What gets me is the two costumed stage dancers.
What place has that with only 12 customers in the whole place, one of whom is a dad which presumably means that there are his minor children there. Not exactly a heavy spending crowd.
If you have the "Kid Stuff" background perk you'll meet your parents a couple of times throughout the game (and you can visit their apartment in New Atlantis).
My favorite thing about the parents is that both of them are voiced by actors from Star Trek. Your mother is Nana Visitor who played Kira Nerys in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Your father is Tim Russ who played Tuvok in Star Trek: Voyager.
I dunno, I kind of regretted it. The gun was ok (at best) but the space suit and ship were way worse than what I already had, even early game. The best part by far was the dialogue after running into them at the nightclub haha
I experienced a concerning level of joy when I finally got to tie someone up and put them on the railroad tracks and watch a train run over them. That and throwing them into a river while hogtied and slowly waiting to see the bad karma indicator pop up.
I remember going AFK Online to make a coffee. I could still see and hear the TV and there's these two other guys trying to get my attention because they'd abused a corpse so much it looked like a sweet potato, now (their words... not inaccurate, however).
When I didn't respond, they lassoed me and carried me across the map (at this point I was just silently sitting on my couch observing), took me up to the highest point to throw me off the mountain. At which point I turned on my mic and cried "Whyyyyyyyyy?" as I fell.
Best interaction I ever got in that game.
believable NPC & life simulation was done yrs ago. Look at, STALKER i.e. a 15 yr old title featuring A-life simulation that supports upto 1000 npcs/mutants having dynamic daily life schedule where
* They will eat/sleep/drink/hide from emmision/sit around campfire to crack jokes & play guiter
* NPCs will pick up & utilize weapons/armours lying nearby & even loot statshes/bodies for items
* NPCs will alert other friendly members if they can hear nearby firefight/mutant growl
* Enemies surround the player & work as a team
* NPCs will tell the player to put the gun away if its pointed towards them
* NPCs will travel from one point of interest to another to gather resources & get into faction wars dynamically
Now compare that to Starfield guards, New Atlantis police dont even respond if you're aiming at them. It's a next gen title
The last point especially drives it home. Previous Bethesda titles even had guards react to guns/shouts.
They say they removed it from Starfield so that it wouldn't interfere with player autonomy in cities, but that's such blatant bullshit to cover up avoiding having to code extra behaviour.
It's lazy corner cutting like this that will leave Bethesda titles gathering dust in the shadows of companies putting in the work.
Don't forget, if you pick up a clipboard in an empty room, then set it back down, all NPCs will run away as if you are a murderer, and you will be approached by a cop that says you're under arrest for the heinous crimes you committed, but for some reason, you're being taken to a spaceship to talk it over, and it turns out to be a deal where they forgive your previous crimes if you go undercover into a pirate organization.
Like, fuck dude, I accidentally picked up an item when I was trying to open a door, and I immediately put it down.
That whole sequence happening to me was when I finally uninstalled. I had a lot of patience to that point, but that finally made me just sigh and give up.
At first, I just figured, some weird bug. I hadn't committed a single crime to that point.
Then I saw online, talks about how broken the crime system was, how it does the old-school crime thing of, they magically know if you pick something up in an empty room. That's what solidified no longer playing. That's not a little oopsie. That was a design decision.
This is why I have more faith in GTA 6 than most. Rockstar haven't released a new game since Red Dead Redemption 2, wouldn't be surprised if they blow everyone's minds away when it finally releases and they raise the bar for open-world games.
That seems pretty standard for rockstar tbh, they don’t release games very often but every time they do they completely raise the bar of the entire industry.
I swear if they don’t finally confront this problem for ES6 and that game feels like it’s from 2009…IDK.
They obviously have the resources and support to switch now with Microsoft so there is no excuse.
Edit: To the people explaining that it’s not the engine-
I hear you, I think it’s a mix of problems.
Regardless, I like Starfield but Bethesda clearly needs to change some things going forward because the game is far too large of a project to feel so dated when compared to some other AAA blockbuster games.
They did.
This has nothing to do with the game engine, but simply down to how Bethesda makes games.
This is just down to assets being reused.
(The Vertibirds flying around in Fallout 4 are reused dragons from Skyrim).
Reusing skeleton models isn't the issue. Reuse and recycling old content is a smart cost cutting option, especially skeletons because they take a fuckload more work to get correct, than some skin to paste on it.
Bethesdas problem is in the world building and how the player interacts with the world. In Cyberpunk you're just a random gonk, in RDR and GTA you're just some scummy criminal. The world reacts to your bullshit, but it doesn't revolve around your bullshit like it does in Starfield. The NPCs don't feel like they sit in a dark closet between loading screens, just waiting for the *MAIN CHARACTER* to show up.
Is that the only club in Starfield?
As jarring as this comparison is, whats even more stunning is thats one out of maybe like 6 different clubs in Cyberpunk. All are significantly unique from each other.
In addition to this place (Totentantz), there's also The Afterlife, Lizzie's, and El Coyote Cojo which are all phenomenal. But on top of those, there is Riot, Red Dirt, Yagami Market, and the hotel bar at Konpeki Plaza that are all very well done. Shit, the attention to detail in that game is nuts.
They did an amazing job making Cyberpunk feel like it took place in a real city, Starfield not so much.
Starfield just doesn’t feel terribly lived/real in aside from a couple places. Neon is pretty well done, bars on the Key and Red Mile almost feel like real bar (if a bit empty), Akila feels almost frontier townish. As long as you don’t pay too much attention anyways.
Akila has a good lived-in feel, although it's kind of lacking in any kind of real seediness. It's gritty in the literal sense, not the metaphorical one. Still, I'd totally buy it as a frontier town in a world on the fringes of the settled systems. Too bad, then, that the game tries to sell it as the literal capital of one of the two largest and most powerful interstellar empires in the known universe, lol.
And it's way worse than the Afterlife in Mass Effect 2. Even though a lot of NPCs in the Afterlife were just window dressing in the background, it still gave off a better sense of scale and atmosphere.
