Contents
Game loops and paths in Starfield
Taken as a whole, the only real mistake it makes is that,
while having a grand game loop of restarting at a very similar spot in a
new universe each time the player goes through the Unity,
Starfield both makes that not-quite-return both too different,
and not different enough.
- NPCs, their drops, and gear in shops tend to follow player level,
which in the case of vendors dramatically changes the game
- Despite being in a new universe, everything (possibly except Constellation)
is exactly the same.
Many players expected hair color, clothes, possibly even color schemes,
sex of some NPCs, shop inventories to change, but nothing does
While both of these undercut the theme, the issue with player level
is more problematic, causing minor problems with key gameplay loops,
although the inability in the original game inject items into the next
universe mitigated most of the issues.
Major game loops (ongoing) and paths (which max out) in Starfield.
Those marked with ✠ are discussed as a group later.
Loops
- Acquire resources
- Acquire ships
- ✠ Acquire credits
- ✠ Acquire gear (weapons and armor)
- ✠ Modify gear
- Build Outposts
- Modify spaceships (and fleet performance, except Guardians, starting in 2026)
- ✠ Playstyle evolution
Note that Starfield completely blocks crafting gear,
which is perfect if you want to prevent starborn from skipping the
gear acquisition loop, yet the game levels up everything around the
player to the point that the available gear is inadequate.
To me, this suggests that health pools might not have been always
intended to increase with level.
Paths / per universe
- Explore the current universe
- Do quests
- Acquire crew
- Improve relationships with the Companions
Paths / per character
- Improve Skills through levelling up
- Improve abilities through Skill Magazine acquisition and similar
- Advance to the next universe
Advancing to the next universe invokes a buff/debuff giving them increasing
advantage against the player, capped at NG+10.
The Unity and NG+
In the original game, the Unity allows everything except for the per-character
paths to be reset. The per-character progress persists. This combination
is remarkable and a key attractor to a subset of the game's players.
Returning to the problems of level in Starfield:
- Not a problem: Skill progression from levelling up (+ Challenges)
- This is satifying for most players,
and a contrast to using player behavior as a trigger
to Skill changes.
- Starfield uses a hybrid where the initial Skill
is purely through levelling (or Background),
but successes ranks also require use of the Skill,
called a Skill Challenge
- Players complain vociferously when bugs prevent Challenges from
progressing, which Bethesda has generally not been fixing
- Problem: NPCs level up to match the player
- This is mixed.
- While players generally want challenge,
scaling NPCs around the player to match the player everywhere tends
to make for a flat experience.
Starfield seems to use a mix of system/ship level and the player level
instead, which is better
- However, it doesn't make sense that the same NPCs in the same area
would require a howitzer instead of a popgun to kill them
- The problem is that the health pools of NPCs and creatures
scales impossibly by level, an RPG trope, a shortcut, generally
called "level" in RPG games
- The trite notion of level should have been split into its components
- ✓ Higher level NPCs should have only Skill-related boosts to health
- ✓ Higher level NPCs should have better gear
- ✓ Higher level NPCs should have better AI
- ✓ Higher level NPCs should be common mostly in higher-level areas
- Problem: Gear levels up to match the player
- Again this is mixed.
- Starfield loot drops seem to take both the source level
(NPC, chest, system? ship?) and the player level into account
- Vendors tend to much more explicitly follow the player level
- A high level player can walk into UC Distribution and immediately
buy an Advanced Hard Target,
even though (IIRC) Beowulfs don't even appear there at player level one
- This breaks the idea that a loop (different universe) has happened
- This sort of change should have been left to system level,
but since Bethesda didn't populate the full range of system levels
with cities, so that some level 75 system with a city would have
high-tier vendors, what we see instead may have been a work-around
- So, assuming vendors could be added across the full range of system levels
- ✓ Gear availability should be scaled by
system, ship, vendor, or NPC level
- ✓ Gear availability should not scale by player level
How NG+ could have been improved
In summary, a more believable loop could be implemented in Starfield,
where the return to New Atlantis after NG+ would leave a Starborn with
a real, but reasonable advantage
(probably ~50% more health in NG+1, and the starborn armor),
yet still vulnerable without the armor,
and the player could immediate choose difficulty by grav jumping to
a suitably levelled system.
