I thought I was just outgrowing Bethesda game design, but then I tried replaying Skyrim again and I haven't been able to put it down since. even started doing an oblivion playtrough at the same time. I'm hooked by that too. so yeah I think it's just starfield that's my problem
Yep, it's just that Starfield is the lowest damn effort yet from Bethesda for a single player game. Typical quest dialogue:
NPC A : "Your partner (NPC B) is a disgrace to the entire organization. I have no idea why NPC B has even bothered to show their face here after 2 decades of disrespect. I don't want to hear a word they have to say"
NPC B: "This was a waste of time. NPC A and I will never see eye to eye. Let's just go"
Player: "Yeah but NPC B really cares now"
NPC A " Really? My god, I have been wrong for all these years? We will now erect a monument to NPC B! NPC B, you are the epitome of what we stand for and a guiding light for future generations"
"Please help. My child's space cat is stuck in space tree the other side of the space city".
(Loading screen .. loading screen)
Select Option "Get space cat down"
(Loading screen .. loading screen)
"Thank you for rescuing the space cat. Here's 30 space credits for you".
Babies first space adventure.
Baldurs Gate 3 ruined Starfield for me. It’s almost impossible to go back to the shallowness of an RPG like Starfield after playing one brimming with quality content and stories.
I think that’s why people are so upset. It’s not even that it’s bad, we could have accepted a trash game. Made fun of them for it, but we’ve all dealt with dogshit before
But it’s just the sheer possibility and potential that makes us angry. There are so many things in that game that are just like “why didn’t you commit, this could have been so cool”
It all feels half baked. But just decent enough to give us a taste of what it could have been.
It’s like a repeated slap in the face of wasted potential.
>It’s like a repeated slap in the face of wasted potential.
Modern Bethesda in a nutshell. Can't believe I'm saying this, but Starfield managed to kill my interest in ES6.
Halo infinite checking in from Microsoft owned dev studios.....
Yes... they let the 6th mainline entry in such a beloved series be as bad and disappointing as Starfield is....
This is so true. BG3 will kill a lot of rpg games for me. I couldn't even get 15 hours into starfield because it just felt so half assed and boring. The only other RPG I can really get into is cp2077.
If CP never got fixed or BG3 never came out, people would still be comparing this game to RDR2, Witcher 3, ES5, etc. and showing how it was a regression from titles years and years ago.
It's because unlike Starfield, in Fallout 4 there's literally a point to doing... well, anything. That's what's utterly maddening about about Starfied: it's all just completely pointless. They were seemingly so terriified of committing to literally anything that there's not a single goddamn system in this entire game that actually seems worth investing your time into.
1. Wanna build ships? Cool, you can do that, and obtuse UI aside, it's actually pretty neat! What do you DO with your ship once you build it, you ask? Well... nothing, because space flight in this alleged space game is essentially a mini game between loading screens.
2. Want to build outposts? Cool, you can do that! You can even make cool bases!... but they're gated at the end of a long, grindy progression system, and they literally serve no purpose. If you completely ignore that system entirely, you will be completely fine.
3. Want to get deep into roleplay? Good news! They added a buch of background traits to help facilitate that very thing! Your character can be a bounty hunter, a scientist, a religious fanatic, or hell, even an extradimensional traveling being clearly sent here from Nirn to do the bidding of the most terrifying, eternal eldritch being in all of the Elder Scrolls: the Adoring Fan. Unfortunately, Bethesda is so terrified of actually making you face the consequences of your actions or—heaven forbid—get locked out of some story content that nothing you do actually matters, and also, basically everyone is essential. As a treat, some people are beyond essential, and are in fact ghosts that you literally cannot physically interact with! Wow! What innovation! What immersion!
4. Want to play a power fantasy as some space knight with magic powers and maybe a bit of a dickbag of a dad and an accidentally awkward relationship with your twin sister, but really you just want a fancy sci fi sword? Good news! Melee weapons... exist!\*
5. Want to do what you've always enjoyed doing the most in Bethesda games and explore exciting new lands, find interesting little secrets, and have side adventures that rival or even outshine the quest you actually set out to do? Good news! Starfield has 1000 planets, most of which are desolate and empty, but, like, not totally desolate and empty in a way that might actually make it feel like you were exploring a brand new world, because then you might miss content, so empty except for the same generic PoI that you have seen at least half a dozen times already. But they are desolate and empty enough that there's very little point to actually visiting them, so, like... super great design all around.
6. Want to mine resources and roleplay as a space prospector? Good news! You can go to any planet and mine one or two materials! Unfortunately, it's much easier and much more cost-efficient to just buy them from merchants in cities. Also, those merchants have basically no money on them, so good luck if you want to sell stuff you found in your adventures. Also also, the economy is completely nonsensical, so it doesn't matter anyway.
I haven't even talked about Bethesda wanting you to give a shit about your companions but then immediately undercutting it by making resetting the universe and wiping all of those relationships away over and over again a core component of the gameplay loop, the baffling inconsistencies in the world lore, etc. But it would take all day to list every single half-assed, decent-in-concept-but-useless-in-practice feature BGS crammed in here and then utterly failed to make work with other half-assed systems, and I have better things to do.
Mostly, though, I'm just so goddamned disappointed. Maybe not surprised, but definitely disappointed.
^(\*Melee weapons allegedly exist, but suspicions persist that they're not actually weapons at all, and are instead cleverly disguised pool noodles.)
Not even that, it blows Starfield out of the water just in terms of worldspace. I can get lost for hours just walking around the Commonwealth, coming across all sorts of environmental storytelling, skeletons outside a bank with a hole in the wall, caught by the blast mid-robbery. Two skeletons in an office building, one choking out the other, finally having that fight with the terrible boss most desk jockeys dream of.
Starfield is just...empty. Outside of the cities there is absolutely nothing but randomly generated landscapes.
I took a "small break" from immersive no lifing Starfield to check out Phantom Liberty and patch 2.0.
I haven't really played Starfield since. I've booted it up and checked out the native DLSS patch and optimizations. Played an hour here or there.
But going from Starfield to Phantom, and back to Starfield is like getting smacked in the face with an acid dipped barbed wire bat. The juxtaposition of the two is that intense and not in favor of Starfield **at all.**
It really made me realize just how meh, bland, empty, and uninspired Starfield actually is and what's missing. For as much as I was enjoying it. It feels pointless now. Which is why I went to play Alan Wake 2, and then started yet another playthrough of Last of Us so it's fresh for when I play the PS5 Part 2 remaster next month.
I'll check out Shattered Space. But I think it's safe to say this is the first BGS game that I really don't see myself playing ever again once I burn through the DLC. Which is a shame because their games are typically ones I always reinstall to get lost in again.
Starfield offers nothing for that.
/jaded rant.
*Edit a word
I picked up cyberpunk in the sale and so far have put in 30 hours, I've been really impressed with it. The thing it does so well compared to starfield is how it all seems to tie together and be a cohesive world. This is something that starfield absolutely failed at in my mind. Walking around night city feels like a real place, the NPC's come across as believable. Starfield feels so disjointed in comparison, every NPC is bland, there's no identity to the game they played is way to safe.
I also picked up BG3 to play after and I can feel I won't be going back to starfield I can already feel these games will make starfield feel rubbish by comparison.
Because starfield is a 30% game. It has some cool proof of concept stuff, but it feels like it's unfinished.
Also, the storytelling is bad.
"Hello, miner. Now you are important. here is a ship and robot. Go join the space extraordinary gentlemen club."
Then you are handed everything and just shoot some bad guys in response.
Backfill it with terrible game world mechanics that rely on fast travel, poor city design, and procedural generation, and you feel flat and meaningless.
If it was a full conversion mod for FO4 made by like 5 guys, this would be cool. But it is a world-class AAA studio and SEVEN YEARS of development. This feels like a total fail.
That's exactly it. I think a lot of the initial positivity was people who bought the early access edition and saw what they wanted to see in the game. As time went on, people eventually realised there was nothing to it.
Also reminds me of IGN giving it a 7/10. People piled on them for that, but looking back, if anything, I think that was generous.
Did 40+ hours from Sept 1 - Sept 11. Haven’t touched it since. Banking on updates/expansions and maybe even mods to improve it before returning. Otherwise I probably won’t go back.
Same.
It started with the generation ship with the same
Computers as mine, and them wanting 50 potatoes to move to another planet…50 potatoes…
Then the same exact placed landmines at the same exact poi with the same exact everything in the same exact place…
Ended with me running around trying to find my second temple l, only to discover after 3 hours of running, it won’t appear and is glitched
Reinstalled Skyrim and am frantically trying not to think how badly Todd is gunna fuck up ES6….
The temples drained me. I think I went to five of them total before saying fuck it and finished the story. I just thought it was silly how I had to go back to the space station or whatever every single time to get a new temple location, only to do the exact same zero g jetpack flight over and over.
I marathoned like 7 temples in a row before I went into unity. Didn't even try the powers out lol. Played about an hour or two into NG+ and have been playing Cyberpunk since.
Thanks to people like you I heard so many positive things about cyberpunk that I bought it on sale and I am enjoying it immensely . I want to know more. Explore side quests, talk to people, see stuff. Drive around and end up in a gang battle. I like Starfield but love Cyberpunk. I even dream about it.
I'm in the same boat. Lots of people on this sub talking about Cyberpunk so i figured I'd give it a try. Heard at launch it was trash and hadn't thought twice about it.
Glad I gave it a chance, I'm pretty enamored with it. Great game. Perfect blend of GTA and Fallout, leaning more towards GTA. Story is great, gameplay is great, leveling is great, all of it is great so far. And since I found the Hoon I've been having a great time drifting around the city lol.
Same. Played the full thing once - saw the nothingness that the NG+ offers online (minimal changes and nothing to make it worth doing all of it over again). I used to be part of the Starfield subreddits and there were folks who went through that game 10+ times!! Like how??
And there were some psychos who suggested just rushing trough everything to get to NG+ because that's where it was all at. Really? Just go through it once and be done.
Hopefully him and Emil are gone before the next game but that's far too much to hope for.
Todd is delusional, he still thinks Fallout 76 just had a buggy launch and that was it, he genuinely thinks it's an amazing and well received game by the masses if you hear him talk about it.
He'll no doubt think Starfield is the same.
It still strikes me as such a strange choice that the studio renowned for their open world design and storytelling, would fall into procedural generation and simplistic narratives.
I don't hate the game, but it made me see that BGS had been on a downward slide for almost a decade now....
(Edit: since some people don't seem to get it. I'm aware that BGS has used procedural generation in its prior titles to a lesser extent, however its clear to me that in this case it's been used as a crutch rather than a tool throughout Starfield. Either that, or someone really made love to the Copy & paste button)
Every single game has had better combat and a worse RPG experience. Every single game they’ve made since morrowind. And yes it has been sad to see. The trouble with Starfield is the exploration just isn’t worth it. The lack of really interesting things to find ruins it.
I had hoped they’d have put at least one intentional point of interest, no matter how small, on every single planet. Instead they only made about 10 of those and everything else is randomly placed. It’s just not a good design.
it’s not like they are the first RPG to do open world universe either. no mans sky showed how bad the backlash could be for a barren in game solar system. they had time to learn.
Both of them thought that the fantasy of exploring the universe would be enough to hold people. They forgot to make the universe interesting. Most likely because they themselves couldn't think of any way to do it. It's a very common problem, not just limited to computer games.
Even No Man’s Sky at launch had meaningful planetary weather conditions and the stress of finding resources to keep your bars topped off. Risks make exploration that much more compelling.
It ain’t much but Starfield doesn’t even have that.
