Xbox Game Pass for PC

[Raid]

I was not impressed with Diablo 4, the combat was really lacking, there was no oomph to it and since playing Lost Ark my expectations have changed with regards to how combat should feel. Spell effects looked particularly weedy. It could just be the areas they showed but it was all a bit too muted for me, as if they heard the silly backlash about the colours in 3 and took it too far the other way, draining the world of any vibrancy.

Art direction aside (I'm pretty much of the same opinion as you), I didn't think it looked hugely different from Diablo 3. It's maybe a little slower or less frenetic, but that could just be because they've chosen smaller packs of enemies so you can actually see what's going on.

Obsidian's new game, Pentinent, looked unique and intriguing.

I liked the idea of the game, but I'm really not keen on the art style.

Pretty much everything was for release in 2023 wasn't it? I'm also genuinely surprised they didn't announce another version of Skyrim was being released

I think there was a fair amount of stuff scheduled for October.

[Sly Boots]

Re Starfield, I went into the presentation prepared to be extremely sceptical about it, but actually what they showed made it look very good. I won't talk about the 1,000 worlds thing, but the rest made it look like some of their best work. I don't know the details of the engine they're using, but it's their best looking game by far, even the close-up faces which is usually a horror show, and the populated worlds and settlements they showed look great and atmospheric, and the idea of exploring worlds, then shooting off into space and engaging in space combat and the like sounds really fun.

People say NMS is a great game these days, and for many people I'm sure it is, but for me the lack of any over-riding point or goal to what you're doing quickly robs me of the impetus to continue. It's fun for a time, but at some point you question why you're actually doing any of it, and in my case stop playing at that point. If Bethesda basically create a game that's similar in many respects but with a story and quests, suddenly that's a game I'm very interested in.

I'll still wait for reviews, but colour me cautiously optimistic for this.

[Sly Boots]

Also, agree with Dj on the Outer Worlds, I was really hyped for it pre-release, but when I played it it rarely rose above merely ok for me personally.

[Solitaire]

Re Starfield, I went into the presentation prepared to be extremely sceptical about it, but actually what they showed made it look very good. I won't talk about the 1,000 worlds thing, but the rest made it look like some of their best work. I don't know the details of the engine they're using, but it's their best looking game by far, even the close-up faces which is usually a horror show, and the populated worlds and settlements they showed look great and atmospheric, and the idea of exploring worlds, then shooting off into space and engaging in space combat and the like sounds really fun.

People say NMS is a great game these days, and for many people I'm sure it is, but for me the lack of any over-riding point or goal to what you're doing quickly robs me of the impetus to continue. It's fun for a time, but at some point you question why you're actually doing any of it, and in my case stop playing at that point. If Bethesda basically create a game that's similar in many respects but with a story and quests, suddenly that's a game I'm very interested in.

I'll still wait for reviews, but colour me cautiously optimistic for this.

Agree with you, Sly. After digging through the subreddits /pcgaming and /starfield, I've changed my mind about the thousand planets thing. People are correct: it's a modding community dream - heck, it might even make me learn to mod the game, if it means I can create content on my very own planet then share it with players. I can see how I'll play this, which is probably close to how I play Skyrim. I throw in some mods that fix quality of life stuff, do a bunch of missions so I can level up/not be complete cannon fodder, then I'll pick a nice planet or moon to build a base, hire some NPCs, build a cool-ass space ship, and doodle around a few solar systems, ignoring the main quests, maybe forever. I've never finished the second half of Skyrim, after all, because I just have too much fun being a loner Ranger/Hunter fellow, with player-made cabins scattered around, collecting furs and making things, tinkering around, exploring... Yeah, this is gonna be me all over again, up in space

[Raid]

I should say I'm still excited for it, but it's cautious optimism. I'd be waiting for reviews if I wasn't going to get it free on Gamepass anyway. It's mostly because I haven't really gotten on with any of the 3D Fallouts or Elder Scrolls - they've usually been fun for a while, but then I end up with the same feeling of ennui that I get with most open-world games.

