Rookeh

joined 1 year ago
[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 45 points 11 months ago (6 children)

I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I'm glad that was the case as otherwise I'd have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I'll be going back to replay it.

The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you've explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they'll never say anything new.

The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?

The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.

The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.

Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC "AI" (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.

It's past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 2 points 11 months ago

Kevin and Toby as O'Brien and Barclay fixing the transporter again.

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone's house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.

A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don't involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 3 points 1 year ago

Sony-Ericsson W350i. Had it for about a year before I got my first Android device, an HTC Hero.

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 6 points 1 year ago

BeamNG. Logged hundreds of hours just mindlessly driving around crashing into stuff and fucking around with vehicle customisations.

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think you'll find the holodeck is the cause of (and occasionally the solution to) most Trek problems.

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Doesn't need to be a "green energy paradise", just a reasonably well connected first world country.

Take a look at Electricity Maps. Unless you live somewhere isolated or with very poorly developed grid infrastructure (or some central US states, apparently), you should see a non-trivial amount of electricity being generated by non-fossil fuels. For example, at the time of typing this 77% of the electricity I'm using is low-carbon and 50% of it is renewable.

That's the kicker. EVs don't have to rely on fossil fuels to operate (but they can make use of them depending on the grid infrastructure). ICE cars on the other hand are burning fuel wherever they go.

Walking or cycling will always be the least polluting means of getting around, but if you really need a car then you could do a lot worse than getting an electric one.

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 15 points 1 year ago

Also the recent SNW crossover where she >!is thirsting over young Spock!<.

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 10 points 1 year ago

Part of the ship, part of the crew...

[–] Rookeh@startrek.website 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Doesn't really surprise me, I've had a Steam deck since launch and the performance on Windows titles has always been impressive, even considering its relatively low-end hardware.

The only thing preventing me from dual-booting my desktop is lack of software RAID support in most distributions (by this I mean RAID configured in the BIOS but not using a dedicated hardware controller).

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