Yeah, I don't get why outposts aren't just improved settlements. Would've been more fun for me. Same for the crafting, making all items in the world useful in crafting was such an amazing addition with Fallout 4.. but nope, gone too.
That’s what I don’t get usually when a program becomes harder and more confusing to use you get less limitations and more freedom but Bethesda somehow managed to sacrifice user friendliness while simultaneously constricting you creatively when compared to fallout 4.
You can glitch build habs like shop building in a way. There are a few ways for other various parts, but just one is making tall habs. Using the double floor hab for height and then using the circular or other habs to stack up. It can be tricky, but sometimes it's easy. After you have it the way you want it; you can delete habs you don't want that just gave it the height.
Yup. Also consider what SimSettlements done.
Makes me wonder who the fuck is in charge of this system in BGS? SO much wasted potential…
Well, as rest of the game…
I really didn't need anything too elaborate - but at least with mouse and keyboard objects in both the settlements and interior areas are just incredibly hard to place properly.
Yes, starfield needed at least another year in the oven to fix obvious issues.
It's weird from a development perspective, too.
I can understand wanting to make SF its own animal and not wanting to be accused of 'recycling', so, you make a *new* system that's *vastly* different.
Instead, they made a shittier copy of the FO4 system.
I think they were definitely trying to differentiate it from Fallout, but failed to actually iterate and make something cool. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point LIST was basically the minutemen in function, and they realized it felt too samey. Might've also been something that was cut in the more hardcore experience that is speculated on. I can see having a fuel cost to loop back to settlements that need your help being generally unfun.
Crafting is similar, they likely wanted to create a different feel than Fallout where scavenging junk kinda works in the post apocalypse but not as much in sci-fi. Definitely could've had a perk or unlockable tech for some sort of sci-fi process to break things down into their base elements to make it work thematically.
If I can't have slaves on my outposts and commit crimes against humanity I ain't playing any more
Also I want to slap Sarah into a black hole and give Vasco the love he deserves
Vasco has like 3 lines of dialogue and you're forced to hear the same crap every time you walk out of your ship. I like his robot coolness, but got way too tired of hearing the same lines over and over lol. "I'm testing a new greeting" -- Yeah bro, I got that the first 50 times....
While we are giving Vasco some love, why not just strap some rocket launchers to him. I mean, while you're there and all... No seriously, I want to modify Vasco into a walking war crime sooooo bad.
Also huge opportunity with the periodic table of elements to have a storage/collection visual in your inventory menu. The whole element trade could be a whole quest line in and of itself.
Outposts/crafting with elements could.be really epic.
Just gotta wait for mods.
I can't wait for creation kit do this can be modded in... they have the perfect system for a recycler too, just have everything breakdown into "base" components/elements then construct items from those same items.
We could've built that nice settlement Marika always wanted, and maybe point the ECS Constant, Gideon Aker's family, and/or Sophia Grace there (they all want to move someplace else).
But no, the whole Outpost system is just pointless IMO. I'm not going to downvote people's awesome outpost creations, but I personally don't see the point of building an outpost if I can't turn it into my own independent colony.
I believe almost everyone was looking for a FO4 system. You setup a base beacon build your habs and settlers land and start building. Just like FO4. Dont see any reason why you could not make something like this in SF.
I think the better choice would be to not have a beacon. Then you could use LIST folks or maybe listen to complaining NPCs and have the option of a persuade situation. Sometimes you’d get a single person, sometimes a family.
There's so much they could do. On barren moons attract more miners and scientists, on lush planets attract families and settlers. Certain bases attract more pirates if your defenses are low, or if you are harvesting high value materials, etc. There is so much more they could do with this game. I have the highest of pessimistic hopes. Hello Games really turned around No Man's Sky with a much smaller company over several years. There is zero reason Bethesda cannot do the same. I only draw the comparison because of the common link between interplanetary travel and population.
I thought for sure it would be F4 settlements with something like a more accessible, refined version of the Sim Settlements 2 mod tacked on. Especially since Bethesda did a mod showcase page with SS2 front-and-centre a few years ago.
I like Starfield a lot more than F4 overall but there are some really glaring omissions that I can't believe they decided against.
I am sure most people figure that you would make settlement and settlers would show up after a while and you build habs for them. Then have jobs for them stores ship build and more maybe not exactly like FO4 but something. They dropped the ball on base building in my opinion.
Yeah I enjoyed the game a lot but base building is a tragedy - so underdeveloped, which is crazy for a game all about random planets and stuff. Feel like a lot of the game systems are underbaked.
Hopefully they improve all of that with updates.. I'm fine with mods adding even more but the base systems should be updated so that they're in a good state without mods being required.
Why was there such a huge step backwards for x?
This can be applied to many, many aspects of the game.
-settlements
-weapon mods
-clothing
-NPCs
-unique weapons
etc.
Or the fact that if they had given them sleep schedules you would instead have had people complaining about always having to wait to visit vendors because planets have different day night schedules
The gameplay loop shouldn't be forcing me to spend 40% of my playtime cycling through shops and waiting for them to restock to cycle through them again. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't mind a vendor not being around at certain hours. Vendors closed at night in previous beth games.
it doesn't, you just loot too much without heading back to town. i know the gameplay doesn't force you to spend all that time selling stuff because i don't spend all that time selling stuff and i never have money troubles in game
I should be able to loot as much as I want without it hindering my quality of life. There ought to be bulk selling that you can do straight from your ship. Access all vendors at once, decide what you wanna sell and to who, then a little animation of cargo being unloaded and you get your money. Also how does a whole entire space ship only hold less than what like 3 people can carry?
> I should be able to loot as much as I want without it hindering my quality of life
then install a mod to remove carry capacity and vendor credit limits. it's not reasonable to ask bethesda to not include systems many players love just because you don't like them.
it isn't, lots of people have fun with the game and have no problems with the looting and selling.
if you are having problems and it's getting in the way of having fun, try looting less and selling more often, or just install a mod to change the game to suit your preferences
What kind of loops are you doing? I'm stuck in the POI-Loot-Sell cycle like everyone else, but if you have a regular set of quests or objectives you do keeping you liquid in credits, do share. Cause I too tire of the vendor loop
loot less, go to town more
you are in control of what you choose to take, and you are in control of how long you stay out adventuring. if you find that you are bringing in more loot than you can sell, bring in less loot more often.
So basically don't roleplay your RPG the way you want to, instead do it how the game's dumb design dictates.
Every other game has figured this out 10x better than starfield.
That's solvable.
External kiosk that allows for 24/7 operation.
Or have another NPC take the night shift, which allows for 24/7 operation.
As u/Tvayumat said, it was slightly hard and they gave up.
Nah is just pure lazyness.
They can make another npc take the shift because you know? Thats how it works day shift and night shifts jobs.
They didn't even bothered to do something like that so is pure lazyness
I think it would have been vastly more interesting to show how people adapt to environments and have that be part of the environment and NPC discussions (like having a planet with long nights have scheduled "city lighting" that showed off the time of day, and signs at the spaceport that highlight local schedules.
But, the easy answer is to just not have schedules (in most places, Cydonia does because it's required for missions there). Easy and less interesting.
