ajtch Posted October 2, 2023 Share Posted October 2, 2023 (edited) I was going to write this down on a google doc for myself but then I figured; "why not just post it on the forums?" I don't really do this often, but this is the first Bethesda RPG I've played on PC from launch. By the time I got to Skyrim and the Fallouts, the modding scene was in full swing already. So I thought I'd list the type of mods I'd like to see so that Starfield can really live up to its potential. Note that I'm not a modder, and this list is by no means a way to push modders into developing mods that may not be possible yet. This is just what I'd like to see in the future. I’ll probably add to this list over time. So, let's get started: Anything and everything Elianora. If the Elderscrolls has 9 Divines, Elianora is the 10th. Her player homes and clothing mashups are a staple of any Bethesda game and I can’t wait to see what she does with Starfield. (And considering how bare bones the building system is in Starfield, we need her.) Body/Hair/Tattoo mods. Let’s all be honest for a second. Starfield’s character creator is the weakest its ever been in a Bethesda title. To go from Fallout 4’s in depth creator to a creator where you can’t even have more than one scar or blemish is a huge step down. The hairs are pretty unremarkable as well. And yet again, Bethesda forgets most people get tattoos on their body and not their face. I know modders will save us from this Hell eventually. Better planet generation. This one is one of my biggest disappointments, but not one that surprised me. The planets kinda suck. There are some gorgeous locations, for sure. Like Casseopia, that jungle you go to for Sarah’s quest. It looks very dense, and humid, and beautiful. But then I decided to leave that valley to see what the rest of the planet looked like: No Man’s Sky launch day levels of RNG terrain. There are two terrain types in this game; flat and mountain. You won’t ever see any rivers, or waterfalls, or canyons, or caves (that aren’t the same 3 dungeons reused ad nauseam). The quality of the planets are not cutting it for a Bethesda title. Oblivion looks better. Better locations/dungeons. Going off of the last thing, the dungeons in this game are a far cry in quality from even Fallout 76’s. I don’t know just how many dungeons there actually are but 100s of hours into Starfield and I can count the amount of interesting ones on one hand. The vast majority of locations are just [abandoned thing] with random raider clones and loot. No story, no secret to discover, nothing. You go in, shoot enemies, and get stuff. I just miss the times when going to a new location brought some sort of fascinating story to uncover about what that place was and what happened. There are SOME locations that still do this, just not enough. More immersive animations. I’m a stickler for small details in RPGs, so immersion is very important to me. One thing that has always broke immersion for me has been lack of animations when it comes to eating, drinking, or other activities. I want to be able to sit down at a bar and have a drink, not just look into my menu and eat the whole bottle. 6. Dynamic companions/fleshed out romance mods. I think most of us can agree that Starfield’s followers leave a lot to be desired. I mean, I like them; but they don’t really do much. They have very little dialogue to offer, and the romance in Starfield falls into that trap most games fall into where a romance is treated like a race to the end with nothing to follow. At least Cyberpunk had romance scenes. In Starfield, the best you can do is have a disjointed [Flirt] conversation that feels like its straight out of Oblivion. With all the amazing follower mods from Skyrim and Fallout, I’d hope Bethesda would step up their game. But it looks like the modders will have to save us again. 7. Alternate Start mods. This one is a given. The background system is very nice (even if its a bit limited), but you're still trapped into the same role as a miner who managed to kill a whole gang of pirates and get their own ship for free... on their first day on the job. We all know Emil thinks we're all stupid shooter fans who just want to get the RP crap over with and get right into fightin'. But the roleplayers among us want a bit more leadup. Edited October 2, 2023 by ajtch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zanity Posted October 2, 2023 Share Posted October 2, 2023 It must be your lucky day (save for the named modder- doesn't she now work for Beth?