As an avid gun fan, I really cannot agree on this aspect, the guns almost universally look retarded. Either they're malformed "bethesda'd" IRL guns like the M1911 or Vintorez, or they're abominations that look like legos and look like they weigh about 30 pounds.
Like seriously look at the above weapon, it's a 'caseless .50' rifle. Presumably not full .50BMG because of it's damage modifiers, so why does it need that absurdly thick barrel/barrel jacket? This apparent hunting rifle (hence the big stupid rail sight, ala a shotgun?) is overbuilt to the max.
You know what hunters like with their guns? LIGHTNESS. BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO CARRY THE FUCKING THING AROUND ALL DAY.
And to top it off, this future mega-gun has a wooden stock. +5 points for style but -10 for immersion unless it's a rare and valuable upgrade.
To be honest, I like a heavy rifle IRL. It makes the kick nice and soft. My AR-10 with all the crap on it (Magpul PRS, ACOG w/RMR, Atlas bipod, VG6 Gamma comp) is like 11 pounds. Shooting full-power .308, the recoil is so light, I can easily one-hand the whole thing like a pistol.
The mass units in-game are supposed to be kilograms, so the Lawgiver weighs about 12 pounds. IRL, if it were solid wood and mostly solid metal and looked like that, it would be thirty, maybe forty pounds, however, the thickness of the barrel shroud doesn't really tell us anything about what it's made of underneath. It could be a carbon fiber over-wrap with a thin layer of polished metal on top.
I like the Laredo guns not because they are in any way practical (quite the opposite, most of them have mechanisms that make absolutely no sense at all), but because they look like they brought Raymond Loewy back from the grave to design retro-fifties sci-fi guns. They have remnants of Fallout 4's Raygun Gothic thing going on.
To be honest, I like a heavy rifle IRL. It makes the kick nice and soft. My AR-10 with all the crap on it (Magpul PRS, ACOG w/RMR, Atlas bipod, VG6 Gamma comp) is like 11 pounds. Shooting full-power .308, the recoil is so light, I can easily one-hand the whole thing like a pistol.
That is one of the benefits of a chonky gun, less inertia with recoil. Gotta love physics like that. But even a beefy AR-10 is going to be a featherweight compared to Starfield's overdesigned behemoths.
The mass units in-game are supposed to be kilograms, so the Lawgiver weighs about 12 pounds. IRL, if it were solid wood and mostly solid metal and looked like that, it would be thirty, maybe forty pounds, however, the thickness of the barrel shroud doesn't really tell us anything about what it's made of underneath. It could be a carbon fiber over-wrap with a thin layer of polished metal on top.
Bethesda mass units are always a little freaky, if you assume them to be pounds or kilograms, there's weird masses from some items that make zero sense. Fallout 3 and it's 7kg+ 'assault rifles' andHuge miniguns plus ammo backpack being 18 kilograms. Starfield astronaut suits weighing in about 7-15 kilograms, good luck with that.
Holy shit had one of the most annoying quests I have ever done in a game.
I have to talk to some hoe to get permission for something.
Okay fine, waddle over there (no fast travel allowed, takes about 3-5 minutes of walking...), persuade her with my speech-oriented character. She claims that she's only giving me something if I follow some strict guidelines.
I reply with "Oh uhh, I'll have to talk to my boss about this" because I think it'll give me a bonus choice.
Waddle back to my boss who's being a lazy hoe (all the leaders are women in this game, its creepy) at her desk.
"Oh hey uhh she wants all these guidelines to be followed, is that okay?" I ask her.
She replies with functionally "Dipshit, she gave you permission to X, just fucking accept, why are you trying to follow chain of command?" so I have to waddle ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL the way back to accept her guidelines.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU GIVE ME THE OPTION TO, OH I DUNNO, ROLEPLAY, IN YOUR ROLEPLAYING GAME, IF IT JUST PUNISHES ME!???
Holy shit had one of the most annoying quests I have ever done in a game.
