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Vidya Games Thread

God's Strongest Dragoon

Well-known member
Joined:  Mar 20, 2023
I can't believe Todd made Elite 3 but dogshit, and 28 years after Elite 3. And almost ten years after Elite 4. And like 15 years after the space sim boom of the 2000s.
For every conceivable explanation and objective analysis, this game by all comparisons should be instantly seen as trash. However despite all reasoning, this game is somehow very fun and I've seen several people absolutely mind broken by it because they will spend 10 minutes complaining about the game's inadequacies then begrudgingly admit that they're having fun while they stream it for another dozen hours. It doesn't even do anything super unique like some niche indie games. This game has absolutely no reason to do this to people, the Space Sim Boom ended a long time ago. Whenever someone dies during the development of their games, do they sacrifice their soul to empower the game they're working on with black magic?
 

Banana Hammock

Born to Sneed
Early Adopter
Joined:  Sep 9, 2022
High T Todd back with another instant classic.
 

Alchemyth

Well-known member
Joined:  Sep 17, 2022
New trailer for VTMB2 dropped.


Made by The Chinese Room, who's only real accolades are A machine for pigs and Dear Esther. I assume Paradox couldn't find anyone cheaper to pawn the game off to.
 

Punished Anime Discusser

Well-known member
Early Adopter
Joined:  Sep 12, 2022
I really enjoy how my shitbox 2017 GPU can max out Armored Core 6 and never drop below 60 on those fuckhueg maps with particle effects with physics going off in my face 24/7, but an empty bathroom, on minimum, in Starfield runs at 23 FPS.

edit: Ah sick, it's not even me having an old GPU, the game is just a fucked piece of shit for everyone. People with 4090s can't crack 60 fps on ultra.

I am about 5 minutes in to the mines segment, I'm literally stumbling over reused Fallout 76 assets, holy fuck.
 
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Seth

Well-known member
Fubuki's Best Friendo
Joined:  Feb 11, 2023
I'm probably going to wait until it goes on sale in the future before I buy it. It definitely feels like Bethesda bite off way more than they can chew. From what I've seen, the game isn't bad but it just feels woefully inadequate for its pricetag, especially when many of its features are compared to other games. The whole major point is that it tries to do a lot of different things that other games have done but it doesn't hit the mark, so it doesn't even feel like a "Jack of All Trades" but more of a "Barely Competent At Everything". The "Skyrim/Fallout in Space" is very applicable, if you were expecting that but with less freedom in exploration, you'll be fine. Quite a few streamers I've watched weren't really enjoying it but after like 5+ hours, something clicks and they enjoy it but they can't say why. It's that classic Bethesda feeling of "Why the fuck am I enjoying this shit? There should be no reason why I have 80+ hours into this game but I do." It's like the game is the definition of a guilty pleasure, where they know how much of the game is not up to par but it just works and they're hooked and having fun.

