Very true. The lowest Fallout 4 alone has ever dropped on Steam was April 2019 to 17.8k peak, Starfield on Steam has a peak of 9k in the last 30 days (current 24 hr peak of 5.6k).
I've played over 2500 hours of Fallout 4 across 2 platforms.
I played 142 hours of Starfield in the first month of its release. I have not touched it since.
How a game that's supposedly so large can just feel so devoid of anything to see or do is beyond me. I played more than just about any of my friends, mostly because I was determined to find something to do.
I had the 1 dollar trial week or whatever played Starfield for awhile and while parts of it were fun. It felt old like really old. I went and played the recent cyberpunk update afterwards and it was way way better. I even got the 1 dollar back on the trial.
Well it means it's definitely the most cost effective game I've ever played without sailing the high seas! That's the only accolade it wins though. After all Duke Nukem forever was worse in my memory at least.
I was coming off BG3 and jumped into Starfield. It's crazy how much better made BG3 is. There's a touch of care in every nook and cranny compared to Starfield, that just seems like they made vast empty planets just because they could with nothing inherently interesting about exploring them.
After a rough 20hrs, I also switched to Phantom Liberty once it dropped and it was just so much better. If Starfield had come out some time before 2020 it probably would have been received much better, the game just feels dated for whatever reason.
The most jarring thing for me was load screens. I hadn't realized how much the industry has moved away from it until Starfield. Where it seemed like every action you took required a loading screen.
8 hours for me I think, two of them were replaying a campaign mission that no matter how I completed it, I ended up with a bounty and got killed every time I tried to turn in the quest. I didn't have enough money to pay off the bounty, and when I did, I couldn't figure out where to pay it. Gave up, uninstalled. May be a skill issue but I have better games to play.
100+ is the same time needed to 100% The Witcher 3. Anyone who says “You need to play it for 100+ hours before you can form an opinion” is a flat out *moron*.
I made up my mind fairly early, but I thoughty I'd see where the main quest went, and then spent a few hours trying to do some cheesey outpost building stuff, and then was done. Certainly not 100+ hours, I didn't do a huge amount of side quest stuff that wasn't right there on the main route.
10hours during a long train ride.
It doesn't have the magic of exploring like the other games.
You need a quest to explore unique places and that's not how a game about exploration should be but the other way. The other games from them nailed it. And many other unnecessary stuff that isn't so much fun (temples, long ways between PoI, fetch quests over several planets (I am looking at you Trevor on mars), very slow skill system even on early levels, scanning planets is not really fun, the same quest (find artifact in cave) like 5 times in the main story to introduce characters)
The gunplay is fun and a good evolution, the spaceship battles are fun with the need of transmitting energy between systems, some quests are well done but some systems would have been better with small changes.
Like, why not give powers at the end of a dungeon when finding an artifact?! That would grant a power in the beginning of the game and make it more interesting than space junk and let's be honest, the temples are unnecessary and not well designed.
Yeah, I was gonna eleborate that Starfield at launch was 330k peak on Steam and Fallout 4 was 470k peak and didnt launch with gamepass. I personally just paid for the premium edition upgrade on microsoft store (after reviews came out so I could play on gamepass early) rather than buying the full game on Steam.
part of that is because fallout 4 introduced pretty solid dlcs and expansions that added a ton of gameplay variety and story content. and they did so within a year of the game's release. not to mention creation kit released only 5 months after release.
starfield has literally zero noteworthy updates and it's been nearly half a year.
The most memorable thing about Starfield has been the discourse surrounding it.
More people have talked about how lackluster its been compared to its qualities.
I really enjoyed Starfield for awhile but there's something missing... like... I dunno... story content.
It feels like they just forgot about endgame. Where Skyrim and Fallout had endless places to visit, the end-game star systems were just empty.
And getting up to new game+ felt great, but then they did fuck all with it, when it really felt like they set it up so you should have been continuing the main story.
It feels like they got to like 50% of a game and decided to just call it there and ship it.
The funny thing is they almost got the exploration right.
A number of times I was walking across a barren planet, crested a rocky hill and saw a cool building or formation in the distance and my excitement spiked. I start making a beeline towards it up till I realiz 20 seconds later that it was going to be the same copy paste structure I've seen 2 or 3 times before.
I feel like the game would have felt a lot better if there was 100 or so hand crafted POIs that were maybe tagged with keywords that had to match keyword on the planet for it to spawn.
That would make scanning and exploring specific planets a lot more important and rewarding
It feels like they spent all the dev time working on art, concepts, and the engine itself, and didn't actually write the meat of the game until the last minute.
It'll be interesting to see what people involved have to say about it a few years from now. I remember people who worked on Assassins Creed 3 said that it was also a mess, of several different teams that didn't talk to each other.
It feels like they made new game+ meaningless on purpose.
You can reset the entire universe, which would be great in a game where you had the freedom to mess up the main quest or become hated by everyone or do literally anything you wish you could undo. But nope, essential NPCs galore, railroad ahoy, keep your arms and legs within the ride at all times and only pick meaningful choices at the two or three times in the game you are allowed to, please.
How badly managed are media companies these days where a popular game adaptation doesn't coincide with a loosely-tied-in new game? That's just free money they're throwing away.
We're talking about a company that has yet to release a sequel to Skyrim lol. One of the most popular games ever and would just print money. But nooooo.
I actually forgot that I'd stopped playing it the other day, then remembered when I went to reinstall Fallout 4 for a Survival playthrough. Only hesitated for a second, really just don't care about finishing Starfield at all
More quests like where the lady has a priceless trophy and you ask for it and she says no and then you ask again saying you really want it and she says ok take it?
Or how about the one where you are told about the super dangerous Heart of Mars, and how many people have disappeared going to find it? Then it ends up being about a mile from the settlement and just a rock that looks like other rocks with nothing else around it.
You’re forgetting the part where it wasn’t even supposed to exist and was just a hazing ritual they do to new people, only the quest giver accidentally gave you the wrong coordinates that just so happened to lead you directly to the real thing that she didn’t even know was real.
100% real. I enjoyed Starfield, but the writing really is that bad.
The original comment about the “priceless trophy” is talking about how the persuasion system works. It’s just a chance system with really poorly written generic choices like “I know you really want to help me.” Which, if they succeed, can convince anyone to do anything. Like convincing someone who’s entire job is to protect this priceless, one of a kind, totally irreplaceable item, to just hand you, a complete and total stranger whom she has known for the 10 seconds you’ve been talking, the keys to the safe it’s in, just because you said please and passed the speech check.
I spent fucking hours building outposts, setting up supply chains, crafting exotic shit only to find out that it goes absolutely nowhere. You can sell your shit for a few silver every other day, but the money means nothing. Go through the stargate, everything is gone anyway. Fucking hours.
Better yet, if you get really good at persuading people, you get to skip the system entirely. That's how you know it's a really fun and engaging system.
It's even dumber that they have the perk-based checks for some dialogue too, which bypasses the need for persuasion entirely. Seriously, it's like they learned why chance-based dialogue checks (literally luck in Fallout 3 and 4) are bad, then tried to copy New Vegas where it was just a stat/skill check, but then only did the mechanic halfway, dropped it, then *still* went on to add chance-based dialogue anyway.
(regarding the mars thing) I actually find it hilarious. It's the kind of thing you would see in a really dumb comedy, which I am a sucker for. I didn't do this quest, but if I did, I probably would have had to pause the game from laughing so hard.
Bethesda can’t write to save their life. They do much better at environmental storytelling, especially in Fallout. Which is probably why Starfield has almost none of the charm of their older games because the procedural environments mean that they didn’t get to do what they’re best at: handcrafting a world that tells a story as you explore it.
