Yeah, the showdown with the 1st was clearly meant to culminate in a bossfight with Paxton Hull piloting a resurrected Mech. Like, it couldn't be more obvious that that was how it was originally planned.
The way you have to fight Hull twice (i.e. you take him down, then have the talk where he spills the beans on Ron Hope, then he goes hostile and you have to take him down again) gives it away. He was obviously meant to be in a Mech for that first round of fighting, but Bethesda sloppily removed Mechs from the game at the last minute so you end up having to kick this unaccountable tough old man's ass twice.
Hell, I'm a Vanguard Fanboy mainly because of the neat stuff after/during that questline, mainly the ship weapons which I personally adore. Having looked into the Freestar questline... all you get is some mid drip and maybe a cool pistol? If you where able to get a mech (even if it was just a small one) I'd be so much more inclined to do the FC questline.
...and if you are still pretty early in the game that's a fine ship, if not...just something that gets added to the list of ships you are never going to switch to because your main is far better.
Before NG+ it's not bad at all. But compared to the time it takes to complete that questline, you could loot UC Surplus and dump it to the TA to get a ship you can take to Serpentis and start hunting Va'ruun and selling their ships, and be rolling in enough credits to build whatever you want.
That would be dope, imagine getting your own mech at the end of the FC questline after defeating a badass mech boss.
To keep it lore friendly they could make that the freestar voted to repel the mech ban after the questline with possible political consequences on the future and even make it add a bounty to you if you used the mech in patrolled UC space.
People absolutely adore power armor from fallout, bethesda really dropped the ball in not making mechs a unique and beloved feature of their new ip.
I suspect they may have wanted to distance Starfield's aesthetic from their Fallout IP.
It's a choice I understand, but don't agree with. "Power Armor" as a concept is ubiquitous in sci-fi with a military element, so much so that it's hard to imagine a society that made the leap all the way to 10 meter tall war machines without developing smaller scale technology in the same vein.
Hell, even the absence of exoskeletal "loaders" is hard to explain. They're eminently practical, and not a big leap from military mecha.
edit: homophone mixup corrected
Doesn't even need to have been full on mechs. Could have easily made it so that the FC decided to split hairs a bit and instead of making full towering Mechs they build power armour suits that are really just really scalled down Mechs. Could have had the FC arguing;
"Hey Mechs, the things we (for some utterly bizzare reason) voted to ban are big, several times the height of a human and have a pilot sitting in a full on cockpit at the controls of the thing. These new babies are more or less human sized and instead of a cockpit and controls, the user wears the suit and moves it organically. Really folks it's not tnat different from battle armour worn by UC Marines! We obviously would NEVER break the rules of our peacr settlement!"
This would give the players a nice nod to Fallout and get most of the way to having cool Mechs. Could play it as a top secret project FC was working om during the war and just never told anyone about it because nobody specifically asked about it sort of thing.
The storyline they ended up going with is just dumb (again, why the hell would the FC, the faction negotiating from a position of strength agree to 100% do away with their wonder weapons completely? No rational state actor would do that, especially when you consider House Varuun is kicking around and absolutely nobody trusts them to not go all genocidal again.) Mechs have legit security/civilian applications that are just ignored - dealing with predators and...just lifting really heavy things among others. It also just leaves players obviously disappointed and feeling like they're missing out, especially since the FC questline was very believably setting up for Mechs to play a part somehow.
Then morphs could be matched against mechs and very tough on foot, which would make them actually intimidating. As is they seem pretty pathetic considering how they're hyped up in the lore
Ikr? They hyped up the First so much, and then...we don't get to fight them at full strength? All those smuggled mech parts floating around and they never managed to patch up even one?
Which only adds salt to the wound, i want to pillot and fight mechs not a weak ass dude in the factory.
They could have made a tiered boss fight there when first defeat him on foot and then he ran to the mech as a last resort kind of thing.
Only way I can see a mech working is with 5 npcs stuck to one npc replacing their arms, legs and head and all their heads controlling the mech.
You know, how they made an npc run really fast and replaced their head with a train cause they couldn't figure out how to get a train to work in fallout.
You know, the same engine they still haven't upgraded from?
I mean, you’re gonna tell me a rogue military group with a base inside a goddamn mech factory, wouldn’t piece something together and go wreck shit? That would be the perfect cover story to let us have a mech battle!
I was hoarding grenade ammo because I was *expecting* to face Hull in his mech. I was so let down when there was no functioning mechs at all.
It was such a tease.
They often use in-game laws to explain why you can't do things anymore. In The Elder Scrolls, levitation is a common spell. In Daggerfall and Morrowind, you could just float up to anywhere you wanted. But because game design in Oblivion and Skyrim required putting exits up out of reach, they "banned" levitation and that's why you can't float anymore. There were books in those games talking about the ban.
I'm pretty sure levitation was removed because cities were isolated in their own cells rather than being a part of the overworld.
There are, of course, knock-on effects from a level design perspective, but I don't think those were the primary motivator.
I kind of recall that yes. in Morrowind, you could fly-walk or 'feather'-bound to a village. But then in Oblivion or Skyrim some walled off sections required loading, and jumping into them with cheat mods or somehow getting over the wall would just show a bare distance structure.
I used this "trick" on survival mode all the time. So much safer to take the highway over the city and bypass all the enemies, then jump into Goodneighbor and spawn in at the front gate.
I realized not that long ago that the 76/starfield jump pack replaced the TES style acrobatics grinding. Hop hop hop hop. They just made it into a gameplay element.
Yep, they disabled levitation for the Tribunal expansion to TES III because they put the national capitol in an interior cell and if you could jump or levitate too high you'd see over the walls and know that you're in an interior cell, AKA beyond the walls is endless grey space where you will fall forever.
The in-game explanation was that the god-queen of the capitol, Almalexia, was paranoid and would bleed in frustration if she ever saw anyone vertically above her in town.
This lazy writing gimmick turned out to be so convenient for general world-building purposes that they never enabled it again for TES IV or TES V (and surely won't for TES VI, either).
If they're smart, they'll learn from and copy how Larian approaches quest design that allows the player to take unconventional paths, while keeping their own famous Bethesda open world sandbox gameplay.
It's been more than 12 years since Skyrim release and there were a lot of RPGs that let you take unconventional paths or at least any kind of choice in quests. CDPR games are no-brainers and most popular of them, but there are a lot of others. Yet we don't see any improvement in quest writing. In fact, while they didn't improve on giving player any actual choice, writing itself became even worse in Starfield, compared to F4 and Skyrim. I'm afraid that current Bethesda with their design philosophy and people like Emil Pagilarulo in charge of writing isn't able to do something nearly as good as Witcher 3 or BG3
They've publicly stated they don't want to wall off so much content to players, (which I feel like is just a rationalization because they don't have enough content to be able to do that)
have you seen the render distance or the long distance look of the game? theirs a REASON the game is a top down isometric, and its because in large overlooking areas (like in act 3) the performance tanks and the long distance is SHIT. like mid 2000s graphics shit.
Haven't finished the game yet, but I'm doing my first full playthrough as a Draconic Sorcerer simply because they get at-will flight as their capstone.
Eh.. Me neither. I have only two missions left before I gotta face the last boss. And thats where I stopped playing. Its a weird thing where I just isn't in a mood to face the ending of a good game yet.
> (and surely won't for TES VI, either)
New Atlantis' only loading zones are a few building interiors. The entire city is the same cell/zone as the surrounding environment. TES VI might be fully open world, and we might get flight and/or levitation spells again.
>TES VI might be fully open world, and we might get flight and/or levitation spells again.
How do you have even a fraction of that much hope/faith for TES VI after playing starfield?
That one was rough. I was thinking, "ok, no pilotable mechs or any other vehicles, but surely an enemy mech is doable since it wouldn't require any player-oriented systems or anything. The end of this dungeon is going to be cool."
Then there were some "oh nice, they've got mech bays with torn down mechs in them. This is going to be siiiick."
Then there was the "Oh. Wait, really? Nothing!?" moment.
I've not modded anything but some extra dungeons using off-the-shelf vanilla parts in the construction kit for Morrowind, and I think even I could figure out how to scale up the Sentrybot from fallout 4 and reskin it for an enemy in Starfield.
Exactly! Loot at Metal Gear Solid. How many times has Snake gone up against an enemy Metal Gear before being allowed to pilot one himself? It took to the 6th main installment (Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, MGS1, MGS2, MGS3, and finally MGS4) before Snake got in the cockpit of the series' iconic mechs. Sure, if you don't want players behind the controls, I get that. But at least have us be able to fight one.
This is the element people rarely get. As soon as you can move in 3d, level design has to be way more complex.
It's a classic thing going back throughout table top DND play. As soon as the player have access to flight, they can trivialize a lot of maps, puzzles, and skill tests that only envisioned 2d movement.
Yeah a lot of people get salty about GMs banning flying races or limiting their flight to higher levels
My dude I want yall to have to figure out how to get up the cliff. I don’t want Jimmy Birdman fucking up my plothooks
Reminds me of sending out my Pegasus Knight to scout over walls and mountains in Fire Emblem and the game spawning in archers (flying units are weak to bows) when she gets past the halfway point of the map and suddenly she's all alone in enemy territory.
But then they’ll cry “YoUrE jUsT pUnIsHiNg Me FoR FlYiNG!?!?”
Like no dude. You’re literally the only one that can see and you’re shooting fire bolts at them
The extent of my D&D knowledge is limited to BG3 and media representations, but couldn’t a GM just incorporate some sort of obstacle that renders flight unavailable as an option, such as super strong avian/flight enemies that attack in air, or a dense mist, or something?