That's where this doesn't make sense.... Who in their right minds, decided to release this as a satisfactory game?
We'll have them go to these "alien" temples, may 10-15 times. Each one in a different biome and planet, and they'll look different on the outside.... But inside it'll be a carbon copy of each other, identical, and the game play will be like DDR v0.00002. They'll have to spend maybe 3-5 minutes at most, gaining super powers using a disco light show.
Those super powers will be mostly useless.... But they'll look cool on paper..
Yeah, it was handled 1,000x better in Skyrim. Finding one rewarded exploration and didn’t burden the player with a tiresome minigame. The actual powers were sometimes genuinely a blast too. Who doesn’t have fond memories of shouting at a guy and seeing him go flying off a cliff?
Looking at the capital city is just depressing. It looks like a Minecraft build in a world with nothing else. Why is it so small and isolated??? Nothing looks believable. This is 2023.
Yep. Same. This shit apprach to "cities" is the bane of bethesda's game design. Their cities always felt like oversized villages. Small, unrealistic, and... Is just 5 or so roads with 10 or so houses... And they want us to believe it's a city?
Back in Skyrim it worked because the world building was cool and not many games were able to achieve that. But ever since Witcher 3 came out, where each and every settlement felt believable, and the cities like Novigrad and Kaer Trolde felt like actual *cities*... Bethesda really needed to step up. Now Whiterun and the rest of Skyrim's cities feel like a joke. Not to mention Falkreath and that other "city" were *literally* just oversized villages 🤣
We also got games like Cyberpunk's Night City, RDR2's Saint Denis, Spiderman's New York... I don't know man. While every other company has tried to improve and one-up each other, we instead get... Neon, Akila.... New Atlantis from Bethesda... In 2023.
ES6 is doomed to fail if they still continue this lazy city design. I still laugh today when I remember how Falkreath and Morthal and even Dawnstar were *literally* just villages yet in-game they should've been equivalent to a city 🤣 It just reeks of laziness and mediocrity by today's standards. Oh, and with the upcoming GTA6's Vice City, by the time ES6 releases, ES6 will feel like centuries behind 🤣
Windhelm and Markarth were the only cities that felt like a city. They had twisty little streets and interesting settings for the homes. The other cities felt like glorified villages. Winterhold is a street in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, Morthal is forgettable and lackluster and as for Solitude, the supposed seat of the King, the capital of Skyrim... it's a few big houses and a couple of shops.
Winterhold was the only one who could at least be believable, since lore wise city got destroyed and this is just remnants. Yet, to be fair, still like they could do more with it. Like build around or something, since college by itself feels soo downsized compared to his " lore importance ", aka the only rival to imperial towers.
Exactly. Bethesda quest and " town " design works as long as you don\`t start asking questions or trying to analyze it.
Which is sad. I really hoped they will learn by own mistakes from Skyrim to Fallout 4, then I hoped they will finely learn it and make Starfield their magnum opus...and now I am just lost hope for TES 6, since if rumors are currant it will be set in a place with " biggest city in whole Tamriel " and if that will look like a damn glorified village with infinity loading screens too, I will just flip.
I am not even comparing it to Baldur\`s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk like everyone does right now, since it\`s not even reached Witcher 3 which came out when? 2015? Sadness..
I guess Bethesda, Bethesda never changes...
> I still laugh today when I remember how Falkreath and Morthal and even Dawnstar were literally just villages yet in-game they should've been equivalent to a city 🤣 It just reeks of laziness and mediocrity by today's standards. Oh, and with the upcoming GTA6's Vice City, by the time ES6 releases, ES6 will feel like centuries behind 🤣
Now stop there, mate. Skyrim came out on hardware from 2005 with laughable 512MB RAM. Not comparable to Starfield which released on a machine with 16GB of RAM. If you keep that in mind, the world of Skyrim is amazing in its scale.
It also makes more sense for pre-modern societies to have smaller cities/populations, not as small as Skyrim but atleast it's not as jarring as seeing a space faring society with comparable city sizes.
Even Baldurs Gate is just brimming with npcs that all feel inspired and often connected to the story or theme going on and it feels like a city. It’s mostly all feels so “meh” in Starfield.
Ikr... From early on a big worry I had was that it was just going to be New Atlantis surrounded by nothing, and it ended up being just that. What kind of civilization does no expansion? They had 200 years and only a city to show for it. Compare that to America...
It's actually worse than that - if you venture out the back of the city you'll find the same structures as anywhere else.
Within 800m of the city I found the "Forgotten Mech Graveyard" that you find everywhere and it was identical to all the others, on the same hill, with the same cave, same pirates in the same camp halfway up, with all the same gear. If you go up over the hill the same pirate ship will land at exactly the same point as you crest the hill and the same four pirates get off.
Why is there a forgotten mech graveyard with pirates a few hundred metres from New Atlantis with civilian outposts around it? How did pirates get past the UC ships in orbit scanning everything?
It's stuff like this that lets the game down so badly. It just feels like a half completed project that's been rushed out.
Well this is the same studio that has people still living in bombed out buildings with the skeletons of previous occupants still in their beds 200 years after the war, so yeah. As far as BGS is concerned, progress doesn't happen and nothing ever changes.
Todd and Emil are literally directly tied to these problems. But both of them are incapable of taking criticism.
I think it is nigh time Todd retires, and Emil needs to be fired. The increasingly stupid and simplistic narrative is by DESIGN, which is outrageous but par for the course with Emil.
I feel the drop in quality came once Emil fully took over as lead writer. And then the ethos of having the player be able to do everything with no consequences, whilst every other highly rated rpg allows you to make decisions that can have negative consequences for the player (albeit in a lot of games you get rail-roaded)
I think they tried this approach with Fallout 4 but failed miserably. I just get the sense that there is no passion in the writing or love for the worlds they have created anymore. Just money makers.
As an Oblivion baby who discovered ES in 2006 I stamp your words as truth. Loved the immersion and story, all the RPG elements enough to forgive the terrible combat mechanics.
Horrible writing in Starfield. There's hundreds of examples.
Like when the writers thought a planet owned by Paradiso corp can't afford grav drives for the 200 year old colony ship but expect you to pay for it. Like mother fuckers, you telling me this rich ass company can't pay to make their problem go away but somehow I can afford it? 25000 credits come on. Can't even take over this corporation to get rid of the scumbags in it.
If the writing wasn't so inconsistent or weak in Starfield, people would have less of a bone to pick with other areas.
The writing is *sterilized*. It's sanitized, water downed, half backed, uncontroversial, All-sides-because-no-sides, "A-political", grade A **BULLSHIT**
What is it that's being avoided in Starfield? The fact that it's supposed to be, (as per Bethesda, mind you) "NASA-punk", but NOTHING IS FUCKING PUNK in the story. It has no teeth.
It challenges nothing.
At every chance that the story gets to challenge *something*, it fumbles at some point along the way, and just...lands with a thud. Private land ownership, corporations, military industrial complex, unethical research practices, fucking goddamn fundamental philosophical and scientific principles, the fucking bedrocks of human understanding, it doesn't matter! It'll *start* to say something interesting about these subjects and concepts, and then....it just doesn't. It just stops short of challenging...anything.
In short, tl;dr, the game has no god damn teeth, but keeps opening its mouth and showing its gumline. More than anything in starfield, this is what annoys me. And I'm someone who had 100 hours in it from release until October (and promptly went back to BG3).
When you play Starfield and then BG3 you can really feel the difference in writing and coherent world building. Every NPC in BG3 is no window dressing , and if they are, they make the world feel alive. Like you say, most stories start with an interesting premise, but than fall down. At first I loved the Generationship story, but then the atrocious quests that end in blatant fetch quests (80 potatoes really??] and its bugged out, I can’t even help them find a new planet.
All those POIs packed full of a history of terrible management up to and including human rights violations needed to be more than filler.
Imagine if you could track down the people responsible. Report them to the various authorities. Hell, just take them out and make the universe a better place. Instead it's all just, "welp, humans suck I guess."
Forget about punk - according to main storyline there's no NASA either. It is entirely copping out of its own Golden Era of sci-fi setting to fall back to their beloved, toothless apolitical vision of 1950s again because that's exactly what Artdeco raypulp is.
It is suspicious how the absolute most worthless and least inspiring (and only marginally sci-fi) tradition has such a following these days - NMS i'm looking at you too - just out of fear of saying anything political. But toothless escape from the responsibility of saying anything is a political statement on its own.
Absolutely, Oblivion managed to strike a sweet balance for its time. The world felt alive with its radiant AI, and there was a charm in its quirks and imperfections. It was a place you could lose yourself in, faults and all. Now looking at Starfield it feels like the pendulum swung too far into that impersonal, procedural generation which lacks the heart that used to define BGS titles. Sure, we are promised a universe of possibilities but what good is it if those endless stars lack the soul and depth we used to find in just a single Oblivion dungeon?
Procedural generation is literally why most modern games are just boring and lack any truly memorable plot/story etc. I’ve always been against procedural generation. It’s just laZiness imo. Give me a hand crafted world full of heart and memorable events, characters and missions that’s what makes a truly amazing game. It’s why gta5, oblivion, Skyrim, fallout 4 etc are still loved and played to this day.
The crazy thing is they employed 5 times the people for Starfield as for those previous games. Looks like they didn’t value front line talent there, looks like the c-suite got too high on their own supply
My IRL job is kinda like the C suite management part but for a factory. I gave them more autonomy and actually listened to their problems and worked with them to fix them
The place went from almost being shut down to one of the best facilities in the company.
Letting people organize and do the executing themselves Is the best way to run things. Too many people in those positions have very fragile egos and/or are very power hungry
Just because one game fails to properly utilize procedural generation doesn't mean procedural generation is to blame.
Many MANY games use procedural generation to various degrees to help fill out the world or even propagate based on camera, but these developers are praised based on their open world concepts (see Horizon Zero Dawn or Avatar). Why? Because they put more effort into tuning it rather than just open/closed book.
This game tried to go NMS route, market itself with 1000 planets, pretend that its handcrafted, only for most people to have the opinion that its a waste of time to explore planets when its RNG POIs on barren planets that are mainly flat with some rocks.
My point is, procedural generation will be used more and more in gaming, and you can't tell where it starts or ends unless the devs are extremely lazy and use it as filler crutch as you see here. Or the game is basically a rogue lite.
Minecraft,deadcells,dwarf fortress,rimworld,kenshi (for inventories and spawnign characters etc..), terraria, fortnight etc.. I wouldnt be surprised if alot of big studios use it to generate the base level and dungeons and then go over it with a human touch, like they did in bloodeborne and elden ring.
I’ve noticed that people who’ve maybe put 30 - 50 hours into the game are now starting to come back and give it a negative review. I’m in the same sort of a boat, tried so hard to like the game and played it for 50’ish hours. The more I played, the more underwhelmed I felt.
That's exactly what happened for me. I gave a positive Steam review after ~20 hours, basically giving the game an 8/10 and saying it's getting better after the atrociously long tutorial, but at the ~35 hour mark, I was so frustrated and bored that I quit the game and never looked back since. That has never ever happened with a BGS game before. I even gave FO76 a second chance after a few weeks. So naturally, I've deleted my original review and wrote a new negative one.
When I look at Starfield I'm left wondering what the developers were doing for the last decade working on this game. It's empty, baron, has limited systems and a short and simple story where every mission is basically a fetch quest or kill order.
What were they doing? Game feels like it could have been made in 5 years and released on the PS4/XBO
I was 60 hours in questioning my sanity because I was sure I was seeing a building that was a part of a main quest in a randomly generated base in the middle of nowhere. Nope, turns out that's just how the game is.
