New Starfield free update added a ground vehicle

dinheiro@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 133 points –
53

Lmao, much of the reason rovers weren't included in the base game was it would take about 3 min to reach one end of the loaded map, before you have to return to your ship and click on another map marker in the UI.

That did not make for exciting exploration, but I guess they forgot about that

They didn't add exciting exploration in the first place so it makes sense they would drop the pretense

They didn’t add exploration

Fixd

Seriously, what is there to explore at all, in the first place? It's always an uneventful time-wasting jog to whatever point of interest you want to go. When said PoI is a dungeon (building with enemies to kill and loot), you can tell from the outside how the inside will be, 100% of the time. No unique loot, no unique quests, no unique anything

Scanning flora and fauna? What for? The slimmest exp gain, a "completed" thingy item that you can sell, it's one of the saddest attempts at padding. Besides, whatever drops you could get from them, you can buy straight from vendors.

If I want Lifeform Scanning Simulator I could just play No Man's Sky

To little too late. Starfield is a dead game.

I have a friend that in his own words likes boring games and Starfield was too boring for him.

I'm a huge fan of bethesda games (well, mainly TES and Fallout) and bloody hell did the hype die fast as i was playing that game. Normally bethesda games keep me playing for months, i take my time discover the fun little quests and hidden areas with lore. But Starfield? there's what, 2 decent quest lines, little to no meaningful lore (repainting death claws doesn't count, and you somehow managed to make space cowboys boring? impressive). And the only actually interesting faction is just straight up missing from the game, and not in a fun "Dwemer are all gone what happened to them" way, no, they're cultists who fucked off to do cultist shit and have no involvement in the story spare for that one guy who just goes "yea here's the thing you need bye". And then you go on to solve the big mystery of the universe with some half assed floating debri excuse for an important item.

And i know making NPCs is hard but why did you stop at 20? you picked space for your RPG game setting and then forgot to put people that are capable of a conversation in it?? i want to hear the stories a settler on a distant world has to say! but noooo because they have to be randomly generated and meeting the same person on multiple planets would ruin the "immersion" they failed to establish

sorry rant over

This would could've been so much more interesting, and so much more lived in if they hired more writers to write the goddamn lore so we can care about anything that happens in that world. Bethesda reheating the good ideas they had without understanding what made them good is just, infuriating. I wanted to love that game, but now it just makes me mad by how bland it is

My biggest gripe with the quests within Starfield is that everything feels absolutely pointless, every story, every quest, is completely isolated from everything else. I've never played a game that gave me such a strong feeling of "you're achieving absolutely nothing"

exactly! in Skyrim helping a little kid get revenge on a person who abused him gets you drafted into the murder guild, in Fallout:NV you follow a trail of a missing scientist and discover sentient plant life!

i remember so many little quests from those games because they turned out to be much bigger than i could ever imagine. But it takes courage to hide a chunk of your game behind a quest somebody could miss or even fail, courage that bethesda fucking misplaced somewhere and i doubt they're even bothering to look for it

it honestly feels refreshing to be able to miss content in games, playing Baldur's Gate 3, and then watching a gameplay of someone else playing it is thrilling, because look at all the things i never knew you could do, look at all the quests, npcs, items, i never saw. There's a whole full fledged companion character that if you're playing as the good guy, which is most player's first choice, you yeet off the cliff the first time you see her and that's it, she's gone! Recently I asked my friend who's been playing that game since launch "are there any other mimics in the game? I only discovered one spot with them" and he replied with "there are mimics in this game?"

argh and in Starfield all that mystery and wonder of discovery is stripped down for "convenience" of walking through a location and picking up 10 quests in a row titled "Help Bob, Help Sam, Help Biggus Dickus". Why would I bother playing that quest if you didn't bother to spend a whole 5 seconds to give it a unique name? Honestly it wouldn't even be an issue if there was enough meaningful quests to play through, but there's one quest that has any work put into it per faction so i guess i'll go do that

Not to mention that like 99% of Starfield depends on any sort of instant communication not existing. I don't even mean interplanetary, FTL communication, even cell phones and walkie talkies are completely missing from the game. I think the only time a character speaks to you via radio while you're on foot, is during that "mandatory stealth mission" in Neon with billionaire idiot.