- so rule her out sadly). Everything you want is everything modders are gagging to implement. But, friend, it is going to take time- a LOT of time. What Starfield needs most of all are new FRAMEWORKS- the ultimate concept for better modding. These are essentially modder created tools, coding packages, data structures and generic guidelines for mods that can all pull from the same resources, and work together. The official tools will be a very primitive beginning, as the appalling base game proves. But they will be the real starting point. After they are released, a new vision for the game needs to form in the community. How space is done. How planets are linked. How missions are handled, and mission breadcrumbs spread across multiple modders work. If anything but the simplest mods fight one another on standards, or limit themselves to only what the terrible base game achieves, everything great is lost. A generally agreed BETTER SPACE FRAMEWORK, for instance, will then allow lower mods to simply operate in the vastly improved system. Likewise a vastly improved 'follower' framework will then allow modders who want to focus on story and appearance to craft their new followers. You want 'cut-scenes' like Cyberpunk. Sorry, that's a no-no. The Creation Engine can no more support those than it can support ground vehicles. Pre-renders are a no-no too, unless they are flash-backs, down to the customisation of characters and environments. And let's face it. What do so many ambitious modders want? To make their own planets. While Starfield's astonishingly awful coding cannot do 'real' planets with a continuous surface, it does allow unlimited square patches with fast-travel between them. The hard boundaries on each square are a bummer (and no amount of modding can make this limitation go away), but disguised fast travel ideas (hidden loading screens) allow a creative modder to invent narrative excuses to mitigate the tech restrictions. Many people complain that even within the limits of Starfield's planet surface system, it is annoying that the features seen from one landing square are never present in another. Mods can fix this, or even generate geometrically correct contiguous land detail in real-time. This would allow a 'REAL' Mars, for instance, even if from any given landing spot one could not travel on land more than a few miles. You mention the PUZZLING lack of story elements in the random dungeons. But you notice they are awful crude clones, cut-n-paste everywhere you go. And because they are clones, with everything hard baked into their geometry, Beth decided it would be silly to even try giving them random story elements. Let me assure you the Starfield you play today was not the Starfield that originally began dev. This is the Starfield they COULD deliver, not the one Todd's imagination wanted to deliver- after years of failure, Starfield was crudely respecced purely on the basis of quick and easy do-ability. The same thing happened to Cyberpunk 1.5 years before released. Contractually the devs had to release on the last gen consoles. This they could not do while keeping the original game ambition. So the last 1.5 years of dev involved tearing literally everything out of the game until the pathetic shell that was left could just about stagger, half-dead, on the old consoles. Today we have Cyberpunk 2.0, a desperate attempt to put back into the game some of those originally planned systems, but without the assistance of the original engine coders, who left CDPR in disgust and despair over the last-gen console issue. While Starfield compromised somewhat to run well enough on the Xbox-S (that console is currently the bane of the game dev industry), its real lack of quality in every respect is wholly a consequence of the hopeless dev team at Beth. Redfall was a terrible warning to the industry of just how bad things have gotten at Beth. In a sane world, Beth would be shut down by Microsoft, and its very valuable IPs distributed to new MS dev teams. Beth is safe, however, since Halo proved MS cannot create new skilled dev teams to save its life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fraquar Posted October 3, 2023 Share Posted October 3, 2023 You seem to be asking for what Bethesda should have delivered in the first place....The CK on game launch..