For the past two days, I've constantly had a stream of someone playing it in the background, so I've seen like 15+ people play it (both IRL and vtubers) and what I've gathered is this:
  • Exploration: Majority of the bad reviews are coming from the fact that there is no real exploration, as you fast travel from place to place. They don't even do the Jedi Survivor trick of making the ship's screen enter hyperspace while you can do whatever, it's just straight into a short cutscene. It's why this game listed SSD as a mandatory requirement under its specs. You go to a city/station, get a quest, you fast travel your ship to orbit around where you were, you fast travel to the orbit of where you need to go, and then you fast travel when landing. The whole concept of "seamless open world" is nonexistent. The whole Bethesda RPG feeling of going off into a random direction and finding some cool shit is dead in this game because when you land on a planet, they draw a big boundary of ~30min of walking and the only thing that really matters is what they set out for you in that specific direction. Instead of letting you run around a giant sandbox, you're now in a fishtank and you just get asked to move to different fishtanks in a room when you're done doing your tasks in that fishtank.
  • Environment: The whole "1000 planets" thing ended up just like everyone expected and the procedural generation isn't that unique. I've seen streamers run into the same location/facility that has the same layout and NPC placement on different planets. People have always complained about this with other procedurally generated space games like No Man's Sky but the problem for Starfield is that environmental storytelling has always been the one thing everyone praises Bethesda for despite their retardation in all other aspects of game development. What I mean by this, is that you could visit a cave or house in their games and the environmental storytelling is what grips you as you figure out what happened here. There was a sense of care players could feel from this stuff. Procedural generation of locations kills this as you'll see something and think "woah, that's cool" and then you see it like 6 more times. These first two points I listed are the two points everyone has always praised Bethesda for but for Starfield, they abandoned their two greatest strengths for mediocre replacements.
  • Gunplay: They weren't joking that the gunplay is the best in the series because from everything I've seen, it definitely is. It is a huge step forward compared to previous Fallout games. However in this case, having the "best gunplay ever in a Bethesda game" is like being the smartest kid on the short bus. If you don't play other FPS games, it will be fine. If you have played any other FPS that has come out in the past 10 years, you'll realize that they're still lightyears behind. This is just like how when Skyrim came out with its horribly outdated combat system. People casually accepted Skyrim's combat because the general Western audience doesn't play a lot of RPGs with better combat. The problem with Starfield is that shooters are one of the most prominent genres in Western gaming so the general Western audience has most likely played a game that has better combat to compare to.
  • Ships and Space Combat: One of the few positives I've seen is that people enjoy the customization of ship creation. However the major problem is that the ship custom builds only really serve a purpose of giving you stats like "bigger inventory slots" and while they buff you in space combat, space combat is routinely noted as being shitty. Space combat's only saving grace is the "Fallout VATS" system where you can target specific sections of a ship, like shooting out their engines so they're easier to board. However these features are limited and do not solely make the space combat fun. It feels like you're on a camera dolly while enemy ships move around you instead of you being able to maneuver around in space.
  • Storytelling: I've heard some claim that the main story is phenomenal but I've watched about a dozen people struggle to stay awake for this stuff and it is mandatory to progress through it a certain extend to access certain gameplay systems. This is one of the few cases where a recent game actually makes this worse because Baldur's Gate 3 had significantly better dialogue, NPC facial expressions, and NPC movements when you were chatting. None of that is here, it just feels monotone and the characters came straight from the uncanny valley. Again, I've heard some people enjoy certain story quests but those people I've talked to have no-life'd the game until they're way further into the game. So either the first dozen hours is filled with the worst quests and stories in the game while it gets better later on or the people I've talked to suffer from a massive sunken cost fallacy mindset. I've been told the game really picks up and becomes super interesting by the time you get to the city of Neon but that's like 5-10+ hours in from what I've heard.
  • AI: Yup, it's Bethesda AI and it has never progressed, it has actually gotten worse. Enemies will constantly look at you and wait several seconds before shooting a few shots, they hardly react to damage or any threats, they don't use the environment as you pop in and out of cover to take shots, and the AI will often just break. One of the best examples I saw was a streamer fighting a melee enemy on a low gravity planet, so he could jump super high. He'd shoot at the enemy but once he jumped into the air, the AI broke because it no longer had a path to hit the player and it just stood still while the player slowly floated back to the ground. Once the player touched the ground again, the AI then resumed combat but the player immediately jumped again and the AI stopped. They didn't implement the bare necessity of allowing AI to anticipate player positioning/trajectory in the pathfinding. The AI wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so effortlessly easy to break it. Every single stream I've watched, the AI completely breaks itself and the streamer stops to take note of the completely retarded AI.
  • Bugs: Everyone was anticipating that there would be bugs because it's a Bethesda game but I heard that this game was surprisingly better. I will say I've seen far less bugs than I expected but some of the bugs that I have seen are far worse. I saw a quest NPC casually float through the wall and disappear into space as a space station was maintaining orbit because the game broke and stopped factoring that in with the NPC's placement. That quest is now bricked as you can't talk to that NPC as it is chilling in the cold vacuum of space. The classic Bethesda bugs break immersion but at least they're amusing and don't break the game, so everyone is fine with that. So even though Starfield's bugs are far less prevalent than any other Bethesda game at launch, there's quite a few bugs in Starfield that straight up break the game entirely, which makes this worse.
So if you take a step back and look at all the components of the game, it really shouldn't work. It doesn't excel in any one thing and it is subpar in many components. This game should by all means be trash but for some reason, IT JUST FUCKING WORKS. I have yet to see a streamer put 5+ hours into this and then say they never want to play it again. They have all been eager to complain about all the things wrong with the game and then they'll keep streaming it for another 5+ hours because they're having fun and they don't know why. There's some evil Bethesda dark magic going on here where the game claims your soul and you start to have fun. You know you shouldn't be having fun, you will complain about all these systems and components that are inadequate, you'll be eager to tell your friends about all these shit things going on, but some some reason, you are now having fun whether you like it or not.
I have also seen that for a space game. You barely see any alien activity. Npcs are basically humans from different faction with pretty much the same skills. But yeah you pretty much confirmed everything i saw in reviews. Game is far less unique than Todd tried to sell us. Ill probably buy it in about 2 months like i did with cyberpunk.
 

