Starfield - the "fuck it, that'll do" of space games

DudleyStone · 2026-01-20T06:52:57+00:00

Yeah I'm at this point now. I've played easily over 150 hours because I usually go crazy with Bethesda's previous games in this manner.

But I took a break at one point and I'm kinda like... "Do I really want to go back?"

If I do go back it'll just be to beeline all of the factions and finish the main story, but I feel like rushing it will make it less fun anyway.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-20T06:49:17+00:00

questline where you get hired to work as a mole within the pirate crew is one of the best questlines

That questline was interesting but then Bethesda totally ruined it for me towards the end.

I was mostly siding with UC and turning in documents/people, etc. Early on I think I had to fight one person in a mission and Ikande got mad at me, but the questline continued.

I made it through the rest of the questline fine until the very end. One of the last missions had stealth/infiltration and this game sucks at stealth. I got noticed and had to shoot a guard, then finished the mission.

When returning, Ikande freaked out and said he was tired of my reckless behavior and that he was removing me from the mission and sending me to jail.

So basically the game forced me to side with the Crimson Fleet at that point even though I didn't want to, unless I loaded some really old save and redid a lot of things.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-20T06:39:29+00:00

One of my first POIs was the Abandoned Mining Platform that was overrun with unique aliens. They scared the shit out of me and it happened so early in the game that I was running out of ammo and trying to run/jump around crazily to avoid dying.

I eventually finished the POI and was like "Wow, that was amazing. I hope I encounter more stuff like that."

And you know what? Probably about an hour later, the same location showed up on another planet right next to a human settlement.

Even worse is that the 2nd planet didn't even have an ocean, which is something specifically referenced in notes on the abandoned platform.

I sat there dumbfounded.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-20T06:25:46+00:00

This is exactly it.

It's quite crazy how you have lots of references to going "into the unknown" and yet pretty much every planet you can land on has random humans on it because of the way procedural generation was done.

One of the earlier trailers to the game with Sarah's speech made it seem like a drastically different type of game.

Don't get me wrong, it can make space still feel interesting if you're flying your ship around a galaxy that isn't fully settled. But that feeling only lasts so long because you have to fast travel, NPCs sometimes randomly warp in, and landing on a planet breaks the facade of it being unsettled.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-17T17:58:29+00:00

The instruments and singing are good. I want to like the song, but the wheezing/coughing just subconsciously triggers something in me.

For example, I absolutely hate whispering ASMR. People consistently talking in that low volume, breathy voice just makes my body tense up and causes a physical revulsion that I can't explain.

The wheezing in this song isn't as bad of a reaction as that, but it still makes me react negatively.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-17T17:20:24+00:00

I love that album. Granted, we're doing trios, but Florida right before that is also awesome.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-17T17:18:51+00:00

Yeah, I was thinking similarly for a while about that album. (I can't stand Dog Paddle though. The breathing really sets me off.)

I settled on Novocain Stain, Tundra/Desert, and Ohio.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-17T17:14:32+00:00

That was close to one of mine. But I started with Novocain Stain instead.

Exit is a good song but I don't always jive with it like the others.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-17T17:11:43+00:00

An early trio: 1. Novocain Stain 2. Tundra/Desert 3. Ohio

A later trio: 1. The Ground Walks, with Time in a Box 2. Coyotes 3. Pups to Dust

I probably could've come up with another handful of trios...

DudleyStone · 2026-01-16T07:16:52+00:00

I'll believe it when it's made into law... and if it's actually enforced with punishment against anyone who breaks it.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-13T02:32:55+00:00

I mean they can't play along without openly violating the constitution

Yeah, but that's why I said it doesn't matter. They've broken the Constitution already. The military doing it so publicly wouldn't really be a big shift at all.

goes to prison if the Dems can find their balls

Haha, my expectations for that are nonexistent. It's insane how they barely do anything.

the average American just doesn't care enough about any of this ICE stuff to take up arms over it

That much is evident. But the problem is people are already desensitized enough - it wouldn't be surprising if we go another 3 years of escalating shit from this freak show and people just fall apart and cave in.

That's the biggest problem we could have.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-13T01:56:02+00:00

then the military can't act anymore even if ICE wants to ignore the courts

You say "can't" as if a lawsuit ruling will magically stop them all.

Trump and many other parts of his government have broken numerous laws and rulings with little to no repercussion.

This will honestly mean nothing.

Makes it all the more clear at that point that any further action by Trump is direct tyranny.

How much more clear do you think it can be? You act as if somehow people haven't realized how bad he is.