The effect of Terran Armada (and Fast Lanes)
Now let's discuss how the effect of Terran Armada (and Fast Lanes)
is almost entirely opposed to improving Starfield.
These updates introduce a number of new elements outside of the Armada itself:
- X-Tech
- a shallow parallel to any occurrence of ~5,000 credits
- none of the charming use in silent storytelling seen for credsticks
- exotically rare, yet paradoxically everywhere, a failure to tell a story
- give you a chance to build 3 extractors you can't control,
and 3 you can - or just stuff them into the QED (they can't be unbuilt)
- see the note on credits for crafting by extension
- Credits as a crafting resource
- beyond nonsensical - they're all identical except for the number,
which could be just a few atoms or electrical charges
- yet the value matters, meaning these are closer to
a Microsoft licensing or usage fee than a component
- which makes no sense for some starborn in a ship using her own
workbench and resources in the middle of nowhere
- essentially this amounts to forcing a certain amount of gameplay
in exchange for certain crafting choices,
where that gameplay during reinforces Microsoft "engagement metrics"
- how can upgrading a weapon cost more credits
than the largest purchasable starship?
- Gear quality upgrades and perk modifications
- interferes with the game loop ✠ acquire gear
- interferes with the game loop ✠ playstyle evolution
- consumes X-Tech and credits,
but ignored alternatives like NPC crafters,
quests to find them, and so on
- The Quantum Entanglement Device
- breaks game lore, could have been rationalized differently to fit instead
- a player option in the Unity to copy some items into the new
Guardian
- upgraded gear should be harder to pass through, not based on mass
- picked up in the Guardian's cargo in the next universe
- currently, fully upgraded gear can be passed through, breaking game loops
- ✠ Acquire credits
- ✠ Acquire gear
- ✠ Modify gear
- ✠ Playstyle evolution
- The Ship Optimization Terminal
- Nonsensically improves all your fleet except for the Guardian
- (I only wanted it to improve my Guardian)
- Fully utilized on top of other ship buffs
allows the player to completely overrun foes on any difficulty -
game breaking
- Reset by NG+
TA completely breaks NG+
Keeping in mind that the NG+ mechanic was intended to give you the feeling
of starting over - but different (more Skill, Powers, the omitted different
looking universe) and mostly delivered, these TA changes let a player
enter NG+ easily with:
- Dozens of overpowered Titanium Build weapons
- 2 to 3 sets of maxed out armor
- Especially lighter armor like the Ryujin set
- Hundreds of thousands of credits
- From selling captured ships for credits in ship cargo to move to the QED
- 500+ med packs
- (easy for me, I've done runs using none)
- 500+ digipicks
- 3 of the X-Tech extractor cores
- If you use just the ones you build for the factions
- Don't use the 3 they give you, you cannot recover them by unbuilding
This gear lets the player immediately hit Vulture's Roost for
another 270,000 credits or so.
It also lets the player trivially retain exactly the same playstyle
used inthe prior run.
Breaking NG+ destroys half the game loops
- ✠ Acquire credits
- ✠ Acquire gear
- ✠ Modify gear
- ✠ Playstyle evolution
The dramatic nature of this destruction is even more evident for
experienced playes, who can easily max out the QED in pre-NG,
potentially in under three hours if optimally farming starborn landing sites,
making the full 200 kg available even for NG+1.
So the charm of needing to regear in NG+ is lost,
and since you have all the gear you need,
there's nothing to spend the money on but shipbuilding,
which (incomprehensibly) not all players are into.
Having all the same weapons as max tier then encourages
continuing with the same playstyles that went with them,
something that the original game fought by
making player unabled to build gear from scratch or modify gear perks.
How a player can preserve the game loops
Avoiding X-Tech and using the QED tactically (and some credit-eating mods)
Most of the horrible side effects of TA can be avoided:
- Don't use X-Tech
- Loot naturally includes superior quality items often (at high level)
- Even using a mod to move perks between weapons would likely
yield a better gameplay experience than crafting perks does,
because the search for those perks stays alive
- Does it even make sense that you can remake a weapon entirely in
Titanium using only X-Tech and broken credsticks as input materials?