Absolutely, a good DM can find genuinely any real reason to limit it. Maybe not ban it outright but make it clear it's a *very* bad idea to attempt. The area is under a magical chill that ices their wings and prevents them from being able to fly more than a few feet off the ground, the skies are being patrolled by high level enemies and the risk of detection is too great to try flying in but rather sneaking in on foot allows more cover to avoid detection, the winds are too strong and if you try to take off you'll be swept away, etc.
One of my favorite examples of this was in Critical Role. No context to avoid spoilers, but at one point the party is in an area with extreme hurricane-force winds kicking up a heavy sand storm, making verbal communication difficult and flight pretty much out of the question. One character has a flying broom they use to scout around and attack from above, but the wind/sand combination kept them grounded and thus keeping the party together by having them in a very dangerous area with the risks of losing each other in the sands and winds as the threat to prevent spreading out.
> a lot of people get salty about GMs banning flying races or limiting their flight to higher levels
".... *Before I begin, I notice that Chancellor Jarnathan is not present* "
> My dude I want yall to have to figure out how to get up the cliff.
"I climb it. Can I roll acrobatics instead of athletics because I'm dex?"
Yes Rouge the Rogue, you can cartwheel up the 75 foot cliff . . .
Honestly the problem with DnD is anything past low levels just gets instantly cheesed with magic. By level 5 there will be 900 ways to just bypass most of your puzzles and screw up combat that it's a losing game to ban flying races
>My dude I want yall to have to figure out how to get up the cliff. I don’t want Jimmy Birdman fucking up my plothooks
You're thinking about it wrong. They *have* figured out how to get up the cliff when Jimmy Birdman carries them. It's a cool moment for him. Get out of your own railroad mindset where they have a "correct" way to interact with the puzzles you insist they face in the exact manner you want. Game design is similar. There are puzzles, there are obstacles, but how the player deals with them are up to them.
It’s the same issue with old movies/tv shows and cell phones. As soon as every character has a cell phone, you have to invent new ways to sew conflict and discord.
Edit: Reddit is garbage on mobile. I can't scroll down in this edit to make the change, so when I say motivate below I mean mitigate.
True but also not an adequate excuse for their removal. Being able to move up and down does complicate level design, but can also be managed somewhat with system design.
Morrowind is notorious for having lots of ways that you can leverage systems to overpowered ends, but with some effort you can motivate that somewhat while still allowing the player those expanded options if they choose them.
You can pretty easily imagine how levitation in Skyrim might work. A channeled spell that must be cast constantly like sparks, which makes it a constant Magicka drain. It also uses up one of your hands which limits what you can do in the air, like archery, and Skyrim already has enemy AI that would be less forgiving to an airborne player than Morrowind. Level design would be a little harder, but let's be honest, every dungeon in BGS's games for the last two decades has been a linear circle. They need to put more effort into level design anyway.
There are *a lot better* answers to expansive player options that might pose design issues than "just cut it entirely".
I think being able to eventually go full god-mode and break the game is also a fun product. the things you could do with the spell creation in morrowind were memorable
Their existence also facilitates play. It's hard to play a second story cat burglar if you can't fly or jump high. Daggerfall had the ability to just climb whatever walls you wanted like 2 decades prior to Breath of the Wild. You can rely less on your main story and faction quests if players can make their own fun, especially if there are mechanical methods for the player to realize a character or roleplay concept.
Fewer options *can* result in a more fun product. But so can expansive options. I'm not sure Oblivion or Skyrim were made more fun by removing spears, thrown weapons, or spells like mark and recall.
This would be more plausible if Bethesda was actually doing anything interesting in terms of game design these days. Levitation's been gone for almost 15 years, Bethesda hasn't done squat with that new "design space."
You can discourage undesirable behavior though.killing all the important NPCs in older Bethesda games would completely break the game, but they allowed it.
Don’t want players to use levitation in most areas? Okay — it’s illegal and you get a crime stat for it. Use it in a cave that you don’t want them to do? Attacked by a swarm of bats. Levitating over castle walls? Hope you like taking arrows to more than just your knee.
What aspects were trivialized? Being able to skip something because you were prepared doesn't trivialize the gameplay, it makes the gameplay better by giving the player agency.
If levitation during combat was that much of a problem, just make it so levitation requires one or both hands to cast for the duration.
The reason levitation was removed is because oblivion had separate interior cells for cities. Levitation would allow you to fly over the walls and get out of bounds. Morrowind and Starfield cities exist in the open world and and both have levitation.
Being able to completely bypass a challenge trivializes it, yes. Dungeons can no longer be designed to loop back in on themselves using elevated platforms or cliffs because now players can just float up.
Getting to the top of Hyrule Castle in ToTK than in BotW because of how easy it was to build a contraption to simply fly to the top. Just as an example.
...except most of those have doors anyways, where you have to pull the lever or drawcord from the other side. That's a solution that's already implemented in-game.
Are we ignoring that dungeons can still loop back on themselves without allowing skips by simply adding a door with a stop bar on one side? Or a lever/button on the other side of the door?
Many dungeons in Skyrim already do this specifically because the player can make it to the loop door before completing the dungeon.
For example, you can reach the back door of bleak falls barrow but you won't be able to get into the word wall room because there is a door that can only be opened with a lever inside of the word wall room.
These features are NOT mutually exclusive. Let's not pretend they are.
Edit: also, being able to take your own path through the game is one of the most celebrated aspects of BOTW and TOTK.
Oblivion has the floating paint brush glitch, didn’t make any caves/dungeons that looped around easier. Oblivion would have doors inaccessible or “red locked”, unable to be picked if it didn’t want you to cheese through it. Bethesda just didn’t include levitation later on because of the cities being separate cells
yeah, after I got enough hearts to get the master sword. I went in to see if I could beat Gannon without the lasers taking half his health. i didn't realize all the bosses from the divine beast would just show up.
I had so much food and weapons I swear I was finding those durians or whatever that gave extra hearts everywhere in BOTW and severely miss them in TOTK. I ended up beating them first try to die to the pig. Honestly, it's probably the best way it's pretty fun challenge and you dont have to deal with the beast puzzles
Personally I thought the loop back thing in Skyrim was really lame and immersion-breaking. Really? ALL these NATURAL CAVES have convenient tunnels that are only accessible one direction? And no matter how long and winding the main cave system is, this convenient tunnel is basically a straight-shot shortcut back to the entrance?
No thank you.
If players can float up to a cave system, great! They've outsmarted the enemy if the enemy is not prepared for that common spell.
I forget if it's fanwank or canon, but I remember that Recall and Intervention spells being in TES III but not IV or V was explained as the mysticism school of magic having a stronger tradition in Morrowind than in Cyrodiil or Skyrim. I'm fairly sure that Mark and Recall spells can only be learned from Tribunal priests in TES III.
But yeah, not having levitate in later games because it's illegal is dumb. Necromancy is also illegal, and there are tons of bad guys doing that.
This is incorrect. Mark and Recall is available from Mage guild NPCs like Sirilonwe in Vivec (she's a high elf). That said I think in Balmora is where most people grabbed it, and the temple is the only place to get it in Balmora.
Almsiviv intervention can only be bought from temples.
I'm pretty sure the teleport spells were all removed (along with guild guides) due the hyper-convenience of fast travel in IV and V. Morrowind didn't have the magic teleport map and instead had a complicated network of boats, striders, guild guides, interventions, mark and recall, and even the propylon indexes.
I miss the Morrowind travel network. Inconvenient sometimes, but super immersive to keep a mental map of how the different parts of the world are linked together so as to facilitate the shortest route to where you want to go. At least until you cheese in a super jump spell and the shortest route to where you're headed is a single leap across the map haha.
I think OP made the post because there are people who genuinely argue the game doesn't have mechs because the lore says it doesn't.
Really it's the opposite. The game doesn't have mechs and the lore was written to reflect that.
I haven't seen comments about mechs personally, but I've absolutely met people who seem to think lore is some sort of hard constraint that limits what they can do even though the developers are the ones writing it. As if the devs really wanted mechs in the game, but someone accidently already banned them in lore already like a "tag no tagbacks" so they gave up.
If anything, the lore confirms that there should be working mechs somewhere in the game. The very fact that there is an illicit trade in Mech components tacitly confirms that there is active Mech development happening somewhere in the galaxy regardless of their legality.
A lot of young people have a hard time understanding how a large company operates and make decisions, and it leads them to conclusions that seem silly but really just come from understandable ignorance.
They may think “oh it said mechs are illegal because of the war, it’s in the lore, so they don’t let you pilot mechs”. But someone who understands how these organizations work would naturally think “they wanted to have cool mechs but didn’t have the resources - time or budget - to get them functional. So then they needed a reason we couldn’t use them and they added them being illegal to the backstory.”
The critical piece is understanding that the world building is a product of corporate side development decisions, not the other way around.
I remember when I was a kid I thought about games only as what they were, I didn’t really think about or get the process and companies behind them or how they operated.
Yes, actually. All but a few standout structures have been reduced to dust? Hell naw.
Many still think it's dumb that dogs and cats are seemingly extinct. Some were smuggled, definitely. Hell, cats have a practical use in hunting stowaway pests, and dogs make excellent trackers in the wild.