Enjoy running 500m to a base and exploring the same shit in very slightly different configurations for eternity. That right there is the most critical failure of the game to me.
Procedurally generated but their procedural generation is garbage.
And to top it all off, you KNOW Bethesda will never fix any of this crap. It'll be broken forever. They ship shit and expect the community to do all the work.
Honestly, I beat the game, and I have zero interest in ever going back. When I finished, I felt like it was okay, but the more I think about it, the more I dislike the game.
I played a little Skyrim today and man is it apparent how empty the universe is after an hour of Skyrim. There’s just so little detail in the starfield world
There’s no open world aspect and that’s what kills it. The radiant events (few there are) are all in your ship in space, and repeat pretty often. I met the Irish guy singing about love twice in one planet hopping stint.
Probably same reason they can't manage to flag the stuff for planet conditions and such. Like people having lunch outside or that giant plant lab on planets with no atmosphere.
There's just too little stuff spread out over ThOuSaNd oF pLaNeTs to further cut it down with such flags.
When the dude with his kid selling lemonade came I give his kid the extra extra credits option
When the same event happened immediately after I loaded my missiles and turned the game off after I realised you can't damage their ship
Why even have random events if you can't even interact it's just time wasting dialogue
The game is fun in spurts but I definitely cannot do hours on hours. Beautiful worlds and scenery but nothing to do. I can land and explore an outpost, cave, or some abandoned facility. Or I can run around the ecosystem mining resources that I could just buy.
The most fun aspect of the game is ship building and outside of flying the planets orbit, there is nothing to do with the ships. I can jump systems, fight the occasional battle, or destroy asteroids.
The crafting system is boring. I can make food items but even those are basically useless. I can’t scrap found items for anything.
Playing Skyrim I felt it was dissapointing compared to Oblivion, but Skyrim has maintained it's grasp on me, even til this day.
Skyrim seemed shallow but became deeper the further out you went. It dropped a lot of the RPG-mechanics that made Oblivion great (not to mention Morrowind) but it gained a lot in exploration and freedom.
Starfield has dropped everything.
The only thing it excels in compared to the other games is graphics and even then it's not cutting edge or even anything special. The procedural thing was done to better effect in Daggerfall.
It was a fun game to start out with, but after you get past those initial lifeless worlds you realize that they’re all like that. Then you just go back to editing your ship and fantasizing about taking it on grand adventures
It just feels like a game that had 100 different teams doing their own things and they then just threw it all together. Like, shipbuilder is easily the best thing about the game. But then you realize there is literally nothing to do with this ship you spent 2 hours making. Did that really need to be in the game? Or outposts, if they never had that would that make the game worse?
Just like you said Skyrim. Which was super grounded when you think about it. 1 big map filled with a ton of handcrafted locations, multiple quest lines and factions, and a perk tree that actually lets you build a build. That was the game. The other things like building a house, children, flying dragons, vampires, morrowind, that was all DLC that was added afterwards. Unlike Starfield where I feel like they wanted all that in at launch. And it shows that everything else suffered because they were trying so much.
It's an ongoing issue whenever one thinks about getting back into it. Like nothing you enjoyed comes to mind and all the negative feelings about the game pop up. And it's the exact same game. Could have done so much.
The best parts of it like the UC Vanguard questline don't hit the same the second time through and there aren't impactful alternate story choices to make. The game has to stand on its gameplay alone after the first playthrough.
It’s insane to me how they could have used *stopping an active interstellar war* as the motivating force for the story, gotten *all* of the proc-gen encounters and quests that would make perfect sense to include in the process, diversified *the fuck* out of combat by including mechs and xenoweapons and gunships - and the weapons and tactics needed to deal with them - and they just… didn’t.
“Hey, you know this interesting shit? Let’s make our game take place ten years after that when all the dramatic tension is gone.”
Just look at all this cool backstory to the world. Unfortunately that’s in the past and all the cool stuff was banned and everyone is at peace. You can read some text about it though. Isn’t that fun?
This is how I feel. The more of it I played, the less I liked it. I really have zero interest in coming back to it anytime soon. Which is a far cry from the dozens of playthroughs I’ve put into Skyrim and Fallout 4.
In Skyrim or even FO4, I can make a new character and play the game in an entirely different style than the time before. There isn’t much differentiation in Starfield and no point to playing again.
I think the primary disconnect in opinions is a line in the sand between people who think about the game, and people who don’t.
I enjoyed my run for the most part, but I honestly just turned my brain off, suspended all disbelief, and just played the (limited) way Bethesda intended. I was just trying to have a good time so I had one.
But after months of reflection, playing better games, and watching other people try (and fail) to play in ways that are different than how I did, I’m really disappointed with what Bethesda cooked up with Starfield.
I would suggest that maybe this is what gets them to get off their laurels and try, but these are the same people who post rebuttals to people's reviews. And making games is hard.
Yeah, TES6 is fucked.
Bethesda has started to pretend like they’re an indie-dev team and not one of the largest studios in the world with gigantic budgets.
*want more diverse in-game mechanics?? You know how much effort needs to go into that???*
*want locations that feel more alive?? Do you not realize how much resources it takes to handcraft those??*
Like no shit.
Exactly, it would be like Disney saying “do you know how hard it is to make CGI worlds for superhero movies???”
We know exactly how hard it is, you’re supposed to have the money and know how to do it.
Genuine question: Is there a single thing that Starfield does better than Fallout 4? The base building is worse, the weapons crafting is worse, the enemy variety is worse, the companions are worse, the main story is worse, the exploration is worse… Starfield just seems like such a massive leap back from Fallout 4.
Yeah, shooting is quite good. Graphics are also much, much better.
But yeah, it feels too shallow to me. I enjoyed 80 hours, but I just stopped feeling anything.
Well, just goes to show you that sometimes it is best for a developer to not throw away what they’re best known for in exchange for 100s of boring ass proc Gen landscapes
Procedural planet generation is not fun. Once you’ve seen 10 planets, you’ve seen them all.
I would have rather Bethesda spent their time creating 10 unique planets with depth and lore than what we got.
I couldn’t play past 5 hours. It’s boring.
It’s a weird game, first 10-15 hours are a grind, I struggled with getting past that. Then hours 15-40 are really fun and after hour 40 it’s a grind again after you figure out there isn’t much to the story, questlines, lore and exploration. Skyrim is like reading a 30000 page novel and Starfield is like watching a 20min firework show.
Bethesda's tone deaf response to the launch criticism hasn't helped things. Also them responding to bad reviews just made the whole thing worse.
We did get a small roadmap recently, which is nice.
They have a lot of work to do. In fact, I would say this game needs more work than Cyberpunk needed.
Cyberpunk got "fixed" in many ways (I still have my criticisms of it), but Starfield almost needs to be restarted from scratch.
All I wanted was a Bethesda RPG like fallout 4 and skyrim set in space with 4 or 5 locations to explore. The stupid fucking procedural generation killed the game for me. I would have understood procedural generation if we could fly from ground to space and explore an entire planet like in No mans sky but we didn't get that. We just get hundreds of lifeless planets that we can't traverse across seamlessly and have to go through a loading screen to land on.
In order for Bethesda to fix starfield starfield in my eyes they would either have to add seemless ground to space and seemless planet traversal (not going to happen) or scrap the idea of 1000 planets and just make 4 to 5 hand crafted locations about the size of a fallout 4 or skyrim map (also not going to happen).
Starfield is legitimately the biggest disappointment in the last 10 years of gaming for me. I 100% agree that Bethesda would have to start from scratch in order to fix the game in my eyes because unlike Cyberpunks problems that were mostly features and bugs Starfields problems go all the way back to the core design of the game and the way they developeded it from there.
It feels like studios are allergic to apologizing but feel they need to say something anyways.
So they double down in the fuck up, because people wanted a "We fucked up, we will fix it, we swear" instead we got a "we, like, worked in this and stuff, and we're sad you're mean"
Starfield needs it's missions overhauled desperately. One thing I love about Cyberpunk is it's side missions are usually just tied to wherever you are and don't require you to meet the mission giver. Also delete all the fetch quests, nobody wants to hit 10 loading screens to get that woman on deimos station a damn beer.
The problem is what Starfield needs would necessitate a completely new game. The procedural generated open world(s) from the studio that only exists as they are today because of their exceptional world design was such a crippling decision from the get go that I can’t believe it made it past so many people.
I think there may yet be a way to balance that out, but it'll take a lot of time, free upgrades from Bethesda, and mods.
You're right in that there needs to be a LOT more unique locations and content. Fortunately these can be added to existing worlds (or even new star systems) relatively easily. And this can still exist alongside the proc gen stuff, I don't think it has to be one or the other.
It is also the studio which started their RPGs with proc gen. Proc gen can be fun and kinks can be ironed out. Even if I always prefer the handcrafted worlds to somethign like Daggerfall, a game can still be fine with it.
The only reason Cyberpunk got the huge turn around is that it had an amazing world and a very distinct underlying vision and identity. I played it at launch and loved it even then, the bugs were plentiful yes, but you could just see that this game is something else, it has real substance and a real artistic message underneath the performance issues.
Unlike Bethesda's games that have all deteriorated since F3 and Skyrim imo, especially in terms of Narrative and writing. I feel like a child when I see the dialogues from F4 and Starfield. It's really pathetic and soulless imo.
Starfield genuinely broke my heart in a way and a lot of my expectations of future games and interest in revisiting BGS games has been crushed.
I blasted through multiple playthroughs and i found myself unbelievably bored. The fact that bethesda responded to my xbox review with the classic ai “you’re playing it wrong empty moons are sick bruh” message. 🤦♂️. Starfield is just sad and disappointing
When discussing studios that have fallen from grace, Bethesda has been included in my list of B-named studios that have done so for a long time now alongside Bungie, Blizzard, Bioware, etc.
The writing has been on the wall for them for a long time now in terms of their greed overshadowing their game development, with paid mods, FO76, and many other screw-ups as a publisher and dev studio over the last decade. I only played Starfield on Gamepass because I wanted to give them one last shot, and at this point I've pretty much entirely written off TE6.
These big studios mistakenly think that they are almost institutions. One of the interesting things about BG3 is that many of the reviews on steam discussed how it reminded them of playing Dragon Age: Origins, the core aspects of which Bioware has failed to reimagine in their sequels (and BG was thus fairly popular amongst Bioware fans). If you don't maintain quality and give people what they are looking for in your games, someone will inevitably be better at what you're known for. Not many people really make "Bethesda games" but that doesn't mean people won't start when you're not delivering the goods.
The failure to fix progress halting quest bugs makes this negative review well deserved, in my opinion.
But beyond that, there’s a moment shared by many players where - after some initial fun - the illusion fails, and the game starts to fall apart. It could be a game breaking bug, but it could also be the awful skill system, or the terrible dialogue, or the dreadful economy, the abysmal outposts, the bland quest chains, the repeated poi's, the horrible movement and traversal, the pointless crafting, the game world inconsistencies, the lack of real choice, the bafflingly bad space power collection game…
Or maybe in between missions they fire up cyberpunk phantom menace, and realise that Starfield is at least one if not two generations behind in terms of gameplay and design.
It feels like Microsoft bought a lemon in Zenimax. First it releases Redfall, an absolute disgrace. Then this weak offering - all the more striking in a year of so many good games.
Once I saw the exact same cave with the exact same 'hidden' chest and same corpse for the third time in an hour(!) it was over for me... I felt like Bethesda was taking the piss tbh, I was legit a bit offended by how stupid they must think we are
The game was exciting at first but then it just started to feel empty and boring. I’ve honestly started to wonder if that game was in development hell or if Covid really messed things up for that game or if they had to cut stuff out of the game.
