Starfield

[Dweller_Benthos]

OK, we all know it's coming, so ... plans?

Personally, I'm going to wait a month or two at least, in case the hype is once again much larger than the game itself. Might even wait longer considering the new expansion to Cyberpunk is coming in hot on it's tail as well. Though I might have to delay that to let mods update first since I'm running quite a few right now.

[PZ]

I did not know about Starfield - will look for it to see what it is all about.

You're running mods in Cyberpunk? If so, what kinds of mods?

[fragger]

Same here, Dweller. I take hype with a boulder-sized grain of salt. Anyway, I just recently got back into No Man's Sky (see there) and besides, this is Bethesda we're talking about I'm happy to wait, and I'd rather leave off until a few reliable verdicts are in. I have enough with re-getting the hang of NMS to keep me occupied for a while.

[Dweller_Benthos]

There are tons of mods for Cyberpunk, though a lot of them are, ahem, clothing related (as in lack thereof) or "body mods" or presets where let's just say the proportions are a bit skewed. But the mods I run are mostly QOL / bug fixes or additional content style. One I like a lot is called Fixer's hidden gems, which gives you a quest line of 190+ items that are hidden around the map, which usually give you money, XP and a bit of good loot like clothes or upgrades. You can find a lot of these on your own of course, but having an in game list of them to follow is a nice extension of the game. A couple others I run are chop shops where you can bring cars you've stolen, or "found" and sell them. Another is courier missions, which pay you to bring goods from one place to another, in a certain amount of time, both those are good for early game to get money, later on not so much when you have more money than you need. They also bring you all over the map to find places which also exposes missions and locations from the main game.

But yeah, Starfield is very anticipated, and like all anticipated games, especially Bethesda, I plan to wait a bit on it.

[fragger]

Here's a fairly good video from gameranx, concerning what is known about Starfield at this point. The game looks a million bucks in the promos - naturally - but whether that will translate into reality is of course anyone's guess. Ditto the gameplay.

The Bethesda folks are saying that Starfield is the most bug-free game they've ever made, which is rather big talk from them, but I guess we'll see.

I'm definitely interested in this, but I don't want to be one of those proverbial fools who rushes in. I'll still be waiting until the critiques are in before deciding whether or not to commit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wusQbTl7mfw&list=WL&index=1

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah people who've pre-ordered the deluxe edition get access tomorrow, so live streams everywhere will be playing it.

[Dweller_Benthos]

OK I saw enough on live streams last night, that I bought it. Wow that was a fast month or two, wasn't it? I should stop making predictions.

[PZ]

There are tons of mods for Cyberpunk, though a lot of them are, ahem, clothing related (as in lack thereof) or "body mods" or presets where let's just say the proportions are a bit skewed. But the mods I run are mostly QOL / bug fixes or additional content style. One I like a lot is called Fixer's hidden gems, which gives you a quest line of 190+ items that are hidden around the map, which usually give you money, XP and a bit of good loot like clothes or upgrades. You can find a lot of these on your own of course, but having an in game list of them to follow is a nice extension of the game. A couple others I run are chop shops where you can bring cars you've stolen, or "found" and sell them. Another is courier missions, which pay you to bring goods from one place to another, in a certain amount of time, both those are good for early game to get money, later on not so much when you have more money than you need. They also bring you all over the map to find places which also exposes missions and locations from the main game.

But yeah, Starfield is very anticipated, and like all anticipated games, especially Bethesda, I plan to wait a bit on it.

Thanks D_B 

[fragger]

I look forward to reading about your experiences, D_B. No Man's Sky has me well and truly immersed at present, but I know it won't last. I'll be looking for something new to get into after a while, other than my usual fallbacks of Civ V and FO4. Starfield might be the ticket.

I should stop making predictions.

That's probably sound general advice for all of us

[Dweller_Benthos]

First hour of gameplay stream:

(link expired)

From what I gather and have seen, it's Fallout/Skyrim only in space. First hour is about half filled with character creation and intro stuff so I didn't get far into it, but watching other people it's pretty involved. Several planets to go to, stuff to do, etc, and you can build some type of outposts and connect them together? Haven't seen much of that.

[fragger]

I get the impression that Starfield is a more of a return to Bethesda's heavily-leaning RPG games like Fallout 3 and New Vegas and less like Fallout 4, which was primarily a shooter with quasi-RPG elements. It appears that Starfield has much more of a branching storyline, where your actions and decisions will have distinct effects on how the story progresses, and of course which of multiple endings will ensue.

I'll have to watch that video later, my access speed is atrocious at the moment (I'm getting about 200 Kbps - Kilobits, that is  I can't even watch You Tube right now).

[Dweller_Benthos]

Dang Fragger that's too bad about the speed you're getting. I feel for you, I really do, I struggled with bad internet for so long it was extremely frustrating. In this day and age you really can't do without it, it should just be considered a utility like electricity and water and be done with it, but that will never happen, at least here in the states, as that would mean regulation and price control.

