Erk @ Erk @cdda.social

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2 yr. ago

ADHD isn't particularly hard to diagnose most of the time. If we're going to wait for psychologists in every bog standard case, good luck with the upcoming twelve year waiting list to get your kid some help.

People just need to know when to identify confounders and refer out. Takes a few good training seminars.

I fudge enemy stats all the time, or at least I used to. These days I play blades in the dark, and before that I no longer needed to fudge much after years of practice.

The argument about fudging usually presumes some sort of pity for injured players and creates a strawman out of that. I don't fudge hits or misses to save people, I fudge to keep the fight moving along. Six rounds of "your sword clatters against its scales but it seems to be holding up okay" gets old really fast. If the fight is taking too long I whip out some kind of tension ramping effect and drop the enemy hp. "Oh no, it dumps over a cauldron of acid! (But it only has 20 hp left not 60 because this is getting slow)"

It's perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.

I'd try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It's a better release than Bethesda's usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven't done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.

I'm playing starfield way too much. Every now and then I get a break to continue my Minecraft project with the kids. The internet keeps telling me I'm not supposed to be having fun with starfield but it's just not working, I'm really excited about the new capital ship I'm working on now.

I found it took a long time to really get rolling. On the other hand I'm 70 hours in now and keep finding more depth and things to do and mechanics I haven't even explored, it sometimes is a bit daunting how much there is to do in it.

!dda_discussion@cdda.social - we've got a micro-instance for our ultra-nichd foss roguelike, cataclysm: dark days ahead.

I'm not sure. It's a good game, but the fun you can have in it is more Minecraft style than Bethesda style. If you want that, then it's probably worth a try

Yeah. I'm agreeing with you I think, but my main gripe here is that even in the intro/tutorial moments they don't actually tutorial anything.

I don't mind the mechanic of the double unlock. I do think a lot of the unlocks themselves are phoned in. Was just ranting about how bad the "install 15 unique ship parts" one is with a friend, like why not something kind of interesting instead of such a grindy one? "Make a ship with only one engine and a top speed of 150" eg.

the system is interesting. The gameplay is meh, but I don't think it'd be too bad if there was something tied to it.

personally I prefer finding the obelisks as a way to learn languages. I forgot about the cookie cutter, useless NPCs in the stations.

imo the main problem isn't that there are a lot of things, it's a major lack of information about game systems really. The game gives you a boostpack and tells you it'll help, but doesn't bother to pop up and tell you you'll need a point in boosters if you want to use it. It shows you how to target enemy engines but doesn't tell you you'll need a point in targeting if you want to do it yourself. It's an obvious, silly miss. I don't mind that these things need points, but it's annoying that it doesn't tell you, especially when they have a place in the game where they easily could.

Lots of places really. Outside the tutorial sections of the main quest, why not have my boost packs say like "basic boost pack - function locked unless you have Boosters 1"

Depending on when you player, it's generally a very different game every 2 years or so, but it's still not perfect. I actually just posted a big rant about it upthread.

There's a solid complaint IGN made that I think is completely true, that starfield has too many of its most fun systems that don't unlock until you unlock the appropriate skill, and nothing in the game even tells you to do that. Disabling and boarding starships is a big one, or using boost packs; modifying weapons and armour too. Depending on how you ran your 12 hours you might be missing some of those.

Performance is a big one too. There are already some good looking performance mods on nexus iirc

One of the weirdest bits there is that they have a fairly interesting and robust system of learning alien languages, but then quest gives always give quests in your native language so there's no reward for learning the alien stuff at all.

And of course all the quests are basic fetch quests, because there is nothing in the game resembling a dungeon or combat arena, and no real enemies you can fight (alien bugs or sentinels, wee)

I really hope starfield lights a bit of a fire under the NMS folks to fix some of their half-finished systems along those lines. NMS has procedurally generated ships, we're just not allowed to tinker with the procedural generator to make our own for some reason.

