What, you think these are Oblivion NPCs with radiant AI?
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Starfield
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It would be nice if they at least closed up shop at night, or swapped out clerks like the general store merchant in Diamond City.
I just want my pixels to have a full belly and a good night's sleep!
Sorry, best we can do is split the game into DLCs and several editions to extort more money out of people, all while outsourcing the game to nearly every other game company in the world and expect you to whip out $1,000+ for a GPU that may or may not run the game at 60 GPS at 1080p without fake resolutions and frames; also please buy premium and support our small indie studio.
Jokes aside, loving the game, just feeling pissy over the predatory ways the gaming industry has embraced in the last several years.
I've seen many NPCs sleeping. Both crew members and randoms out in the world(s). I've also seen crew members using the kitchen, but I'm not sure about other NPCs in that regard.
It's kinda inconsistent.
Shop keepers are always 100% active at every hour. I can't be a criminal if they're always watching
Yeah I was just in "The Rock" and the ranger I needed to talk to was in bed. I woke his ass up just like in Skyrim and Oblivion lol. "Hey wake up, I finished that thing, gimme my money!"
Same I went to sleep in my captains bed, Sam and Sarah at different times where using it which meant I had to go sleep in the peasant quarters. I've also seen all of them sitting at a table presumably "eating" by themselves or in pairs since there was food on the table. 1 time Ioaded into my ship to see everyone in the mess hall staring at me children of the corn style, thought there was about to be a mutiny. Lastly I periodically see them at select work stations. One of Barrett's fav spots was in my workshop fiddling with the research console. I've also seen Sarah "interact" with the weapons table or seen any I've assigned as crew sit down at crew stations/consoles around my ship
I suspect it has something to do with the complexity of extraterrestrial time tracking. How long should they sleep? Local time or UT? Do human sleep cycles eventually sync with their planet? Should shops close during the day if people sleep on a UT schedule? Bah. Nobody gets to sleep.
NPCs appear to operate according to the local time of the cell they're in. So they sleep on UT in your ship in space and Jemison time (local hour == 125 UT minutes) in the Lodge. The game doesn't appear to have any issue with this whatsoever.
Vendors, and many quest-related NPCs never seem to sleep or eat. It looks like some of this was done to decrease player frustration. Now we never have to wait for shops to open and we never have to worry if we arrived to confront a corporate exec while they're out or sleeping. It simplifies the work the designers have to do too. They could have designed around this, but might have considered it a low priority to have night-shift workers or different kiosk rules.
Meanwhile the members of Constellation use their bedrooms (except Cora who seems to wander the basement at night), and that guy living on disability in Cydonia keeps going to back to bed without asking me for the next book. Muria from the GalBank lobby in New Atlantis likes to go sit at the outdoor TerraBrew all night and have a non-conversation with the diplomat lady.
Sorry, that's 2006 tech. It was too long ago, they just kinda...forgot.
they forgot in skyrim? where people slept and ate?
It is all that damn Terrabrew.
Keeps em going 24/7.
Now I want to check on everyone who drinks Tranquilitea to see if they are the only NPCs that sleep.
Good question. In Skyrim, everyone slept except the guards. I wonder if it was just too tough to model with the different day intervals on each planet?
The guards slept in Skyrim. Maybe some of them don't? But the whiterun guards definitely slept, they had barracks that they used
Maybe, but then again, they could have just done it on ut, since humans dont change. I think it was a design decision to keep things from being confusing.
Because in the future we have transcended the need for food and sleep
They’re secretly all terrormorphs. Who live off coffee.
They've gotten lazier and lazier with the schedule system since Oblivion first introduced it. Fallout 4 has the same problems with tons of NPCs not even having the basic "eat food" times.
Starfield also adds tons of dynamically generated NPCs for the crowds. I doubt those would have a schedule, as it seems an entirely separate system from how they would dynamically spawn unnamed guards and things. But it's also weird how shops run by humans are open 24/7 and the store owner doesn't eat, sleep or go to the bathroom. 😬
It could be explained away with future science in-game, but it’s not.
Cause the game is not that good and engaging.
Is there a reason you're saying that or are you just complaining for the sake of it under a random post?
Yes there are. The game is once again a consecutive series of fetch quests. It's always "go/get/kill X" and comeback to quest giver. You also spend most of your time fast travelling back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back again. Almost every decision is also "choose a side" New Vegas Style, which is not bad perse but the fucking quests though are just a chore of repetition. Enemies are dumb as rocks and soo easy to kill at every level they're just more or less bulletspongy.
Timing and events also don't matter. Completing faction quests do absolutely nothing except for loot. Nobody acts differently, the enemies stay the same the world just keeps trucking as it was. Everything is just constanstly stagnating, waiting for the player to complete the necessary main quests. That sucks, that sucked in Fallout, that sucked in Skyrim yet here we are 2023 new ip, crazy new competition in RPGS but they didn't work on that. The world still feels fake and dead, even moreso now that we experienced very good rpgs in that regard in recent years. edit: There's also too much black and white good guys/bad guys characters and factions, it's incredibly boring.
AI is also abysmally bad. My companions make a habit of standing in doors (not just companions btw), running in front of my sights or grenades, go leeroy jenkins on the first enemy they see while I'm sneaking, etc, etc... If I didn't need the inventory space, I would never recuit any of them.
I'll end with the only good thing for me and it was ship building. Great new implementation in both design and interaction with the player. It's also super rewarding to hunt for ships or highjack them when they land or by spending the points and maxing the skills to build massive destroyers. Great addition to a space faring RPG. Unfortunately Bethesda can't do UI's so both ship building and outpost building are such a pain to navigate and don't allow basic control features (basically unchanged from f4 in that reason).
So yeah game not real good. Looks flashy and all but ultimately it's just the same old skyrim klunker under the hood and it shows. They seriously overlooked how RPGs have come forward. Writing is also completely overshadowed by the chore that is the main gameplay loop. Anyway your mileage may vary. But I felt like the complain of OP could easily be attributed to a lazy studio that didn't do much more than slap a paint job on an old beater. Skyrim is still more fun.