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Starfield early impressions
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Same impressions for me, and it's especially jarring when it's in space. One note: you can only teleport to a city if you've been there once. Otherwise it's just a matter of clicking on a few menu buttons.
This worked in skyrim because you still had to travel there in the first place and see stuff along the way, but nothing happens out in space so they just minimized the travel as much as they could to the point it's comical. Traversing a solar system and showing up at the embassy on a planet thousands of light years away takes the duration of a loading screen lol.
Same compartmentalization as fallout too. Open a door, loading screen, get loaded into a different scene and you can pretend there's still a bustling city outside and you just crossed the threshold, but there's nothing actually outside the building you loaded into, except the void. The space station mission was especially weird, you dock on the space station (press a button) and "enter" through your ship's docking door I guess (load a screen). Then inside the space station there are absolutely 0 windows anywhere, you can't see your ship, you can't see out in space, you can't see planet far away. Everything is its own compartment.
This worked in 2008 but in 2023 we've come to expect more precisely because games did that before, sometimes with half the budget.
Edit: also everyone is peppy and happy and super eager to talk to you, it's weird once you notice it. I guess they wanted to move away from the dystopian space tropes that are popular currently but like, I'm talking to a cashier. You shouldn't be this happy to see me lol
I walked on the moon for 5 minutes before getting out of there. It's the moon. In a video game. You've seen one spot you've seen them all. Also a travelling merchant was just taking a walk there for no reason it was super weird lol.
Edit2: One thing they did really well I guess (I stopped playing after 1 day because the game suddenly started consistently crashing in the capital city and I can't leave because of this lol) is to give you a feeling of wanting to see what's out there. The moon is obviously boring, but in space you can invent anything you want. I did want to go check out other planets and systems and see what they had in store for us, and it seems especially that the planet maps are huge.
Isn't that the case with TES as well?
Aren't there a bunch of megacorps doing what megacorps always do? And some space pirates doing space pirate things?
Depends on what TES you're talking about. In Morrowind most people are neutral towards the player and you have to gain their trust or bribe them if you want something from them. Some just hate the player for various reasons and some NPCs are just straight up racist/spiecist. Some refuse to talk to you if you have contraband in your inventory (like skooma or moon sugar). I don't know about the other games but I've heard that the "universally liked player" thing started with Skyrim.
probably, it's been a while since I played it. But it rings a bell now that you mention it.
Also likely, I go into my games blind. There's a weird faction that's essentially a mcguffin for all pirates, the Crimson Fleet (explained as a federation of pirates). Somehow it also strikes me as a hopeful take on space pirates, also note that not a dystopia doesn't have to mean a utopia π (but a game set in space communism might be cool!)