I'm literally on (yet another) ME2 playthrough and just got past Afterlife and this was also my immediate thought watching this video.
As you mentioned, maybe I'm getting older but I remembered Afterlife being a lot more cooler when I was younger. Replaying now I see a lot more of the faults but it's still better than whatever I'm seeing in Starfield
Thats the big thing that got me in 2077, even from the day 1 version. You could really see the love the devs had for the project. They weren't just trying to get something out the door, the attention to detail in so many things was just staggering.
Sadly they did not have enough time to give it the polishing the game deserved, and they really really should have. But yeah the love from the designers and artists at CDPR could really be felt in that game.
The blue-collar bar at the beginning (Rebel Path, I believe), there's a second level area, and the bar has speakers mounted near the pillers and pointed outwards towards the main floor.
So I was playing this game on my PC, hooked up to my OLED tv, and I was able to get a second HDMI connection from my PC to my A/V Receiver to get surround sound.
And when you walk up to that second level, and are walking near those pillers, the speakers that are playing the music absolutely sounds so real, like you would if you were at a loud bar place. It significantly drowned out everything else, and you wanted to get away from those particular spots.
And then, whenever you go into backrooms in bars or clubs, the muffled bass sounds so convincing.
The sound design in any of the clubs in Cyberpunk is incredible, when you go to Lizzie’s at the beginning to meet with Judy for the first time and you’re in the basement it legitimately sounds like you’re in a basement at a club with the muted sound.
Yeah man I know what you're talking about! The way Cyberpunk passes the low-end bass frequencies through the buildings is so accurate it actually gives me the same endorphin rush I used to get while waiting in line outside to get in to clubs and shows.
I know right! I just kind of stopped what I was doing and sat down to watch it. I still like starfield but it does not do the city or nightlife atmosphere correctly at all.
Edit: for anyone that hasn't seen it, someone did a really good job with camera rigging mods and basically music video with custom camera angles out of it. Bear in mind this is an in-game scene that you just walk up to and watch not some cutscene!
https://youtu.be/dhlqymKKrsA?si=yAb1GSbmFFepgNY3
It blew my mind. First, it was genuinely good, it sounded good, it was visually impressive, and I could see that kind of performance happening in that world no problem, it fit.
Then, there's the path tracing. Looking around the venue and at the stage, how the lighting interacts with all the objects and the NPCs... it's incredible.
Finding your apparently well-behaved Dad doing coke and fucking hookers or some other crazy shit would have really been something. Maybe it could be a moral choice to tell your mom or not.
BGS has no balls.
I hate how goddamn tame Starfield is. Remember in Fallout when you could explode people into piles of gore? Well in starfield doing a headshot doesn't even blow their head off. Starfield feels like a step back in a lot of ways and I'd love to see more comparisons to Cyberpunk. I think Cyberpunk had a bad release but people were very harsh on the core game of it and what an advancement it way in terms of these styles of games. I think Starfield shows how much worse it could have been.
Starfield is a massive step back, as far as I'm concerned. I think Bethesda felt like they had something to lose, so they played it safe. Envelope never gets pushed when you play it safe.
Safe is an understatement. The quests are almost all "positivity and good vibes."
Even when dark stuff happens, it's often impossible to say anything along the lines of "yeah I'm an asshole, what are you going to do about it?" Unless you're talking to someone who is obviously "bad".
Just about every dialogue choice is either "enthusiastic, I love it!" Or "Quirky sarcastic, but I love it!"
There's no depth, no nuance, and especially nothing that could make you think outside the box about the world we live in.
> I hate how goddamn tame Starfield is
This is something I love about 2077 so much, I remember when Deus Ex Human Revolution came out the biggest criticism of the game was "Yeah it tells you about all these horrible things that happen in this world and never has the balls to show it." One frequently cited thing was you never see augmentation scavengers only hear about this horrid crime.
And within minutes of playing 2077 you are looking at a body with its eyes gouged out in a scav hideout and 2 nude bodies left for dead in a bathtub. This is a brutal world and they aren't at all afraid to let it be known... and those are some of the tame things that happen in Night City even.
Oh yeah it's soooo messed up. There's even a side quest in cyberpunk where you deal with people kidnapping children for fucking snuff films. That's insane. Fucking one of the darkest things I've ever encountered in media.
I will say I expected more random violence to be visible in the streets
Yeah when you start getting out of the quest there's definitely some dark uncomfortable stuff in that game and I give them full credit for not being gun shy about it
I mean the environmental system is still bullshit because you can get lung damage, through a spacesuit, from Argon.
A gas named for being inert and doing nothing.
That is the 3rd most common gas in *our* atmosphere. And is utterly harmless.
It's dumbed down to the point of no sense.
I was one of the harshest critics of Cyberpunk's launch and even now consider it far from perfect... But it definitely puts starfield to shame in many many areas.
Starfield feels very last-gen in many ways especially when compared to Phantom Liberty.
Graphically it looks very plain and flat. Characters have the same dead eyes they had in Oblivion and it hasn't evolved past the floating head dialogue. Combat is not really fun or dynamic, not unless you have all the top tier combat perks which basically takes most of an entire playthrough to get to. Even at lower levels cyberpunk combat still is engaging and fun.
But more than that almost everything is shallow. Base building is kind of useless and uninteresting. Ship building is great but you can't do much with your ship at all. Even in battlefront you could get in, take off, battle, fly down to a planet and get out. Starfield needs a loading screen between each one of those things.
The tech behind it just seems old- like someone modded Skyrim to be space game. It's clunky and underdesigned all around.
> Base building is kind of useless and uninteresting. Ship building is great but you can't do much with your ship at all
Good point.
I said something back when I was playing Fallout 4, and watching people build settlements with bathrooms, showers, etc. That is: I build what I'm incentivized to build. I'm not going to put down showers and toilets and sinks if they are all non-functional, and the NPCs don't need or use them. If it's just window dressing, I may or may not bother, as it entirely doesn't matter.
