That's way more than enough to run something like Demon's Souls, you'll be just fine. It's a pretty light PS3 game to emulate.
Gaming thoughts, bite-size chewables - new orange flavor!
- Thread starter pauli
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The System Shock remake is fun, but I am not loving the Cyberspace sections. They're vaguely Descent-like, but the hit boxing and feedback about when damage is occurring (either way) is poor, and there's no checkpointing, so if you make it nearly through a section and get ganked by a swarm, you have to plod through the whole thing again. It's just not a tight experience, and there's no way to change the game difficulty after you've started, so when the Cyberspace levels start getting harder mid-game, you're already committed to the run. It also annoyingly sometimes fails to register mouse clicks, so in addition to being floaty and frustrating, you sometimes die because you didn't shoot when you tried to. I've restored to hiding in corners and cheesing to the extent possible.
I also found c-space to be really difficult, and the last two hours of the game felt like a chore. All in all, not a bad remake. And it has Public Image Ltd at the end. But System Shock 2 or Prey it is not.
Also, I don't remember if the laser rapier drained battery power or not but that was a dumb decision.
I heard that melee was still floaty/insubstantial in the current System Shock release and I am hoping they fix this before I play it.
Don't worry, they didn't bother with QA.
The reality is that games will get far more playtime in the first hours after release than a team of hundreds of QA people could provide. And few (none?) QA teams are that large. Automation can help with more straightforward use cases, but a game as complex as Starfield looks to be is going to have a shit ton of unexpected edge cases.
Which is, indirectly, a very strong argument to leave it on the shelf for at least six months after it ships.
I feel like I am in the distinct and tiny minority who has zero interest in Starfield.
I would be interested, but it’s Bethesda Game Studios. And going back over their games?
The actual Game Studios / Softworks titles developed by them, not simply published by them? I haven’t enjoyed any of them. Not really. I find their games to be buggy, soulless messes that ultimately just fill me with boredom for 90% of the time or more. I have better uses of my free time and discretionary spending.
I would be interested, but it’s Bethesda Game Studios. And going back over their games?
The actual Game Studios / Softworks titles developed by them, not simply published by them? I haven’t enjoyed any of them. Not really. I find their games to be buggy, soulless messes that ultimately just fill me with boredom for 90% of the time or more. I have better uses of my free time and discretionary spending.
I think most people who aren't interested in Starfield wouldn't bother talking about it, so... for what it's worth, I have no faith in Bethesda pulling off anything better than exactly what you just said. I've found their output from Oblivion onwards (and to a smaller extent before it) aggressively mediocre or worse in terms of things that matter to me in RPGs, like gameplay mechanics and narrative. They make incredible-looking environments for their games, but the art seems to be the only thing propping up the experience, and every time I play them it feels like I'm inhaling a double-decker Big Mac made half out of grease and half out of minced cardboard.
Not that there's anything wrong if people like and want an archetypical fast food RPG experience, but I do not.
I killed my first dragon and did my first shout, ever in Skyrim. I'm going to stick to it this time
Maybe
Maybe
See, to me, no one does open-world as well as Bethesda. The feeling of the world, it's extended lore and small-scale storytelling feels more real than any other open-world RPG out there. Witcher 3 was a fantastic linear story that saddled itself with a humdrum open-world that was entirely busywork. Pretty busywork but busywork nonetheless. There was nothing in it that made me go "I wonder what's inside that cave".
Yeah, their main plots are aggressively mediocre and they always have been. People like to wax lovely about Morrowind but, ultimately, it gets a lot of credit for being many people's first but it's a really mediocre and samey story that benefits from being a very lore heavy story at a time when people were new to the TES lore. It's main benefit (and something Bethesda really should revisit) is that it doesn't have any urgency built in. There's no catastrophe or immediacy in the threat. It's a big follow the dots story that explicitly tells you to take your time and go do side stuff (as in literally the third main quest). The only other game they did that with was Fallout 3 and it benefits greatly from that too (at least until the last act of the game).