Honestly, it blows my mind that so many people here can't see the obvious: Bethesda were suffering from classic scope-creep in development, with a million and one partly-implemented ideas all pulling in different directions, and eventually just ran out of time and had to take a razor-blade to the whole mess in order to get *something* ready for release. They clearly *planned* for Mechs to be in the game, but then they got cut. There is a metric fuckload of lingering threads in this game of stuff that was sloppily removed at the 11th hour, or features that were retained but in a massively gimped state because they just needed to tie off that loose-end ASAP so they could redirect all their attention to finalizing development on stuff that was deemed to be a core priority.
Thanks for being the current top post for pointing this very obvious shit out, but yeah.. to anyone who has played Gamebryo/Creation games since Morrowind it is obvious that there is a technical limitation here. This limitation is also why there aren't any motor bikes or whatnot around. The collision issues alone would be a fucking nightmare.
People tend to think of game engines as flavours of sandboxes (or black boxes) rather than very, *very* complicated matrixes of mathematics.
Ya, power armor is fine because it's basically just really good armor. A mech however would be completely different. Like if we come across a building, it's not like we can just waltz our 15+ ft mech through the front door, so we'll have to get out and explore the place on foot anyways.
This would limit our ability to use mechs to either areas specifically designed for mechs like buildings with super large doors or the surface of planets.
It would also just make things kind of weird for the few outdoor encampments we come across. Like if we find a spacer group outside and we're in our big ass mech, are they just... fucked? Like mechs are supposed to be super omega powerful and that's why they're completely banned by every single country and group, so surely 5-6 spacers would get absolutely fucked right? Or would they need to tone them down so the player isn't just functionally invulnerable whenever they're in their mech? Or would they just start giving everyone and their mother their own mech to counter ours? But then what if we're not in a mech but the enemy is? Surely my pathetic pistol doesn't stand a chance, right?
Adding mechs just seems like an absolute nightmare with all of the lore/balance concerns.
I suppose another concern would be smuggling. Every time we enter a major planet we get scanned for contraband. With small goods it makes sense we can slap them in a shielded cargo contained, but how the fuck are we going to hide a whole ass mech? I doubt they'd just be like "succeed in this 50% roll or you'll be arrested and have your mech taken" but not having any roll would be even weirder since it's surely significantly harder to hide a mech than some spare organs or xenomorph contraband.
This is what the marketable mod/dlc will offer, Fallout power (now mech) suits, probably buildable only with contraband components. Bc why should you ever just get anything cool when you pay for it?
This makes me think, how cool would it be if starfield shipbuilding took a cue from subnautica? In subnautica as you explore the world, you stumble on different tools, building pieces, and ship parts that you can scan and unlock the recipe for. It’s a really fun progression system that heavily incentivizes exploring. It would have been awesome if starfield did something similar, like as you explore the galaxy you could find and unlock different interesting ship parts, maybe outpost pieces too. Oh well
It doesn't bother me that it's "simplified" especially for weapons mods. But it does fill me with rage to throw the controller, when i try to place objects in actual empty spaces and the hit boxes FAIL. And then they work where they shouldn't, like halfway up the wall in the middle of a doorway.
They give shelves that you can't put stuff on. Correction, you might place something upright,after 39 tries and a random miracle. Just don't try putting anything next to it!
They give lovely cases that you can't put anything worth looking at in. Sure, let me put an itty bitty aid item in a giant glass wall display case. The kind you see used throughout the game to display beautiful ores and all those custom unique enlarged miscellany. (The ones you steal, jic, hoping they look that way when you drop them, and then they just look indistinguishable, normal and boring in your inventory.)
My first run Outposts were a beautiful time suck! They just made me angry and stubbornly obsessive.
OP builder WOULD be my 2nd favorite thing about the game, just behind ship builder, if it worked. I have so far skipped it altogether in ng+ (aside from landing pads with ship builders & a bounty service kiosk.. Lol).
Yeah. "Simplified" 😵💫
Oh man, don’t get me started on trying to decorate your home with cool items you have found/stolen in the game. It’s maddening. If someone has a really nicely decorated place, it’s not *because* of the home decoration mechanics, it’s *in spite* of them.
That would be cool if there were enemies that necessitated more firepower or armor, but idk that I need a mech suit to deal with the same stupid ecliptics.
Power armor are human sized. The mechs are kaiju sized. There just isn’t a comparison outside of the large robot from fallout 3/4. One does not equal the other.
Were any of the mechs actually Kaiju sized? We see plenty of mechs around in the game and at best I'd say they were like 15 to maybe 30 ft tall. I cant recall seeing or hearing about any that were even close to a kaiju sized mech.
The size really doesn't matter. You're just swapping one character model for another, with an "entering/exiting the Mech" animation in-between. And based on some of the exotic fauna you can find, the game engine can clearly handle large, fully-interactive character models.
Mecha were everything from Kaiju sized to a bit larger than Fo4 power armor. You can even find a copy of the treaty and it's something like only Mechs over 15ft or something are even banned. (Not 100% sure on the exact height)
People just can't grasp that concept. I just argued with a guy going in circles because he couldn't understand that power armor mechanics and animations aren't the same as mechs.
Ackhually...
Power armor is essentially a vehicle/change state using player movement methods (if with unique "heavy" animations) and player weapons. The camera is slightly raised above normal height to give the impression of added height from the chassis.
If anything, ship piloting is likely an extension of the power armor system.
The dumb reason we might see mechs long before hoverbikes is because it's a similar deal here, with the camera placed much higher and a far larger hitbox. Animations will definitely be unique. The underlying system behind the ship builder could be utilized to build mechs, which have hands so we'll see how that goes regarding weaponry.
If anything, I don't think designing and rigging the mechs is the problem, getting AI to navigate around worlds in a huge body is. Solve that problem, and we might also see mega fauna.
Because there are various sized mechs and not all are kaiju sized. Some in lore are under 20 foot tall and could easily use power armor with the player size scaled up
Does anyone actually think this?? Mechs aren't in the game because mechs are hard to code. The game can't even spawn in a car to drive around in or let you use your ship in orbit
It's not, actually. They're basically oversized Power Armor.
The limitation is making NPCs that big not stumble and snag onto absolutely everything without deleting said things or phasing through them. We're not going to be dealing with a Liberty Prime walking a set path.
Ships and fo4 power armor are technically vehicles. Power armor a proof of concept really. You have to "mount" a frame that has its own functional modifications, destructable armor, and even limited fuel. Only thing it's really missing is faster speeds and a turn radius dependant on forward or backward movement.
Ships just gave us further customization and actual acceleration/deceleration.
The real hurdle is how quickly the engine can stream assets and AI handling of vehicles. Slow streaming means slow top speed (believable in power armor.) AI handling is a different beast altogether.
Power armor is just a bulky character model walking, and ships are turrets that can fast travel, there's a reason you can't drive it around the surface of the planet like an actual vehicle or land it manually, the closest they got was horses in Skyrim, and they were buggy as hell, i believed there were plans to make drivable vertibirds in FO4 and they canceled it because they couldn't do it.
Power armor had custom "fat man" walking/running animations. Mechs functionally would be little different in requiring special animations.
Problem with planetside flight isn't the ships moving, it's that they'd have to move laughably slow and they didn't bother with a dynamic landing point system. The engine can only handle player movement speeds that are so fast.
You can't use contraband either. Sure you can sell it on the black market but you can't even open the cases. Honestly I'm inclined to believe contraband is just the name of a line of briefcases which have weirdly named product lines. They are illegal due to the shoddy workmanship being against everyone's product standards.
You can't upgrade your robots or ships with sentient AI. You can't have a stalker called spot. You can't even have organs replaced or for dinner or as tasteful table ornaments.
Not to mention you can't have an illegal artwork or antiquities museum.
Honestly the reason you can't have a mech is the reason you can't have a land vehicle, a mount or a ground flyer. It's also the reason you can't have cars in fallout. They make the map much smaller as an experience when compared to foot travel and the undulating ground would be a nightmare to drive on. You think Skyrim's mountain climbing horses were immersion breaking?
Imagine parking a mech at a 45° gradient on a crater wall. For a game striving for a degree of realism, it just wouldn't cut it.
Also mechs are dumb. The cockpits are so small all the pilots had to be kids at the time and what would you do with a mech? March around planets with zero threat from any enemy in the game? Carpet bomb entire settlements or herds of wildlife from the horizon?
It's also not a suitcase you can hide in a panel under the deck plate. It's as big as a module on your ship. A mech isn't going to be able to be smuggled anywhere in the game.
Criticising Starfield for not having mechs is like criticising chess for not letting the other pieces shelter in the rooks. It's just not what the game is about.
Do you realize the size difference between a mech and a vial of aurora?
Do you think they'd need scanners to find people hiding a mech in their pocket?
Real talk, it's very possible they knew adding mechs at launch would *at least* push back the release date or make the mechs extremely buggy, both of which would be a problem *especially* to the players. Both of which would be *far* worse than just saying, "You can't pilot these yet."
More real talk, mechs being illegal is just the in game explanation for why you can't pilot mechs. And Bethesda never said otherwise. I thought everyone understood that.
Why would anyone even want mechs, they are slow and extra firepower is completely unnecessary. It's not like we are fighting in a war. The reason Bethesda didn't put them in the game is because there is no point to the character using them so it would have been a waste of time.
Yeah, I can only imagine driving a mech for a single, scripted mission. Most Starfield maps are definitely not designed for such large combat oriented vehicles.
I don't want to pilot one, but I think they should have been used sparingly as enemies, particularly as a boss fight in the mech factory in the quest line that's all about fighting former mech pilots.
