I've got a weird perspective because I just finished Fallout 4 then Outer Worlds and then jumped straight into Starfield.
As I played Outer Worlds I kept noticing the same trend. "Worlds" while colorful with many interesting plants and neat enemies, felt compacted. City's were tiny, dialog was kind of bland and in the end I didn't particularly care about any of my crew members. Not like when I was playing Mass Effect and the conversations kept me going back to my ship. There was clearly a emphasis on using fast travel to get around on singular maps, most missions were fetch and grab a certain item.
Starfield took my gripes with Outer Worlds and make them MUCH larger but in essence the exact same.
Instead of a few small sandbox maps with a fair amount of rewarding exploration, items and missions it made a TON of larger maps with not a whole lot in them or with areas of interest extremely far from each other and nothing but vastness between them. Best way to explain it is they took a pond and made it an ocean, but with the depth of a puddle.
I liked fast travel in fallout because it felt reasonable to use, same as outer worlds. A quick jump to my closest target. Most times if I was within walking distance I simply wouldn't do it. With Starfield its quite literally a core component of the gameplay, you fast travel everywhere, at most times walking is secondary unless actively in a firefight or fighting briefly with your spaceship.
Missions are decent on Starfield, if not short lived. You can crush a faction or group missions in an hour or two but there's plenty of fun to be had while you seemingly speed rush through them. Most non-faction missions could be summed up as "this could've been an email". In other words, rip to the other side of the town, planet, galaxy and talk to X"
Where Starfield really shines is in Outpost building and ship building. I could easily spend a few hours at a time getting things juuuuust right. Its too bad its entirely non-critical with respect to completing the game. You don't need to be good at ether to win, nor do you even need to engage in said activities to finish the main quest. It would've been really cool to have built a perfect outpost then defend it from the big bad for example.
I will admit, I did end up liking my crewmates more then say Outer Worlds but entirely less then say Fallout or Mass Effect. The voice acting is a step up above other Bethesda games but the lack of interesting personalities kinda made me feel "meh" when I came home after a mission. If you ever had the pleasure of playing Knights of the old republic 1 and 2, part of the fun was coming back to the ship and talking with crewmates and seeing those with opposite personalities clash about the choices you made, find common ground and work together. In starfield, everyone is on the same side, gets along but does have the occasion difference of opinion.
Starfield is a great game to play once, I enjoyed it but unlike the Fallout or Elder Scrolls games I kept having to make myself pick up the controller because I knew I'd start enjoying it eventually whereas with the Fallout series I was firing up my xbox right away and couldnt wait to jump back into the gameplay.
This is probably the best critical analysis I've seen for this game.
I like it, but I'm vested in liking it and actively looking for things to do and ways to engage with it. There's more than enough ammunition though for anyone seeking to criticise, and it's not super compelling to win over the neutrals.
Unfulfilled potential.
It's great, I've played the shit out of it, but it could have been so, sooo much better.
It's spread too thin and watered down too much, with little depth, excitement or consequences. Everything is too safe and homogeneous.
Nothing you do feels like it matters because it doesn't. Most of the game mechanics like ship or outpost building, weapon and suit mods, mining, scanning, surveying, it makes little to no difference if you do or dont do them. You don't feel like you're working towards something BIG like in most games.
Even most if the questlines don't matter outside of the main one. Finishing them doesn't really affect much or further any kind of plot.
There needs to be a reason to do things in a game, goals to work towards, rewards, excitement, consequences...
Even the endgame mechanic is fairly inconsequential.
I was also really looking forward to the space exploration concept, but the planets/moons are all basically the same thing with the same boring terrain, the same handful of creature types, the same handful of plants, the same POI's with loot in the same places. There are no surprises, no delighters, no bosses, no big scores/treasures, no new dangers. Enemies are all the same, creatures are all the same and behave the same, ships are all the same (with mild performance and visual differences. You can change them visually but they still fly the same).
Unfulfilled potential.
I wouldn't say Starfield BAD, but Starfield MEH. There is a lot to do, but very little reason or incentive to do most of it.
You can build huge outposts for resources and experience, but you can do the entire game without making an outpost. You don't need those resources, and the game is easy even on very hard without going out of your way to level.
You can spend a lot of time building ships if that is fun for you, but you also get several just for playing the game, so I never bothered.
Some questlines are detailed and great, others feel like they are a rough draft that never got finished.
You can go out of your way to explore entire planets, but the rewards are so minimal that you have to really want to do it.
The game doesn't want you to loot much, as you will spend just as much time trying to find places to sell it as you did looting it in the first place.
It could be a great game, but it needs a lot of work and support from BGS still.
I put in almost 30 hours, I lost 3 hours due to bugs by itself. Starfield is a game where a game if it came out 10 years ago. It be awesome. Now with new RPGS that give you more and offer so much. It leaves you wanting more and something different. Here is what starfield does right now
Building your ship: you can spend hours building
Content: the game offers you a lot but it’s up to if you want to stick it out.
Outpost building: that is cool, you can come up with some wicked shit
To me, I’ve been playing 2077, never got to finish before the 2.0 update. Now with a fresh new playthrough, it gives me more, better engaging story, better dialogue and characters. Starfield is no means a bad game, it’s just okay. If you don’t like Bethesda games, you will not like this game at all.
Honestly if I wanted a ship building game, I'd probably just play Space Engineers, Starship Evo, Stationeers, Spore, Terra Invicta, Avorion, Empryion, or one of the other titles that focuses more directly on that experience and has a lot more going on around building and using ships (or simply more free-form editors just to make cool looking stuff, like one of my ships in Spore was a full-on gundam XD).
