davehtaylor

Dunno if I’d call it a stinker, but my excitement for Starfield waned very quickly as I played. 20 hours in, it was still fun. 30-40 hours, I’m like, eh. Past about 60 hours I was completely disillusioned with it. The perk system is a nightmare, leveling up gets really difficult really quickly. Making money (especially after they hid all the vendor chests), getting materials, etc. is a tedious slog. The UI/UX for ship building and settlement building is painful. Settlement building in general is a pointless waste of time and takes way too long to get the perks enough to make it even remotely worthwhile.

It also doesn’t help that there’s not a native version for the Xbox One, and Cloud Play is miserable. Constant disconnects, jitters, long load times, long wait times.

SPOILER BITS

The main quest is completely pointless. It has no effect on anything. Outside of Constellation and the other Starborn, no one even knows anything is happening. Your choices don’t have any impact on anything. Side with the Hunter? Side with the Emissary? Outside of the number of dupes you fight at the end, it literally doesn’t matter. And getting to the end does absolutely nothing. Now you have to start over with a shittier ship you can’t upgrade, some armor that’s mostly fine, and literally nothing else. Nothing’s different. Sure, after enough times through, silly things start happening at Constellation. But what else? It’s not worth it.

The faction quests are fun, but then again, have basically no bearing on anything.

The companions are disappointing: ostensibly you have two lovable rogues, a religious zealot, and the most Lawful Good character who will judge you for even the slightest non-Squeaky Clean choices you make, though they all end up being basically the same.

Otherwise, you just keep running the treadmill: get all 10 upgrades to your Space Shouts, ship, and armor? And then what? Just keep going. Do it again. And again. And you still don’t have enough perk points.

On second thought, maybe I would call it a stinker. So fucking disappointing. It had so much potential.

I’ve often described NMS as Minecraft in Space. The “story”, such as it is, is completely pointless and superfluous. You just fly around, mine minerals, build stuff, and that’s about it. And it wears thin really quickly.

(even BioWare’s old Mass Effect trilogy)

Yeah, at the beginning Fallout 4 was just Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it. And especially since the game really pushes you into the Minutemen faction, for a new player, the annoyance of constant settlement building and rescuing settlers and setting up new settlements completely overwhelms you and makes the game extremely frustrating. After my first playthrough I put it down and didn’t come back to it for over a year because it pissed me off so much. Realizing you could just ignore the Minutemen made the game so much better. And then when mods came to the consoles, it completely changed the game. Made it so much more enjoyable.

Like, yeah, there’s loads of YT channels now devoted to FO4 content, but only because mods allowed people to transcend how lackluster the game was at the beginning. The love of it now is despite Bethesda. And they definitely spend way too much time smelling their own farts thinking they hit the ball out of the park because of all that.

Spoilers Here

Yeah, I ended up feeling the same about Starfield as I did about NMS. A huge universe that’s wildly unrewarding in every way possible. And getting to the end of Starfield, the NG+ feels exactly like getting to the center of the galaxy in NMS. Completely pointless.

The main quest of Starfield had literally no impact on the world at large. And don’t get me wrong, that’s totally fine. As long as it has an impact on something. But it doesn’t. It all boils down to “no one can know about this” and where you stand on the issue, which in itself its meaningless because no matter where you stand, the outcome is exactly the same. You just run in circles and your choices have no effect on anything.

The side quests and faction quests are pretty good. But that’s about it. The ship building system is painful, the outpost building system is so fucking bad I don’t even know where to start, and it takes hours upon hours to go through levelling up, doing skill challenges, as well as research, to even get to a point where any of it is rewarding, and even then it isn’t actually rewarding. At least the settlement crafting in NMS felt like building a cool house and a rad looking planet. Whereas Starfield, settlements are just massive pain in the ass mines and manufacturers.

Of course you can! You decouple the hydrocoptic marzelvane, and insert it perpendicular to the sperving bearing

Why do you seem so invested in the fact that well-known bigots might not actually be bigots?

When people tell you who they are: believe them.

No one is throwing “fake” bigotry accusations at anyone. And if you believe they are, then you also are a bigot. Period.

Not false. He admitted it and was forced to out of Mozilla because of it. It was a massive scandal.

gone woke

The fact that you unironically use the phrase “gone woke” means discussion with you is pointless.

Enjoy being blocked.

Brendan Eich literally spent millions of dollars to push for the passage of Prop 8 in California, which would have banned same-sex marriage.

That’s the literal definition of a bigot.

Brave is malware made by a company run by a fucking bigot who used his millions to try to strip people of their human rights. They are not your friend

Using AI is feeding bullshit into a bullshit generator that’s handing back a synthesis of stolen art.

It’s a bullshit tool for hacks and grifters to pretend they’re “artists” so they can exploit another avenue for the grind.

This is not a debate. I don’t give a shit what your excuses are. Shout at a wall for all I care.

Environmental storytelling

This one is so often used to complement or enhance other forms of storytelling that pulling it out on its own seems so disingenuous in the OP. It can add so much richness to a story.

Companies like this really need to get back to hosting their own forums and stop relying on centralized third parties for everything.

Lost at the chess move

Oblivion is an amazing game that’s hampered by its horrendous level scaling. You basically have to run through the main quest as quickly as possible and try to keep yourself under level 5 or so, or it becomes absolutely impossible. After that, once the main quest is done, you can start really levelling and more fully enjoying things.

Morowind is an amazing game, but it’s incredibly unforgiving and takes dedication. It can take dozens of hours before you ever start feeling like you have a handle on it.

Content farms have been polluting the web for years, to the point that search engines are near totally unreliable. But this new wave of AI-powered content farms, and even worse, AI-driven content from once respected and trustworthy orgs, is going to make things exponentially worse