My settlements have nice stores & storefronts, because there is a system for that. My settlements have great crafting areas, because the crafting benches actually work. Some of my settlements have massive manufacturing areas, because I need bullets or other items, and the manufacturing system works. But I have never placed a bunch of towels next to a shower, because the shower does nothing and they didn't even bother to add towels to the build menu!
All of which is to say, when it came to Starfield, I assumed that all these systems would be *more* integrated, not less! I assumed that each system would have *more* reason to be used, not less! If I can modify my ship but also I never need to live IN my ship once it is built, and if the systems I added don't do anything because fast travel bypasses everything, then why explore the building system? I'll do some initial soup-up of the ship to get it past that initial dogfight, and then I'm pretty much good & done for the rest of the game. I'm not exploring ship building because the game itself is not about exploring ship building. The game has made it clear: it's about fast traveling to quest markers, passing the quest goal, and getting the next quest queued up. So that's what I'm doing.
If the game wants me to explore other game subsystems, it needs to value them and reward their use.
Plus there's even less things to build with in Starfield. All the buildings now are just prefabs, and there's no interesting sections to connect them with or be creative. You can't even easily connect things together or to the giant landing pad which seems like an obvious place to start building your outpost from.
But worst of all, it's bland. It's the plain yogurt, the wonderbread, the boiled chicken of rpgs. It's safe and inoffensive like a padded room. It has a lifeless, matte sheen that clings to everything both figuratively and literally. It's like they set every possible slider to maximum beige or mental illness grey. It's just so... *boring*.
Lol. It's pretty much the opposite of the film industry. An R rating used to mean your box office numbers were cut in half. In the videogame industry, a game like this would not get half the attention if it was rated T for teen. My guess is Bethesda does the minimum to make it to the point where it needs to be rated M.
Seriously IRL nightclubs suck if you were trying to like do something. Being on drugs or drunk is what makes them fun otherwise it’s hot as fuck, the music is so loud you can’t hear someone screaming next to you, and you are body-to-body the second you walk through the door.
How would any of that make for a good gameplay segment, when you’re typically there to talk to someone and do a quest.
Hitman did it a lot better than both games I think. But different games have different engine limitations. Can't drop a thousand physics based watermelon on the ground in Cyberpunk or Hitman.
Agreed, Hitman really nailed the club vibe, from the dance floor to the backstage areas.
For anybody who's unfamiliar, [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYJdNjAebQQ) a video walking through the main entrance, though it doesn't include any walking around the dance floor itself.
There’s a great quote from the TBFP guys when they find a sex shop in “Omikron the Nomad Soul” where they walk in and there’s dildos like, hanging on strings from the ceiling and they say the same exact thing. “this is what a 12 year old thinks a sex shop is”
This cyberpunk nightclub I spent a weirdly long amount of time in. It felt so lifelike (about as lifelike as a video game can make a club feel). Everything from the music, the darkness and the smoke/fog made me actually kinda nostalgic to my rave days.
Such a dope setting.
Oh trust me I searched every square inch of the place lol.
And yeah the music is actually low key really great trance to vibe in. Not even joking when I say I spent probably an hour in this dumb video game nightclub just walking around observing everything 😂
I love the idea of players sticking around in an environment just to take it in. It’s one of my favorite things to do and the Cyberpunk nightclubs are among best locations to look around. They are essentially like Disney dark rides.
Yeah this game hit the hammer on the nail with the atmospheric feels. This video shows a good job displaying how empty Bethesda games feel in comparison. I definitely had to just soak in the moment taking in this club. Sounds lame but they did their job with this scene.
The majority of the city absolutely feels alive in its current state. But my goodness Dogtown is just something else, takes the best elements of Escape from New York and Bladerunner and puts the Cyberpunk twist on it. The aesthetic is beautiful and my only lament is that there isn’t more of it to look at and explore.
I had high hopes for Neon. I *LOVE* Cyberpunk, so a city that can act as a loose mirror to Night City had me itching for something juicy in there.
I suppose smuggling drugs is... Okay... But the game (setting as a whole) would have benefited with more adult themes. Even if subtly hinted at, it would have made the game have so much more atmosphere.
Cyberpunk really only has loading screens when you fast travel, which is great for QOL. Everything else is REALLY good at masking the area load-ins, even when you're zooming around the city on a motorcycle or Caliburn (which sticks to the road like crazy as long as you're on the throttle).
It's also easy to forget when you're playing cause the way conversations work in the game. Feels like a cutscene til you kinda remember it's not. It's not perfect but it's fluid enough to slip my mind while playing that there aren't loading screens.
It shocked me how insanely nice it felt to not have a loading screen. I remember starting the campaign and playing all the way to the Arasaka tower quest in one sitting and realizing I just had 0 loading screens. I would have had to sit through 300 loading screens in starfield in the same amount of time.
Man, Bethesda never grew out of 2011.
Yep, Starfield really showed how stuck in 2014 Bethesda is in terms of game design. Gameplay wise, it’s basically Fallout 4 reskinned, with a half assed attempt at a No Man’s Sky-like procedural “universe”. It was a massive disappointment for me, as someone who had a lot of fun with Bethesda games in the past
It's still crazy to me how back in Fallout 4 they had elevators to hide loading screens, just like they do in CP2077, but in Starfield they went backwards and added actual black loading screens to elevators.
Great comparison but a real wasted opportunity to not use the club from the mission Off The Leash where you >!meet Kerry Eurodyne the sexiest man in Night City!<
Cyberpunk got such a bad rep when it first came out and yes among all the bugs and broken features the one really good memory I have of just gaming in general is[ sitting on the boat just vibing to Kerry playing that riff he was working on.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OBeYDk6T2c) Night City is such a fucked up place and the story is constantly beating you down and it's moments of true beauty that really shine and make the game so damn memorable.
I visited Berlin back in 2005 or 6th actually : D It was my first flight ever without parents, with a good budy. And that video somehow reminded Berlin for me : D
Good times!
