Goddamn, yeah. I dont play a lot of competitive multiplayer, but I actually was decent at tribes ascend. I remember in whichever game mode where you have to hold the flag for as long as possible I was pretty decent. I wasn’t great at shooting people, but once I got that flag I could skate so fast it was tough for people to catch me.

Simply nothing like it nowadays.

Mentioning smoking breaks is a big part, I think. At a place I used to work if you smoked you basically got free extra breaks to take care of it that other associates did not, and depending how tough your job is it could be an incentive.

I call foul play, there was no “taking on” just “swimming near”

Well, I enjoy them, and enjoyment is the point of me playing this game. If you like things like Minecraft or Terraria/Starbound/the building portions of Valheim, then you can find enjoyment in outpost construction. Otherwise, you might like it as a way to make resources or a way to store things and have a living space without resorting to a ship that you’re locked to because any other ship not made to accommodate all of your crap and need for workstations won’t do.

The pros are not purely creative, but that is a pro if you’re into that. Every game has parts that some people will like and others won’t like, just because you think sandbox elements have no point by definition doesn’t mean someone like me won’t enjoy noodling around in Garry’s Mod without any mechanical incentive. Exploring the mechanical space of a game and creating just to create can be fun. Not for everyone, but it can be in its own right.

It’s part of how you can gather materials more on demand or long term than hoping you loot some or going and buying them, and it’s about being able to make your own space to live in and feel like you made something neat.

I tried to make a ship to live out of with every crafting station and tons of cargo, but the ship just ended up massive and unwieldy to move around in.

I ended up creating a base with lots of organized storage and such so that I can now have whatever size and kind of ship I want, just for funsies, and I can leave all the storage and crafting shit at “home”.

I’m glad they let you gain materials and such in different ways, so if I really really wanted to, I could just bust my ass running missions and use my money to buy mats.

I’d really prefer being able to load into your ship interior during construction and marking ladder or door points that way, but having the ability to do it from the exterior view would be handy too. I’d assume the ability to move facilities within a hab would also be extremely useful so you didn’t have to choose between losing a workbench or putting a door where you want it.

It’s just difficult to imagine what it’s like walking through your ship and just how far it feels to walk certain distances.

When I start making notepad lists of long term goals or shopping lists and such, usually in open world games with lots of tasks where you’d forget on your own what you might be working toward

I assume whatever wizardry is going on with the auto placement of ladders and doors gets much more complicated if you were allowed to flip them, but I agree, it really sucks being pretty heavily led to make long ass ships because making them wide is not as natural or means using multiple smaller habs instead

I think when a new post is posted and it hits the front page it bumps all the other posts back by that many, which will make them get bumped from the end of one page into the beginning of the next

I can scroll for hours on all or something, but when it comes to subbed magazines/communities I’m actually interested in, and then content within those I’m truly interested in engaging in, it gets trimmed down significantly

It’s not always the best option, like if you wanna save your gold for the ship upgrades it’ll eat a big chunk out of that, but you could totally keep your gear perks that way if you really like them, you can upgrade at 61, don’t have to wait for 62

My best guess is that it’s a debris effect from your ship taking damage, and it’s supposed to fly away and expire, but somehow got stuck instead of disappearing, so now it’s an “effect” on your character that doesn’t know its supposed to have timed out already.

Other Bethesda games, especially Skyrim, had bugs like this of status effects that would get stuck on your character longer than they were supposed to and you’d only realize hours later when your character has some weird blue fog following them

Once you get the perks you want you totally can hold onto it. Every ten levels all of your perk and major attack stat bonuses on gear get more powerful, (but there’s no stat bonus to upgrading before the 10 level threshold at all) even when you upgrade the same old gear you had, but it happens at the “first” level of each ten, so not at level 20, instead it’s 21, 31, 41, etc.

Basically I’ve had the “same” gear for like 30 or 40 levels, now, just every time I hit the new stat range I go and upgrade all of it. It costs a shitload of gold, but aside from ship upgrades I don’t have another major gold sink, so it’s worth it to me, my perk loadout is extremely optimized for assassin damage, which is important for me since I’m basically playing it as an open world stealth game where I only fight if I get caught, I can one shot anyone I want, no exaggeration (using critical assassination when necessary).