- The huge grind Microsoft wants (for "engagement metrics")
to power gear upgrades makes it hard to let go of that gear later
- Don't put anything tactical in the QED
- Unless it's specifically to convert it to credits in the next universe
- It's hard to resist using a basically perfect weapon or armor set,
which interferes with the evolution of playstyle
- Yet it's hard to leave a perfect weapon behind
- So selling it, as part of, say, building up credits to rebuild
your starship, is probably the most game-loop friendly option
- Instead of using upgrades as the credit sink,
look for mods that trade credits for convenience or enable huge purchases
- mod: TN's Class M (shipbuilding with pricey class M parts)
- mod: Colorful Class M (to make painting them work well)
- mod: Transport Authority Delivery Services (on the hard setting)
Mods for specific changes
For the crazier players, who want to go deeper:
Practical changes
- Look for mods that detach everything about the universe from the player's
level: vendors, NPCs, etc. Those should be based on system levels and
ship levels, not your level. Ideally POIs on level 75 worlds should be
seriously difficult, and only enemy AI should scale up by your level
- The other aspect is limiting health. Armor, awareness, and skills should
be most of a target's resilience. Health should level up by Skill tiers,
not level. I'd love a mod that scaled health based on how many tiers you
have of the five novice Physical Skills (20 in all), where each counts
for about 10 health on top of the base of 100, and level counts for zero.
(Human NPCs should be similarly limited, but don't need to be) This is
about 1/10th of the normal hard cap of around 3,000.
- Note that with all your health-buffing Skills from above, and the
bonus NPCs get to damage, by NG+10 you have 3x as much health,
but they're still doing 2x as much damage.
Armor mitigation is up to 85%,
making your health effectively about 2000 with it on.
- The result is even those stupid level one peashooters can still be
hazards to both the NPCs and to the NG+ player without armor,
and that you can't just walk into New Atlantis and buy a Hard Target.
The search for gear is meaningful
- Aside: I've reached NG+1 without wearing armor since that first
airlock Lin opens, at 2% below (can't nap in Argos) max
difficulty. Before Terran Armada. That's what "Extreme" should feel
like. (Also: no using guns, no healing kits, no item vendor use.
Difficult runt)
- The NG+ loop now works from a practical perspective
Thematic changes
- There is at least one mod that changes the appearances of the
Companions and some other NPCs in a way specific to each NG+
up to some limit. With some…
- The NG+ theme now should work in a visible way
Larger mods that have a similar grand effect
If you don't want to do all that, and just want to try a single mod that
still accomplishes roughly the same feel, NASAPUNK2330 is a great mod that
moves the resilience to the armor instead of your health bar. It's
awesome.
What the future holds for Starfield
The interaction between Bethesda and Microsoft, leading (presumably)
to much of what we see in Terran Armada, is a terrible path from
a thematic and replayability perspective. Since Microsoft reportedly
has been increasing its meddling, any updates to Starfield can be
expected to do more lore-breaking, shallow, pointless, grindy,
poorly considering things (some to silence players who are crybabies)
I left out that the actually content additions of Terran Armada
are imminently forgettable except perhaps for Delta and its doctor.
No other NPCs appear to have any depth.
I even forgot about BUCK-E, which in retrospect probably cost my
first Terra Armada run millions of credits.
The space POIs were relentless duplicated rectangular chambers just
with different, utterly trival goals enabled. Pathetic.
The main campaign was pretty good, though, enemies were challenging
in Extreme, rewards were reasonable. It's just that almost everything
else wasn't worth remembering or actively damages the games in
various ways.
More of the same could be expected:
- A continuing failure of Bethesda to fix basic math bugs in Skills
- Expansion with a good core sequences and forgettable, generic contexts
- More abysmally stupid "currencies" and forced play time to improve
Microsoftian "engagement" metrics
- Probably some idiot way to jump into NG+ in your own favorite ship
- Move moves away from resource-based crafting to currency-based upgrades
- Some disastrous DLC about the starborn,
trivializing them and most likely breaking the lore to put them
in control of the Starborn tech instead of being the mere clueless
users of it that they are
All hypothetical, of course. ;-)
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