STARFIELD discussion

[snowbro]

Biggest disappointment in years.

 

[blaseblase]

Well, it's not "garbage", it's just confused, and perhaps a bit too ambitious. You gotta walk before you run, and I think this game might be where huge single player RPG's are headed, just with a better UI and path finding. The game itself is loaded with content and gives you bang for your buck, but it's the little issues that fuck it up. The architecture in the game for instance, is mind blowing. You've got so many gigantic areas that that beg for exploration and discovery, but there's something missing to drive you forward. Whether it's the bland writing, or just simply confusing the player with such a grand scope, guided by outdated mechanics that simply need an upgrade for a game as huge as this one is.

Somebody posted an "Honest Conference" vid, and one thing nailed it for me. Something like:

"I have a house in New Atlantis, and I still can't find it after 100 hours of gameplay"

That's the kind of shit that sunk it for me. I love big games, but you can't just plant me in a gigantic world, and go "have at it". It's a bit too realistic, where if you put me in a town or whatever, that I've never been to before, and then task me to find a specific house somewhere in it, with no hints, no guides, no nothing. I'd just walk around aimlessly and then give up. It's not that bad, but that's what this game feels like a lot of the time.

They don't have a city map with your house marked on it? That's a pretty big oversight.

 

[HereticBD]

They don't have a city map with your house marked on it? That's a pretty big oversight.

Not really(although it's just a comment on how big and confusing the environments are in this game). Thing is, you shouldn't need a map to navigate a hub world that you visit a million times throughout the game. In any other game like this, you get acclimated to the hub worlds fairly quickly, and can map out all the hot spots in your head within minutes. In this game, you practically need a tour guide to find all the shops and whatnot, even after being there multiple times, because the areas are just so big and confusing to navigate due to their sprawling area and verticality. Take a wrong stairwell, and you're lost. You could have the map marker like 30 feet away from you, and you can still easily get turned around and start going in circles trying to get to it, because the area is just not designed in an intuitive way, that naturally relays the path finding to your brain.

There's a technique to videogame mapping that makes that shit easy to relay to the player, that is just completely missing in this game. It's kind of like trying to familiarize yourself with an actual city in real life. It's like getting dropped off in New York City for the first time, and trying to find a house with nothing more to go on than "It's on John Street".