Now, to be fair here, the named characters you get dialogue with aren't really badly designed. The vast majority of people I've talked to look good, really good. It's just that the face animations are gobshite.
The thing that boggles my mind from watching some of the gameplay is just why is the alien life on this game so incredibly murderous and suicidal? 99% of IRL wild animals are skittish and defensive, but the monsters on this game have the AI of a cacodemon from Doom 1 and just charge straight at you on sight and never stop attacking even while getting actively shot at.
It's typical design of so many games out there, for all the praise devs wanna blow up their own ass about how they've advanced this and advanced that I wonder if there is a single game where animals really react the way animals ought to do. Maybe a hunting game? But yeah exploring alien planets just turns into a shooting gallery. Gotta get that tiny bit of microreward exp somehow!
Yes. I decided to give planetary surveying a try. DON'T. DO. IT. One it involves nothing but walking, which is just awful. Two if you miss whatever unknown thing you are supposed to find, good luck finding it. Also combat is ass and even the lvl 4 guys still eat 15 rounds from a Assault rifle that shoots 3 bullets for every 1 fired. Might just bump this shit down to easy so I don't spend so long shooting sponges. they don't even do damage, they just take forever to die.
Not only that but I find the damage of weapons really inconsistent. Sometimes I do a huge chunk of damage and other times I might as well have hit them with a flyswatter. I will keep going on Normal though because that is the "intended" experience.
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Yknow how people keep going on and on about mods will fix it when it comes to Bethesda games? Has mods ever fixed a Bethesda game completely?
I think four mods that could fix some problems would be:
A mod that just replaces all generic NPC's with handcrafted NPC's.
A mod that adds in vehicles or some form of mobility for exploration.
A mod that reduces scanning to once per fauna/flora.
A mod that makes items in scanning appear as different colours rather than a uniform blue. So bodies are red, weapons and ammo are orange, healing is green etc etc.
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For the amount of bullets you need to sink into a human I am starting to lose my mind with how fucking twitchy they are. They just won't be fucking still. They zoop around constantly whenever you land your aim on them. It's infuriating. Also, dark areas means good fucking luck hitting anything what so ever. All I see is bullets flying with no way of knowing where the hell the enemy is.
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Yknow, before the game was released and when we were seeing reviews pop in there were a ton of mentions of how Starfield had "SO MANY SYSTEMS" (mechanics) and I've been percolating on this for a while and I wanna just throw this out there even though it might be premature:
Bethesda games, wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle.
Does this count for the mechanics in Starfield as well?
See, the game has a ton of features that you can engage with, so many in fact that you can't engage with them all (because they're locked behind perks that takes ages to level up to) and so my conspiracy theory is that all those folks had a middling game experience but figured "hey, I haven't even scratched the surface yet, but when I do!" but I've also seen reports from peeps over on RPGcodex who've said that you don't 'need' to bother with a ton of features in the game, meaning that they're... Superfluous. They're just there for the sake of being there.
And that's where I am leaning more and more as the game goes on and it makes me wonder how many of these features in the game are really relevant at all. The idea was to create a colossal game that had a ton of things in it to do that catered to as many different people as possible casting the widest net they could by having dog fights, and dialogue, and quests, and landable planets, and scanning, and weapon modding, and research, and outpost building, and ship building, and dialogue minigame etc etc.
But how many of these features are actually important? What is the core experience of the game and are any of these features relevant or even necessary for it? And if they are then how developed are they? Do they synergize with one another?
Like if we have 3 people, one decides to focus on scanning a ton of things, one decides to focus on outpost building and the third decides to just get on with the main quest, when either of them goes to do the main quest, let's call the quest Blue Balls, Mommy Won't Fuck Me Yet (see, it's foreshadowing that Sarah wants to hump you), how do they differentiate? The person who spent 5 hours scanning things, the person who spent 10 hours working with the wonky outpost building and the person who spent 0 hours wasted and just got on with the main quest, how different are their experiences with Blue Balls, Mommy Won't Fuck Me Yet?
It just screams fluff to me. Padding. Here's gameplay mechanics and game features to distract you from 'actually' playing the game. "Oh you can't criticize the game when you spent 70 hours in it, you must have enjoyed something!" But did I? Or was a lot of my time just wasted? How many hours did I spend doing something that I 'thought' would mount up towards a reward but ended up just being a complete waste of my time?
Like I said, might be a bit too early to tell but a lot of things just seems pointless to me, cause here's the thing, like I said before you level up way too slow and you require way too many perk points to unlock features so what about those who don't spend any points in Tech or Science? THe game has to be playable for them as well. So you shouldn't NEED to mod weapons. You shouldn't NEED to operate outposts. You shouldn't NEED to build or modify spaceships. All of this is completely 100% optional as some players might never spend the points into those perks to unlock the full functionality of those features (I can't even do a suppressor for my laser rifle (yes, I know how absurd that sounds) because I don't have the first perk in weapon engineering so Muzzle Mods 2 is locked for me and I'd have to wait until I can loot or buy a modified laser rifle that has the mod on it).
Also, Bethesda, I have a mommy kink, how'd you manage to make Sarah so fucking insufferable? Also the doctor lady in The Wells is my aged wine waifu, fight me.
Example: "Why do you burry carrying all that junk?
![Very Happy :D :D](/../../xencustomimages/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
" ... Sarah... I'm literally picking up credit chits... It's money... I'm sorry I'm not a wealthy black widow like you are but could I please just PICK UP SOME MONEY IN PEACE!?
Like, yknow companions in games that never shut their stupid traps? That's this game. After I've finished looting this place I'm jumping straight on the main quest and doing whatever I need to get her to become dismissable cause I am done with companions in this game. They just ruin stealth anyway.
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Pro-tip, wanna sell stolen stuff? There is a place called Trade Authority (big fuckoff yellow sign, can't miss it, if you use the elevator from spaceport it's the second left) and the woman in there is a fence. Also, when it comes to smuggled goods (illegal trading items) I fast traveled from one part of the planet that New Atlantis is on to this area and I did not get scanned. I don't know if this means that they never scan you if you fast travel or if they don't scan you if you fast travel within the planet but hey, that's a way to get around "smuggling".
Also the scanner at the "lobby" of spaceport didn't go red with me having 2 illegal items on me so that thing is probably just for bounties and can't scan you for illegal items either.
You can also hide your helmet and space suit in civilized areas if you go their equipment parts in the inventory and use the Hide button.
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... Why are they calling "blackouts" "brownouts"?
This is what the NPC's look like whenthey smile in this game btw:
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Great, traveled to another planet and a script sequence was supposed to start where Horny Mommy starts commenting on something and it just decided not to, leaving me completely stuck and not able to do anything, forcing me to reload and having to re-do a bunch of previous dialogue cause I dared to not quicksave every 10 seconds.
Oh, there's ship space stealth in this game too. And god is it boring.