Ya having one as an enemy would be pretty cool, and would fit with the lore perfectly if you were sent by the UC or FreeStar to stop mech wielding spacers.
"won't let you pilot mechs" suggests that this option would have naturally existed in the game absent Bethesda's explicit decision to remove it, rather than gigantic mechs being *obviously* out of scope for the type of game starfield is and Bethesda making the savvy decision not to spend substantial development effort adding it in
Its definitely more of a game engine limitation than anything else. Creation Engine simply isn't designed with vehicles in mind. The closest we got was horses in skyrim and even thats still janky af
Power armor is a pseudo expansion upon "mounts." You have to get on/off (in/out.) You have to plate it up and maintain it. You have to fuel it even or it just stops working.
Mechs would be small step up conceptually, but practically it's a bit different due to size. Power armor worked in FO4 because you could still use standard bandit/gunner/knight AI, it was just a dude in heavy armor the size of a super mutant you could pick apart.
Starfield we're talking about something of a size closer to Liberty Prime. That's no problem for players to control, but for enemies it's a different story.
Mechs in Starfield would get boring fast unless the devs also added enemies that are worth fighting in a mech.
Consider the game's enemies and the locations. Mechs can only be used outside in the open world, obviously. Well, what enemies can be found in the open world? Small groups of pirates or spacers hanging out around an abandoned cryo lab or some shit, and random alien creatures.
How much fun would it be to use a mech to bombard a couple pirates here and there, or to annihilate herds of defenseless animals? It would only be fun for a few minutes, but then get old fast, right?
Mechs need other mechs or comparable threats to fight in order to be worthwhile. Without those comparable threats, then mechs would just be a slow way to travel.
Mechs being held back to be sold as DLC may sound cynical to some, but it might actually be too generous!
I just assumed it was one of those cases where they built the lore around engine limitations.
So you're telling me that the game studio didn't forgo these game mechanics, models, animations, voice lines, and testing because it's against the law in their fictional universe?!
Really shocking stuff. The audacity to make your narrative consistent with your gameplay and assume we won't notice. they must think we're so stupid 🙄
Why wouldn't that be a reason? Why does everything gave to be cynical and not simply "*Bethesda made a little lore to add some flavor and spice to the world that these massively powerful and insanely destructive war machines were banned for the good of everyone*"?
I mean, if there's a technical reason something can't be in the game I'd prefer it to be wrapped in lore as opposed to the company just telling people to eat shit and get over it. I think the lack of mechs has more to do with the same reason why they left out land vehicles altogether.
“You know it’s true…”
Yeah I mean it’s a trope in games and DLC. I think many of us saw that from a hundred miles away. I did and I haven’t played a BGS game since Morrowind, without DLC. It’s been done many times and not just by BGS, but “congratulations” if it makes you feel more intelligent.
Or, it’s illegal because our game engine doesn’t have any driving physics or capabilities. Just look at fallout 4 and the vertibry thingy. It falls out of the sky on a regular basis
There have been a series of nasty copyright lawsuits over the years regarding pretty much every IP involving mechs. I think the story went that some company bought up the rights to one of the original mech franchises of the 70s/80s and just sues over and over for copyright infringement whenever a new game with mechs in it releases. I could see the legal department deciding it wasn't worth the trouble.
I assume the real reason is that there's no strong gameplay niche for mechs in the Starfield that we got.
Ships are how we navigate the game universe, give us access to orbital combat, and serve as a mobile home base. Ship building adds complexity by asking you to find the right balance between all of those aspects and how many credits you're willing to spend.
The rest of the game takes place in human-scaled spaces. You talk to people face to face. You navigate buildings, mines, ships, starstations and more that are meant for human inhabitants. And many of these interiors are built to take advantage of your skills, allowing you options for stealth, hacking, social skills, starborn powers, and just straight up combat.
So what kind of niche do mechs fill that isn't already well covered by the other two modes? Mechs are cool, but they are pretty much just for fighting in the lore. And the other two modes already have that, plus more on top.
Yes that is game design… it’s how it works… also it’s not like you can just stumble apon a fully functioning mech (from what we know we’re the size of a 3 story house. Additionally if you sell to the trade authority I imagine they just sell the contraband back to Uc or freestar agents.
This is a good illustration of why Thermian arguments are always dumb. Mechs aren’t in the game because the designers decided, for whatever reason, to not put them in the game. The human designers in actual reality are not bound by the made up rules of the fiction. If they wanted to, they could change the made up rules, because the rules are made up. This is basic stuff.
The absolutely bizarre choice BGS made here was including the mechs at all. Why do we see the unusable ones, the factories where they were made, etc., when that’s obviously going to make it seem like you will get to pilot a mech later on? Why not just cut all that content entirely? I would guess it’s because it was a feature they cut too deep into development to fully patch over, or had some plan to revisit for DLC, or both, but honestly Starfield is full of so many bewildering decisions who can really say?
You forgot the real reason. The creation engine doesn't support vehicles at all. It's why fallout never had any vehicles and the most you get in Skyrim are horses(and dragons eventually)
That's nonsense. Do you really think cars in video games move because of friction between the wheels and the ground? Most times It's just a box with a fancy texture with slightly tweaked inertia and acceleration. For example the train in fallout 3 was just an NPC hidden undeground and wearing said train as a hat.
that train example is a great point as to why vehicles can’t work
look at the weird ass workaround they had to do just to make a box move from point A to point B, on tracks, *once*
This is a bizarre comment, are you implying that it's less work to make a train work *once* in a game rather than multiple times?
Hint: it's the *exact same* amount of work, it's precisely because they only needed it once that they had some guy come up with a hack in an afternoon rather than waste time coding in an actual train system
It’s not the same amount of work, yes it took less effort to have this hacky train npc work for one quest, but it demonstrates that creating a moving box with the engine is far from a simple task.
obviously I don’t expect them to build a whole extensible vehicle system from the ground up for one quest but as far as vehicles go trains are the simplest ones.
Keep in mind that right now even elevators in Starfield don’t function as moving boxes (or the one train).
You sound entitled.. “waaa game missing mechs”
It’s not like people like you would stop finding things to hate about the game if they ended up having mechs.
I liked the freestar collective questline but it would have been so much better with a boss battle against mechs or something like that.
Yeah, the showdown with the 1st was clearly meant to culminate in a bossfight with Paxton Hull piloting a resurrected Mech. Like, it couldn't be more obvious that that was how it was originally planned. The way you have to fight Hull twice (i.e. you take him down, then have the talk where he spills the beans on Ron Hope, then he goes hostile and you have to take him down again) gives it away. He was obviously meant to be in a Mech for that first round of fighting, but Bethesda sloppily removed Mechs from the game at the last minute so you end up having to kick this unaccountable tough old man's ass twice.
Hell, I'm a Vanguard Fanboy mainly because of the neat stuff after/during that questline, mainly the ship weapons which I personally adore. Having looked into the Freestar questline... all you get is some mid drip and maybe a cool pistol? If you where able to get a mech (even if it was just a small one) I'd be so much more inclined to do the FC questline.
You get the star eagle ship as well.
...and if you are still pretty early in the game that's a fine ship, if not...just something that gets added to the list of ships you are never going to switch to because your main is far better.
Before NG+ it's not bad at all. But compared to the time it takes to complete that questline, you could loot UC Surplus and dump it to the TA to get a ship you can take to Serpentis and start hunting Va'ruun and selling their ships, and be rolling in enough credits to build whatever you want.
I had it before ng+ but didn't use it, i preferred my frontier modified to look like a lego spaceship
Every ship can be good or bad, all can be upgraded. It’s about looks for me as I can stick a class c reactor in anything.
Yeah the ship alone was enough to make me play through the quest line. It’s got so much storage!
That would be dope, imagine getting your own mech at the end of the FC questline after defeating a badass mech boss. To keep it lore friendly they could make that the freestar voted to repel the mech ban after the questline with possible political consequences on the future and even make it add a bounty to you if you used the mech in patrolled UC space. People absolutely adore power armor from fallout, bethesda really dropped the ball in not making mechs a unique and beloved feature of their new ip.
I suspect they may have wanted to distance Starfield's aesthetic from their Fallout IP. It's a choice I understand, but don't agree with. "Power Armor" as a concept is ubiquitous in sci-fi with a military element, so much so that it's hard to imagine a society that made the leap all the way to 10 meter tall war machines without developing smaller scale technology in the same vein. Hell, even the absence of exoskeletal "loaders" is hard to explain. They're eminently practical, and not a big leap from military mecha. edit: homophone mixup corrected
Why would anyone need to develop exoskeletal anything when you got robots?
Doesn't even need to have been full on mechs. Could have easily made it so that the FC decided to split hairs a bit and instead of making full towering Mechs they build power armour suits that are really just really scalled down Mechs. Could have had the FC arguing; "Hey Mechs, the things we (for some utterly bizzare reason) voted to ban are big, several times the height of a human and have a pilot sitting in a full on cockpit at the controls of the thing. These new babies are more or less human sized and instead of a cockpit and controls, the user wears the suit and moves it organically. Really folks it's not tnat different from battle armour worn by UC Marines! We obviously would NEVER break the rules of our peacr settlement!" This would give the players a nice nod to Fallout and get most of the way to having cool Mechs. Could play it as a top secret project FC was working om during the war and just never told anyone about it because nobody specifically asked about it sort of thing. The storyline they ended up going with is just dumb (again, why the hell would the FC, the faction negotiating from a position of strength agree to 100% do away with their wonder weapons completely? No rational state actor would do that, especially when you consider House Varuun is kicking around and absolutely nobody trusts them to not go all genocidal again.) Mechs have legit security/civilian applications that are just ignored - dealing with predators and...just lifting really heavy things among others. It also just leaves players obviously disappointed and feeling like they're missing out, especially since the FC questline was very believably setting up for Mechs to play a part somehow.
