I get that, but to me it all feels like cookie cutter material. Maybe I’m not searching right, and maybe I haven’t discovered enough, but I can’t help but feel extremely whelmed.
I had high hopes for Outer Worlds and found it very disappointing. In fact if you took all the criticism currently being leveled at Starfield and aimed it at Outer Worlds it would make total sense to me.
Starfield, as is, is an amazing game. If you are a fan of any of the fallout games and you like space crap than you will love it. If you ever played and enjoyed the Wing Commander series you will LOVE it. I honestly want to see what games people who are complaining about it are comparing it to because it’s honestly really good and I do not understand the criticism and I have put a lot of hours into it now. They knocked it out of the park.
To give you an example, I just accepted a side quest from a bartender while in a new town on other business. They asked me to go pull some top shelf liqour from a derelict ship they knew about. Cool sounds like easy money and I am in.
I show up on site (one loading screen) and am immediately engaged in space combat by a decently large ship that was already at the derelict. The combat was fun, having put many hours and points into my ship dealing with a single enemy was no problem.
After docking (one loading screen) I find that the ship had already disgorged a crew of pirates so I was going to have to fight my way to the loot. Pretty standard dungeon so far. 20 seconds in and me and my companion realize something isn’t right; the lights have all cut out and we are now weightless. 30 seconds later we plop to the ground because it turns out the engines on this hulk are damaged and the power is alternating. Every 30 seconds, the whole time we are in it.
note I am 125 hours into Starfield and I have never seen this ship layout, never had a ship have power fluctuating like this.
i have to figure out the maze of this vessel, which has been designed so that parts of my way forward are only accessible during the periods of null gravity and darkness, to find a console to let me into the cargo area to get the loot for this bartender.
Oh at one point I find out that some of the crew of this vessel was smuggling illegal cargo which i can take, my ship conveniently has a smuggling area which gives me a CHANCE to evade detection and haul this stuff in, this is good RPG stuff right here. There are notes all over this ship, which is again of a unique design, talking about the crews last minutes, the event that caused the ship to take damage, messages to loved ones, etc.
Every time the ships power cuts out (every 30 seconds) the whole ship shakes and makes awful noise and all the items and bodies and whatever in the room rise up and start bouncing against the walls. When the power cuts back in everything plops back down satisfyingly. its a chaotic noisy mess and very atmospheric. When you fire a kinetic weapon in zero g you go flying backwards. I can invoke crazy powers I have earned to see enemies through walls and help figure out which way to go. You really feel like you are on this ship.
I finally clear the ship out and am now heading back (one loading screen). This one side quest of a side quest has taken more than an hour and was really fun and super immersive the entire time. Again I want to know what people are comparing this to to imagine that it’s somehow a fail for Bethesda. It’s a really fun, really well done space RPG. My hopes have been exceeded and I can’t wait to see what the modding community does.
In terms of exploration, it’s very similar to No Man’s Sky, another boring space game. Every planet has similar terrain, similar plants and animals, similar goals, and similar structures. The differences are ambient light shades, colors and patterns on the plants and animals, and clutter in the artificial areas. The player can go scan life forms and blast bad guys. That’s about it.
But I don’t see how it could be any other way. How else does a studio scale up a galaxy such that every one of the 1000-odd planets is its own unique, interesting, engaging snowflake of a setting without spending hundreds of employee-years on each one?
Maybe AI will be the answer, but I’m not holding my breath.
I get that, but to me it all feels like cookie cutter material. Maybe I’m not searching right, and maybe I haven’t discovered enough, but I can’t help but feel extremely whelmed.
Soooo, The Outer Worlds?
I had high hopes for Outer Worlds and found it very disappointing. In fact if you took all the criticism currently being leveled at Starfield and aimed it at Outer Worlds it would make total sense to me.
Starfield, as is, is an amazing game. If you are a fan of any of the fallout games and you like space crap than you will love it. If you ever played and enjoyed the Wing Commander series you will LOVE it. I honestly want to see what games people who are complaining about it are comparing it to because it’s honestly really good and I do not understand the criticism and I have put a lot of hours into it now. They knocked it out of the park.
To give you an example, I just accepted a side quest from a bartender while in a new town on other business. They asked me to go pull some top shelf liqour from a derelict ship they knew about. Cool sounds like easy money and I am in.
I show up on site (one loading screen) and am immediately engaged in space combat by a decently large ship that was already at the derelict. The combat was fun, having put many hours and points into my ship dealing with a single enemy was no problem.
After docking (one loading screen) I find that the ship had already disgorged a crew of pirates so I was going to have to fight my way to the loot. Pretty standard dungeon so far. 20 seconds in and me and my companion realize something isn’t right; the lights have all cut out and we are now weightless. 30 seconds later we plop to the ground because it turns out the engines on this hulk are damaged and the power is alternating. Every 30 seconds, the whole time we are in it.
note I am 125 hours into Starfield and I have never seen this ship layout, never had a ship have power fluctuating like this.
i have to figure out the maze of this vessel, which has been designed so that parts of my way forward are only accessible during the periods of null gravity and darkness, to find a console to let me into the cargo area to get the loot for this bartender.
Oh at one point I find out that some of the crew of this vessel was smuggling illegal cargo which i can take, my ship conveniently has a smuggling area which gives me a CHANCE to evade detection and haul this stuff in, this is good RPG stuff right here. There are notes all over this ship, which is again of a unique design, talking about the crews last minutes, the event that caused the ship to take damage, messages to loved ones, etc.
Every time the ships power cuts out (every 30 seconds) the whole ship shakes and makes awful noise and all the items and bodies and whatever in the room rise up and start bouncing against the walls. When the power cuts back in everything plops back down satisfyingly. its a chaotic noisy mess and very atmospheric. When you fire a kinetic weapon in zero g you go flying backwards. I can invoke crazy powers I have earned to see enemies through walls and help figure out which way to go. You really feel like you are on this ship.
I finally clear the ship out and am now heading back (one loading screen). This one side quest of a side quest has taken more than an hour and was really fun and super immersive the entire time. Again I want to know what people are comparing this to to imagine that it’s somehow a fail for Bethesda. It’s a really fun, really well done space RPG. My hopes have been exceeded and I can’t wait to see what the modding community does.
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In terms of exploration, it’s very similar to No Man’s Sky, another boring space game. Every planet has similar terrain, similar plants and animals, similar goals, and similar structures. The differences are ambient light shades, colors and patterns on the plants and animals, and clutter in the artificial areas. The player can go scan life forms and blast bad guys. That’s about it.
But I don’t see how it could be any other way. How else does a studio scale up a galaxy such that every one of the 1000-odd planets is its own unique, interesting, engaging snowflake of a setting without spending hundreds of employee-years on each one?
Maybe AI will be the answer, but I’m not holding my breath.