, and choose your own landing spot, you’ll find yourself in a new six kilometer square, complete with POIs, NPCs, ships, traders, and battles. You can’t walk from one square to the next - you have to take off, and land again, to do that.
3 Likes
Nice! Right now I am trying to sell off the mountain of things I have hoarded without selling things I want to keep…like that green stuffed alien that will look so cute on my bed.
3 Likes
This.
I haven’t made it far enough to get a base or any of that, so crafting hasn’t really become a thing for me…got a bunch of pens books, cups though…so…there’s that.
One feature I liked in Fallout…especially with mods was the conveyers. I had a setup on my farm that when the npc attacked there bodies got turned into fertilizer lol
2 Likes
I just gained citizenship and paid 30k for a noisy apartment in The Well on New Atlantid. It is cozy. And noisy. Especially with Rick and Jake arguing right outside my door all night.
In case anyone wants to know what to expect before buying. It comes with just the basic kitchen and bathroom fixtures. I have started decorating.
1 Like
3 Likes
That could be the explanation! That’s also why we can recognise this emoji (^_^) as a positive emotion and these (-_-) and (o_o) as a negative.
Gamers used to talk about the Uncanny Valley, is that still a thing?
With Minecraft and Lara Croft 1 and Deus Ex 1 and Half Life 1, nobody complained about the character models and the simple AI. The better the toons look, the higher our expectations towards them and the likelihood that the onlooker’s brain uses “human” criteria to judge the characters.
We intuitively know how humans work (acceleration ranges of muscles, turn ranges of joints, etc.) and constantly try to guess where others will go or reach or look.
Since the joints of 3D models can move at any angle at any acceleration, an animator cannot manually marionette them perfectly according to human constraints. If a computer character just deviates one millimetre from the norm, it’s painful to watch for us, but we don’t consciously know why.
If characters look like their muscles/joints are either stiff or overextended, and their eyes roll back, we associate that with pain, deceit, or illness. If a character looks very human but is not motion captured, the brain puts it in the “walking corpse!” category and we shy back. 
Similarly if their eyes don’t focus or don’t dart to follow movement, we assume they are blind, and if they don’t react to gunshot noises, we assume they are deaf, and so on.
E.g. the game Control has great characters that look up when you pass – and none of them have tongues. Everything’s perfect until they start speaking, but at first you don’t realise why it looks painful.
4 Likes
It is. You’re looking at it. 
All in all, it sounds a bit like Starfield has become what Mass Effect: Andromeda was planned to be, but Bethesda gave its devs enough time to come up with decent procgen. But both Bioware and Bethesda are really starting to suffer from not taking the time and money to come up with a new engine. Or just switch to a 3rd-party one. It’s understandable, considering how much legacy code and probably development processes are connected to those engines, but at some point they’ll need to do something.
I feel like we’re reverting in time to the early 90ies, where the general credo was “RPGs don’t need good graphics”. Which I kind of agree with, but then photorealism really isn’t a great idea. Lots of abstracted art styles out there that can effortlessly carry an immersive RPG without requiring the insane budget…
Why exactly do you need a dinky apartment if you have a big honking spaceship?
2 Likes
I have to say, I actually like The Well. It reminds me of where I grew up. Of course, I don’t live like that now - I moved on, and up… still, much of it feels comfortable and familiar.
1 Like
The Well is cozy. Shops close by. More compact than above ground.
At this point though, I really need a map. Time for pencil and paper.
I cannot even remember where the house is that I got on loan from the bank. It is super nice but I do not yet have enough materials for a house of that size.
This not having a standard flat map, is making things difficult for me. Fast travel is great, if I can remember how to make it work. Even if I remember how to bring up the map we do have, it does not show my house in The Well. I have had to memorize the walk there. Take the NAT to the MAST platform. Hang a right to the lift at the end of the platform. Hang a right at the Med building. Take the next right and climb the stairs. Apt door dead ahead.
It’s the one thing I would really criticise about the game. Most of the critique I’ve seen is just whinging about standard Bethesda quirkiness - which I actually find quite endearing and familiar. But the lack of indoor maps is genuinely a PITA.
2 Likes
I do not mind the galactic map and bringing up systems then planets to look for target areas but, not having a city map while on the ground is just not working. It makes the fast travel so many button presses away, the term ‘fast’ is negated. It is just ‘travel’ by another means. I usually end up running there.
I too do not mind Bethesda weirdness. I get a laugh out of it most the time, except when Sarah steps repeatedly in front of me while taking down pirates. “Ouch! That hurts!” she says as I riddle her shoulder with laser fire…again.
2 Likes
Thats what Andromeda was supposed to be until EA got nervous, fired creative director and had someone come in and stitch a game together from the parts within a yer.
Crazy to think Mass Effect Andromeda were going to do exactly what starfield did but just were never allowed to go there long enough to figure it out. Proc Gen assisted planet exploration.
Very tempted to buy this, it feels kinda like I’m missing out on tradition and rite of passage by not playing a Bethesda game during its buggy launch. I’m just very broke right now and dead space finally went on sale (hearing good things about this remake)
A question about the 6km proc gen landing sites.
Are they truly random seeds RNG style like an old SCUMM dungeon generator? Or can you find a really good proc genned landing site and tell people about it? Really hoping for the latter cos that’s one of NMS’s best features. Sharing what you’ve found and directing others to the bounty.
You got rimworld in your fallout? Nice!
I believe thats going to be explained in Alan Wake 2… Since Control explained a lot about Alan Wake XD It’s a very important plot element, the lack of tongues… 
edit:
Yeah I just bought it… Cancelled my weekend plans XD They understood… *accidnetally boots up star citizen *
2 Likes
No, they’re not random - they’re the same every time you visit them. I have read that the seed is the pixel address on the planetary map - every pixel generates a new map square - but I can’t swear to that. I do know that If you have visited a procedural square, and identified (visited, surveyed) a POI there, that POI will afterwards show up on your planetary map, and you can land there again. However, since AFAIK they don’t have addresses, I don’t know how you could send somebody else to one. Your own discoveries only show up on your own map.
2 Likes
3 Likes