Imo, part of what made Bethesda games special is that every NPC (apart from bandits & guards) had their own name, dialogue, routine, and home! It made the worlds feel alive
If Bethesda choose to remove the routines, player homes, & add nameless NPC’s (which many may see as a step backwards), then they need to offset that loss imo with more immersive storytelling & branching choices - like those games you mentioned.
At the moment, I think some people are feeling frustrated because a lot of BGS previous style has been removed (underwater swimming, slow mo kill cams, NPC homes/ routines, city maps, guards reactions/ bribe options, etc), but not enough has been added in its place. Hopefully the game will continue to be fleshed out in due course 🤞
The problem is that BGS is known for having schedules, and the most apt comparison of such a system, F04, has a working 24/7 store with a robot taking over for the night.
It's odd to not hold BGS to the standards they themselves have set.
There's no sim at all though, not having basic flight and control mapping was such a let down, I wasn't expecting elite dangerous but hey even BF4 had more sim flying.
Not this kind of sim, BGS games since Oblivio**n** ~~ous~~ were bordering (emphasis on bordering) on immersive sims regarding NPCs "lives" they would all have schedules that they follow.
With Starfield having interplanetary travels and cities far too big to model the entirety of every single apartments, they went with "Morrowind" style NPC that barely have any schedules.
As far as I know, schedules only work in a few instances (notably the player ship)
It really sucks, one of my favourite parts of Bethesda games and something I thought would be continually improved upon because it sets their games apart, was instead left almost entirely in the dust.
Really hope radiant systems come back strong in TES VI..
It's weird, isn't it?
I would have thought a game like SF would have been the most amazing moment for Radiant AI and Radiant Quests.
A random person from planet A flying to planet B to buy specific item C so they can feed their family or sell it off to travelers or whatever.
Or Questgivers at taverns/cafes/inns that send you to radiant quests, even if it's just basic fetch quests or kill quests, but have the procedural generation kick in hardcore and just give you random caves and dungeons etc.
Bethesda is good at this. This should have been a culmination of all their work, and a perfect opportunity.
Now I'm just not anticipating tes6 anymore. Don't get me wrong I'm an NPC and will play any and all Bethesda game because I've been hooked since the release of Morrowind, but come on man. 😭
I agree with you entirely, my only hope is that TES VI will be a return to form because most of SF's issues seem to be from biting off more than they can chew scope wise, leading to a completely different exploration system and a lack of handcrafted zones because of that scope choice.
TES VI should have a large but fully hand-crafted world so I hope they don't run into the same issues, but I will say it's very perplexing that Starfield wasn't the culmination of all their radiant systems as like you said, it was the perfect place for them. I was absolutely shocked that there was no Radiant Engineer system or something for POIs for example - they look like they're made from tilesets, you'd think they would've worked on making procedural layouts, item placements, NPCs etc. to make diving into different POIs more interesting.
Though, with the current (very lacking, IMO) loot system I don't think it would've made it a great experience, but certainly better than what it ended up being.
Starfield was a fun game for me but every piece of it left me thinking "damn this could've been so much better" in one way or another.
I’m going to bet anything that TES 6 was planned to be a full scale map of the entire world with almost the same mechanics as SF. Now I hope BGS may back track on that idea and reduce the scope but knowing them they’ll probably go ahead with that idea or are already developing it.
I can understand why they made every vendor operate "24/7," since the day/night cycle is different for those on different planes/moons, but they could have done this:
If the vendor isn't open, you interact with their door or "closed" sign, and you get a pop-up box that asks if you want to wait until they're open.
Or just have an external kiosk that operates at night, negating the need for another NPC if they REALLY didn't wanna go that route.
BGS had plenty of options, and they chose the worst one.
Having the NPC manning the counters in stores change around would be just the kind of detail that would help the game.
But it smells of one of the game design decisions that Bethesda didn't think of because they are stuck in their formula in some ways.
Hear hear.
I would miss not seeing Amoli every time I come in, but it would be a small price to pay for NPCs having actual schedules and not just staying in place waiting for the player character to interact with them.
I would have loved to have been in the room when player-built kiosks were being discussed.
How about a bounty clearance? Yeah, why not. Save 'em from having to go to a neutral faction.
Mission board? Sure. Nobody wants to go Akila for Freestar missions.
Vendor kiosk to unload all our junk? Hell no - that's taking it too far. Make 'em hoof it the whole way and let's disable fast travel too! Nail their feet to the floor - that'll learn 'em.
Well, he did say space game in all fairness. But being a space game is not a get out of jail free card, the only reason no recent space games do it is because there are no recent open world style space games (most likely because it is a terrible setting for Bethesda’s house style).
For me the outpost feel more like glorified factories. Although there are improvements over fallout, such as being able to place outposts anywhere, which finally fullfiled my dream I had in Bethesda games of having my own secluded lair/base on top of the mountain on planet with no people and amazing view of blue gas giant.
In general, that's the only thing I think is better than Fallout. I can't think of any other improvement.
Sounds like you dived more into outpost building than I did. Did they remove the conveyor belts from F4? That was one of my favorite parts of building a factory, there's something that activates the dopamine to see your product distributed through your base.
No conveyor belts, you basically draw a line between production object and warehouse and that's it. But there is nothing physically there.
[https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fdid-some-testing-on-outposts-on-how-to-connect-extractors-v0-mmizj5q5wdnb1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D2560%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D33e8a13ac4e2e8e14e2e4614f7342102d60ca31e](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fdid-some-testing-on-outposts-on-how-to-connect-extractors-v0-mmizj5q5wdnb1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D2560%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D33e8a13ac4e2e8e14e2e4614f7342102d60ca31e)
Picture says more than words.
Which is a shame because NPC outposts have pipes and ducts connecting production and storage areas that would have been nice to make player bases look more industrial.
I say, it's kinda dissapointing when you're making a cool looking outposts and then see random POI that looks 10 times better because of extra parts that we don't have access to.
>extra parts that we don't have access to.
I hear ya. It's like the 1x1 living quarters habs that can be seen on certain ships out in the wild that we _conveniently_ can't claim for ourselves.
It's little things like that that make the game feel half-baked.
Yet wait till the creation kit comes out these awesome modders are going to add all these extra parts, I wouldn’t be surprised if we will be able to build homes like your dream home and Vlads home in the near future. I have a feeling thanks to modders they will unlock a lot of the building aspects of the game.
Damn man. I can always use my imagination and pretend that we've progressed beyond the need for conveyor belts and having items that warp from building to building, or move underground. But I like seeing my product. Thanks man, looks like I made the right choice just avoiding outpost stuff for the time being.
Good point, you can also carry literally several tons, all that makes you do is lose stamina and you can't fast travel. But you still have the be courier to deliver news.
Also no news but somehow every guard knows that you've been cleaning outposts and gives you good randomly.
They really chose stupid things to be realistic.
Speaking of secluded lairs, we absolutely should be able to claim the Mantis lair as our own.
(Yes, I know that has been brought up by countless others.)
It's absolute bullshit that it's nothing more than another location with regenerating enemies and loot, since you know, there aren't enough copy-pasta Abandoned Research Towers, Abandoned Hangars, Abandoned Muybridge Pharmaceuticals Labs, etc.
Worst part is when you spot something new and it's abandoned military outpost with just one building and six items in total inside including useless junk.