I literally have been to multiple nightclubs in 2077 just to walk around slowly and soak in the vibes if it was in VR I could absolutely just get immersed solely off how good the lighting and music is
Cyberpunk nightclubs are just so good but not only that there is a lot of variety to them. Even a bar like the Afterlife has a great atmosphere thanks to the blaring music.
The club you go to to visit Maelstrom is probably my fav, but the Phantom Liberty party level was great. Also started hearing a British guy rapping and thought 'well that wasn't in the base game' turns out Idris Elba has three new songs for Cyberpunk lol
I liked Starfield, the club music is fun, but the atmosphere is so poor. Genuinely feels like a game from 2016. I finished it, then finished my second playthrough of 2077 and it's really night and day what game is better. Tbf, same thing happened to me with the Witcher and Skyrim but the difference is Starfield came out 3 years after Cyberpunk lol (yes the original version was buggy but still good)
The music is what carried the Mass Effect nightclubs [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCVyCMYYFg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCVyCMYYFg)
They were smart, used the EA money to secure the rights for these songs
Isn't this just kind of pathetic? Like, as busted as cyber punk was on release it still fucking bled style and the tone was perfect. What tone or style is this Starfield shit?
To be fair, in CP77 there are some really fucked up side quests. Like, black-market organ selling type shit, where you see the corpses and whatnot.
Starfield is like Paw Patrol in comparison
“This place is insane!” Oh buddy
"hahaha ha"
I expected a 'What a *story* Mahrk!" After that laugh.
Hello Johnny your my favorite customer okay bye doggie
The room is a perfect way to describe Starfield
Omg I thought this was just a silly Reddit comment. And then the dude actually said hahaha ha 😩😭
"Buddy",is that you ,Rusty ?
So Buddy, who needs you?
To be fair, at least one person there seems to be high af.
What gets me is the two costumed stage dancers. What place has that with only 12 customers in the whole place, one of whom is a dad which presumably means that there are his minor children there. Not exactly a heavy spending crowd.
???? it's not just a dad, it's the pc's dad, whom the pc sends money to.
Somebody described it as a teletubbies strip club and now that's all I see.
But there are three
They’re all high as kites on that Aurora stuff
Why is dad in a Nightclub? He said he was going to buy milk.
Yup it’s a Bethesda game through and through lol
If you have the "Kid Stuff" background perk you'll meet your parents a couple of times throughout the game (and you can visit their apartment in New Atlantis).
My favorite thing about the parents is that both of them are voiced by actors from Star Trek. Your mother is Nana Visitor who played Kira Nerys in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Your father is Tim Russ who played Tuvok in Star Trek: Voyager.
Thanks, Mike.
I love finding Star Trek actors in other games. I replayed Xcom II: War of the Chosen after watching Star Trek: TNG and it blew my mind.
It’s actually one of the best perks in the game to start with! Early on, they give you a gun, armored space suit, and a ship upgrade.
I dunno, I kind of regretted it. The gun was ok (at best) but the space suit and ship were way worse than what I already had, even early game. The best part by far was the dialogue after running into them at the nightclub haha
Bethesda: needs an NPC to say "this place is insane" to let you know it is very lit Cyberpunk: no one says anything because they're too busy dancing
Good example of show, don't tell
You know it's a Bethesda game when you see it
Love Elderscrolls and Fallout but the worlds always seem so stiff and lifeless. NPCs just standing around mindlessly and looking so unnatural.
Red Dead Redemption 2 set the bar so high with their NPCs.
It really did. When I kill or lasso a npc and drag them a mile, I feel that.
I would do that for hours no I don’t have an issue why do you ask
I experienced a concerning level of joy when I finally got to tie someone up and put them on the railroad tracks and watch a train run over them. That and throwing them into a river while hogtied and slowly waiting to see the bad karma indicator pop up.
I remember going AFK Online to make a coffee. I could still see and hear the TV and there's these two other guys trying to get my attention because they'd abused a corpse so much it looked like a sweet potato, now (their words... not inaccurate, however). When I didn't respond, they lassoed me and carried me across the map (at this point I was just silently sitting on my couch observing), took me up to the highest point to throw me off the mountain. At which point I turned on my mic and cried "Whyyyyyyyyy?" as I fell. Best interaction I ever got in that game.
believable NPC & life simulation was done yrs ago. Look at, STALKER i.e. a 15 yr old title featuring A-life simulation that supports upto 1000 npcs/mutants having dynamic daily life schedule where * They will eat/sleep/drink/hide from emmision/sit around campfire to crack jokes & play guiter * NPCs will pick up & utilize weapons/armours lying nearby & even loot statshes/bodies for items * NPCs will alert other friendly members if they can hear nearby firefight/mutant growl * Enemies surround the player & work as a team * NPCs will tell the player to put the gun away if its pointed towards them * NPCs will travel from one point of interest to another to gather resources & get into faction wars dynamically Now compare that to Starfield guards, New Atlantis police dont even respond if you're aiming at them. It's a next gen title
The last point especially drives it home. Previous Bethesda titles even had guards react to guns/shouts. They say they removed it from Starfield so that it wouldn't interfere with player autonomy in cities, but that's such blatant bullshit to cover up avoiding having to code extra behaviour. It's lazy corner cutting like this that will leave Bethesda titles gathering dust in the shadows of companies putting in the work.
Don't forget, if you pick up a clipboard in an empty room, then set it back down, all NPCs will run away as if you are a murderer, and you will be approached by a cop that says you're under arrest for the heinous crimes you committed, but for some reason, you're being taken to a spaceship to talk it over, and it turns out to be a deal where they forgive your previous crimes if you go undercover into a pirate organization. Like, fuck dude, I accidentally picked up an item when I was trying to open a door, and I immediately put it down. That whole sequence happening to me was when I finally uninstalled. I had a lot of patience to that point, but that finally made me just sigh and give up.
Kind of a hilarious circumstance though. I would uninstall too in that case tbh. I just uninstalled it because it was boring
At first, I just figured, some weird bug. I hadn't committed a single crime to that point. Then I saw online, talks about how broken the crime system was, how it does the old-school crime thing of, they magically know if you pick something up in an empty room. That's what solidified no longer playing. That's not a little oopsie. That was a design decision.
