*S*T*A*R*F*I*E*L*D* / Starfield

At least judging from the trailer the FPS-combat looks a bit weak. Or at least mediocre. Surprisingly space combat looks comparatively decent. Characters and dialogue seem boring, but I guess everyone and their mother expected that.

Should be interesting how ship construction and character progression turn out.

In spite of what the trailer is showing I'm not exactly holding my breath when it comes to the AI. It certainly would be cool to have some more complex and sometimes non-aggressive wildlife, but they'll probably fuck that up.

Maybe it's not as simple as just picking *your favourite engine* due to building systems they like to use into it. The Devs have used this engine the entire time at working for Bethesda and will be very familiar working with it.

I'm sure they have looked into the viability of switching at various points and decided against it.

Re: the weak combat, every game they have made has weak combat. I would just be happy if they could drag it up to mass effect 2 level.

The thing is you are naming tight non open world experiences. Bethesda's games are on a scale that almost nobody else makes and should only be compared to games of a similar scale.

I dont even particularly like their games (only one I've ever managed to finish was Skyrim) but comparing their games to something like the resident evil remake is mental as they are totally different beasts.

Try and create something that looks like that on a massive scale and you end up with a project like star citizen (which is partly down to mismanagement but an example of a similar scale).

I feel like they've probably had a small team of people that have been working there for a long time, and the Gamebryo engine is just what they know. I get a bit frustrated by it too, but it doesn't feel like they have much inventive to change it.

Why would you bother fixing it when the community does the job for you.

I came away reasonably impressed and excited; especially by elements like the shipbuilding (though who knows how significant a role that will play).

But I'm not sure my expectations were ever that high. Did anyone really think they were going to deliver something massively different from Elder Scrolls / Fallout in its fundamental systems? Exhibit A: Digipick :-D

I'm still looking forward to it.

It's crazy how underwhelmed I am. If this reveal had happened 5 years or so ago my ass temps would have cranked through the roof. I'll almost certainly get it on day one, but we've seen games promise this stuff before, and it's never been as mind-blowing as expected. Add to the that the fact that it's Bethesda, and the level of jank and bugginess at an inter-planetary scale is going to be unprecedented. IF they can avoid Cyberpunk levels of broken I'll be very impressed.

Ultimately, it's a space RPG and I'll be all over it because I'm a sucker.

I was very whelmed by that footage. I think if it didn't have the Bethesda name on it and people hadn't been anticipating it it wouldn't have made much of a splash at all. It's going to need to be vastly more than the sum of its parts, as many of those parts looked quite lackluster there.

All I know is that I loved the base building in Fallout 4. I spent so many hours building an intricate treehouse base. I just wish there was more point to the base building, as they were never subject to any meaningful super mutant threat.

If Starfield manages to make the base building an inherent and meaningful part of the game I'm going to lose months of my life to it... that's a big "if" though.

Amazing that 11 years ago, Bethesda created the only Game Engine capable of handling large game worlds and many objects, a technical marvel bolt of lightning that could only happen once in history.

More screenshots and observations coming, but I was too tired to do any more last night and I have an eight hour shift today, so it'll be a while.

Because there are *so* many other game engines that are set up to do that right out of the box without significant engineering cost arent there?

Ah what do I know, I only work as a video game programmer after all.

I find it so weird there’s a lot of people defending Bethesda for reinvesting fuck all into their technology while they were buying every studio around, because it would have been work.

Their games look like turds, the animations, acting direction and writing are only matched in their shallowness by their gameplay systems. But they make great commercials for them with stellar music.

It's no secret that I'm a Bethesda fan, in that I love Oblivion and Skyrim dearly (they're the two games I'm currently playing), and that I enjoyed Fallout 3 immensely, Fallout 4 slightly less so (and never completed the main quest) and New Vegas was...okay...but does feel a it of a slog now, to be honest.

I'm excited for their space game - I don't mind it being "Oblivion With Guns With Spaceships" to extend the old Fallout 3 phrase.

People do go on about the quests not being interesting and so on, but I'd honestly prefer to spend five minutes in a Bethesda world than any amount of time at all in the Witcher games.