They almost completely won me over with the ship building stuff, I really wasn't expecting that. Most games like this have given you a selection of ship types that you can pick from, I don't remember having this amount of granularity in a game of this scope before.

It's a fair point about the modding potential of the open world.

[DjchunKfunK]

I think with 1000 planets, and especially if they are split up into galaxies as Todd mentioned, it is just about manageable in terms of the team checking the procedural generation as opposed to No Man Sky or Elite which have millions of planets.

Pretty much everything was for release in 2023 wasn't it? I'm also genuinely surprised they didn't announce another version of Skyrim was being released

A chunk of the stuff on the left was announced at the show yesterday.

EDIT: I recommend people take a look at some of the trailers for stuff last night on YouTube as I find a lot of games don't pop due to the reduced bitrate on Twitch etc.

[Raid]

I think with 1000 planets, and especially if they are split up into galaxies as Todd mentioned, it is just about manageable in terms of the team checking the procedural generation as opposed to No Man Sky or Elite which have millions of planets.

I think when you're generating whole planets, there isn't going to be an entirely trustworthy way of checking even one of them. At that scale you're relying on some sort of error-checking software (which may itself not be entirely reliable), not play-testing. Given how riddled with bugs every Bethesda RPG is at launch, I doubt it really makes much of a difference anyway.

[DjchunKfunK]

When most of them are going to be fairly small with only a few things to do on them I think it's possible.

[Raid]

Howard directly mentioned that you can land anywhere on over a thousand planets. Even if they're small and don't have many points of interest, that's still a thousand entire procedurally generated planet surfaces that have to be built and checked. Alternatively the game procedurally generates the surface as you explore it, meaning that planet x in my game may have an entirely different surface to planet x in yours. You therefore wouldn't be able to just stick down a crafted outpost design on a particular location on a particular planet, because that planet's surface may be completely different for other people that download your mod.

[Wrathbone]

It could be that the Creation Kit has a way of designating an area of a planet as suitable for building so that modders can easily handle that. Also remember that procedural generation doesn't necessarily mean that the planets are different for everyone. If the generation all comes from the same seeds then the planets should be the same for everyone, much like in No Man's Sky.

[DjchunKfunK]

Relevant to our discussion.

https://www.ign.com/articles/starfield- ... generation

"We’re also careful to let you know that’s what [that procedural content] is. So if you look at space, you know there are a lot of ice balls in space, so that was one of our big design considerations on this game is, ‘What’s fun about an ice ball?’ And it’s OK sometimes if ice balls aren’t- it is what it is. We’d rather have them and say yes to you, ‘Hey, you can land on this.’ Here are the resources, you can survey it, and then you can land and spend ten minutes there and be like, ‘OK, now I’m going to leave and go back to the other planet that has all this other content on it, and I’m going to follow this questline.’
"So we’re pretty careful about saying, ‘Here’s where the fun is, here’s this kind of content,’ but still say yes to the player and, ‘You want to go land on that weird planet, check it out, and build an outpost, and live your life there, and watch the sunset because you like the view of the moons there? Go for it.’ We love that stuff."

This in particular captures how I feel about space games.

[Wrathbone]

Yep, bang on that. It's why the 1000 planets / landing anywhere thing makes sense to me - because if that wasn't the case, the first thing people would say is "why can't I land over there?", even if there's nothing over there.

[Raid]

It's a valid point I suppose. I guess you could say it serves minimal practical gameplay value, it's more for atmosphere.

[Sly Boots]

I really hope they can pull this off. If they can it could be something quite special.

[Wrathbone]

The two things that concern me slightly are performance and combat. The gameplay video looked like it had some serious framerate dips, but it's hard to tell if that was just the video encoding or whether it was representative of how it currently plays. And of course they've plenty of time to try and address performance.

Combat looks a bit bland from what we've seen, but again it's hard to gauge from the video because it could just be a thin slice of what's possible, or maybe a bad example. You'd think they'd show off their best, though.