Well, that's interesting to me, right? I don't necessarily disagree with that last bit, it's part of what I mean by their environments being great. There's a certain sense of mystique and allure that their design team manages to seamlessly cram into their open worlds, by compressing the perfect amount of 'oh, what's that over the hill? Looks interesting!' into their spaces.
However, and let me preface the rest of post by saying this is incredibly subjective: I have to say that part of the problem is when I do go into that cave, I find identikit dungeon #257 with maybe a bit of level-matched treasure, or a poorly-written side-quest, or some 'environmental storytelling', usually a bunch of skeletons posed in tableaux or whatever. As for lore and sidequests, I find Bethesda's approach to lore painfully tedious, and most of their side-quests are pretty run of the mill, shallow, and just plain badly written. The fun and interesting side-quests are actually an exception more than the rule (though I will say there tend to be better ones in a few of the guild paths).
TW3 has the opposite problem, where the world's pretty but doesn't invite exploration as well as, say, FO3, but the quests have actual effort put into them; I would not describe most of them as busywork. The random treasure hunts, yes, but I just skipped 95% of them. TW3's quest design works in a similar way to Bethesda's in that the campaign takes you to places that serve as hubs where side-quests splinter off in all directions (a few even spawning off the critical path, IIRC The Bloody Baron was designed that way), but because the design isn't as inviting as Bethesda manages, it becomes a bit tedious to start them off. The sticking point is because they're written better, they end up feeling more meaningful at their conclusion, whereas in a Bethsoft side-quest, it feels like I wasted most of my time at the end of it.
Well, FO3's last act was hilarious to me because of the purported urgency of it while instead I was off chasing some synth guy or whatever, but then we're used to that in RPGs by now, so I'll give it a pass. I have major bugbears with FO3 as a Fallout game, but beyond that, most of the above points stand: it's endemic to Bethsoft's design at this point. I haven't played FO3's expansions though, so maybe those are better in terms of the above.
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I'll clarify: the open-world is filled with busywork and the quests don't need (or want) the open-world. If it was a third small region-based presentation then nothing would have been missing and it would have been a tighter story presentation. I think an witcher open-world game could work in a way that needs the open-world but it would have to lean, heavily, into the actual witching part of the story and not be focused on a big, overarching, narrative.
From the microsoft show, besides Starfield?
Star Wars Outlaws, because NOT A JEDI!
Jusant, the climbing game in the future from Don’t Nod, because that looks rad as hell!
Dungeons of Hinterberg, because jot damn that looks purty and neat and cool and stuff.
Clockwork Revolution because Clockwork time travel seems cool?
Metaphor Re Fantazio because reasons! I’m lumping it in there with Persona 5 Tactics and the Persona 3 remake.
Richard Aoyade in the Fable trailer was AWESOME.
Some of the others were interesting, but these were the highlights for me.
I’ve hot the PC Gaming Show to parse through next. There have been a staggering amount of demos released this past week as well.
Star Wars Outlaws, because NOT A JEDI!
Jusant, the climbing game in the future from Don’t Nod, because that looks rad as hell!
Dungeons of Hinterberg, because jot damn that looks purty and neat and cool and stuff.
Clockwork Revolution because Clockwork time travel seems cool?
Metaphor Re Fantazio because reasons! I’m lumping it in there with Persona 5 Tactics and the Persona 3 remake.
Richard Aoyade in the Fable trailer was AWESOME.
Some of the others were interesting, but these were the highlights for me.
I’ve hot the PC Gaming Show to parse through next. There have been a staggering amount of demos released this past week as well.
I've been thinking about this same thing, coincidentally. I put some 250 hours into Skyrim back in the day, and am now playing through The Witcher 3, and I think that they are different things with different goals.