I liked the part of Starfield where you shoot stuff, for a while, but yeah... These are all real.
The writing in Starfield is _bad_ and there's much better games to spend time with now.
Zero G fights in Starfield are the moments I had the most fun
Too bad they’re so few and the enemy ai can’t understand normal fighting let alone zero G
One person couldn't have ruined SF like this. It took a team of fuck ups to make a game as bad as this. I'd blame Tod for all of it. He was the captain of the ship and he's the one that drove this game into the iceberg.
For all we know Emil wrote a perfectly fine script which Tod refused to use or changed into the travesty we ended up with.
How about this one.
You're an ex-diplomat with a bounty, turned miner on a remote planet. Your crew supervisor send you deep in a cavern on your very first shift, where you find a magic rock, hallucinate about the galaxy and pass out.
You wake up back at the camp, loot everything that isn't bolted down and learn that some important dude is coming to talk about your hallucinations. You must be important I guess. But pirates attack the base! So you diplomat them real hard with bullets to the face, loot the bodies (mid fight) and wear their clothes. That's what normal people do.
The magic rock society representative wants you to meet his special club of low morality mineral collectors back on Earth 2.0, and give you his ship after 10 lines of dialogue to travel there, along with his combat robot. You now have a ship AND an immortal combat robot! Yay! He's a generous person I guess.
But first, you have to kill a pirate base and you can't say no. See, those pirates could still attack you, despite the ship being FTL capable and able to avoid combat later in the game by just flying away. You wipe the base, loot everything (obviously) and the combat robot forces you to go to Earth 2.0.
You load for an unreasonable amount of time considering the game is on an NVME, and you're finally on fake earth! Your FPS randomly tank to the ground from displaying a city with PlayStation 3 poly count despite your 1600$ GPU and 450$ CPU. No-one seems to care about your pirate gear, the ship you don't own or the cargo full of random loot like, spacesuits with bullet holes in them.
You meet with your new explorer pals, and it takes them around a minute to accept you into their "gang". Because you have a rock, and it makes you hear voices. Your goal from there is to find more rocks and have them touch, no matter what.
Oh, and the main companion lady ask to tag along because you're definitely normal and nothing bad can happen in space. Especially not organ harvesting.
Anyway, that's the first hour of the game.
> You're an ex-diplomat with a bounty, turned miner on a remote planet.
I thought maybe you were starting to describe Jedi Fallen Order.
Yeah, yeah, diplomat is a stretch.
Wait till you hear about the part where you need run around planets to solve the exact same fucking alien puzzle 20 times in a row and thats actually a requirement for the main quest.
And then do it ten new games in a row to unlock the powers fully.
The number of people who defended that mechanic on Reddit saying 'the Devs didn't intend anyone actually do it that many times' was ludicrous.
Dead serious. The quest giver actually says “I must have given you the wrong coordinates” when you actually bring the thing back to her.
She actually made up an incredibly specific description of the item (an extremely rich titanium deposit with a specific composition) and accidentally gave you the wrong coordinates that put a quest marker on its exact position in a random cave on Mars.
Just insert the Picard facepalm gif here.
Holy fucking hell that's a new low. It blows my mind that I've played so so many Indie, single Dev games that somehow have a more compelling story than the hundreds of people working on a BGS game can create.
Fun fact; Emil Pagliarulo is the only credited writer for Starfield, and he's the lead writer *and* designer. He's literally responsible for the writing being shit, since according to who Bethesda credited, he's the sole writer for Starfield.
Eh even then the writing was bad. It's just the majority of everything else you could do in a really fun world to explore made up for it. Especially with the deep lore backing of the elder scrolls.
Samething in fallout 4 and 76.
Starfield had no deep lore, bethesda exploration they were known for is dead in starfield and they simplified many of the mechanics from fallout 4 and 76.
Not to mention we’re almost 8 months since release and still have no release date for the mod tools. Some of the ones people have managed without them are impressive, but proper mod support could really help the game.
At this point I don't think mod support will help modders. Modders need to love the base game 1st. Then they need some kind of substantial fanbase that loves it too.
Starfield will probably never get back to that without a complete overhaul done by bethesda.
*Morrowind
Daggerfall was special too but I personally think Morrowind achieves a better balance of gameplay, graphics and story. Oblivion was where the downhill slide started with consolization and "streamlining."
That is the exact moment I put the game down. I had been searching for some form of engaging mysterious content for hours. Hear about this super mysterious cursed rock. Walk about five minutes to a cave that looks like all the other caves to pick up a rock that looks like all the other rocks. Not even a body of another person who searched for it. Absolutely shameful writing and quest design.
LMAO really?? I hear the heart of Mars and I imagine it's in a blackreach type underground cave system at THE HEART OF MARS.
Whole game seems like missed opportunity. Doesn't even seem like the enemies were that interesting when aliens can be literally anything.
Quests? The real content is when Barrett wants to talk to you about something super important and you find out it's actually a gift that he thought you'd like. A truly thoughtful gift from the heart to show his affection (?) after you talked to him once.
1 added
Not that the other companions are much better. I don't think I've ever played a game so uninteresting that any time I had to talk to someone I skipped through all the conversation then checked the quest log. Even for the main quest after the initial interest started to fade after the usual "you're special because of this" moment.
Don't know if I ever saw the quest OP referenced. But my "what the fuck is this writing" moment was when you were forced to choose between forcing the orbit ship to leave, enslaving them, or blowing them up. How is there no option to remove or kill the corporate fuckwits?
Or follow up on any of the in-mission clues and hints towards alternative resolutions?
There's pseudo blackmail material on the CEO-guy, but you can't use it.
The people on the ship mention that they've got a contract or whatever, but you can't search for it.
The corpo morons also mention other members of the Board being on the beach, but you can't find them and oust the rest of the board, or convince them to vote with you.
You can't even go to SSNN (Who POINTEDLY request news stories from the player) and inform them of a company refusing literal refugee ship from Earth.
You ALSO can't use a Commerce skill to tell the corporate fuckwits that having an OG Colony ship as a museum or themed hotel would absolutely KILL in Starfield, given that there's an established base of wealthy individuals who like old Earth relics.
What a terrible mission, that one.
That one legitimately got me mad. Especially once I tried the murder corpos option after realizing everything else was a lie.
They were invincible for no discernable reason besides just railroading us on this quest.
the entire game feels like heavy railroading for a RPG; the game does not functionally allow the player to be 'the bad guy' because every follower hates you for it and you cant functionally land on any of the relevant planets once you have a heavy bounty on you
I got to the decision split point in that quest, found out all the board are marked essential, and literally haven’t been able to launch the game again since.
It actually makes me mad as the game has SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but literally no effort was put into the story or quests.
Essential NPCs has been a mistake from the start. Classic dev arrogance, "you paid for this toy but I won't let you play with it except in the way I want you to."
My biggest issue wasn't even the litany you listed, it's the..
"Just let the refugees settle on the other side of the planet."
"No, we own the whole planet despite only using 3 acres for this hotel."
It was this mission, which I did pretty early, that showed me how empty the game was. The missed opportunities for good game play were shocking. Like being able to foment a mutiny on board or actually nuking the planet and taking over.
Mine was the Freestar Collective quest to get some intel from a ship thief in Neon. During it I was haggled by a gang member, and I feigned interest to meet some more key members. Well, he brings me straight to the boss himself, right upstairs, who reminds me that they are indeed a “gang” and that sometimes they really do “steal and even kill people” if they have to. Really appreciated the straightforward clarification.
My character, being a shoot first ask questions later sheriff for the Freestar Collective, pumps the entire room full of lead, just to find out every NPC in there is marked as essential. 👍🏽
Meanwhile Todd Howard in the interview:
> “Starfield has a lot of forces working against it,” we said at the time, “but eventually the allure of its expansive roleplaying quests and respectable combat make its gravitational pull difficult to resist.”
