You say "unique", you do realise that Stroud is identical with slightly different lighting?
Game Discussions Bethesda Softworks Starfield Space RPG
- Thread starter Lngjohnsilver1
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I find this amusing simply because I've never even noticed them. Maybe I've played too many games that work this way, but it's certainly a non-issue for me.
Meanwhile, I've started playing Cities Skylines 2. The original is one of my favorite city builders, so naturally I'm quite interested in the sequel.
CS2 has arrived with lots of bugs and performance issues, though. Reminds me of the Odyssey launch, heh.
Here's my favorite bug so far, which I unfortunately have not seen myself.
"A massive (nearly as large as the playable area) column of water/sewage appears in the sky and cascades onto the map in a part that is not yet unlocked."
Now that's a hilarious bug! Perhaps the game is self-referential?
I'm having fun with it anyway, and Colossal Order is acknowledging the bugs quickly and starting to issue fixes. It's the kind of game I will play for years, so I'm not concerned about initial bugs.
But that's just me. The forums are full of anger and rage. Business as usual in the gaming community!
But lest I stray too far from the thread topic, here's a screenie.
Videos I've seen suggest that cargo links have to be built multiple times at the receiving end. So it's probably 1 cargo link per "link"? For some reason I expected 1 building to handle several links. Quite sure my hub had 1 building and I had 2 links active in that building at first. So I assumed that was all I needed. When I tried a second link building it would change anything - the whole thing might have been bugged.
They are there, but minimally disrupt the game... Of course there are some on this thread who may have made them seem a massive issue.
Many games are much worse, even on a NVMe drive...
Have you never played a Bethesda game?
It's pretty bad if you want to actually try and do proper travel from planet to planet without fast travelling.
Enter ship -> Loading screen
Take off -> Unskippable cutscene (basically a loading screen)
Hyperspace to new system -> Unskippable cutscene
Land on new planet -> Loading screen AND unskippable cutscene
Exit ship -> Loading screen.
I mean... it's not great. Amplified by the fact that there's basically nothing else to do at each of those steps other than select the option to take you to the next loading screen. Of course, you can skip all that with fast travel (via a loading screen), but then what's the point of even having a spaceship?
Enter ship -> Loading screen
Take off -> Unskippable cutscene (basically a loading screen)
Hyperspace to new system -> Unskippable cutscene
Land on new planet -> Loading screen AND unskippable cutscene
Exit ship -> Loading screen.
I mean... it's not great. Amplified by the fact that there's basically nothing else to do at each of those steps other than select the option to take you to the next loading screen. Of course, you can skip all that with fast travel (via a loading screen), but then what's the point of even having a spaceship?
The point is having your little base / house with you, for random encounters, for space fights. If I want to generate random encounters I do the load screens. The rest of the time I use fast travel.
The problem isn't really the load screens. They are fine. In fact I think these are the fastest load screens I ever saw in a Bethesda game. The problem is the facturing of the game world. You need to use travel to get from Jemison to Akila. In Skyrim you could just wander.
Matter of opinion I guess.
This has been my thinking in general, in that it looks amazing and fun to design and "live in" a custom spaceship, but if that spaceship just sits on the ground all the time, then I fail to see the point. Sure, you fly your spaceship in space, but is there any other gameplay in space tied to your ship's design and interiors? Is there a damage model and associated gameplay, for example? Is there a "repel borders" scenario where your ship is boarded and you a gunfight in your custom-crafted rooms and hallways? How does ship design affect the flight model?
Coming from Space Engineers, I have high expectations for the gameplay that involves my spaceship, where every design choice matters, and where I can set my ship on autopilot while it flies a few thousand feet above a planet's surface and walk around and enjoy the views from various windows and portholes, etc. Not that designing and walking around a ship in Starfield wouldn't be fun for me, but I want it to be more than just a mobile base. Maybe it is, and I'm missing something.
Building your vault ship is interesting but once you undock you're stuck in the pilots chair until you land or dock.
I've not seen a defensive boarding action, only offensive.
The primary considerations in ship design are how quickly can I get from the pilots seat to the docker, where are my work benches, how many beds have I got (I haven't seen more than 6 passengers in a mission but have beds for at least twice that) Otherwise it's making sure you have enough power for systems, enough firepower and shields to deal with opposition and enough landing thrust for the ship.
No internal damage model.
I've taken ships to a sliver of hull before boarding and nothing is out of place as long as the artificial gravity is working.
