this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Something about the future being as extremely car brained as present day North America is kinda unintentionally funny though.
It's fucking weird. The idea of being a space pilot is literally the fantasy the game sells. But that's meaningless if everyone in the galaxy with even an admin job has a spaceship like they're cars. Why would people work as gunner/engineer on someone else's spaceship if they have enough money to own their own? Why are all these people working with/for the player for wages?
It's absolutely ridiculous. You need to ground space travel in people who dream of going to the stars but are stuck due to it being out of their means vs the people who do have the means. And you need to give the player many different possible backstories for how they attained these means. Either luck. Or piracy. Or they're a super engineer who built one. Or they're actually rich. Etc etc. You've got to give the player roleplay options to properly fill this in.
All of these things should be relatively easy to fix though, since the only places you have to change to fix these are the major cities. You can probably fix this with 10-15 new NPCs per city with dialog, and then a bunch of NPCs with no dialog other than a 1 line response.
Yeah I think it's also a big problem that the money system is so compressed that it's hard to know how much anything is worth. Like if an apple or a meal is around 100 credits, then the 10k that small ship would cost is basically walking around money for most people. A penthouse apartment on Neon is 25k is, so is property just really cheap there or is food expensive?
Ultimately gameplay balance and all that, but it seems like very strange world building to me.
The prices they've chosen are really just about fantasy fulfilment for the player, they went with making everything cheap and easily attainable, since most of it is fairly meaningless. You fly around in a flying house with every amenity you need for one, you don't need properties.
Modding has a lot of potential here though. Rebuilding the economy and pricing combined with a good survival mod that takes advantage of the game having native temperature and climate features... Add fuel necessity and costs to the game too. You can really make working and doing missions to earn a living a necessity, and you will be able to get stranded on planets where you starve/freeze and die. A significant amount of depth will come from deepening this. The temperature feature in particular feels like they added it specifically for modders since it's effect is negligible in the base game.
I also think that we need a "cities don't allow space suits" feature so players have to lose their armour in cities and become more vulnerable. Make decisions more meaningful.
Generally I feel like the gameplay should be balanced around Fromsoft's approach to combat as well. Death should be quick for players that make mistakes but combat highly rewarding when you play it well and smartly. The powers in particular seem like they can be VERY powerful and will remain strong even when you raise damage significantly.
There's a lot to work with here. I won't pretend I'm not a little excited about modding, I really do think it's the best game this studio has released since Oblivion even with all my criticisms of the lib writing. They REALLY need to put something into solving performance issues though, because when you add script heavy stuff into a game that already chugs it will literally break.
Wish fulfillment used to be saving the world or getting the girl. Now it's having a place to live that doesn't put you into financial crisis.
I can't tell you how many times I've imagined implementing economic simulations in Skyrim just because the vapidness of the base game bugs me. If you're going to insist on heavily involving capitalism in your medieval fantasy, at least have it be capitalism.
Being able to get loans that have interest and potentially put you in serious debt that gets people chasing you down would be sick (I'm either game, but Starfield in particular)
I find there's a fine line with this. We could easily make the games not-fun by accurately balancing them into being capitalist. You can mod Skyrim to the point that a single mistake results in you becoming a drug addled destitute beggar but that's only fun for some RP purposes and is NOT fun for basic gameplay overall after you've experienced its content once.
A substantial difference in Skyrim is that you're still the dovakiin or however they spell it. There is plenty of reason for you to be able to escape destitution pretty easily, and my point wasn't that it would be some sort of political statement but simply a more interesting sandbox.
For a wage? Like, idk, they still need income no matter how cheap starships are
Yeah, the game starts you off as a laborer working on a job site that can't even afford have a ship permanently on station, then you're just given a decent starter ship that's worth more than most other small ships and that's it you're set until you can get a better one or make meaningful upgrades to it. The Frontier really should have been a non-modifiable, non-sellable ship that's just there to paper over the issue of you needing a ship until you can buy, find, or steal one for yourself.
Yeah, it feels like ME1 biotics all over where they're just free hard CC options that can lock down entire rooms as every enemy is stuck ragdolling around for 30 seconds each. They really need to just get shunted to zero-g movement with maybe some "disoriented" debuff instead of ragdolling as they drift around. Enemies can literally maneuver just fine in zero-g and it even makes sense that a bunch of people used to fighting onboard ships that can lose or regain gravity at any moment wouldn't just go limp if gravity suddenly got a bit weird.
It should have been trash too, literally falling apart, practically space junk. But they made Constellation into this fantasy of a secret society of explorers that flies through the unknown killing literally everything on every single planet they visit with near limitless resources from their benevolent CEO billionaire with bottomless pockets because he's just in it for the "passion" of exploring space (I'm hopeful that this turns out to not be true later on, but I have low expectations).
