abraxas @ abraxas @sh.itjust.works

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For most skills, there low level human equivalents in the real world who will never "choke under pressure" once when doing the thing thousands of times throughout their life. When we're talking about one of the heroes of a tale that are also "the best of the best", I think it's ok from a literature, fantasy, or gameplay standpoint for them to have a 100% success rate despite the fact that a failure risk would be possible in the real world. This is doubly true (DM point of view) when failure would be uninteresting or mess with suspension of disbelief. If an ace pilot is trying to fly through a bad storm to land where the firefight is going to happen, he bloody well makes it. I'm ok with "success with complications" on a 1, but the complications should be fun as well. You land ok, but the wind that hit at the last minute caused some damage to a wing. You might need to find another way out" or even "unfortunately, you weren't able to fly evasively enough because of the buffetting winds, so they know you're here.

Nobody wants Skyrim syndrome, where a master thief gets caught pickpocketing someone (we Bethesda players do something called save-scumming to keep the immersion). I used to go to a pickpocket show at the local renfair and the performer never got caught. And he was not a "master thief".

Which, as said elsewhere, is still a 1-in-400 chance. A commercial pilot lands a plane thousands of times in his life. 1d20 with a 1d20 confirm would mean no pilot ever survived to retirement.

And one could argue a commercial pilot has a fairly average skill level, the equivalent of a level 0 character with a ~4 points of proficiency (D&D3 mindset, I know I'm old). Someone who is 5 or 6 times that should have no meaningful risk of crashing a plane (and the plane should have no meaningful risk of dangerously malfunctioning 0.25% of the time)

Yeah, I really like the "success with complications" category (Fate system does something like this, too) to keep things moving when a bad roll would otherwise make 1-in-a-million tragedy happen.

Doubly so if that bad roll would be a session- or campaign-ender.

I still think you’d enjoy it even more if they did try a bit harder.

I think that's true of any game except when it isn't. Half (or more) of the complaints to me about this game in threads of this post have been about situations where they DID try harder.

Take the NG+. Not only is this the first time they went through the effort to add that, but they arguably did it because it was one of the most requested feature for Bethesda games of all time. Now everyone hates it because "it doesn't work for me with how deep I go into a playthrough building my base". Had they "tried less hard" and either not given us NG+ or not given us a base-builder, people would be happier. A Bethesda game doesn't NEED NG+ OR base-builders, after all.

Also take "how vast and boring space is". They explicitly took the biggest hand-crafted world they've ever made, and the most hand-crafted quests they've ever made, and put it on top of a Daggerfall-tier progressive wonderland. All of these things are examples of them trying really flaming hard, to me.

What it really seems to me is that they gave us the kitchen sink with everything everyone wanted, AND Polished it certified less-buggy... and most complaints from people are that they really wanted a game that held your hand a bit more, only had the planets that were hand-crafted (can't ask for more than the ones they gave, since their hand-crafted mapsize is massive), and didn't include the heavily-requested features. Oh, and a more realistic physics engine for some reason I still don't quite get.

Basically, the complaints were "this game isn't an Outer Worlds remake and that's what I was hoping for". As I see it, many of the complaints about Starfield were them doing the opposite of the complaints people had about Outer Worlds in the first place. Do you remember that awkward alien planet in OW that's only about 500 meters square with invisible walls?

EDIT: To be clear, if someone likes Outer Worlds more, that's great for them. For me, the only complaints I have are silly ones about the lack of full-lego-power of the ship builder. I'd have preferred a less friendly ship-builder that lets me make the ship happen more like outposts do. Custom doors would be so much better.

Every time I've seen an HR degree, conflict resolution was a required course.

It's one thing to say that they're "not good at it", but I suppose by expert I mean professional qualifications. I like to have coworkers who are proficient in their professional qualifications, and then forgive them for the things they're not qualified in but replace them if they are incapable in the things they are supposed to be qualified in.

Maybe I'm a jerk, but I'm used to having competent people around me and having difficult discussions with those who aren't. HR is the same as any other department in that, to me.

EDIT: I realize how much of an asshole I sound like. To be clear, I've got the Boston IT scene in my blood. Starting salaries in the 6-figure range, incredibly low oversight. But zero pity for people who can't keep up. I know I need to have more sympathy than that for people who aren't as capable in their job - it's not like I love capitalism as concept.

