I’m in the same historical boat as you. Arena was one of my first games on my 486. Here’s my take.
Starfield is Skyrim in Space with Daggerfall’s procedural generation. It may not be the perfect game (or for some people, even a good game), but it is the close-to-ideal Elder Scrolls experience in space.
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring
I tried a Daggerfall playthrough where I went town to town looking for loot and doing nothing else. It got boring because the towns all started to look alike. So I stopped and just played it how it was meant to be played.
There’s no “boring” take if you ignore the procedural filler content and outpost system (which Bored me in my last FO4 playthrough) and focus on the storyline and main areas. The other stuff is all there for those of us who enjoy mission-fun. I LIKE pirating ships again and again, but maybe you don’t. Literally the boring complaints come from the fact that they gave us Daggerfall-level places to explore, with Daggerfall-level repetition.
This is the first one that’s made me want to check out the game. I actually weirdly enjoyed the randomly generated dungeons that were basically all the same, probably because I had never played such a completely open world game before. At least some of it had to be the novelty compared to games like Ultima or the D&D games out at the time.
I’ve always played a lot of the RP part in my head - like in Morrowind I’d usually play as an escaped Argonian slave who became a thief-assassin after winning his freedom with a hatred for the Dunmer.
I’d this one is leaning back in that direction, I’ll check it out sooner rather than later.
The thing I like most is that the procedural stuff is never forced on you. Go pirating a bunch of random ships with random people. Or stick around to the Mars colony. Go exploring random military and science bases, or only go to the ones that were handcrafted. It’s really not hard to avoid the procedural content that bores you if any does. Nothing has bored me so far.
I learn the games I like from “what’s wrong with it”. Here’s what’s “wrong” with Starfield
It’s not a physics simulator. Ragdoll is about the best you’re getting. The ship-building is unprecedented for an RPG, but not Space Engineers.
It’s not an action shooter. People ridiculed that guards won’t aggro on you if you happen to shoot near them. There’s a video of someone drawing a minigun outline around a chill guard
It’s not a seamless space simulator. You get load screens and the bases you’re building are cooler than FO4 but no minecraft. The FPS portion is much more polished than ship-flying.
It’s not a NY Times bestselling storybook . There’s a few tropey factions and a few obvious plot points. There’s one specific mission where you’ll want to take the “sneak an atomic bomb into the building and reenact Fallout3’s Megaton bad version” strategy whether you play good or evil, but you won’t have that option (you’ll know the one I’m talking about if you see it). In that one case, I’d appreciate a “something good happens if you find a way to slaughter everyone in that boardroom”, but again… not what the game is about.
…all of the above, of course, sums up to “Skyrim in Space”.
That all sounds reasonable. I mean, Skyrim has the classic feature where you stealth shoot an arrow into somebody and they say “Who’s there?” followed by “I guess it was just the wind.” or whatever - with an arrow sticking out of their chest. At some point it just becomes a classic Bethesda aspect of the game. The base building was my least favorite part - but that was more about having to run back to defend stuff rather than just pushing through on side quests.
My funniest moment is realizing that grenades are better stealth weapons than a pistol. Someone sees you shoot a silenced pistol, you’re screwed. If someone watches you throw a grenade, but you get into hiding fast enough, they don’t put 2 and 2 together between the thing you threw and that random explosion.
I was in a certain important location and accidentally hit the grenade button… So without thinking I ran. Everyone but one died, and nobody was mad at me. So I looted all the corpses, and walked on whistling.
God that reminds me of almost EVERY bad day I had in Fallout games.
I’m in the same historical boat as you. Arena was one of my first games on my 486. Here’s my take.
Starfield is Skyrim in Space with Daggerfall’s procedural generation. It may not be the perfect game (or for some people, even a good game), but it is the close-to-ideal Elder Scrolls experience in space.
I tried a Daggerfall playthrough where I went town to town looking for loot and doing nothing else. It got boring because the towns all started to look alike. So I stopped and just played it how it was meant to be played.
There’s no “boring” take if you ignore the procedural filler content and outpost system (which Bored me in my last FO4 playthrough) and focus on the storyline and main areas. The other stuff is all there for those of us who enjoy mission-fun. I LIKE pirating ships again and again, but maybe you don’t. Literally the boring complaints come from the fact that they gave us Daggerfall-level places to explore, with Daggerfall-level repetition.
That’s a great description! Thanks!
This is the first one that’s made me want to check out the game. I actually weirdly enjoyed the randomly generated dungeons that were basically all the same, probably because I had never played such a completely open world game before. At least some of it had to be the novelty compared to games like Ultima or the D&D games out at the time.
I’ve always played a lot of the RP part in my head - like in Morrowind I’d usually play as an escaped Argonian slave who became a thief-assassin after winning his freedom with a hatred for the Dunmer.
I’d this one is leaning back in that direction, I’ll check it out sooner rather than later.
The thing I like most is that the procedural stuff is never forced on you. Go pirating a bunch of random ships with random people. Or stick around to the Mars colony. Go exploring random military and science bases, or only go to the ones that were handcrafted. It’s really not hard to avoid the procedural content that bores you if any does. Nothing has bored me so far.
I learn the games I like from “what’s wrong with it”. Here’s what’s “wrong” with Starfield
…all of the above, of course, sums up to “Skyrim in Space”.
That all sounds reasonable. I mean, Skyrim has the classic feature where you stealth shoot an arrow into somebody and they say “Who’s there?” followed by “I guess it was just the wind.” or whatever - with an arrow sticking out of their chest. At some point it just becomes a classic Bethesda aspect of the game. The base building was my least favorite part - but that was more about having to run back to defend stuff rather than just pushing through on side quests.
You nailed it.
My funniest moment is realizing that grenades are better stealth weapons than a pistol. Someone sees you shoot a silenced pistol, you’re screwed. If someone watches you throw a grenade, but you get into hiding fast enough, they don’t put 2 and 2 together between the thing you threw and that random explosion.
I was in a certain important location and accidentally hit the grenade button… So without thinking I ran. Everyone but one died, and nobody was mad at me. So I looted all the corpses, and walked on whistling.
God that reminds me of almost EVERY bad day I had in Fallout games.
What a grand and intoxicating innocence. How amusing. The Nerevar; an Argonian. The gods must be spiting me.