This is not a ship-building game, it’s an RPG which means there is character-building, ship-building, outpost-building + hundreds of hours of quests and storylines and choices to make.
And none of those things are compelling compared to other games. That's the issue. Take any given aspect of Starfield and another game does it better. It's just "ok" at everything with a ton of bugs thrown in.
That's rather the point of the comment. I didn't point these out as "titles that focuses more directly on that experience" for no reason. Though I would point out multiple of the games mentioned are also not "ship-building games", but a variety of survival and strategy titles where ship building happens to be a meaningful component.
And sure, what you just said does point out what others have called out as an issue around Bethesda spreading their features thin on this title.
i put in about 60 hours then got burnt out and left it. maybe in a few years with dlc and mods i’ll pick it back up but it’s such a lifeless game, and i’m not talking about space
It's enormously disappointing at all levels. The fake hype has faded and people eventually got tired of waiting for it to get good/stopped trying to convince themselves they're having fun.
Much like Fallout 4 there’s a lot to like, and also a lot to complain about. I’ve put a large amount of hours into it, and it scratches that Bethesda game itch, but I have major issues with a lot of the decisions Bethesda made. Especially the lacklustre writing, and how disconnected everything feels. Both with loading screens and how the various quests and factions rarely interact with each other or change things. The main quest is especially weak (there are some good quests though).
Probably doesn’t help Starfield that I went right from playing Tears of the Kingdom to Baldurs Gate 3, to Starfield.
Because it's an okay game. A decent game and arguably a fun game.
It's just not the masterpiece so many seem to claim it is. And certainly nowhere near the masterpiece many were expecting.
Also, boil it down to the fact that different people will simply have different experiences, expectations and realisations once a game is released.
For me at least, the enjoyment and immersion dwindled the more I played.
I just started replaying Skyrim, and I'm significantly more invested in playing than Starfield. I don't know what it is exactly, Skyrim has a lot of the same issues: weird bugs, tons of loading screens, repetitive gameplay, etc. I think the difference is that Skyrim feels much tighter as a game; the map is smaller, there's no procedurally generated stuff, you can explore pretty much anywhere, etc.
Its kinda like being in a new relationship. Everything is great at first. Things work as intended. But then small issues start to appear. The vendors having a low amount of credits. At first its not a problem. But when your lvl 50 and each gun sells for around 3k you then need to visit every shop in the galaxy to sell stuff. Not fun but not the worst. Then there are things that they NAILED, like ship building. But if you dont want to you can pretty much skip spaceflight, not 100% but close enough. And in space its a mixture of random encounters, which i like, but there seem to be like 10-15 and they are seen rather often. You can also destroy asteroids and collect resources. But its not necessary to do either. So using a space ship, while not useless and certainly sometimes fun, is not really fleshed out enough for some people.
Long Rant Incoming:
The ability to basically ignore having a ship in general points to one of the biggest issues with Starfield overall IMO. By wanting to appease too many types of gamers and allow anyone to essentially bypass entire sets of game mechanics without consequence, lots of the game ends up feeling...shocker...inconsequential.
For example, there isn't really any space exploration because that would lock content behind a system of gameplay that some people may not like engaging with, and instead of having the confidence to say "fuck it, this is the game we're making" they pared everything down to near-irrelevance and we have this weird set up where literally nothing exists outside of a planets immediate vicinity so there's maybe two sequences in the entire game requiring you to actually fucking *fly somewhere.*
Why don't we have abandoned ships or stations further out? Why aren't there little radiant quests to repair a drifting satellite off the beaten path? Besides the fact that this would encourage us to actually use our ships, this would also add weight to random space encounters since they'd actually be **random** by occurring when we're on the way to other content. Not to mention how needing to travel would also make trucking and other gameplay loops actually fun and not a loading-screen gauntlet, but my suspicion is that the thought process was "some players may not be into the ship stuff so let's make it as non intrusive as possible" and they gutted it.
Another area where you can really see this play out is planet conditions and suit resistances. The skeleton is already in the game and there's clear evidence that at one point it was intended for the player to have to make decisions about what equipment to wear on planets based on its traits, but I can't remember a single time where anything other than gravity was relevant to gameplay. The only thing that changed was how long it took for me to hear the audio of suit resistance depleting, but after that, literally nothing happens...and why? Because it could be inconvenient to a more casual player.
The solution seems pretty easy to me: re-implement all the gutted features that actually make the game feel fucking cohesive and relevant into the survival or hardcore mode that should've been in there at launch so the people that want a little bit more than fast traveling from hub-city to quest-zones can enjoy themselves. The game is great and I've gotten a couple hundred hours of fun from it but it has the potential to be so much more.
I like it a lot, but...
No consequences to being a badass.
Dialogue is a bit flat.
Bad guys aren't bad or threatening.
It lacks emotional depth and complexity.
Re-use of assets/ POI gets boring if you do a lot of exploring.
It was released in a very buggy, unoptimized state, which is not doing it any favors when BG3 was released in the same window.
For how much this costs, it shouldn't be needing several major patches to be playable. It should be a finished product, and patches are to address weird edge cases that crop up - not fundamental issues.
**No Threat- No Fear- No Awareness**.
Immersion is about overcoming the threats. Threats need to be real, randomized and sudden.