Oh, a significant portion of the stories also rely on portable cameras not being a thing. You know, the thing that every cell phone has had for well over 10 years now? That went completely missing 200 years in the future. Photographs? Video recordings? You speak funny, spaceman.

I would love to get a code break down and see how Bethesda spaghetti recoded the Skyrim horse mechanic into a vehicle.

Why though, I'm having a hard time imagining this bringing much life into the game... Unless I can use it to drive around the big ass city map... No?

3 more...

Does it actually move faster than sprinting?

Unless they did a physics overhaul, not much faster. Collision physics in that game engine are really wonky, and good vehicles need good collision. Pardon the pun.

It's still Daggerfall under the hood right?

I think so, there have been extensive changes, like when the VATS animations were added. That's why I asked if there was a new change made to the game engine.

Technically it’s Morrowind under the hood as they scrapped Daggerfall’s XnGine and licensed NetImmerse/Gamebryo for TESIII which they’ve been maintaining ever since (currently called Creation Engine).

While I admire their commitment to improve the game, I spent about six hours with the Rev-8 last night. It gets stuck on things, even little tiny things far too often. Using it in the forest biomes, for example, feels like a hastle and made me want to just walk the entire time I was in that biome. You can definitely tell the game wasn't built with vehicles in mind. I do enjoy the game in small doses, though. Just not sure how I feel about this. Other than that, it does feel nice, it handles well (surprisingly) and when the game allows it, specifically in the more open areas, it is fun to drive.

So is your car the only car in the universe? As far as I recall the only form of local transportation has been that miniature train system on New Atlantis. If your own transport ships need to travel to an outpost 200 meters away, they go to space and back to get there.

There were several prop rovers on a number of locations, but they were just set dressing. This is obviously the only working rover in the universe

Sweet, can't wait to see what modders do with this as a template.

Based on past experience, first will probably be Thomas the Tank Engine

Joke's on you, this time it'll be the horse drawn carriage from the Skyrim intro.

"Hey, you. You're finally awake! You might as well go back to sleep; absolutely nothing interesting will happen in this game."

Complete with the convoy of imperial soldiers, Ulfric Stormcloak, and that thief over there

You know I'm kind of amazed that Starfield has a 10k (24hr peak) playerbase according to SteamDB. Comparatively speaking, it's doing better than other dumpster fires like halo infinite

I did not care for Starfield, but I would argue that it is not actually a “dumpster fire”, just kind of a mid game. Maybe even slightly better than mid.

Agreed. It's just very mediocre. Luma HDR mod is absolutely beautiful though, and I recommend it for anyone with a HDR monitor. It makes the game look absolutely stunning. It's basically the only reason I played it lol.

I'm inclined to disagree but perhaps I'm just jaded by prior entries built against that engine. With that said, it's pretty unique to starfield that curiosity is never rewarded in this supposedly vast universe.

The story was actually pretty interesting. The mechanics are... Decent. The game outside of the main quests? Don't even bother.

Oh and fuck settlements and shitty load screen space travel. I loaded up elite dangerous just to feel like I was actually in space for a minute.

I found some of the side stories to be a bit more compelling than the main one. the movement and action felt a little bit better than fo4.

The settlements thing is wild. How could they have you sink any time into that when the game pushes you repeatedly towards NG+?!

And I love how the highest difficulty just makes everything into a bullet sponge. Nothing besides that feels more difficult; enemies aren't more cunning, aggressive or accurate. Stealth and speech checks felt pretty much unchanged.

I think the ship combat and boarding could be spun off into a standalone mini-game. NMS is a clunky, goofy time but it's funny how it managed to get interplanetary travel down on day one.

Is this a meme or are people still playing starfield?

Right now, it's sitting at #153 on steam charts. It's still averaging some 6-7k players with peaks of 10k, so yes, people are playing. Less than half of what Skyrim is pulling and roughly half of what FO4 was pulling before the show premiered.

Oh boy, can't wait for modders to dress it up as various star wars speeders. I'm looking forward to play all the star wars mods but i refuse to pay full price for that thing

this is the biggest disappointment to me. the game wasn't good enough to justify all the crazy star wars mods that could have been. even lightsabers and speeders won't make this into a good game unfortunately