But anyway, if your internet ever comes back, second live stream that shows some actual game, and yeah, it's very RPG heavy though still has a bunch of shooter qualities to it.

(video expired)

The first part is me being weird and just wandering the mostly empty starting world, though I do find you can go quite far, I never did find the edge, so the planet side open areas are quite large. There are some extra places to find out there which surprised me, but that's just a lot of wandering around.

I get to space and engage in space combat at about an hour in, so yeah, I wandered around a mostly empty planet for an hour, but there you go. Space combat is a bit weird, mostly because the controls don't follow any of the "established norms" and is a bit more complex, mostly it started combat before I was done fiddling with the controls and had essentially turned off my shields and couldn't figure out how to turn them back on before I got attacked. But I got it figured out in the end, and actually watching the stream back while being able to pause and read what all the notices on screen are that I couldn't read at the time because I was, you know, fighting? made it more clear now.

So after a bit of trial and error I land on the planet at 1 hour 22 minutes and thus begins a long stretch of on foot combat. This is all pretty typical, shoot guys, loot, shoot guys, loot, there's also a lock picking mini game because why not, I fail the first one, which you always do, then figure it out later.

So back in space then travel to the main quest marker, sort loot and figure things out some more, the inventory system is a bit weird and takes some getting used to the way it's set up, but after a bit of fiddling, I find the main city to land at and then embark on the main quest, which is a bit of wandering around the city to find where I need to go and then follows a bunch of talking at about 2 hours and 45 minutes in. From there until the end of the stream at 4 hours 15 minutes is talking with people, getting minor quests, etc, and looking at the city which is pretty cool. You can upgrade your ship and buy other ones as well, seems some are more suited to different tasks, etc.

So, final assessment is I like the game, and can see it being something I'll play for quite a while.

[PZ]

The visuals are a bit reminiscent of the Fallout games but much more detailed (less cartoonish).

Should be interesting to follow the game.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah the new version of the engine has much higher detail in both texture and geometry, so it looks better than Fallout 4 generally, it's much higher quality. Some people are having trouble running it, getting the newest graphics drivers for your system is a must apparently. People are complaining of low frame rate but I haven't seen that, getting at least 50-60 FPS according to Steam for the most part. But I think beyond a decent GPU you also need a pretty good CPU, as both of them run pretty warm while playing.

So, I was first under the impression that you could only land on planets at the pre-determined areas that pop up on the planet map screen, but that is not the case, you can land pretty much anywhere on any planet, or so it seems. I've only tried it on the moon, when the mission was to dock with a space station orbiting the moon, and one of the dialog choices was something like, "I don't want to dock yet, I want to walk on the moon!", so I thought, can you really? As there were no marked landing sites on the moon, I opened the map screen and clicked a random spot and it marked it as a place to land, clicking anywhere else also popped up a landing site. Apparently, you can land and it will load pre-made areas and then use procedural generation to fill in the areas around, and you can walk for a good long time before something stops you I guess, I haven't seen what happens when you get to the edge, but apparently, if you move your ship from where you landed to where you are (not sure how to do that yet) you can then continue walking, so I guess it's theoretically possible to walk all the way around the planet like you can do in No Man's Sky if you're crazy enough and have that huge amount of free time to do so. Since I took almost an hour to walk one kilometer from the landing site on the starter planet, walking all the way around seems to be a gargantuan task that would take an enormous amount of time.

Another mission took me to a small planet to meet a person, you land quite a distance away and walk to the place they are staying, and talk to them. Once I was done, I scanned a few places nearby and with half a kilometer was a structure, so I walked there, it had nothing to do with the quest and as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with anything, it was just there to explore. Turns out it was an old research facility that was being looted by pirates, who you can then fight, gather loot and get some decent stuff from. It took the good part of an hour to run through, it wasn't a tiny little place, it was extensive. There were a bunch of icons like that with  a few kilometers of the area as well, so I'm guessing they are similar places to go explore. Another place I went was near a quest point was marked as a cave. Went there, explored a very large cave system that at the end had a closed area with a lock above my level to pick locks, so I couldn't get the final loot from it, I'll have to remember it's there and go back when my lock picking is higher.

But that's what you find, and that's on a couple small planets, and there are supposedly a thousand planets in the game, with I presume different conditions on the surface. I honestly think you'll never be able to explore everything in a reasonable amount of time, the game is huge. The two large cities I've been to have a ton of people in them, and a lot of them seem to have a side quest to do, some are simple and take 5-10 minutes, others seem to be extensive that will be something you can do throughout the rest of the game.

I'm going to be playing this game for a long time, I expect.

[fragger]

D_B, I watched the first video you posted. The game graphics look really good, much better than FO4's. Less cartoonish, like PZ said. Looks like a game I could really get into.

There is certainly a plethora of character-creating options, jeepers

I don't have time right now to watch the second video.  I'm leaving in a couple of hours to go visit some friends up in Queensland for a few days, so I'll be incommunicado for a bit.