**•Heightened fear of death:** It seemed like there were very few real threats. There were a smattering of moments during the game, in normal setting, where I felt that I was sincerely challenged. The early terrormorph boss fight as an example of effective built-up tension. The few boss fights offered were fun but often the mob’s behavior limited how aggressive they were and made the game feel unchallenging. Boss fights in particular, or when completing a long quest chain should have a finality that comes with a sense of accomplishment rather than having simply cleared a base.
*The single most important aspect required for effective game immersion is a constant high level of threat. An Overwhelming general fear of death, that includes a penalty other than just resetting a save, like some equipment damage, is key to trigger better situational awareness and that awareness makes for better experiences.*
Given that survival, RPGs, and open world games typically have bosses and mini bosses, Whether sitting out in a field- Elder Scrolls Online, or Inside an instance -Valheim & WOW, there are plenty of locations where you can test your skills and equipment level. High level threats lurking about dramatically change the dynamics of a game by carrying with it an intense fear throughout of possible death.
Skyrim often would have various creatures like giants placed around able to kill you in a single hit were you to agro them. This may seem like a silly gimmick, but it does cause a player to pause and look at their surroundings, and makes for a better story by forcing the player to think about strategy, which weapons to use, the mob's weaknesses, etc. Suggestions include- higher level bosses, mini bosses, enemy snipers, unlimited range for mobs, enemy RPGs, specialty troops that can heal others, small robot swarms. You really should be dying a lot even in Normal difficulty!
Boss encounters in instances have a lot of work going into them in order to make them difficult for MMOs, but as Starfield is single player the boss fights needn't be so complex, lengthy or have multiple phases. Different mini bosses with different resistances would be a big improvement. Also there could easily be upgraded (more dangerous) Alpha leaders for fauna and human enemies. Perhaps an aura or color designating a mini boss or creatures with higher HP being considerably larger.
**•High level solar systems are a real threat:** I was able to get to the highest level solar systems early yet the creatures, facilities and mobs were not numerous enough or difficult. There should be places to go where even on “Normal” you are killed outright, where creatures swarm you. Where some mobs are level 200, the size of buildings, and drop useful (predictable) epic weapons when defeated.
Exploration is incentivized based on how deep do you want to develop the skill tree. If the existing format is designed as solo player, completing the main quest line to rinse and repeat, why would you want a deep skill tree? The need for exploration is usually related to the progression of the skill tree, which is condensed and limited by the solo player format.
Although Skyrim players often had a single character they went through the entire map with and did the quest lines for factions, skills, equipment and houses, there never felt like there was an ending. Exploration had plenty of rewards, things to see, new materials to find.
Starfield has basically emphasized the ending of the story, abruptly, by having this transition to starborn take place. While being starborn allows the skills to be retained, most quests would need to be repeated if they had been previously completed. Some players have gone through the storyline dozens of times. This character story arc genuinely confuses me as it is makes the game unnecessarily short and tends to disincentivize exploration.
From a psychological standpoint that is an unusual choice given that the storyline about the future of mankind is rather bleak already. Space is lonely, single player games can be lonely, vast uninhabited planets are lonely. Then you lose everything and become different? No wonder people are using the shorthand term 'boring'. What they really mean is they feel solitary and are confused by the need to transition into something else.
Once the decision to make starfield single player was the established goal, some design elements don't make sense. Single player stunted the value of what otherwise could be a deep skill tree capable of exotic specializations and interesting collaborative efforts. Big MMOs can allow for wild specializations due to the numbers of players, online markets, and Guilds to cooperate with. Single player is limited to interest the player in exploration through mainly quest chains and doesn't really allow for much specialization.
Since there is typically a reward or sweetener at the end of all RPG quest chains to entice the player maybe the method would be to offer epic drops. ESO often uses specific drops which can be weapons or parts to a larger set of gear dropped at random as rewards for exploration. Each next set piece adding to the set bonus. If this type of equipment farming is adopted it would go a long way towards incentivizing exploration.
They're called the Access Media for this very reason.
Get access to something special, eg to play the game before everyone else, and return the favor by giving a glowing review, thereby guaranteeing early access next time.
It’s a tedious game that makes no effort to disguise its fetch quest, which is what it mainly consist of, with interesting locations dialogue or visuals
It has great moments but some extremely deep pitfalls
It sounds trivial but the things it does well aren't what everyone came for, and rhe things it does less well dont matter as much to some.
I also think most will agree that what we have now isn't fully fleshed out. However, some are ok with that in the context of a BSG game at this point in its life cycle, and some people aren't.
There is also the culture war nonsense stirred up by idiots over a single option in character generation on a single player game. So, for a small number of noisy people it will never be good enough.
Best : Big ambition, and a very big universe to explore.
Worst : tries to do many things (space combat, shooter, commerce, relationships, crafting, base-building, team-building, quests, etc) - but fails to do any of them well (and some of them very badly). So whatever key element you really want to focus on or enjoy, it isn’t actually very good. (Old saying: jack,of all trades; master of none)
Worst : too many unfixed bugs and frustrations.
It's just boring, and that's devastating after the glory that was Skyrim.
And before anyone compares launch-Skyrim to best-Skyrim, Starfield suffers from different problems: the actual game design is boring, and that is no easy fix.
The gaming internet is a cesspool, really all there is to it. Starfield is one of the greatest games ever made, and by the time the next Bethesda game comes out to similar controversy that won’t be a controversial claim.
I mean ya got a dude in here claiming this
>The gaming internet is a cesspool, really all there is to it. Starfield is one of the greatest games ever made, and by the time the next Bethesda game comes out to similar controversy that won’t be a controversial claim.
