Starfield’s Steam rating falls to “mostly negative,” can Bethesda still save its RPG? | TechSpot

Starfield, an RPG that excited gamers for years before release with the promise of being Skyrim in space, is ending 2023 with its Steam Recent Reviews rating at Mostly Negative. Even the overall rating is Mixed, which will doubtlessly disappoint Bethesda and Todd Howard.

Source: Starfield’s Steam rating falls to “mostly negative,” can Bethesda still save its RPG? | TechSpot

I was definitely salty when Bethesda was bought by Microsoft. Like so many others, I’ve been a long time fan of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and was really looking forward to this one. However, as a PS5 player, I realized that Starfield and TES VI would never be coming to Playstation.

I eventually bought a new PC for the Elder Scrolls Online, and tried the digital deluxe pre-release version of Starfield on Steam. I refunded it after 12 hours. While I could see all the criticisms people are talking about with regard to the game, my particular problem was that inventory management was the worst of any open-world game I’ve seen. After this amount of time, I had collected enough “stuff” to require me to start building bases to store them, so that I could eventually build the interesting items, and start working on ships.

I discovered, to my dismay, that unlimited storage containers do not exist, as there are in Skyrim and Fallout 4. Not only that, but it was going to take precious resources to build containers that were — at their largest — still pitifully small. By the time I realized what was happening, I only had enough resources to build a single-base’s limit of storage containers, and it barely made a dent in my inventory.

The whole thing came crashing down at once. The exercise of breaking down and storing my junk — which had become a very efficient and quick abstraction in Fallout 76 — was going to be many, many more hours of work to tame, and it would never not be a chore. To me, there was simply no excuse for this.

So not only do I now view Bethesda suspiciously (even though I continue to play ESO), but I also hate Microsoft from “back in the day,” because I’ve been a fan of Linux since the start, and I watched them buy up any and all competition in the 90’s, and then use the courts and their bought-and-paid for trade press to try to kill Linux.

And above all of this, I hate the trend towards nation-state corporations having more power than governments, and I hate the reduction in choice and increased price by such moves, all while they funnel all the profits from becoming more and more integrated straight to the top.

I’m not trying to start a fight with Windows and Xbox fans. I just say all of this to preface saying this, in response to this news:

And I hope they have a terrible time with The Elder Scrolls 6 now, whatever it will be called.

How Can Sharing a Screenshot from the PS5 Be this Frustrating?

I’m GenX. I’ve been programming since I was 10. I’ve been programming professionally for 30 years now. I live with computers and software all day, every day. I am comfortable in macOS, Windows, and Linux. I want to share a couple of screenshots from my PS5 to Reddit. Seems simple, right? So how do I get them off the console, and onto a computer?

  • I see that I no longer have the option to upload to Twitter, which I had done before. (Has Sony officially joined the ranks of the He-Man Musk Haters Club? Or did Musk kill the API that Sony was using? Both possibilities seem equally likely.)
  • I also have YouTube, Discord, and Twitch accounts linked on the console. I have no options for sharing to any of these services either. What is the point of even having the option of linking them!? What is this doing other than just giving Sony permission to go fishing through those accounts?
  • I use the only option I see to upload them to the PS “app.” What is this doing for me? They don’t seem to be available anywhere on the Playstation website.
  • I install the PS+ app on Windows. It sticks for some time, so I kill it, only to see that Windows has hidden the UAE thing, so I never saw it. I try to install it again. It works.
  • I “sign in” to the PS+ app. I answer a stupid catcha, despite having 2FA on my account. Nothing happens.
  • I log in again. NOW I see my account. But I don’t see any way to access my screenshots. It’s just an ad page for a bunch of games that Sony should understand by now that I’m not interested in.
  • Grasping at straws, I install “Share Factory.” I shouldn’t need another application, but the name suggests possibilities… Aaand it’s a basic editor. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get this media off the console. The only “sharing” option I see is to friend groups on the console. For this, it’s titled “‘Share’ Factory?” Are they serious?
  • I finally notice that the mobile PS app has the ability to look at my screenshots, and download them, but I don’t want to download them to the mobile device’s photo bank. I don’t want to allow the PS app access to my photos. I want to pull them to the PC, where I can more easily post them to Reddit.
  • At the end of all of this, the only option seems to be to put a USB memory stick in the console, and transfer media via sneakernet to my PC, like it was the 90’s all over again. The bottom line is that this seems — incredibly — to be the least amount of hassle to do what I want.