I have to talk to some hoe to get permission for something.
Okay fine, waddle over there (no fast travel allowed, takes about 3-5 minutes of walking...), persuade her with my speech-oriented character. She claims that she's only giving me something if I follow some strict guidelines.
I reply with "Oh uhh, I'll have to talk to my boss about this" because I think it'll give me a bonus choice.
Waddle back to my boss who's being a lazy hoe (all the leaders are women in this game, its creepy) at her desk.
"Oh hey uhh she wants all these guidelines to be followed, is that okay?" I ask her.
She replies with functionally "Dipshit, she gave you permission to X, just fucking accept, why are you trying to follow chain of command?" so I have to waddle ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL the way back to accept her guidelines.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU GIVE ME THE OPTION TO, OH I DUNNO, ROLEPLAY, IN YOUR ROLEPLAYING GAME, IF IT JUST PUNISHES ME!???
I mean some bosses in corporate are like that in every continent...so in that way it is unnecessarily realistic. What is not realistic, unless there is a "rational" and "justified" "lore" "reason", is a societal setting that looks extremely matriarchal or gynocentric.
Then I live in Italy, in Western Europe, a continent which has become excessively and (hate to repeat myself but here we go again!) unnecessarily gynocentric.
So it might be realistic to whoever made the decisions to put girl bosses.
So, I'm going to put this behind spoilers, but I just have to say it, because of how stupid it is.
I just beat the Freestar quest line, and there's an entire plot line where we find out that Ron Hope, the head of HopeTech, one of the ship manufacturers in the game, was involved with a conspiracy to poison farmland with a compound that transmutes soil into valuable minerals at the cost of making it barren, and then hiring mercenaries to force people off their farms and then mine these minerals. The whole thing is dripping with Outer Worlds-style full-blown smug Marxism and environmentalism, where the player is invited to beat up on a rich, elitist, exploitative entrepreneur (voiced by Wes fucking Johnson) just because they can, and then, when the inevitable happens and you refuse his attempted bribery and try and arrest him, he goes down in a gunfight like a chump, and there are no repercussions for the player at all.
This is stupid. It's beyond moronical. The writers have contrived a conflict while ignoring the facts of their own setting. Three things immediately come to mind.
A substance that turns soil into industrial quantities of metals is scientifically implausible. This is Tiberium-level handwavium. Either the elements are there, or they aren't. In fact, the setting has abundant fusion reactors, so industrial transmutation and recycling of materials should be entirely feasible and cheap... in fixed locations, in a factory setting. Look up Bernard Eastlund's fifty-year-old paper on the Fusion Torch.
If you do have such a magical substance, why in the maximum fuck would you distribute it on farmland, instead of one of the many uninhabited (and, indeed, uninhabitable) planets all over the goddamn place?
THERE ARE METALS EVERYWHERE. Blow up an asteroid. It's full of iron. Hell, do a few jumps, and you'll encounter enough recyclable station debris from the Colony War to build hundreds of ships. It's free fucking metal! HOLY FUCK! Ron Retard would have been money ahead if he'd just hired the garbage scow guys from Planetes to scoop up all the FREE METAL.
So, in the end, I didn't shoot Ron Hope because he was a capitalist. I shot him because he was a moron.
You either missed or left out a few critical details that make Hope's actions have a bit more sense...
Firstly, you left off the part where you're dutifully appointed law enforcement who'd been actively investigating this issue and had hard evidence tracing back to Hope. So of course there would be limited fallout from your actions, the Rangers in the Freestar have quite broad powers when it comes to enforcing the law and your actions fell well within them.
Secondly, you seem to have missed where the substance that turns soil into industrial minerals was ORIGINALLY sold to farmers as FERTALIZER. Hope wasn't trying to get the land for their mineral wealth, that was a nice byproduct, he was trying to get the land to cover up the mistake his company had made. That this would also give him extra resources was gravy. This also explains why he did distribute it to farmland initially.
