I wish. I got Starfield a month ago and everything is gated like that. Core space combat abilities from the tutorial are gated behind perks. Want to craft? You have to invest 15 levels for guns, then 10 for space suits, then 10 for ships, and on, and on. And there’s no getting better just because you do it a lot.

Starfield seems like someone thought Skyrim was too freewheeling so they locked everything down way beyond what’s necessary.

It can be too reactive as well. I love BG3, I did 3 full runs. But I never used the grease spell again after the first run. They made it flammable to the entire puddle. What that means in practical terms is every tiny candle can turn the entire puddle into a small amount of fire damage. The prevalence of flame sources also means this will nearly always happen. So instead of getting a bunch of prone enemies that are easier to hit, I have mildly annoyed enemies.

So now that question is in the back of my head whenever I see this. What kind of damage and reactivity are we talking about here?

Nah, you just described Starfield. They’re going to decide that was too easy and gate building behind even more story/skills/tasks for less reward.

Not liking it does not mean it’s outdated. There’s a lot of us that like it as the success of XCOM and BG3 show. We’re allowed to like things that you don’t.

Oof that’s quite the haul. Thanks for the write up though.

That’s where I am, I’m looking at switching my gaming computer over to fiddle with it, see what’s going on.

Some people were saying MS Office will still run in the browser though and that’s 90 percent of my use case these days to be honest.

Okay. I can see that being an issue. I’m fine without HDR but I know people who aren’t.

What do you use on a daily basis that’s not supported? I see this kind of comment all the time and nobody wants to tell me!

Yes. It affected my enjoyment of the game.

Ugh the crafting is a drag. You need to level up, you need to build outposts for materials, and you need to create useless stuff as practice, and you have to deal with an inventory system from 2010. It’s like after the daggers in Skyrim they decided crafters in a single player game needed to be punished. Any one of those systems would have worked to provide a feeling of progression and keeping people from going too fast on crafting.

The thing that gets me is having the interior of the ships. But that interior doesn’t matter. And if you try to actually RP in your RPG you inevitably get plopped on an airless planet without a suit because of the ship fast travel mechanic. The entire section of stuff there is a complete useless doodad that could be replaced with small cutscenes or static scenes to talk with onboard crew and use upgraded ship things like research stations.

Literally the first time I played it, the very first planet told me I wasn’t supposed to be seeing it.

And I waited a year to buy it.

I get that but as a gamer I’m forced to ask why? They went through all this trouble and now they’re unwilling to abandon it while other games are sprinting past them in tech, story, and graphics.

Star Field does not use clutter for crafting. You just literally pick up crafting material. Most of your material comes from outposts growing or mining stuff.

Is that the same engine they used for Star Field? Because I can hear the creaking from here. It’s absolutely time for a new engine.

I wanted to get into outpost building in Starfield but I just can’t get past the question, why am I doing it? Everything is needlessly gated three times over and I don’t get any utility or story out of it.

I don’t play FO4 anymore either. I will say I appreciate the stories, but their attempts to make games you can live in just don’t measure up anymore. Not when you have games like no man’s land and satisfactory. We know just how comfy a game can be.

We know that. Trauma is an interesting thing. There are many ways to get traumatized. And all trauma can cause PTSD. So an Infantryman could see a dead body but never actually get into a fight and end up with PTSD. It can happen on the first body, or the 100th. Drone Operators are prone to something called moral injury. Basically they get a form a trauma from seeing the results of their work.

That’s the thing it’s not diminished. The brain doesn’t see it as any different than directing fire through binoculars.