this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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I played 10hrs and refunded. (Thank god for Steam)
I feel like im in Truman Show. I see how shallow the game is. Everything is a facade. They try to mask the issues of their old game engine and people (streamers and reviewers) just eat it up. Im watching streams where they run into game breaking bugs several times but still praise the game like they have a script to follow.
This has kind of been my biggest concern about the game from the earliest days, I don't want it to fail or anything but the idea that Bethesda, with their characteristic mechanical jank and traditionally buggy releases, could undertake such an ambitious concept has always found me skeptical.
Procedurally generating planets and stuff is not really the most difficult part of this kind of game, it's having a way to scale your designer-touched content to match that scale and make that procedural content not feel procedural.
If they made a game that took place in one or two systems, or even just a handful, that would've been enough. But I have a hard time believing the 1,000 planets will be filled with content that's any more worth exploring than what they could've put on a handful of more hand-crafted systems. The quantity is not a selling point without some guarantee of quality.
But, I haven't played it, so I could be wrong. Time will tell once the hype has cleared. Maybe modding will add a dimension that a single studio can't accomplish on their own.
I mean, they straight up said that 90% of planets will be empty.
As far as spreading out the handcrafted content goes, in my 60 hours it's been pretty good, but I also deliberately stick primarily to actual quests, only dipping into random exploration and proc-gen mission board quests like bounties and cargo delivery on occasion. I was initally worried that the handcrafted stuff would be limited to the three major cities, but there's plenty of other towns and locations out there. I think there's like three small towns just in the Sol system. It feels like every other system has one or two big handcrafted locations or questlines. I came across stuff like a resort town, a small assortment of settlers I had to negotiate a mutual defense pact for, an abandoned zero-g casino space station, a mercenary bar/motel with the absolute motherload of contraband (and a free ship), just to name a few.
The side and faction quests also are almost entirely handcrafted locations and not just clearing out enemies in generic locations like half the stuff in FO4 was. All the proc-gen quests have been relegated to Mission Boards, so every quest you get from an NPC will be an actual quest, although I had to do one single proc-gen mission to join one of the factions.
Also I'm surprised you saw that many game breaking bugs on streams, because it's actually a very stable release. There's some of the usual Creation Engine physics stuff, or an NPC might stand on a table or something, but I haven't really encountered all that many bugs.
Sure, and like I say I'd be happy for my concerns to be proved wrong, it's just more that Bethesda is like that uncle who is fun and you have some good times together, but they also maybe drink a bit too much sometimes and you don't have super high expectations when they tell you they're going to do a double backflip off the coffee table.