A rant on Reddit — before it was removed — surprise, surprise — confirms I’m not missing anything. I’m 54 years old. I live with bad apps and software and services like this every day, and I get sick of it. I have no idea how regular people are dealing with all of this “technology.” It makes no sense to me, and I’ve literally grown up with it. How can this be the best “we” can do here? Why aren’t we living in the future yet?

Ebony and Ivory

This is actually what McCartney and Jackson were singing about. Sony and Microsoft, living in harmony.

Ebony and Ivory

I bought the Xbox because Microsoft bought Bethesda, and will be making Starfield an exclusive. According to leaks, it’s releasing in the summer. (The Elder Scrolls VI will also be exclusive, but that’s so far off, it’s not fair to talk about.) In the meantime, though, I had been wanting to play through Fallout 4 again. And I did, on my PS5. Except that I started the game with the unofficial patch, because of this, I got stuck and couldn’t finish the Nuka World DLC, which is best part. So not only was I capped at 30 FPS, I got stopped by a bug. On the X, they’ve bumped it up to 60 FPS, so I bought the GOTY edition, did NOT install the unofficial patch, and started playing.

But in looking through the Xbox store, I’ve noticed that you can install Fallout 3 and New Vegas natively on the X. I had been wanting to re-play these two for a long time, but they are basically dead on modern versions of Windows. There are lots of long write-ups for how to get them working, but I’ve tried some, and I can’t seem to do it. They’re “available” on Playstation, but only through their cloud gaming service, and that just doesn’t work well at all. It’s grainy and slow and laggy. So basically, I thought these games were lost forever. I would have thought that they would only be available on Xbox through Microsoft’s version of cloud gaming.

I just installed NV on the X, and it plays GREAT! Fully 60 FPS, and it even looks decent at 4K, which I wouldn’t have thought possible for a 13 year old game. I will probably wind up paying for both 3 and NV and all their DLC. I love Fallout so much, that these games being native on the X, alone, almost make the price worth it to me. And while I’ve waffled between buying an X versus buying a new gaming PC, this clinches it, because this just isn’t (practically) possible any more on PC.

Playstation 5 and the “Control” Game Review

Control is a game that came free with Playstation Plus. I had heard relatively good things about it, but I know that PS+ games are the B- games that have run their course commercially, so I took this move with a grain of salt. Turns out that, like Red Dead Redemption 2, Control has a great game buried in there, underneath all the really terrible parts.

Control has a great X-Files-like vibe. Very atmospheric and moody. Very surreal and mysterious. It’s a great new intellectual property space. Or, at least, it will be, if Remedy ever makes another game based on the franchise. The story is great.

Control has an interesting gun play system. There’s no reloading, but there’s a pause while the gun reloads itself, so it’s all the same thing. Plus, the button that most games would use for reloading swaps between the 2 active weapon morphs in play, and muscle memory frequently leaves me hanging with the wrong weapon effect at the worst time.

That’s… about all the good I can say about it. I’m sure other people have done enough actual reviews, but I’ll give it a short run down:

  • The “control” points where you can start over if you die are far apart, and you have to walk a long way to get back to the point where you died.
  • The gun does NOT snap (by default), and the aim is unforgiving for a game like this.
  • There’s no crouching behind cover. Which is bizarre, because the enemies do it.
  • Optional missions come up at opportune moments, but you only get one shot at them. You have no idea what you’re facing, and if you die, and you simply lose out.
  • Finally, the map and the level design is horrendous, and there’s no pathing to help you navigate it.

I could chalk all the shooting mechanics up to taste, and put up with it for the story, but the last point just does the game in. I just tried the game again, and the ONLY way I can find to go forward to my objective is to go through an area that’s just too tough for me. I’ve failed to get through it twice, and there just didn’t seem to be a way to get it done. But I wandered around for 15 minutes, and concluded that this is, in fact, where I should be going, so I tried — and failed — for a third time, with literally no idea how I could deal with it.