I've not seen a defensive boarding action, only offensive.
The primary considerations in ship design are how quickly can I get from the pilots seat to the docker, where are my work benches, how many beds have I got (I haven't seen more than 6 passengers in a mission but have beds for at least twice that) Otherwise it's making sure you have enough power for systems, enough firepower and shields to deal with opposition and enough landing thrust for the ship.
No internal damage model.
I've taken ships to a sliver of hull before boarding and nothing is out of place as long as the artificial gravity is working.
Pressing the “get up” key works in space - it’s just not shown as an option on screen
Which can be embarrasing as it is bound to my targeting key - I must check the bindings to find out why!Pressing the “get up” key works in space - it’s just not shown as an option on screen
Talking of building ships, I would like to show pictures of my modified Kepler R. It's the first ship to which I have made, I'd say, extensive modifications.
I found out quickly that the original design is very unpractical. It had, among others, six decks, of which the two topmost were 1x1 storage rooms, which don't even add to cargo space, a big 2x3 dining hall, and a crazy amount of huge fuel tanks. So I removed the two topmost decks, moved the reactor and the middle engine down correspondingly, moved the command bridge one deck down and moved the big white weapon mount from the nose to the roof. I removed five of the seven fuel tanks, added a cargo space and a 2x1 All-in-one hab module to the bottom, replaced the Stroud 2x3 Mess Hall with a Deimos 2x1 Living Quarters, and replaced also the Infirmary with a Deimos 2x1 hab module. Then I upgraded the reactor and weapons.
Now this ship is more practical, smaller and more agile, has more firepower, but it has stillalmost more than the original cargo capacity. With my Payloads L1 skill it's 4262 kg. Fuel capacity is now 800 units (kg?), which I believe is quite enough. It's now a pretty good cargo and passenger ship, and it can do combat too.
The below picture shows how limited visibility in the vertical plane there is from the Stroud Viking CP-220 cockpit. This in itself is bad for combat, but the HUD saves a lot because it's drawn over all structures of the cockpit, not just windows:
Despite that, combat with this ship goes like this:
I found out quickly that the original design is very unpractical. It had, among others, six decks, of which the two topmost were 1x1 storage rooms, which don't even add to cargo space, a big 2x3 dining hall, and a crazy amount of huge fuel tanks. So I removed the two topmost decks, moved the reactor and the middle engine down correspondingly, moved the command bridge one deck down and moved the big white weapon mount from the nose to the roof. I removed five of the seven fuel tanks, added a cargo space and a 2x1 All-in-one hab module to the bottom, replaced the Stroud 2x3 Mess Hall with a Deimos 2x1 Living Quarters, and replaced also the Infirmary with a Deimos 2x1 hab module. Then I upgraded the reactor and weapons.
Now this ship is more practical, smaller and more agile, has more firepower, but it has still
The below picture shows how limited visibility in the vertical plane there is from the Stroud Viking CP-220 cockpit. This in itself is bad for combat, but the HUD saves a lot because it's drawn over all structures of the cockpit, not just windows:
Despite that, combat with this ship goes like this:
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Can you walk around while your ship is in motion? How about EVA?Pressing the “get up” key works in space - it’s just not shown as an option on screen
Once you get out of the chair the ship throttles down, and there’s no EVA without using console commands - plus, there’s not much to do apart from sightsee or use the installed ship work facilities
If Bethesda don’t expand space gameplay in the DLCs then I’m sure modders will be seeing what Creation Kit v2 will let them do next year.
Yes.
It's possible to target individual modules in combat, and thus there's some advantage of burying critical systems like the reactor behind other, less critical modules.
Never had that happen to me, but I'm not very far into the game.
Sadly, this game doesn't go into the amount of detail that Empyion Galactic Survival does when it comes to the flight model. That game remains near the top, right behind Kerbal Space Program in this department.
Nor does it go into the more limited thruster detail of Space Engineers. This game more reminds me of a 3D version of FTL when it comes to ship combat, especially power management. Which is a good thing in my book. It's just not necessary to set up my HOTAS to play this game. At least not yet...
There's quite a bit to encounter in space, but much of it revolves around ship-to-ship combat... and naturally you can skip the whole thing via fast travel if you're not interested in that kind of thing. And as you know, there's no surface flight available.
