A quite Remarkable bug

[zanity]

So on the main mission, back at base planet in orbit ready to choose the landing location. A ton of fast-travel icons appear linked to the location, but all are greyed out. Two other locations on the same planet are fine, both ready to initiate landing (both, of course, would be the wrong land instance). Zoom in and out of the star map. Even try pressing 'e' (tho the screen states it wants mouse 1, which is doing nothing). Over and over. Zoom in, zoom out, rotate the planet. Activate other landing spots to see if it'll shake something loose- nothing.

 

Yay for the agenda hire practices at Beth that allow the "brightest and best" to work on the script code. I mean who gets fed up of followers constantly standing dead still facing a blank wall- eh? Even Anne of Green Gables eventually learned her geometry, but apparently today "math is (too) hard",and Todd couldn't agree more.

 

The bug is this. When approaching a planet, you get the "illicit cargo" customs scan. Jump too quickly into the select landing location mode, and that script halts. Without ANY indication (I mean you don't hear the message complete, but of course you just assume it has in the background). You can mess with the Star-map quite easily without restarting it- which is why the bug didn't go away for me. Eventually- I think I returned to the planet view, and didn't actually do anything while thinking- the script restarted and the audio completed- or the 'scan' completed- so now I could land.

 

Starfield is riddled with the worst code I've ever witnessed in a AAA game. And none of it was corrected by a supposed extra year of QA. Because there wasn't any QA. Because the people responsible for the code lacked any ability to fix their own code- a fact Todd was fully aware of.

 

Space is so primitive in this game, there is literally almost nothing to get right- and even then Starfield gets everything wrong- the worst being the interface.

 

And if the custom scan links to the spaceport, and not the planet in general, that would surely happen on landing, or at least best on selecting the spaceport and beginning the landing process. But this insanely poor game scans you on arrival at the planet, but still allows you to land on the planet anywhere else even if the scan fails to complete- I mean what story sense does that make? Any other game made by a company with an iota of self respect would have a patrol vehicle approach in space, or have a team of custom agents scan your ship on landing- either of which even Beth's lousy engine could have handled.

 

The meme is that Beth puts out shoddy rubbish, and waits for the modder community to do actual quality coding for free. I would never have gone that far in the past, but with Starfield that meme is now literally true.

Edited September 23, 2023 by zanity

[lvlnd]

I think they really under delivered, and with all the hype that is was going to be so much more with so much better AI and experiences and interactions....no on all those.