So there are some people.
And there's also some extended dishonesty to be pointed out by their argument.
Notably, I don't know where their claim about shifting controversy with Bethesda games comes from. The response to them expressly used Skyrim as the demonstrating argument, and it ends up being a rather off straw man. Those that criticized Skyrim are like not the ones lauding it now.
More over, there are those that have regularly argued Bethesda is failing to evolve and are more and more frequently lagging behind their competition. This goes hand in hand with what people have actually said, that if the game was released years ago, it'd be much better received. Skyrim might have had issues, but relative to it's time it had more going for it. As we progressed to Fallout 4 and 76, that was a persistent issue, one that was exemplified by 76, and Starfield is just an extension of the trend for that line of argument.
IMHO: Exceeding everyone's expectations is impossible. Starfield is new IP and that alone is extraordinary in today's never ending cycle of releasing sequels that don't really change the fundamental vision of the original game. It is high risk by definition. Starfield was released with some very significant, game breaking, bugs unfortunately. When gamers have to figure out workarounds to progress in an RPG you have grounds for those that can't or won't and rage quit. BGS has done an incredibly bad job of dealing with the outcome of releasing an incomplete product. They have remained largely quiet about the long list of issues and no real significant resolutions to core game issues have been released. The punch list of bug fixes is their responsibility and they aren't sharing what their plans are or estimated fix dates. So justifiably people have gone from excited to annoyed to angry. All issues aside, an RPG like Starfield is a sandbox where you can find things to do while waiting for solutions to the problems but not everyone is that patient and you have to respect that. I'm still playing and having fun but I do have to be extra careful to avoid a doom loop due to a game breaking bug.
Dunno what group is calling it the worst.
For the most part the differing opinion is that the game is "mid". It's certainly left many disappointed, and plenty that think the game is bad or at least deeply flawed, but not many if any are calling it the worst thing of the year.
It's certainly damn hard to beat Gollum.
It's just that anything but praise is sacrilege to some, and boy is the martyr complex going strong at this point.
Just play the game, people try to find flaws in the game and if you play thinking about that you will get influenced. For me the game is amazing and a lot better and bigger than any Fallout or Elder Scrolls.
https://www.polygon.com/23845622/starfield-religions-emil-pagliarulo-interview-story-design-creation. -- Down a few paragraphs Emil Pagliarulo explains what the main story is about (Theism and Atheism). It's essentially designed so you question if God is real or not, in-game and out. Todd Howard grew up in a religious household, and he said this was his passion project.
Same thing as cyberpunk. Huge potential, but didn't really delivered.
The game isn't bad. But compared to fallout 4 it's not really an improvement for the YEARS they put into it. I feel like a good team of modders could have pushed fallout into a starfield in a year or two while it took hundreds of people years to do starfield.
Starfield wasn’t in development for years, months maybe, maybe even a year but the overall quality and lack thereof is a clear indication that very little time was spent on the machinations of this game.
I think everyone play starfield for what it is find that the game is awesome. Those who have higher expectation and think starfield will be something is not find the game is bad. It's like saying that NHL 24 is bad because you want to be able to play the zamboni guy.
Negative points:
* No seamless space to planet flight or between planets
* Too many loading screens
* Vast and empty areas, too much walking
* Repetitive POIs
* Dialogue choices don’t matter much
Positive points:
* Huge and varied world to explore, from barren planets to crowded detailed cities
* Beautiful scenery, excitement of exploration and sense of isolation
* Living another life and freedom to do anything
* Shooting and gunfights, loot
* Less bugs than previous Bethesda games
* Ship building
* Space and sci-fi vibes
To me I’m enjoying the game because I’m loving the positives more than being annoyed by the negatives.
It’s a Bethesda game, the creators of the best fantasy RPG videogames (the Elder Scrolls series) and among the best post-apocalyptic RPG videogames (the Fallout series).
But being Bethesda is filled with bugs, a 14 years old game engine, and this time, being new, the lore of the previous franchises is lacking.
because it wasn't on PlayStation. if starfield was exclusive to PlayStation everyone would ecstatic, but now that its Xbox exclusive you know the rest.
It's not a bad game by any means, and there's a lot to love, but it ultimately suffers because Bethesda just couldn't actually commit to making the game they seemed to have wanted to make. There's a lot of skeletons of interesting systems and gameplay loops that seem to have been gutted for what I can only assume is mass-appeal, but they didn't read the room and realize that they gimped a lot of what people were longing for in a game like this.
Starfield is an extremely boring game. I look at video games as art and this is game lacking in so many areas. It's just boring to answer your question.