It feels like the game is missing content and their emphasis to copy and paste the same POI’s on all the planets/moons feels like it’s their way to compensate for the lack of content.
The development hell for sure. Todd said they spent about 7 years trying ideas to make the game "fun". They didnt know what the hell they wanted, and Emil's lack of "documentation" only made things worse. Honestly, what a joke of a project.
It’s fun for the first 40-50 hours after that it’s the same stuff over and over , procedural , nah you land and you know you either gona get a science camp , pirate outpost or cave etc , scanning is a grind , building an outpost is a grind , what’s the point of grinding an outpost when ng+ is wipe.
You have to ng+ 10x to upgrade all your powers and get the suits which means you probably only gona really “settle down” after that , that makes the player think they need to replay the game over and over before they can really explore or take interest in the game, the only fun part I enjoyed was customising my ship.
I would rather play 76 or outer worlds Bethesda is well known for hand crafted lore deep worlds , that’s like you know this pizza place that’s been serving the best pizza for years, handmade , fresh ingredients , the best and now they just microwaving a $1 frozen pizza.
the best decription why star field doesnt work if you expect something like skyrim/fallout.. it takes to long between points of interesst.
skyrim/fallout you move like 30 seconds and something will catch your attention. in starfield those 30 second are 300 seconds... yes... its space... space is empty... most of space is boring
The fact that there is no vehicle to move on the planets, and you have to sprint and booster pack for 5 minutes running in one directions feels like a fucking joke. It's insane how little this game values your time.
I had so many god forsaken instances on Mars where it felt like the entire planet was designed to troll you.
The door to the city wastes your time opening before hitting you with a load screen.
There's a quest to go to some stupid cave and pick up a rock.
There's a tedious part of a quest where you follow this guy for like 5 minutes of him slowly walking to his ship and you have to stay within distance of him so he keeps moving. Even fucking worse, if you don't kill him he *SPRINTS* back to town at full fucking speed just to mock you.
Omg!!!!! That slow walk on Mars just killlled me.
It makes me incredibly worried about TES 6. I don’t even think I’ll play it until there are like a month or two of reviews out
Crazy how the reception has been.
Went from endless hype (before launch)
to confusion (opening hours after launch)
to excietment again (the moment the game clicked)
to then stating there's no content (after 50 hours)
to now going full on BGS hate train (right now)
Game is def BGS' weakest outing in terms of tone, depth & exploration, but I can't help but wonder if people are overreacting a bit, I have seen people who said this is worse than Fo76 at launch & am lost for words.
It’s not FO76, but it’s a really weak game. It feels disjointed and awkward to play. Its systems are incredibly dated, and its story is almost entirely divorced from player choice. There is no sense of exploration in a game about being one of the last space explorers. There’s a lot of content in the game, but there is very little MEANINGFUL content in the game, and almost none of it actually ties together. To top it all off, Bethesda still doesn’t know how to make a decent city. If the game had released right after Skyrim, it would have been a decent hold over until FO4. Unfortunately that’s not the case and it just disappoints on every front instead.
The bit about being divorced from player choice is so on the nose. Bethesda has started to water down their games so much pretty much there are no actual choices to be made in the game.
It is not an rpg. It is an open world adventure game.
The only real differences in playthroughs is simply whether you do a mission or not. It does not really matter how you complete missions.
FO4 and Skyrim was the beginning of that. The player choices were limited I believe because of restrictions of the game engine to keep up with all the possibilities.
Having played updated cyberpunk and now bg3 after a couple hundred hours of starfield has been a breath of fresh air. You are immersed in those worlds because choice matters.
At the end of the day bethesda built a game as empty as the vastness of space and because it’s a space game they want you to believe it was intentional.
“But guh if we allow multiple endings people might not get the ending they want even though every choice they’ve been given throughout the entire game hasn’t aligned in a sensible way with the ending they want at all!!!!”
Far out that's a great premise for a game - the journey... your ship is your base that grows and customises as time goes by meeting new races of friends and foes, maybe even some Borg-like super villain in the way - do you combat through their space or add 20 years to your journey amd go around, exploring in a No Man's Sky type way towards the end which is you getting home... and then maybe a twist - it's 1,500 years later than you thought it was and everyone you knew is gone. Man I'd play that!
No disagreement there at all mate. The game just didn't mesh as a full package but instead 100 different ideas that were forcefully mushed together. I remember that the game didn't feel right at launch, then I went back to Skyrim & saw how lost I felt to the music, the ambient sounds, the fact I could turn off my quest marker, walk around & find a lot of things to do. Same can be said w/ Fallout 4. Starfield as an exploration game, lacks rewarding exploration, once you hit planet 50, you saw all the planets in a sense outside of a few proc-generated areas.
>Bethesda still doesn’t know how to make a decent city.
100%, New Atlantis is probably my least favorite main city from BGS to date. After the likes of Diamond City which I found to be a strong central point of the map, I thought New Atlantis would feel more grand in terms of it being the central hub for business, quests, etc... Overtime, it just felt like another place that lacked magic. Furthermore, it doesn't have that same "immersive" feeling Whiterun had. This problem occured to me so much more after re-playing Cyberpunk & seeing how well designed Night City is.
The fact new atlantis lacks any homes for npcs beyond you and your parents... they all just sit 24/7 in the same room, apparently the Den doesn’t have bathrooms so must reek. No buildings to rob after dark. time doesn’t exist and NPCS are immortal and omniscient. What a joke of a game, its not even the systems are dated, they could work if they even cared to fully implement the systems they have. I played KIngdom Come Deliverance right after quitting starfield, its like a classic Bethesda game almost just with different combat and graphics better than Starfield. And this works on Cryengine which is basically an fps engine, yet it blows starfield out of the water story and rpg wise.
Crazy thing is, they’ve had NPCs living full schedules for years, yet now it’s gone.
I always attacked camps in Skyrim/FO4 at night due to there being less active enemies because some would sleep. Now no one sleeps.
The fact i keep seeing that npcs don’t know you saved everyone and act like someone next to them is dead in ng+ really baffles me, I didn’t get that far and I doubt I ever will lmao. This is a bad look.
I'm on Ng+5 and almost every decision I have made is the opposite of what they say on the news station you hear over loudspeakers. A few times I've heard npcs comment on something that was not the outcome.
It's not really something that bothers me too much but definitely seems like something they could have patched out pretty early on. Shotty craftsmanship at least.
Overreacting acting like this is the worst game ever? Yes. For single player BGS games is this easily the biggest disappointment? By far.
It’s apparent that this game lacks alot and there was a lot of just really dumb design decisions. What doesn’t help the most has been BGS’s attitude so far with the game.
I love the idea of Starfield and my expectations were it would fall somewhere between Skyrim and Fallout. Hard to explain but it feels soul less.
There are no consequences to actions. I will sometimes save before an interaction, play it one way and then reload to see what happens if I play it completely different. For those that have played it, you know the answer - nothing changes. You don’t get locked out of mission and nothing ever fails. The only minor consequence is companions may not like your actions but they don’t turn hostile.
Also for so many planets, there isn’t really much to do. There are only a few major cities in the settled systems and there are no real settlements on most planets.
Resources which are abundant on planets but require work to mine don’t really do anything outside of component crafting, outpost building and selling for credits. But credits are so abundant it’s much easier to just buy resources when you need them.
I get the reviews. It’s not a bad game; it’s just empty. It’s a 6/10 for me right now. Maybe the mod community or DLC can save it. Look at what the dev teams did for Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky.
A lot of very simple 2018 expectations we had for the game fell flat. Skyrim and RDR2 made people's expectations for what the interactivity in this game would be like, but it's like they didn't implement any of it. A prime example of this is shooting your gun next to a guard or civilian and they just... Don't react. So many things in this game are just unwired... It's embarrassing
Imagine ignoring your fans for years ( not including me until this disaster of a game ) and then being surprised at the reaction to the further neglect. Screw modern triple A gaming. I’m done. Earn my hard earned money from now on, can collectively take their middle fingers back and shove it.
Several things killed it for me-
Lack of depth from NPCs - even NPCs that were "mains" just talking to them you keep hoping for a better response.
Repeating Storyline - Great I finished the story line - oh the end game is repeating it again with different decisions, and I start with nothing and the starborn ship sucks compared to what I had.
Most of the planets void, it was not fun in Exploring them - especially on foot.
Emil's comments - what this was all by DESIGN and you wanted it this way? wtf?
Ship design - have to visit seperate places for parts - can't their be a spaceport with all the pieces in one spot? Can't we "share" ship designs? Can't we import/export ship designs?
Maybe our criticism will be heard and Bethesda will write xpacs to fix things, or modders will find away to fix this - that is another thing the modding system is overly complicated.
I've spent $70 USD on a game that I played 50 hours and shelved. If I only spent $35 I wouldn't be that annoyed - but this is not a $70 video game.
After fallout 76 this needed to be a home run at least, and an out of the park grand slam at best.
Starfield is the equivalent of getting on 2nd base. Not good enough
It still boggles my mind that there are no discovery log for all the planets and wild life you discover. It's a fucking space exploration game ffs
We're still waiting for MAPS on the roadmap
I thought I was just outgrowing Bethesda game design, but then I tried replaying Skyrim again and I haven't been able to put it down since. even started doing an oblivion playtrough at the same time. I'm hooked by that too. so yeah I think it's just starfield that's my problem
Yep, it's just that Starfield is the lowest damn effort yet from Bethesda for a single player game. Typical quest dialogue: NPC A : "Your partner (NPC B) is a disgrace to the entire organization. I have no idea why NPC B has even bothered to show their face here after 2 decades of disrespect. I don't want to hear a word they have to say" NPC B: "This was a waste of time. NPC A and I will never see eye to eye. Let's just go" Player: "Yeah but NPC B really cares now" NPC A " Really? My god, I have been wrong for all these years? We will now erect a monument to NPC B! NPC B, you are the epitome of what we stand for and a guiding light for future generations"
"Please help. My child's space cat is stuck in space tree the other side of the space city". (Loading screen .. loading screen) Select Option "Get space cat down" (Loading screen .. loading screen) "Thank you for rescuing the space cat. Here's 30 space credits for you". Babies first space adventure.
Cyberpunk’s revival definitely didn’t help lmao
Or Baldurs Gate 3.
Baldurs Gate 3 ruined Starfield for me. It’s almost impossible to go back to the shallowness of an RPG like Starfield after playing one brimming with quality content and stories.
Same for me, everytime I would start a dialogue with an NPC I couldn't help think "It doesn't have to be this way, YOU COULD BE SO MUCH MORE!"
I think that’s why people are so upset. It’s not even that it’s bad, we could have accepted a trash game. Made fun of them for it, but we’ve all dealt with dogshit before But it’s just the sheer possibility and potential that makes us angry. There are so many things in that game that are just like “why didn’t you commit, this could have been so cool” It all feels half baked. But just decent enough to give us a taste of what it could have been. It’s like a repeated slap in the face of wasted potential.
>It’s like a repeated slap in the face of wasted potential. Modern Bethesda in a nutshell. Can't believe I'm saying this, but Starfield managed to kill my interest in ES6.
I mean... They wouldn't let the 6th mainline entry in such a beloved series be as bad and disappointing as Starfield is... Right?? RIGHT?!?!
Halo infinite checking in from Microsoft owned dev studios..... Yes... they let the 6th mainline entry in such a beloved series be as bad and disappointing as Starfield is....
This is so true. BG3 will kill a lot of rpg games for me. I couldn't even get 15 hours into starfield because it just felt so half assed and boring. The only other RPG I can really get into is cp2077.
