I don’t even mean I wouldn’t trust Obsidian. I mean I wouldn’t trust the specific team they had working on New Vegas, which was an absurdly stacked deck that they seemingly haven’t been able to re-create since.
Films you can re-watch twice and have it be just as good the second time are rare. Bethesda wanted a film you could rewatch ten times while simultaneously larping as a cosmic god and trying to break everything you could.
But this isn’t a film. People replay systems-driven games all the time, because you can tweak the variables and make it feel new. RPGs have done this plenty of times. Interacting with a separate quest line that occasionally intersects with things you did in one of your previous timelines is something that there is absolutely a way to do, and Obsidian has made exactly that type of systems-driven RPG plenty of times.
if RPGs have done this plenty of times, then it’s not a new idea, and why are we talking about it in the context of the new ideas starfield had?
people replay games for the gameplay. bethesda wanted a game you could replay for the story, and then have it still work as a story when the player deliberately sequence breaks everything because of their omniscience
The thing that Obsidian has done plenty of times is system-driven reputations. The thing that would be new is bending that into new playthroughs on NG+ that interact with your past playthroughs.
I don’t know how worth it is to try to explain my idea of what a hypothetical better version of Starfield is, but the short answer is:
only let you do one faction quest per playthrough
those factions’ quest lines already, in the real Starfield that exists today, intersect with one another
change how different factions react to you and those other factions based on a system similar to the type of reputation system Obsidian has done before, not unlike Levine’s “Narrative Legos” video, but it doesn’t even have to be that advanced
It wouldn’t involve grinding. If I still haven’t articulated it well enough, don’t worry about it, because that game doesn’t exist anyway.
I don’t even mean I wouldn’t trust Obsidian. I mean I wouldn’t trust the specific team they had working on New Vegas, which was an absurdly stacked deck that they seemingly haven’t been able to re-create since.
Films you can re-watch twice and have it be just as good the second time are rare. Bethesda wanted a film you could rewatch ten times while simultaneously larping as a cosmic god and trying to break everything you could.
But this isn’t a film. People replay systems-driven games all the time, because you can tweak the variables and make it feel new. RPGs have done this plenty of times. Interacting with a separate quest line that occasionally intersects with things you did in one of your previous timelines is something that there is absolutely a way to do, and Obsidian has made exactly that type of systems-driven RPG plenty of times.
if RPGs have done this plenty of times, then it’s not a new idea, and why are we talking about it in the context of the new ideas starfield had?
people replay games for the gameplay. bethesda wanted a game you could replay for the story, and then have it still work as a story when the player deliberately sequence breaks everything because of their omniscience
The thing that Obsidian has done plenty of times is system-driven reputations. The thing that would be new is bending that into new playthroughs on NG+ that interact with your past playthroughs.
how would your reputation carry over when nobody in the universe knows who you are? it sounds like you’re just inventing a new thing you have to grind
I don’t know how worth it is to try to explain my idea of what a hypothetical better version of Starfield is, but the short answer is:
It wouldn’t involve grinding. If I still haven’t articulated it well enough, don’t worry about it, because that game doesn’t exist anyway.