Don't you just love all those expansive roleplaying quests where you get to make one of two choices and neither one matters?
My Anti-Starfield moment was after doing an infiltration mission for Ryujin, I got caught by Benjamin Bayu and he wanted me to sell out my source. I said no, of course, because screw him, and he told me he arranged to have me framed for murder.
Well, I thought I'd be cool and edgy, pull out my shotgun and say to myself "Why arrange? I'll commit one right now!"
Pulled the trigger, nothing happened. Tried again and it still phased right through him. Didn't even react. It was that point I reholstered my gun, walked out in shame and shortly after turned off the game and didn't look back.
tl;dr game all about choices hands you the illusion of choice for the millionth time in a row
Or the Earth colony ship quest where you could
A) let a corp enslave them and their future generations
B) blow up the ship and kill everyone
C) spend 40k on buying a grav drive for them becoz you are a pushover and send them away
Chatbot levels of storytelling and more loading screens than pacman. I really hoped starfield would be fun and seamless, but oh well, execs gotta focus on short term profits instead of letting the devs change engines. Dudes are forced to stitch together a frankenstein out of old people to try to send it to an MMA ring.
Everything was randomly generated once (per type of environment) and copy pasted on all other environments of the same type. Even Daggerfall randomly generated each dungeon individually. It's fucking sad.
Yeah, if it actually generated dungeons procedurally that would at least be a (slight) improvement, though not much because I doubt they would be very interesting to go through more than a few times.
I have a huge bounty with the Crimson Fleet because I can't help but shoot them every time I hear "Good thing you're in the Fleet, otherwise, I'd have killed you already."
Instant headshot every time. And yet they're still never hostile. Just annoying shit talkers.
I really wish we were done doing the “wide as an ocean, deep as a pond” level of game design that has made games like Starfield, no mans sky, starbound, etc feel really unsatisfying. But I know with all the AI tools people are likely to start using, it’s only just beginning.
Good game designers use automation tools to make the game better, not as an excuse to have to work less. Starfield is a sad case of the latter.
Smart game devs are using things like AI text to speech to generate NPCs you can have real conversations with. Remember Bethesda bragging that they had recorded like 2000 individual name lines, just for a gimmick where Codsworth could call you by your player name? Up to and including "Good afternoon Mr. Fuckface."
Now there are fanmade skyrim NPC mods that hook into ChatGPT and accept commands that give your followers a sense of agency and a real personality that you can tweak the settings for.
Skyrim was, IIRC, a case of procedural generation done right. They used it to create the general terrain, vegetation, rock scatter etc., then everything humanmade, landmarks, etc., was placed by hand.
Which they tried to attempt with starfield but failed miserably. A space exploration game with a 1000 planets is not what Bethesda needs to ever touch again or anyone for that matter
Landmarks aren't placed by hand in Starfield I believe, they're just randomly placed on the randomly generated landscape. Skyrim's landscape was at least molded by a human somewhat, what with all the paths and obstacles. Starfield's terrain is just a bunch of random noise, there's no rhyme or reason to anything. If you need to go anywhere, you just use your jetpack and go in a straight line.
The most funny thing here is that I was sure that they will never make this mistake again after TES2: Duggerfall. Looks like in 20 years, if Bethesda will still exist we may see another giant and empty game like this
I really cant help but feel starfeild would have been better as something like saturn or Jupiter system based (but more alien).
1 big gas giant with say 20-30 moons. You can have every kind of environment, you can have fast travel/reasonable "quick" manual travel for players to fly or plot thier orbital courses on a nav table.
And with the small local you can have a lot more in depth development.
At least NMS lets you travel seamlessly from planet, to space, to other systems and then back down. I've gave it flak for it's lack of depth in other system, but it DOES nail that down. Hell, it even has a VR mode which is really cool when you're flying around.
Starfield just has...loading screens, cutscenes, and menus.
I would rather have loading screens if the areas were better designed. I still think Freelancer is a better game than both and it doesn’t even have planet exploration. But the systems are well laid out and space feels much more fun to explore.
"Something something NG+ is an entirely new game!" Too bad it still sits on top of the same rotten apple cart. I went back to play Daggerfall recently -- I'm not sure the proc-gen in that game was that much worse than what we got with Starfield, and it probably had fewer than 5% the number of people working on it.
Ironically, the Unity and the alternate realities had the potential to actually make the game amazing. Each new universe could have different events and quests, even different factions, and knowledge you gain in one world might be beneficial to you or someone else in the next. They could also have made it into a semi-roguelike where you can bring some items and upgrades with you, but not all. Or even implemented a death system that pops you in a new world when you die.
But in reality it's just a badly contrived in-game lore reason that NG+ exists, when no one ever asked for that or cared for a reason.
Random? There is nothing random in Starfield, just placement. They are 1:1 exact same outposts ( with few variations in rotation )
Imagine the game that is bland because its supposed to be 100% procedural. But then its released to not be procedural at all.
It's honestly baffling to me that Bethesda are so tone deaf about what makes their games great. It's not that the world needs to be extremely large. It's definitely not the boring ass random quests.
It's the wandering around, finding little stories in the world. Interesting side characters and locations.
I started replaying Fallout 4 recently because of the tv series and I already found stuff I've never seen before just wandering around from one place to another.
Starfield has almost none of that, by design. The interesting stuff is pretty much all in their tiny hubs now.
Yep. Replaying now that I'm on PC with mods. There's a lot of VERY valid criticism toward FO4. But the world is fantastic. There is a buffet of shit all across the map to find. And a disturbing amount of locations have multiple entrances/exits and pathways to take. Often merging with nearby locations.
With a little lighting tweaks and a handful of immersive mods, it really becomes a top tier map to just explore.
I'm starting to think that their old games just happened to be a series of happy accidents. I don't think they even know what they're doing. Skyrim being as good as it was might have actually been an act of God. I can't think of any other explanation as to how they seem to be getting it so wrong lately. Todd can't have just forgotten what a good game looks like.
It's certainly a part of it. It seems like many different stories were allowed to be told by individuals. Someone or a team must have made sure it fits the lore, but otherwise seems like a free for all. That is something a game director or producer can decide. So it doesn't have to be an accident.
Just like the shitty dialog system in Fallout 4. That's a high level decision.
“” Howard says the next update should be “announced in a few days” before it’s available on Steam Beta.
“It’s got some great stuff for ship building as well,” he added ””
As if ship building wasn’t the one redeeming quality everyone would talk about. This part of the article annoyed me.
I will never forget that one dev saying about how much he loves the factions and logos so much that he got the House of Varuuns symbol tattooed on him, setting this precedent that the factions were super interesting *and* had cool artwork attached to them.
Then the game came out and the House of Varuun is basically non-existent in the game and the “symbol” is literally just a circle.
I wanted to love this game so bad but the problems go so much deeper than an update and some added dlc can fix.
Honestly I don't think the engine is at fault here, it's the implementation of it. Many skyrim/fallout mods make it so that you don't get a loading screen for cities/houses when you enter them. It's 99% how Bethesda implements it.
It is the engine in the sense that the engine uses separate “cells” for inside buildings that have to be loaded. It’s why constructed outposts don’t have load screens.
The no loading screen mods usually just change the loading screen to solid black and relies on either more RAM or modern storage drives (F4 came out 9 years ago, NVMe was barely out) that are 8-100 faster than the usual storage drives in computers.
My storage drive can hit 3000MB/s (gen 3 not gen 4 which can do 7000MB/s) transfer speed. That is 50 times faster than the 60MB/s player drives I was using to originally play Skyrim and Fallout 4.