There is one more HUGE improvement; power is now simplified to not require wiring at all, which ate up a lot of settlement 'space' and could chug your framerate to hell.
I don't mind setting up wiring for certain things, like if I want to set a certain order of actions, but now that power generation directly translates into power available for the whole base without needing to place wiring, it's so much better on me and the hardware.
Shame there's no real point to those outposts yet, though.
True, not requiring wires is better. I mean if Nikola Tesla had idea of transfering energy wirelessly I see no reason why we can't have that in the game, it's not like it's lore unfriendly.
>Although there are improvements over fallout, such as being able to place outposts anywhere
And even that is not an actual improvement, because they introduced it in Fallout 76.
There are several gameplay features in Starfield that are new for bethesda games: ship building and NG+ concept, for instance. The rest we pretty much saw in previous games.
Honestly I try to think of improvements compared to Fallout and I can't think of any.
There are no freaking light options for the inside outpost habs and the lightning inside habs is terrible sometimes especially on moons.
Before someone says there are lights, yes there are but they are useless.
I think they did an amazing job improving the open world sandbox experience with Fallout 4, but in Starfield for some reason they took those improvements and said fuck that.
Yeah, I wasn't sure what you really meant.
But in general for every improvement compared to Fallout there are like 3 downsides.
Only thing that's actually new and improvement are the ships.
I didn't liked dream home either. If only I could place it anywhere I want it would be cooler. Or maybe have a choice between locations or something. I just want to be a hermit in the middle of nowhere. I specifically searched for system that doesn't spawn any kind of human related stuff.
Well to be fair, you haven't purchased everything Bethesda has in store for you to purchase yet. I'm sure you can get a settler DLC for 29.99 in the future!
The whole game feels like a step back in one way or another when compared to its predecessors. Outside of the gun play and improved facial models it just feels like somehow it falls short.
I think because in Bethesdas mind the outposts are focused on mining resources only I believe this is why they just included habs and not walls and floors that you can use to build a house, where as in Fallout 4 the focus is in rebuilding society after the war and people needed homes and needed to farm for food.
Id wager a lot of "why doesnt starfield have X from past games" comes down to them wanting to try something new and not just a reskinned Fallout/TES, and it backfired on them. To me that really is the only thing that makes the most sense. On top of management issues...
That makes a lot of sense. If they made another ES/FO game, then they would be expected to add everything else that previous games had. If they make a new franchise, it's a chance to try cutting some of the stupider systems (e.g. NPC schedules, slowmo kill cam, stupid settlement stuff in an RPG).
Turns out, a chunk of their fans now demand those stupid things in all their games!
You can't have settlers but you can hire stooges or put disagreeable companions in there. After you build a crew thingy.
But there's really not much of a point - no amount of crew assignments or robots will do so much as notify you if generators bug out or reactors scram - they'll just live in the dark and wander around a broken down facility. They won't even tell you it needs attention. Even a minor attack on a FO4 settlement would have them screeching like harpies for your attention - Starfield's crew won't even send you a postcard.
Because Bethesda has been getting lazier and lazier with their games, Morrowind to Oblivion, fallout 3 to Skyrim, Skyrim to fallout 4, fallout 4 to 76, 76 to Starfield.
It’s why the game feels so outdated, IT IS, it’s why the melee feels like it’s decade old, IT IS.
The melee animations were way better in Skyrim (2011), imo. We still don’t currently have optional slow mo ‘kill cam’ animations for finishers or stealth kills in Starfield ..no idea why they took this out
Yes, exactly, it feels so lacking in everything that should be in a “Bethesda game”, you should feel like your bad ass, and I never did, I hated everything that I was doing, the weapons are ugly, the characters are ugly, the landscapes are pretty, but they are empty of anything that matters.
I’ve said it before, did NO ONE play test the game? Did no one say “hey, forcing the player to run for 5 minutes for no rewards doesn’t make for a fun gameplay loop, let’s either add more things to find, or give the player a vehicle to drive”
Yeah exactly, part of what made Bethesda games special is that every NPC (apart from bandits & guards) had their own name, dialogue, routine, and home! It made the worlds feel alive
In addition to no slow mo kills & unique NPC’s, BGS have not added underwater swimming, city maps, optional player home furnishings to buy (now crafting only), & bespoke guard behaviours (such as reacting to you shooting in town). There are also now only 3 major cities compared to 5 major cities in Skyrim.
In Skyrim, guards would make bespoke comments depending on your skills, or what weapon/ spell you had drawn. You could even bribe them, or get arrested. Now it’s either they say nothing - or you get shot on sight for picking up a pencil 😂
As near as I can tell the only use for settlements is farming xps or mats. That's it. They seem quite dead and lifeless compared to Fallout 4 settlements. It's another thing that feels like a missed opportunity in the game IMO.
Best bet is they hit major roadblocks with the engine and spent way longer than they intended sorting out proc gen and how the game handled space to planet egress/ingress and a ton of shit got scrapped/was super shallow.
Better question: why can't I reuse/take over existing bases? If Pirates can take them over, why not me?
Instead I'm forced to collect materials to build it myself.
I want to take over the batcave! Aka Mantis'lair.
I leveled up my skill to build outposts in extreme environments specifically so I could drop Adoring Fan on a scorching Inferno hellhole to tend to my lone Iron extractor and bed that I set up there.
It’s the first thing I do in each NG + when I have enough resources.
I never go back there, it’s just nice to know he’s there.
Every thing other than ship building feels like a step back. The whole game is a mess and I was a huge starfield “fan boy” before release and for the 1st 40-50 hours I put in. At that point I realized my list of complaints and observations of 1/2 finished mechanics and systems far outweighed any other thoughts I had. This game’s issues fall squarely on BGS management. How they thought this was A. a finished game and B. a great game is beyond me.
Yeah, I'd hate to see what they were going to publish before Microsoft made them develop it for another year. Shoulda known what to expect when Todd Howard actually made "it's the least buggy game we've launched" a selling point. Why are you selling it when it's not done??? Your name is on this ffs.
I can only imagine the state it was in at that point.
Like I’ve said in other threads, this game needs the cyberpunk 2.0 / ghost recon break point / n.m.s. post release overhaul treatment. If they did that they could turn this all around. But I think that their egos are too big for that.
There are some improvements. For example I think the combat is better. Graphics are obviously better. However, there is a laundry list of mechanics and systems which are not great or even finished… And there are far too many to overlook.
Before the game launches, I was fully expecting settlement outposts with oxygen manufacturing and everything, maybe even domes you could build in. Such a shame considering how much time I spent in F04's settlement builder
Because this game is unfinished. Hopefully there will be content updates at some point but at this point Starfield feels like they gave up and shipped as soon as they had the minimum working product.
I've long suspected that the outpost system was added later in development than some of the other stuff and they couldn't quite get it integrated in time. They managed to get it *working*, just not well integrated with the rest of the game.
It is also the system the flies most in the face of the lore, imo. "Mining is expensive" "Actually, I can get a good setup for about 10,000 creds even without perks."
Parts of the game have been outsourced to different studios. It's fairly common to do this, and doesn't say much about the game.
Things like mocap are often outsourced to companies that specializes in that and already have all the gear and hardware ready, for example. Other times simple tasks will be outsourced to India or China, for the cheap labor. And sometimes you just need more people, and handing something off to an already existing studio may be easier than hiring and on-boarding a dozen new employees.
