I mean, 6 of one half a dozen of the other. The single month prices have already gone to the moon without any cheaper alternative. Netflix has gone from $8 to $12 to $13 to $16 to $18 to $20 without any price incentive for longer plans. Even if that went up to $22/mo alongside an annual plan for lets say $200/yr, it’d…

I haven’t seen that showing up anywhere new, but if anything that would be a return to form.

The current predominant model of completely flat pricing seems like greed that backfired. “Okay but why would we have an option that costs $10/mo when we can just have everyone do the $15/mo one?” Well the idea was a discount…

Outside of stuff like Game Pass where you can ‘bank’ an extended period of time at a pretty steep discount if you keep an eye out, I’ve long since adopted the a la carte purchase model with subscriptions, which is to say I cancel them the instant I buy them.

Completely removes the burden of trying to keep track of…

(Minor mid-late game spoiler warning)

They eventually very very loosely justify outposts by giving you something that will be frequently attacked by enemies, and outposts (with defensive emplacements) is one option of how to store it. But that really justifies one heavily armored outpost.

Why you’d ever want to invest…

Yeah, I was genuinely awed by how good the game can look once I removed the color filters. It was a shame to lose some of the ‘space western’ vibes that the color palette imparted when it wasn’t completely destroying the image, but the cost to image quality was just way, way too high to bear.

If you couldn’t be bothered to find time to include incredibly basic features somewhere in 7 years of development, then you have no place selling your unfinished game for $70. So again, no excuse.

It’s their color filtering. They use really primitive color filters that destroy the bit depth. It already seems to be an 8-bit native image but its even worse than that because their shitty color filtering compresses that range even further, so you get constant posterization. On PC, you can mod out the color filters,…

Hi, I’m a working software engineer and have a 4 year degree in game development. Adding a fucking gamma calibration is bog standard and there is 0 excuse for not including it. Hope this helps.

The people going “what about it” in the replies to this are legitimately some of the most pathetic people I can imagine.

You can’t ‘manually’ land on a planet, but you can land on a planet without going to the starmap as long as its not a landing location with multiple fast travel points. You just open up the scanner and look at the point on the planet. Strong agree that playing in such a way that you open their dogshit menus as little…

That is once again a sign of good optimization. Gamers have completely conflated heavy loads with poor optimization and it makes them look incredibly fucking dense.

Put me in the camp of people who really can’t imagine going back to this stuff from Valhalla. We’ll see what the future of the franchise ends up looking like but so far this one is gonna be a hard pass from me.

But... you can. In Starfield, you probably will, given that its meant to be played with multiple NG+ cycles. But it’s also completely unclear to me why you needing to move the 6 skill points that affect build diversity in any way makes that character more compelling to play as an alt. If anything, the reason to make…

Well, the gap between getting some good VAs to talk over your 6 JPEGs and getting full performance capture, which is what BG3 used, is pretty gargantuan.

I don’t disagree that there’s a wildly underserved market there that could probably be served by a AA or A quality release instead of a AAA that includes it as 1 of…

I mean this is the thing right. The reason people attach so heavily to the romances in stuff like Baldur’s Gate or Mass Effect is 1) production quality. Performance capture on high quality models with talented VOs and strong writing is just not comparable to 6 JPEGs of a mute questionably aged anime girl with writing t…

there are 25 different abilities, of which you can equip 4-8 at a time, and each have their own upgrades, and are acquired by finding them in the world. That is the comparable system to Starfield’s powers, and again if you compare the two, Starfield comes out looking absolutely pathetic.

Well the genesis of all of this was someone saying that Starfields skill design is so much more interesting and developed than boring old Ubisofts. Which struck me as a completely ludicrous thing to say.

And for the record, I still don’t think the superficial similarities you’re drawing here remotely reflect what it’s…

You realize the 3 “different” builds you’ve described here hinge on a grand total of 6 (maybe 8) skills between them? Of the 82 skills in Starfield?

And even then, this substantially more damage thing you’re talking about hinges on a single point in 2 of the skills that Bethesda has continued to make busted for…

I’m definitely not. Valhalla and Starfield have wildly different skill point economies. Valhalla has a lot of minor stat nodes, but you move through those several at a time, and crucially those minor nodes exist to allow you to specialize your character. The different paths you take along the minor nodes will…

So let me get this straight, your defense of the game, and assertion that others haven’t played it, is based on the fact that some very small interior spaces in some locations aren’t instanced? Am I getting that right?