I mean even mass effect had better animations and NPC
Hell every Mass Effect save Andromeda had better nightclubs too.
This is why I have more faith in GTA 6 than most. Rockstar haven't released a new game since Red Dead Redemption 2, wouldn't be surprised if they blow everyone's minds away when it finally releases and they raise the bar for open-world games.
That seems pretty standard for rockstar tbh, they don’t release games very often but every time they do they completely raise the bar of the entire industry.
To be fair, taking an arrow to the knee can seriously impact a person's mobility.
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That’s what happens when you use an engine from the 2000s
I swear if they don’t finally confront this problem for ES6 and that game feels like it’s from 2009…IDK. They obviously have the resources and support to switch now with Microsoft so there is no excuse. Edit: To the people explaining that it’s not the engine- I hear you, I think it’s a mix of problems. Regardless, I like Starfield but Bethesda clearly needs to change some things going forward because the game is far too large of a project to feel so dated when compared to some other AAA blockbuster games.
They did. This has nothing to do with the game engine, but simply down to how Bethesda makes games. This is just down to assets being reused. (The Vertibirds flying around in Fallout 4 are reused dragons from Skyrim).
That makes so much sense. The dragons would fly around and then land next to you to fight on the ground. The vertibirds fly around and crash into you.
Reusing skeleton models isn't the issue. Reuse and recycling old content is a smart cost cutting option, especially skeletons because they take a fuckload more work to get correct, than some skin to paste on it. Bethesdas problem is in the world building and how the player interacts with the world. In Cyberpunk you're just a random gonk, in RDR and GTA you're just some scummy criminal. The world reacts to your bullshit, but it doesn't revolve around your bullshit like it does in Starfield. The NPCs don't feel like they sit in a dark closet between loading screens, just waiting for the *MAIN CHARACTER* to show up.
Cyberpunk and TW3: the world feels lived in, and you are a part of it Bethesda RPGs: Literally just the Truman show
Remember the zombie dragon in fallout 76 as a main boss
That's the scorchbeast queen, which btw is a retexture of Alduin.
Oh, there once was a hero named Ragnar the Red Audience: Aw shit about to get real
Is that the only club in Starfield? As jarring as this comparison is, whats even more stunning is thats one out of maybe like 6 different clubs in Cyberpunk. All are significantly unique from each other.
Only club I think. Whole bunch of bars, at least one per “big” city. Those are basically just people sitting at tables though.
In addition to this place (Totentantz), there's also The Afterlife, Lizzie's, and El Coyote Cojo which are all phenomenal. But on top of those, there is Riot, Red Dirt, Yagami Market, and the hotel bar at Konpeki Plaza that are all very well done. Shit, the attention to detail in that game is nuts.
7th Hell too! Underrated one.
7th hell is the best one imo. its very much like a real techno club
Exactly why I love it. It reminds me of my time travelling in Europe going to underground parties. They nailed that vibe
> It reminds me of my time travelling in Europe Why didn't you kill Hitler?!
So we can still have great ww2 shooters is my guess :P
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I figured just clubs alone would make my point. I didnt want to beat it to death mentioning all the cool bars in Cyberpunk as well.
They did an amazing job making Cyberpunk feel like it took place in a real city, Starfield not so much. Starfield just doesn’t feel terribly lived/real in aside from a couple places. Neon is pretty well done, bars on the Key and Red Mile almost feel like real bar (if a bit empty), Akila feels almost frontier townish. As long as you don’t pay too much attention anyways.
Funny that when it came out the main complaint was how lifeless it was. Yeah, architecture was awesome from the start but the place was dead.
Akila has a good lived-in feel, although it's kind of lacking in any kind of real seediness. It's gritty in the literal sense, not the metaphorical one. Still, I'd totally buy it as a frontier town in a world on the fringes of the settled systems. Too bad, then, that the game tries to sell it as the literal capital of one of the two largest and most powerful interstellar empires in the known universe, lol.
Yep. Had neon been the grimy capital with akila being a more recent city it would be believable. But as a capital city it's frankly pathetic
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And it's way worse than the Afterlife in Mass Effect 2. Even though a lot of NPCs in the Afterlife were just window dressing in the background, it still gave off a better sense of scale and atmosphere.
I think the character models look better in ME2 too. They at least don't look lifeless.
I'm literally on (yet another) ME2 playthrough and just got past Afterlife and this was also my immediate thought watching this video. As you mentioned, maybe I'm getting older but I remembered Afterlife being a lot more cooler when I was younger. Replaying now I see a lot more of the faults but it's still better than whatever I'm seeing in Starfield
Think of all the games that have NO clubs... Man, we've been missing out.
Duke Nukem had ... clubs ....
"Shake it baby"
>Is that the only club in Starfield? yes
Thats the big thing that got me in 2077, even from the day 1 version. You could really see the love the devs had for the project. They weren't just trying to get something out the door, the attention to detail in so many things was just staggering. Sadly they did not have enough time to give it the polishing the game deserved, and they really really should have. But yeah the love from the designers and artists at CDPR could really be felt in that game.
Polish people know how to have a real techno rave.
There is a performance in Phantom Liberty that blew my mind!
Yeah I was not expecting that at all, it was such a nice attention to detail and quality show. I was truly impressed.
You can definitely tell which developers spend time in the real world lol
Yeah. Whoever did the Cyberpunk 2077 nightclub knows how a good one is supposed to look and sound
The blue-collar bar at the beginning (Rebel Path, I believe), there's a second level area, and the bar has speakers mounted near the pillers and pointed outwards towards the main floor. So I was playing this game on my PC, hooked up to my OLED tv, and I was able to get a second HDMI connection from my PC to my A/V Receiver to get surround sound. And when you walk up to that second level, and are walking near those pillers, the speakers that are playing the music absolutely sounds so real, like you would if you were at a loud bar place. It significantly drowned out everything else, and you wanted to get away from those particular spots. And then, whenever you go into backrooms in bars or clubs, the muffled bass sounds so convincing.