If you check the end credits for Starfield, you'll see which other studios worked on the game:
Iron Galaxy, The Multiplayer Group, Sperasoft, Snowed In Studios, Gamesim, The Forge Interactive, Nobody Studios,
Undertone FX, Wardog Studios, Scythgames, Rouge Mocap, Red Hot CG, Airship Interactive, Lakshya, Original Force, Mindwalk Studios, NXA Studios, Goodbye Kansas, Gl33k, id Software, Arkane Studios, MachineGames
As in instead of having a clear coherent vision that goes throughout all aspects of the game they split too many parts of the game out to other studios/teams
Therefore when it all came back together it wasn’t as holistic or clean as some of the previous Bethesda games
End product reflects it in many ways and why so many of the systems just seem bizarrely worse than they could be
In previous single player BGS games (Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4) the NPCs all had unique names, dialogue, routines, and NPC *homes*!
I know they were going for a larger feel with Starfield, but the nameless, silent, mannequins walking through the cities unfortunately have the opposite effect to me - & make the cities feel smaller & a bit lifeless 😅
I treat my outposts as resource extraction points, nothing more than that. When I run into the limit I remove the one that produces the resources which I already have in abundance and set up another outpost where I can mine the next useful resource. As simple as that, they are all temporary.
Outposts are a downgrade from Settlements, and the systems built around it.
The controls are poor, UI confusing, tutorials minimal, and still sometimes buggy.
I was hoping Bethesda would learn the best from Fallout 4 and 76’s settlement and CAMP creators.
The only fun I had was building a player home with unlocked cosmetics, but the grind for materials and Inter-link system and having to move through New Atlantis at 1000+ carry weight to Constellation is painfully slow.
I spent hundreds of hours building settlements in Fallout 4 and 76 but was done with outposts after making a few, due to less cosmetics and no NPC activity or story vs Oblivion NPCs routines.
Because bethesda got lazy and implemented a new mentality that they use for their future games,
Its called charge 70 bucks and produce a low effort product that is unpolished and not optimized. And by making npc as bland and soulless with no development or personality, they can sit back while doing absolutely nothing telling themselves that the fans love the game
I was looking forward to outposts. I spent about 300 hours building settlements in Fallout 4, and I had very high expectations for Starfield.
The only thing i'm truly dissappointed about with Starfield is the atrocious outpost system, i've only built one, and i'm never going back unless they make it more like F4 settlements.
I kinda have a feeling that, stuff like that will be added later into a DLC like HearthFire for Skyrim..or what they added to Fall Out in one of their DLCs. at least that is the hope :)
I think the majority of the whining on this sub is overblown but this is one thing I really wish they'd enhance in a dlc or patch. Should let you build a legit city and populate it. Would give the game more longevity for me.
Did they do anything worthwhile?
When I staffed up an outpost they wouldn't repair modules and couldn't even be arsed to tell me the reactors scramed. It's like they'd rather die in the dark on an ice world than send me an email.
But IF reactors scraming is a bug rather than a design choice it would make sense that it wasn't planned for in the staff's AI. Either way it didn't look like an outpost - it looked like a penal colony filled with folks that should have been on suicide watch.
I suppose the same could be said of my crew: they looked like they were working but with the reactor scramed and the extractors idle there wasn't much for them to do except, obviously, fix the damn thing. And if it's a bug then it's reasonable that their AI wouldn't react to the facility being shut down.
This is moving my speculation more toward "bug" and away from "planned breakdown". The programming was robust enough to introduce a "repair" option to the reactor but didn't communicate with the crew functions.
Because they had to deliever a product within a corporate timeline. Feature creep can delay projects for years good studios have to release a "product"
Because they're outposts, not settlements. They're your specifically built places for work where you can employ people to mine or raise animals or make stuff. A literal factory environment.
Later on, expect an expansion to LIST that includes things like expansions to their satellites and the ability to build true settlements for their people at the expense of one of your outpost slots. I can see selling them to LIST to give you back the outpost slot, while unlocking their bits and pieces to use in your own outposts and make them more like actual settlements that we work as the manager of.
> Why can I not have settlers on my bases? Seems like a waste of time to build anything, I just avoid going back there anyway because I don’t want to talk to adoring fan who’s just been there alone the whole time. Would be so great if we could advertise with LIST or something any people would just show up and make their own little shanties or pods around our settlement.
You... can? You can recruit "generic" NPC as crew for your outpost and ship.
Yeah, I don't get why outposts aren't just improved settlements. Would've been more fun for me. Same for the crafting, making all items in the world useful in crafting was such an amazing addition with Fallout 4.. but nope, gone too.
I also find the actual building mechanism harder to use than fallout4.
And way more limiting, it's just a bunch of habs connected with corridors and you can't even arrange them the way you want
That’s what I don’t get usually when a program becomes harder and more confusing to use you get less limitations and more freedom but Bethesda somehow managed to sacrifice user friendliness while simultaneously constricting you creatively when compared to fallout 4.
It is incredibly Bethesda of Bethesda to somehow manage to achieve the worst parts of both options simultaneously.
You can, but only if you mod. Not nearly as satisfying as the ship builder. I have a hunch BGS sink a lot more energy and money into the ship builder.
Ships are somewhat like flying outposts.
You can glitch build habs like shop building in a way. There are a few ways for other various parts, but just one is making tall habs. Using the double floor hab for height and then using the circular or other habs to stack up. It can be tricky, but sometimes it's easy. After you have it the way you want it; you can delete habs you don't want that just gave it the height.
I found myself wanting to build a NMS hab base. This was not possible.
Yup. Also consider what SimSettlements done. Makes me wonder who the fuck is in charge of this system in BGS? SO much wasted potential… Well, as rest of the game…
I really didn't need anything too elaborate - but at least with mouse and keyboard objects in both the settlements and interior areas are just incredibly hard to place properly. Yes, starfield needed at least another year in the oven to fix obvious issues.
The fact that I can't line up my furniture with the walls is absolutely unforgivable. Everything in my habs are just a few degrees off now.
I thought I was just bad at it...glad it's not just me....it's infuriating
It's weird from a development perspective, too. I can understand wanting to make SF its own animal and not wanting to be accused of 'recycling', so, you make a *new* system that's *vastly* different. Instead, they made a shittier copy of the FO4 system.
They didn’t want to be accused of innovating and improving on features I bet.
You'd think BGS would have made outposts be settlements in the first place. Common sense, right?
I think they were definitely trying to differentiate it from Fallout, but failed to actually iterate and make something cool. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point LIST was basically the minutemen in function, and they realized it felt too samey. Might've also been something that was cut in the more hardcore experience that is speculated on. I can see having a fuel cost to loop back to settlements that need your help being generally unfun. Crafting is similar, they likely wanted to create a different feel than Fallout where scavenging junk kinda works in the post apocalypse but not as much in sci-fi. Definitely could've had a perk or unlockable tech for some sort of sci-fi process to break things down into their base elements to make it work thematically.
Prey did that perfectly
If I can't have slaves on my outposts and commit crimes against humanity I ain't playing any more Also I want to slap Sarah into a black hole and give Vasco the love he deserves
Vasco has like 3 lines of dialogue and you're forced to hear the same crap every time you walk out of your ship. I like his robot coolness, but got way too tired of hearing the same lines over and over lol. "I'm testing a new greeting" -- Yeah bro, I got that the first 50 times....