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myerk2008 Posted October 3, 2023 Share Posted October 3, 2023 Having the option to close the cell doors after you open them would be nice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajtch Posted October 4, 2023 Author Share Posted October 4, 2023 Having the option to close the cell doors after you open them would be nice. OMG I want this too. Its so annoying when you have an apartment that doesn't have its own cell so you like leave the door open for the world Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mebme Posted November 28, 2024 Share Posted November 28, 2024 On 10/2/2023 at 11:34 AM, ajtch said: 6. Dynamic companions/fleshed out romance mods. I think most of us can agree that Starfield’s followers leave a lot to be desired. I mean, I like them; but they don’t really do much. They have very little dialogue to offer, and the romance in Starfield falls into that trap most games fall into where a romance is treated like a race to the end with nothing to follow. At least Cyberpunk had romance scenes. In Starfield, the best you can do is have a disjointed [Flirt] conversation that feels like its straight out of Oblivion. With all the amazing follower mods from Skyrim and Fallout, I’d hope Bethesda would step up their game. But it looks like the modders will have to save us again. I just came here for this. I was playing and felt that the romance options are very weak in this game (only 4!?!?), and the flirt dialogue is not great. There are a few lost opportunities for romance for the different routes. Marika, Heller, Lin, Hadrian, Diana Brackenridge, I saw on Reddit a lot of people would have loved to romance Delgado. Even a casual fling in Neon or the Red Mile. Hell, a hookup with Emillian from Paradiso is already halfway written. A mod of this size would be large, I'm sure, especially if it has voice acting, but I can dream... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tulius Posted December 31, 2024 Share Posted December 31, 2024 (edited) On 11/28/2024 at 4:55 AM, mebme said: I just came here for this. I was playing and felt that the romance options are very weak in this game (only 4!?!?), and the flirt dialogue is not great. There are a few lost opportunities for romance for the different routes. Marika, Heller, Lin, Hadrian, Diana Brackenridge, I saw on Reddit a lot of people would have loved to romance Delgado. Even a casual fling in Neon or the Red Mile. Hell, a hookup with Emillian from Paradiso is already halfway written. A mod of this size would be large, I'm sure, especially if it has voice acting, but I can dream... Indeed, in Fallout NV we had "Willow - A Better Companion Experience" by llamaRCA and Nivea, in Skyrim I recall "Vilja" by Emma Amgepo Lycanthrops, and among others we had the sister in Fallout 3, or the wife Nora in Fallout 4, or even Heather Casdin again by llamaRCA... all wonderfull mod companions, some with quests, and this was just to say a few. I hope we can see something similar in Starfield, we really need it, the vanilla companions are few and... vanilla. On 10/2/2023 at 4:34 PM, ajtch said: Better planet generation. This one is one of my biggest disappointments, but not one that surprised me. The planets kinda suck. There are some gorgeous locations, for sure. Like Casseopia, that jungle you go to for Sarah’s quest. It looks very dense, and humid, and beautiful. But then I decided to leave that valley to see what the rest of the planet looked like: No Man’s Sky launch day levels of RNG terrain. There are two terrain types in this game; flat and mountain. You won’t ever see any rivers, or waterfalls, or canyons, or caves (that aren’t the same 3 dungeons reused ad nauseam). The quality of the planets are not cutting it for a Bethesda title. Oblivion looks better. I would like to see some Medieval planet, I woudn't say "Skyrim" (well, I said it...), but something... Medieval... with swords and spears. There was the "sword and planet" adventures in literature and comics that can give good ideas for mods for "Lost Planets" that became isolated from mankind. From John Carter in Barsoom (doesn't need to be Mars); Mongo ruled by Ming, in Flash Gordon; Etheria/Eternia in the Masters of the Universe; "Fire and Ice" animation movie from 1983, by Frank Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi; The Mercenary, by Segrelles; or even the planet from Avatar... well, I will not mention Fallout or other post-apocalyptic inpired planets (now I recall that there was a mod for Fallout New Vegas that introduced Riddick as a companion)... Another thing that would be interesting to see would be a Robinsonade quest (from Robinson Crusoe), a crash in a planet where we would have to collect materials, or recover a ship, to get out of there... we saw that theme in movies like "65" or "After Earth", or the older "Robinson Crusoe on Mars". EDIT: On the other hand, I would like to see a planet with a big, big city... with vehicles... it is odd that we seem to be the only ones in the universe to have a land vehicle. I mean we saw cities with people and vehicles in games decades ago, can't we have that in Starfield? Edited December 31, 2024 by Tulius Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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