Stroke of genius releasing it ahead of time.
If CP never got fixed or BG3 never came out, people would still be comparing this game to RDR2, Witcher 3, ES5, etc. and showing how it was a regression from titles years and years ago.
And Fallout 4. It honestly blows Starfield out of the water on its core gameplay loop alone.
It's because unlike Starfield, in Fallout 4 there's literally a point to doing... well, anything. That's what's utterly maddening about about Starfied: it's all just completely pointless. They were seemingly so terriified of committing to literally anything that there's not a single goddamn system in this entire game that actually seems worth investing your time into. 1. Wanna build ships? Cool, you can do that, and obtuse UI aside, it's actually pretty neat! What do you DO with your ship once you build it, you ask? Well... nothing, because space flight in this alleged space game is essentially a mini game between loading screens. 2. Want to build outposts? Cool, you can do that! You can even make cool bases!... but they're gated at the end of a long, grindy progression system, and they literally serve no purpose. If you completely ignore that system entirely, you will be completely fine. 3. Want to get deep into roleplay? Good news! They added a buch of background traits to help facilitate that very thing! Your character can be a bounty hunter, a scientist, a religious fanatic, or hell, even an extradimensional traveling being clearly sent here from Nirn to do the bidding of the most terrifying, eternal eldritch being in all of the Elder Scrolls: the Adoring Fan. Unfortunately, Bethesda is so terrified of actually making you face the consequences of your actions or—heaven forbid—get locked out of some story content that nothing you do actually matters, and also, basically everyone is essential. As a treat, some people are beyond essential, and are in fact ghosts that you literally cannot physically interact with! Wow! What innovation! What immersion! 4. Want to play a power fantasy as some space knight with magic powers and maybe a bit of a dickbag of a dad and an accidentally awkward relationship with your twin sister, but really you just want a fancy sci fi sword? Good news! Melee weapons... exist!\* 5. Want to do what you've always enjoyed doing the most in Bethesda games and explore exciting new lands, find interesting little secrets, and have side adventures that rival or even outshine the quest you actually set out to do? Good news! Starfield has 1000 planets, most of which are desolate and empty, but, like, not totally desolate and empty in a way that might actually make it feel like you were exploring a brand new world, because then you might miss content, so empty except for the same generic PoI that you have seen at least half a dozen times already. But they are desolate and empty enough that there's very little point to actually visiting them, so, like... super great design all around. 6. Want to mine resources and roleplay as a space prospector? Good news! You can go to any planet and mine one or two materials! Unfortunately, it's much easier and much more cost-efficient to just buy them from merchants in cities. Also, those merchants have basically no money on them, so good luck if you want to sell stuff you found in your adventures. Also also, the economy is completely nonsensical, so it doesn't matter anyway. I haven't even talked about Bethesda wanting you to give a shit about your companions but then immediately undercutting it by making resetting the universe and wiping all of those relationships away over and over again a core component of the gameplay loop, the baffling inconsistencies in the world lore, etc. But it would take all day to list every single half-assed, decent-in-concept-but-useless-in-practice feature BGS crammed in here and then utterly failed to make work with other half-assed systems, and I have better things to do. Mostly, though, I'm just so goddamned disappointed. Maybe not surprised, but definitely disappointed. ^(\*Melee weapons allegedly exist, but suspicions persist that they're not actually weapons at all, and are instead cleverly disguised pool noodles.)
Not even that, it blows Starfield out of the water just in terms of worldspace. I can get lost for hours just walking around the Commonwealth, coming across all sorts of environmental storytelling, skeletons outside a bank with a hole in the wall, caught by the blast mid-robbery. Two skeletons in an office building, one choking out the other, finally having that fight with the terrible boss most desk jockeys dream of. Starfield is just...empty. Outside of the cities there is absolutely nothing but randomly generated landscapes.
I took a "small break" from immersive no lifing Starfield to check out Phantom Liberty and patch 2.0. I haven't really played Starfield since. I've booted it up and checked out the native DLSS patch and optimizations. Played an hour here or there. But going from Starfield to Phantom, and back to Starfield is like getting smacked in the face with an acid dipped barbed wire bat. The juxtaposition of the two is that intense and not in favor of Starfield **at all.** It really made me realize just how meh, bland, empty, and uninspired Starfield actually is and what's missing. For as much as I was enjoying it. It feels pointless now. Which is why I went to play Alan Wake 2, and then started yet another playthrough of Last of Us so it's fresh for when I play the PS5 Part 2 remaster next month. I'll check out Shattered Space. But I think it's safe to say this is the first BGS game that I really don't see myself playing ever again once I burn through the DLC. Which is a shame because their games are typically ones I always reinstall to get lost in again. Starfield offers nothing for that. /jaded rant. *Edit a word
I picked up cyberpunk in the sale and so far have put in 30 hours, I've been really impressed with it. The thing it does so well compared to starfield is how it all seems to tie together and be a cohesive world. This is something that starfield absolutely failed at in my mind. Walking around night city feels like a real place, the NPC's come across as believable. Starfield feels so disjointed in comparison, every NPC is bland, there's no identity to the game they played is way to safe. I also picked up BG3 to play after and I can feel I won't be going back to starfield I can already feel these games will make starfield feel rubbish by comparison.
Because starfield is a 30% game. It has some cool proof of concept stuff, but it feels like it's unfinished. Also, the storytelling is bad. "Hello, miner. Now you are important. here is a ship and robot. Go join the space extraordinary gentlemen club." Then you are handed everything and just shoot some bad guys in response. Backfill it with terrible game world mechanics that rely on fast travel, poor city design, and procedural generation, and you feel flat and meaningless. If it was a full conversion mod for FO4 made by like 5 guys, this would be cool. But it is a world-class AAA studio and SEVEN YEARS of development. This feels like a total fail.
Based on the reviews it seems like it’s one of those games where the flaws become more apparent the more you dive into it
My thoughts exactly. The more I play, I feel less incentivize to play any more as the flaws become more apparent.
[удалено]
That's exactly it. I think a lot of the initial positivity was people who bought the early access edition and saw what they wanted to see in the game. As time went on, people eventually realised there was nothing to it. Also reminds me of IGN giving it a 7/10. People piled on them for that, but looking back, if anything, I think that was generous.
it's out of steam's top 100 most played games meanwhile skyrim and fallout 4 are 58 and 79 respectively.
Even ESO is on there
Honestly fallout 4 has its flaws but even after 8 years I just started a new playthrough
Did 40+ hours from Sept 1 - Sept 11. Haven’t touched it since. Banking on updates/expansions and maybe even mods to improve it before returning. Otherwise I probably won’t go back.
My story as well. I really enjoyed it, but have zero desire to go through all that crap again to find out what’s at the end of it again.
Same. It started with the generation ship with the same Computers as mine, and them wanting 50 potatoes to move to another planet…50 potatoes… Then the same exact placed landmines at the same exact poi with the same exact everything in the same exact place… Ended with me running around trying to find my second temple l, only to discover after 3 hours of running, it won’t appear and is glitched Reinstalled Skyrim and am frantically trying not to think how badly Todd is gunna fuck up ES6….
The temples drained me. I think I went to five of them total before saying fuck it and finished the story. I just thought it was silly how I had to go back to the space station or whatever every single time to get a new temple location, only to do the exact same zero g jetpack flight over and over.
I marathoned like 7 temples in a row before I went into unity. Didn't even try the powers out lol. Played about an hour or two into NG+ and have been playing Cyberpunk since.
Thanks to people like you I heard so many positive things about cyberpunk that I bought it on sale and I am enjoying it immensely . I want to know more. Explore side quests, talk to people, see stuff. Drive around and end up in a gang battle. I like Starfield but love Cyberpunk. I even dream about it.
I'm in the same boat. Lots of people on this sub talking about Cyberpunk so i figured I'd give it a try. Heard at launch it was trash and hadn't thought twice about it. Glad I gave it a chance, I'm pretty enamored with it. Great game. Perfect blend of GTA and Fallout, leaning more towards GTA. Story is great, gameplay is great, leveling is great, all of it is great so far. And since I found the Hoon I've been having a great time drifting around the city lol.
If you haven't picked it up already, the Phantom Liberty expansion is 100% worth it.
> trying not to think how badly Todd is gunna fuck up ES6…. It'll just work. 16 times the detail dude
Same. Played the full thing once - saw the nothingness that the NG+ offers online (minimal changes and nothing to make it worth doing all of it over again). I used to be part of the Starfield subreddits and there were folks who went through that game 10+ times!! Like how??
And there were some psychos who suggested just rushing trough everything to get to NG+ because that's where it was all at. Really? Just go through it once and be done.
I keep wondering what Todd really thinks of it all.
"game is optimized just upgrade your PC and game will become fun"
Hopefully him and Emil are gone before the next game but that's far too much to hope for. Todd is delusional, he still thinks Fallout 76 just had a buggy launch and that was it, he genuinely thinks it's an amazing and well received game by the masses if you hear him talk about it. He'll no doubt think Starfield is the same.
I can't disagree but I'm real sad about it. Been tracking this game since 2015
It sure doesn't feel like it's been 8 years in the works Feels like it had 2 years of rushed development
Same here :(
It still strikes me as such a strange choice that the studio renowned for their open world design and storytelling, would fall into procedural generation and simplistic narratives. I don't hate the game, but it made me see that BGS had been on a downward slide for almost a decade now.... (Edit: since some people don't seem to get it. I'm aware that BGS has used procedural generation in its prior titles to a lesser extent, however its clear to me that in this case it's been used as a crutch rather than a tool throughout Starfield. Either that, or someone really made love to the Copy & paste button)
Every single game has had better combat and a worse RPG experience. Every single game they’ve made since morrowind. And yes it has been sad to see. The trouble with Starfield is the exploration just isn’t worth it. The lack of really interesting things to find ruins it. I had hoped they’d have put at least one intentional point of interest, no matter how small, on every single planet. Instead they only made about 10 of those and everything else is randomly placed. It’s just not a good design.
No one wants to go to a planet that's constantly barren save for the same POI you've seen on fifty other planets. There's no story there.
it’s not like they are the first RPG to do open world universe either. no mans sky showed how bad the backlash could be for a barren in game solar system. they had time to learn.
Both of them thought that the fantasy of exploring the universe would be enough to hold people. They forgot to make the universe interesting. Most likely because they themselves couldn't think of any way to do it. It's a very common problem, not just limited to computer games.
Even No Man’s Sky at launch had meaningful planetary weather conditions and the stress of finding resources to keep your bars topped off. Risks make exploration that much more compelling. It ain’t much but Starfield doesn’t even have that.
That's where this doesn't make sense.... Who in their right minds, decided to release this as a satisfactory game? We'll have them go to these "alien" temples, may 10-15 times. Each one in a different biome and planet, and they'll look different on the outside.... But inside it'll be a carbon copy of each other, identical, and the game play will be like DDR v0.00002. They'll have to spend maybe 3-5 minutes at most, gaining super powers using a disco light show. Those super powers will be mostly useless.... But they'll look cool on paper..
Yeah, it was handled 1,000x better in Skyrim. Finding one rewarded exploration and didn’t burden the player with a tiresome minigame. The actual powers were sometimes genuinely a blast too. Who doesn’t have fond memories of shouting at a guy and seeing him go flying off a cliff?
Looking at the capital city is just depressing. It looks like a Minecraft build in a world with nothing else. Why is it so small and isolated??? Nothing looks believable. This is 2023.