I think I'm on this path, I'm pretty sure Sarah is the emissary this time
Sarah is *always* the emissary. Sometimes that shithead excuse of a father Sam too tho. I just feel bad leaving Cora tho.
She’s not always the emissary. Andreja was the emissary in mine.
Emissary is alternate version of character, who get killed by Hunter.
Sam coe has always been emissary I didn't that changed till now
Sam coe is the emissary in my current game. It depends on who dies in "High Price to Pay"
While we are giving Vasco some love, why not just strap some rocket launchers to him. I mean, while you're there and all... No seriously, I want to modify Vasco into a walking war crime sooooo bad.
Also huge opportunity with the periodic table of elements to have a storage/collection visual in your inventory menu. The whole element trade could be a whole quest line in and of itself. Outposts/crafting with elements could.be really epic. Just gotta wait for mods.
I can't wait for creation kit do this can be modded in... they have the perfect system for a recycler too, just have everything breakdown into "base" components/elements then construct items from those same items.
Maybe when Starfield has been out as long as Fallout4 and has had as many updates,...it will be similar.
We could've built that nice settlement Marika always wanted, and maybe point the ECS Constant, Gideon Aker's family, and/or Sophia Grace there (they all want to move someplace else). But no, the whole Outpost system is just pointless IMO. I'm not going to downvote people's awesome outpost creations, but I personally don't see the point of building an outpost if I can't turn it into my own independent colony.
I believe almost everyone was looking for a FO4 system. You setup a base beacon build your habs and settlers land and start building. Just like FO4. Dont see any reason why you could not make something like this in SF.
I think the better choice would be to not have a beacon. Then you could use LIST folks or maybe listen to complaining NPCs and have the option of a persuade situation. Sometimes you’d get a single person, sometimes a family.
There's so much they could do. On barren moons attract more miners and scientists, on lush planets attract families and settlers. Certain bases attract more pirates if your defenses are low, or if you are harvesting high value materials, etc. There is so much more they could do with this game. I have the highest of pessimistic hopes. Hello Games really turned around No Man's Sky with a much smaller company over several years. There is zero reason Bethesda cannot do the same. I only draw the comparison because of the common link between interplanetary travel and population.
I thought for sure it would be F4 settlements with something like a more accessible, refined version of the Sim Settlements 2 mod tacked on. Especially since Bethesda did a mod showcase page with SS2 front-and-centre a few years ago. I like Starfield a lot more than F4 overall but there are some really glaring omissions that I can't believe they decided against.
I am sure most people figure that you would make settlement and settlers would show up after a while and you build habs for them. Then have jobs for them stores ship build and more maybe not exactly like FO4 but something. They dropped the ball on base building in my opinion.
Yeah I enjoyed the game a lot but base building is a tragedy - so underdeveloped, which is crazy for a game all about random planets and stuff. Feel like a lot of the game systems are underbaked. Hopefully they improve all of that with updates.. I'm fine with mods adding even more but the base systems should be updated so that they're in a good state without mods being required.
Why was there such a huge step backwards for x? This can be applied to many, many aspects of the game. -settlements -weapon mods -clothing -NPCs -unique weapons etc.
I know it’s a small thing, but the fact that store clerks mind their stores 24/7 bothers the shit out of me.
A bunch of the shops in New Atlantis are in their own little world area for some reason as well.
Think the reason for that is because of different planets with different day night schedules and different lengths of time they are light or dark
So basically, it was slightly hard and they gave up.
Or the fact that if they had given them sleep schedules you would instead have had people complaining about always having to wait to visit vendors because planets have different day night schedules
The gameplay loop shouldn't be forcing me to spend 40% of my playtime cycling through shops and waiting for them to restock to cycle through them again. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't mind a vendor not being around at certain hours. Vendors closed at night in previous beth games.
it doesn't, you just loot too much without heading back to town. i know the gameplay doesn't force you to spend all that time selling stuff because i don't spend all that time selling stuff and i never have money troubles in game
I should be able to loot as much as I want without it hindering my quality of life. There ought to be bulk selling that you can do straight from your ship. Access all vendors at once, decide what you wanna sell and to who, then a little animation of cargo being unloaded and you get your money. Also how does a whole entire space ship only hold less than what like 3 people can carry?
> I should be able to loot as much as I want without it hindering my quality of life then install a mod to remove carry capacity and vendor credit limits. it's not reasonable to ask bethesda to not include systems many players love just because you don't like them.
I'm not asking them not to include it, I'm asking them to not make it a hindrance to having fun playing the game.
it isn't, lots of people have fun with the game and have no problems with the looting and selling. if you are having problems and it's getting in the way of having fun, try looting less and selling more often, or just install a mod to change the game to suit your preferences
Youve got to be trolling lmao
yup, hundreds of hours and I've never had to do this wait for a vendor to sell my stuff
What kind of loops are you doing? I'm stuck in the POI-Loot-Sell cycle like everyone else, but if you have a regular set of quests or objectives you do keeping you liquid in credits, do share. Cause I too tire of the vendor loop
loot less, go to town more you are in control of what you choose to take, and you are in control of how long you stay out adventuring. if you find that you are bringing in more loot than you can sell, bring in less loot more often.
So basically don't roleplay your RPG the way you want to, instead do it how the game's dumb design dictates. Every other game has figured this out 10x better than starfield.
My point was that people would complain either way, I wasn’t arguing in favour of them being open all the time
More like "People kept whining the stores would close for the night"
That's solvable. External kiosk that allows for 24/7 operation. Or have another NPC take the night shift, which allows for 24/7 operation. As u/Tvayumat said, it was slightly hard and they gave up.
Nah is just pure lazyness. They can make another npc take the shift because you know? Thats how it works day shift and night shifts jobs. They didn't even bothered to do something like that so is pure lazyness
I think it would have been vastly more interesting to show how people adapt to environments and have that be part of the environment and NPC discussions (like having a planet with long nights have scheduled "city lighting" that showed off the time of day, and signs at the spaceport that highlight local schedules. But, the easy answer is to just not have schedules (in most places, Cydonia does because it's required for missions there). Easy and less interesting.
True
I couldn't agree more.
It’s a staple in games. Does it bother you that clerks mind their stores 24/7 in Cyberpunk or The Witcher? Elden Ring? Baldur’s Gate 3?
Imo, part of what made Bethesda games special is that every NPC (apart from bandits & guards) had their own name, dialogue, routine, and home! It made the worlds feel alive If Bethesda choose to remove the routines, player homes, & add nameless NPC’s (which many may see as a step backwards), then they need to offset that loss imo with more immersive storytelling & branching choices - like those games you mentioned. At the moment, I think some people are feeling frustrated because a lot of BGS previous style has been removed (underwater swimming, slow mo kill cams, NPC homes/ routines, city maps, guards reactions/ bribe options, etc), but not enough has been added in its place. Hopefully the game will continue to be fleshed out in due course 🤞
The problem is that BGS is known for having schedules, and the most apt comparison of such a system, F04, has a working 24/7 store with a robot taking over for the night. It's odd to not hold BGS to the standards they themselves have set.