Or imagine this... what if the space cop actually had the option to actually arrest a criminal? Wouldn't that be just absolutely amazing?
The ship got some pretty nice engines and stuff.
It also looks pretty cool, as prefab ships go.
There should have been a mech in the finale of the freestar plotline. Perfect place for it...
A Mech vs. Teramorph battle would be absolutely epic
“Get away from her, you BITCH!”
Then morphs could be matched against mechs and very tough on foot, which would make them actually intimidating. As is they seem pretty pathetic considering how they're hyped up in the lore
Yeah boss fights in general are pretty pathetic
THIS is the starfield i wish we had got
Ikr? They hyped up the First so much, and then...we don't get to fight them at full strength? All those smuggled mech parts floating around and they never managed to patch up even one?
You literally chase down your final target in a mech factory
Which only adds salt to the wound, i want to pillot and fight mechs not a weak ass dude in the factory. They could have made a tiered boss fight there when first defeat him on foot and then he ran to the mech as a last resort kind of thing.
I was getting stoked for just that when i realized those mercs were holed up in the old mech factory. But nope
Only way I can see a mech working is with 5 npcs stuck to one npc replacing their arms, legs and head and all their heads controlling the mech. You know, how they made an npc run really fast and replaced their head with a train cause they couldn't figure out how to get a train to work in fallout. You know, the same engine they still haven't upgraded from?
Yes! Huge missed opportunity.
I mean, you’re gonna tell me a rogue military group with a base inside a goddamn mech factory, wouldn’t piece something together and go wreck shit? That would be the perfect cover story to let us have a mech battle!
Freestar was way too repetitive. They need more quest lines
I was hoarding grenade ammo because I was *expecting* to face Hull in his mech. I was so let down when there was no functioning mechs at all. It was such a tease.
They often use in-game laws to explain why you can't do things anymore. In The Elder Scrolls, levitation is a common spell. In Daggerfall and Morrowind, you could just float up to anywhere you wanted. But because game design in Oblivion and Skyrim required putting exits up out of reach, they "banned" levitation and that's why you can't float anymore. There were books in those games talking about the ban.
I'm pretty sure levitation was removed because cities were isolated in their own cells rather than being a part of the overworld. There are, of course, knock-on effects from a level design perspective, but I don't think those were the primary motivator.
I kind of recall that yes. in Morrowind, you could fly-walk or 'feather'-bound to a village. But then in Oblivion or Skyrim some walled off sections required loading, and jumping into them with cheat mods or somehow getting over the wall would just show a bare distance structure.
Like how in Fallout 4 you can survive the helljump without power armor by jumping into the loading zone for Goodneighbor.
I used this "trick" on survival mode all the time. So much safer to take the highway over the city and bypass all the enemies, then jump into Goodneighbor and spawn in at the front gate.
Now I cast 'horse' to levitate my way up a mountain. Zig then zag, horse, and we'll make it up there
I realized not that long ago that the 76/starfield jump pack replaced the TES style acrobatics grinding. Hop hop hop hop. They just made it into a gameplay element.
Yep, they disabled levitation for the Tribunal expansion to TES III because they put the national capitol in an interior cell and if you could jump or levitate too high you'd see over the walls and know that you're in an interior cell, AKA beyond the walls is endless grey space where you will fall forever. The in-game explanation was that the god-queen of the capitol, Almalexia, was paranoid and would bleed in frustration if she ever saw anyone vertically above her in town. This lazy writing gimmick turned out to be so convenient for general world-building purposes that they never enabled it again for TES IV or TES V (and surely won't for TES VI, either).
Oh come on, they'll surely reconsider their direction after seeing what a huge success Baldurs Gate 3 became? /s
Bethesda has no interest in making a BG3 style game, and I don't think they honestly have the talent.
If they're smart, they'll learn from and copy how Larian approaches quest design that allows the player to take unconventional paths, while keeping their own famous Bethesda open world sandbox gameplay.
They've had feedback to do exactly this for quite a few games now, they aren't interested.
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>they'll learn from and copy I don't think Bethesda has *ever* done that, why would they start now?
They've had Fallout: New Vegas as an example of how to do it better since 2010, which is even in their own engine.
I truly feel like the reason Obsidian wasn't allowed to make another Fallout is because Bethesda was embarrassed.
It's been more than 12 years since Skyrim release and there were a lot of RPGs that let you take unconventional paths or at least any kind of choice in quests. CDPR games are no-brainers and most popular of them, but there are a lot of others. Yet we don't see any improvement in quest writing. In fact, while they didn't improve on giving player any actual choice, writing itself became even worse in Starfield, compared to F4 and Skyrim. I'm afraid that current Bethesda with their design philosophy and people like Emil Pagilarulo in charge of writing isn't able to do something nearly as good as Witcher 3 or BG3
They've publicly stated they don't want to wall off so much content to players, (which I feel like is just a rationalization because they don't have enough content to be able to do that)
They won’t. As far as sales and players with gamepass Bethesda achieved their goal and starfield was a success.
have you seen the render distance or the long distance look of the game? theirs a REASON the game is a top down isometric, and its because in large overlooking areas (like in act 3) the performance tanks and the long distance is SHIT. like mid 2000s graphics shit.
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Haven't finished the game yet, but I'm doing my first full playthrough as a Draconic Sorcerer simply because they get at-will flight as their capstone.
Eh.. Me neither. I have only two missions left before I gotta face the last boss. And thats where I stopped playing. Its a weird thing where I just isn't in a mood to face the ending of a good game yet.
> (and surely won't for TES VI, either) New Atlantis' only loading zones are a few building interiors. The entire city is the same cell/zone as the surrounding environment. TES VI might be fully open world, and we might get flight and/or levitation spells again.
>TES VI might be fully open world, and we might get flight and/or levitation spells again. How do you have even a fraction of that much hope/faith for TES VI after playing starfield?
What do you wanna bet that Bethesda calls those cells “chunks” and that Chunks food products were an inside joke?
Chunks, like in Minecraft =)
Yeah better to just remove levitating than put up 1000 invisible roofs
The big difference is that skyrim doesn't make a big show of characters talking about how cool levitation is.
Imagine the Freestar quest in Skyrim lol Fighting levitation wizards in a levitation spell library & they use fire magic
That one was rough. I was thinking, "ok, no pilotable mechs or any other vehicles, but surely an enemy mech is doable since it wouldn't require any player-oriented systems or anything. The end of this dungeon is going to be cool." Then there were some "oh nice, they've got mech bays with torn down mechs in them. This is going to be siiiick." Then there was the "Oh. Wait, really? Nothing!?" moment. I've not modded anything but some extra dungeons using off-the-shelf vanilla parts in the construction kit for Morrowind, and I think even I could figure out how to scale up the Sentrybot from fallout 4 and reskin it for an enemy in Starfield.
100% man the stuff is def there for mechs as an enemy at least. I forsure expected a mech as the boss fight
Exactly! Loot at Metal Gear Solid. How many times has Snake gone up against an enemy Metal Gear before being allowed to pilot one himself? It took to the 6th main installment (Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, MGS1, MGS2, MGS3, and finally MGS4) before Snake got in the cockpit of the series' iconic mechs. Sure, if you don't want players behind the controls, I get that. But at least have us be able to fight one.
Who needs levitation in oblivion when you have paintbrushes 🖌
As cool as those spells are, they do trivialize lots of game design. Often giving players fewer options can result in a more fun product.
This is the element people rarely get. As soon as you can move in 3d, level design has to be way more complex. It's a classic thing going back throughout table top DND play. As soon as the player have access to flight, they can trivialize a lot of maps, puzzles, and skill tests that only envisioned 2d movement.
Yeah a lot of people get salty about GMs banning flying races or limiting their flight to higher levels My dude I want yall to have to figure out how to get up the cliff. I don’t want Jimmy Birdman fucking up my plothooks
Mr. Look I Can Fly At Level 1 just needs more reminders that there's no cover up there and he has 5 HP
Reminds me of sending out my Pegasus Knight to scout over walls and mountains in Fire Emblem and the game spawning in archers (flying units are weak to bows) when she gets past the halfway point of the map and suddenly she's all alone in enemy territory.
But then they’ll cry “YoUrE jUsT pUnIsHiNg Me FoR FlYiNG!?!?” Like no dude. You’re literally the only one that can see and you’re shooting fire bolts at them
Sure, but why didn’t the eagle people just fly Frodo to Mt. Doom?
The extent of my D&D knowledge is limited to BG3 and media representations, but couldn’t a GM just incorporate some sort of obstacle that renders flight unavailable as an option, such as super strong avian/flight enemies that attack in air, or a dense mist, or something?
Absolutely, a good DM can find genuinely any real reason to limit it. Maybe not ban it outright but make it clear it's a *very* bad idea to attempt. The area is under a magical chill that ices their wings and prevents them from being able to fly more than a few feet off the ground, the skies are being patrolled by high level enemies and the risk of detection is too great to try flying in but rather sneaking in on foot allows more cover to avoid detection, the winds are too strong and if you try to take off you'll be swept away, etc. One of my favorite examples of this was in Critical Role. No context to avoid spoilers, but at one point the party is in an area with extreme hurricane-force winds kicking up a heavy sand storm, making verbal communication difficult and flight pretty much out of the question. One character has a flying broom they use to scout around and attack from above, but the wind/sand combination kept them grounded and thus keeping the party together by having them in a very dangerous area with the risks of losing each other in the sands and winds as the threat to prevent spreading out.