I have always wanted to get the "full" Witcher story experience. That's why, after playing the first game and hearing only good things about its sequels, I took the time to read all of the Witcher books (except the prequel one published after the main series), then replay The Witcher 1 (because a long time had passed), then play 2, and now 3. Consequently, I'm very keen on not doing the story "wrong", in The Witcher 3. The thought that I might go here or there and lock out this or that narratively-significant quest is quite distressing.
So I'm playing the game in more or less the way it wants me to -- doing the quests at the recommended level and so on -- and am very happy: the story is amazing, and it's told very, very well. (The gameplay is good too, but pretty easy, even on its highest difficulty level.)
But what I don't have, like krimhorn said, is the feeling of joy and wonder that I had with the free-roam, aimless exploration in Skyrim. Because there, I didn't care one jot about the story or missing out on quests, I just went where I wanted to, when I wanted to. I mean, I got to care about some of the characters and story points later, but on the whole, not a lot.
To illustrate the above:
The Witcher 3's first act (after the Prologue) is in Velen, a swampy region where a big battle was just fought between two empires. The game is very good at conveying the horror and tragedy of war: oppressive (but still good) music, ghouls eating corpses, peasants victimising non-human races, et cetera. It's all quite grim, but that's what they were going for.
Skyrim is a fun-time playground. There's supposed to be a civil war between the Imperial Legion and the Stormcloaks, but what you have in the game is various far-flung camps of a few legionnaires / rebels each, which IIRC don't even bother to attack each other much outside of scripted events, absent mods. And the dragons returning are likewise a threat only in theory -- it's not like they'll jump on you the second you go outdoors, you're quite free to explore the world at your leisure.
So, different games with different goals, I'd argue.
That's an interesting point. I'll admit I'm curious about an open-world Witcher that isn't very hand-holdy and has enough gameplay depth to support monster hunting as a whole gig, instead of the current version that's breadcrumb-trailed up the wazoo.
Anyway, about the busywork, I assume you're talking about the bazillion question marks on the map and the resource gathering, right? I can see why you'd have an issue with that, but honestly, if something's optional and feels like it's not actively enriching my experience of the game, I'm happy to let it go. I managed to not care too much about those, somehow (though I will admit there are games where I have not been so successful in ignoring the icon-clearing bullshit and/or task logs, mostly to my regret).
While I appreciate a more condensed map is a great solution for TW3, I think there's something of a discussion to be had in terms of how to solve the problem of open-world games needing to do what they do - if we were developers trying to make an expansive open world engaging for a player, we already know that sprinkling low-effort bullshit all over the map isn't a great way to do it (cf. AssCreed since the first sequel, almost every Ubisoft game ever since, and everything that was influenced by them). RDR 2 may in fact be one of the games that addressed this problem to varying degrees, but man I need to play it properly first.
And, to be fair, I think is all comes down to what we appreciate as individual gamers. There is absolutely nothing I love more than a first-person open-world RPG with survival elements. My second favorite? First-person open-world survival game with RPG elements. But I cannot get into visual novels, dating sims, or bullet hell games. They're just not my thing.
My son will play Spiderman and Spiderman: Miles Morales for hours and hours and hours, unlocking and trying on different spider suits, swinging around the city, etc. Watching him play, I realize that it simply is not for me, and playing like he does is boring as fook. But really we do the same thing, explore, improve, and get finer threads (or armor).
It's all good if you are not interested in Starfield. I am just glad that there are enough of us out here that are, so it got made. Because it is totally my thing, and I have always wanted something like this, going back to high school, playing pen and paper Traveller RPG with my buddies when we got tired of AD&D or Gamma World.
My son will play Spiderman and Spiderman: Miles Morales for hours and hours and hours, unlocking and trying on different spider suits, swinging around the city, etc. Watching him play, I realize that it simply is not for me, and playing like he does is boring as fook. But really we do the same thing, explore, improve, and get finer threads (or armor).