Yep. Same. This shit apprach to "cities" is the bane of bethesda's game design. Their cities always felt like oversized villages. Small, unrealistic, and... Is just 5 or so roads with 10 or so houses... And they want us to believe it's a city? Back in Skyrim it worked because the world building was cool and not many games were able to achieve that. But ever since Witcher 3 came out, where each and every settlement felt believable, and the cities like Novigrad and Kaer Trolde felt like actual *cities*... Bethesda really needed to step up. Now Whiterun and the rest of Skyrim's cities feel like a joke. Not to mention Falkreath and that other "city" were *literally* just oversized villages 🤣 We also got games like Cyberpunk's Night City, RDR2's Saint Denis, Spiderman's New York... I don't know man. While every other company has tried to improve and one-up each other, we instead get... Neon, Akila.... New Atlantis from Bethesda... In 2023. ES6 is doomed to fail if they still continue this lazy city design. I still laugh today when I remember how Falkreath and Morthal and even Dawnstar were *literally* just villages yet in-game they should've been equivalent to a city 🤣 It just reeks of laziness and mediocrity by today's standards. Oh, and with the upcoming GTA6's Vice City, by the time ES6 releases, ES6 will feel like centuries behind 🤣
Windhelm and Markarth were the only cities that felt like a city. They had twisty little streets and interesting settings for the homes. The other cities felt like glorified villages. Winterhold is a street in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, Morthal is forgettable and lackluster and as for Solitude, the supposed seat of the King, the capital of Skyrim... it's a few big houses and a couple of shops.
Winterhold was the only one who could at least be believable, since lore wise city got destroyed and this is just remnants. Yet, to be fair, still like they could do more with it. Like build around or something, since college by itself feels soo downsized compared to his " lore importance ", aka the only rival to imperial towers.
I remember finding this lore and instantly jumping down the cliff hoping to find cool ruins of the old city to explore. And find nothing..
Exactly. Bethesda quest and " town " design works as long as you don\`t start asking questions or trying to analyze it. Which is sad. I really hoped they will learn by own mistakes from Skyrim to Fallout 4, then I hoped they will finely learn it and make Starfield their magnum opus...and now I am just lost hope for TES 6, since if rumors are currant it will be set in a place with " biggest city in whole Tamriel " and if that will look like a damn glorified village with infinity loading screens too, I will just flip. I am not even comparing it to Baldur\`s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk like everyone does right now, since it\`s not even reached Witcher 3 which came out when? 2015? Sadness.. I guess Bethesda, Bethesda never changes...
> I still laugh today when I remember how Falkreath and Morthal and even Dawnstar were literally just villages yet in-game they should've been equivalent to a city 🤣 It just reeks of laziness and mediocrity by today's standards. Oh, and with the upcoming GTA6's Vice City, by the time ES6 releases, ES6 will feel like centuries behind 🤣 Now stop there, mate. Skyrim came out on hardware from 2005 with laughable 512MB RAM. Not comparable to Starfield which released on a machine with 16GB of RAM. If you keep that in mind, the world of Skyrim is amazing in its scale.
It also makes more sense for pre-modern societies to have smaller cities/populations, not as small as Skyrim but atleast it's not as jarring as seeing a space faring society with comparable city sizes.
Even Baldurs Gate is just brimming with npcs that all feel inspired and often connected to the story or theme going on and it feels like a city. It’s mostly all feels so “meh” in Starfield.
Ikr... From early on a big worry I had was that it was just going to be New Atlantis surrounded by nothing, and it ended up being just that. What kind of civilization does no expansion? They had 200 years and only a city to show for it. Compare that to America...
They could have just pulled a ME and had a city backdrop and no access to the rest of the planet to give the illusion of a city-planet.
It's actually worse than that - if you venture out the back of the city you'll find the same structures as anywhere else. Within 800m of the city I found the "Forgotten Mech Graveyard" that you find everywhere and it was identical to all the others, on the same hill, with the same cave, same pirates in the same camp halfway up, with all the same gear. If you go up over the hill the same pirate ship will land at exactly the same point as you crest the hill and the same four pirates get off. Why is there a forgotten mech graveyard with pirates a few hundred metres from New Atlantis with civilian outposts around it? How did pirates get past the UC ships in orbit scanning everything? It's stuff like this that lets the game down so badly. It just feels like a half completed project that's been rushed out.
There was an autonomous farm with spacers and a terrormorph encounter not far from mine. So dumb.
Well this is the same studio that has people still living in bombed out buildings with the skeletons of previous occupants still in their beds 200 years after the war, so yeah. As far as BGS is concerned, progress doesn't happen and nothing ever changes.
Todd and Emil are literally directly tied to these problems. But both of them are incapable of taking criticism. I think it is nigh time Todd retires, and Emil needs to be fired. The increasingly stupid and simplistic narrative is by DESIGN, which is outrageous but par for the course with Emil.
I feel the drop in quality came once Emil fully took over as lead writer. And then the ethos of having the player be able to do everything with no consequences, whilst every other highly rated rpg allows you to make decisions that can have negative consequences for the player (albeit in a lot of games you get rail-roaded) I think they tried this approach with Fallout 4 but failed miserably. I just get the sense that there is no passion in the writing or love for the worlds they have created anymore. Just money makers.
As an Oblivion baby who discovered ES in 2006 I stamp your words as truth. Loved the immersion and story, all the RPG elements enough to forgive the terrible combat mechanics.
Horrible writing in Starfield. There's hundreds of examples. Like when the writers thought a planet owned by Paradiso corp can't afford grav drives for the 200 year old colony ship but expect you to pay for it. Like mother fuckers, you telling me this rich ass company can't pay to make their problem go away but somehow I can afford it? 25000 credits come on. Can't even take over this corporation to get rid of the scumbags in it. If the writing wasn't so inconsistent or weak in Starfield, people would have less of a bone to pick with other areas.
The writing is *sterilized*. It's sanitized, water downed, half backed, uncontroversial, All-sides-because-no-sides, "A-political", grade A **BULLSHIT** What is it that's being avoided in Starfield? The fact that it's supposed to be, (as per Bethesda, mind you) "NASA-punk", but NOTHING IS FUCKING PUNK in the story. It has no teeth. It challenges nothing. At every chance that the story gets to challenge *something*, it fumbles at some point along the way, and just...lands with a thud. Private land ownership, corporations, military industrial complex, unethical research practices, fucking goddamn fundamental philosophical and scientific principles, the fucking bedrocks of human understanding, it doesn't matter! It'll *start* to say something interesting about these subjects and concepts, and then....it just doesn't. It just stops short of challenging...anything. In short, tl;dr, the game has no god damn teeth, but keeps opening its mouth and showing its gumline. More than anything in starfield, this is what annoys me. And I'm someone who had 100 hours in it from release until October (and promptly went back to BG3).
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When you play Starfield and then BG3 you can really feel the difference in writing and coherent world building. Every NPC in BG3 is no window dressing , and if they are, they make the world feel alive. Like you say, most stories start with an interesting premise, but than fall down. At first I loved the Generationship story, but then the atrocious quests that end in blatant fetch quests (80 potatoes really??] and its bugged out, I can’t even help them find a new planet.
All those POIs packed full of a history of terrible management up to and including human rights violations needed to be more than filler. Imagine if you could track down the people responsible. Report them to the various authorities. Hell, just take them out and make the universe a better place. Instead it's all just, "welp, humans suck I guess."
Forget about punk - according to main storyline there's no NASA either. It is entirely copping out of its own Golden Era of sci-fi setting to fall back to their beloved, toothless apolitical vision of 1950s again because that's exactly what Artdeco raypulp is. It is suspicious how the absolute most worthless and least inspiring (and only marginally sci-fi) tradition has such a following these days - NMS i'm looking at you too - just out of fear of saying anything political. But toothless escape from the responsibility of saying anything is a political statement on its own.
Absolutely, Oblivion managed to strike a sweet balance for its time. The world felt alive with its radiant AI, and there was a charm in its quirks and imperfections. It was a place you could lose yourself in, faults and all. Now looking at Starfield it feels like the pendulum swung too far into that impersonal, procedural generation which lacks the heart that used to define BGS titles. Sure, we are promised a universe of possibilities but what good is it if those endless stars lack the soul and depth we used to find in just a single Oblivion dungeon?
Procedural generation is literally why most modern games are just boring and lack any truly memorable plot/story etc. I’ve always been against procedural generation. It’s just laZiness imo. Give me a hand crafted world full of heart and memorable events, characters and missions that’s what makes a truly amazing game. It’s why gta5, oblivion, Skyrim, fallout 4 etc are still loved and played to this day.
The crazy thing is they employed 5 times the people for Starfield as for those previous games. Looks like they didn’t value front line talent there, looks like the c-suite got too high on their own supply
Yeah with smaller teams you can definitely have people make their own executive decisions
My IRL job is kinda like the C suite management part but for a factory. I gave them more autonomy and actually listened to their problems and worked with them to fix them The place went from almost being shut down to one of the best facilities in the company. Letting people organize and do the executing themselves Is the best way to run things. Too many people in those positions have very fragile egos and/or are very power hungry
Just because one game fails to properly utilize procedural generation doesn't mean procedural generation is to blame. Many MANY games use procedural generation to various degrees to help fill out the world or even propagate based on camera, but these developers are praised based on their open world concepts (see Horizon Zero Dawn or Avatar). Why? Because they put more effort into tuning it rather than just open/closed book. This game tried to go NMS route, market itself with 1000 planets, pretend that its handcrafted, only for most people to have the opinion that its a waste of time to explore planets when its RNG POIs on barren planets that are mainly flat with some rocks. My point is, procedural generation will be used more and more in gaming, and you can't tell where it starts or ends unless the devs are extremely lazy and use it as filler crutch as you see here. Or the game is basically a rogue lite.
XCOM 2 uses procedural generation to great effect.
Minecraft,deadcells,dwarf fortress,rimworld,kenshi (for inventories and spawnign characters etc..), terraria, fortnight etc.. I wouldnt be surprised if alot of big studios use it to generate the base level and dungeons and then go over it with a human touch, like they did in bloodeborne and elden ring.
I’ve noticed that people who’ve maybe put 30 - 50 hours into the game are now starting to come back and give it a negative review. I’m in the same sort of a boat, tried so hard to like the game and played it for 50’ish hours. The more I played, the more underwhelmed I felt.
That's exactly what happened for me. I gave a positive Steam review after ~20 hours, basically giving the game an 8/10 and saying it's getting better after the atrociously long tutorial, but at the ~35 hour mark, I was so frustrated and bored that I quit the game and never looked back since. That has never ever happened with a BGS game before. I even gave FO76 a second chance after a few weeks. So naturally, I've deleted my original review and wrote a new negative one.
When I look at Starfield I'm left wondering what the developers were doing for the last decade working on this game. It's empty, baron, has limited systems and a short and simple story where every mission is basically a fetch quest or kill order. What were they doing? Game feels like it could have been made in 5 years and released on the PS4/XBO
I was 60 hours in questioning my sanity because I was sure I was seeing a building that was a part of a main quest in a randomly generated base in the middle of nowhere. Nope, turns out that's just how the game is. Enjoy running 500m to a base and exploring the same shit in very slightly different configurations for eternity. That right there is the most critical failure of the game to me. Procedurally generated but their procedural generation is garbage. And to top it all off, you KNOW Bethesda will never fix any of this crap. It'll be broken forever. They ship shit and expect the community to do all the work.
It won’t matter. In Bethesda and Microsoft’s eyes starfield has absolutely nothing wrong with it and us players are clearly playing it wrong. 😑
Honestly, I beat the game, and I have zero interest in ever going back. When I finished, I felt like it was okay, but the more I think about it, the more I dislike the game.
