Like seriously, let’s look at this: in Mass Effect the player is a high-profile military careerist who’s about to become space James Bond complete with the license to kill, starts hallucinating weird portents of doom after finding an inscrutable alien relic, gets their legal murder license, follows their hallucinations to find more weird alien shit, has to chose which of their crewmates dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with revelations about what’s going on and an elaborate multi-stage boss fight.
In Starfield the player is just some random asshole who’s decided to take up space mining for no clear reason, hallucinates something cool and neat after being told to grab the weird thing by their chortling coworkers, gets to join a country club of amateur astronomers who think those weird artifacts are kind of neat, goes on an adventure to look for more sort of neat artifacts and hallucinate some more, has to chose which of their fellow country club members dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with the revelation that everything going on is fucking stupid and pointless and there’s an elaborate multi-stage boss fight that’s buggy as absolute fuck.
Meanwhile the aesthetics are just Mass Effect blandness taken to a whole new level of blandless. If Mass Effect was oversanitized corporate slop Starfield has been further boiled into a completely flavorless mush. Same for the overall plot: Mass Effect had a generic eldritch horror plot that pivoted from being a climate change allegory to just being “so yeah turns out the eldritch robots are just really stupid, like absolute buffoons, and their whole mission is literal nonsense and even they know it but because they’re just big dummies they don’t know how to stop doing galactic genocide, whoopsy!” thanks to corporate meddling, but Starfield skips the pivot and goes straight to the vapid “so yeah it’s all just meaningless accumulation of pointless nothing, nothing’s going on here and there’s nothing at stake at all, just lobotomize yourself and join the race to accumulate meaningless accolades!” which uh, framed like that actually reads like a call for help from the writers.
I will continue to pat myself on the back for having zero inclinations to even try Starfield.
I gave it a pirate’s try because I like scifi and I have incredibly low standards when it comes to the slop I consume. It ran like absolute shit and crashed constantly, and the parts I did manage to get through were boring as fuck. Glad I didn’t pay for that shit.
Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed with every open world game that I’ve tried in the past decade. Had a friend get me to try Horizon Zero Dawn a couple years ago after talking it up for a long time and I was sort of enjoying it until I realized it’s just Far Cry with robot dinosaurs, I read the Wikipedia article to get the rest of the plot.
Disco Elysium also lays bare just how dogshit all other video game writing is.
I don’t think anything holds up to that standard unless you go all the way back to the original planescape. Even then, disco is better.
Its sad because Horizon could have been so much more. But no you’re not old and crotchety most modern open world games after far cry 3 suck
I felt the same. I thought the world building and the robot dinosaur miniboss stuff was neat but then I climbed a tower to reveal a new map segment and went “…Ah” and haven’t played it since. Seems like a neat setting but I’m really tired of that kind of design.
Really enjoyed Dave the Diver recently though.
assassins creed and far cry really just shoehorned that into everything. at least in assassins creed it felt sensible because youre a weird dude in an alien sissy hypno machine that turns you into a greek girl that can jump off skyscrapers and be fine
No HZD is just an incredibly mediocre game
Kenshi is pretty cool
the moment I saw the advertisements I was like “Why the fuck are they doing this instead of printing unlimited dollars with TES VI?” and I still don’t have an answer to that question.
I think Todd’s been wanting to do a space IP for years and figured it would be a sure fire hit. Tbh after finishing FO4 in like a week because I just ran out of stuff to do I assumed every subsequent game was on a downward slide from there.
doing a space game was a dream of todds for like 25 years. it was less about what was demanded and more what hes always wanted to do.
Oof. I guess I do feel a little bad for him then. : p
I don’t because he had 25 years to come up with a coherent idea but he never developed it past “the space game”
Brutal, but called for
Like you think he’d have written something down at some point, but no, he just jumped on the multiverse bandwagon and did fuck all with it
I do too. Either a) his quest to make his ultimate space game involved creating a corporation that grew so large that it neutered any creative vision he might have had for that very same game or b) his dream space game was just that bad all along. Neither one is a great realization.
