Starfield

[Uncus]

2 hours ago, Pseron Wyrd said:

A new video today:

 

Clap Trap gets a big brother 

[LeBurns]

On 4/5/2022 at 2:23 PM, Uncus said:

Clap Trap gets a big brother 

 

I just hope he doesn't become some kind of 'comic relief' character.  I would prefer something a little more serious this time around.  Course Emil is still doing the writing so I have little hope of anything interesting from the NPC's.

 

[Pseron Wyrd]

New video today:

 

[Uncus]

7 minutes ago, Pseron Wyrd said:

New video today:

 

thanks for the heads up

 

[Pseron Wyrd]

Starfield has been delayed.

 

[Uncus]

Not too happy about that but on the other hand I appreciate them taking the extra time to polish the games all shiny an bug free , by the way what is red fall missed that one I will have to look it up.

[Hana]

https://bethesda.net/en/game/redfall

 

Gotta say, I'm not surprised by the delay.

[Uncus]

Looks interesting but if its not single play then I’m out too old and slow to keep up these days.

[Pseron Wyrd]

The XBox Showcase 2022 Starfield gameplay reveal:

 

[alt3rn1ty]

Well its my favourite genre, it looks good, has good scope for exploration once the main story is done (1000 planets, its not quite No Man's Sky but then we dont know how diverse the biomes are going to be, or amount of Fauna etcetera and how it is all generated, will it be done well enough to hold the players interest like the forests of Oblivion) ..

.. But I'm still cautious, its Bethesda, which means it will be 2030 by the time the community has solved all of their problems to make it into a decent polished game.

The AI of alien life forms could be interesting, and flight mechanics / entering / leaving atmospheres. Combined with it being a bit distopian so there will more than likely be opportunistic attacks from space banditos out there, and having to craft your own weapons / ships into something that can help you hold your own.

The video showed 2 life forms on the moon of Kreet at the start, there was like a beetle and a crab like critter, but the scans which came up on the HUD say there is 0/0 Fauna, so thats probably something not quite working yet.

I think I will still hold out until a few years after release and see what happens. I'm still just too jaded by Bethesda's usual format, make it wow the crowd and cover up the edges, then promise fixing everything but only deliver on a tenth of that before we give it bigger textures and start promising our next title, never quite finishing this one off because the bean counters put a stop on further updates undermining the company rep' with the fans.

If they put half the dedication into this game as Hellogames has put into No Man's Sky, I might start looking at Bethesda as maybe turning into a decent company again. But then I see Todd Howard and just cant get past thinking bullshit artist  

Fingers crossed it turns into a very decent Space RPG with good longevity potential, but I still have my doubts Beth are the man for the trousers.

I wonder what game engine they are using, FrankenBrio ?

[Arthmoor]

56 minutes ago, alt3rn1ty said:

But I'm still cautious, its Bethesda, which means it will be 2030 by the time the community has solved all of their problems to make it into a decent polished game.

It may be time to reevaluate your stance on this. You're talking about the Bethesda of old, the one before the Microsoft merger. They've shown plenty of signs of improvement since that point and they've focused more on fixing stuff than they used to. Including updating some really old titles like Arena and Daggerfall because they somehow weren't the right versions on Steam, and updating Fallout 3 to get rid of the obsolete GFWL support hooks. And yes, even some bug fixes for Skyrim along the way.

Plus you already know that it's folly to think the modding community is full of miracle workers who can fix all things. Sure, we can rise to the occasion and fix a lot, but we're not the saviors people seem to think we are.

[smr1957]

Well, any new game, no matter how well designed, how well developed, and how well tested, is going to have some initial issues - and the more involved the game the greater the likelihood of there being bugs.  But as Arthmoor said, with the Microsoft merger, Bethesda would seem to be giving a greater emphasis to getting as much right at the outset as possible.  Still, one thing I know, is that trying to guess ahead of time how something will be is not very practical when there is nothing you can do about it anyway.

