In 2016?

That was my impression trying it this year

Well if you think that the universe is dull then I suggest Starfield (I'm joking).

Although Starfield has more issues than one could possibly describe, it's the most fun I've had with a game this year.

The gameplay loop is fun and the combat is incredible.

That's my sense too. Starfield is clearly the worst of the Bethesda RPGs. But it's the first Bethesda RPG in 8 years, and nothing else scratches that itch. I loved it. Hopefully DLCs clean up the Outpost-building subgame, which is a mess.

The thing that was a huge let down was the fact that 95% of planets were just barren and procedural generated with the same outposts and the same layouts. It provided no incentive to explore, because there simply wasn't anything unique out there.

Yeah I love it.

My starfield experience has been great. The metagame with newgame+ doesnt interest me at all however.

It seems like crafting has gone downhill in terms of UX since Fallout4, but that would be easy for them to fix.

The fact that you can't scrap items like you could in Fallout 4 makes no sense to me. It just makes so many items useless.

Starfield is fun but it has no gravitas because they’ve taken anything with edge out of it (sex, nudity, drugs/junkies, extreme violence etc.) it feels like one of those bleh G rated Disney “horror” movies.

Does sex, nudity, drugs/junkies, extreme violence make a game better? Anyway I think there are more fundamental problems with the game.

I think so, especially when you’re trying to represent a sizable part of the known universe. It also severely restricts the stories you can tell.

Absolutely, it's more realistic.

Unless you like playing hello kitty :)

Yeah no, I think I can easily play a game without.

Compare the videos linked elsewhere in this thread, the CP scenes are just so much richer. The starfield ones feel really fake imo.

I'm speaking more in general, not as a comparison between cyberpunk 2077 and starfield, there are plenty of games that do not have dark themes, and I don't think that any of that is required to make a good game.

I think you're intentionally missing the point being made.

None of games without these elements feel real. Not everybody prefer polished Disney-like worlds, thank you very much.

I mean if you only play games that needs to feel real than you are really limiting yourself.

Todd was the one saying Starfield was going to be realistic.

Instead you're Buck Rogers

I have more than 200 games in my Steam library, I’m good, thank you.

Yeah and I imagine that all of them have sex, nudity, drugs/junkies, extreme violence in it otherwise they would be polished Disney-like worlds.

Yeah, that’s right. Do you have any other questions? It’s going to be a fun discussion with your desire to reduce everything to absurdity.

A man of his word but no I don't believe that.

Who cares?

You evidently ahah

Ok let’s play a game - whoever leaves the last comment wins. You didn’t win by using “reduce to absurdity”, maybe you’ll win now? Let’s find out.

Definitely not every game but a space rpg? It’s basically cutting out anything that humans genuinely find interesting on a primal level.

These two short videos compare two similar scenes in Starfield and Cyberpunk, the difference is astounding.

https://youtu.be/ws0ufhrgWJw

https://youtu.be/K4ADco41g9s

Seconded. I was hoping for a persistent multiplayer and modernized Freelancer 2 but i got a very pretty, but mile wide and inch deep game.

God what i would give for a modern reimagining of Freelancer 2...

That's also what I was hoping for, but yeah, NMS kinda just culminated into pastel drudgery. For some reason it just doesn't feel like there is either carrot or stick and I suppose the creative avenues offered don't really feel interesting to me in the context of the game. But maybe it'd be more interesting on creative mode or something similar. But the combat has always been really subpar, both in FPS and in-ship which would definitely be my forte.

It is only a spiritual successor, but have you been following Star Citizen?

Sca..ehm Star Citizen is such a weird subject. The game seem to be on a completely different timeline than any other game, so its hard to form an objective opinion on it. From one point of view it might look like vaporware on life support, but from another it might actually shape into solid game in a decade. We just have no real data to infer from, because no other game dev story comes close to SC.

I wish that game the best, and I so so wish for it to actually shape into something great, but at the same time I have given up all hope on it, and I still cant imagine investing a single dollar into it (I think they got more than enough money to make a solid game already).

To give you a little hope, I think it's hard to refute that the company is actually making the games at this point, it's not a secretive project and they have over 600 staff. There is so much information on it plus a very contentful Alpha game that thousands are playing. They recently announced that the singleplayer game was feature complete and showed off a lot of gameplay footage as well.

I wouldn't suggest people go sign up or anything because of that but as someone who has followed dev pretty closely, they look to be in the end phases for the singleplayer and probably like 50% into the open world game mechanics. I would bet on a singleplayer release in the next two years, and I would not place a bet on the open world because who knows. Their biggest risk is just running out if money and needing a publisher.

I backed it on day 1, refunded it three years later. Star Citizen by another developer would've been great, but i have zero faith in Roberts and co.

I think that's a bit unfair, they had barely put a team together by year three. They started from zero employees and had to put together a AAA studio from scratch, and kick off two massive games that had no fixed scope due to the crowdfunding goals. They have 600 employees or something right now, are feature complete on the single player and somewhat fixed scope on the open world. I am not a rabid fanboy, but credit where it is due, 10 years isn't unheard of even from established studios on known scope games, and they have two games plus all the overhead of open development.

I don’t even mind a grind, but this game just feels… pointless. Why am I here, why do I care? Something about an infinite loop in a simulation? May as well use the “it’s all a dream” card.

I did give it an honest try, and even enjoyed the first 30 hours or so. This was about a year ago, though I did buy the game at launch and promptly give up on it, like many others.

A true mile-wide-inch-deep game. Once that initial spark fizzles out the idea of picking the game up again is painful. Bit of a shame really, because the actual game parts do work well enough.

Just a long way of saying “I hate to say it, but I completely agree”

Agreed. New systems to the game tend to just be shallow window dressing. Settlement management is literally fetch quests, or kill X number of sentinels that are attacking. A vast portion of the game revolves around finding things and shooting mining beams at them. Valheim solved this beautifully, they turned boring resource gathering tasks into practically their own minigames - you can use the simple tree/ground physics to cause massive chain reactions that are super satisfying to watch.

NMS's planets are enormous and completely devoid of any content. They're just an endlessly repeating pattern of the same outposts, resources, etc. They couldn't even be bothered to add a map feature so you can see where you've been, probably to hide the fact that it's just a bunch of identical tiles. No landmarks, no biomes, no reason to venture past a 5 minute radius from your landing area because everything on the planet can be found everywhere.

So, like Starflight?

I've made several attempts, but I legit can't get past the first 2 hours of gameplay. Call me superficial, but the interface is just so messy. It's so disorganized and all over the place.