:.:. Starfield .:.: - by Vae
Jason Moyer on 9/9/2023 at 19:58
If TLOU had come out as a book first no one would have given a shit. Or, more likely, it would have been a young adult (i.e. preteen) novel. Personally, I barely consider TLOU to be a videogame anyway. The quality of something doesn't really matter to most people if they can consume it while staring at a screen and pounding a bag of Doritos.
Thief's writing was fine, but it's not good enough to make me ever want to play Deadly Shadows again. It's a nice extra for getting immersed in the world, but no one would remember those games if they hadn't set a bar for systems-driven gameplay that not much else has matched. I've played Undertale and Max Payne and honestly don't remember anything about the stories in them really. I remember playing arcadey minigames and shooting people in slow motion.
Back when everyone was all "wut's the Citizen Kane of gaming" maybe we should have been "wut's the Great Gatsby of gaming". Especially since the Citizen Kane of gaming had already happened (it was Thief).
Sulphur on 10/9/2023 at 02:15
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
If TLOU had come out as a book first no one would have given a shit. Or, more likely, it would have been a young adult (i.e. preteen) novel. Personally, I barely consider TLOU to be a videogame anyway. The quality of something doesn't really matter to most people if they can consume it while staring at a screen and pounding a bag of Doritos.
If TLoU had come out as a book, it would have been called The Road. As it is, the game has had one of the most successful TV adaptations of recent history, so no, people did give a shit.
The rest of that argument is fallacious, because obviously it applies to movies, television, and games universally, and you're confusing how
some people consume things with how you think
most everyone consumes them. If this were true, then all entertainment everywhere should just be of the lowest level of quality, because no one really cares so it won't make a difference - but obviously, this is not how things are, and therefore not true.
For gaming, I appreciate your personal preference is for how good a game plays over anything else, and I think that'll be more of the majority opinion, which is fine. I think video games should be good
games first and foremost, but I don't mind if they're more than that; and I don't mind if they're less than that either, as long as there's something noteworthy bolstering the overall experience.
So for perspective: for a lot of us, I'm guessing, the audio, the visuals, and the narrative are either as important as how the game plays or important
enough to pay attention to, and none of those elements descend into background noise unless they are meant to. I wouldn't criticise Tetris for having a weak as fuck story (the T-tetromino being a scenery-chewing villain while the L-tetrominos haplessly noodled around was
very clichéd, truth be told), but if I'm playing a game that wants me to pay attention to what it's saying, like Spec Ops: The Line, it had better be a good story, or at the very least, an interesting one that interfaces with what the game is trying to do as an experience. This combined power of every element - interactivity via gameplay, audio, visuals, narrative - potentially makes video gaming one of the most compelling entertainment experiences we are capable of designing, and that experience can be and usually is elevated by having a quality narrative. A great story can't save a bad game, obviously, but it can elevate a decent one to a great one - like SOMA.
As an aside, I'd also say that the act of telling stories is a universal human quality, and when we talk about our experiences of gaming, it's usually in the form of a story. It's only natural that that inherent quality of games, to be able to generate stories by the truckload simply by making you part of the experience, is a thing to be harnessed in the telling of them.
Returning to your first paragraph: anyone who eats a bag of salted radioactive orange corn shards while playing a game is by default not experiencing it optimally,
and they're getting cheese dust all over their keyboard or controller to boot, so fuck those guys.
WingedKagouti on 10/9/2023 at 10:47
Been playing Starfield thanks to the 3 months of Game Pass I got with my Ally.
It's just about everything I expected. My complaints so far are:
1) Way too many types of ammunition. It's basically like some extreme gun nut's wet dream, with me finding more than 20 different types of ammo so far and most of them are for ballistic weapons. You should generally expect to need a specific type of ammo for each weapon model. The only upside is that ammo has no weight, so you can carry as much as you want for all weapons.
2) Way too much clutter everywhere. And while it all goes into the Misc category in your inventory, so do Digipicks, which means you can't just go to a store and do a "sell all" from that category. It also means you get spammed with items that basically have no value in every single settlement, ship or outpost you visit, making it harder to locate the useful stuff.
3) The randomness of some things. I made two characters so far and the first struggled for 15+ hours of gameplay to find the 5 required Novice/Advanced locks to be able to upgrade Security so I could pick Expert locks. The second character got the 5 Novice/Advanced locks before reaching New Atlantis (basically the end of the tutorial) and both characters followed the same path to get there.
4) The interface. Bethesda's UI has only gotten worse since Morrowind. Sure it's functional, but there are many annoying things that are clearly a product of the game being made for console as well.
But other than those four things, the game is engaging enough for me to consider buying.
Jason Moyer on 11/9/2023 at 01:59
Every Bethsoft game since Morrowind has had TONS of clutter. My general rule of thumb is to only pick stuff up that weighs basically nothing (like gems or whatever) and is worth something. The less time I have to interact with their inventory interfaces (including Morrowind's) the better. I haven't gotten far enough to look at it in Starfield and I'm going to delay it for as long as the intro allows because I'm sure it's bad.
Anyway, just fiddling around in the beginning bits right now. I'm a loner wanted for being a cyber runner in the streets of Neon City. At least that's how the class/traits I chose play out in my head.
WingedKagouti on 11/9/2023 at 08:29
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Every Bethsoft game since Morrowind has had TONS of clutter. My general rule of thumb is to only pick stuff up that weighs basically nothing (like gems or whatever) and is worth something. The less time I have to interact with their inventory interfaces (including Morrowind's) the better. I haven't gotten far enough to look at it in Starfield and I'm going to delay it for as long as the intro allows because I'm sure it's bad.
The main problem is that starship modules come with clutter and when you remove those modules or sell the ship, all that clutter goes directly into the cargo hold of your primary ship.
Pyrian on 11/9/2023 at 16:56
Quote Posted by henke
...perfectly linear narrative...Undertale...
:weird:
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Of the many many reasons to dislike a game, water not having proper reflections might be the lamest. It's up there with "bad writing" for me.
I'll take better writing over better reflections any day of the week.
henke on 12/9/2023 at 05:09
Aside from the choice of playing pacifist, you didn't have any sway over how things play out in Undertale, did you? I played through it twice and it seemed like the same story both times. Maybe I'm misremembering.
Pyrian on 12/9/2023 at 08:39
I mean, if you'd said "broadly linear" or "more-or-less linear-ish" or something, that'd be one thing, but you said "perfectly linear" which excludes even Half-Life 1 'cause you get a little choice at the very end, nevermind
this (the purple part is Undertale):
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/no850qB.jpghenke on 12/9/2023 at 08:44
Ah, ok.
Jason Moyer on 12/9/2023 at 14:38
Jesus christ, the clutter. I don't mind the usual janky Bethesda clutter where there's tons of interactive stuff laying around and most if it is worthless; what I don't like is how there's just as much non-interactive clutter now and the visual design language doesn't do anything to distinguish between the two. So I'm pushing my face against every surface looking for things I can interact with, then trying to figure out which things are useful since "having a description" isn't a reliable indicator of whether something is junk or not.
