The game is aggressively Bethesda but I'm enjoying the visuals and sniffing the 3d model of every insignificant bit of detritis in the world. I saw a very nice looking bowl, maybe THE bowl of all videogames. Other than that the narrative and main story has already lost my interest after about 10 minutes and I'll be off being a space menace if the game will let me.
Once i found out I can travel using the ship in scanner mode it doesn't feel like a map simulator anymore.
Also the chef having a perk for dueling tickles me.
Game also runs like shit on PC but digital foundry showed most settings being on medium yields good performance with no noticable quality loss.
If they're using the same combat AI they've been using since the 16th century their AI is capable of being much better than this. It seems like they've turned down all the parameters until they might as well be off. Speed of reaction to the player, intervals at which they fire their guns, interval for seeking cover and repositioning, it's all turned way down.
Religion works in TES because you can, and frequently do, interact with the gods. Whether Talos and Tiber Septim are the same entity has major metaphysical ramifications on the world. Like, if the Thalmor can make Talos and Tiber Septim be different entities through magical Dragon Break fuckery it might allow them to unmake hte world. Religions in space are kind of silly. Like you went to Heaven, god isn't there, why are you still doing this?
The ai is weird because its practically passive. AI in games just keeps getting worse and worse ots kinda sad. I had to up the difficulty to give them a chance to land a hit on me and even then I had to stand still
Even then they actually interacted with the environment - breaching doors, knocking over furniture, improvising cover, exploding walls. Combat environments feel so static in most games, like all the objects in your surrounds are either immutable and unbreakable, or are just there to demonstrate havok physics and go flying around like they’re filled with helium
There is a combat ai mod that basically proves this. Here is some of the code, it's also helpfully commented showing the vanilla number vs the changed numbers.
Personally I think the biggest issue they have with AI is that they're using one universal set of AI for all locations. The game needs different AI parameters for different locations. The cities. Interior spaceship combat. Planet exterior combat. Interior facility combat. These are all very different spaces where the player behaves very differently. Combat in them should be assumed to be different.
Oh my god I can't wait for coherent combat mods.
One time I modded New Vegas to be approximately realistic and oh my god it was such a rush. Everything took 1 or maaaaybe 2 headshots to kill, other than super mutants and deathclaws and shit, but everything also killed you just as fast.
There's damage value mods and the like at the moment but I don't think "coherent" is going to be achieved until we figure out what to do about level up health increases and how to balance armour vs levelling over time. Right now the game adds 20hp to your health every level up, and does something with enemies being tougher with more skills as they get higher level too. But exactly what they do is ehhh I dunno. On top of that you have the question of how to handle armour, particularly the space suits that seem to be intended to be armoured and built for expecting combat or damage of some sort. Factoring that in and having it make sense seems worthwhile.
So yeah. I'm not sure. It can probably be done but also you generally don't just want to entirely trivialise the levelling up system as well. That takes more work and I think a pretty deep understanding of what's in the game, something most of us don't have until a good few hundred hours of gameplay and exploration. This seems a lot slower to explore too, if you're investigating stuff properly. It's taking me a long time to move location to location as I get bogged down in stuff to do.
One thing I might be interested in is expanding the pirates into something more.... Interesting. I'm finding that some of the gameplay feels a bit like sailing the ocean from island to island where you meet the locals and have an adventure on each island and then move on. This travelling loop has been heavily reminding me of One Piece but in space. An expansion to pirates along that line in a political sense could work quite well in the universe, you could even add in a new faction analogous to the Celestial Dragons/World Nobles, suddenly you have One Piece in space and you resolve a lot of the lack of coherent politics the game has.
You don't even need to add new npcs for that kind of faction addition. CEOs are present throughout the game, just add all the CEOs to the faction and make them meaner. Give them something to make the player really see them as shits. Suddenly every damn business owner in the game becomes sussy (and omg the game has you talking to A LOT of business owners).
YES! You have these variously libertarian to neoliberal space capitalist societies living in incredibly close proximity to massive bands of spacers and pirates- the governments cannot even provide security, not just for independent colonists but even their own important facilities. This should be a really interesting backdrop, but they just don't seem to talk about it. It's clearly a societal meltdown and the pirates should have some kind of politics. You could have good pirates and bad pirates, and the bad pirates could be getting funded on the DL by rival governments.
Theres a really glaring thing - you have Pirates and you have Spacers, the latter of which are supposed to be just nutjobs or cults or something. But they don't actually do anything different from the pirates, in any way. It seems like something was cut, and they just wound up with two slightly different looking bad guy human types.
I should be able to join commie pirates or mobster pirates, and fight the core world NPCs to different ends.
We need to create like "THE" faction mod in the far future, with more involved factions that include ones with horrible politics too
Right, and this is exactly the same as One Piece.
It's pretty obvious that one group was supposed to be good pirates with a clear political basis in anarchism, whereas the other group was supposed to be bad pirates, complete and total marauders, 100% bad in every incarnation of them.
I think representing these as 2 factions was a mistake and the better idea would have been to have "pirates" and do it One Piece style with some of them being objectively good while others are clearly terrible. Create a kind of ambiguity and an understanding for the distrust people have for them, and create a tension for the player because they don't know what kind of pirates they're dealing with until after they take the risk of seeing if they're good or bad. The alternative is blasting them on sight every single time, which turns you into the same as the World Navy.
I'm not sure what you would do with the Spacers if you go down this route. They feel like they shouldn't be a clear independent faction but rather a subfaction of Pirates that do not always make it clear that they're members of that subfaction.
Ultimately this is all a bit of a mess but there is a twinkle of something good here with somewhat minor changes to structure. One Piece is absolutely the right work of fiction to look at for inspiration in repairing it though, it's very similar.
Au contraire, cultic religions make sense in a libertarian capitalist hellscape in which 50% of the population are vagrants and marauders
How many techbro billionaires right now have cult-adjacent followings?
If capitalism somehow endures another century, I would fully expect actual churches to Steve Jobs and other vampires.