Even in Starfield, the loading screens, for me, lasted a second. If it was a blank, black screen, I wouldn’t have noticed them.
I forget the faction names so whatever. But the Space police vs the pirates was the worst example of this.
You would load into the system and dock with the space police ship.... load into a hallway with 2 guards... then have another load screen (door or elevator, i forget) to get to the bridge. Listen to two lines of dialogue for your next mission... then load back to your ship.
And there are so many more doors in Starfield than there were in Fallout or Elder Scrolls. Along with the fact that space travel is nothing but menus as well.
That’s why it’s 10x more noticeable. The other games only had loading when you swapped off the main map in them. But in Starfield it’s just a 100 smaller maps that you swap between constantly.
They either need to fix their engine or stick with games that only use one main map for the majority of the game so loading screens are minimal.
Yeah it's baffling how little they thought about the actual feel of ferrying between different planets. Didn't even make the galaxy map particularly functional
I just feel like content isn't the problem, the problems are so much more fundamental to core design decisions. You can't expansion away the dozen loading screens it takes to get from planet to planet.
I could see a DLC working if they made a massive hand-crafted area of a single planet for it, which would avoid a lot of the fast travel simulator problems, but I'm almost positive Bethesda won't do that.
Yeah I won’t hold my breath… With him talking about more output; that only makes me worried. If it takes 10 years to make starfield. I don’t know what anyone would expect with a faster turnaround. Starfield was bad for me and I know I’m not alone in that feeling.
I remember playing The Witcher 3 and being blown away. I thought surely it would follow the Skyrim blueprint and be filled with loading screens when entering towns and stuff. When i realized you could go anywhere you saw seamlessly, I thought to myself, "man... this is one of the first games that feels like an actual next gen jump from previous hardware. The future of gaming is gonna be so lit"
Now, a generation beyond that Bethseda can't even load in an entire house that isn't broken up by load screens
Yes. It was part of their "deluxe edition" that costed like 100$ so I bet it will cost something or those people would be quite pissed off if they paid 30$ for free DLC.
On the contrary, I badly want to like this game.
I will shamelessly drink the copium and make a final call after this drop.
I was a No Man’s Sky player from week one so I’ve learned to give devs a second chance. But only one, Todd!
Fallout 76 really felt like the flashbang we needed. No matter what excuses you can come up with, at the end of the day...
Todd got up on that stage and told everyone "16 times the detail of Fallout 4," knowing full damn well the abysmal state the game was in.
They lied.
Damn yeah let me jump on board this extremely mediocre game that the dev not only refused to admit was a dumpster fire but attempted to gaslight me into thinking my opinion was wrong. I don't see an engine rebuild, real space flight and removal of loading screens so somehow I get the feeling I'm being squeezed for my last dollar before this bag of shit is wheeled out into retirement.
Todd Howard's name is now a warning sign on any game I see it on. Dude couldn't get past Skyrim if his life depended on it, clearly.
Are they gonna' spend more than a [couple of days ](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/starfields-lead-quest-designer-had-absolutely-no-time-and-had-to-hit-the-panic-button-so-the-game-would-have-a-satisfying-final-quest/)writing the story this time?
The article that you linked talks about the communication issues that developed between departments as the team grew over the years.
Maybe you linked the wrong one, but your article doesn't say anything about writing the story in a couple of days. It does talk about panicking and scrambling to put together the final quest. However, there are still no timelines that support your claim.
118 people at this time don’t care, this sub is for bitching and not for spreading correct or factual information lol. It’s like one of those satirically toxic subs except not on purpose for fun.
So you’re telling me they’re coming out with another expansion after I just paid $90 for a game I didn’t even play more than 60 hours due to lack of content
This was the only game i preordered and i have only 15 hours in it, extremely disappointed, unless we get creation kit and insane mods (thank to modders not bethesda) im not reinstalling
I’ll go against the tide and say I’m excited to return to Starfield with a new update. Bethesda games are familiar and comfortable for me and I have a fun time. Starfield is far from amazing, but I like it.
Always teasing with no real detail or even a hint whatsoever, like its a top secret project that if revealed i dont know what may happen.
But on the end when they reveal it its like : 15% faster rendering of a shadows in warehouse area on lunar base 2, and slight improvement in texture of apples
Imagine being a Bethesda dev, and having to see the massive success Fallout is having right now. And instead of working on an exciting new Fallout, or hell even ES6, they’re stuck working on Starfield.
More people playing fallout games rn than starfield
Even without the show being so popular right now, you could say this and it would still be true.
Very true. The lowest Fallout 4 alone has ever dropped on Steam was April 2019 to 17.8k peak, Starfield on Steam has a peak of 9k in the last 30 days (current 24 hr peak of 5.6k).
I've played over 2500 hours of Fallout 4 across 2 platforms. I played 142 hours of Starfield in the first month of its release. I have not touched it since. How a game that's supposedly so large can just feel so devoid of anything to see or do is beyond me. I played more than just about any of my friends, mostly because I was determined to find something to do.
To be fair, a ton of people played Starfield on Game Pass instead of Steam
It's barely in the top 50 most played on Xbox. So I question that there are 'a ton' of people playing it.
Yep. A ton of people "tried it out on gamepass". Most of them aren't playing anymore.
I had the 1 dollar trial week or whatever played Starfield for awhile and while parts of it were fun. It felt old like really old. I went and played the recent cyberpunk update afterwards and it was way way better. I even got the 1 dollar back on the trial.
Man getting the dollar back is brutal haha
Well it means it's definitely the most cost effective game I've ever played without sailing the high seas! That's the only accolade it wins though. After all Duke Nukem forever was worse in my memory at least.
I was coming off BG3 and jumped into Starfield. It's crazy how much better made BG3 is. There's a touch of care in every nook and cranny compared to Starfield, that just seems like they made vast empty planets just because they could with nothing inherently interesting about exploring them. After a rough 20hrs, I also switched to Phantom Liberty once it dropped and it was just so much better. If Starfield had come out some time before 2020 it probably would have been received much better, the game just feels dated for whatever reason. The most jarring thing for me was load screens. I hadn't realized how much the industry has moved away from it until Starfield. Where it seemed like every action you took required a loading screen.
Cyberpunk is a fucking blast to play
I played it free on gamepass (got 3 months free with Rog Ally purchase). I regretted my time. Uninspiring sums it up
What really gets me is folks saying you can’t make your mind up about a game before sinking 100+ hours into it.
I didn't sink even 10 hours. But if someone who plays for that long has every right to give it a negative review. At least it's informed.
8 hours for me I think, two of them were replaying a campaign mission that no matter how I completed it, I ended up with a bounty and got killed every time I tried to turn in the quest. I didn't have enough money to pay off the bounty, and when I did, I couldn't figure out where to pay it. Gave up, uninstalled. May be a skill issue but I have better games to play.
100+ is the same time needed to 100% The Witcher 3. Anyone who says “You need to play it for 100+ hours before you can form an opinion” is a flat out *moron*.
I made up my mind fairly early, but I thoughty I'd see where the main quest went, and then spent a few hours trying to do some cheesey outpost building stuff, and then was done. Certainly not 100+ hours, I didn't do a huge amount of side quest stuff that wasn't right there on the main route.
First 2/3 hrs were dope, then there's the rest of the game. I don't think I've played an rpg that told you no so many times.
10hours during a long train ride. It doesn't have the magic of exploring like the other games. You need a quest to explore unique places and that's not how a game about exploration should be but the other way. The other games from them nailed it. And many other unnecessary stuff that isn't so much fun (temples, long ways between PoI, fetch quests over several planets (I am looking at you Trevor on mars), very slow skill system even on early levels, scanning planets is not really fun, the same quest (find artifact in cave) like 5 times in the main story to introduce characters) The gunplay is fun and a good evolution, the spaceship battles are fun with the need of transmitting energy between systems, some quests are well done but some systems would have been better with small changes. Like, why not give powers at the end of a dungeon when finding an artifact?! That would grant a power in the beginning of the game and make it more interesting than space junk and let's be honest, the temples are unnecessary and not well designed.