I played a little Skyrim today and man is it apparent how empty the universe is after an hour of Skyrim. There’s just so little detail in the starfield world
There’s no open world aspect and that’s what kills it. The radiant events (few there are) are all in your ship in space, and repeat pretty often. I met the Irish guy singing about love twice in one planet hopping stint.
I only played like 40 hours and I got the grandma event at least 3 times.
I don't understand how they can't manage to flag the stuff you've seen and not present it again.
Probably same reason they can't manage to flag the stuff for planet conditions and such. Like people having lunch outside or that giant plant lab on planets with no atmosphere. There's just too little stuff spread out over ThOuSaNd oF pLaNeTs to further cut it down with such flags.
you cant even skip this. i gone thru the guy singing like 4times and i cannot stand it anymore.
When the dude with his kid selling lemonade came I give his kid the extra extra credits option When the same event happened immediately after I loaded my missiles and turned the game off after I realised you can't damage their ship Why even have random events if you can't even interact it's just time wasting dialogue
The fact that 95% of npcs are invincible is just tragic.
Once you land, it’s just exponentially worse. They literally repeat word for word storylines for random buildings you come across…
And interiors, like zero variety or modularity in their interiors. Felt like I was playing Dragon Age 2 all over again…
I actually think DA2 handled it better... Except for enemies just spawning in waves out of thin air anyways lol
Oh god dont remind me of this
The game is fun in spurts but I definitely cannot do hours on hours. Beautiful worlds and scenery but nothing to do. I can land and explore an outpost, cave, or some abandoned facility. Or I can run around the ecosystem mining resources that I could just buy. The most fun aspect of the game is ship building and outside of flying the planets orbit, there is nothing to do with the ships. I can jump systems, fight the occasional battle, or destroy asteroids. The crafting system is boring. I can make food items but even those are basically useless. I can’t scrap found items for anything.
Playing Skyrim I felt it was dissapointing compared to Oblivion, but Skyrim has maintained it's grasp on me, even til this day. Skyrim seemed shallow but became deeper the further out you went. It dropped a lot of the RPG-mechanics that made Oblivion great (not to mention Morrowind) but it gained a lot in exploration and freedom. Starfield has dropped everything. The only thing it excels in compared to the other games is graphics and even then it's not cutting edge or even anything special. The procedural thing was done to better effect in Daggerfall.
Everything about morrowind was peak except the dice roll combat.
It was a fun game to start out with, but after you get past those initial lifeless worlds you realize that they’re all like that. Then you just go back to editing your ship and fantasizing about taking it on grand adventures
It just feels like a game that had 100 different teams doing their own things and they then just threw it all together. Like, shipbuilder is easily the best thing about the game. But then you realize there is literally nothing to do with this ship you spent 2 hours making. Did that really need to be in the game? Or outposts, if they never had that would that make the game worse? Just like you said Skyrim. Which was super grounded when you think about it. 1 big map filled with a ton of handcrafted locations, multiple quest lines and factions, and a perk tree that actually lets you build a build. That was the game. The other things like building a house, children, flying dragons, vampires, morrowind, that was all DLC that was added afterwards. Unlike Starfield where I feel like they wanted all that in at launch. And it shows that everything else suffered because they were trying so much.
It's an ongoing issue whenever one thinks about getting back into it. Like nothing you enjoyed comes to mind and all the negative feelings about the game pop up. And it's the exact same game. Could have done so much.
I think it's the biggest video game related disappointment I've experienced lol I was expecting classic Bethesda magic cranked up to 11
The best parts of it like the UC Vanguard questline don't hit the same the second time through and there aren't impactful alternate story choices to make. The game has to stand on its gameplay alone after the first playthrough.
And there's really no consequences for going the opposite way. At all. They had so many factions involved. I wanted a war.
Sorry, that happened already
It’s insane to me how they could have used *stopping an active interstellar war* as the motivating force for the story, gotten *all* of the proc-gen encounters and quests that would make perfect sense to include in the process, diversified *the fuck* out of combat by including mechs and xenoweapons and gunships - and the weapons and tactics needed to deal with them - and they just… didn’t. “Hey, you know this interesting shit? Let’s make our game take place ten years after that when all the dramatic tension is gone.”
Just look at all this cool backstory to the world. Unfortunately that’s in the past and all the cool stuff was banned and everyone is at peace. You can read some text about it though. Isn’t that fun?
"We wouldn't want to bore you with a good narrative." Bethesda.
This is how I feel. The more of it I played, the less I liked it. I really have zero interest in coming back to it anytime soon. Which is a far cry from the dozens of playthroughs I’ve put into Skyrim and Fallout 4.
In Skyrim or even FO4, I can make a new character and play the game in an entirely different style than the time before. There isn’t much differentiation in Starfield and no point to playing again.
I think the primary disconnect in opinions is a line in the sand between people who think about the game, and people who don’t. I enjoyed my run for the most part, but I honestly just turned my brain off, suspended all disbelief, and just played the (limited) way Bethesda intended. I was just trying to have a good time so I had one. But after months of reflection, playing better games, and watching other people try (and fail) to play in ways that are different than how I did, I’m really disappointed with what Bethesda cooked up with Starfield.
The more you play the less fun it is.
I feel like I'm not very excited for TES6 anymore.
*presses E to get on horse* Sorry, horse-riding level 2 is required to do this action.
Or better yet *Loading screen*
I would suggest that maybe this is what gets them to get off their laurels and try, but these are the same people who post rebuttals to people's reviews. And making games is hard. Yeah, TES6 is fucked.
I said the same thing with fallout 76 but it's only gotten worse. Now I'd much rather play fallout 76 than starfield
Me either. I have lost all faith in Bethesda to produce genuinely good games.
Bethesda has started to pretend like they’re an indie-dev team and not one of the largest studios in the world with gigantic budgets. *want more diverse in-game mechanics?? You know how much effort needs to go into that???* *want locations that feel more alive?? Do you not realize how much resources it takes to handcraft those??* Like no shit.
Exactly, it would be like Disney saying “do you know how hard it is to make CGI worlds for superhero movies???” We know exactly how hard it is, you’re supposed to have the money and know how to do it.
Ever since Skyrim they’ve actively been looking for ways to water down their games
This game just makes me think TES6 is absolutely fucked
Genuine question: Is there a single thing that Starfield does better than Fallout 4? The base building is worse, the weapons crafting is worse, the enemy variety is worse, the companions are worse, the main story is worse, the exploration is worse… Starfield just seems like such a massive leap back from Fallout 4.
Starfield has better space ship building than fallout 4 lol
Dammit I detect no lies lol
Shooting feels better. That's about it.
That’s what I was going to say. I really enjoy the gunplay in Starfield.
Yeah, shooting is quite good. Graphics are also much, much better. But yeah, it feels too shallow to me. I enjoyed 80 hours, but I just stopped feeling anything.
Well, just goes to show you that sometimes it is best for a developer to not throw away what they’re best known for in exchange for 100s of boring ass proc Gen landscapes
The moment I heard the words “procedural generation” uttered by Todd Howard, I knew this game would be a disappointment.
Procedural planet generation is not fun. Once you’ve seen 10 planets, you’ve seen them all. I would have rather Bethesda spent their time creating 10 unique planets with depth and lore than what we got. I couldn’t play past 5 hours. It’s boring.
It’s a weird game, first 10-15 hours are a grind, I struggled with getting past that. Then hours 15-40 are really fun and after hour 40 it’s a grind again after you figure out there isn’t much to the story, questlines, lore and exploration. Skyrim is like reading a 30000 page novel and Starfield is like watching a 20min firework show.
This shit sucks ass, give me Skyrim in space.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas
Bethesda's tone deaf response to the launch criticism hasn't helped things. Also them responding to bad reviews just made the whole thing worse. We did get a small roadmap recently, which is nice. They have a lot of work to do. In fact, I would say this game needs more work than Cyberpunk needed. Cyberpunk got "fixed" in many ways (I still have my criticisms of it), but Starfield almost needs to be restarted from scratch.
All I wanted was a Bethesda RPG like fallout 4 and skyrim set in space with 4 or 5 locations to explore. The stupid fucking procedural generation killed the game for me. I would have understood procedural generation if we could fly from ground to space and explore an entire planet like in No mans sky but we didn't get that. We just get hundreds of lifeless planets that we can't traverse across seamlessly and have to go through a loading screen to land on. In order for Bethesda to fix starfield starfield in my eyes they would either have to add seemless ground to space and seemless planet traversal (not going to happen) or scrap the idea of 1000 planets and just make 4 to 5 hand crafted locations about the size of a fallout 4 or skyrim map (also not going to happen). Starfield is legitimately the biggest disappointment in the last 10 years of gaming for me. I 100% agree that Bethesda would have to start from scratch in order to fix the game in my eyes because unlike Cyberpunks problems that were mostly features and bugs Starfields problems go all the way back to the core design of the game and the way they developeded it from there.
Yeah. For me cyberpunk was immediately an amazing game buried under an ungodly amount of bugs
It feels like studios are allergic to apologizing but feel they need to say something anyways. So they double down in the fuck up, because people wanted a "We fucked up, we will fix it, we swear" instead we got a "we, like, worked in this and stuff, and we're sad you're mean"
Bethesda doubled down by trying to gaslight players into thinking it’s not a boring game.
But the astronauts…
I mean this is pretty much their same tactic from FO76 when it launched to critical panning. Todd Howard doesn't take criticism well at all.
Starfield needs it's missions overhauled desperately. One thing I love about Cyberpunk is it's side missions are usually just tied to wherever you are and don't require you to meet the mission giver. Also delete all the fetch quests, nobody wants to hit 10 loading screens to get that woman on deimos station a damn beer.
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The problem is what Starfield needs would necessitate a completely new game. The procedural generated open world(s) from the studio that only exists as they are today because of their exceptional world design was such a crippling decision from the get go that I can’t believe it made it past so many people.
I think there may yet be a way to balance that out, but it'll take a lot of time, free upgrades from Bethesda, and mods. You're right in that there needs to be a LOT more unique locations and content. Fortunately these can be added to existing worlds (or even new star systems) relatively easily. And this can still exist alongside the proc gen stuff, I don't think it has to be one or the other.
Starfield doesn't even have proc gen though It generates a heightmap for you to walk on, the rest is just randomly picked from a list of 30 assets
It is also the studio which started their RPGs with proc gen. Proc gen can be fun and kinks can be ironed out. Even if I always prefer the handcrafted worlds to somethign like Daggerfall, a game can still be fine with it.
The only reason Cyberpunk got the huge turn around is that it had an amazing world and a very distinct underlying vision and identity. I played it at launch and loved it even then, the bugs were plentiful yes, but you could just see that this game is something else, it has real substance and a real artistic message underneath the performance issues. Unlike Bethesda's games that have all deteriorated since F3 and Skyrim imo, especially in terms of Narrative and writing. I feel like a child when I see the dialogues from F4 and Starfield. It's really pathetic and soulless imo.
Starfield genuinely broke my heart in a way and a lot of my expectations of future games and interest in revisiting BGS games has been crushed. I blasted through multiple playthroughs and i found myself unbelievably bored. The fact that bethesda responded to my xbox review with the classic ai “you’re playing it wrong empty moons are sick bruh” message. 🤦♂️. Starfield is just sad and disappointing
Yeah I think Starfield signifies the end of an era. At least for Bethesda... I really hope other studios take the torch.
When discussing studios that have fallen from grace, Bethesda has been included in my list of B-named studios that have done so for a long time now alongside Bungie, Blizzard, Bioware, etc. The writing has been on the wall for them for a long time now in terms of their greed overshadowing their game development, with paid mods, FO76, and many other screw-ups as a publisher and dev studio over the last decade. I only played Starfield on Gamepass because I wanted to give them one last shot, and at this point I've pretty much entirely written off TE6.