So yeah, Hope being incompetent and desperately flailing is pretty much canon to that entire storyline.
Also, counterpoint, I don't think that questline was meant to be communist / leftist sympathetic, it's meant to be more like a classic western tale concerning a big railroad or mining magnate trying to drive freeholders off their land only held back by the work of a lone US Martial or Texas Ranger. It's a classic western story in space.
Freestar is a Libertarian-esq. state and the two main planets in it harken to different Libertarian society tropes. Akila, where the Ranger questline starts, is all about space westerns, you have all the aspects of it both in the main city as well as the different quests. Meanwhile Neon is a cyberpunk style corporate city and the major questline there where you work for Ryujin Industries and find a mega-corporation that is not super corrupt and evil, has executives that genuinely have moral limits, and the one classic fully ruthless evil corpo...
Is one of the primary antagonists whom you can clear out and thus make Ryujin actually MORE moral.
In fact, Starfield is perhaps one of the most fair representations of the wealthy I've seen in that they're generally just... people. Some are bad, some are good. I mean, sure, Hope was an asshole and idiot, but then you have Walter Stroud and his wife Issa Eklund who are your staunch allies and supporters through things and clearly coded as good people, while also owning and running one of the largest shipbuilding corporations in space.
Stroud's 'competitor' evil dude is rich and incredibly stupid though.
Oh yes, lets taunt, threaten, and personally fight a known ranger, terrormorph killer AND first-class-citizen of the united spaces, great idea! He's totally not rocking some badass one-man-army weapons at all!
You either missed or left out a few critical details that make Hope's actions have a bit more sense...
Firstly, you left off the part where you're dutifully appointed law enforcement who'd been actively investigating this issue and had hard evidence tracing back to Hope. So of course there would be limited fallout from your actions, the Rangers in the Freestar have quite broad powers when it comes to enforcing the law and your actions fell well within them.
Secondly, you seem to have missed where the substance that turns soil into industrial minerals was ORIGINALLY sold to farmers as FERTALIZER. Hope wasn't trying to get the land for their mineral wealth, that was a nice byproduct, he was trying to get the land to cover up the mistake his company had made. That this would also give him extra resources was gravy. This also explains why he did distribute it to farmland initially.
So yeah, Hope being incompetent and desperately flailing is pretty much canon to that entire storyline.
Also, counterpoint, I don't think that questline was meant to be communist / leftist sympathetic, it's meant to be more like a classic western tale concerning a big railroad or mining magnate trying to drive freeholders off their land only held back by the work of a lone US Martial or Texas Ranger. It's a classic western story in space.
Freestar is a Libertarian-esq. state and the two main planets in it harken to different Libertarian society tropes. Akila, where the Ranger questline starts, is all about space westerns, you have all the aspects of it both in the main city as well as the different quests. Meanwhile Neon is a cyberpunk style corporate city and the major questline there where you work for Ryujin Industries and find a mega-corporation that is not super corrupt and evil, has executives that genuinely have moral limits, and the one classic fully ruthless evil corpo...
Is one of the primary antagonists whom you can clear out and thus make Ryujin actually MORE moral.
In fact, Starfield is perhaps one of the most fair representations of the wealthy I've seen in that they're generally just... people. Some are bad, some are good. I mean, sure, Hope was an asshole and idiot, but then you have Walter Stroud and his wife Issa Eklund who are your staunch allies and supporters through things and clearly coded as good people, while also owning and running one of the largest shipbuilding corporations in space.
I would contend that it's not exactly clear what level of criminal culpability Ron Hope had in the first place.
He admits that after he discovered that their experimental fertilizer didn't work and caused plants to die, he began intentionally selling the fertilizer to farmers in the hopes that he could mine their over-mineralized soil later. This is, at worst, product mislabeling.
He was complicit in the ship theft from the HopeTech factory, but since the ship was technically his company's property, the worst you could say about it was that it was embezzlement or abstraction, which would depend entirely on how his company is owned and operated (i.e. if he's the sole owner or not).
