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heart-forge · 18 hours
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interested in yr starfield take. played a lot of skyrim as a teen as one does but am not per se a bethesda fan and am mostly bemused by how little i have seen anyone talking about starfield either way in my social circles
well listen this with the important distinction that I am a Bethesda fan. Todd wrapped his chess-master's hands around my throat as a child and has not let go, so perhaps it's me that is biased, but I've been asking for years for a Starfield-esque game and I will not complain now that they've given it to me.
The critical like friction point I think with Starfield and mainstream gaming is that it's an FPS that isn't an FPS. I rarely had to actually fight outside of space flight mechanics. Most plot-based fights could be avoided with a keen enough charisma-or-whatever-space-equivalent skill. I think overall Starfield's flaw was Cyberpunk's flaw in a much more professional setting: it didn't commit enough to what it wanted to do, and by doing so added some watered down stuff that didn't work. Starfield wanted to be an exploration game: No Man's Sky, Garden of the Sea, something that's focused on studying the flora and fauna.
But also they doubled down on settlement building, something that people only wanted to use to make themselves home bases in Fallout 4 and otherwise didn't enjoy as a method of resource management (unless there was some bethesda forum silent majority: generally I gauge whether something is broadly popular or unpopular by asking my brother if it annoyed him dsfkjhds). And then also there was combat, but not just the ship combat which was the real novelty, but also base level FPS combat? But only sometimes.
And then of course there were the procedurally generated worlds which everyone knew immediately was not going to work, because No Man's Sky had already fumbled that hurdle. Bethesda narrative structure is not suitable for random distribution: they excel with specific and focused quest lines in limited, fleshed out locations (ie Shivering Isles, particular abandoned Vault side quests in Fallout 3, Rivenspire in ESO) and become overly generic and repetitive once they remove that element (all the busywork in Skyrim, all the backtracking in Starfield).
This is a problem with a lot of AAA video games as time goes on because...they don't want to commit to genre. What if someone doesn't like that genre? Then they won't buy the game. And it's gotten to the point where games are starting to flop because the mechanics are so broadly generalized and bloated that even the interesting stuff isn't relevant enough to do more than annoy players. I love scanning things in Starfield, I loved scanning them enough that they were fully researched, I loved finding different planets with variations on gravity...but there was literally no reason to explore. There could have been: I was in a guild of explorers. They could have done so much to make it worth my while to explore planets, but instead it was a radiant quest that I didn't even get the first time I played.
I've asked for a long, long time for a video game where my core purpose was not "bloodthirsty fighter itching to kill something with a gun or several guns or a knife or a sword murder kill death death death I don't understand magic I just want to cull my enemies". I hate playing ESO and getting treated like a barbarian in every interaction. I hate being railroaded into being a combat marine in Mass Effect (and was thrilled when Andromeda gave me cool biotics like everyone else got except for Shepard even if Shepard was a biotics class). I want class variation, even if we need to take money away from fidelity and put it into narrative so I can have someone treat me like I'm not a complete drooling neanderthal even if I specifically pick a magic or stealth class.
Starfield gave me that. I was able to pick dialogue options that reflected my skills. If I had points in geology, I could reassure Barrett that the story that the mining company fed him about his husband's misconduct was implausible. I could scold people for improper storage and care of relics even without sinking any particular skills. I could choose to be in religious awe of the relic visions, I could choose to be scientifically fascinated by them, I could choose to be power hungry about them. It's the most flexibility that's ever been allowed in a Bethesda game that I've ever played, and combat was so unfocused that I frequently forgot that fighting was even an option.
I really liked building my ship. I liked that it was a bit of a puzzle when it came to connecting things. The UI was awful and there wasn't much of a tutorial, but I said already that I'm a Bethesda fan. I liked ship combat once I got the hang of it, I liked the act of flying the ship around space. A lot of people said "Starfield gets really good...twelve hours in har har har" which I don't think is strictly fair. Starfield gets good once you figure out how to do stuff and use stuff the way it's supposed to be done and used.
Overall I think Starfield was a really positive experiment in trying something new with the FPS genre. Not everything worked which is grounds for a mass murder-suicide when it comes to how level-headedly gamers react to things that are really popular that they're just not clicking with (seriously I think a lot of problems in the game industry could be at least alleviated if we unlocked the 'just because you want to like it does not mean a fundamental right of yours is being violated if you don't' skill tree), but I like that a company the size of Bethesda is still kind of trying new things. Some quests REALLY hit me in the face: there's one where you're hunting down a relic and find a permeable reality where you have to decide to canonize one particular timeline over another, which involves a lot of switching through timelines in order to advance through to the next room. That was incredible, and meant so much more to me than any generic fetch quest. Grinding mechanics are difficult: not all players like to grind, but if you leave off grinding altogether then it becomes more complicated to balance for difficulty, especially if your goal is to present specific challenges to your player.
Anyway I thought Starfield was fun, I thought the story was good, I think fidelity is overrated, I think that many problems with video games would be solved by carefully integrated accessibility features, and I watched multiple videos criticizing Starfield for things that have always been true across Bethesda games (ie "why do guards know I've stolen and what I've stolen between different planets" because that's how Bethesda has always handled theft mechanics, maybe you just don't like Bethesda games and don't have an immutable human right to frictionlessly play and enjoy every video game that your friends are also playing (not YOU anon just the general you)). There's plenty of things to criticize but at this point I think some people just start nitpicking for nitpicking's sake. It's okay that some people didn't like it. They don't have to, but much like not liking something doesn't make it evil, not liking something also doesn't make it bad.