Banana Hammock

Born to Sneed
Early Adopter
Joined:  Sep 9, 2022

MrProcessor

Soldier of Godrick
Joined:  Feb 22, 2023
Anyone played starfield yet? Im seeing a shit tons of bad reviews and im wondering if i should just wait until patch notes comes in to buy it.
I'm watching Calli's playthrough. It seems like what I'd expect Fallout 4 in space to be like so far. I'm good with just Armored Core for now, so I'll wait on getting it.
New trailer for VTMB2 dropped.


Made by The Chinese Room, who's only real accolades are A machine for pigs and Dear Esther. I assume Paradox couldn't find anyone cheaper to pawn the game off to.

I remember when some executive from the Chinese Room wrote an article for Game Informer (I think) saying how much he hated the very existence of Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V and compared her to antisemitic caricatures promoted by Nazi Germany.

1693754341749.png

Link to image

They also commented on the Cyberpunk early advertising.

1693753927004.png


Hard Pass. Looks like replaying the original is our best bet.
 
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PleaseCheckYourReceipts

Well-known member
Joined:  May 6, 2023
New trailer for VTMB2 dropped.


Made by The Chinese Room, who's only real accolades are A machine for pigs and Dear Esther. I assume Paradox couldn't find anyone cheaper to pawn the game off to.


I think they fired more than one developer from the project, so it's going to be a design muck. You'll probably be able to feel the 3 different designs at different parts and the sum of the parts won't work well.

I really enjoy how my shitbox 2017 GPU can max out Armored Core 6 and never drop below 60 on those fuckhueg maps with particle effects with physics going off in my face 24/7, but an empty bathroom, on minimum, in Starfield runs at 23 FPS.

edit: Ah sick, it's not even me having an old GPU, the game is just a fucked piece of shit for everyone. People with 4090s can't crack 60 fps on ultra.

I am about 5 minutes in to the mines segment, I'm literally stumbling over reused Fallout 76 assets, holy fuck.



It's BAD. Though weirdly stable. All settings have Upscaling on by default on PC. There's something weird going on with the engine itself. It's competent enough to run, but the 4090 / 7900 XTX are far too close to lower end cards than they should be. The game is actually well optimized (and HUB's numbers are generally in the most demanding part), it's just a heavy, heavy load that doesn't scale great with current architectures. We'll know more in 1-2 GPU/CPU cycles where the hang up is. Though I honestly think some modders might be able to unlock some huge performance gains.

I have also seen that for a space game. You barely see any alien activity. Npcs are basically humans from different faction with pretty much the same skills. But yeah you pretty much confirmed everything i saw in reviews. Game is far less unique than Todd tried to sell us. Ill probably buy it in about 2 months like i did with cyberpunk.
Funny thing about Space Operas is you really should mostly stick to humans. There's been plenty of attempts to construct what would happen when Humans encounter an alien race. I honestly think Gunbuster probably gets it right. In 15 years we've figure out how to turn Juniper into an FTL-enabled Black Hole bomb.
 