The ship they give the player to start out with is too good. And fundamentally starts the game off on the wrong foot.
Having the player need to beg/borrow/steal to get their foothold in space would fundamentally put the player in a headspace of feeling grateful for what they have. Alternate start mods can solve this, and then modifications to ship prices and so on can tie it all together.
I think part of the problem here is that Bethesda are scared of making their game too roleplay heavy. They have always tried to avoid any limitation on freedom of the player, no matter the skill of the player. This makes the game fun for anyone but comes at a considerable expense to storytelling.
One of the main problems is that a spaceship is the price of just fifty guns. But this is because looting is boring and they don't want to force the player to do too much of it just to survive.
Another problem is probably the inventory system itself, allowing the player to carry too much. I think if you have crew on a ship you should be able to order your crew to loot a vessel/spacestation/facility for you(after clearing it of enemies). This would eliminate the need to painstakingly search a facility from top to bottom. You would do "crew action>loot location" and then some time would pass and you'd get a list of all objects in the location and the option to load them onto your ship cargo or not. With this kind of feature you can then limit what the player can carry more significantly (2-3 guns, some medical equipment, ammunition). The general point here being that if you're the captain of a starship with a crew you should be able to use that crew, and this ties into fixing problems with the pricing. If you increase the pricing of everything then you also need to increase the loot you get and make doing that looting enjoyable in some way. Obviously a space encounter needs to somehow give the player enough loot to pay for that encounter too and turn a profit on top otherwise you're just encouraging the player to avoid it all.
Money sinks need finding to make up for this. Fuel probably being the biggest one. Infinite generated local missions on settled planets need to be worth enough to get the player enough fuel to get into space. And they need to be fun too. That or thievery in some way. Robbing Galbank or some corporation ought to be a viable alternative for a quick buck but come with the negative effect of them sending people to kill you later.
I can seriously think of a lot with regards to overhauling this. On the same scale as Requiem for Skyrim.
The best reading of it is that he's a bored and lonely old man who thinks space is neat and throws some pocket change at a little clubhouse full of people who'll pretend to be his friends where he can hang out instead of working, and he only really gets invested once the weird shit starts happening. He's still too friendly and whitewashed for the character to really land though.
Exactly. Even just some option at the end where you do a quick time skip like waiting or sleeping and it gives you a menu with all the stuff that's not literal trash, to then dump straight into the cargo hold. Hell, take it a step further and let all the trash guns and armor get turned into irrecoverable bulk packages just to compress it all and avoid the serious slowdown that having tons of junk in your inventory/cargo causes, so instead of dozens of various modded maelstroms you just have "crate of ten shit guns" that's just vendor trash from that point on.
FO76 eventually added bulk area looting for dead enemies, so the same general principle shouldn't be too hard.
There are some downsides to this looting concept. One being that finding an interesting book or audiolog that sends you on a quest somewhere will lose some context. Instead of finding it on the body of someone with environmental storytelling because you searched the place yourself it would be something your crew comes to you with and "in addition to the usual loot, we found this which is particularly interesting on a dead victim of the Spacers".
There's less incentive to thoroughly comb every nook and cranny if you can just have your crew do it. Hmmmmmmmmm. Perhaps an alternative to this is to have your companions do the search as you go along. Why not have them loot? Pick up stuff over x value. Interesting items/weapons. Have voicelines remarking on the stuff they pick up. Shout "we found something interesting over here" for important finds. Have the player and the crew loot together as part of the experience. Maybe don't allow this to happen until AFTER a player has cleared a dungeon, encouraging the player to focus on clearing first before looting because then they get the help of crew members. And you don't get that jarring experience of looting mid combat this way.
This can also allow you to keep the limitation of 1 companion for the clearance phase then having the whole crew come in to do the looting phase. Although I suspect the majority of people out there mod in the ability for multiple companions. I feel pretty strongly that 3-4 players in the player's group would make much more interesting gameplay because you can have companions talk to each other BG3 style.
Unfortunately I haven't seen anything like that so far in Starfield, not the way FO4 would do it. There's been like one message that started a quest and it's a common drop from spacer enemies. Locations are painfully generic and I've already looted the same abandoned facilities multiple times on different planets.
I have. There was a drop in a random facility I found while out exploring. Basically a message to the man's family as he knew he was going to die, thanking his kids, apologising to his wife for a few things, telling them how much he loved them, real tear jerking. Delivering it was.... Awkward.
I assume that things like this are peppered around. Just gonna take a while to find them and for the memorable ones to enter community consciousness.
Ew. That's pretty concerning.