So, Starfield was a disappointment (in my opinion). The story isn't interesting. The lore and world-building do not make sense. The game mechanics do not mesh together. (And it doesn't run well on the Steam Deck.)

But the promise of Starfield? The big space game? The big space RPG where you can play as Captain Reynolds type character? That's something I can get behind. I want to traverse space, visit different planets, get lost, meet interesting characters, solve their problems, and shoot some stuff. Two games come to my mind when I think of this:

No Man's Sky
Mass Effect

I've only played a few hours of No Man's Sky, but I think it does space traversal well. To put it bluntly, flying from planet to planet without interruption is better than fast travel. But the gameplay loop did not

Mass Effect nails the space adventure side of things. You visit multiple interesting places, you meet different people with curious problems, and you solve these problems (mainly by shooting). But it's a typical Bioware game: The places you visit are small and confined, and there are (comparatively) few of them. The space traversal is done by clicking a few buttons in a menu.

My question is: Are there any “big space games”? Are there any games that deliver on the promise of Starfield? What are your favourite sci-fi RPGs?

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[–] PushButton 6 points 5 days ago

Elite Dangerous

[–] Vinny_93 7 points 5 days ago (12 children)

Star Citizen will get a story mode called Squadron 42 witch should be feature complete and it has a star studded Hollywood cast. It looks worthwile but it won't be here for at least a year.

[–] Agent_Karyo 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I wouldn't be so sure that SQ42 will be a guaranteed slam dunk as many SC fans seem to be speculating. That's if it ever does get released or course.

The gameplay in the recent demo is subpar. FPS combat in particular was trash, far worse than HL1; a game released more than a quarter of a century ago. Turret gunning and the platforming parts looked decent but they are not going to carry the game. No example of player controlled space flight was shown.

The space battles looked nice in a b-movie kind of way, but I have my doubts how this will translate to fun space flight gameplay.

From SC, we know that they have a very history of even basic conceptual balance and they are horrible at iterative play testing.

Regarding the Hollywood cast, Gary Oldman sounded like he wanted to get his money and get out of there ASAP. Anderson wasn't much better. Writing was some high school-level drivel "we must win because we must!" and lots of shouty one liners. There is a very real possibility that the whole thing will be a Wing Commander: The Movie - 30 hours of tedious custscenes. And you just know it's going to take itself extremely seriously (think the space bulldozer scene in Wing Commander).

Looking at the UI/UX of SC, it's not unreasonable to assume SQ42 will suffer the same sorry fate. Very flashy ironman-style UI visuals that are nigh unusable in a video game.

Let's see what happens.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Star citizen right now is great if you have a group of friends to play with. You can divide up work, do your space cowboy stuff. You and your friends just need a high tolerance for jinky systems

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[–] TotalFat 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Duskers. A game that seems to be inspired heavily by the aesthetics of the first Alien movie. Instead of one terrifying xenomorph, there are four (?) different kinds all working independently to exterminate humanity. You're at the point in the story where they've basically succeeded, and you're trying to figure out what the heck happened. You get to do some basic scripting as well!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

star trek online. you could technically warp to destinations rather than fast travel but it would be hard to keep that up and ignore them. It even has a race event where the ships have to visit major planets and locations and it even allows for transwarps but because of the race nature you at best can use it for a shortcut or two to optimize the path. They used to have events with hourly rotations and just being up and watching the space map was sorta neat as you would see all these ships trying to do the race. They switched to a format where people could choose it more whenever they want though so it lost that particular community effect.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

SpaceBourne 2

SpaceBourne 2 is a single-player, open-universe RPG and third-person shooter game with an abundance of features, including role-playing, mining, trading, piracy, crafting, and deep exploration. The story picks up where it left off in SpaceBourne, but now the player's goal is to build a new empire in the galaxy, with the methods of doing so being completely up to the player.

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