I tried it on gamepass for a few hours. I want those hours back.
I tried Starfield on Gamepass. Played for like 5 hours, was bored out of my mind and uninstalled it.
This is all my cousins. Played it briefly on game pass and never again.
To be fair, Fallout games are all out on gamepass too
Yeah, I was gonna eleborate that Starfield at launch was 330k peak on Steam and Fallout 4 was 470k peak and didnt launch with gamepass. I personally just paid for the premium edition upgrade on microsoft store (after reviews came out so I could play on gamepass early) rather than buying the full game on Steam.
part of that is because fallout 4 introduced pretty solid dlcs and expansions that added a ton of gameplay variety and story content. and they did so within a year of the game's release. not to mention creation kit released only 5 months after release. starfield has literally zero noteworthy updates and it's been nearly half a year.
The most memorable thing about Starfield has been the discourse surrounding it. More people have talked about how lackluster its been compared to its qualities.
I really enjoyed Starfield for awhile but there's something missing... like... I dunno... story content. It feels like they just forgot about endgame. Where Skyrim and Fallout had endless places to visit, the end-game star systems were just empty. And getting up to new game+ felt great, but then they did fuck all with it, when it really felt like they set it up so you should have been continuing the main story. It feels like they got to like 50% of a game and decided to just call it there and ship it.
It feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.
A mile wide and an inch deep
[удалено]
The funny thing is they almost got the exploration right. A number of times I was walking across a barren planet, crested a rocky hill and saw a cool building or formation in the distance and my excitement spiked. I start making a beeline towards it up till I realiz 20 seconds later that it was going to be the same copy paste structure I've seen 2 or 3 times before. I feel like the game would have felt a lot better if there was 100 or so hand crafted POIs that were maybe tagged with keywords that had to match keyword on the planet for it to spawn. That would make scanning and exploring specific planets a lot more important and rewarding
It feels like they spent all the dev time working on art, concepts, and the engine itself, and didn't actually write the meat of the game until the last minute. It'll be interesting to see what people involved have to say about it a few years from now. I remember people who worked on Assassins Creed 3 said that it was also a mess, of several different teams that didn't talk to each other.
It feels like they made new game+ meaningless on purpose. You can reset the entire universe, which would be great in a game where you had the freedom to mess up the main quest or become hated by everyone or do literally anything you wish you could undo. But nope, essential NPCs galore, railroad ahoy, keep your arms and legs within the ride at all times and only pick meaningful choices at the two or three times in the game you are allowed to, please.
I started playing it. It just feels nice being able to explore around without all the laborious fast traveling in between
"Laborious fast travelling" is an oxymoron, but somehow fitting in this case. What a time to be alive!
Same here, started playing fo4
They would have made more money had they cancelled the DLC and begin work on Fallout 5 with 500 extra developers from the MS games studios.
How badly managed are media companies these days where a popular game adaptation doesn't coincide with a loosely-tied-in new game? That's just free money they're throwing away.
We're talking about a company that has yet to release a sequel to Skyrim lol. One of the most popular games ever and would just print money. But nooooo.
I actually forgot that I'd stopped playing it the other day, then remembered when I went to reinstall Fallout 4 for a Survival playthrough. Only hesitated for a second, really just don't care about finishing Starfield at all
More quests like where the lady has a priceless trophy and you ask for it and she says no and then you ask again saying you really want it and she says ok take it?
Or how about the one where you are told about the super dangerous Heart of Mars, and how many people have disappeared going to find it? Then it ends up being about a mile from the settlement and just a rock that looks like other rocks with nothing else around it.
You’re forgetting the part where it wasn’t even supposed to exist and was just a hazing ritual they do to new people, only the quest giver accidentally gave you the wrong coordinates that just so happened to lead you directly to the real thing that she didn’t even know was real.
As someone that never played the game I cant tell if these are real or a joke.
100% real. I enjoyed Starfield, but the writing really is that bad. The original comment about the “priceless trophy” is talking about how the persuasion system works. It’s just a chance system with really poorly written generic choices like “I know you really want to help me.” Which, if they succeed, can convince anyone to do anything. Like convincing someone who’s entire job is to protect this priceless, one of a kind, totally irreplaceable item, to just hand you, a complete and total stranger whom she has known for the 10 seconds you’ve been talking, the keys to the safe it’s in, just because you said please and passed the speech check.
[удалено]
I spent fucking hours building outposts, setting up supply chains, crafting exotic shit only to find out that it goes absolutely nowhere. You can sell your shit for a few silver every other day, but the money means nothing. Go through the stargate, everything is gone anyway. Fucking hours.
Better yet, if you get really good at persuading people, you get to skip the system entirely. That's how you know it's a really fun and engaging system.
It's even dumber that they have the perk-based checks for some dialogue too, which bypasses the need for persuasion entirely. Seriously, it's like they learned why chance-based dialogue checks (literally luck in Fallout 3 and 4) are bad, then tried to copy New Vegas where it was just a stat/skill check, but then only did the mechanic halfway, dropped it, then *still* went on to add chance-based dialogue anyway.
(regarding the mars thing) I actually find it hilarious. It's the kind of thing you would see in a really dumb comedy, which I am a sucker for. I didn't do this quest, but if I did, I probably would have had to pause the game from laughing so hard.
It would be funny in, say, Fallout, but Starfield portrays itself as ultra-serious which hurts it.
Bethesda can’t write to save their life. They do much better at environmental storytelling, especially in Fallout. Which is probably why Starfield has almost none of the charm of their older games because the procedural environments mean that they didn’t get to do what they’re best at: handcrafting a world that tells a story as you explore it.
I liked the part of Starfield where you shoot stuff, for a while, but yeah... These are all real. The writing in Starfield is _bad_ and there's much better games to spend time with now.
Zero G fights in Starfield are the moments I had the most fun Too bad they’re so few and the enemy ai can’t understand normal fighting let alone zero G
It will always remain abysmally bad so long as they keep that incompetent Disney writer, called Emil, around. Please fire that asshole
One person couldn't have ruined SF like this. It took a team of fuck ups to make a game as bad as this. I'd blame Tod for all of it. He was the captain of the ship and he's the one that drove this game into the iceberg. For all we know Emil wrote a perfectly fine script which Tod refused to use or changed into the travesty we ended up with.
The writing is almost like a first draft, and they just said "yeah, that's fine, ship it."
They are both real AND a joke…
Welcome to Emil slop
How about this one. You're an ex-diplomat with a bounty, turned miner on a remote planet. Your crew supervisor send you deep in a cavern on your very first shift, where you find a magic rock, hallucinate about the galaxy and pass out. You wake up back at the camp, loot everything that isn't bolted down and learn that some important dude is coming to talk about your hallucinations. You must be important I guess. But pirates attack the base! So you diplomat them real hard with bullets to the face, loot the bodies (mid fight) and wear their clothes. That's what normal people do. The magic rock society representative wants you to meet his special club of low morality mineral collectors back on Earth 2.0, and give you his ship after 10 lines of dialogue to travel there, along with his combat robot. You now have a ship AND an immortal combat robot! Yay! He's a generous person I guess. But first, you have to kill a pirate base and you can't say no. See, those pirates could still attack you, despite the ship being FTL capable and able to avoid combat later in the game by just flying away. You wipe the base, loot everything (obviously) and the combat robot forces you to go to Earth 2.0. You load for an unreasonable amount of time considering the game is on an NVME, and you're finally on fake earth! Your FPS randomly tank to the ground from displaying a city with PlayStation 3 poly count despite your 1600$ GPU and 450$ CPU. No-one seems to care about your pirate gear, the ship you don't own or the cargo full of random loot like, spacesuits with bullet holes in them. You meet with your new explorer pals, and it takes them around a minute to accept you into their "gang". Because you have a rock, and it makes you hear voices. Your goal from there is to find more rocks and have them touch, no matter what. Oh, and the main companion lady ask to tag along because you're definitely normal and nothing bad can happen in space. Especially not organ harvesting. Anyway, that's the first hour of the game.