It's all good if you are not interested in Starfield. I am just glad that there are enough of us out here that are, so it got made. Because it is totally my thing, and I have always wanted something like this, going back to high school, playing pen and paper Traveller RPG with my buddies when we got tired of AD&D or Gamma World.
I would absolutely be totally into the game if it was being made by nearly any other developer in the entirety of the god damn planet than Bethesda Game Studios. In 20 years, they have not delivered a title worth my time. Not one. And I’ve given them time and money for Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4. I finally learned my freaking lesson.It's all good if you are not interested in Starfield. I am just glad that there are enough of us out here that are, so it got made. Because it is totally my thing, and I have always wanted something like this, going back to high school, playing pen and paper Traveller RPG with my buddies when we got tired of AD&D or Gamma World.
That's totally fair, I get that you don't like anything from them. Just like I will never purchase any "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney" games, nor will I purchase Dead Space nor the System Shock games. They're not your bag, no one is expecting you to buy them. Like I said, I am just happy that there are enough people who will buy them that BethSoft will make them. I am with @krimhorn, to me:
That is what I am looking for in a game. I understand your objection to these games, and am totally cool with it. You have to play what's fun for you, live like you want to live!
I think it's going to come down to how well they can combat the No Man's Sky effect. In NMS, there's always something over the next rise, but it's meaningless because there's something over all the rises across the whole procedurally generated planet, and the game systems are wide, but shallow. I'm sure there will be enough hand-crafted story content in StarField to keep things interesting, but at some point you're raiding the same bunker with a slightly different layout for scraps of XP or resources and it's just no longer very interesting. Past BethSoft games have flirted with this kind of exhaustion, but StarField explodes the traditional world map across planets and systems, and when the neato factor wears off is where I think how good of a game it is will settle in.
I don’t think you do, not really. I deeply enjoy open world experiences that are well done, well crafted. I have an immense amount of fun in games that really go out of their way to encourage exploration, and truly fascinating experiences can happen with the lore or setting or even a bit of asset art placed in just the right way to evoke an emotional response. I keep a notepad by my PC for games for a reason - a couple of those pages of game notes basically turned into a narrative player journal of what my character saw and did and experienced, usually outside of the main quest line.
I like the settings! I enjoy the concepts! I cry out in anger and frustration at the execution!
My objection isn’t to the type of games at all. Fuck, I bought all of those games I listed up there because I really, really wanted to play and enjoy them. My objection is entirely based on the developer.
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Okay, not going to argue with you. You do you, man. I am sure there are plenty of other games that strike your fancy, that you can enjoy. Just no BethSoft, I get it.
Bethesda learned an important lesson from Arena and Daggerfall which they took to heart when developing Morrowind: just because your game world is vast, doesn't make it interesting.
No Man's Sky's developers had to learn a similar lesson. We'll see whether Bethesda needs to re-learn it.
Having a bunch of empty, boring worlds doesn't necessarily spell doom if the game's story and overall theme supports it. For example, most of the star systems in Star Control II were filler that didn't provide anything other than resources, but it quickly became apparent which systems (and planets in them) were worth your time, and your home base (and the races your interacted with) provided exploration guidance at appropriate moments. You didn't really get exhausted with the mechanic because you didn't feel like you were missing out by not exploring everything.
SC2 is a good example of great design given an apparently vast map. The common sensical solution for Starfield would be to do something similar (i.e., not drop random quests on random procedurally generated planets, or at least signpost them well/relegate busywork-ish things to them), in the vein of ME1; as a matter of fact, I'm seeing most of these planets tie in to their crafting economy as the most obvious explanation for why you'd want to visit them (and in any case, Starfield is giving off a heavy ME1 vibe).
I think all of this is a matter of course, really, because there's only a few smart ways to implement a game with this kind of structure. The issue will come down to execution - how does all of this tie into the game's mechanics, and will it all be rich enough to sustain gameplay and narrative across how many ever hours it takes to finish the game?
