#in starfield it is literally just being told what to do and being given no reason for doing it. and this is supposed to be a game | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

zydrateacademy · 3 months

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Starfield Addendum: Ryujin and Stealth Design

I posted my review on Steam and here on Tumblr before completing the Ryujin questline. There's things to like about it but the penultimate mission was an awful experience.

Disclaimer: There are spoilers. I don't get into specifics on the who's and what's and I don't name names so even reading this post you can still mostly experience the story on your own. I just kind of spoil the general expectations and layouts of certain missions.

Side thought: I've already been told that there's a 'cheesy' way to blitz through the questline. Ryujin doesn't want you to ever murder anyone but they actually don't ever really care if you're marked as 'caught'. So there's a strategy of literally sprinting through the missions, hitting the objectives, eating food and medpaks and just escaping the area. In theory you'll still get the bonus rewards.

Just in case someone wants to "um actually" parts of this post. I just don't feel that that's the intended style of gameplay here. So let me start with the stealth.

Playing the game normally, still doing my first run clocking at about 24 hours. Some main quest, some side stuff, some spacefaring, some contraband. All of it trying to stealth through most encounters.

Just kind of experiencing the game as a first timer. At first stealth was a chore, nigh impossible beyond the first hit. I got an early lucky drop when an enemy bandit gave me a suppressed pistol (my review talks about how stupidly obtuse crafting is, ~24 hours and I still can't really kit all my own stuff out yet, just wearing what was dropped or rewarded) that luckily had a scope on it and stealth finally became a viable option even when I was only one or two perks into the stealth skill. So stealth is sadly not something you can just dive into, at least not in the same way as Skyrim.

I haven't tested stealth melee but judging from the low damage numbers I can't imagine it being very good. The stealth perk only gives bonuses to suppressed weapons, not melee attacks. So very quickly, melee could potentially fall behind. There's a blurb somewhere on TVtropes on Starfield that mentions that melee is almost completely useless as 98% of enemies will be shooting at you. I only see a melee enemy once in a while, meanwhile Starfield follows the same formulae of "dungeon bosses" that they did in Skyrim. The area's boss can be about 8-15 levels above you and they can hit incredibly hard with the scaling so it's a bad time to try and rush them while they're dumping bullets on full automatic.

So there's no sneaky stabby here, the game's main stealth conceit is making sure you're a suppressed sniper. And I haven't even acquired a proper sniper rifle yet but I have a silenced pistol and single shot rifle that do just fine.

Now, shooting a spacer in the head will still put your stealth meter in the orange and force enemies to patrol. I think over a decade of Skyrim (and even some in Fallout 4) have made the open world RPG gamer community a bit complacent, as everyone seems to miss the days where you could silently pick enemies off without their mates knowing. But if a spacer sees their heavily armored mate hit the deck with a crack in their helmet and blood on the ground, they will of course start doing some patrolling. They'll give up the search eventually.

However, enemy sight lines are both incredibly wide and far reaching to the point where there's a mod with 170,000 downloads trying to nerf them. I might have to get it.

So let's veer into the game's stealth faction, Ryujin Industries. Supposedly this game's version of the Thieves Guild, with Neon City serving as a cyberpunk version of Riften. Their introduction was neat, giving me a fair bit of Arasaka-but-worse, with their black/red motif and Japanese ownership. I liked their vibe, especially since I am effectively playing the same character I do on 2077.

I briefly had a few warning signs before being given one very good mission, then it went downhill.

First, Ryujin has a fairly strict no-murder policy. Now I have no idea if they actually kick you out or not because I tried to play by their rules for the experience but I do know you get chastised if you do actually kill anyone. This actually proves to be a huge detriment as you can't eliminate patrollers without angering your employers. I think they took Skyrim's TG as a lesson about how you could murderhobo your way through that questline without much of an issue but they forgot to split the difference. Starfield could have benefitted from Oblivion's style where if you kill someone in the same interior as where your job is supposed to be, you get kicked out of the guild. In Skyrim, Fallout, and otherwise I think Beth doesn't want people to lose out on content so they try to make everything accessible. They should be appealing to logic. If you fucked up, reload a last save you filthy animal.