There’s lots of baffling design decisions too. Like how the fuck do you make a elder scrolls in space type game and you don’t have any aliens at all? Like none whatsoever. This is your chance to really show your creativity with a character that people can make in your system and you make it exclusively humans. No aliens. Nothing really interesting at all. Like what were they thinking?
and you make it exclusively humans. No aliens
i haven’t played starfield at all. this true?
i’m more asking not becuase i think you’re lying but because i’m shocked like lol wtf?
There’s alien animals but nothing sapient, just different shapes for mud crab / mammoth Skyrim ai
Literally just space mudcrabs, not even interesting critters to shoot
In terms of near-human or above-human intelligence, I think the plot of the main quest line involves first contact, but in terms of player characters it is totally true that you can only be human, which was the main point.
Spoilers of the main plot to follow:
spoiler
The one arguably “alien” intelligence is some godlike entity that appears to you as human (looking like your PC specifically) and only in the special finale cutscene zone, never the actual game world. Even then you aren’t the first to meet them, several dozen other NPCs, all of which are disposable enemies, got there first. Everyone else is just human.
lol the game is just an endless pit of suck
theres an alien space glowy orb thing that may or may not be alien and may just be a technological thing that was made by humans in the future, but yeah anyone to interact with is human
uh did you forget about the No Man’s Sky style weird creatures on every planet that all feel basically the same?Just think: NMS was made by like 12 people over what, 6 or 7 years? And it still has more aesthetic variety than Starfield which was made by a studio of hundreds over the course of a decade. So all the limited animal parts in NMS were the work of maybe 1-3 people, while in Starfield the static copy/pasted designs were probably made by a team that’s larger than the entire Hello Games studio.
The original release of NMS had more visual variety and that’s the version everyone hated
OG No Man’s Sky was overhated to the extreme. It was empty, but the emptiness was part of how the original release was good. If it was marketed better, the “liminal space” feeling of the original version would have been a lot more popular.
Wild to me that starfield reuses aliens across planets. Especially insane that they’re treated as different species with different biologies and behaviors. Like, sure have some lore that this alien is like wild hogs in the americas where they were transported on ships and gone feral. But no instead there’s just this alien on three different planets at three different sizes, herding on one of them, and one is carnivorous. Just lazy
The space fascism quest line is built around that idea. The very creatively named “terrormorphs” are spread by the heat leeches on ships.
They signal this so loudly nobody can possibly be surprised by the “twist” after you learn the dictator in a box they have under the space capitol is using them as bio weapons again.
As soon as I met him it was like “Oh so it’s Basement Hitler behind these attacks, easy.”
And then when you find that out your only options are to lie to protect Basement Hitler or tell the council so they can have him quietly executed (or possibly put in a second, deeper basement). No option to tell the galaxy “Hey guys, the council has been keeping Hitler in the basement and he did 9/11!”
Yeah, I’m so glad i pirated that shit.
Basement Hitler would actually be an interesting quest line if handled by a writer with any interest in reactivity to player actions.
Under Bethesda as is it was hilariously lacking in anything but the most milquetoast liberal “creativity”
That’s unfair to NMS for many reasons, not the least of which being that it has human-like aliens and a ton more of both flora and fauna variety.
That’s correct, I just meant the little animal creatures in Starfield
easier to animate
They wanted to do colonial era global exploration but in space. If they included intelligent indigenous aliens then the colonising you do is literally the same as the settler states of the British empire era were doing. And people would genocide the natives.
You’re supposed to feel like Darwin or whatever, hopping around islands checking out the local wildlife and geology while documenting it for science. But without the whole genociding all the tribes you meet stuff. The result is directly caused by going for a specific aesthetic vibe but also sanitising it of all potentially awkward features due to wanting to avoid having literally any ideological point whatsoever.
Any fantasy / sci fi RPG that exclusively has humans as playable is a fundamental failure. That is my OFFICIAL STaNce as a published game developer
I actually really like the aesthetic of Mass Effect, particularly ME1, for the way that it looks like an early '90s sci-fi show with a limited budget.
It’s a fun mix of Star Trek and Star Wars.