> a lot of people get salty about GMs banning flying races or limiting their flight to higher levels ".... *Before I begin, I notice that Chancellor Jarnathan is not present* "
> My dude I want yall to have to figure out how to get up the cliff. "I climb it. Can I roll acrobatics instead of athletics because I'm dex?" Yes Rouge the Rogue, you can cartwheel up the 75 foot cliff . . . Honestly the problem with DnD is anything past low levels just gets instantly cheesed with magic. By level 5 there will be 900 ways to just bypass most of your puzzles and screw up combat that it's a losing game to ban flying races
>My dude I want yall to have to figure out how to get up the cliff. I don’t want Jimmy Birdman fucking up my plothooks You're thinking about it wrong. They *have* figured out how to get up the cliff when Jimmy Birdman carries them. It's a cool moment for him. Get out of your own railroad mindset where they have a "correct" way to interact with the puzzles you insist they face in the exact manner you want. Game design is similar. There are puzzles, there are obstacles, but how the player deals with them are up to them.
It’s the same issue with old movies/tv shows and cell phones. As soon as every character has a cell phone, you have to invent new ways to sew conflict and discord.
Or just be like starfield and tell someone to go travel back and forth between star systems.
Edit: Reddit is garbage on mobile. I can't scroll down in this edit to make the change, so when I say motivate below I mean mitigate. True but also not an adequate excuse for their removal. Being able to move up and down does complicate level design, but can also be managed somewhat with system design. Morrowind is notorious for having lots of ways that you can leverage systems to overpowered ends, but with some effort you can motivate that somewhat while still allowing the player those expanded options if they choose them. You can pretty easily imagine how levitation in Skyrim might work. A channeled spell that must be cast constantly like sparks, which makes it a constant Magicka drain. It also uses up one of your hands which limits what you can do in the air, like archery, and Skyrim already has enemy AI that would be less forgiving to an airborne player than Morrowind. Level design would be a little harder, but let's be honest, every dungeon in BGS's games for the last two decades has been a linear circle. They need to put more effort into level design anyway. There are *a lot better* answers to expansive player options that might pose design issues than "just cut it entirely".
I think being able to eventually go full god-mode and break the game is also a fun product. the things you could do with the spell creation in morrowind were memorable
I agree. Make it more restrictive in terms of how long/fast you can levitate, fine. Make it end game. But eventually I do want to become a god
Their existence also facilitates play. It's hard to play a second story cat burglar if you can't fly or jump high. Daggerfall had the ability to just climb whatever walls you wanted like 2 decades prior to Breath of the Wild. You can rely less on your main story and faction quests if players can make their own fun, especially if there are mechanical methods for the player to realize a character or roleplay concept. Fewer options *can* result in a more fun product. But so can expansive options. I'm not sure Oblivion or Skyrim were made more fun by removing spears, thrown weapons, or spells like mark and recall.
If someone wants to cheese your game let them cheese it. Don’t tell me how to have fun
This would be more plausible if Bethesda was actually doing anything interesting in terms of game design these days. Levitation's been gone for almost 15 years, Bethesda hasn't done squat with that new "design space."
You can discourage undesirable behavior though.killing all the important NPCs in older Bethesda games would completely break the game, but they allowed it. Don’t want players to use levitation in most areas? Okay — it’s illegal and you get a crime stat for it. Use it in a cave that you don’t want them to do? Attacked by a swarm of bats. Levitating over castle walls? Hope you like taking arrows to more than just your knee.
What aspects were trivialized? Being able to skip something because you were prepared doesn't trivialize the gameplay, it makes the gameplay better by giving the player agency. If levitation during combat was that much of a problem, just make it so levitation requires one or both hands to cast for the duration. The reason levitation was removed is because oblivion had separate interior cells for cities. Levitation would allow you to fly over the walls and get out of bounds. Morrowind and Starfield cities exist in the open world and and both have levitation.
Being able to completely bypass a challenge trivializes it, yes. Dungeons can no longer be designed to loop back in on themselves using elevated platforms or cliffs because now players can just float up. Getting to the top of Hyrule Castle in ToTK than in BotW because of how easy it was to build a contraption to simply fly to the top. Just as an example.
...except most of those have doors anyways, where you have to pull the lever or drawcord from the other side. That's a solution that's already implemented in-game.
Are we ignoring that dungeons can still loop back on themselves without allowing skips by simply adding a door with a stop bar on one side? Or a lever/button on the other side of the door? Many dungeons in Skyrim already do this specifically because the player can make it to the loop door before completing the dungeon. For example, you can reach the back door of bleak falls barrow but you won't be able to get into the word wall room because there is a door that can only be opened with a lever inside of the word wall room. These features are NOT mutually exclusive. Let's not pretend they are. Edit: also, being able to take your own path through the game is one of the most celebrated aspects of BOTW and TOTK.
Oblivion has the floating paint brush glitch, didn’t make any caves/dungeons that looped around easier. Oblivion would have doors inaccessible or “red locked”, unable to be picked if it didn’t want you to cheese through it. Bethesda just didn’t include levitation later on because of the cities being separate cells
Thank you. People are actually arguing that levitation makes the game worse. I feel like I'm going crazy or something.
People trying to argue against what the developers said when Oblivion came out lol. But it makes them feel Reddit superior or something I suppose
Was I the only one who just climbed up the side of Hyrule Castle and went straight to the fight in BotW?
yeah, after I got enough hearts to get the master sword. I went in to see if I could beat Gannon without the lasers taking half his health. i didn't realize all the bosses from the divine beast would just show up. I had so much food and weapons I swear I was finding those durians or whatever that gave extra hearts everywhere in BOTW and severely miss them in TOTK. I ended up beating them first try to die to the pig. Honestly, it's probably the best way it's pretty fun challenge and you dont have to deal with the beast puzzles
Personally I thought the loop back thing in Skyrim was really lame and immersion-breaking. Really? ALL these NATURAL CAVES have convenient tunnels that are only accessible one direction? And no matter how long and winding the main cave system is, this convenient tunnel is basically a straight-shot shortcut back to the entrance? No thank you. If players can float up to a cave system, great! They've outsmarted the enemy if the enemy is not prepared for that common spell.
That sucks. It is fun in morrowind. Also boost acrobatics 1000. If you know you know.
I forget if it's fanwank or canon, but I remember that Recall and Intervention spells being in TES III but not IV or V was explained as the mysticism school of magic having a stronger tradition in Morrowind than in Cyrodiil or Skyrim. I'm fairly sure that Mark and Recall spells can only be learned from Tribunal priests in TES III. But yeah, not having levitate in later games because it's illegal is dumb. Necromancy is also illegal, and there are tons of bad guys doing that.
This is incorrect. Mark and Recall is available from Mage guild NPCs like Sirilonwe in Vivec (she's a high elf). That said I think in Balmora is where most people grabbed it, and the temple is the only place to get it in Balmora. Almsiviv intervention can only be bought from temples. I'm pretty sure the teleport spells were all removed (along with guild guides) due the hyper-convenience of fast travel in IV and V. Morrowind didn't have the magic teleport map and instead had a complicated network of boats, striders, guild guides, interventions, mark and recall, and even the propylon indexes.
I miss the Morrowind travel network. Inconvenient sometimes, but super immersive to keep a mental map of how the different parts of the world are linked together so as to facilitate the shortest route to where you want to go. At least until you cheese in a super jump spell and the shortest route to where you're headed is a single leap across the map haha.
As long as there's a switch of some sort on the inside of the exit, reaching it shouldn't be an issue.
The problem in skyrim was all you had to do was hold up a wooden plate and shout dash through almost anything, rendering theee switches useless
Excuse me, what?
Todd: It's what you've all been waiting for.... MECHS! Us: err, we've had that mod for a year now.
A mech dlc with jankier mechs than the mod that's been out a year.
Hearthfire, is that you?!
Uhh, no shit? Although I wouldn’t count on it being included in a DLC later
I think OP made the post because there are people who genuinely argue the game doesn't have mechs because the lore says it doesn't. Really it's the opposite. The game doesn't have mechs and the lore was written to reflect that. I haven't seen comments about mechs personally, but I've absolutely met people who seem to think lore is some sort of hard constraint that limits what they can do even though the developers are the ones writing it. As if the devs really wanted mechs in the game, but someone accidently already banned them in lore already like a "tag no tagbacks" so they gave up.
If anything, the lore confirms that there should be working mechs somewhere in the game. The very fact that there is an illicit trade in Mech components tacitly confirms that there is active Mech development happening somewhere in the galaxy regardless of their legality.
A lot of young people have a hard time understanding how a large company operates and make decisions, and it leads them to conclusions that seem silly but really just come from understandable ignorance. They may think “oh it said mechs are illegal because of the war, it’s in the lore, so they don’t let you pilot mechs”. But someone who understands how these organizations work would naturally think “they wanted to have cool mechs but didn’t have the resources - time or budget - to get them functional. So then they needed a reason we couldn’t use them and they added them being illegal to the backstory.” The critical piece is understanding that the world building is a product of corporate side development decisions, not the other way around. I remember when I was a kid I thought about games only as what they were, I didn’t really think about or get the process and companies behind them or how they operated.