[alt3rn1ty]

37 minutes ago, Arthmoor said:

It may be time to reevaluate your stance on this. You're talking about the Bethesda of old, the one before the Microsoft merger. They've shown plenty of signs of improvement since that point and they've focused more on fixing stuff than they used to. Including updating some really old titles like Arena and Daggerfall because they somehow weren't the right versions on Steam, and updating Fallout 3 to get rid of the obsolete GFWL support hooks. And yes, even some bug fixes for Skyrim along the way.

Plus you already know that it's folly to think the modding community is full of miracle workers who can fix all things. Sure, we can rise to the occasion and fix a lot, but we're not the saviors people seem to think we are.

Yep I think you might be right, I am basing on "Bethesda of old", I didn't know all that you have mentioned since the Microsoft merger, I have been out of it too long and not noticed recent events.

The latter part though and the heroic communities abilities, methinks you are too modest, you are all miracle workers  

[DayDreamer]

55 minutes ago, Arthmoor said:

updating some really old titles like Arena and Daggerfall

Woah. If memory serves, they lost the source to Arena and Daggerfall. Could you be more specific about updates on Steam?

As I've mentioned in the past, I'd played a bit of Arena and Daggerfall back in the day (never finishing either because they belonged to my younger brother who traded them to friends for other games after he tired of them). Both were innovative for their time.

Although Arena was rather crude, it was still more "open world" than anything else I'd played. IIRC, it took me at least 6 tries to actually get out of the first dungeon. And then there I was, standing in an unknown town, having to ask everybody for help. I tried walking to the next town, but that proved impossible (at one time I'd persisted for at least 2 hours). Also, there were seemingly prostitutes.

In Daggerfall, I still remember the leaves brushing past my face on horseback, the first game I'd played with that level of realism. Much more detailed travel options than Skyrim, too.

I've yet to play Morrowind. On a nephew's machine visiting during Christmas, I'd played the opening escape from Oblivion, but wasn't enthused enough to buy the game myself at the time.

Playing Skyrim on the same nephew's machine 4 (or 5) years later, I was sufficiently interested to buy Skyrim -- and a PC to play it.

Think about the last time you were willing to spend over $1,200 just to play a particular game.... Then discover it had so many bugs, and crashed all the time.

I've already got No Man's Sky. I've already purchased the Valve Index (for Skyrim VR with disappointing results), and it is surprisingly well integrated with NMS.

Folks are already calling this "No Man's Skyrim".

[Arthmoor]

From my understanding, Arena and Daggerfall both had aftermarket patches up to a certain point and supposedly both games had been added to Steam using the original unpatched retail copies. I have no idea if this is true or not since my copies are on GoG and rumor has it those are fully patched versions.

It's kind of like how they apparently also uploaded the wrong asset set with Oblivion on GoG and you have outdated meshes as a result, while the Steam version has a different set, and in the end NEITHER of them is actually correct if you started from retail CDs and patches up to the last official versions of those from the old websites.

[Fenrus]

I just finished watching the gamplay video. It looks like it will be quite a good game. (I hope Beth puts the same effort into the Elderscrolls 6.)

[DayDreamer]

4 hours ago, Arthmoor said:

my copies are on GoG and rumor has it those are fully patched versions.

Aha! I'm not a GoG member, but I see them on Steam now. Perhaps we could have two more TES topic sections for them, where we could compare and discuss whether versions match from different download sites?

4 hours ago, Arthmoor said:

wrong asset set with Oblivion on GoG [...], while the Steam version has a different set [...]

I'd not seen a topic about the differences. How do we support UOP with different variants floating around?

(I'd bought Morrowind and Oblivion on Steam sale in 2012, but have not yet downloaded them. Thought I'd try them after all the Skyrim bugs were fixed and I'd actually finished playing it.)

[Arthmoor]

The differences were something Jon pointed out either on Discord or some other place. He's long since left the scene though. It was something we both confirmed to be the case. Almost 2000 meshes with definite differences in them when compared between retail vanilla and the GoG copy. With the GoG copy being meshes using an older version of the format. He thought it likely that those assets came out of an older dev branch of the game, but the .esm files all match perfectly so who knows what happened there.