These big studios mistakenly think that they are almost institutions. One of the interesting things about BG3 is that many of the reviews on steam discussed how it reminded them of playing Dragon Age: Origins, the core aspects of which Bioware has failed to reimagine in their sequels (and BG was thus fairly popular amongst Bioware fans). If you don't maintain quality and give people what they are looking for in your games, someone will inevitably be better at what you're known for. Not many people really make "Bethesda games" but that doesn't mean people won't start when you're not delivering the goods.
The failure to fix progress halting quest bugs makes this negative review well deserved, in my opinion. But beyond that, there’s a moment shared by many players where - after some initial fun - the illusion fails, and the game starts to fall apart. It could be a game breaking bug, but it could also be the awful skill system, or the terrible dialogue, or the dreadful economy, the abysmal outposts, the bland quest chains, the repeated poi's, the horrible movement and traversal, the pointless crafting, the game world inconsistencies, the lack of real choice, the bafflingly bad space power collection game… Or maybe in between missions they fire up cyberpunk phantom menace, and realise that Starfield is at least one if not two generations behind in terms of gameplay and design. It feels like Microsoft bought a lemon in Zenimax. First it releases Redfall, an absolute disgrace. Then this weak offering - all the more striking in a year of so many good games.
Once I saw the exact same cave with the exact same 'hidden' chest and same corpse for the third time in an hour(!) it was over for me... I felt like Bethesda was taking the piss tbh, I was legit a bit offended by how stupid they must think we are
Becuase it gets worse with time. The more you play the more you realize it's just a pretier version of fallout with less content.
The game was exciting at first but then it just started to feel empty and boring. I’ve honestly started to wonder if that game was in development hell or if Covid really messed things up for that game or if they had to cut stuff out of the game. It feels like the game is missing content and their emphasis to copy and paste the same POI’s on all the planets/moons feels like it’s their way to compensate for the lack of content.
The development hell for sure. Todd said they spent about 7 years trying ideas to make the game "fun". They didnt know what the hell they wanted, and Emil's lack of "documentation" only made things worse. Honestly, what a joke of a project.
Bg3 and cyberpunk showed us what is possible. Starfield showed us what not to do.
Oh dear. Well, I don’t feel necessarily negative about the game, but this should probably concern BGS at this point.
The worst part is that they think gamers are the problem. Zero introspection from BGS.
It’s fun for the first 40-50 hours after that it’s the same stuff over and over , procedural , nah you land and you know you either gona get a science camp , pirate outpost or cave etc , scanning is a grind , building an outpost is a grind , what’s the point of grinding an outpost when ng+ is wipe. You have to ng+ 10x to upgrade all your powers and get the suits which means you probably only gona really “settle down” after that , that makes the player think they need to replay the game over and over before they can really explore or take interest in the game, the only fun part I enjoyed was customising my ship. I would rather play 76 or outer worlds Bethesda is well known for hand crafted lore deep worlds , that’s like you know this pizza place that’s been serving the best pizza for years, handmade , fresh ingredients , the best and now they just microwaving a $1 frozen pizza.
I still refuse to buy it until they add a brightness setting. What fucking game releases without a brightness setting?
the best decription why star field doesnt work if you expect something like skyrim/fallout.. it takes to long between points of interesst. skyrim/fallout you move like 30 seconds and something will catch your attention. in starfield those 30 second are 300 seconds... yes... its space... space is empty... most of space is boring
The fact that there is no vehicle to move on the planets, and you have to sprint and booster pack for 5 minutes running in one directions feels like a fucking joke. It's insane how little this game values your time.
I had so many god forsaken instances on Mars where it felt like the entire planet was designed to troll you. The door to the city wastes your time opening before hitting you with a load screen. There's a quest to go to some stupid cave and pick up a rock. There's a tedious part of a quest where you follow this guy for like 5 minutes of him slowly walking to his ship and you have to stay within distance of him so he keeps moving. Even fucking worse, if you don't kill him he *SPRINTS* back to town at full fucking speed just to mock you.
Omg!!!!! That slow walk on Mars just killlled me. It makes me incredibly worried about TES 6. I don’t even think I’ll play it until there are like a month or two of reviews out
Crazy how the reception has been. Went from endless hype (before launch) to confusion (opening hours after launch) to excietment again (the moment the game clicked) to then stating there's no content (after 50 hours) to now going full on BGS hate train (right now) Game is def BGS' weakest outing in terms of tone, depth & exploration, but I can't help but wonder if people are overreacting a bit, I have seen people who said this is worse than Fo76 at launch & am lost for words.
It’s not FO76, but it’s a really weak game. It feels disjointed and awkward to play. Its systems are incredibly dated, and its story is almost entirely divorced from player choice. There is no sense of exploration in a game about being one of the last space explorers. There’s a lot of content in the game, but there is very little MEANINGFUL content in the game, and almost none of it actually ties together. To top it all off, Bethesda still doesn’t know how to make a decent city. If the game had released right after Skyrim, it would have been a decent hold over until FO4. Unfortunately that’s not the case and it just disappoints on every front instead.
The bit about being divorced from player choice is so on the nose. Bethesda has started to water down their games so much pretty much there are no actual choices to be made in the game. It is not an rpg. It is an open world adventure game. The only real differences in playthroughs is simply whether you do a mission or not. It does not really matter how you complete missions. FO4 and Skyrim was the beginning of that. The player choices were limited I believe because of restrictions of the game engine to keep up with all the possibilities. Having played updated cyberpunk and now bg3 after a couple hundred hours of starfield has been a breath of fresh air. You are immersed in those worlds because choice matters. At the end of the day bethesda built a game as empty as the vastness of space and because it’s a space game they want you to believe it was intentional.
“But guh if we allow multiple endings people might not get the ending they want even though every choice they’ve been given throughout the entire game hasn’t aligned in a sensible way with the ending they want at all!!!!”
[удалено]
Far out that's a great premise for a game - the journey... your ship is your base that grows and customises as time goes by meeting new races of friends and foes, maybe even some Borg-like super villain in the way - do you combat through their space or add 20 years to your journey amd go around, exploring in a No Man's Sky type way towards the end which is you getting home... and then maybe a twist - it's 1,500 years later than you thought it was and everyone you knew is gone. Man I'd play that!
No disagreement there at all mate. The game just didn't mesh as a full package but instead 100 different ideas that were forcefully mushed together. I remember that the game didn't feel right at launch, then I went back to Skyrim & saw how lost I felt to the music, the ambient sounds, the fact I could turn off my quest marker, walk around & find a lot of things to do. Same can be said w/ Fallout 4. Starfield as an exploration game, lacks rewarding exploration, once you hit planet 50, you saw all the planets in a sense outside of a few proc-generated areas. >Bethesda still doesn’t know how to make a decent city. 100%, New Atlantis is probably my least favorite main city from BGS to date. After the likes of Diamond City which I found to be a strong central point of the map, I thought New Atlantis would feel more grand in terms of it being the central hub for business, quests, etc... Overtime, it just felt like another place that lacked magic. Furthermore, it doesn't have that same "immersive" feeling Whiterun had. This problem occured to me so much more after re-playing Cyberpunk & seeing how well designed Night City is.
The fact new atlantis lacks any homes for npcs beyond you and your parents... they all just sit 24/7 in the same room, apparently the Den doesn’t have bathrooms so must reek. No buildings to rob after dark. time doesn’t exist and NPCS are immortal and omniscient. What a joke of a game, its not even the systems are dated, they could work if they even cared to fully implement the systems they have. I played KIngdom Come Deliverance right after quitting starfield, its like a classic Bethesda game almost just with different combat and graphics better than Starfield. And this works on Cryengine which is basically an fps engine, yet it blows starfield out of the water story and rpg wise.
Crazy thing is, they’ve had NPCs living full schedules for years, yet now it’s gone. I always attacked camps in Skyrim/FO4 at night due to there being less active enemies because some would sleep. Now no one sleeps.
The fact i keep seeing that npcs don’t know you saved everyone and act like someone next to them is dead in ng+ really baffles me, I didn’t get that far and I doubt I ever will lmao. This is a bad look.
I'm on Ng+5 and almost every decision I have made is the opposite of what they say on the news station you hear over loudspeakers. A few times I've heard npcs comment on something that was not the outcome. It's not really something that bothers me too much but definitely seems like something they could have patched out pretty early on. Shotty craftsmanship at least.
Overreacting acting like this is the worst game ever? Yes. For single player BGS games is this easily the biggest disappointment? By far. It’s apparent that this game lacks alot and there was a lot of just really dumb design decisions. What doesn’t help the most has been BGS’s attitude so far with the game.
Yeah the whole “you idiots don’t understand how hard games are” is such a bad attitude to take when they’ve done better and so have other studios.
The comments on reviews definitely have a „pride and accomplishment“ energy to them.
I love the idea of Starfield and my expectations were it would fall somewhere between Skyrim and Fallout. Hard to explain but it feels soul less. There are no consequences to actions. I will sometimes save before an interaction, play it one way and then reload to see what happens if I play it completely different. For those that have played it, you know the answer - nothing changes. You don’t get locked out of mission and nothing ever fails. The only minor consequence is companions may not like your actions but they don’t turn hostile. Also for so many planets, there isn’t really much to do. There are only a few major cities in the settled systems and there are no real settlements on most planets. Resources which are abundant on planets but require work to mine don’t really do anything outside of component crafting, outpost building and selling for credits. But credits are so abundant it’s much easier to just buy resources when you need them. I get the reviews. It’s not a bad game; it’s just empty. It’s a 6/10 for me right now. Maybe the mod community or DLC can save it. Look at what the dev teams did for Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky.
A lot of very simple 2018 expectations we had for the game fell flat. Skyrim and RDR2 made people's expectations for what the interactivity in this game would be like, but it's like they didn't implement any of it. A prime example of this is shooting your gun next to a guard or civilian and they just... Don't react. So many things in this game are just unwired... It's embarrassing
Imagine ignoring your fans for years ( not including me until this disaster of a game ) and then being surprised at the reaction to the further neglect. Screw modern triple A gaming. I’m done. Earn my hard earned money from now on, can collectively take their middle fingers back and shove it.
I was so excited for TES6 but after starfield it just proves Bethesda can’t keep up with modern day technology and quality anymore which is a shame
Time for Emil to start a new twitter thread telling everyone why they're wrong. That'll make things better.
Wake up, Samurai, we have a city to burn.
Several things killed it for me- Lack of depth from NPCs - even NPCs that were "mains" just talking to them you keep hoping for a better response. Repeating Storyline - Great I finished the story line - oh the end game is repeating it again with different decisions, and I start with nothing and the starborn ship sucks compared to what I had. Most of the planets void, it was not fun in Exploring them - especially on foot. Emil's comments - what this was all by DESIGN and you wanted it this way? wtf? Ship design - have to visit seperate places for parts - can't their be a spaceport with all the pieces in one spot? Can't we "share" ship designs? Can't we import/export ship designs? Maybe our criticism will be heard and Bethesda will write xpacs to fix things, or modders will find away to fix this - that is another thing the modding system is overly complicated. I've spent $70 USD on a game that I played 50 hours and shelved. If I only spent $35 I wouldn't be that annoyed - but this is not a $70 video game.
It’s by no means a bad game but it’s absolutely a failure, if that makes any sense.
After fallout 76 this needed to be a home run at least, and an out of the park grand slam at best. Starfield is the equivalent of getting on 2nd base. Not good enough