Brosnan Pierce Brosnan

God's Strongest Smartass
Dizzy's Husband
Joined:  Apr 4, 2023
New trailer for VTMB2 dropped.


Made by The Chinese Room, who's only real accolades are A machine for pigs and Dear Esther. I assume Paradox couldn't find anyone cheaper to pawn the game off to.

Ah jesus, I didn't know that. Nice to see that the Chinese Room have a price though being one of the worst devs out there. I'm guessing they took the scraps as goddamn does the trailer look like a Dishonored clone from 2013. Paradox, is it worth keeping this project alive?
 

MrProcessor

Soldier of Godrick
Joined:  Feb 22, 2023
Ah jesus, I didn't know that. Nice to see that the Chinese Room have a price though being one of the worst devs out there. I'm guessing they took the scraps as goddamn does the trailer look like a Dishonored clone from 2013. Paradox, is it worth keeping this project alive?
They should cancel it and just have Nightdive remake the original.

In other news, I finally got support from IndieGala and got my copy of Blasphemous 2. The trick is to ignore the support message that sends you to their Discord server and Email them directly.
 

Banana Hammock

Born to Sneed
Early Adopter
Joined:  Sep 9, 2022
A Machine for Pigs seemed mildly interesting when Josh did his playthrough.
 

UberSoldat

Well-known member
Joined:  Oct 19, 2022
They should cancel it and just have Nightdive remake the original.
They already got their hands full for the year and beyond, and look at how long they took on System Shock.

The CEO also confirmed on Twitter they were looking at The Darkness too.

Yeah they got the Darkness and Turok 3 coming right?
Along with SiN, System Shock 2 and Dark Forces, and whatever unannounced projects they have.
 
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Brosnan Pierce Brosnan

God's Strongest Smartass
Dizzy's Husband
Joined:  Apr 4, 2023
Yeah they got the Darkness and Turok 3 coming right? its weird that a game from 2007 is up there now.

A game that kind of needs it is Quake 4 as its a bit broken (I mean its easy enough to fix) at the moment. If they get into that era there are a ton of games left by the wayside. Condemned, Prey, Riddick, Timeshift. Hell even Turok 2008. Bloodlines would make a good choice but yeah, Bloodlines would be more akin to a System Shock esque project in scope.
 

God's Strongest Dragoon

Well-known member
Joined:  Mar 20, 2023
They already got their hands full for the year and beyond, and look at how long they took on System Shock.

The CEO also confirmed on Twitter they were looking at The Darkness too.
I hope them all the best on that because being blue balled on that cliffhanger at the end of The Darkness 2 for a decade has been rough.
 

superduper

Gods Strongest Chiramigo
Nolan's Widow
Early Adopter
Rie's Publicist
Joined:  Nov 7, 2022

reinigen

Dang it
Ward Security
Joined:  Sep 16, 2022


I mean I shouldnt be surprised. Bethesda games have never had that much attention to detail. But the AI reactions are just inexcusable.
 

God's Strongest Mozumite

Mega Mozu Milkers.
Early Adopter
ENTERING FLAVOR COUNTRY
Joined:  Oct 28, 2022
I'm probably going to wait until it goes on sale in the future before I buy it. It definitely feels like Bethesda bite off way more than they can chew. From what I've seen, the game isn't bad but it just feels woefully inadequate for its pricetag, especially when many of its features are compared to other games. The whole major point is that it tries to do a lot of different things that other games have done but it doesn't hit the mark, so it doesn't even feel like a "Jack of All Trades" but more of a "Barely Competent At Everything". The "Skyrim/Fallout in Space" is very applicable, if you were expecting that but with less freedom in exploration, you'll be fine. Quite a few streamers I've watched weren't really enjoying it but after like 5+ hours, something clicks and they enjoy it but they can't say why. It's that classic Bethesda feeling of "Why the fuck am I enjoying this shit? There should be no reason why I have 80+ hours into this game but I do." It's like the game is the definition of a guilty pleasure, where they know how much of the game is not up to par but it just works and they're hooked and having fun.

