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Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that’s not boring, Bethesda insists
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Starfield
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When they said this would be hard sci-fi, I actually imagined myself piloting an actual space ship and doing astronaut things, not a glorified magic plane.
If someone is looking for what Starfield offers but better, here are my recommendations at a fraction of cost:
Maybe the issue is that this game, like NMS before, tried to be everything to everyone and didn't develop towards something meaningful.
Hopefully, like NMS will find its soul and develop into something worth playing. (IMO)
EDIT: This is a stealthy way of getting recommendations ;)
Eve Online for the cutthroat privateer life.
If you like these sorts of games (particularly games like Titanfall and Subnautica, or DRG), you might really like Elite Dangerous. Has a big learning curve, but it's a "once every decade or two" game when it comes to scratching a deep deep Sci fi itch. 1:1* milky way, set thousands of years in the future, with a variety of ships and missions,with excellent HOTAS and VR support. Co-op up to five people, even more if you are in a public server. FPS game with a variety of vehicles, from small cars to aircraft carriers 4x the length of the burj Khalifa.
While I own it and have tested it, like Eve, it's a multiplayer game for people who enjoy and have the skills (and time) for it...
My memory of Elite Dangerous is trying to start auto-undocking, and the flight computer putting me on hold because of another person floating around in the docking bay. Eventually, it aborted the auto-undock; and the tutorial had not taught me how to release the controls to manually undock. So, eventually the station's security systems flagged me as flying in unpermitted space and destroyed my ship.
So that does seem to echo the "big learning curve" bit.
The tutorials are a bit rough, haha. I found the actual game easier. There's some great YouTube guides that help with the basics, how to make money easily, how to get certain ships, etc. Makes the game a lot easier. :)
Elite is fantastic at being Elite, I'm actually glad starfield isn't like elite though. Elite is all about the beautiful desolation of space, and the attempts of humanity to carve out a place in that desolation. But there's not really any story or characters or much stuff that isn't procedurally generated. It's just you and the grind in a really pretty world.
When I have an itch that elite will scratch I pop on and enjoy being in the cockpit (especially in VR). Im playing starfield to scratch that BGS rpg itch. If I had to manually jump from system to system and fly my ship in to land everytime I want to do a small quest I'd be really put off of starfield.
I think my biggest pet peeve with Starfield is the whole looter aproach all Bethesda games have, which means during the first mission, I spent more time rumaging through stuff and figuring out how to break into rooms to get more loot than actually playing the mission.
Not because I like looting, but because I think that if I miss an important item, at some point in the game I'll be locked out of it and require grinding which is my kryptonite.
Oh yeah I definitely feel the inventory management pain issue lol. Some people have been complaining that you can't open every draw in every room, there's so so much loot already that I'm glad tbh that it's usually only yellow crates and bodies that are worth looting. Having a ship with a large inventory helps massively for me. I can dump all my resources in there, and dump all the armour and loot me and my companions haul back from missing a there, them just go on a selling spree in between a few missions. Almost hit a million in income and 90% of that is from loot from killed enemies.
At level 25 now so starting to hit a real limit on how much money shopkeepers have. Would be nice to unlock richer traders, or do missions for them which gives them more capital or something. It'll probably mean that I only bother looting things worth 5k or something going forward as otherwise it's more mass than worth the effort looting and selling. Maybe that's an intentional game design? Force people to not spend all day looting and managing inventory space?
I haven't played Elite Dangerous since the first year it came out. At that time it was the very definition of "A mile wide and an inch deep" though.
Has it gotten any deeper?
If you haven't played since 2014, it has gotten a lot deeper, haha. Hell, there's even a whole human civilization around Sag A* these days.
i remember doing the run to Sag A* in a single day a few years ago. In full VR with HOTAS. Experiencing that black hole like that is still one of my best gaming memories of all time.
The fact that there’s now a full human civilisation out there blows my mind.
Hah oh yeah? I had been part of some organized effort in the early days to flip a system ownership, and after a large amount of people working hard on missions for a couple months, they finally admitted that it wasn't functional yet.
Surprised you didn't mention the star citizen and space engineers. They have that I'm a space mining cowboy aspect nailed down pretty well.
Star citizen is more of an overpriced ship-store than an actual game.
Mostly true, but it is playable and amazing. I'm in love with the fact I can go from waking up in a bunk, to a space station, to mining a airless moon, all without loading screens seamlessly. Super immersive.
Buggy as all get out, lol
And a development pace slower than anything else
I would never recommend that scam to anyone hahaha
Also Endless Sky, which is free
Exploration and Space combat: Endless Space 2. I have my share of problems with that game but it's effectively Civilization In Space. You can explore star systems, and you can fight space pirates.
I love mods, but often they come with the trade-off of balancing issues.
A big chunk in gameplay design and development is balancing and while I agree some mods are great, they tend to mess with balance heavily, making it either easier or a whole spiky mess.
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll look into these, and already have dipped my feet into stuff like Everspace 2 and Outer Wilds. Some of these are on Xbox Game Pass as well, which is cool.
So, KSP 1&2 then? :)
or Elite Dangerous
No orbital mechanics in E:D, no in-space EVA. It does have a slightly more realistic flight model with dampening off, but it’s not true to life.