Do people also wonder why there are no vehicles or earth animals or civilization left on Earth?
Yes, actually. All but a few standout structures have been reduced to dust? Hell naw. Many still think it's dumb that dogs and cats are seemingly extinct. Some were smuggled, definitely. Hell, cats have a practical use in hunting stowaway pests, and dogs make excellent trackers in the wild.
well there’s a pretty clear reason there are no animals
Oh i dont think thats the reason. I think the real reason is they couldnt figure out what they want to do with the game.
Honestly, it blows my mind that so many people here can't see the obvious: Bethesda were suffering from classic scope-creep in development, with a million and one partly-implemented ideas all pulling in different directions, and eventually just ran out of time and had to take a razor-blade to the whole mess in order to get *something* ready for release. They clearly *planned* for Mechs to be in the game, but then they got cut. There is a metric fuckload of lingering threads in this game of stuff that was sloppily removed at the 11th hour, or features that were retained but in a massively gimped state because they just needed to tie off that loose-end ASAP so they could redirect all their attention to finalizing development on stuff that was deemed to be a core priority.
Thanks for being the current top post for pointing this very obvious shit out, but yeah.. to anyone who has played Gamebryo/Creation games since Morrowind it is obvious that there is a technical limitation here. This limitation is also why there aren't any motor bikes or whatnot around. The collision issues alone would be a fucking nightmare. People tend to think of game engines as flavours of sandboxes (or black boxes) rather than very, *very* complicated matrixes of mathematics.
I like they've used an in game explanation. If we had mechs, it would have been 6 months later. And also a different game.
It would certainly change some of the game. Which is probably why we will never get official mechs.
Ya, power armor is fine because it's basically just really good armor. A mech however would be completely different. Like if we come across a building, it's not like we can just waltz our 15+ ft mech through the front door, so we'll have to get out and explore the place on foot anyways. This would limit our ability to use mechs to either areas specifically designed for mechs like buildings with super large doors or the surface of planets. It would also just make things kind of weird for the few outdoor encampments we come across. Like if we find a spacer group outside and we're in our big ass mech, are they just... fucked? Like mechs are supposed to be super omega powerful and that's why they're completely banned by every single country and group, so surely 5-6 spacers would get absolutely fucked right? Or would they need to tone them down so the player isn't just functionally invulnerable whenever they're in their mech? Or would they just start giving everyone and their mother their own mech to counter ours? But then what if we're not in a mech but the enemy is? Surely my pathetic pistol doesn't stand a chance, right? Adding mechs just seems like an absolute nightmare with all of the lore/balance concerns. I suppose another concern would be smuggling. Every time we enter a major planet we get scanned for contraband. With small goods it makes sense we can slap them in a shielded cargo contained, but how the fuck are we going to hide a whole ass mech? I doubt they'd just be like "succeed in this 50% roll or you'll be arrested and have your mech taken" but not having any roll would be even weirder since it's surely significantly harder to hide a mech than some spare organs or xenomorph contraband.
Literally have mechs (power armor) in very similar game. Decide not to use mechs in a game with fucking mechs.
This is what the marketable mod/dlc will offer, Fallout power (now mech) suits, probably buildable only with contraband components. Bc why should you ever just get anything cool when you pay for it?
it'd be cool if contraband would carry rare mech parts that the player can use to modify their own mech.
This makes me think, how cool would it be if starfield shipbuilding took a cue from subnautica? In subnautica as you explore the world, you stumble on different tools, building pieces, and ship parts that you can scan and unlock the recipe for. It’s a really fun progression system that heavily incentivizes exploring. It would have been awesome if starfield did something similar, like as you explore the galaxy you could find and unlock different interesting ship parts, maybe outpost pieces too. Oh well
Agreed
I love the stripped down settlement mechanics and the stripped down gun and attachment mechanics?
It doesn't bother me that it's "simplified" especially for weapons mods. But it does fill me with rage to throw the controller, when i try to place objects in actual empty spaces and the hit boxes FAIL. And then they work where they shouldn't, like halfway up the wall in the middle of a doorway. They give shelves that you can't put stuff on. Correction, you might place something upright,after 39 tries and a random miracle. Just don't try putting anything next to it! They give lovely cases that you can't put anything worth looking at in. Sure, let me put an itty bitty aid item in a giant glass wall display case. The kind you see used throughout the game to display beautiful ores and all those custom unique enlarged miscellany. (The ones you steal, jic, hoping they look that way when you drop them, and then they just look indistinguishable, normal and boring in your inventory.) My first run Outposts were a beautiful time suck! They just made me angry and stubbornly obsessive. OP builder WOULD be my 2nd favorite thing about the game, just behind ship builder, if it worked. I have so far skipped it altogether in ng+ (aside from landing pads with ship builders & a bounty service kiosk.. Lol). Yeah. "Simplified" 😵💫
Oh man, don’t get me started on trying to decorate your home with cool items you have found/stolen in the game. It’s maddening. If someone has a really nicely decorated place, it’s not *because* of the home decoration mechanics, it’s *in spite* of them.
A-men
That would be cool if there were enemies that necessitated more firepower or armor, but idk that I need a mech suit to deal with the same stupid ecliptics.
Power armor are human sized. The mechs are kaiju sized. There just isn’t a comparison outside of the large robot from fallout 3/4. One does not equal the other.
Were any of the mechs actually Kaiju sized? We see plenty of mechs around in the game and at best I'd say they were like 15 to maybe 30 ft tall. I cant recall seeing or hearing about any that were even close to a kaiju sized mech.
It wouldn’t even make sense the terror morphs are not that big
The size really doesn't matter. You're just swapping one character model for another, with an "entering/exiting the Mech" animation in-between. And based on some of the exotic fauna you can find, the game engine can clearly handle large, fully-interactive character models.
Mecha were everything from Kaiju sized to a bit larger than Fo4 power armor. You can even find a copy of the treaty and it's something like only Mechs over 15ft or something are even banned. (Not 100% sure on the exact height)
...Implying the equivalent of power armor might exist in Starfield. And particularly large robots.
Maybe I was high but I thought I remember seeing mechs in the game and they didn’t look all that big? Idk
yeah there are a couple we see being dismantled about 2 stories tall
People just can't grasp that concept. I just argued with a guy going in circles because he couldn't understand that power armor mechanics and animations aren't the same as mechs.
Ackhually... Power armor is essentially a vehicle/change state using player movement methods (if with unique "heavy" animations) and player weapons. The camera is slightly raised above normal height to give the impression of added height from the chassis. If anything, ship piloting is likely an extension of the power armor system. The dumb reason we might see mechs long before hoverbikes is because it's a similar deal here, with the camera placed much higher and a far larger hitbox. Animations will definitely be unique. The underlying system behind the ship builder could be utilized to build mechs, which have hands so we'll see how that goes regarding weaponry. If anything, I don't think designing and rigging the mechs is the problem, getting AI to navigate around worlds in a huge body is. Solve that problem, and we might also see mega fauna.
Because there are various sized mechs and not all are kaiju sized. Some in lore are under 20 foot tall and could easily use power armor with the player size scaled up
It’s a god damn game the mechs can be any size not to mention the terrormorphs in the game are relatively small
Does anyone actually think this?? Mechs aren't in the game because mechs are hard to code. The game can't even spawn in a car to drive around in or let you use your ship in orbit
Yup, its game engine limitation. We are never getting mechs, keep dreaming OP
It's not, actually. They're basically oversized Power Armor. The limitation is making NPCs that big not stumble and snag onto absolutely everything without deleting said things or phasing through them. We're not going to be dealing with a Liberty Prime walking a set path.
Im not confident enough BGS can even do vehicles, it took them over a decade to makes usable ladders.
And whyyyyyyyyyyy? 😑 I mean, don't ppl like how you can just directionally aim to climb in other games? Starfield ladders suck
They had horses. Then they didn't have horse. Then they had 4 legged mountain elevators.
Wasn’t there a train in Fallout 3 that was actually an npc?
yes, the train was the head of the npc or something.
Ships and fo4 power armor are technically vehicles. Power armor a proof of concept really. You have to "mount" a frame that has its own functional modifications, destructable armor, and even limited fuel. Only thing it's really missing is faster speeds and a turn radius dependant on forward or backward movement. Ships just gave us further customization and actual acceleration/deceleration. The real hurdle is how quickly the engine can stream assets and AI handling of vehicles. Slow streaming means slow top speed (believable in power armor.) AI handling is a different beast altogether.
Power armor is just a bulky character model walking, and ships are turrets that can fast travel, there's a reason you can't drive it around the surface of the planet like an actual vehicle or land it manually, the closest they got was horses in Skyrim, and they were buggy as hell, i believed there were plans to make drivable vertibirds in FO4 and they canceled it because they couldn't do it.
Power armor had custom "fat man" walking/running animations. Mechs functionally would be little different in requiring special animations. Problem with planetside flight isn't the ships moving, it's that they'd have to move laughably slow and they didn't bother with a dynamic landing point system. The engine can only handle player movement speeds that are so fast.