For the past two days, I've constantly had a stream of someone playing it in the background, so I've seen like 15+ people play it (both IRL and vtubers) and what I've gathered is this:
  • Exploration: Majority of the bad reviews are coming from the fact that there is no real exploration, as you fast travel from place to place. They don't even do the Jedi Survivor trick of making the ship's screen enter hyperspace while you can do whatever, it's just straight into a short cutscene. It's why this game listed SSD as a mandatory requirement under its specs. You go to a city/station, get a quest, you fast travel your ship to orbit around where you were, you fast travel to the orbit of where you need to go, and then you fast travel when landing. The whole concept of "seamless open world" is nonexistent. The whole Bethesda RPG feeling of going off into a random direction and finding some cool shit is dead in this game because when you land on a planet, they draw a big boundary of ~30min of walking and the only thing that really matters is what they set out for you in that specific direction. Instead of letting you run around a giant sandbox, you're now in a fishtank and you just get asked to move to different fishtanks in a room when you're done doing your tasks in that fishtank.
  • Environment: The whole "1000 planets" thing ended up just like everyone expected and the procedural generation isn't that unique. I've seen streamers run into the same location/facility that has the same layout and NPC placement on different planets. People have always complained about this with other procedurally generated space games like No Man's Sky but the problem for Starfield is that environmental storytelling has always been the one thing everyone praises Bethesda for despite their retardation in all other aspects of game development. What I mean by this, is that you could visit a cave or house in their games and the environmental storytelling is what grips you as you figure out what happened here. There was a sense of care players could feel from this stuff. Procedural generation of locations kills this as you'll see something and think "woah, that's cool" and then you see it like 6 more times. These first two points I listed are the two points everyone has always praised Bethesda for but for Starfield, they abandoned their two greatest strengths for mediocre replacements.
  • Gunplay: They weren't joking that the gunplay is the best in the series because from everything I've seen, it definitely is. It is a huge step forward compared to previous Fallout games. However in this case, having the "best gunplay ever in a Bethesda game" is like being the smartest kid on the short bus. If you don't play other FPS games, it will be fine. If you have played any other FPS that has come out in the past 10 years, you'll realize that they're still lightyears behind. This is just like how when Skyrim came out with its horribly outdated combat system. People casually accepted Skyrim's combat because the general Western audience doesn't play a lot of RPGs with better combat. The problem with Starfield is that shooters are one of the most prominent genres in Western gaming so the general Western audience has most likely played a game that has better combat to compare to.
  • Ships and Space Combat: One of the few positives I've seen is that people enjoy the customization of ship creation. However the major problem is that the ship custom builds only really serve a purpose of giving you stats like "bigger inventory slots" and while they buff you in space combat, space combat is routinely noted as being shitty. Space combat's only saving grace is the "Fallout VATS" system where you can target specific sections of a ship, like shooting out their engines so they're easier to board. However these features are limited and do not solely make the space combat fun. It feels like you're on a camera dolly while enemy ships move around you instead of you being able to maneuver around in space.
  • Storytelling: I've heard some claim that the main story is phenomenal but I've watched about a dozen people struggle to stay awake for this stuff and it is mandatory to progress through it a certain extend to access certain gameplay systems. This is one of the few cases where a recent game actually makes this worse because Baldur's Gate 3 had significantly better dialogue, NPC facial expressions, and NPC movements when you were chatting. None of that is here, it just feels monotone and the characters came straight from the uncanny valley. Again, I've heard some people enjoy certain story quests but those people I've talked to have no-life'd the game until they're way further into the game. So either the first dozen hours is filled with the worst quests and stories in the game while it gets better later on or the people I've talked to suffer from a massive sunken cost fallacy mindset. I've been told the game really picks up and becomes super interesting by the time you get to the city of Neon but that's like 5-10+ hours in from what I've heard.
  • AI: Yup, it's Bethesda AI and it has never progressed, it has actually gotten worse. Enemies will constantly look at you and wait several seconds before shooting a few shots, they hardly react to damage or any threats, they don't use the environment as you pop in and out of cover to take shots, and the AI will often just break. One of the best examples I saw was a streamer fighting a melee enemy on a low gravity planet, so he could jump super high. He'd shoot at the enemy but once he jumped into the air, the AI broke because it no longer had a path to hit the player and it just stood still while the player slowly floated back to the ground. Once the player touched the ground again, the AI then resumed combat but the player immediately jumped again and the AI stopped. They didn't implement the bare necessity of allowing AI to anticipate player positioning/trajectory in the pathfinding. The AI wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so effortlessly easy to break it. Every single stream I've watched, the AI completely breaks itself and the streamer stops to take note of the completely retarded AI.
  • Bugs: Everyone was anticipating that there would be bugs because it's a Bethesda game but I heard that this game was surprisingly better. I will say I've seen far less bugs than I expected but some of the bugs that I have seen are far worse. I saw a quest NPC casually float through the wall and disappear into space as a space station was maintaining orbit because the game broke and stopped factoring that in with the NPC's placement. That quest is now bricked as you can't talk to that NPC as it is chilling in the cold vacuum of space. The classic Bethesda bugs break immersion but at least they're amusing and don't break the game, so everyone is fine with that. So even though Starfield's bugs are far less prevalent than any other Bethesda game at launch, there's quite a few bugs in Starfield that straight up break the game entirely, which makes this worse.
So if you take a step back and look at all the components of the game, it really shouldn't work. It doesn't excel in any one thing and it is subpar in many components. This game should by all means be trash but for some reason, IT JUST FUCKING WORKS. I have yet to see a streamer put 5+ hours into this and then say they never want to play it again. They have all been eager to complain about all the things wrong with the game and then they'll keep streaming it for another 5+ hours because they're having fun and they don't know why. There's some evil Bethesda dark magic going on here where the game claims your soul and you start to have fun. You know you shouldn't be having fun, you will complain about all these systems and components that are inadequate, you'll be eager to tell your friends about all these shit things going on, but some some reason, you are now having fun whether you like it or not.
is there much in the way of RPG mechanics in Starfield? Are they more like old ES/NV where they actually have merit or are they like Skyrim/FO4 where they have the depth of a puddle?
 