The final ship upgrades are very expensive, yeah, just seems like they give you something to grind for if you get that far

The ones that aren’t timed (don’t have the hourglass icons) are worth picking up because they’re all just like “kill 20 Athenians”, “sink 5 ships”, basically shit you’re already doing, so you just swing by, pick them up, and keep playing like you already were and randomly one will pop and you’ll get fat XP for doing what you were doing already anyway, but that’s only if you want the extra XP, it’s totally unnecessary

Nintendo hire this man

Sorry, my intent was not to sound condescending, I was erring on the side that you weren’t aware of the ways you could get around those issues in order to enjoy the parts you wanted to. Your criticisms are definitely valid, I would agree that even needing to know about the workarounds sort of proves that what was included wasn’t an entirely cohesive and tight product to begin with, the way I played is not necessarily right or wrong, and neither is yours, it’s just how I was able to mine the most enjoyment out of what was there.

My main idea is to not let someone see your comment and assume that that’s how the game is and there’s not another way to enjoy it or any clear ways to identify where content you’d want to play begins and ends, I was able to figure out and selective play the parts I enjoy, but even still there is content in that game that I skip because it’s, definitively, not fun. Even still, it’s become one of my favorite games of all time, but no one game is for everyone, thanks for the mature discussion, sincerely!

Sad that your sticking points are making it too difficult to enjoy the game properly, but I also can’t say you’re wrong. They made it very easy to fast travel around and they gave us a jump range that hardly matters since fuel is infinite, and your ships can be teleported around with you with no problem or cost.

My reference point is Elite Dangerous, and you’re right, the sense of scale in Starfield just isn’t there. I enjoy the space setting a lot as a backdrop and change of pace from other Bethesda titles, and I love exploring space complexes, bases, and orbital stations, and the planets with flora and fauna are quite beautiful, but you definitely don’t feel like you’re in a large galaxy that you must traverse and explore, and as a result there’s no incentive to specialize your ships for exploring or anything like that.

I’m able to forgive it more because I already have Elite if I want a space game that heavily commits to having a price for exploring and object permanence in the galaxy, that game’s traversal is more time consuming and difficult and so it makes it harder to play in short bursts and more casually considering the fact that I can’t just save scum and if my ship is destroyed it can be very costly. I do like the balance Starfield brought my personal space game variety in this respect, which helps me forgive the issues youre having, but they are still real issues with the game.

I think it’s possible for a good deal of it to be alleviated eventually with mods, but the game Bethesda gave us by itself has some real caveats, absolutely.

You can just pay off your bounties instantly at any time from the map screen, and I’ve always had so much money in that game that I’ve never had to deal with a bounty hunter unless I wanted to, and I don’t even sell any gear, I dismantle it all.

If you’re a compulsionary completionist then the game is probably too big, but they make it as friendly as they can to not have to complete the world. Unique gear drops only seem to come from unique Cultist leaders or checking vendors, and there’s no achievements for completing all map markers, it’s just supplemental content for XP and some gear or if you just really want to do it, there’s no huge cost to just moving on to actual quest content if you want.

They don’t tell you when you’ve completed a whole region for a reason, to disincentivize completing it all unless you’re a madman. I’m doing world completion just because I like grinding the game, but it’s been two years in the making with big breaks in between, and if you ever feel like your gear or levels are behind the curve and you have to grind, the difficulty settings can be changed and can be set as forgiving as you like, they actually alter the level scaling and RPG aspects.

I think it’s a great game worth playing, but you do need to be ready to tell yourself when enough is enough because they give you too much for weirdos like me that just wanna experience it all over a really long… Odyssey.

The quests you get from the quest boards, especially the ones with the hourglass icons can be pretty much blanket ignored. Otherwise you can tell when talking to the quest giver if Alexios/Kassandra accepts the quest generically and doesn’t respond to anything the giver says very specifically other than “I’ll take care of it” or things like that.

I love the shit out of that game, have been world exploring and only doing the unique side quests.

Funnily enough playing BotW on CEMU was what got me to get a switch, it was just so good I wanted to play it without any caveats or messing with settings or working around the gyro controls and the allure of playing it portably anywhere was high.