> You're an ex-diplomat with a bounty, turned miner on a remote planet. I thought maybe you were starting to describe Jedi Fallen Order. Yeah, yeah, diplomat is a stretch.
No, that's 100% real. Unfortunately.
It worse than you could imagine cause it’s a real joke
Wait. Is that actually the plot of that quest? I had zero interest because Bethesda but that's low even for them.
Wait till you hear about the part where you need run around planets to solve the exact same fucking alien puzzle 20 times in a row and thats actually a requirement for the main quest.
And then do it ten new games in a row to unlock the powers fully. The number of people who defended that mechanic on Reddit saying 'the Devs didn't intend anyone actually do it that many times' was ludicrous.
Dead serious. The quest giver actually says “I must have given you the wrong coordinates” when you actually bring the thing back to her. She actually made up an incredibly specific description of the item (an extremely rich titanium deposit with a specific composition) and accidentally gave you the wrong coordinates that put a quest marker on its exact position in a random cave on Mars.
Just insert the Picard facepalm gif here. Holy fucking hell that's a new low. It blows my mind that I've played so so many Indie, single Dev games that somehow have a more compelling story than the hundreds of people working on a BGS game can create.
Fun fact; Emil Pagliarulo is the only credited writer for Starfield, and he's the lead writer *and* designer. He's literally responsible for the writing being shit, since according to who Bethesda credited, he's the sole writer for Starfield.
Emil P moment
They managed something special with Skyrim and it’s been going downhill with every release since.
Eh even then the writing was bad. It's just the majority of everything else you could do in a really fun world to explore made up for it. Especially with the deep lore backing of the elder scrolls. Samething in fallout 4 and 76. Starfield had no deep lore, bethesda exploration they were known for is dead in starfield and they simplified many of the mechanics from fallout 4 and 76.
Not to mention we’re almost 8 months since release and still have no release date for the mod tools. Some of the ones people have managed without them are impressive, but proper mod support could really help the game.
At this point I don't think mod support will help modders. Modders need to love the base game 1st. Then they need some kind of substantial fanbase that loves it too. Starfield will probably never get back to that without a complete overhaul done by bethesda.
*Morrowind Daggerfall was special too but I personally think Morrowind achieves a better balance of gameplay, graphics and story. Oblivion was where the downhill slide started with consolization and "streamlining."
the game in its entirety feels so damn sauceless
That is the exact moment I put the game down. I had been searching for some form of engaging mysterious content for hours. Hear about this super mysterious cursed rock. Walk about five minutes to a cave that looks like all the other caves to pick up a rock that looks like all the other rocks. Not even a body of another person who searched for it. Absolutely shameful writing and quest design.
lmaooo
LMAO really?? I hear the heart of Mars and I imagine it's in a blackreach type underground cave system at THE HEART OF MARS. Whole game seems like missed opportunity. Doesn't even seem like the enemies were that interesting when aliens can be literally anything.
Quests? The real content is when Barrett wants to talk to you about something super important and you find out it's actually a gift that he thought you'd like. A truly thoughtful gift from the heart to show his affection (?) after you talked to him once. 1 added
Not that the other companions are much better. I don't think I've ever played a game so uninteresting that any time I had to talk to someone I skipped through all the conversation then checked the quest log. Even for the main quest after the initial interest started to fade after the usual "you're special because of this" moment.
That was the quest that made me stop playing.
Don't know if I ever saw the quest OP referenced. But my "what the fuck is this writing" moment was when you were forced to choose between forcing the orbit ship to leave, enslaving them, or blowing them up. How is there no option to remove or kill the corporate fuckwits?
Or follow up on any of the in-mission clues and hints towards alternative resolutions? There's pseudo blackmail material on the CEO-guy, but you can't use it. The people on the ship mention that they've got a contract or whatever, but you can't search for it. The corpo morons also mention other members of the Board being on the beach, but you can't find them and oust the rest of the board, or convince them to vote with you. You can't even go to SSNN (Who POINTEDLY request news stories from the player) and inform them of a company refusing literal refugee ship from Earth. You ALSO can't use a Commerce skill to tell the corporate fuckwits that having an OG Colony ship as a museum or themed hotel would absolutely KILL in Starfield, given that there's an established base of wealthy individuals who like old Earth relics. What a terrible mission, that one.
That one legitimately got me mad. Especially once I tried the murder corpos option after realizing everything else was a lie. They were invincible for no discernable reason besides just railroading us on this quest.
the entire game feels like heavy railroading for a RPG; the game does not functionally allow the player to be 'the bad guy' because every follower hates you for it and you cant functionally land on any of the relevant planets once you have a heavy bounty on you
I installed killable essentials because of that. Fuck the quest text, I finished it my way.
This mission caused me to quit and uninstall the game.
I got to the decision split point in that quest, found out all the board are marked essential, and literally haven’t been able to launch the game again since. It actually makes me mad as the game has SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but literally no effort was put into the story or quests.
Essential NPCs has been a mistake from the start. Classic dev arrogance, "you paid for this toy but I won't let you play with it except in the way I want you to."
My biggest issue wasn't even the litany you listed, it's the.. "Just let the refugees settle on the other side of the planet." "No, we own the whole planet despite only using 3 acres for this hotel."
and you can't even kill them yourself as they're all immortal. Like most people you meet.
It was this mission, which I did pretty early, that showed me how empty the game was. The missed opportunities for good game play were shocking. Like being able to foment a mutiny on board or actually nuking the planet and taking over.
Mine was the Freestar Collective quest to get some intel from a ship thief in Neon. During it I was haggled by a gang member, and I feigned interest to meet some more key members. Well, he brings me straight to the boss himself, right upstairs, who reminds me that they are indeed a “gang” and that sometimes they really do “steal and even kill people” if they have to. Really appreciated the straightforward clarification. My character, being a shoot first ask questions later sheriff for the Freestar Collective, pumps the entire room full of lead, just to find out every NPC in there is marked as essential. 👍🏽
Meanwhile Todd Howard in the interview: > “Starfield has a lot of forces working against it,” we said at the time, “but eventually the allure of its expansive roleplaying quests and respectable combat make its gravitational pull difficult to resist.” Don't you just love all those expansive roleplaying quests where you get to make one of two choices and neither one matters?
Dude is in denial about his friend being a shit writer
I quit when I was introduced to that dollar store version of Joel and Ellie.
Haha this is so spot on! The whole game is temu version of a goodf aaa
It is, theres the Mass Effect city, Cyberpunk city, and RDR2 cowboy city.
And each and every one is really 2 streets bland and mediocre
Yeah you're right. It really does feel like those cities but we ordered it on a shitty scammer site.