I posted a shorter version of this elsewhere in here but I've thought more and want to expand.

Disclaimer: I really like both no man's sky and starfield. Gonna be down on both of them but I've got hundreds of hours in NMS and I expect to have hundreds more in SF, they are both good games, I have no regrets about buying either of them.

That said, I've realized that starfield is actually making me low-key kind of angry at NMS, for all the potential it wasted. It's showing just how little extra depth NMS could have used (could still use) to be great. There are really only a couple fairly minor ways that starfield is better, and yet for me and I think a lot of people they spell the difference between "fun sandbox" and "awesome game". Starfield is so shallow on all of these that despite being the first game to really deliver on the promise of an open world space RPG sandbox, it's like a wish-dot-com version of what nms could be.

First, combat. Nms has all right space combat, nothing great but acceptable, but there's no excusing its ground combat. There's effectively one enemy, they're not really designed to be fought most of the time, and they're almost never involved in battles of any meaning. The combat overhaul added some mechanics but didn't solve the problem... in a way it's worse now because fighting seems like it could be interesting. How come when I find a trading post it's never a ruin overrun by pirates, with scattered notes from the lost inhabitants, written in their native language so that if I can speak it I can read their sad story? Why don't I ever find a detail of gek security bots defending the inner chambers of a crashed frigate? Why can't I have a shootout with the crew of a frigate on board its procedurally generated interior?

That leads into the issue that there's no story at all. People complain about the main quest of SF, but nms has one of the flimsiest, poorest written central plots of any game I've ever seen. That would be okay, but there are also no side quests. You can't stumble upon an abandoned mine, or have a spacer randomly ask you to help break a blockade of their home system. There are a tiny number of very shallow fetch quests, but nothing with even a hint of effort in the writing.

I get a bit annoyed at starfield for systems not interacting. Like, i have a house, but I can't build outpost buildings around it, eg. However, NMS takes that to extremes with how outpost building, village building, and frigate building all seem like they're actively hostile to each other, as if coming from different games. IIRC even some of the outpost components won't properly snap together if they're from different 'styles' of outpost, although I may be misremembering.

Add to that that there's also not a lot of gear collecting mechanics, minimal ways to display loot, minimal character customisation, and so on, and it's just... sigh. Everything nms does feels like it falls just short of being amazing, but they get bored right before completing the last step to bring it all home and then they go work on another system that they'll get 3/4 through and then abandon. I wish it had mods.

Meanwhile, starfield doesn't do any individually thing particularly well either, but unlike NMS, it feels like I can do stuff with what I make. I can build a ship... and then take it smuggling! Or fight pirates! I can have NPCs on board and they'll chat with each other while I'm flying around, and help run the ship! They're not all well written, but they're actually written, and do more than just stand around saying one line back at me. It's frustrating, because honestly, taken on its own, starfield isn't particularly remarkable (see how bland space travel is eg) but there's nothing out there that's actually gone the very obvious extra mile of "okay we have beautiful worlds to explore, what if now we put some things to do on them"

Se for me has exactly the same issue as NMS. No story, no person-to-person combat, no side quests. Just an empty world you're expected to populate yourself I guess. Starfield definitely doesn't do that as well, it isn't as much a Minecraft style sandbox. If nms or se had quests and story, I might not like starfield this much... but they don't, and there really isn't another space sim that also provides a decent shooter and rpg while having a nice open world.

I agree, but I think if I had stuff to do there, I wouldn't mind. The thing is there just isn't, the game is so shallow and the writing is so boring. I shouldn't like starfield this much except I have been primed to want this since NMS came.

I've usually gone with "meet people, make friends, introduce blades in the dark" rather than trying to find other bitd players.

I don't find it as difficult as it used to be just to find people who knew what an RPG was at all, that may influence my perspective. I'm just happy the hobby is healthy

Playing starfield is making me realize all I really wanted from NMS was some coherent side quests, actual combat, and a ship builder.