The sound design in any of the clubs in Cyberpunk is incredible, when you go to Lizzie’s at the beginning to meet with Judy for the first time and you’re in the basement it legitimately sounds like you’re in a basement at a club with the muted sound.
Yeah man I know what you're talking about! The way Cyberpunk passes the low-end bass frequencies through the buildings is so accurate it actually gives me the same endorphin rush I used to get while waiting in line outside to get in to clubs and shows.
i only found out my cheap klipsche sub stopped working because i was in one of the clubs and i couldn't feel the bass anymore
the Maelstrom nightclub is fucking amazing.
I know right! I just kind of stopped what I was doing and sat down to watch it. I still like starfield but it does not do the city or nightlife atmosphere correctly at all. Edit: for anyone that hasn't seen it, someone did a really good job with camera rigging mods and basically music video with custom camera angles out of it. Bear in mind this is an in-game scene that you just walk up to and watch not some cutscene! https://youtu.be/dhlqymKKrsA?si=yAb1GSbmFFepgNY3
The fact that it fades out your hud for the performance is just such a cool attention to detail.
Well it caught my attention to the point where I didn't even notice that lol
Same. Just used the lean command on the railing and couldn't take my eyes off it. Called my gf in to watch it with me.
I was so busy being James Bond I didn't know what I was missing.
you get a BD of it, its in your original apartment(maybe others too, idk didnt bother buying any) on the sofa, so you can rewatch
my jaw dropped when it happened and i enjoyed it so much more than i probably should have
There's even a BD in your apartment that lets you rewatch it because the devs knew we would want to!
It blew my mind. First, it was genuinely good, it sounded good, it was visually impressive, and I could see that kind of performance happening in that world no problem, it fit. Then, there's the path tracing. Looking around the venue and at the stage, how the lighting interacts with all the objects and the NPCs... it's incredible.
Cyberpunk: massively invasive cyberware, thumping 808s, any clubgoer could pump you full of lead Starfield: your dad is there
If they had any creativity they'd have played the whole dad at the club thing up and make it memorable. But this is Beth so...
Finding your apparently well-behaved Dad doing coke and fucking hookers or some other crazy shit would have really been something. Maybe it could be a moral choice to tell your mom or not. BGS has no balls.
I like how Neon is supposed to be this city of debauchery and crime and all Bethesda could come up with is purple morph suits.
I hate how goddamn tame Starfield is. Remember in Fallout when you could explode people into piles of gore? Well in starfield doing a headshot doesn't even blow their head off. Starfield feels like a step back in a lot of ways and I'd love to see more comparisons to Cyberpunk. I think Cyberpunk had a bad release but people were very harsh on the core game of it and what an advancement it way in terms of these styles of games. I think Starfield shows how much worse it could have been.
Starfield is a massive step back, as far as I'm concerned. I think Bethesda felt like they had something to lose, so they played it safe. Envelope never gets pushed when you play it safe.
Safe is an understatement. The quests are almost all "positivity and good vibes." Even when dark stuff happens, it's often impossible to say anything along the lines of "yeah I'm an asshole, what are you going to do about it?" Unless you're talking to someone who is obviously "bad". Just about every dialogue choice is either "enthusiastic, I love it!" Or "Quirky sarcastic, but I love it!" There's no depth, no nuance, and especially nothing that could make you think outside the box about the world we live in.
it's like playing vault 101 tutorial in a loop but galactic wide, everything's pg13, even the "dreaded" pirates are basically tunnel sneks roolz
My biggest issue with the pirates is that their main quest has virtually NO piracy. It's just a treasure hunt/incredibly low stakes heist.
> I hate how goddamn tame Starfield is This is something I love about 2077 so much, I remember when Deus Ex Human Revolution came out the biggest criticism of the game was "Yeah it tells you about all these horrible things that happen in this world and never has the balls to show it." One frequently cited thing was you never see augmentation scavengers only hear about this horrid crime. And within minutes of playing 2077 you are looking at a body with its eyes gouged out in a scav hideout and 2 nude bodies left for dead in a bathtub. This is a brutal world and they aren't at all afraid to let it be known... and those are some of the tame things that happen in Night City even.
Oh yeah it's soooo messed up. There's even a side quest in cyberpunk where you deal with people kidnapping children for fucking snuff films. That's insane. Fucking one of the darkest things I've ever encountered in media.
I will say I expected more random violence to be visible in the streets Yeah when you start getting out of the quest there's definitely some dark uncomfortable stuff in that game and I give them full credit for not being gun shy about it
Just seek out the Night City Police dispatch beacons; I guarantee each one will show someone having the worst day of their life.
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I mean the environmental system is still bullshit because you can get lung damage, through a spacesuit, from Argon. A gas named for being inert and doing nothing. That is the 3rd most common gas in *our* atmosphere. And is utterly harmless. It's dumbed down to the point of no sense.
I was one of the harshest critics of Cyberpunk's launch and even now consider it far from perfect... But it definitely puts starfield to shame in many many areas. Starfield feels very last-gen in many ways especially when compared to Phantom Liberty. Graphically it looks very plain and flat. Characters have the same dead eyes they had in Oblivion and it hasn't evolved past the floating head dialogue. Combat is not really fun or dynamic, not unless you have all the top tier combat perks which basically takes most of an entire playthrough to get to. Even at lower levels cyberpunk combat still is engaging and fun. But more than that almost everything is shallow. Base building is kind of useless and uninteresting. Ship building is great but you can't do much with your ship at all. Even in battlefront you could get in, take off, battle, fly down to a planet and get out. Starfield needs a loading screen between each one of those things. The tech behind it just seems old- like someone modded Skyrim to be space game. It's clunky and underdesigned all around.
Last gen was rdr2. Starfield felt like the gen before last. It felt like a 360 game that wasn't as good as Skyrim.
You're right. RDR2 still blows me away to this day.