Brosnan Pierce Brosnan

God's Strongest Smartass
Dizzy's Husband
Joined:  Apr 4, 2023
I'M GLAD SOMEONE FINALLY UNDERSTANDS!

Archive

Rejoice in the fact that Microsoft has hired every American company to put out some of the worst games. Which to be fair, at least they are games unlike what Sony puts out. But we shall never see another Crimson Skies. Another Blinx. Good Gears of War or Halo games. Cooperation with Japan with stuff like Dead or Alive, Panzer Dragoon Orta and Lost Odyssey. Or even fun games to throw on for an afternoon like Brute Force.
 

superduper

Gods Strongest Chiramigo
Nolan's Widow
Early Adopter
Rie's Publicist
Joined:  Nov 7, 2022
Rejoice in the fact that Microsoft has hired every American company to put out some of the worst games. Which to be fair, at least they are games unlike what Sony puts out. But we shall never see another Crimson Skies. Another Blinx. Good Gears of War or Halo games. Cooperation with Japan with stuff like Dead or Alive, Panzer Dragoon Orta and Lost Odyssey. Or even fun games to throw on for an afternoon like Brute Force.
:urtearingmeapart:
 

Schockwellenreiter

Dr. Negro Cortex
Joined:  Jan 6, 2023
I can't believe Todd made Elite 3 but dogshit, and 28 years after Elite 3. And almost ten years after Elite 4. And like 15 years after the space sim boom of the 2000s.
Man, I just want more Homeworld. But, like, good Homeworld.
 
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