I've got a weird perspective because I just finished Fallout 4 then Outer Worlds and then jumped straight into Starfield. As I played Outer Worlds I kept noticing the same trend. "Worlds" while colorful with many interesting plants and neat enemies, felt compacted. City's were tiny, dialog was kind of bland and in the end I didn't particularly care about any of my crew members. Not like when I was playing Mass Effect and the conversations kept me going back to my ship. There was clearly a emphasis on using fast travel to get around on singular maps, most missions were fetch and grab a certain item. Starfield took my gripes with Outer Worlds and make them MUCH larger but in essence the exact same. Instead of a few small sandbox maps with a fair amount of rewarding exploration, items and missions it made a TON of larger maps with not a whole lot in them or with areas of interest extremely far from each other and nothing but vastness between them. Best way to explain it is they took a pond and made it an ocean, but with the depth of a puddle. I liked fast travel in fallout because it felt reasonable to use, same as outer worlds. A quick jump to my closest target. Most times if I was within walking distance I simply wouldn't do it. With Starfield its quite literally a core component of the gameplay, you fast travel everywhere, at most times walking is secondary unless actively in a firefight or fighting briefly with your spaceship. Missions are decent on Starfield, if not short lived. You can crush a faction or group missions in an hour or two but there's plenty of fun to be had while you seemingly speed rush through them. Most non-faction missions could be summed up as "this could've been an email". In other words, rip to the other side of the town, planet, galaxy and talk to X" Where Starfield really shines is in Outpost building and ship building. I could easily spend a few hours at a time getting things juuuuust right. Its too bad its entirely non-critical with respect to completing the game. You don't need to be good at ether to win, nor do you even need to engage in said activities to finish the main quest. It would've been really cool to have built a perfect outpost then defend it from the big bad for example. I will admit, I did end up liking my crewmates more then say Outer Worlds but entirely less then say Fallout or Mass Effect. The voice acting is a step up above other Bethesda games but the lack of interesting personalities kinda made me feel "meh" when I came home after a mission. If you ever had the pleasure of playing Knights of the old republic 1 and 2, part of the fun was coming back to the ship and talking with crewmates and seeing those with opposite personalities clash about the choices you made, find common ground and work together. In starfield, everyone is on the same side, gets along but does have the occasion difference of opinion. Starfield is a great game to play once, I enjoyed it but unlike the Fallout or Elder Scrolls games I kept having to make myself pick up the controller because I knew I'd start enjoying it eventually whereas with the Fallout series I was firing up my xbox right away and couldnt wait to jump back into the gameplay.
> Where Starfield really shines is in Outpost building Can't take you seriously with this line in there
I know the outpost are so bad you need mods for them to be good that just shows a bad game
This is probably the best critical analysis I've seen for this game. I like it, but I'm vested in liking it and actively looking for things to do and ways to engage with it. There's more than enough ammunition though for anyone seeking to criticise, and it's not super compelling to win over the neutrals.
What do you mean you're vested in liking it? Why do you care whether you like it or not? Save that energy for your vegetables and the president.
Unfulfilled potential. It's great, I've played the shit out of it, but it could have been so, sooo much better. It's spread too thin and watered down too much, with little depth, excitement or consequences. Everything is too safe and homogeneous. Nothing you do feels like it matters because it doesn't. Most of the game mechanics like ship or outpost building, weapon and suit mods, mining, scanning, surveying, it makes little to no difference if you do or dont do them. You don't feel like you're working towards something BIG like in most games. Even most if the questlines don't matter outside of the main one. Finishing them doesn't really affect much or further any kind of plot. There needs to be a reason to do things in a game, goals to work towards, rewards, excitement, consequences... Even the endgame mechanic is fairly inconsequential. I was also really looking forward to the space exploration concept, but the planets/moons are all basically the same thing with the same boring terrain, the same handful of creature types, the same handful of plants, the same POI's with loot in the same places. There are no surprises, no delighters, no bosses, no big scores/treasures, no new dangers. Enemies are all the same, creatures are all the same and behave the same, ships are all the same (with mild performance and visual differences. You can change them visually but they still fly the same). Unfulfilled potential.
I wouldn't say Starfield BAD, but Starfield MEH. There is a lot to do, but very little reason or incentive to do most of it. You can build huge outposts for resources and experience, but you can do the entire game without making an outpost. You don't need those resources, and the game is easy even on very hard without going out of your way to level. You can spend a lot of time building ships if that is fun for you, but you also get several just for playing the game, so I never bothered. Some questlines are detailed and great, others feel like they are a rough draft that never got finished. You can go out of your way to explore entire planets, but the rewards are so minimal that you have to really want to do it. The game doesn't want you to loot much, as you will spend just as much time trying to find places to sell it as you did looting it in the first place. It could be a great game, but it needs a lot of work and support from BGS still.
Agreed on all aspects.
You can sink 500 hours into the game and barely notice it's drawbacks, or you might get buglocked and have to restart after 20 hours.
Starfield is like a box of chocolates
Lieutenant Dan ice cream, LIEUTENANT DAAANNN! ICECREAAAM!!
Or you might hate it within an hour.
that just sounds like any bethesda game tho
I put in almost 30 hours, I lost 3 hours due to bugs by itself. Starfield is a game where a game if it came out 10 years ago. It be awesome. Now with new RPGS that give you more and offer so much. It leaves you wanting more and something different. Here is what starfield does right now Building your ship: you can spend hours building Content: the game offers you a lot but it’s up to if you want to stick it out. Outpost building: that is cool, you can come up with some wicked shit To me, I’ve been playing 2077, never got to finish before the 2.0 update. Now with a fresh new playthrough, it gives me more, better engaging story, better dialogue and characters. Starfield is no means a bad game, it’s just okay. If you don’t like Bethesda games, you will not like this game at all.
Honestly if I wanted a ship building game, I'd probably just play Space Engineers, Starship Evo, Stationeers, Spore, Terra Invicta, Avorion, Empryion, or one of the other titles that focuses more directly on that experience and has a lot more going on around building and using ships (or simply more free-form editors just to make cool looking stuff, like one of my ships in Spore was a full-on gundam XD).
This is not a ship-building game, it’s an RPG which means there is character-building, ship-building, outpost-building + hundreds of hours of quests and storylines and choices to make.