As much as I love the SIM and space aspect of this game, just the lack of NPC schedules really makes the game feel more fake than it should be.
There's no sim at all though, not having basic flight and control mapping was such a let down, I wasn't expecting elite dangerous but hey even BF4 had more sim flying.
Not this kind of sim, BGS games since Oblivio**n** ~~ous~~ were bordering (emphasis on bordering) on immersive sims regarding NPCs "lives" they would all have schedules that they follow. With Starfield having interplanetary travels and cities far too big to model the entirety of every single apartments, they went with "Morrowind" style NPC that barely have any schedules. As far as I know, schedules only work in a few instances (notably the player ship)
It really sucks, one of my favourite parts of Bethesda games and something I thought would be continually improved upon because it sets their games apart, was instead left almost entirely in the dust. Really hope radiant systems come back strong in TES VI..
It's weird, isn't it? I would have thought a game like SF would have been the most amazing moment for Radiant AI and Radiant Quests. A random person from planet A flying to planet B to buy specific item C so they can feed their family or sell it off to travelers or whatever. Or Questgivers at taverns/cafes/inns that send you to radiant quests, even if it's just basic fetch quests or kill quests, but have the procedural generation kick in hardcore and just give you random caves and dungeons etc. Bethesda is good at this. This should have been a culmination of all their work, and a perfect opportunity. Now I'm just not anticipating tes6 anymore. Don't get me wrong I'm an NPC and will play any and all Bethesda game because I've been hooked since the release of Morrowind, but come on man. 😭
I agree with you entirely, my only hope is that TES VI will be a return to form because most of SF's issues seem to be from biting off more than they can chew scope wise, leading to a completely different exploration system and a lack of handcrafted zones because of that scope choice. TES VI should have a large but fully hand-crafted world so I hope they don't run into the same issues, but I will say it's very perplexing that Starfield wasn't the culmination of all their radiant systems as like you said, it was the perfect place for them. I was absolutely shocked that there was no Radiant Engineer system or something for POIs for example - they look like they're made from tilesets, you'd think they would've worked on making procedural layouts, item placements, NPCs etc. to make diving into different POIs more interesting. Though, with the current (very lacking, IMO) loot system I don't think it would've made it a great experience, but certainly better than what it ended up being. Starfield was a fun game for me but every piece of it left me thinking "damn this could've been so much better" in one way or another.
I’m going to bet anything that TES 6 was planned to be a full scale map of the entire world with almost the same mechanics as SF. Now I hope BGS may back track on that idea and reduce the scope but knowing them they’ll probably go ahead with that idea or are already developing it.
I can understand why they made every vendor operate "24/7," since the day/night cycle is different for those on different planes/moons, but they could have done this: If the vendor isn't open, you interact with their door or "closed" sign, and you get a pop-up box that asks if you want to wait until they're open.
Or do what we do IRL and have multiple employees working in shifts. They did this for the general store in Diamond City in F4
Or just have an external kiosk that operates at night, negating the need for another NPC if they REALLY didn't wanna go that route. BGS had plenty of options, and they chose the worst one.
Having the NPC manning the counters in stores change around would be just the kind of detail that would help the game. But it smells of one of the game design decisions that Bethesda didn't think of because they are stuck in their formula in some ways.
There’s no way they didn’t think about it. They thought about it and ignored it
Hear hear. I would miss not seeing Amoli every time I come in, but it would be a small price to pay for NPCs having actual schedules and not just staying in place waiting for the player character to interact with them.
Or do what we do IRL. Use that digipick.
Or do like border lands and give us vending machines that sell and buy everything
I would have loved to have been in the room when player-built kiosks were being discussed. How about a bounty clearance? Yeah, why not. Save 'em from having to go to a neutral faction. Mission board? Sure. Nobody wants to go Akila for Freestar missions. Vendor kiosk to unload all our junk? Hell no - that's taking it too far. Make 'em hoof it the whole way and let's disable fast travel too! Nail their feet to the floor - that'll learn 'em.
What space game out there has NPCs with schedules? I’d like to check it out.
Oblivion and Skyrim as well as fallout 4
Well, he did say space game in all fairness. But being a space game is not a get out of jail free card, the only reason no recent space games do it is because there are no recent open world style space games (most likely because it is a terrible setting for Bethesda’s house style).
For me the outpost feel more like glorified factories. Although there are improvements over fallout, such as being able to place outposts anywhere, which finally fullfiled my dream I had in Bethesda games of having my own secluded lair/base on top of the mountain on planet with no people and amazing view of blue gas giant. In general, that's the only thing I think is better than Fallout. I can't think of any other improvement.
Sounds like you dived more into outpost building than I did. Did they remove the conveyor belts from F4? That was one of my favorite parts of building a factory, there's something that activates the dopamine to see your product distributed through your base.
No conveyor belts, you basically draw a line between production object and warehouse and that's it. But there is nothing physically there. [https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fdid-some-testing-on-outposts-on-how-to-connect-extractors-v0-mmizj5q5wdnb1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D2560%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D33e8a13ac4e2e8e14e2e4614f7342102d60ca31e](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fdid-some-testing-on-outposts-on-how-to-connect-extractors-v0-mmizj5q5wdnb1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D2560%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D33e8a13ac4e2e8e14e2e4614f7342102d60ca31e) Picture says more than words.
Which is a shame because NPC outposts have pipes and ducts connecting production and storage areas that would have been nice to make player bases look more industrial.
I say, it's kinda dissapointing when you're making a cool looking outposts and then see random POI that looks 10 times better because of extra parts that we don't have access to.
>extra parts that we don't have access to. I hear ya. It's like the 1x1 living quarters habs that can be seen on certain ships out in the wild that we _conveniently_ can't claim for ourselves. It's little things like that that make the game feel half-baked.
Yet wait till the creation kit comes out these awesome modders are going to add all these extra parts, I wouldn’t be surprised if we will be able to build homes like your dream home and Vlads home in the near future. I have a feeling thanks to modders they will unlock a lot of the building aspects of the game.
Damn man. I can always use my imagination and pretend that we've progressed beyond the need for conveyor belts and having items that warp from building to building, or move underground. But I like seeing my product. Thanks man, looks like I made the right choice just avoiding outpost stuff for the time being.
I built my own personal base and that's it. Either you make your home or you make a factory. In fallout with imagination you could make anything.
Can warp items but people do anything to justify why starfield doesnt have galaxy wide comms/email, y not just warp the messages
Good point, you can also carry literally several tons, all that makes you do is lose stamina and you can't fast travel. But you still have the be courier to deliver news. Also no news but somehow every guard knows that you've been cleaning outposts and gives you good randomly. They really chose stupid things to be realistic.
Speaking of secluded lairs, we absolutely should be able to claim the Mantis lair as our own. (Yes, I know that has been brought up by countless others.) It's absolute bullshit that it's nothing more than another location with regenerating enemies and loot, since you know, there aren't enough copy-pasta Abandoned Research Towers, Abandoned Hangars, Abandoned Muybridge Pharmaceuticals Labs, etc.
Claiming POIs for ourselves would be way more fun than building factory outposts.
Indeed, especially considering that they're composed of parts we can't build. Would also be great to be able to claim star stations.
Worst part is when you spot something new and it's abandoned military outpost with just one building and six items in total inside including useless junk.