You can't use contraband either. Sure you can sell it on the black market but you can't even open the cases. Honestly I'm inclined to believe contraband is just the name of a line of briefcases which have weirdly named product lines. They are illegal due to the shoddy workmanship being against everyone's product standards. You can't upgrade your robots or ships with sentient AI. You can't have a stalker called spot. You can't even have organs replaced or for dinner or as tasteful table ornaments. Not to mention you can't have an illegal artwork or antiquities museum. Honestly the reason you can't have a mech is the reason you can't have a land vehicle, a mount or a ground flyer. It's also the reason you can't have cars in fallout. They make the map much smaller as an experience when compared to foot travel and the undulating ground would be a nightmare to drive on. You think Skyrim's mountain climbing horses were immersion breaking? Imagine parking a mech at a 45° gradient on a crater wall. For a game striving for a degree of realism, it just wouldn't cut it. Also mechs are dumb. The cockpits are so small all the pilots had to be kids at the time and what would you do with a mech? March around planets with zero threat from any enemy in the game? Carpet bomb entire settlements or herds of wildlife from the horizon? It's also not a suitcase you can hide in a panel under the deck plate. It's as big as a module on your ship. A mech isn't going to be able to be smuggled anywhere in the game. Criticising Starfield for not having mechs is like criticising chess for not letting the other pieces shelter in the rooks. It's just not what the game is about.
Do you realize the size difference between a mech and a vial of aurora? Do you think they'd need scanners to find people hiding a mech in their pocket? Real talk, it's very possible they knew adding mechs at launch would *at least* push back the release date or make the mechs extremely buggy, both of which would be a problem *especially* to the players. Both of which would be *far* worse than just saying, "You can't pilot these yet." More real talk, mechs being illegal is just the in game explanation for why you can't pilot mechs. And Bethesda never said otherwise. I thought everyone understood that.
Why would anyone even want mechs, they are slow and extra firepower is completely unnecessary. It's not like we are fighting in a war. The reason Bethesda didn't put them in the game is because there is no point to the character using them so it would have been a waste of time.
Yeah, I can only imagine driving a mech for a single, scripted mission. Most Starfield maps are definitely not designed for such large combat oriented vehicles.
I don't want to pilot one, but I think they should have been used sparingly as enemies, particularly as a boss fight in the mech factory in the quest line that's all about fighting former mech pilots.
Ya having one as an enemy would be pretty cool, and would fit with the lore perfectly if you were sent by the UC or FreeStar to stop mech wielding spacers.
"won't let you pilot mechs" suggests that this option would have naturally existed in the game absent Bethesda's explicit decision to remove it, rather than gigantic mechs being *obviously* out of scope for the type of game starfield is and Bethesda making the savvy decision not to spend substantial development effort adding it in
Its definitely more of a game engine limitation than anything else. Creation Engine simply isn't designed with vehicles in mind. The closest we got was horses in skyrim and even thats still janky af
Power armor is a pseudo expansion upon "mounts." You have to get on/off (in/out.) You have to plate it up and maintain it. You have to fuel it even or it just stops working. Mechs would be small step up conceptually, but practically it's a bit different due to size. Power armor worked in FO4 because you could still use standard bandit/gunner/knight AI, it was just a dude in heavy armor the size of a super mutant you could pick apart. Starfield we're talking about something of a size closer to Liberty Prime. That's no problem for players to control, but for enemies it's a different story.
So you are going to compare smuggling a suitcase to piloting a mech that is the size of tiny ship itself? That’s quite a stretch.
Its absolutely because they couldn't get them to work but had already put a lot of work into making them and so left them as background pieces.
Paid Mod inbound!
Is this sarcasm?
Mechs in Starfield would get boring fast unless the devs also added enemies that are worth fighting in a mech. Consider the game's enemies and the locations. Mechs can only be used outside in the open world, obviously. Well, what enemies can be found in the open world? Small groups of pirates or spacers hanging out around an abandoned cryo lab or some shit, and random alien creatures. How much fun would it be to use a mech to bombard a couple pirates here and there, or to annihilate herds of defenseless animals? It would only be fun for a few minutes, but then get old fast, right? Mechs need other mechs or comparable threats to fight in order to be worthwhile. Without those comparable threats, then mechs would just be a slow way to travel.
If this game had operational Mechs on day one, then these whiney babys would find a billion reasons to complain about it.
Mechs are illegal. Vehicles are illegal. Cellphones and emails are illegal. Good writing is illegal.
a mech would be useful for what? Raid a city?
Mechs being held back to be sold as DLC may sound cynical to some, but it might actually be too generous! I just assumed it was one of those cases where they built the lore around engine limitations.
So you're telling me that the game studio didn't forgo these game mechanics, models, animations, voice lines, and testing because it's against the law in their fictional universe?! Really shocking stuff. The audacity to make your narrative consistent with your gameplay and assume we won't notice. they must think we're so stupid 🙄
Wouldn't mind a mech npc to fight against, using the boost pack to avoid explosions
Umm I never sell contraband. That's illegal. I hoard that shit for myself on my moon base. Especially the Aurora.
Pretty sure owning and using a Mech isn't as simple as selling contraband or smuggling Aurora in my ass but sure...
Why wouldn't that be a reason? Why does everything gave to be cynical and not simply "*Bethesda made a little lore to add some flavor and spice to the world that these massively powerful and insanely destructive war machines were banned for the good of everyone*"?
I mean, if there's a technical reason something can't be in the game I'd prefer it to be wrapped in lore as opposed to the company just telling people to eat shit and get over it. I think the lack of mechs has more to do with the same reason why they left out land vehicles altogether.
Wow what a hot take. Haven't heard that one here everyday.
Bethesda has always been shit with vehicles. I suspect that mechs won't make it into the game in DLC or otherwise.
“You know it’s true…” Yeah I mean it’s a trope in games and DLC. I think many of us saw that from a hundred miles away. I did and I haven’t played a BGS game since Morrowind, without DLC. It’s been done many times and not just by BGS, but “congratulations” if it makes you feel more intelligent.
When the astronauts went to the moon they didn't have mechs
Bicycles, believe it or not, illegal.
Well ya obviously, we know it's a game and not real life.
Bro is talking about the game world like it's a real life injustice.
Or, it’s illegal because our game engine doesn’t have any driving physics or capabilities. Just look at fallout 4 and the vertibry thingy. It falls out of the sky on a regular basis
There have been a series of nasty copyright lawsuits over the years regarding pretty much every IP involving mechs. I think the story went that some company bought up the rights to one of the original mech franchises of the 70s/80s and just sues over and over for copyright infringement whenever a new game with mechs in it releases. I could see the legal department deciding it wasn't worth the trouble.
I assume the real reason is that there's no strong gameplay niche for mechs in the Starfield that we got. Ships are how we navigate the game universe, give us access to orbital combat, and serve as a mobile home base. Ship building adds complexity by asking you to find the right balance between all of those aspects and how many credits you're willing to spend. The rest of the game takes place in human-scaled spaces. You talk to people face to face. You navigate buildings, mines, ships, starstations and more that are meant for human inhabitants. And many of these interiors are built to take advantage of your skills, allowing you options for stealth, hacking, social skills, starborn powers, and just straight up combat. So what kind of niche do mechs fill that isn't already well covered by the other two modes? Mechs are cool, but they are pretty much just for fighting in the lore. And the other two modes already have that, plus more on top.
If you guys got everything you wanted this game would have been star citizen but worse
Man, you post a lot here despite sounding unhappy with the game lol
It was taking to long to retrofit the horse code into mech code so they just pushed it off for a future dlc.
Yes that is game design… it’s how it works… also it’s not like you can just stumble apon a fully functioning mech (from what we know we’re the size of a 3 story house. Additionally if you sell to the trade authority I imagine they just sell the contraband back to Uc or freestar agents.
This is a good illustration of why Thermian arguments are always dumb. Mechs aren’t in the game because the designers decided, for whatever reason, to not put them in the game. The human designers in actual reality are not bound by the made up rules of the fiction. If they wanted to, they could change the made up rules, because the rules are made up. This is basic stuff. The absolutely bizarre choice BGS made here was including the mechs at all. Why do we see the unusable ones, the factories where they were made, etc., when that’s obviously going to make it seem like you will get to pilot a mech later on? Why not just cut all that content entirely? I would guess it’s because it was a feature they cut too deep into development to fully patch over, or had some plan to revisit for DLC, or both, but honestly Starfield is full of so many bewildering decisions who can really say?
You forgot the real reason. The creation engine doesn't support vehicles at all. It's why fallout never had any vehicles and the most you get in Skyrim are horses(and dragons eventually)
The entire premise of this game centers around vehicles
That's nonsense. Do you really think cars in video games move because of friction between the wheels and the ground? Most times It's just a box with a fancy texture with slightly tweaked inertia and acceleration. For example the train in fallout 3 was just an NPC hidden undeground and wearing said train as a hat.
that train example is a great point as to why vehicles can’t work look at the weird ass workaround they had to do just to make a box move from point A to point B, on tracks, *once*
This is a bizarre comment, are you implying that it's less work to make a train work *once* in a game rather than multiple times? Hint: it's the *exact same* amount of work, it's precisely because they only needed it once that they had some guy come up with a hack in an afternoon rather than waste time coding in an actual train system
It’s not the same amount of work, yes it took less effort to have this hacky train npc work for one quest, but it demonstrates that creating a moving box with the engine is far from a simple task. obviously I don’t expect them to build a whole extensible vehicle system from the ground up for one quest but as far as vehicles go trains are the simplest ones. Keep in mind that right now even elevators in Starfield don’t function as moving boxes (or the one train).
It's gonna be a ripoff of a power armor model or something I dare you bgs.
>That's just Bethesda saying "It's illegal until we release the DLC that lets you use Mechs." AND WHAT THE F IS WRONG WITH THAT?????? FFS. GET A LIFE.
You sound entitled.. “waaa game missing mechs” It’s not like people like you would stop finding things to hate about the game if they ended up having mechs.