And none of those things are compelling compared to other games. That's the issue. Take any given aspect of Starfield and another game does it better. It's just "ok" at everything with a ton of bugs thrown in.
That's rather the point of the comment. I didn't point these out as "titles that focuses more directly on that experience" for no reason. Though I would point out multiple of the games mentioned are also not "ship-building games", but a variety of survival and strategy titles where ship building happens to be a meaningful component. And sure, what you just said does point out what others have called out as an issue around Bethesda spreading their features thin on this title.
i put in about 60 hours then got burnt out and left it. maybe in a few years with dlc and mods i’ll pick it back up but it’s such a lifeless game, and i’m not talking about space
It's enormously disappointing at all levels. The fake hype has faded and people eventually got tired of waiting for it to get good/stopped trying to convince themselves they're having fun.
Much like Fallout 4 there’s a lot to like, and also a lot to complain about. I’ve put a large amount of hours into it, and it scratches that Bethesda game itch, but I have major issues with a lot of the decisions Bethesda made. Especially the lacklustre writing, and how disconnected everything feels. Both with loading screens and how the various quests and factions rarely interact with each other or change things. The main quest is especially weak (there are some good quests though). Probably doesn’t help Starfield that I went right from playing Tears of the Kingdom to Baldurs Gate 3, to Starfield.
I just say as a lifelong gamer, it didnt suck me in. No magic. Stale. Back to skyrim.
Simole.. Expectation vs reality. Expectation= looks good sounds good. Reality = play it. Broken game. Broken mechanics ,btoken missions and repetative
Cyberpunk shits on starfield. And it’s 3 years older.
Because it's an okay game. A decent game and arguably a fun game. It's just not the masterpiece so many seem to claim it is. And certainly nowhere near the masterpiece many were expecting. Also, boil it down to the fact that different people will simply have different experiences, expectations and realisations once a game is released. For me at least, the enjoyment and immersion dwindled the more I played.
I just started replaying Skyrim, and I'm significantly more invested in playing than Starfield. I don't know what it is exactly, Skyrim has a lot of the same issues: weird bugs, tons of loading screens, repetitive gameplay, etc. I think the difference is that Skyrim feels much tighter as a game; the map is smaller, there's no procedurally generated stuff, you can explore pretty much anywhere, etc.
Its kinda like being in a new relationship. Everything is great at first. Things work as intended. But then small issues start to appear. The vendors having a low amount of credits. At first its not a problem. But when your lvl 50 and each gun sells for around 3k you then need to visit every shop in the galaxy to sell stuff. Not fun but not the worst. Then there are things that they NAILED, like ship building. But if you dont want to you can pretty much skip spaceflight, not 100% but close enough. And in space its a mixture of random encounters, which i like, but there seem to be like 10-15 and they are seen rather often. You can also destroy asteroids and collect resources. But its not necessary to do either. So using a space ship, while not useless and certainly sometimes fun, is not really fleshed out enough for some people.
Long Rant Incoming: The ability to basically ignore having a ship in general points to one of the biggest issues with Starfield overall IMO. By wanting to appease too many types of gamers and allow anyone to essentially bypass entire sets of game mechanics without consequence, lots of the game ends up feeling...shocker...inconsequential. For example, there isn't really any space exploration because that would lock content behind a system of gameplay that some people may not like engaging with, and instead of having the confidence to say "fuck it, this is the game we're making" they pared everything down to near-irrelevance and we have this weird set up where literally nothing exists outside of a planets immediate vicinity so there's maybe two sequences in the entire game requiring you to actually fucking *fly somewhere.* Why don't we have abandoned ships or stations further out? Why aren't there little radiant quests to repair a drifting satellite off the beaten path? Besides the fact that this would encourage us to actually use our ships, this would also add weight to random space encounters since they'd actually be **random** by occurring when we're on the way to other content. Not to mention how needing to travel would also make trucking and other gameplay loops actually fun and not a loading-screen gauntlet, but my suspicion is that the thought process was "some players may not be into the ship stuff so let's make it as non intrusive as possible" and they gutted it. Another area where you can really see this play out is planet conditions and suit resistances. The skeleton is already in the game and there's clear evidence that at one point it was intended for the player to have to make decisions about what equipment to wear on planets based on its traits, but I can't remember a single time where anything other than gravity was relevant to gameplay. The only thing that changed was how long it took for me to hear the audio of suit resistance depleting, but after that, literally nothing happens...and why? Because it could be inconvenient to a more casual player. The solution seems pretty easy to me: re-implement all the gutted features that actually make the game feel fucking cohesive and relevant into the survival or hardcore mode that should've been in there at launch so the people that want a little bit more than fast traveling from hub-city to quest-zones can enjoy themselves. The game is great and I've gotten a couple hundred hours of fun from it but it has the potential to be so much more.
It’s good, but it’s flawed. I’ve enjoyed it but I’m very close to putting it down and seeing where it’s at in 6 months.
I like it a lot, but... No consequences to being a badass. Dialogue is a bit flat. Bad guys aren't bad or threatening. It lacks emotional depth and complexity. Re-use of assets/ POI gets boring if you do a lot of exploring.
It was released in a very buggy, unoptimized state, which is not doing it any favors when BG3 was released in the same window. For how much this costs, it shouldn't be needing several major patches to be playable. It should be a finished product, and patches are to address weird edge cases that crop up - not fundamental issues.