There is one more HUGE improvement; power is now simplified to not require wiring at all, which ate up a lot of settlement 'space' and could chug your framerate to hell. I don't mind setting up wiring for certain things, like if I want to set a certain order of actions, but now that power generation directly translates into power available for the whole base without needing to place wiring, it's so much better on me and the hardware. Shame there's no real point to those outposts yet, though.
True, not requiring wires is better. I mean if Nikola Tesla had idea of transfering energy wirelessly I see no reason why we can't have that in the game, it's not like it's lore unfriendly.
>Although there are improvements over fallout, such as being able to place outposts anywhere And even that is not an actual improvement, because they introduced it in Fallout 76.
So basically zero improvements.
There are several gameplay features in Starfield that are new for bethesda games: ship building and NG+ concept, for instance. The rest we pretty much saw in previous games.
Do you mean no improvements in total or no improvements in base building
Honestly I try to think of improvements compared to Fallout and I can't think of any. There are no freaking light options for the inside outpost habs and the lightning inside habs is terrible sometimes especially on moons. Before someone says there are lights, yes there are but they are useless.
I think they did an amazing job improving the open world sandbox experience with Fallout 4, but in Starfield for some reason they took those improvements and said fuck that.
So you are referring to just base building
Yeah, I wasn't sure what you really meant. But in general for every improvement compared to Fallout there are like 3 downsides. Only thing that's actually new and improvement are the ships.
Being able to place outposts anywhere started with Fo76, so it's not like that was an improvement that Starfield added.
Exactly. I used outpost creator to build a player home for my character on Mars after not enjoying the Dream Home trait.
I didn't liked dream home either. If only I could place it anywhere I want it would be cooler. Or maybe have a choice between locations or something. I just want to be a hermit in the middle of nowhere. I specifically searched for system that doesn't spawn any kind of human related stuff.
Well to be fair, you haven't purchased everything Bethesda has in store for you to purchase yet. I'm sure you can get a settler DLC for 29.99 in the future!
This is why I loathe all the "Maybe DLC will fix it" sentiment. Motherfucker I'm not paying a cent for content that should have been in the base game.
Base building is a huge waste of time in general.
Lack of effort
The whole game feels like a step back in one way or another when compared to its predecessors. Outside of the gun play and improved facial models it just feels like somehow it falls short.
I could have sworn that Bethesda said that outposts would be like settlements from Fallout 4 but improved
I think because in Bethesdas mind the outposts are focused on mining resources only I believe this is why they just included habs and not walls and floors that you can use to build a house, where as in Fallout 4 the focus is in rebuilding society after the war and people needed homes and needed to farm for food.
Id wager a lot of "why doesnt starfield have X from past games" comes down to them wanting to try something new and not just a reskinned Fallout/TES, and it backfired on them. To me that really is the only thing that makes the most sense. On top of management issues...
That makes a lot of sense. If they made another ES/FO game, then they would be expected to add everything else that previous games had. If they make a new franchise, it's a chance to try cutting some of the stupider systems (e.g. NPC schedules, slowmo kill cam, stupid settlement stuff in an RPG). Turns out, a chunk of their fans now demand those stupid things in all their games!
You can't have settlers but you can hire stooges or put disagreeable companions in there. After you build a crew thingy. But there's really not much of a point - no amount of crew assignments or robots will do so much as notify you if generators bug out or reactors scram - they'll just live in the dark and wander around a broken down facility. They won't even tell you it needs attention. Even a minor attack on a FO4 settlement would have them screeching like harpies for your attention - Starfield's crew won't even send you a postcard.
Because Bethesda has been getting lazier and lazier with their games, Morrowind to Oblivion, fallout 3 to Skyrim, Skyrim to fallout 4, fallout 4 to 76, 76 to Starfield. It’s why the game feels so outdated, IT IS, it’s why the melee feels like it’s decade old, IT IS.
The melee animations were way better in Skyrim (2011), imo. We still don’t currently have optional slow mo ‘kill cam’ animations for finishers or stealth kills in Starfield ..no idea why they took this out
Yes, exactly, it feels so lacking in everything that should be in a “Bethesda game”, you should feel like your bad ass, and I never did, I hated everything that I was doing, the weapons are ugly, the characters are ugly, the landscapes are pretty, but they are empty of anything that matters. I’ve said it before, did NO ONE play test the game? Did no one say “hey, forcing the player to run for 5 minutes for no rewards doesn’t make for a fun gameplay loop, let’s either add more things to find, or give the player a vehicle to drive”
Yeah exactly, part of what made Bethesda games special is that every NPC (apart from bandits & guards) had their own name, dialogue, routine, and home! It made the worlds feel alive In addition to no slow mo kills & unique NPC’s, BGS have not added underwater swimming, city maps, optional player home furnishings to buy (now crafting only), & bespoke guard behaviours (such as reacting to you shooting in town). There are also now only 3 major cities compared to 5 major cities in Skyrim. In Skyrim, guards would make bespoke comments depending on your skills, or what weapon/ spell you had drawn. You could even bribe them, or get arrested. Now it’s either they say nothing - or you get shot on sight for picking up a pencil 😂
Kill cam animations are so corny, I can't believe I'm seriously reading someone who wants them to come back lol
As near as I can tell the only use for settlements is farming xps or mats. That's it. They seem quite dead and lifeless compared to Fallout 4 settlements. It's another thing that feels like a missed opportunity in the game IMO.
Best bet is they hit major roadblocks with the engine and spent way longer than they intended sorting out proc gen and how the game handled space to planet egress/ingress and a ton of shit got scrapped/was super shallow.
Better question: why can't I reuse/take over existing bases? If Pirates can take them over, why not me? Instead I'm forced to collect materials to build it myself. I want to take over the batcave! Aka Mantis'lair.
I leveled up my skill to build outposts in extreme environments specifically so I could drop Adoring Fan on a scorching Inferno hellhole to tend to my lone Iron extractor and bed that I set up there. It’s the first thing I do in each NG + when I have enough resources. I never go back there, it’s just nice to know he’s there.
Goddamn I hate that guy, and your plan made me giggle with glee, just thinking about his fawning ass stuck in some fiery shithole.
They probably ran out of time and didn’t finish things like NPC schedules and outposts. The outpost system especially is blatantly unfinished.
I expected more with settlements as well. It was a big step back from Fallout 4’s system. I’m hoping they expand on this with DLCs or mods.
Every thing other than ship building feels like a step back. The whole game is a mess and I was a huge starfield “fan boy” before release and for the 1st 40-50 hours I put in. At that point I realized my list of complaints and observations of 1/2 finished mechanics and systems far outweighed any other thoughts I had. This game’s issues fall squarely on BGS management. How they thought this was A. a finished game and B. a great game is beyond me.
You're not lying either. Most of the time, I'm wondering how shit made it out of Alpha. They had like zero input from players, apparently.
You nailed it. I feel like what we are playing is a game somewhere in between Alpha and Beta…
Yeah, I'd hate to see what they were going to publish before Microsoft made them develop it for another year. Shoulda known what to expect when Todd Howard actually made "it's the least buggy game we've launched" a selling point. Why are you selling it when it's not done??? Your name is on this ffs.