I looked for a difficulty setting, and found that it has cheats. Well, that makes sense. So I activated them, and tried again. Despite aim snap, I was about to die for the 4th time, so I just went ahead and activated god mode. I got through the area, and found another control point, but there’s no where to go. Here’s what I see:

Control Ultimate Edition_20210214104514

And here’s what the map is showing me at that point:

Control Ultimate Edition_20210214104521

I don’t know where to go. I have an optional mission selected, and there’s no indication where that is. If I activate the “main” mission, the map indicator is in the ??? area to the northeast of my position. I cannot interpret what this is telling me, there’s no indication on how I can get where I need to go, and I can’t find any way through this section. I’m quite literally stuck, and I’m really tired of putting up with video games that force me to do a search and read some article to get past every other difficult part. At this point, I’m just going to delete the game, and hope that Sony gives Remedy access to the fact that this player quit playing the game at 18% completion, and uninstalled it, even though the game was free. That’s how big of a fail it is.

Tangentially, while trying to get the screenshots off the console, I found that it takes 4 non-obvious clicks to get to the media library, and there’s only one option for a service to upload the images with: Twitter. Really, Sony? Really? There must be a dozen prominent image sharing sites, and the only option is Twitter? Screw Twitter. Especially for sharing screenshots! And screw Sony for making that the only option. I had to resort to a USB stick. Ew.

Additionally, you can only share recorded video to YouTube or Twitter. You can only livestream to Twitch. Nothing about these options makes sense. Sony must expand these options with an update. I’m sure it’s all about the Benjamins. Sony was probably looking for kickbacks to include other services here, and no one donated, so they were forced to give us one option. Sony needs to suck it up, now that the console has launched, and move on. There’s no excuse for a lack of options for any of these ways of sharing. They need to make it like an iPhone, were you can connect your console to a service, and it becomes a “destination” to which you can share anything. (Well, I mean, they do, but they need to give us a lot more options.)

The best PS4 games to play right now – Polygon

A mix of originals, remakes, and remasters makes the PS4 a system with a vast library of wonderful games

Source: The best PS4 games to play right now – Polygon

I just note, for the record, and with no small amount of satisfaction, that Red Dead Redemption 2 didn’t even make the list. It’s only an honorable mention. It’s not that it was completely terrible in all aspects, of course, but I contend it will eventually be seen as one of the most overrated and over-hyped AAA titles to ever hit the market.

Playstation 5: At Last

I finally got a Playstation 5, thanks to Best Buy and Twitter. The new hardware can apparently do 4K at 120Hz over HDMI 2.1. I have a monitor that I use at 4K@60Hz over DisplayPort for my Mac, but it can only do 4K@30Hz over HDMI. So I went looking for a new monitor. The problem is that what I want doesn’t seem to exist. I can’t find a single model in the 30-inch range that can do 4K@120Hz. There are a lot that do 1080, and many that can do 1440, but if there are any that can do the full 2160, I can’t find them. What I don’t understand is that there seem to be a lot of big screen TV’s that can do 4K at 120Hz. Why aren’t they making them in desktop monitor sizes? I guess I’ll have to wait and hope that the new-gen gaming consoles push the market to make them.

UPDATE: I’ve been able to find a few select models that will do 4K@60Hz in a 32″ size, but, so far, none of the them support HDMI 2.1. Only 2.0. I’m not buying until I can find a unit that satisfies all the display features of the PS5.

UPDATE: Aha! My prediction about the next-gen consoles pushing the market was spot on. Asus — from whom I’ve bought all of my monitors for years, now — has just announced a new model, the ROG Swift PG32UQ, and it was covered just 3 days ago. It supports HDMI 2.1 and HDR and 4K@120Hz.

At the time of this writing, Amazon has listings for the 25″, the 43″, and a 34″ models. The 43″ is listed at $1,100, but I don’t want to go bigger than about 34″, and that one is being listed by some 3rd-party scalper at $1,600. (Good job, buddy.)

B&H lists them as a new item, “coming soon,” for $800, and that seems correct, but then I notice that it’s a ROG Swift PG32Q (not “UQ”), and the specs say it only supports HDMI 2.0, and I’m right back where I started. Why is this so hard? Researching further, this article says that the UQ version will be available starting at the end of the first quarter. Sigh.

Note bene: This means that all three listings on Amazon for the “UQ” model are fraudulent. They can’t possibly be that model yet. Nice, Amazon. Really keeping up your reputation here.

Anyway, I guess that will give me time to recoup from the PS5 itself, and get my tax return…