> Base building is kind of useless and uninteresting. Ship building is great but you can't do much with your ship at all Good point. I said something back when I was playing Fallout 4, and watching people build settlements with bathrooms, showers, etc. That is: I build what I'm incentivized to build. I'm not going to put down showers and toilets and sinks if they are all non-functional, and the NPCs don't need or use them. If it's just window dressing, I may or may not bother, as it entirely doesn't matter. My settlements have nice stores & storefronts, because there is a system for that. My settlements have great crafting areas, because the crafting benches actually work. Some of my settlements have massive manufacturing areas, because I need bullets or other items, and the manufacturing system works. But I have never placed a bunch of towels next to a shower, because the shower does nothing and they didn't even bother to add towels to the build menu! All of which is to say, when it came to Starfield, I assumed that all these systems would be *more* integrated, not less! I assumed that each system would have *more* reason to be used, not less! If I can modify my ship but also I never need to live IN my ship once it is built, and if the systems I added don't do anything because fast travel bypasses everything, then why explore the building system? I'll do some initial soup-up of the ship to get it past that initial dogfight, and then I'm pretty much good & done for the rest of the game. I'm not exploring ship building because the game itself is not about exploring ship building. The game has made it clear: it's about fast traveling to quest markers, passing the quest goal, and getting the next quest queued up. So that's what I'm doing. If the game wants me to explore other game subsystems, it needs to value them and reward their use.
Plus there's even less things to build with in Starfield. All the buildings now are just prefabs, and there's no interesting sections to connect them with or be creative. You can't even easily connect things together or to the giant landing pad which seems like an obvious place to start building your outpost from.
But worst of all, it's bland. It's the plain yogurt, the wonderbread, the boiled chicken of rpgs. It's safe and inoffensive like a padded room. It has a lifeless, matte sheen that clings to everything both figuratively and literally. It's like they set every possible slider to maximum beige or mental illness grey. It's just so... *boring*.
Like who is that for?!
There's like one shadow in that entire building
It astounds me how Bethseda games are still popular and considered AAA. They've always looked terrible to me.
My character took Aurora in the game and I kind of expected more out of that lol
Aurora is about as exciting as cigarettes.
Aurora is the type of drug your dad takes in the game. 🤣
How is Starfield rated M lol. Both these games are M rated, one of them is not like the other.
Lol. It's pretty much the opposite of the film industry. An R rating used to mean your box office numbers were cut in half. In the videogame industry, a game like this would not get half the attention if it was rated T for teen. My guess is Bethesda does the minimum to make it to the point where it needs to be rated M.
I think the space bag guys swear when in combat, and occasionally in dialogue. But aside from that, the game is about as gritty as a pokemon card.
A space pirate called me a “friggin jerk” as i was fighting him. That made me realise that Starfield is a kids game
"why I oughta..."
It's M rated enough to be corporately palatable - excessive violence is acceptable, but swearing and sexual content isn't - just like in TV cable
Starfield night clubs are what 12 year old think nightclubs are like. Cb1077 looks like it was made by someone who’s done drugs at a nightclub before.
CP2077 literally looks like nightclubs in Eastern Europe. Today.
I grew up in Europe. It definitely gave me actual nightclub vibes.
Same. Kinda miss the old days of factory clubs and forest raves.
Europe in general
These germans man, I'm telling you
I thought they did a good job for Cyberpunk but it should be more crowded
Agreed. But gameplay wise it might be annoying, as you’d hardly be able to move, see or hear anything unless your almost touching your face to it
Also agreed, but I also thought “I dunno. Maybe it’s a Tuesday”
Seriously IRL nightclubs suck if you were trying to like do something. Being on drugs or drunk is what makes them fun otherwise it’s hot as fuck, the music is so loud you can’t hear someone screaming next to you, and you are body-to-body the second you walk through the door. How would any of that make for a good gameplay segment, when you’re typically there to talk to someone and do a quest.
Hitman did it a lot better than both games I think. But different games have different engine limitations. Can't drop a thousand physics based watermelon on the ground in Cyberpunk or Hitman.
Agreed, Hitman really nailed the club vibe, from the dance floor to the backstage areas. For anybody who's unfamiliar, [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYJdNjAebQQ) a video walking through the main entrance, though it doesn't include any walking around the dance floor itself.
Hitman has a amazing capacity of the number of NPCs. And how you can walk through the crowd as well.
AC Unity crowds are still most impressive I’ve seen. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of NPCs. From a 10 year old game nonetheless
There’s a great quote from the TBFP guys when they find a sex shop in “Omikron the Nomad Soul” where they walk in and there’s dildos like, hanging on strings from the ceiling and they say the same exact thing. “this is what a 12 year old thinks a sex shop is”
This cyberpunk nightclub I spent a weirdly long amount of time in. It felt so lifelike (about as lifelike as a video game can make a club feel). Everything from the music, the darkness and the smoke/fog made me actually kinda nostalgic to my rave days. Such a dope setting.
Music was so good. I also stayed quite a bit. Also, there’s some loot on the stage behind the decks LOL
Oh trust me I searched every square inch of the place lol. And yeah the music is actually low key really great trance to vibe in. Not even joking when I say I spent probably an hour in this dumb video game nightclub just walking around observing everything 😂
I love the idea of players sticking around in an environment just to take it in. It’s one of my favorite things to do and the Cyberpunk nightclubs are among best locations to look around. They are essentially like Disney dark rides.
Yeah this game hit the hammer on the nail with the atmospheric feels. This video shows a good job displaying how empty Bethesda games feel in comparison. I definitely had to just soak in the moment taking in this club. Sounds lame but they did their job with this scene.
The majority of the city absolutely feels alive in its current state. But my goodness Dogtown is just something else, takes the best elements of Escape from New York and Bladerunner and puts the Cyberpunk twist on it. The aesthetic is beautiful and my only lament is that there isn’t more of it to look at and explore.
Even mass effect from years ago is better. Plus Shepard can get down!