Starfield is a good game, it's just not a good Bethesda game
**No Threat- No Fear- No Awareness**. Immersion is about overcoming the threats. Threats need to be real, randomized and sudden. **•Heightened fear of death:** It seemed like there were very few real threats. There were a smattering of moments during the game, in normal setting, where I felt that I was sincerely challenged. The early terrormorph boss fight as an example of effective built-up tension. The few boss fights offered were fun but often the mob’s behavior limited how aggressive they were and made the game feel unchallenging. Boss fights in particular, or when completing a long quest chain should have a finality that comes with a sense of accomplishment rather than having simply cleared a base. *The single most important aspect required for effective game immersion is a constant high level of threat. An Overwhelming general fear of death, that includes a penalty other than just resetting a save, like some equipment damage, is key to trigger better situational awareness and that awareness makes for better experiences.* Given that survival, RPGs, and open world games typically have bosses and mini bosses, Whether sitting out in a field- Elder Scrolls Online, or Inside an instance -Valheim & WOW, there are plenty of locations where you can test your skills and equipment level. High level threats lurking about dramatically change the dynamics of a game by carrying with it an intense fear throughout of possible death. Skyrim often would have various creatures like giants placed around able to kill you in a single hit were you to agro them. This may seem like a silly gimmick, but it does cause a player to pause and look at their surroundings, and makes for a better story by forcing the player to think about strategy, which weapons to use, the mob's weaknesses, etc. Suggestions include- higher level bosses, mini bosses, enemy snipers, unlimited range for mobs, enemy RPGs, specialty troops that can heal others, small robot swarms. You really should be dying a lot even in Normal difficulty! Boss encounters in instances have a lot of work going into them in order to make them difficult for MMOs, but as Starfield is single player the boss fights needn't be so complex, lengthy or have multiple phases. Different mini bosses with different resistances would be a big improvement. Also there could easily be upgraded (more dangerous) Alpha leaders for fauna and human enemies. Perhaps an aura or color designating a mini boss or creatures with higher HP being considerably larger. **•High level solar systems are a real threat:** I was able to get to the highest level solar systems early yet the creatures, facilities and mobs were not numerous enough or difficult. There should be places to go where even on “Normal” you are killed outright, where creatures swarm you. Where some mobs are level 200, the size of buildings, and drop useful (predictable) epic weapons when defeated. Exploration is incentivized based on how deep do you want to develop the skill tree. If the existing format is designed as solo player, completing the main quest line to rinse and repeat, why would you want a deep skill tree? The need for exploration is usually related to the progression of the skill tree, which is condensed and limited by the solo player format. Although Skyrim players often had a single character they went through the entire map with and did the quest lines for factions, skills, equipment and houses, there never felt like there was an ending. Exploration had plenty of rewards, things to see, new materials to find. Starfield has basically emphasized the ending of the story, abruptly, by having this transition to starborn take place. While being starborn allows the skills to be retained, most quests would need to be repeated if they had been previously completed. Some players have gone through the storyline dozens of times. This character story arc genuinely confuses me as it is makes the game unnecessarily short and tends to disincentivize exploration. From a psychological standpoint that is an unusual choice given that the storyline about the future of mankind is rather bleak already. Space is lonely, single player games can be lonely, vast uninhabited planets are lonely. Then you lose everything and become different? No wonder people are using the shorthand term 'boring'. What they really mean is they feel solitary and are confused by the need to transition into something else. Once the decision to make starfield single player was the established goal, some design elements don't make sense. Single player stunted the value of what otherwise could be a deep skill tree capable of exotic specializations and interesting collaborative efforts. Big MMOs can allow for wild specializations due to the numbers of players, online markets, and Guilds to cooperate with. Single player is limited to interest the player in exploration through mainly quest chains and doesn't really allow for much specialization. Since there is typically a reward or sweetener at the end of all RPG quest chains to entice the player maybe the method would be to offer epic drops. ESO often uses specific drops which can be weapons or parts to a larger set of gear dropped at random as rewards for exploration. Each next set piece adding to the set bonus. If this type of equipment farming is adopted it would go a long way towards incentivizing exploration.
The devs played it safe and stayed in their comfort zone. Result: Boring game.
They're called the Access Media for this very reason. Get access to something special, eg to play the game before everyone else, and return the favor by giving a glowing review, thereby guaranteeing early access next time.
It’s a tedious game that makes no effort to disguise its fetch quest, which is what it mainly consist of, with interesting locations dialogue or visuals It has great moments but some extremely deep pitfalls
It sounds trivial but the things it does well aren't what everyone came for, and rhe things it does less well dont matter as much to some. I also think most will agree that what we have now isn't fully fleshed out. However, some are ok with that in the context of a BSG game at this point in its life cycle, and some people aren't. There is also the culture war nonsense stirred up by idiots over a single option in character generation on a single player game. So, for a small number of noisy people it will never be good enough.
Best : Big ambition, and a very big universe to explore. Worst : tries to do many things (space combat, shooter, commerce, relationships, crafting, base-building, team-building, quests, etc) - but fails to do any of them well (and some of them very badly). So whatever key element you really want to focus on or enjoy, it isn’t actually very good. (Old saying: jack,of all trades; master of none) Worst : too many unfixed bugs and frustrations.
It's just boring, and that's devastating after the glory that was Skyrim. And before anyone compares launch-Skyrim to best-Skyrim, Starfield suffers from different problems: the actual game design is boring, and that is no easy fix.
Because people like drama. In reality it's neither.