And I recognize the irony of acknowledging my own assholishness when the topic is Linus Torvald's assholishness. But then, I'm also used to HR that can move heaven and earth to reconcile a situation with a valued employee. To keep your job where I come from, you need to be so valuable that they'll hide bodies for you (figuratively).

Flipside... no matter how many times the suit-shop owner says otherwise, the classic suit-shoes are fucking torture devices.

As. frankly, are any suit that cost less than a human kidney

Clearly you haven't been to one recently. I'd kill for people to wear pajamas instead of lingerie or jeans that are ripped in the ass or crotch.

I think we can agree on some things, but I have no choice but to object to "genre = lazy". There is a massive demand for a very specific set of gaming characteristics. Not only is it a silly move not to "scratch that itch", but it's a disservice to the fans of that genre to insist that there's something inherently wrong to provide the exact itch in question.

I like obscure music from a dying genre that never really had a lot of legs. I just got introduced to a band called October Noir, and they're blowing my mind. You could call them a cheap knock-off, a lazy attempt to get one last career out of the dead Gothic Metal genre. But as someone who has never had access to as many Gothic Metal albums as the mainstream gets access to Boy Bands, fuck that.

Bethesda addicts would consume 4 "Skyrim-Style games" a year, and have as much patience with them as hardcore gamers can be toward cheap soulsborne knockoffs. And I don't think it's an insult to the fan OR the companies making such a game.

It's kinda hard to respond to you with this when everyone else is arguing "they gave us Skyrim in space instead of innovating at all in the last 20 years". In fact, just looked back and that's the exact family of criticism I was responding to.

There is no adventure in Starfield because “space is empty, and boring” - Todd Howard.

Space is empty and boring but still has more hand-crafted (non-procedural) content than the entirety of Skyrim. New Atlantis is arguably as big as the 3 largest Skyrim cities combined. The main quest+faction dungeons are as big as the equivalents in Skyrim. The New London battlefield (for example) is pretty gorgeous and fairly massive.

There's a genuine argument that maybe we don't have enough "sprinkled in random places "quest starts that aren't radiant, considering it's only 50% more than Skyrim has but an dramatically larger universe. More quests that start like Mantis could go a long way, where you're nudged towards the quest regardless of proximity. BUT, saying "there is no adventure in Starfield" seems somewhat off to the actual facts of the game... that there's 50% more adventure in Starfield than Skyrim, but the map is 1000x larger.

There has apparently been historical disagreement over whether 6÷2(3) is equivalent to 6÷2x3

As a logician instead of a mathemetician, the answer is "they're both wrong because they have proven themselves ambiguous". Of course, my answer would be RPN to be a jerk or just have more parens to be a programmer

If I had to guess, probably for the same reason you can't sue for not being able to pick what apps you install on your toaster.

Google probably opened themselves up to this monopoly shit by trying not to be as much of a monopoly as Apple is trying to be.

I've heard a lot of lawyers say that the law punishes virtually every good behavior because that behavior can be construed in a way that you can be sued for, and that it favors being a dick more than anything. In this case, that might be what happened?

I mean, not that Google is a saint at all.

"Narrow Precedent". I don't see it happening because they have no loyalty to Trump, but it could.

They can vaguely rule that some unique aspects of the Trump case makes it different unique and that courts should not take it as jurisprudence for future cases. There's more to it, obviously. Lower courts can "narrow" a SCOTUS precedent if it is defensible to do so by being able to defend their interpretation as non-contradictory to the SCOTUS precent (some subtle differences from the case law), but SCOTUS occasionally instructs that a decision should not be taken as precedent. Lower courts can ignore that (and afair, it has happened), but it leaves SCOTUS open to the idea of Biden being prosecuted in the future.

The first book (about 900 pages if I recall) is largely an homage to Tolkien with the slow meandering journey punctuated only by a few action sequences. There's a few incredible beats (surprise, Wheel of Time is my favorite literature and I've read the 14-book series 6-7 times), but the author quickly shows his notorious slow pacing. It is a true joke that he can spend an entire page explaining the braid in someone's hair and exactly how they pull at it when they're angry.

But a lot of epic fantasy is notoriously slow with world-building.

No, really I'm not. I'm saying "violent life simulator" as a holistic explanation of what rdr2 and gta is. One thing I always loved about some other games like CP2077 and the tES games is that they're much more forgiving in many ways, instead avoiding mapping on just "realism".

