• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • I didn't mind the ads back in the day, like 10+ years ago. They were ads for cars, cleaning products, food and drink, movies, games, theme parks, shit like that. Regular products, wasn't really any super scummy stuff there. Now half the ads are scummy mobile games designed to cause a gambling addiction, impersonation frauds and scams, crypto doubling scams like it's fucking Runescape, and a whole bunch of other shit that is actively harmful or brainrotting. I don't mind seeing a funny little fox selling me laundry detergent, but the fart-piss-and-shit mobile ads are just genuinely revolting. If YouTube wants to make me watch ads, they should have some standards and vetting processes for those ads. Like, I still listen to the radio. I hardly notice the ads there because they aren't actively making me feel worse physically for having listened to them. Very rarely I'll watch regular TV and, again, don't really mind the ads there 90% of the time.

    And that's not even touching on what the creators actually get from the hours of my life I would end up watching ads. If you donate 2 bucks to your favorite creator or sub to their patreon or whatever, you've probably given them more money than they would get from your ad views in a year. It's not the loss of adblock revenue that's making so many creators take sponsorships, it's the lack of revenue in the first place.






  • Yup. People will always bring up some games like Witcher 3 as “better than Skyrim” and in terms of the roleplay elements within the story? Sure. Do the games have some similarities? Sure. They’re both open world RPGs in a medieval fantasy setting. But beyond that, the comparisons fall apart. Somebody just looking for any RPG experience might well prefer Witcher 3 over Skyrim, but somebody looking for another Skyrim experience is not gonna find it in Witcher 3. Same goes for comparisons for NMS and Starfield. Does NMS have seamless planetary flight and Starfield doesn’t? Absolutely. Can you scan plants and wildlife in both? Sure. But, again, beyond that the comparisons fall apart.



  • Starfield has made me very disappointed with the planet designs in NMS, unfortunately. Like, a lot of it boils down to “This planet has purple dirt, but this other planet over here has blue dirt and is cold!” and they’re always one biome only. In Starfield, one planet can have several different biomes realistically spread out (like snow/ice region on the polar caps, etc.), and it also has a bigger pool of structures to pull from. I last played No Man’s Sky a year or so ago, and it always felt like there were only a handful of structures that could generate on a planet.



  • I mean, they straight up said that 90% of planets will be empty.

    As far as spreading out the handcrafted content goes, in my 60 hours it’s been pretty good, but I also deliberately stick primarily to actual quests, only dipping into random exploration and proc-gen mission board quests like bounties and cargo delivery on occasion. I was initally worried that the handcrafted stuff would be limited to the three major cities, but there’s plenty of other towns and locations out there. I think there’s like three small towns just in the Sol system. It feels like every other system has one or two big handcrafted locations or questlines. I came across stuff like a resort town, a small assortment of settlers I had to negotiate a mutual defense pact for, an abandoned zero-g casino space station, a mercenary bar/motel with the absolute motherload of contraband (and a free ship), just to name a few.

    The side and faction quests also are almost entirely handcrafted locations and not just clearing out enemies in generic locations like half the stuff in FO4 was. All the proc-gen quests have been relegated to Mission Boards, so every quest you get from an NPC will be an actual quest, although I had to do one single proc-gen mission to join one of the factions.

    Also I’m surprised you saw that many game breaking bugs on streams, because it’s actually a very stable release. There’s some of the usual Creation Engine physics stuff, or an NPC might stand on a table or something, but I haven’t really encountered all that many bugs.


  • If you need a little more hope, I keep stumbling into cool and unique handcrafted locations and encounters all over the place, just doing side stuff, like, I just delivered two passengers and in doing so found two unique locations in the target star system. I originally feared it was mostly the three major cities getting the handcrafted stuff, but nope, there’s a ton of it out there.

    Yes, there’s a lot of loading screens, but, honestly, I hardly even realize they’re there because they are legitimately just like 2 seconds on PC.


  • Honestly, I just keep kinda having that sort of look. Like, recently I was in need of Titanium, but all of the planets I found that had some were extreme environments I am not equipped for, so I couldn’t collect much. But I did stumble onto an an abandoned ship that just happened to be loaded with the stuff! Now, the crew on that ship also all died of a mysterious illness shortly after picking up the ore, but, hey, I need to mod my weapons.

    I also may have genocided some dinosaurs for another resource I had a hard time getting.




  • Yeah, the story/stories and characters are the actual meat of the game. It’s not a space sim like Star Citizen or NMS, it’s an RPG first and foremost, really.

    Also, so far (~20 hours in) it’s way less bland than Fallout 4. It’s a way more of an RPG (I talked my way out of confrontations multiple times, sometimes even using my background and traits, when relevant). Sure, if you just keep landing on planets and going to the auto generated structures and scanning wildlife, it’s probably gonna be quite bland. But there’s way more actual content, way more actual quests that aren’t just clearing out bandits/raiders. The space sim-y stuff, that’s just there to sell the fantasy. Yes, you can be a bounty hunter or space trucker or whatever, but that content is of course going to be way more autogenerated, bland stuff. I’d recommend doing that stuff on the side, when you want a break from story heavy quests.

    But even clearing out raiders is often waymore fun in Starfield, especially when it’s in space. For example, I came across an abandoned zero-gravity casino space station that spacers (one of this games version of raiders and bandits) were in, while I was on my way to the space cowboy city, and that was a very fun fight.

    Another time, I was heading back to New Atlantis when I noticed a symbol for a ship in the same system. When I went to investigate, I first got into a dogfight with another ship, disabled their engine and borded them, then I noticed there was some kind of heavy freighter they were raiding, so I docked with that. On that ship, the engines were funky and as they were turning on and off the gravity was going, too, so I was fighting my way through a ship where the gravity was constantly fluctuating, which then also factored into small environmental puzzles, like waiting for the gravity to turn off to go up an elevator shaft. Eventually got to into the vault the space pirates were trying to get into, and although I couldn’t get all of it because I didn’t have a high enough lockpicking skill (the new lockpicking minigame is also kinda fun, ngl), but I did pick up some contraband. When I then finally actually went to New Atlantis, the contraband was caught by the scanners, I was arrested and then forcibly conscripted to go undercover into the Crimson Fleet (the space pirates), although I could’ve killed my way off the ship they brought me to if I wanted. Then the contact to get into the Crimson Fleet was actually the same person that gave the orders to attack that freighter I found! (There was an audiolog, because of course.) Sorry for going off on a tangent, I just felt like it would illustrate my point better than just saying “it good”

    I also probably have like 5 other quests in my quest log to go join some faction, some big factions, some small factions. And that’s without even going to the cyberpunk city.

    And so far I haven’t had to follow a dog for 20 minutes in search of a chainsmoker, so that’s already better than Fallout 4.


  • Even if you do go with realism, we’ve hit a point of diminishing returns. Most PS5 games just look like the best looking PS4 games, but in 4K. I’d rather developers start using the system resources for things that actually matter instead of realistically simulating every follicle of a characters ass hair. Like, give me better NPC AI, give me more interactive environments, give me denser crowds, more interconnected systems. Just something.