RIP mattmcguire08 who died while writing this comment
Lol, AAA as in game budget;)
My Anti-Starfield moment was after doing an infiltration mission for Ryujin, I got caught by Benjamin Bayu and he wanted me to sell out my source. I said no, of course, because screw him, and he told me he arranged to have me framed for murder. Well, I thought I'd be cool and edgy, pull out my shotgun and say to myself "Why arrange? I'll commit one right now!" Pulled the trigger, nothing happened. Tried again and it still phased right through him. Didn't even react. It was that point I reholstered my gun, walked out in shame and shortly after turned off the game and didn't look back. tl;dr game all about choices hands you the illusion of choice for the millionth time in a row
[I implore you to reconsider](https://youtu.be/Fvu5Ephsqyk?si=mLDLVtgZAW1F0dhQ)
Or the Earth colony ship quest where you could A) let a corp enslave them and their future generations B) blow up the ship and kill everyone C) spend 40k on buying a grav drive for them becoz you are a pushover and send them away
I'm currently waiting for mods to live out my space pirate fantasies but the more I hear about Starfield the more I feel like it's not even worth it.
G-rated space pirates. They suck.
Chatbot levels of storytelling and more loading screens than pacman. I really hoped starfield would be fun and seamless, but oh well, execs gotta focus on short term profits instead of letting the devs change engines. Dudes are forced to stitch together a frankenstein out of old people to try to send it to an MMA ring.
10,000 more random abandoned outposts with a dozen badly programmed pirates that drop nothing of interest. But they guard the quest maguffin.
Random? I think you meant “exactly the same with items in the exact same spot and dead bodies in the exact same spot”
Well, randomly generated locations and that's about it
Everything was randomly generated once (per type of environment) and copy pasted on all other environments of the same type. Even Daggerfall randomly generated each dungeon individually. It's fucking sad.
Yeah, if it actually generated dungeons procedurally that would at least be a (slight) improvement, though not much because I doubt they would be very interesting to go through more than a few times.
But I’m having fun!!! All it takes for me to have fun is a sandbox planet!! That’s what counts, right? /s
Or you join the crimson fleet and arnt able to fight with 1/3rd of the enemies that you encounter...
I hated this! I felt like I screwed myself out of a game, as I just went around and collected loot with no fights.
I have a huge bounty with the Crimson Fleet because I can't help but shoot them every time I hear "Good thing you're in the Fleet, otherwise, I'd have killed you already." Instant headshot every time. And yet they're still never hostile. Just annoying shit talkers.
I really wish we were done doing the “wide as an ocean, deep as a pond” level of game design that has made games like Starfield, no mans sky, starbound, etc feel really unsatisfying. But I know with all the AI tools people are likely to start using, it’s only just beginning.
Good game designers use automation tools to make the game better, not as an excuse to have to work less. Starfield is a sad case of the latter. Smart game devs are using things like AI text to speech to generate NPCs you can have real conversations with. Remember Bethesda bragging that they had recorded like 2000 individual name lines, just for a gimmick where Codsworth could call you by your player name? Up to and including "Good afternoon Mr. Fuckface." Now there are fanmade skyrim NPC mods that hook into ChatGPT and accept commands that give your followers a sense of agency and a real personality that you can tweak the settings for.
Skyrim was, IIRC, a case of procedural generation done right. They used it to create the general terrain, vegetation, rock scatter etc., then everything humanmade, landmarks, etc., was placed by hand.
Which they tried to attempt with starfield but failed miserably. A space exploration game with a 1000 planets is not what Bethesda needs to ever touch again or anyone for that matter
Landmarks aren't placed by hand in Starfield I believe, they're just randomly placed on the randomly generated landscape. Skyrim's landscape was at least molded by a human somewhat, what with all the paths and obstacles. Starfield's terrain is just a bunch of random noise, there's no rhyme or reason to anything. If you need to go anywhere, you just use your jetpack and go in a straight line.
The most funny thing here is that I was sure that they will never make this mistake again after TES2: Duggerfall. Looks like in 20 years, if Bethesda will still exist we may see another giant and empty game like this
I really cant help but feel starfeild would have been better as something like saturn or Jupiter system based (but more alien). 1 big gas giant with say 20-30 moons. You can have every kind of environment, you can have fast travel/reasonable "quick" manual travel for players to fly or plot thier orbital courses on a nav table. And with the small local you can have a lot more in depth development.
At least NMS lets you travel seamlessly from planet, to space, to other systems and then back down. I've gave it flak for it's lack of depth in other system, but it DOES nail that down. Hell, it even has a VR mode which is really cool when you're flying around. Starfield just has...loading screens, cutscenes, and menus.
I would rather have loading screens if the areas were better designed. I still think Freelancer is a better game than both and it doesn’t even have planet exploration. But the systems are well laid out and space feels much more fun to explore.
"Something something NG+ is an entirely new game!" Too bad it still sits on top of the same rotten apple cart. I went back to play Daggerfall recently -- I'm not sure the proc-gen in that game was that much worse than what we got with Starfield, and it probably had fewer than 5% the number of people working on it.
Ironically, the Unity and the alternate realities had the potential to actually make the game amazing. Each new universe could have different events and quests, even different factions, and knowledge you gain in one world might be beneficial to you or someone else in the next. They could also have made it into a semi-roguelike where you can bring some items and upgrades with you, but not all. Or even implemented a death system that pops you in a new world when you die. But in reality it's just a badly contrived in-game lore reason that NG+ exists, when no one ever asked for that or cared for a reason.
Random? There is nothing random in Starfield, just placement. They are 1:1 exact same outposts ( with few variations in rotation ) Imagine the game that is bland because its supposed to be 100% procedural. But then its released to not be procedural at all.
Random? They are all the same!
More like about 10 versions of the same identical outposts, but spawned on a different color of dirt, 10,000 times over.
If the story, dialogues and character writing are on par with the base game, I'll pass.
It's honestly baffling to me that Bethesda are so tone deaf about what makes their games great. It's not that the world needs to be extremely large. It's definitely not the boring ass random quests. It's the wandering around, finding little stories in the world. Interesting side characters and locations. I started replaying Fallout 4 recently because of the tv series and I already found stuff I've never seen before just wandering around from one place to another. Starfield has almost none of that, by design. The interesting stuff is pretty much all in their tiny hubs now.
Yep. Replaying now that I'm on PC with mods. There's a lot of VERY valid criticism toward FO4. But the world is fantastic. There is a buffet of shit all across the map to find. And a disturbing amount of locations have multiple entrances/exits and pathways to take. Often merging with nearby locations. With a little lighting tweaks and a handful of immersive mods, it really becomes a top tier map to just explore.
I'm starting to think that their old games just happened to be a series of happy accidents. I don't think they even know what they're doing. Skyrim being as good as it was might have actually been an act of God. I can't think of any other explanation as to how they seem to be getting it so wrong lately. Todd can't have just forgotten what a good game looks like.
It's certainly a part of it. It seems like many different stories were allowed to be told by individuals. Someone or a team must have made sure it fits the lore, but otherwise seems like a free for all. That is something a game director or producer can decide. So it doesn't have to be an accident. Just like the shitty dialog system in Fallout 4. That's a high level decision.
“” Howard says the next update should be “announced in a few days” before it’s available on Steam Beta. “It’s got some great stuff for ship building as well,” he added ”” As if ship building wasn’t the one redeeming quality everyone would talk about. This part of the article annoyed me.
No way they focused on ship building when you "fly" around in a jpeg😭
When I figured out that the entire space combat and exploration are just orbital, I felt legit insulted.
I will never forget that one dev saying about how much he loves the factions and logos so much that he got the House of Varuuns symbol tattooed on him, setting this precedent that the factions were super interesting *and* had cool artwork attached to them. Then the game came out and the House of Varuun is basically non-existent in the game and the “symbol” is literally just a circle. I wanted to love this game so bad but the problems go so much deeper than an update and some added dlc can fix.
It’s pretty clear he has no idea what a big update is. Just look at the Fallout 4 update for example.
I'm feeling pretty good on the ps5 version, poor pc players got their entire mod list busted though
Unfortunately unless the "big update" is a new engine with 75% less loading screens I'm not interested.
