Bethesda’s latest can’t help but feel shallow by comparison.

  • iforgotmyinstance@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m enjoying Starfield far more than I expected.

    That said the NPC interactions are incredibly sterile in comparison to the full mo-capped acting of the BG3 NPCs. The Starfield NPCs feel like mannequins just spitting out their lines.

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      That’s like 75% of the work for BG3. There’s absolutely some work implementing DnD mechanics into code and designing encounters, and obviously the assets for the world have to be created as well, but the vast majority of their time was spent on dialogue choices and designing the story in general.

      It’s a great game for it, but we’re a good ways away from being able to do the same in an FPS/TPS with real time combat that isn’t absolutely brutal. BG3 could be what it was in terms of interactions because it was a CRPG. But it had to be a CRPG to do it. ARPG isn’t the term for what Starfield is, but games with reasonably rewarding action take too much work on that element to invest the time into every encounter than BG3 does. Balancing probabilities and maps for encounters for a CRPG isn’t trivial, but it costs way less to do than building out all those mechanics and skill trees into real time physics.

      They’re different games with different goals.

      • glimse@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I finished bg3 tonight. The credits are 35 minutes long and it felt like half of it was all the actors. Such an expansion game, even the animals have voices (if you can speak to them)

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          It absolutely a masterpiece and I’ll be playing it for a long time.

          I’ll just also be playing Starfield for a long time because it’s a different game that scratches a different itch.

        • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          And the animals are fucking hilarious! I enjoy the cats most of all, especially the “film noir PI” one in act three. I wish he could become another pet in the camp.

    • Endorkend@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The writing of BG3, both storyline and interpersonal for every NPC, is top tier.

      In Starfield, it’s like they put together a committee of pretentious artsy fartsy people who think that their Tumblr page makes them writers and a bunch of execs.

      And anything that combination of creatively dead asswipes came up with was canon.

      It’s a combination of trying to hard to be clever with the most derivative shite story I’ve seen in a long ass time.

      Starfield would be a better game without its main story.

      If it was allowed to put all the focus on being someone in this games universe, it would be far better than any elements of the main story existing in the games universe.

      Joining Constellation or not should also be an option.

      And Constellation should’ve been more of a JRPG style guild with people focusing on various branches of enterprise in the game and giving missions for those. A questhub rather than this club. They all already have their own specialization.

      But seriously, the main story is just all levels of meh.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Starfield falls into the classic Bethesda problem of here’s your story, go do it, also here’s a bunch of unrelated side quests.

        Also feel free to murder literally everyone you come into contact with it probably won’t matter.