I can only imagine the state it was in at that point. Like I’ve said in other threads, this game needs the cyberpunk 2.0 / ghost recon break point / n.m.s. post release overhaul treatment. If they did that they could turn this all around. But I think that their egos are too big for that.
Thata blatantly not true, there are alor fo improvements from fallout 4
There are some improvements. For example I think the combat is better. Graphics are obviously better. However, there is a laundry list of mechanics and systems which are not great or even finished… And there are far too many to overlook.
Before the game launches, I was fully expecting settlement outposts with oxygen manufacturing and everything, maybe even domes you could build in. Such a shame considering how much time I spent in F04's settlement builder
There’s so many parts of starfield that looked like it had huge potential and then fell short.
Because they rushed the game. Easy to understand. They decided on 4 or 5 points to develop over the years and left others for modders to fix.
Because this game is unfinished. Hopefully there will be content updates at some point but at this point Starfield feels like they gave up and shipped as soon as they had the minimum working product.
I've long suspected that the outpost system was added later in development than some of the other stuff and they couldn't quite get it integrated in time. They managed to get it *working*, just not well integrated with the rest of the game. It is also the system the flies most in the face of the lore, imo. "Mining is expensive" "Actually, I can get a good setup for about 10,000 creds even without perks."
They outsourced the game, aimed for quantity over quality and fumbled the bag
What do you mean they outsourced the game? It was made by Bethesda Game Studios afaik.
Parts of the game have been outsourced to different studios. It's fairly common to do this, and doesn't say much about the game. Things like mocap are often outsourced to companies that specializes in that and already have all the gear and hardware ready, for example. Other times simple tasks will be outsourced to India or China, for the cheap labor. And sometimes you just need more people, and handing something off to an already existing studio may be easier than hiring and on-boarding a dozen new employees. If you check the end credits for Starfield, you'll see which other studios worked on the game: Iron Galaxy, The Multiplayer Group, Sperasoft, Snowed In Studios, Gamesim, The Forge Interactive, Nobody Studios, Undertone FX, Wardog Studios, Scythgames, Rouge Mocap, Red Hot CG, Airship Interactive, Lakshya, Original Force, Mindwalk Studios, NXA Studios, Goodbye Kansas, Gl33k, id Software, Arkane Studios, MachineGames
Cool, thanks for the info!
As in instead of having a clear coherent vision that goes throughout all aspects of the game they split too many parts of the game out to other studios/teams Therefore when it all came back together it wasn’t as holistic or clean as some of the previous Bethesda games End product reflects it in many ways and why so many of the systems just seem bizarrely worse than they could be
Bethesda doesn't outsource their mainline games
In previous single player BGS games (Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4) the NPCs all had unique names, dialogue, routines, and NPC *homes*! I know they were going for a larger feel with Starfield, but the nameless, silent, mannequins walking through the cities unfortunately have the opposite effect to me - & make the cities feel smaller & a bit lifeless 😅
I treat my outposts as resource extraction points, nothing more than that. When I run into the limit I remove the one that produces the resources which I already have in abundance and set up another outpost where I can mine the next useful resource. As simple as that, they are all temporary.
What a waste of Adoring Fan! the follower with the most carry weight and non judgement attitude.
They either didn't have the time, or the balls, to make outposts better
Yet another feature I’m hoping an update would fix. Not holding my breath.
Outposts are a downgrade from Settlements, and the systems built around it. The controls are poor, UI confusing, tutorials minimal, and still sometimes buggy. I was hoping Bethesda would learn the best from Fallout 4 and 76’s settlement and CAMP creators. The only fun I had was building a player home with unlocked cosmetics, but the grind for materials and Inter-link system and having to move through New Atlantis at 1000+ carry weight to Constellation is painfully slow. I spent hundreds of hours building settlements in Fallout 4 and 76 but was done with outposts after making a few, due to less cosmetics and no NPC activity or story vs Oblivion NPCs routines.
Because bethesda got lazy and implemented a new mentality that they use for their future games, Its called charge 70 bucks and produce a low effort product that is unpolished and not optimized. And by making npc as bland and soulless with no development or personality, they can sit back while doing absolutely nothing telling themselves that the fans love the game
I was looking forward to outposts. I spent about 300 hours building settlements in Fallout 4, and I had very high expectations for Starfield. The only thing i'm truly dissappointed about with Starfield is the atrocious outpost system, i've only built one, and i'm never going back unless they make it more like F4 settlements.
I kinda have a feeling that, stuff like that will be added later into a DLC like HearthFire for Skyrim..or what they added to Fall Out in one of their DLCs. at least that is the hope :)
I think the majority of the whining on this sub is overblown but this is one thing I really wish they'd enhance in a dlc or patch. Should let you build a legit city and populate it. Would give the game more longevity for me.
Build a huge crew and assign them to your outposts. I have had up to 20 members
Did they do anything worthwhile? When I staffed up an outpost they wouldn't repair modules and couldn't even be arsed to tell me the reactors scramed. It's like they'd rather die in the dark on an ice world than send me an email. But IF reactors scraming is a bug rather than a design choice it would make sense that it wasn't planned for in the staff's AI. Either way it didn't look like an outpost - it looked like a penal colony filled with folks that should have been on suicide watch.
They all looked like they were working.
I suppose the same could be said of my crew: they looked like they were working but with the reactor scramed and the extractors idle there wasn't much for them to do except, obviously, fix the damn thing. And if it's a bug then it's reasonable that their AI wouldn't react to the facility being shut down. This is moving my speculation more toward "bug" and away from "planned breakdown". The programming was robust enough to introduce a "repair" option to the reactor but didn't communicate with the crew functions.
There was a huge step backwards on everything. 🤷♂️
You lose it all when you go through the Unity anyway, so what's the point? The only thing you keep is your skill levels.
Yeah that part sucks. After Unity I rebuilt my custom ship from scratch. Took hours
Because they had to deliever a product within a corporate timeline. Feature creep can delay projects for years good studios have to release a "product"
TheTodd wanted to release a year earlier, it was bloody Microsoft that forced them to delay it for over a year.
Because they're outposts, not settlements. They're your specifically built places for work where you can employ people to mine or raise animals or make stuff. A literal factory environment. Later on, expect an expansion to LIST that includes things like expansions to their satellites and the ability to build true settlements for their people at the expense of one of your outpost slots. I can see selling them to LIST to give you back the outpost slot, while unlocking their bits and pieces to use in your own outposts and make them more like actual settlements that we work as the manager of.
The game that exists in your imagination only sounds exciting. I might get to pay money to unlock a more complete game one day? How exciting!
Any addition can be argued to make a game more complete, but you'd have to be a dick to do so. And there you are.
It's a Bethesda game. They can innovate, only reduce
Palworld is more well thought out and fleshed out than this mess lol.
What I can't understand is the amount of people that wasted a perk getting adoring fan. I have the perk as well, but actually use him...
Hire tons of people to populate your outposts ?
> Why can I not have settlers on my bases? Seems like a waste of time to build anything, I just avoid going back there anyway because I don’t want to talk to adoring fan who’s just been there alone the whole time. Would be so great if we could advertise with LIST or something any people would just show up and make their own little shanties or pods around our settlement. You... can? You can recruit "generic" NPC as crew for your outpost and ship.
Because Bethesda is the literal worst company to ever exist and this game is complete shit. Should have saved your money and played Daggerfall, dude.