As far as UOP, it's been generally assumed to be patching against the old retail DVDs everyone was using before Steam and GoG became a thing. There hasn't been a lot of call for doing anything about this problem though because it involves messing with so much stuff and apparently doesn't cause any real problems while playing either.

[XRAT]

On 6/13/2022 at 5:42 AM, Fenrus said:

I just finished watching the gamplay video. It looks like it will be quite a good game. (I hope Beth puts the same effort into the Elderscrolls 6.)

Me too and ditto but you just had to go mention the elephant in the room haha

[alt3rn1ty]

Aah thats a bummer, apparently Todd Howard has confirmed that you can not just fly down to anywhere on a planets surface like No Man's Sky ..

https://www.ign.com/articles/starfield-new-details-todd-howard-interview

"

Todd Howard has said that Starfield won't allow you to fly seamlessly from space to its 1,000 explorable planets, saying the feature is "really just not that important to the player" to justify the engineering work involved.

"People have asked, ‘Can you fly the ship straight down to the planet?’ No. We decided early in the project that the on-surface is one reality, and then when you’re in space it’s another reality."

"

really just not that important to the player .. hmm, kind of is, it may just seem like a little detail and is probably insurmountable for the game engine which is more than likely Bethesda's real issue here and not the players relaxed attitude to their inabilities, but when I heard Todd talking about landing anywhere on the planets surface, thats exactly what I imagined it would be.

Todd proving again to be a bullshit artist. "You can land into Atlantis .. but you also can land and explore .. anywhere on the planet .. its not just this planet .. its all the planets in the system" " and not just this system but over 100 systems"

The mans like a politician, only later you realise he didn't say you can fly from outer space directly down to anywhere on the planet seamlessly without transition, he makes the listener fill in the gaps but cant be held accountable for what we imagined 

So its Fallout in space, and the flight sim part is either planet side, or in space, after some kind of pre-rendered transition animation between the two, which is ok I suppose, just a bit naff.

Its another Frankenstein Game Brio / Creation engine, which I reckon will have all the usual mesh / texture / animation / scripting / dialogue / sound / lod issues (and lod further complicated this time by the distant transitions between crafted parts of a world and procedurally generated parts of a world in between the crafted parts). I can just about see Sheson and Zilav pulling their hair out and shouting "Not again!"

 

[Scythe Bearer]

Wow, you should post that tirade on reddit.  On reddit, they give lots of up-votes to people for belittling Todd Howard and bad mouthing Bethesda, especially when the denigration is based on nothing more that one persons petty opinion. 

 

[Arthmoor]

3 hours ago, alt3rn1ty said:

really just not that important to the player

As a potential player myself, I agree with him. Seamless landing in the style of No Man's Sky is something I consider a "nice to have", not a necessity. I already devote a lot of time to another space game that shares many qualities with how Starfield has been developed. It's called "Empyrion - Galactic Survival". It's playfield system is basically the same as what Todd says will happen when you attempt to land on a planet. There is a hard separation between planetside activity and orbital activity above. It works well enough and I've seen only a few people in that game's community complain about it, but it is what it is and it's apparently the more common way that space sims of all stripes handle planet landings.

This constant bashing of Bethesda because they aren't the perfect developer is getting old. You will never find this perfection.

[alt3rn1ty]

21 minutes ago, Arthmoor said:

You will never find this perfection.

Sadly, that is true.

I think I am turning into Victor Meldrew from One foot in the grave (UK Sitcom, grouchy old bugger)

[KoolHndLuke]

On 6/15/2022 at 1:09 PM, Arthmoor said:

This constant bashing of Bethesda because they aren't the perfect developer is getting old.

Agree. So long as they keep working with the modding community they created, I'll be satisfied. But both Beth and the community should remember that mods don't transform a subpar game into a good one. They customize and enhance something that was already pretty good- like Skyrim.

[smr1957]

46 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

Agree. So long as they keep working with the modding community they created, I'll be satisfied. But both Beth and the community should remember that mods don't transform a subpar game into a good one. They customize and enhance something that was already pretty good- like Skyrim.

Well put.  People do not mod games that they don't like or don't think are good - people only mod games that they really like and think are already good, and do so to make them even better.