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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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It should have been trash too, literally falling apart, practically space junk. But they made Constellation into this fantasy of a secret society of explorers that flies through the unknown killing literally everything on every single planet they visit with near limitless resources from their benevolent CEO billionaire with bottomless pockets because he's just in it for the "passion" of exploring space (I'm hopeful that this turns out to not be true later on, but I have low expectations).
The ship they give the player to start out with is too good. And fundamentally starts the game off on the wrong foot.
Having the player need to beg/borrow/steal to get their foothold in space would fundamentally put the player in a headspace of feeling grateful for what they have. Alternate start mods can solve this, and then modifications to ship prices and so on can tie it all together.
I think part of the problem here is that Bethesda are scared of making their game too roleplay heavy. They have always tried to avoid any limitation on freedom of the player, no matter the skill of the player. This makes the game fun for anyone but comes at a considerable expense to storytelling.
One of the main problems is that a spaceship is the price of just fifty guns. But this is because looting is boring and they don't want to force the player to do too much of it just to survive.
Another problem is probably the inventory system itself, allowing the player to carry too much. I think if you have crew on a ship you should be able to order your crew to loot a vessel/spacestation/facility for you(after clearing it of enemies). This would eliminate the need to painstakingly search a facility from top to bottom. You would do "crew action>loot location" and then some time would pass and you'd get a list of all objects in the location and the option to load them onto your ship cargo or not. With this kind of feature you can then limit what the player can carry more significantly (2-3 guns, some medical equipment, ammunition). The general point here being that if you're the captain of a starship with a crew you should be able to use that crew, and this ties into fixing problems with the pricing. If you increase the pricing of everything then you also need to increase the loot you get and make doing that looting enjoyable in some way. Obviously a space encounter needs to somehow give the player enough loot to pay for that encounter too and turn a profit on top otherwise you're just encouraging the player to avoid it all.
Money sinks need finding to make up for this. Fuel probably being the biggest one. Infinite generated local missions on settled planets need to be worth enough to get the player enough fuel to get into space. And they need to be fun too. That or thievery in some way. Robbing Galbank or some corporation ought to be a viable alternative for a quick buck but come with the negative effect of them sending people to kill you later.
I can seriously think of a lot with regards to overhauling this. On the same scale as Requiem for Skyrim.
The best reading of it is that he's a bored and lonely old man who thinks space is neat and throws some pocket change at a little clubhouse full of people who'll pretend to be his friends where he can hang out instead of working, and he only really gets invested once the weird shit starts happening. He's still too friendly and whitewashed for the character to really land though.
Exactly. Even just some option at the end where you do a quick time skip like waiting or sleeping and it gives you a menu with all the stuff that's not literal trash, to then dump straight into the cargo hold. Hell, take it a step further and let all the trash guns and armor get turned into irrecoverable bulk packages just to compress it all and avoid the serious slowdown that having tons of junk in your inventory/cargo causes, so instead of dozens of various modded maelstroms you just have "crate of ten shit guns" that's just vendor trash from that point on.
FO76 eventually added bulk area looting for dead enemies, so the same general principle shouldn't be too hard.
There are some downsides to this looting concept. One being that finding an interesting book or audiolog that sends you on a quest somewhere will lose some context. Instead of finding it on the body of someone with environmental storytelling because you searched the place yourself it would be something your crew comes to you with and "in addition to the usual loot, we found this which is particularly interesting on a dead victim of the Spacers".
There's less incentive to thoroughly comb every nook and cranny if you can just have your crew do it. Hmmmmmmmmm. Perhaps an alternative to this is to have your companions do the search as you go along. Why not have them loot? Pick up stuff over x value. Interesting items/weapons. Have voicelines remarking on the stuff they pick up. Shout "we found something interesting over here" for important finds. Have the player and the crew loot together as part of the experience. Maybe don't allow this to happen until AFTER a player has cleared a dungeon, encouraging the player to focus on clearing first before looting because then they get the help of crew members. And you don't get that jarring experience of looting mid combat this way.
This can also allow you to keep the limitation of 1 companion for the clearance phase then having the whole crew come in to do the looting phase. Although I suspect the majority of people out there mod in the ability for multiple companions. I feel pretty strongly that 3-4 players in the player's group would make much more interesting gameplay because you can have companions talk to each other BG3 style.
Unfortunately I haven't seen anything like that so far in Starfield, not the way FO4 would do it. There's been like one message that started a quest and it's a common drop from spacer enemies. Locations are painfully generic and I've already looted the same abandoned facilities multiple times on different planets.
I have. There was a drop in a random facility I found while out exploring. Basically a message to the man's family as he knew he was going to die, thanking his kids, apologising to his wife for a few things, telling them how much he loved them, real tear jerking. Delivering it was.... Awkward.
I assume that things like this are peppered around. Just gonna take a while to find them and for the memorable ones to enter community consciousness.
Ew. That's pretty concerning.