Fair enough. Don't read the Wheel of Time then (or any Epic Fantasy, if we're being honest) :)

I would say life is too short to play games you don't enjoy. The 1-10 scale is trying to measure overall quality, not enjoyability to an individual.

I hate Witcher 3. Its 92 on metacritic doesn't mean I have to force myself to play it more than I already have. But there's a line after which I usually will not touch a game because its objective failings make it highly unlikely I will enjoy it. Starfield's 83 in metacritic (not sure why the toxicity hasn't dragged it down more yet, perhaps because it's an echo chamber) puts it cleanly in a "give it a chance" level for me.

I'm thinking you can't continue talking about any topics with me if it's getting incivil. I'm not looking for reddit 2.0. So I'll just agree to disagree.

I think people here are actually trying to make objective statements about the quality of the game (that is, lack thereof). Though they aren't really quantifying good reasons to support that high bar.

The unfortunate reality of the game is that it is a “Bethesda game” with a lot of the magic stripped out.

Interesting. I don't find "Bethesda game" to be unfortunate, and I don't agree that a lot of the magic is stripped out. No, we do not get the Iconic fallout Vault Boy attitude, but tES never managed to brand itself like that anyway. What "magic" should I be seeing missing from Starfield? It seems pretty magical to me. I'm REALLY holding my breath for a Ve'ruun expansion, maybe some "Legacy of the Starborn" style expansion that leans into the Artifacts and the cycle. And I KNOW space stations are coming (data leaks confirmed there's code for them), and I'm so excited for when they finally do.

The promise of 1000 planets rings pretty hollow when a vast majority of them are desolate chucks of rock, and procedural generation is just an exceedingly lazy way to achieve a bullet point on the hype sheet.

But isn't that what you'd expect? What do people expect from this? 1000 full-size planets all lovingly hand-crafted on a $1T budget? Micro-planets like some other games did? Taking a step back, remember that Starfield has more hand-crafted content than Skyrim... THEN adds 1000 planets to explore so you have a Daggerfall-like procedural exploration game on top of it. Because a lot of us missed procedural exploration.

The fun of “discovery by exploration” – going to continue on a quest and getting stopped by a dozen different interesting things along the way – is completely broken by “fast travel”. A “Bethesda game” that requires you to skip a lot of the in-between and not lose focus on a singular objective does not feel like a “Bethesda game” to me.

Are you that guy who does no-fast-travel runs in Skyrim? Quite literally, Starfield feels like the exact same amount of fast-travel as any tES game to me. FT to this city, kill this person. FT back, report what you did. FT to this area, and go find a dungeon.

Unfortunately, they spent a lot of time hyping their pride on being their “least buggy” game on release

For the record, that's true. Starfield was largely downright stable from day 1.

they should’ve spent that time rebuilding something modern from the ground up instead of cramming their ambition into their aging platform

"Should" is a hard point. They're clearly trying to stay Iconic Bethesda. As far as I've heard, Creation Engine 2 is largely a from-scratch engine. The thing is, the goal was for it to still work like a Bethesda game. Largely that goal succeeded. Many of us were craving Exactly Skyrim in Space for 10-15 years now. It's weird how many people are complaining after they gave us what we asked for.

I'm IT. I get it. Sometimes you asks for things you don't really want and it's my job to say "no" to you. But I actually really wanted Skyrim in space!!!

So to be clear, you think you can demonstrate that Starfield is the "Grown Ups 2" of video games? This conversation isn't me arguing there's something wrong with you for disliking Starfield, but you trying to imply that starfield is a genuinely bad game in some objectively quantifiable way.

And… Being bigger than skyrim doesnt really matter when “”“bigger”“” means you pick one of 10 buildings at random to respawn in front of me, forever.

Specifically, Starfield is bigger than Skyrim with regards to hand-crafted content, leaving procedural content out entirely. There's more hand-crafted locations than Skyrim by square meters, and more non-Radiant quests in Starfield by a fairly large margin (apparently it's that Starfield has as many hand-crafted quests as Skyrim+Fallout4 combined).

So no, "bigger" does not mean picking one of 10 buildings at random to respawn. Those 10 buildings at random are yet another of those "added on top of the completed game that people are now complaining about" things like NG+.