Overall though I'm not surprised that no one has heard much about it: it ran terribly without many options outside of modding to fix that issue. Maybe things are different over on Reddit, but I'm willing to wager that a lot of PC gamers have outdated systems. I said it about Cyberpunk and I'll say it here too: it's nice that your NASA computer can run one billion fps with high detail shadows and 4K reflections. Mine needs to be able to turn that shit off or else I just can't play your game.
As far as what you haven't heard about the main plot, I'll say this: it's a very, very interesting twist on infinite replayability. Nothing is truly infinitely replayable, but Starfield makes a very bold and frankly fascinating leap into how to achieve such a thing, to the point where before I found the ending I was like "it would have been better to redirect resources from x to the ending in order to achieve this insane thing" and while it's not perfect, I was SHOCKED that they just...literally do. It's so fascinating that I'm kind of surprised that no one talked about it.
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heart-forge · 20 hours
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there's like a scale of inconvenient mechanics by design. on one end you have what remains to me as the most mind-boggling stupid thing to put into a video game for aesthetic purposes, the cyberpunk seizure inducing lights. and then on the other hand you have "well you won't die if I don't add an entirely separate reroute through the menus"
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heart-forge · 5 days
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Hi sorry to bother and maybe it’s just me but every time I try to move on to chapter 5 it blanks my screen and I have to close out and reopen never actually moving forward.
SDKJFHJKDS you should win a prize anon you are the FIRST person to play test the new game kdjfh. It should be fixed now sorry about that. I believe I started work on the update as the last update went out and so the chapter transition was greyed out so no one could get to it before the update was done and I didn't notice because I was building saves to get to the chapter. Works now, I think!
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heart-forge · 5 days
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Bad Ritual Chapter 5: Warlock
Happy update day, Apocalyptic Hermit Tier! Enjoy the new chapters for both Tahira and Siruud, and thank-you for your support !! 🙏💚
Update will release publicly on the 31st (after a quick road trip on my part, so please be patient 😅)
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heart-forge · 8 days
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pillars of eternity on sale right now btw
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heart-forge · 12 days
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Finally posting again yayyy
Xelef drawing I’ve been working on for months now lol
Was going to draw him as a vampire but then I kinda didn’t???
vv drawing process vv
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heart-forge · 13 days
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AH JUMPSCARE FROM MY UNIVERSITY'S WEBSITE
if anyone happens to run a popular blog about edible bugs and gives me ten dollars I'll name drop your bug eating blog in next month's drabble
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heart-forge · 13 days
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why does the government of canada have a dedicated webpage for eating bugs?
if anyone happens to run a popular blog about edible bugs and gives me ten dollars I'll name drop your bug eating blog in next month's drabble
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heart-forge · 13 days
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if anyone happens to run a popular blog about edible bugs and gives me ten dollars I'll name drop your bug eating blog in next month's drabble
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heart-forge · 14 days
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another five hour shift with time to work, but windows update making it impossible to use twine.
did the back end overhaul for hybrid (changing it so that instead of specifying a neutral route I just don't add a route and reapply the character routes as necessary) and it took like four minutes between customers I'm getting really good at cleaning up after myself.
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heart-forge · 15 days
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boom, back end stuff done and in theory working. new chapter will give you one more chance to piss around with whatever LI you want before committing to a route.
did the back end overhaul for hybrid (changing it so that instead of specifying a neutral route I just don't add a route and reapply the character routes as necessary) and it took like four minutes between customers I'm getting really good at cleaning up after myself.
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heart-forge · 16 days
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have you watched the brothers sun on netflix? valerian coded
I don't watch netflix, but I love Michelle Yeoh
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heart-forge · 16 days
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did the back end overhaul for hybrid (changing it so that instead of specifying a neutral route I just don't add a route and reapply the character routes as necessary) and it took like four minutes between customers I'm getting really good at cleaning up after myself.
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heart-forge · 17 days
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finished my hybrid reread to prep for a new chapter. might decide to adjust some things on the back end (nothing you would notice, mostly to bring it in line with BR and MH organization-wise), but otherwise. giggling and kicking my feet.
opened hybrid and gotta say, stupid stuff bothers me. I typically tag my passages when there's a player choice in them (so the next arrow doesn't show at the bottom) and for hybrid I made the choice tag blue? sick. twisted. the choice tag is green. everyone knows that but you hybrid.
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heart-forge · 17 days
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Bad Ritual Chapter 5 - Warlock
Thanks for your patience 🙏 here's chapter five (I think: it's technically five in the passage structure). This is an update for both Siruud and Tahira, so regardless of who you romance, there's new content for you !! There's also a bit of a credits section at the end: if you should appear there but don't, or appear there when you shouldn't, let me know !! I just used your Ko-fi username.
Hermit Tier will unlock early access on March 24th, and the update will go public on March 31st.
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heart-forge · 18 days
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opened hybrid and gotta say, stupid stuff bothers me. I typically tag my passages when there's a player choice in them (so the next arrow doesn't show at the bottom) and for hybrid I made the choice tag blue? sick. twisted. the choice tag is green. everyone knows that but you hybrid.
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heart-forge · 18 days
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Bad Ritual Chapter 5 - Warlock
Thanks for your patience 🙏 here's chapter five (I think: it's technically five in the passage structure). This is an update for both Siruud and Tahira, so regardless of who you romance, there's new content for you !! There's also a bit of a credits section at the end: if you should appear there but don't, or appear there when you shouldn't, let me know !! I just used your Ko-fi username.
Hermit Tier will unlock early access on March 24th, and the update will go public on March 31st.
242 notes · View notes