I'm tending towards 'no' for the latter question from what I've seen, but I'll be fair, this sort of scope is a hard one to tackle for any studio, let alone Bethsoft, who specialise in ocean-wide and inch-deep.
It's Ubisoft, I am not going to install it.
I absolutely hated FO4 when it first shipped. It was the emptiest game I've ever played, despite its size. Everything was autogenerated, there was no reason to really explore, it just sucked.
But I recently replayed it with all the DLC, and I gotta say, those were better. Nuka World was well done in terms of exploration; I actually genuinely had fun poking around and finding stuff in there. You have to short-circuit its whole plot, and kill everyone there, if you want to be Wasteland Jesus, because otherwise you turn into an evil warlord, but the actual physical setting was quite cool. Core FO4 is still soulless, but Nuka World was fun.
edit: oh, and what led me into FO4 again was playing through A Tale of Two Wastelands, which is a set of mods that glue FO3 and FO:NV into one large game. That works surprisingly well, and I had a good time with that, too.
second edit: note that FO4 has a horrific bug with level loading, where it takes FOREVER to transition anywhere. Load screens are ridiculously laggy. I've forgotten the name, but there's a mod that turns off vsync during level loads, and then turns it back on again when loading is done. This speeds up loading by at least ten times. It's a critical mod.... and of course it disables achievements, if those are important to you.
As recent as FO4 is, the code is absolute shit. I think Starfield is going to be built on the same foundation, which is unfreaking forgivable. They should long since have transitioned to another engine.
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So is there a developer people would have been happy with for a new Star Wars game, because for the longest time it was "get rid of EA exclusivity", and now we're straight into "I'm not buying from Ubi" 
Matt McMuscles has a series called "What Happened?" that goes over development debacles in gaming history as well. One of my favourites is his dive into "Rise of the Robots," which is also part of his series "The Worst Fighting Game."
Frosty Grin
Ars Legatus Legionis
No, I think Jedi Fallen Order demonstrated that it's enough for the game to have a certain level of quality and just enough novelty, as well as making the right choices from the source material - and the franchise will carry them among the fans, while not scaring off all the not-fans.
I am getting this from what they're showing with SWO - even if the choices are a bit farther from my tastes, compared to JFO.
Frosty Grin
Ars Legatus Legionis
QA on a Bethesda Game Studios game? That's new.I am feeling sorry for the QA people on Starfield. So many systems and combinations to test
technophile
Ars Legatus Legionis
It's hitting some good notes for me. Not-a-Jedi is a nice change of pace even if some of the systems (the bullet-time/VATS-like system, the sidekick giving you an equivalent to Force Pull or distraction abilities, etc.) may end up "feeling" similar to some of the things Jedi heroes can do in other games. From the gameplay video it kind of looks like an ME3-style "semi-open" world where you have specific quest arcs with some limited choices provided, but you're more on rails than a real "open-world" experience where you can fuck off in the middle of a quest to go become a Bantha rancher or something. Having a workshop prompt on the ship is a little bit of a concern just because of how much crafting tends to force resource gathering into the core gameplay loop and I am not really into that, but if it's not too onerous (or even completely optional) it can add some options for people who like that sort of thing. (Not every game needs a crafting subsystem, y'all... and if there's weapon degradation or something equally aggravating that might move this into "pass" territory for me.)
If they hit a good sweet spot there, and the story and characters are good, I think it will satisfy a lot of people even if none of the gameplay systems are terribly innovative. The story from the gameplay trailer is giving me some strong Firefly vibes, which I don't hate. It's definitely one I'll keep an eye on.
Anyone without a launcher would have been good, like any of the Sony studios.So is there a developer people would have been happy with for a new Star Wars game, because for the longest time it was "get rid of EA exclusivity", and now we're straight into "I'm not buying from Ubi"
I've never understood the launcher hate. I just toggle the option to not have it run all the time, just as I do with steam or discord 
That's pretty much what I took away from it, only in a Star Wars setting. Definitely something I'll be keeping an eye on.