The first five or so missions are like a baby's introduction to basic espionage. Go hack someone's computer, go slip this item in someone's storage, go talk to a guard to get their keycard (though I think I could have actually just pickpocketed them for that one). There's no danger or any real threat as long as you're not playing a braindead murderhobo.

To contrast, Skyrim's thieves guild sets you loose pretty quickly. You have the two radiant questgivers, all give 7 or so different "types" of missions to pick from. (This comes as a post-questline reward for Ryujin). So you can pick up two (more with mods) of those and go to the island estate to sneak around a bandit-controlled base. Now it still encourages stealth because those mercenaries have absolutely ungodly amounts of hitpoints, like five times the amount their counterparts in the open world do. They only hit as hard as their level demands (and wielding iron weapons) but if you're a fledgling thief they can be a real bastard to deal with in open combat.

That's what Ryujin should have done. Beef up the security, let us kill them if we have to but you can still figure out how to punish us for entering open combat beyond some chastising in dialog. As it stands I save-scummed through some missions (the penultimate mission, which we'll get to, I think I near broke my F9 key) but ultimately got through a majority of the questline with nary a bad word to my name. I think on any NG+ I might go get a bit head-shotty and see if I get kicked out completely. If I do, then that means Beth weren't fucking cowards and my previous commentary is null and void.

So after baby mode I am given a mission where I'm like oh hell yeah, the actual questline is starting. It's the mission called "Background Checks". Without spoiling any specifics about it, you're actually infiltrating your own employer's base (everyone but a security team is given some fake story about maintenance) to hack into an employee's computer to find some potential espionage. All well and good. The layout should already be partially familiar to you, the vent system is unlocked for your benefit... After that you're just ducking and weaving through some hallways in order to get to the computer. There was a moment where I had to savescum through a couple of encounters because the stealth... just isn't quite there.

So the perk system isn't as robust as Skyrim's was. There's literally only one stealth perk that eventually, all it does is make you 100% harder to detect while also giving the final benefit of opening doors not alerting enemies. Helpful, right. I also made sure to unequip my space suit which you are still technically wearing even if you clicked the option to "hide in settlements", but you're still wearing it and benefit from the stats. Well that's more weight, and it makes you "louder". And let me tell you, it only helps slightly. So with the perks, the weight knowledge, and even eventually an outfit that adds another 25% more detection reduction, I keep running into situations where I peak into a hallway or slightly out a doorway and my alert meter goes from "Hidden" to 90% into the orange "caution" notation in a single second. A half second more and it's red and put in "danger", where enemies will open fire and sound alarms. I still can't grasp why this is, except that they're still working on outdated Fallout 4 coding where some similar problems persist even then.

Beth caught some flack because Starfield is still running on a decade old engine. That wouldn't have bothered me because some of these problems didn't exist with Skyrim. I've had my stealth fuckups on Skyrim but they still didn't cascade in an entire base or cavern assaulting me. Usually just the immediate area. That went away in Fallout 4 with ballistic coding, where a single missed bullet, suppressed or not, will send legions of enemies to investigate you.

So after the quite excellent "Background Checks" mission you're given two other missions and they're... fine, but basic. You can infiltate some criminal base with a couple different options but the option I took I was literally able to just walk in, not make a fuss, talk to the person, then leave. So it was more of a persuasion minigame than a stealth mission. Same with the mission after that. With one or two persuasions you can literally just talk to two guys and pick up a briefcase that doesn't even have the stolen tag on it. Despite you stealing it, it's still something of a scripted event where a guy won't leave his desk. (Maybe he does and I didn't give him enough time). Either way, both missions are thematically fine for the story its telling. I just didn't sneak through them.

And now we approach the problem with Ryujin. We're forced to not defend ourselves properly, at least not in a preventative capacity. There is a damage type where you can nuke robots faster and stun human enemies but that's already a post-fuckup option. During this questline we still can't just snipe guards from afar to make the pathing easier. I did everything Starfield wanted me to do within my power and abilities. Rank 4 in the stealth perk. That one piece of clothing. Took off my space suit. I used detection based chems. Yet even still if you're in the vaguest periphery of the enemy, your hidden meter hits the orange instantly. This is the problem I had with the penultimate mission, "Sabotage".