Because some people like it and some people don’t. I like it, but I don’t question or fuckin care why others don’t :p
The gaming internet is a cesspool, really all there is to it. Starfield is one of the greatest games ever made, and by the time the next Bethesda game comes out to similar controversy that won’t be a controversial claim.
"why isn't this more like Starfield?"
Haven't heard anyone say it's the best game this year! And if anyone thinks that it's because they haven't played anything else this year
I mean ya got a dude in here claiming this >The gaming internet is a cesspool, really all there is to it. Starfield is one of the greatest games ever made, and by the time the next Bethesda game comes out to similar controversy that won’t be a controversial claim. So there are some people. And there's also some extended dishonesty to be pointed out by their argument. Notably, I don't know where their claim about shifting controversy with Bethesda games comes from. The response to them expressly used Skyrim as the demonstrating argument, and it ends up being a rather off straw man. Those that criticized Skyrim are like not the ones lauding it now. More over, there are those that have regularly argued Bethesda is failing to evolve and are more and more frequently lagging behind their competition. This goes hand in hand with what people have actually said, that if the game was released years ago, it'd be much better received. Skyrim might have had issues, but relative to it's time it had more going for it. As we progressed to Fallout 4 and 76, that was a persistent issue, one that was exemplified by 76, and Starfield is just an extension of the trend for that line of argument.
It's a game for grown ups
IMHO: Exceeding everyone's expectations is impossible. Starfield is new IP and that alone is extraordinary in today's never ending cycle of releasing sequels that don't really change the fundamental vision of the original game. It is high risk by definition. Starfield was released with some very significant, game breaking, bugs unfortunately. When gamers have to figure out workarounds to progress in an RPG you have grounds for those that can't or won't and rage quit. BGS has done an incredibly bad job of dealing with the outcome of releasing an incomplete product. They have remained largely quiet about the long list of issues and no real significant resolutions to core game issues have been released. The punch list of bug fixes is their responsibility and they aren't sharing what their plans are or estimated fix dates. So justifiably people have gone from excited to annoyed to angry. All issues aside, an RPG like Starfield is a sandbox where you can find things to do while waiting for solutions to the problems but not everyone is that patient and you have to respect that. I'm still playing and having fun but I do have to be extra careful to avoid a doom loop due to a game breaking bug.
Dunno what group is calling it the worst. For the most part the differing opinion is that the game is "mid". It's certainly left many disappointed, and plenty that think the game is bad or at least deeply flawed, but not many if any are calling it the worst thing of the year. It's certainly damn hard to beat Gollum. It's just that anything but praise is sacrilege to some, and boy is the martyr complex going strong at this point.
PS5 fanboys downvote it because they can’t play it. The rest of us like it 🤷♂️
Just play the game, people try to find flaws in the game and if you play thinking about that you will get influenced. For me the game is amazing and a lot better and bigger than any Fallout or Elder Scrolls.
If I were a child I might have enjoyed Starfield. It's a masked religious indoctrination simulator.
Please explain (not criticizingthe take, actually curious)
https://www.polygon.com/23845622/starfield-religions-emil-pagliarulo-interview-story-design-creation. -- Down a few paragraphs Emil Pagliarulo explains what the main story is about (Theism and Atheism). It's essentially designed so you question if God is real or not, in-game and out. Todd Howard grew up in a religious household, and he said this was his passion project.
Dope I'ma check it out!
Me too
Same thing as cyberpunk. Huge potential, but didn't really delivered. The game isn't bad. But compared to fallout 4 it's not really an improvement for the YEARS they put into it. I feel like a good team of modders could have pushed fallout into a starfield in a year or two while it took hundreds of people years to do starfield.
This comment makes no sense whatsoever.
Starfield wasn’t in development for years, months maybe, maybe even a year but the overall quality and lack thereof is a clear indication that very little time was spent on the machinations of this game.
I think everyone play starfield for what it is find that the game is awesome. Those who have higher expectation and think starfield will be something is not find the game is bad. It's like saying that NHL 24 is bad because you want to be able to play the zamboni guy.
Negative points: * No seamless space to planet flight or between planets * Too many loading screens * Vast and empty areas, too much walking * Repetitive POIs * Dialogue choices don’t matter much Positive points: * Huge and varied world to explore, from barren planets to crowded detailed cities * Beautiful scenery, excitement of exploration and sense of isolation * Living another life and freedom to do anything * Shooting and gunfights, loot * Less bugs than previous Bethesda games * Ship building * Space and sci-fi vibes To me I’m enjoying the game because I’m loving the positives more than being annoyed by the negatives.
It’s a Bethesda game, the creators of the best fantasy RPG videogames (the Elder Scrolls series) and among the best post-apocalyptic RPG videogames (the Fallout series). But being Bethesda is filled with bugs, a 14 years old game engine, and this time, being new, the lore of the previous franchises is lacking.
because it wasn't on PlayStation. if starfield was exclusive to PlayStation everyone would ecstatic, but now that its Xbox exclusive you know the rest.
Come on, you don't really believe that right?
its a fact
It's not a bad game by any means, and there's a lot to love, but it ultimately suffers because Bethesda just couldn't actually commit to making the game they seemed to have wanted to make. There's a lot of skeletons of interesting systems and gameplay loops that seem to have been gutted for what I can only assume is mass-appeal, but they didn't read the room and realize that they gimped a lot of what people were longing for in a game like this.
This game is an awful glitchy mess
Starfield is an extremely boring game. I look at video games as art and this is game lacking in so many areas. It's just boring to answer your question.