Sadly, there's still no "ideal" space game out there. Elite: Dangerous comes closest IMO, but unless Frontier builds upon the on-foot portions of the game, especially when it comes to exploration, what game you play is going to depend upon what aspects of a game you willing to compromise on, and which you aren't. Starfield has a great planetary exploration loop going for it, but without a procedurally generated galaxy to explore, there's a limited number of planets explore. It also has the best scripted missions, but again those are limited.
ED has by far the best flight model; an entire procedurally generated galaxy to explore; a decent political simulator; the best economic sim outside of X4 and EVE online (even if it used to be much better); vies with Space Engineers when it comes to the planetary vehicle physics; and ED would be at the top of my list when it comes to stealth gameplay if it wasn't for the fact that I have to play in real time.
It's that last factor that causes Starfield to currently scratch my on-foot itch when it comes to space games. But I suspect that it'll be like Fallout 4 in the end: I'll play it for a while, reach a point in the game where it feels just too much like a grind to continue further, and then go do something else until that itch becomes unbearable again.
This is my great hope for a large number of features (or lack thereof)! I will very likely get Starfield, someday. It might be a year from now, might be five. There is some truly incredible talent in the modding community, and I can't wait to see what they turn this game into.
I’m constantly amazed by what gets produced by the modders - Skyrim still gets fresh mods every day, and I’m about 10 hours into a fresh play of SkyrimVR thanks to a new physical parry mod which really changes melee combat (I’m doing a 2-handed build for the first time). 5 years ago I was a pair of floating hands having to hold weapons horizontally to “block” but now I have a body with weapon holsters and full IK arms, I can grab pretty much anything in the game and have it/them react with proper physics, can parry incoming attacks with my broadsword, leave a trail of footprints, and most recently I can admire water reflections. That’s just a few of the two dozen or so mods I have installed, and I have a very lightly modded gameThis is my great hope for a large number of features (or lack thereof)! I will very likely get Starfield, someday. It might be a year from now, might be five. There is some truly incredible talent in the modding community, and I can't wait to see what they turn this game into.
Looking at the Starfield page on Nexus and the sheer amount of mods made without the Creation Kit - I think it’s going to explode next year.
Had an AWESOME day!
Visited the parents, pa won at the gambling and gave me a ship for free. Bit like the first car he got me but he's a legend, so I'll take that He did say I could flog it if I wanted. It was a massive surprise since I'd actually just decided to drop in RPG-wise to listen to them arguing like when I was back in Atlantis doing some other things.
Made headway with the Rangers and got the Star Eagle - nice ship, though not tested it in combat, yet.
Then to top it off decided to finish the Mantis mission - and got the Razorleaf.
3 ships in one day. Looking at the statistics, I think I like the look of the Star Eagle the most. Ships are really building up now so I need to take stock and start creating/modifying some to make some progress with ship-based activities.
Thought I was a higher level; turns out I am level 26. Visited several early-starter systems (Sol etc.) and realised there are STILL loads of side-quests to complete. This game seems huge...
Visited the parents, pa won at the gambling and gave me a ship for free. Bit like the first car he got me but he's a legend, so I'll take that
He did say I could flog it if I wanted. It was a massive surprise since I'd actually just decided to drop in RPG-wise to listen to them arguing like when I was back in Atlantis doing some other things.Made headway with the Rangers and got the Star Eagle - nice ship, though not tested it in combat, yet.
Then to top it off decided to finish the Mantis mission - and got the Razorleaf.
3 ships in one day. Looking at the statistics, I think I like the look of the Star Eagle the most. Ships are really building up now so I need to take stock and start creating/modifying some to make some progress with ship-based activities.
Thought I was a higher level; turns out I am level 26. Visited several early-starter systems (Sol etc.) and realised there are STILL loads of side-quests to complete. This game seems huge...
Ships are for carrying your stuff and your crew around, and for space combat.
When I'm designing one, I'm thinking about cargo space, armament, internal layout, and what utility I want to have with me (workshops for weapon customization and spacesuit customization, a research station for getting the technologies I want, pharmaceutical station, etc.) In combat I care about shields, which weapons I have and how much power they need, and speed/maneuverability. Ships do have lateral thrusters, if you learn that skill, but they are pretty weak. I really don't use them.
So I design with that in mind. Looks also matter, and jump range, and the cockpit is important.
So ship design in SF is not entirely trivial, but it's not super deep either. I find it fun, and walking around inside and outside a ship I designed, and then taking it into combat, is pretty cool.