This is essentially the finale. In theory this should be the "test" of all the things you've learned before, in a normal game. It's not. You're given one skill of "Manipulation" which allows you to temporarily mind control people. You can make them run off, open doors, use objects, etc. Typically in the fashion of getting them out of your way. Half the time it doesn't work and just puts me in their sightlines which was a huge problem in this mission.

It's tutorialized once, where it took me several attempts to even get the guy to move before finally getting it done. I barely learned how the mechanic actually functions, and then I'm shoved off to do this multilayered, multi-objective espionage assault on a rival company. There's elevators, you activate some gas leak to get all the civilians to leave, it's like a whole fucking thing.

It's fucking awful.

Maybe my second attempt will be better. Maybe I should have picked some more pockets. But the mission didn't give me room to learn and breathe.

I wasn't clear on the order of operations. You're able to get into one floor freely, and I tried breaking into other places that way but there were too many guards everywhere. I later then realize; I probably should have just done the gas-evacuation. Several alerts and reloads later I just full on reload an actual save, not just a quicksave, back at the beginning of the tower and I go hit the gas leak. So now most people are gone and the tower is replaced with specific patrolling-type enemies.

They were fucking awful.

I don't know if it was coding, behavior, or all stealth concepts just glitched out on me fully. All the problems I listed before came to me on this mission full force, a wrecking ball to my patience. Between quickloads, enemies would sometimes stop patrolling and just stare down the hallway I needed to go. At one point, dozens of quickloads and attempts, I was once stuck in this room with some guy who just wouldn't stop looking at the doorway I was in. I'd peak out the door and get hit with full caution or danger/alarms instantly.

I only fixed this by letting it go full orange which put him in a semi-alert status and only then would he actually move a bit. He and his buddy came to the door, gave up, and I could sneak behind them as they were walking away. Ten minutes of this shit and it wasn't even where I needed to be at all.

Also during that, my objective kind of glitched on me. The only marker was on the elevator which didn't work. I don't know if it's because the building was on lockdown or what. Where I ACTUALLY needed to be was back in the Marketting area (the place you can get legit access to) and find some vents and shafts and make your way deeper into the level.

And let me tell you, the actual level design... was fine. You can sneak on the vents and actually hop on the lights at catwalks and sneak above people. The same option was a thing back in the superior mission "Background Checks". So in theory we'd be familiar with the lessons. The design of the place itself was fine, but everything else was dogshit.

I was fucking around this mission for something to the tune of an hour and a half. I eventually gave the fuck up completely and someone on a discord server told me about the "tdetect" cheat which turns off enemies ability to see you. And EVEN THEN it still took me 10-15 minutes or so to find my way back down to the place where I was to steal a prototype. I literally couldn't figure out where to go even without worrying about enemies. Not because the level design was broke, but because the game itself kind of broke on me. Stealth wasn't working. The elevator didn't work. My objective marker didn't work. Players can whine about objective markers if they want but I did play Morrowind and was able to read the journal because NPC's gave you exact directions. There was no direction here, was the problem. Just "go do these five things," which is why losing the objective marker was such a problem at one point.

That last mission pissed me off that I just wrote 2550 words (that's about a chapter in a fucking novel) to rant about it.

Crazy thing is, the storyline wrapped up really well. The final-final mission is this unique thing where you go lobby a bunch of board members, and you can choose the level of ethics to employ on two different issues at once. It was really cool with a lot of dialog options and that characterization from the leadership I so craved from before.

To contrast, in Skyrim's Thieves Guild, you work with the leadership often. They give you those radiant quests, you're sent to speak with them to get tips on the mission. In the first mission, talking to one of them will give you some characterization about infiltration; and she points out an extra entry point that avoids guards. Ryujin needed more of that here. They really should have brought the lessons they learned with the Dark Brotherhood as well. In Oblivion and Skyrim's DB questlines, you're encouraged to speak with every guildmate and they'll often offer some kind of insight to the mission. Sometimes it's just a quip, but other times they'll actually give you an idea of positioning or something.

All of that soul is lost here. They hit the vibe. The story is actually really neat and fairly underplayed compared to a lot of other things. Nothing particularly world-shattering (except the issue of the whole mind control device, which you can address at the end), just a bit of Corpo on Corpo violence. There was a lot to like and it just came up a bit short for me.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

#Starfield #Bethesda #bethesda softworks #gaming #pc gaming

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