He hired mercenaries to buy farmland while intimidating landowners with their presence, but he didn't hire them to assassinate farmers. The mercs were violent on their own initiative.
None of these things were a death sentence, and yet, if you refuse his bribe and refuse to keep quiet, he instantly loses his mind, resists arrest, and dies. You're trying to arrest a guy for mislabeling a product, redistributing what is likely his own property, and hiring agents to buy farms. The mercenaries acted the way they did, harassing and shooting farmers, because they were hostile to their client and wanted to destroy his reputation.
He's a complete idiot, but if you examine the facts of the case, it's not even fully clear why he's being arrested in the first place. I'm not saying that he was a saint, or that what he did was morally correct. Quite the opposite. It's stupid and evil. But is it illegal?
"Starfield is way more polished than other Bethesda games!"
A complete and utter fucking lie, given that about 20% of New Atlantis' geometry is MISSING in my save.
I don't even know what caused it, I've just been playing the main quest. Apparently stealing enemy ships, an intended mechanic, causes it.
So you're telling me absolutely ZERO bugtesters simply played the main quest and stole a couple pirate ships? This is absurd. The SALES TERMINAL at the landing pad is GONE. The damned train is missing too.
There's HOLES IN THE CONCRETE WHERE NPC's ARE FALLING INTO!
Edit: I don't ever remember New Vegas, Fallout 3, or Oblivion removing entire segments of geometry from it's maps.
He's a complete idiot, but if you examine the facts of the case, it's not even fully clear why he's being arrested in the first place. I'm not saying that he was a saint, or that what he did was morally correct. Quite the opposite. It's stupid and evil. But is it illegal?
Oh he absolutely is an idiot. And yeah, none of what he did was necessarily death sentence worthy, but you pull a gun on a Ranger see how long you get to live?
One thing I kinda want to try is see if using a stun weapon allows you to properly capture him and how it changes things. Will have to try that on the New Game+ though...
"Starfield is way more polished than other Bethesda games!"
A complete and utter fucking lie, given that about 20% of New Atlantis' geometry is MISSING in my save.
I don't even know what caused it, I've just been playing the main quest. Apparently stealing enemy ships, an intended mechanic, causes it.
So you're telling me absolutely ZERO bugtesters simply played the main quest and stole a couple pirate ships? This is absurd. The SALES TERMINAL at the landing pad is GONE. The damned train is missing too.
There's HOLES IN THE CONCRETE WHERE NPC's ARE FALLING INTO!
Edit: I don't ever remember New Vegas, Fallout 3, or Oblivion removing entire segments of geometry from it's maps.
That's my policy when it comes to buy games...even with companies with a decent truck record such as From Software (holy crap their release dates for dlcs is atrocious) and (until CYBERPUNK) CD Project Red. Or with any company who has a history of releasing expansions for some of their games.
As I said previously made the mistake twice with FO3 and New Vegas of buying the base game then the DLCs and then they released the complete versions after a year!
So my policy is to wait for complete releases or getting games that already have them.
I made the mistake also with Outward, but honestly I don't think that many people actually expected the grounded, budget-indie Souls-like to actually have an expansion.
Look at it : does this game looks like it is going to have expansions ?
Most stores don't trade in grenade launchers and illicit drugs for lockpicks.
WHOAH.
STARFIELD IS A FICTIONAL UNIVERSE AND GAME!?
I'm rich as fuck, I have my own starship. I should be able to go to my local space-bank and order whatever the fuck I want, with bulk cargo haulers bringing it to me within the DAY.
Those stores don't also buy used goods from random customers coming in, though. If you're running a produce market it's fine to operate that way because your customers will not randomly offer to sell you six hundred heads of lettuce cheap. If you're operating a pawn shop and buying goods off your customers, though, you better have the cash on hand to buy that acoustic guitar or shotgun a dude's lugging in, or you'll go out of business real quick.