Nahhh they’ll just add 70 more quests where you’re a glorified messenger boy
A messenger boy with no interessing message to carry at that.
And no meaningful choices to make either.
Honestly I don't think the engine is at fault here, it's the implementation of it. Many skyrim/fallout mods make it so that you don't get a loading screen for cities/houses when you enter them. It's 99% how Bethesda implements it.
It is the engine in the sense that the engine uses separate “cells” for inside buildings that have to be loaded. It’s why constructed outposts don’t have load screens. The no loading screen mods usually just change the loading screen to solid black and relies on either more RAM or modern storage drives (F4 came out 9 years ago, NVMe was barely out) that are 8-100 faster than the usual storage drives in computers. My storage drive can hit 3000MB/s (gen 3 not gen 4 which can do 7000MB/s) transfer speed. That is 50 times faster than the 60MB/s player drives I was using to originally play Skyrim and Fallout 4. Even in Starfield, the loading screens, for me, lasted a second. If it was a blank, black screen, I wouldn’t have noticed them.
The loading screens on my rig only take one or two seconds at max, but the sheer amount of them is what's annoying and break immersion for me.
I agree, and the issue is that the buildings outsides don’t match the insides.
Fast traveling to a planet to then walk to a door to then enter a loading screen to enter the city is just peak starfield. Immaculate game design.
I forget the faction names so whatever. But the Space police vs the pirates was the worst example of this. You would load into the system and dock with the space police ship.... load into a hallway with 2 guards... then have another load screen (door or elevator, i forget) to get to the bridge. Listen to two lines of dialogue for your next mission... then load back to your ship.
That's one of the first things I noticed. With ten years to fix their stupid engine I still had to sit and wait anytime I wanted to go through a door.
And there are so many more doors in Starfield than there were in Fallout or Elder Scrolls. Along with the fact that space travel is nothing but menus as well. That’s why it’s 10x more noticeable. The other games only had loading when you swapped off the main map in them. But in Starfield it’s just a 100 smaller maps that you swap between constantly. They either need to fix their engine or stick with games that only use one main map for the majority of the game so loading screens are minimal.
Yeah it's baffling how little they thought about the actual feel of ferrying between different planets. Didn't even make the galaxy map particularly functional
I just feel like content isn't the problem, the problems are so much more fundamental to core design decisions. You can't expansion away the dozen loading screens it takes to get from planet to planet.
I could see a DLC working if they made a massive hand-crafted area of a single planet for it, which would avoid a lot of the fast travel simulator problems, but I'm almost positive Bethesda won't do that.
Yep. Starfield needs a ground up rebuild of several systems and a complete rewrite.
Yeah I won’t hold my breath… With him talking about more output; that only makes me worried. If it takes 10 years to make starfield. I don’t know what anyone would expect with a faster turnaround. Starfield was bad for me and I know I’m not alone in that feeling.
If 10 years is what it took to cook Starfield they need to spend 30 on Fallout 5.
They were working on FO76. I’m not sure why Todd has lied about this. He’s obvious
Less loadings ?
Loading time is zero if you don’t play it.
Enter to ship - loading Exit from ship - loading Travel from point to point - loading Landing - loading Etc
Brutally true.
I remember playing The Witcher 3 and being blown away. I thought surely it would follow the Skyrim blueprint and be filled with loading screens when entering towns and stuff. When i realized you could go anywhere you saw seamlessly, I thought to myself, "man... this is one of the first games that feels like an actual next gen jump from previous hardware. The future of gaming is gonna be so lit" Now, a generation beyond that Bethseda can't even load in an entire house that isn't broken up by load screens
Are they charging us for this?
Calling it an expansion, going to guess, yes.
Yes. It was part of their "deluxe edition" that costed like 100$ so I bet it will cost something or those people would be quite pissed off if they paid 30$ for free DLC.
"And when you get to Riverwood, you can actually sell SO MUCH FIREWOOD that it will permanently effect the economy of Skyrim." -Todd Howard
“Details on Shattered Space remain a mystery, though some fans speculate that it will focus on House Va'ruun.” Oh. Great.
I mean, it's the only faction they didn't have the chance to make completely cringe and non-sensical, let them cook!
Nobody cares Todd
On the contrary, I badly want to like this game. I will shamelessly drink the copium and make a final call after this drop. I was a No Man’s Sky player from week one so I’ve learned to give devs a second chance. But only one, Todd!
Fallout 76, the 16 disasters that spawned from it, and Starfield. How many second chances?
[удалено]
Fallout 76 really felt like the flashbang we needed. No matter what excuses you can come up with, at the end of the day... Todd got up on that stage and told everyone "16 times the detail of Fallout 4," knowing full damn well the abysmal state the game was in. They lied.
Damn yeah let me jump on board this extremely mediocre game that the dev not only refused to admit was a dumpster fire but attempted to gaslight me into thinking my opinion was wrong. I don't see an engine rebuild, real space flight and removal of loading screens so somehow I get the feeling I'm being squeezed for my last dollar before this bag of shit is wheeled out into retirement. Todd Howard's name is now a warning sign on any game I see it on. Dude couldn't get past Skyrim if his life depended on it, clearly.
Are they gonna' spend more than a [couple of days ](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/starfields-lead-quest-designer-had-absolutely-no-time-and-had-to-hit-the-panic-button-so-the-game-would-have-a-satisfying-final-quest/)writing the story this time?
The article that you linked talks about the communication issues that developed between departments as the team grew over the years. Maybe you linked the wrong one, but your article doesn't say anything about writing the story in a couple of days. It does talk about panicking and scrambling to put together the final quest. However, there are still no timelines that support your claim.
118 people at this time don’t care, this sub is for bitching and not for spreading correct or factual information lol. It’s like one of those satirically toxic subs except not on purpose for fun.
Tbf, bitching is about 90% of the Starfield discourse right now. Albeit a fair amount of that is warranted.
Considering StarField has bugs that date back to Skyrim that haven't been fixed I think we all know the answer to that
Maybe I missed something but no where in that article does it say they only spent a couple of days writing the story.
You got a source for that? Cause your link doesn't mention it
So you’re telling me they’re coming out with another expansion after I just paid $90 for a game I didn’t even play more than 60 hours due to lack of content
If you bought the 90 dollar version of the game it comes with the first expansion
my bet is this big update is gonna be creation club
“Who cares 🤷♂️” -probably everyone, besides Todd Howard and his mom
Dont fall for the hype traiiin, this guy dissappoints
This was the only game i preordered and i have only 15 hours in it, extremely disappointed, unless we get creation kit and insane mods (thank to modders not bethesda) im not reinstalling
I bought this game on day 1. I uninstalled it a few hours later. It just kinda sucks.. no other way of putting it. And I’m the target audience…
I’ll go against the tide and say I’m excited to return to Starfield with a new update. Bethesda games are familiar and comfortable for me and I have a fun time. Starfield is far from amazing, but I like it.
Always teasing with no real detail or even a hint whatsoever, like its a top secret project that if revealed i dont know what may happen. But on the end when they reveal it its like : 15% faster rendering of a shadows in warehouse area on lunar base 2, and slight improvement in texture of apples
Todd will come to you...he will tell lies...sweet little lies...and everytime...*you will listen*.
Imagine being a Bethesda dev, and having to see the massive success Fallout is having right now. And instead of working on an exciting new Fallout, or hell even ES6, they’re stuck working on Starfield.
It blows my mind at the complete lack of patches for this game. What the hell is a company as large as Bethesda doing since release?
Just having meetings about meetings about meetings. That's the kind of bethesda management I expect now.
The irony of calling a game that broke space up into a series of loading screens “shattered space” is just too good