Whiny nerds who haven’t read a new book in over two decades shed tears over the fact their boring-ass game sucks and is getting swirlied in the toilet bowl by actual cool games
Yeah I think it’s also a big problem that the money system is so compressed that it’s hard to know how much anything is worth. Like if an apple or a meal is around 100 credits, then the 10k that small ship would cost is basically walking around money for most people. A penthouse apartment on Neon is 25k is, so is property just really cheap there or is food expensive?
Ultimately gameplay balance and all that, but it seems like very strange world building to me.
The prices they’ve chosen are really just about fantasy fulfilment for the player, they went with making everything cheap and easily attainable, since most of it is fairly meaningless. You fly around in a flying house with every amenity you need for one, you don’t need properties.
Modding has a lot of potential here though. Rebuilding the economy and pricing combined with a good survival mod that takes advantage of the game having native temperature and climate features… Add fuel necessity and costs to the game too. You can really make working and doing missions to earn a living a necessity, and you will be able to get stranded on planets where you starve/freeze and die. A significant amount of depth will come from deepening this. The temperature feature in particular feels like they added it specifically for modders since it’s effect is negligible in the base game.
I also think that we need a “cities don’t allow space suits” feature so players have to lose their armour in cities and become more vulnerable. Make decisions more meaningful.
Generally I feel like the gameplay should be balanced around Fromsoft’s approach to combat as well. Death should be quick for players that make mistakes but combat highly rewarding when you play it well and smartly. The powers in particular seem like they can be VERY powerful and will remain strong even when you raise damage significantly.
There’s a lot to work with here. I won’t pretend I’m not a little excited about modding, I really do think it’s the best game this studio has released since Oblivion even with all my criticisms of the lib writing. They REALLY need to put something into solving performance issues though, because when you add script heavy stuff into a game that already chugs it will literally break.
The prices they’ve chosen are really just about fantasy fulfilment for the player, they went with making everything cheap and easily attainable, since most of it is fairly meaningless. You fly around in a flying house with every amenity you need for one, you don’t need properties.
Wish fulfillment used to be saving the world or getting the girl. Now it’s having a place to live that doesn’t put you into financial crisis.
Rebuilding the economy
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined implementing economic simulations in Skyrim just because the vapidness of the base game bugs me. If you’re going to insist on heavily involving capitalism in your medieval fantasy, at least have it be capitalism.
Being able to get loans that have interest and potentially put you in serious debt that gets people chasing you down would be sick (I’m either game, but Starfield in particular)
I find there’s a fine line with this. We could easily make the games not-fun by accurately balancing them into being capitalist. You can mod Skyrim to the point that a single mistake results in you becoming a drug addled destitute beggar but that’s only fun for some RP purposes and is NOT fun for basic gameplay overall after you’ve experienced its content once.
