WHAT PLAY YOU!? Version 3.0

[Loki]

I just want Elite really, so the fps shooting bit will drag, I just want to boldly go.

[Merzbow]

All I've heard from people into stuff like Elite and No Man's Sky is that the space travel is definitely the lowest point of the game, it's inconsequential.

[Jazzy G]

5 minutes ago, Loki said:

I just want Elite really, so the fps shooting bit will drag, I just want to boldly go.

You should probably get Elite? 

[Keith Houchen]

12 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

it's inconsequential

That’s a fine summary, from my limited experience of it. The other parts of the game make up for it to some degree. 

[Loki]

8 minutes ago, jazzygeofferz said:

You should probably get Elite? 

Played the various versions of it to death.  Dangerous was fun but too focussed on combat, and it’s not available on next gen consoles.

Starfield looked like perfect for me but the reviews haven’t been encouraging.

[Keith Houchen]

Just now, Loki said:

Played the various versions of it to death.  Dangerous was fun but too focussed on combat, and it’s not available on next gen consoles.

It is. I had it on XB1 and carried on my save on Series X. 

[Mr_Danger]

Are the planets on Starfield just procedurally generated big Assasins Creed forts then? Heard they’re pretty much the same and the missions aren’t too different either. Big shame if that’s the case. Give me a bespoke playing experience over a big ginormous grey pile of choose your own shite any day. Unless you hit the jackpot and get do the both but not many Rockstar budgets around in gaming.

[CAREBEAR LUVVA]

Finished the main story on Starfield this afternoon. It's really really dull. Quite literally just collect a bunch of artifacts - none of which really have any especially different quests or anything linked to them, it's just "go here, shoot a few lads and pick the thing up" - then stick them all together and make a decision at the end about what you want to do with them. The storyline that goes along with it isn't much cop either - the characters are fairly dull, and the story isn't especially unique or interesting. Meh. There's also a bunch of slightly supernatural powers you can acquire, but all you do is enter a temple, fly around a little room touching a few sparkly things, then walk into a portal. Every single time. You're never even given any actual uses for any of the powers either, so I never bothered using them and quickly forgot I'd even acquired them.

I checked the achievements list when I'd finished the story, to see if it hinted at any other quests that I might have missed. There are 4 or 5 achievements linked to a questline that it turns out I can't even access because of some sort of bug that prevented one of the early missions from triggering. The internet reckons it's one of the better questlines in the game, too. Add it to the half a dozen quests I'd already picked up that bugged out and wouldn't let me finish (doors not opening, items that I couldn't hand over to the right person for no reason at all, stupid things like that). That sort of thing is probably to be expected, given Bethesda's history of buggy games (particularly within the first few weeks of release), but it doesn't stop it from being really annoying. Overall, 6 out of 10 at best.

[Jazzy G]

You'd have thought Microsoft would want to exercise better quality control than this.

[textonly]

The thing that's bugging me the most is the balance of gameplay to travel. For fairly nothing side quests, having to pop in and out of a hugely clunky menu system to *fast travel* between multiple planets can take longer than you spend actually doing the missions. "Go to this planet and talk to Person." Okay. Menu, menu, menu, menu, menu... loading screens... orbit... land... walk to Person. "Oh hi, you're the new guy. Go to this planet for me!". Repeat the process. With any RPG I always try to exhaust the side quests before finishing the main story, but I'm not sure I'll be able to with this. The time spent in menus is just too much for the meagre gains.

[The King Of Swing]

You can skip manually going through menus by targeting the quest marker in space, like you would an enemy ship and pressing X. 

That maps out the journey for you as long as you have enough fuel for the jump. Then press/hold X to jump to your location or land. 

Edited September 11, 2023 by The King Of Swing

[BomberPat]

Having finished Final Fantasy IX, I'm continuing to scratch the JRPG itch, with Sea Of Stars, and WrestleQuest.

WrestleQuest is cute, but a little bare bones. Very early days, and it's a slow start, but I don't think it's something I'm going to get consumed by, just something I'll give ten or twenty minutes to here and there. Some good inside jokes early on, but I can see the gimmick getting old and the gameplay getting tired pretty quick, and I find the battle system a bit needlessly fiddly.

Sea Of Stars is a gorgeous game. There's a balance to find when making consciously retro games, and this is obviously meant to feel like a SNES JRPG, in that you want it to feel authentically nostalgic, but also you want to take advantage of the countless quality of life improvements in gaming since then, or else it will be a frustrating experience. It's about appealing to your memory of how these games felt, rather than reflecting how they actually were, so a new game in that style needs to aim to be, in many ways, better than the source material, but not so much so that it's not identifiably aping said material. That's a long-winded way to say that it's a very pretty game that plays very well, with gameplay mechanics that could easily have come from the golden age of JRPGs, but which still feel fresh and interesting - there's some stuff in the battle system that I've never seen before, in terms of how it handles KOs and cutting off enemy attacks, for example, but it's still within a very simple turn-based battle system. I've not played long enough to get a feel for the story beyond the most generic level, and so far so RPG story, but hopefully it picks up.

[69MeDon]

21 hours ago, Loki said:

 

@69MeDon - what's your impressions so far?

I'm loving Starfield. For me, the best Bethesda RPG ever, but I'm a sci-fi guy.

However, ships and space travel are the weakest parts of the game. The ships (interiors and exteriors) themselves are pretty cool, but the actual travelling on your ship is more or less just a different sort of loading screen. You can't travel planet to planet even within the same system, instead the game shows your ship moving off and then loads orbiting the planet you wanted to visit. Then when you land? Another loading cutscene of the ship landing. Taking off? Same thing. The planets themselves, once you are on them, are fun to explore, but if you're looking to Starfield for space flight and exploration that is similar to a game like Elite: Dangerous, you will be very disappointed (and that was a disappointment to me, too, when I first played Starfield, but I've gotten over it and love Starfield for what it is). It's cool that the moons and planets on Starfield have some kind of orbital mechanics thing going on, as it meant I was able to create my first outpost on a moon which had one side locked to its star, right around the day/night terminator, so I get to see fucking awesome sunrises but my base is still on the dark side of the moon.

Speaking of Elite, I would so love an Elite: Dangerous 2, but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen. My kingdom for an The Expanse game that is more like Elite and not the Telltale Games one they did make.

Edited September 11, 2023 by 69MeDon

[Loki]

Urgh.  I saw all these trailers with combat in orbit and right you could at least fly around a solar system.

I dunno now whether to drop 500 odd quid just to play it.

[Dr. Alan Grant]

21 minutes ago, Loki said:

I dunno now whether to drop 500 odd quid just to play it.

Crikey, the price of games nowadays.