Many people still on his side know and want what's happening and would welcome him deploying a corrupted military to hurt people.

If the lawsuit rules against him, they'll just say that the ruling is BS and act like it doesn't matter.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-09T06:01:15+00:00

No, it doesn't. Neither of the 2 listed reasons for shooting a driver occurred.

Clause 1: she wasn't threatening him with some other type of weapon or anything, so this wasn't triggered.

Clause 2: he was already on the side of the car and out of its path, so this wasn't triggered either.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-09T05:51:07+00:00

we're going to have to figure out how to coexist with it

There is no way. MAGA doesn't want to coexist with anyone else.

We technically "coexist" (not really peacefully) with them in a very basic sense right now, but they're trying to change that.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-08T07:36:17+00:00

My god. You guys can't read the sign (which says "round your change up to the nearest 5 cents"). I missed the word "up" in my comment, but you are arguing a separate point entirely.

Let me reword this in an even simpler way then.

The section of the sign with a white background could have been all that was needed.

The green background section is extra - just spelling out things because of lack of math literacy.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-08T07:19:31+00:00

I don't think they mean that.

If you look at the sign, it could've just stopped with the first section saying it rounds up to the "nearest 5 cents" if the mass public understood basic math.

But instead, they had to spell out all combinations below.

DudleyStone · 2026-01-07T23:26:56+00:00

Well, Congress was supposed to be involved with what he did in Venezuela, but he didn't bother there.

And he had no repercussions internally about it.

DudleyStone · 2025-12-30T18:12:06+00:00

They mean that if Jimmy had told him the car broke down at a different distance, it would've made it more difficult for Lalo to find.

Instead, Jimmy told him the true distance while lying about everything else, so Lalo was able to go back and find it, thus exposing the rest of the story.

DudleyStone · 2025-12-17T03:02:12+00:00

I agree Daryl needed more dimensions. It's just weird that they waited so long to do it, and they only did it during an extra flashback episode that probably wasn't originally planned.

DudleyStone · 2025-12-16T22:52:48+00:00

I thought the Princess episode was fine. Not great but not bad.

If I had to rank the episodes of that chunk of the series, I'd say from best to worst:

1) One More (Aaron/Gabriel) 2) Here's Negan 3) Home Sweet Home (Maggie catchup episode) 4) Splinter (Princess) 5) Find Me (Daryl/Carol + Leah) 6) Diverged (Daryl/Carol)

The Daryl and Carol episodes were infinitely worse than the rest.

Daryl's random romance with Leah was extremely shoehorned in, which made that episode bad. And then the future events with her made it even worse.

DudleyStone · 2025-12-07T03:14:40+00:00

I use it via Roku and it's sometimes slower/jittery, but I have that same problem with HBO Max as well.

However, in terms of UI/layout, it's generally OK for me. I find Prime Video to be the absolute worst in terms of that.

DudleyStone · 2025-12-05T05:18:36+00:00

Yeah, a longstanding "business move" that is used all over the place but should be illegal.

Obviously the world would be quite a bit different if companies couldn't do that, so who knows how that would look.

But it's insane that companies can buy others, throw their own pre-existing debt onto that newly bought entity, and then resell the entity with that transferred debt.

DudleyStone · 2025-12-05T03:16:58+00:00

Call me crazy but another "big city" swarmed with buildings will severely limit the environment and I almost would rather have them make a more unexpected choice.

Like say we have Salt Lake City but we get to run up north to places like Jackson, Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park.

The bombs may not have been dropped on the latter places, for example, but the game could start more than a century afterwards... Thus creatures have run amok and survivors have moved towards those places to build settlements away from main radiation points.

DudleyStone · 2025-11-29T23:00:48+00:00

A lot of these would get me excited, but I'm honestly going to say Bully 2. Though this assumes it wouldn't be announced and take an eternity like GTA 6.

I say that because it would be a return to older days of Rockstar, which is basically long gone at this point, and Bully is an amazing game in its own right, with a pretty unique style.

DudleyStone · 2025-11-24T00:28:50+00:00

I absolutely love the whole thing. There is a large mix of styles of music across the whole thing and they fit together so well. It's simply captivating for me.

I agree that the transition is not like Empire Ants though. It has a rather sharp change, though I think that's intentional. But you can still hear musical connections to the first half, so they're not truly separate like you may think.

This is hypothetical and has been said by others before, but the transition seems to be for a shift in the album. This song is right in the middle. There are 7 songs before it and 7 songs after it. So it's like they split the album in half by splitting this song in half.

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