Soyfield: ESG-compliance and bafflement

[rabidtictac]

Dude, I shit my pants in Elite Dangerous when I come out of cruising staring directly into a sun. Never mind anything else. It took me a hot minute to stop feeling like I was gonna fly directly into a star all the time.

What surprises me about Starfield is not how awful the game is, but how even the most hardcore bugthesda fan seems to finally have realized this fact.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

I imagine Elite has a better idea of what it wants to, and how to implement it within its limitation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure landing on shit in Elite is more of a side gig, if at all possible. Because at the end of a day this is primarily a game about flying a fucking spaceship.

Meanwhile Cuckfield bought into the Cuck Citizen hype that every AAA space sim game worth its salt has to be a fully-realized, immersive experience where you can (more or less) seemlessly land on any planetoid and walk around.

A better alternative for this to pan out within the confines of The Elder Cucks paradigm would've involved limiting the game to a single solar system. Then you could actually polish the ground shit.

[Kugelfisch]

I imagine Elite has a better idea of what it wants to, and how to implement it within its limitation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure landing on shit in Elite is more of a side gig, if at all possible. Because at the end of a day this is primarily a game about flying a fucking spaceship.

Starting with the Horizons update one could land on planets and moons. Completely seamlessly, by the way.

The games aren't even comparable in gameplay or genre. My point was more that space is absolutely terrifying and that it doesn't need much to make it a truly profound experience.
Jumping to the next system, something you do hundreds of times as a space trucker, remains an uneasy experience.

Getting blasted right in front of a bright as fuck C-class star or a monstrously huge, wavering red giant is always scary. A millisecond pulsar looks absolutely nuts. A black hole looks incomprehensible and eerie.

Messing up your in-system approach to a planet or moon and passing it by a few thousand km at 10% lightspeed feels like missing a lamp post by inches on a bike at high speed.

Entering a planetary ring for mining is beautiful. Everything is to scale and totally seamless. The illusion is damn near perfect.

There is fuckall on those planets. Hell, there's not much to do in the game at all, really. It's a shame. But you'll never feel more like actually traveling space.

Meanwhile, there is no space flight in Starfield.
System to system? Loading screen, cutscene. In system to another planet? Loading screen, cutscene. Land on a planet? Loading screen, cutscene.

Instead of a thousand planets, they shouldn't have had this facsimile of space flight at all. Starfield feels incredibly small. It feels tiny.
That's amazing to achieve, when any regular gas giant or one of the thousands of stars alone should feel uncomfortably massive on its own.
Starfield feels smaller than Oblivion.

Meanwhile Cuckfield bought into the Cuck Citizen hype that every AAA space sim game worth its salt has to be a fully-realized, immersive experience where you can (more or less) seemlessly land on any planetoid and walk around.

Which you can't do in Starfield.
Idiotically however they allow you to exit the miniature cities and walk around on the planet. So you can get a great look at this capital city that's smaller than the next town over that doesn't even have a bakery.

They should've ditched the idea of space flight entirely and just showed most of the cities as a sky box, like Mass Effect or Anor Londo in DS.

[Complicity]

That'd be fine but it only accounts for the woke shit, not why it's so boring.

That's because of the "bigger Failout 4" part.

[Singh'sSpot]

I was just thinking about this: what if some modder or a small team were to create a brand new game out of this, like Endreal but in space, maybe the same company can also make something from this, maybe.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Why would you make a brand new space game using Starfield as a base? That game doesn't get anything right about space.
Plus with Enderal and shit the development team knew their efforts would pay off 'cause Skyrim is - for better or worse - one of the most successful CRPGs of all time.

[Kugelfisch]

Starfield is apparently difficult to mod for. Bad practises of coding by Bethesda have made some things very difficult in previous games and it's supposedly much worse in Starfield.
Basically, too much shit is interconnected, changing somethung without fucking up five other things is nearly impossible.

More importantly, almost nobody likes Starfield. Some do for a while but just about nobody got to 100 hours into it without being totally over it. Including modders.
The world is just uninspiring and boring.

I bet even Bethesda won't do anything with it. They just have to release the DLC they already sold and then they will shove Starslop into a silent corner.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Starfield is apparently difficult to mod for. Bad practises of coding by Bethesda have made some things very difficult in previous games and it's supposedly much worse in Starfield.

For starters the engine was never meant for planet-hopping space adventures where you frolic on the surface like it's Minecraft.
The Creation Engine was probably fine at a time, but they kept slapping on band-aid solutions instead of admitting that the engine can't keep up with their aspirations.

FFS they can't even program shops right. Every trader inventory is a literal in-game chest, which they've sneakily noclipped beyond the boundary of the world, which usually prevents you from opening it and grabbing everything for yourself.

[Kugelfisch]

Well, it's still Gamebryo. This isn't a case like Source or the IW Engine (CoD) where they once were a Quake engine but have been modified and reworked so much they are now entirely different engines.

The Creation engine seriously is just fucking Gamebryo made to run on more modern systems on newer DirectX versions.
And Gamebryo itself was originally a shitty MMORPG engine. Morrowind's Vivec (the city) is a compartmentalised mess of buildings because an actual city that large would just crash the engine.

Skyrim really is the absolute extreme of what you can make in that engine. To make Starfield work - as poorly as it does - they had to work around the engine so much that trying to make a mod, have it load and not break fucking everything is really, really difficult.

And then why do that? Why go through the trouble when there's nothing appealing to the game. It doesn't have the game world, identity and lore that TES and Fallout have.

The reality is, there is just about nobody currently working hard on a mod for Starfield. They are back to Fallout and TES.

[rabidtictac]

What the fuck is a modder going to do with a space game where you can't actually explore space?