Mass Effect is neoliberal Trek, the Citadel is literally a shopping mall in space. The peak of intergalactic sociopolitical development is a cosmic Walmart.
well there’s also the whole thing where it’s an antediluvian Walmart that warps the minds of those within it into hollowing out their societies and leaving them defenseless to the encroachment of soulless technology that’s literally made of condensed and corrupted life.
damn I wish they would have leaned more into the cosmic horror side of things with that series
The original Mass Effect had a stated visual design philosophy of “80s scifi movie” that sequels deviated from, but it’s still a better aesthetic than whatever the fuck “nasapunk” was supposed to be
There’s something to be said for how horribly naff and unappealing everyone’s outfits are in Mass Effect 1. Armour is ugly, civilian clothing is ugly, the scientist overalls are ugly. The latter two especially give off that TNG vibe- all those ugly onesies just draped over these regular looking people’s average physiques. The female armours all have boob plates but they’re unflattering non-sexy boob plates so they just look kinda awkwardly naked
Then you get to the second and third games and its giant tits and huge asses squeezed into vacuumsealed latex catsuits and big hunky dudes
They went from TNG season 1 to TNG season 2
the beard really adds a lot
I think “nasapunk” is fine (but I don’t like calling it that), and that Starfield was just poor execution.
I would say Prey aimed for a similar style and pulled it off. There were even actual space shuttles.
nasapunk
i prefer sovietwave myself
Wasn’t Prey more of an Art Deco but in space sort of vibe?
It was both, but the space-y stuff is what I’m talking about:
Ah, makes sense, I didn’t play it that much and I’m a huge slut for mid-20th century architecture so that was all I remembered
It’s so fucking weird to me that the entire storyline and gameplay mechanics are built around the RickenMorty multiverse nihilism, in which in your relationships with the factions and characters fundamentally do not matter. They’re all just set pieces for you to occasionally go ‘huh neat’ when you roll an interesting multiverse version of them before being tossed aside.
In order for ANYONE to care about the characters and universe enough to mod more content into this game, you would need to remove the mutliverse aspect, but that’s it, that’s what the game is all about and building towards.
But even with the multiverse being the focus there’s still no content to make doing the new game plus loops worthwhile. TWENTY FUCKING PROCGEN DUNGEONS
What the hell even is Starfield. How did this happen
Bethesda doesn’t use design docs
Not joking they literally just don’t
Imo you could do something interesting with the loops where questlines are short but complicated and you typically either get a pyrrhic victory or outright fail narratively due to limited knowledge going in. Then in future timelines you can go in with starborn bullshit and do your best to get the “good” endings. But yeah it’s pretty clear that the main plot is utterly detached from the entire rest of the game so it just comes off as weird and alienating.
Yeah, it would be possible to do something with it. They could also have like three big branching points in the story and have had the different versions you pop into be alternate worldstates that you the player didn’t pick.
Not to hand it to Rick and Morty, but at least that show has a POV cast of characters that are retained between the universe hopping that the viewers can have some investment in. Starfield somehow doesn’t even have that, it’s just the player.
But the player staying consistent the whole time also means that you actually can’t experience the different backstories content even though that seems like an obvious feature to have. WHAT IS STARFIELD
It’s funny that they still have the “essential NPCs are unkillable” issue even with the multiverse duplicating characters
I finished Mass Effect out of spite because I was so sick of the cliche’d evil robots of evil.
What really pissed me off is that they gave the Geth this unique and interesting psychology in Mass Effect 2 and then just completely threw it out the window in the sequel by making individuality their reward for helping the good guys, rather than something that Legion described as basically hell for them
Gross. i never played 3 and I’m increasingly glad of that,.
I still can’t belive how poorly optimized the game was, like I have a higher end rig and it was chugging to deliver worse graphics than Cyberpunk
Truly bonkers, yeah. Top end rigs just absolutely screaming to deliver 2013 graphics at 1080p60.
It was baffling. Starfield on Low got me barely 30fps while looking the same as Skyrim on Medium, on a computer that can run Skyrim on Ultra without missing a beat.
corporate nihilism summed up in one product
Forever baffled they made the 2 main political entities 2 different flavors of Space America