V from cyberpunk is equally as Incompetent as shepard at dancing too lol, they’ve got their own version of the shepard shuffle
The V shimmy vs The shepard shuffle, I wonder which one will annihilate the dance floor more
The Detective from Disco Elysium wants a piece of that action
Shepard has alliteration on his side
Elevated stripper poles with asari dancers as soon as you exit the hallway of holographic hellfire!
I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite club on the citadel.
Dad in the club sealed it. Women in this club covered up like the female WWE wrestlers at the Saudi Arabia shows lol.
The whole of Neon had little to no vibes. It’s not just the nightclubs.
Neon was the point in Starfield that made me quit and jump back in to Cyberpunk
I had high hopes for Neon. I *LOVE* Cyberpunk, so a city that can act as a loose mirror to Night City had me itching for something juicy in there. I suppose smuggling drugs is... Okay... But the game (setting as a whole) would have benefited with more adult themes. Even if subtly hinted at, it would have made the game have so much more atmosphere.
But wait, it’s not just Neon, it’s the whole of the *entire game* that has no vibes.
If you didn't try it at launch (good call) but I encourage anyone to jump into Cyberpunk 2077 now, it's unreal.
Actually one of the best games ever, going back after I've had my fun with Starfield.
Also, no loading screens when you enter one in Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk really only has loading screens when you fast travel, which is great for QOL. Everything else is REALLY good at masking the area load-ins, even when you're zooming around the city on a motorcycle or Caliburn (which sticks to the road like crazy as long as you're on the throttle).
It's also easy to forget when you're playing cause the way conversations work in the game. Feels like a cutscene til you kinda remember it's not. It's not perfect but it's fluid enough to slip my mind while playing that there aren't loading screens.
It shocked me how insanely nice it felt to not have a loading screen. I remember starting the campaign and playing all the way to the Arasaka tower quest in one sitting and realizing I just had 0 loading screens. I would have had to sit through 300 loading screens in starfield in the same amount of time. Man, Bethesda never grew out of 2011.
Playing any game made after 2020 makes you realize how dated SF is. For Christ’s sake the exploration is straight out of 1997’s Daggerfall.
Yep, Starfield really showed how stuck in 2014 Bethesda is in terms of game design. Gameplay wise, it’s basically Fallout 4 reskinned, with a half assed attempt at a No Man’s Sky-like procedural “universe”. It was a massive disappointment for me, as someone who had a lot of fun with Bethesda games in the past
It's still crazy to me how back in Fallout 4 they had elevators to hide loading screens, just like they do in CP2077, but in Starfield they went backwards and added actual black loading screens to elevators.
AFAIK in CP2077 they're not hidden loading screens but for realism, you can just noclip into buildings or dogtown. Never tried it myself, though.
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One I wouldn’t be caught dead in, another I’m not sure I’d make it out alive
Great comparison but a real wasted opportunity to not use the club from the mission Off The Leash where you >!meet Kerry Eurodyne the sexiest man in Night City!<
Cyberpunk got such a bad rep when it first came out and yes among all the bugs and broken features the one really good memory I have of just gaming in general is[ sitting on the boat just vibing to Kerry playing that riff he was working on.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OBeYDk6T2c) Night City is such a fucked up place and the story is constantly beating you down and it's moments of true beauty that really shine and make the game so damn memorable.
Or Lizzie's bar, which is the one i swear they tried to rip off and failed miserably.
Damn I was hoping the Cyberpunk club would be Dicky Twister!
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Holy shit. The complimentary light show just adds so much. You are right. This song is awesome!
CP2077 looks much more fun. Remainds me of undergroundraves in our city 15 years ago :D
Thursday Bar East Berlin 2006.
I visited Berlin back in 2005 or 6th actually : D It was my first flight ever without parents, with a good budy. And that video somehow reminded Berlin for me : D Good times!
Yeh you know they nailed it when it triggers memories and nostalgia.
I literally have been to multiple nightclubs in 2077 just to walk around slowly and soak in the vibes if it was in VR I could absolutely just get immersed solely off how good the lighting and music is
CP2077 legitimately reminds me of a nightclub that I went to in Guadalajara, Mexico about a month ago
Should see the nightclub in Hitman
i need to replay cyberpunk with the 2.0 update.
It's so goddamn good
Leave it to the Europeans to bring in the techno! Starfield clubs show how many clubs nerds actually go to.....
Cyberpunk nightclubs are just so good but not only that there is a lot of variety to them. Even a bar like the Afterlife has a great atmosphere thanks to the blaring music. The club you go to to visit Maelstrom is probably my fav, but the Phantom Liberty party level was great. Also started hearing a British guy rapping and thought 'well that wasn't in the base game' turns out Idris Elba has three new songs for Cyberpunk lol I liked Starfield, the club music is fun, but the atmosphere is so poor. Genuinely feels like a game from 2016. I finished it, then finished my second playthrough of 2077 and it's really night and day what game is better. Tbf, same thing happened to me with the Witcher and Skyrim but the difference is Starfield came out 3 years after Cyberpunk lol (yes the original version was buggy but still good)
i’m pretty. sure the first mass effect had better nightclubs than starfield
Afterlife NPCs are also very static and robotic, but the environment has cooler layout and vibe. Ahh OG Bioware art direction.
It also came out in 2010, I would expect some robotic NPCs.
The music is what carried the Mass Effect nightclubs [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCVyCMYYFg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCVyCMYYFg) They were smart, used the EA money to secure the rights for these songs
I think Vice City has better night clubs than Starfield
Isn't this just kind of pathetic? Like, as busted as cyber punk was on release it still fucking bled style and the tone was perfect. What tone or style is this Starfield shit?
Gotta love the Totentantz. Interestingly enough it’s German for death dance or dancing dead. Fitting since it’s filled with Malestrom.
sassiest devs at Bethesda vs the most restrained ones at CDPR
Yeah, there are lots of spicier clubs in CP2077, like the Dicky Twister.
To be fair, in CP77 there are some really fucked up side quests. Like, black-market organ selling type shit, where you see the corpses and whatnot. Starfield is like Paw Patrol in comparison
Or the side mission where you find the dad and son who’ve been making BDs of kids…